Or until the owner ceases paying property tax. You don't own property, you just rent it from the government.
Does your property cease to be yours when its stolen by a protection racket for failing to pay their fee? The case with government and property tax is no different. It's still rightfully your property, but it's been stolen from you with no hope of recovery.
When discussing the actions of a government I prefer to start by judging them according to their own bylaws (e.g. the Constitution), since such arguments are simpler and tend to appeal to a broader range of people. That doesn't mean I consider the Constitution to be a legitimate grant of authority to commit coercion, which means I consider all government acts (which could not have been performed by a private citizen) to be aggressive in nature and the government itself no different from any other criminal organization. (The only coercion I consider legitimate is proportional self-defense against prior aggression.)
...you seem toconveniently [sic] forget that intellectual property rights were included even before amendments were proposed.
Perhaps you stop and reread the Constitution before making such a sloppy argument. The Constitution allows Congress "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". Note that Congress isn't required to enact copyrights and patents; it merely has the ability to do so under the Constitution, with a very specific purpose: promoting "the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Copyrights and patents, in other words, are an attempt at social engineering, one which Congress can enact or withdraw at its leisure. They are also transient ("for limited times") whereas real property rights are permanent, passing from one generation to the next until the property is finally consumed or abandoned by its owner -- even presuming such ever occurs.
In contract, regular property rights are barely mentioned in the Constitution, because they were already thoroughly established in the Common Law; real property rights formed a background so obvious to the Constitution's authors that they saw no need to make them explicit; copyrights and patents had to be mentioned precisely because they were not part of that background. Congress can revoke them on a whim because they exist purely by Congressional decree. There are some (badly worded and poorly interpreted) clauses which Congress can abuse to violate traditional property rights under very specific circumstances, but as such rights do not originate with Congress it would take more than a simple decree to eliminate them entirely. (It would probably take a major Constitutional amendment, a change in the very nature of the government itself.)
Quite a few of those jobs would not get done (or the cost of the labour would be out of the reach of many) if government didn't provide them.
The thing is, the government doesn't provide those services -- we do. We pay for them through taxes and inflation, and we provide them by staffing those organizations and producing the materials they use. The only part the government plays is in forcing everyone to go through them for services which any given taxpayer may never need or want, in the process eliminating any possiblity of competitive, cost-effective private production of those services for those who do want them.
If big government is so disastrous how come the 20th century saw huge and unparallelled economic growth in North America, Western Europe and Australia despite much bigger governments than before?
Correlation != causality. Alternate reasoning: Government interference in everyday affairs increased in response to private improvements in economics (quality-of-living) and technology. In particular, improvements in the speed and reach of communications enabled a vast increase in the territory that could be ruled by a single government.
Answer me this: Which started first, economic growth or larger governments? I believe you'll find that economic improvements had a sizeable lead, one which the government has fortunately not proven capable of completely suppressing -- though they do try. Private advancement hold the potential to seriously weaken their grip.
I like taxes. . . . I'm happy to financially contribute to that system.
The question isn't whether you want to pay taxes. You're obviously free to pay whatever "taxes" you want. (Though they wouldn't really be taxes if you choose to pay them -- they'd be donations instead.) No, the question is whether you have the right to make the rest of us pay those taxes to benefit you.
I'm really happy not to have to be a part time police officer, fireman, social worker, sewage worker, nurse, builder of roads, and all those other jobs that I really appreciate getting done around me and make my life better as a result.
I wouldn't expect you to. That's why we have the social division of labor and trade. That has nothing to do with government or taxation, though -- just basic economics.
Common sense is the judge. If 2 relatively equivalent options are available, and you choose to use the more resource intensive option, you should pay more.
(1) Last I checked, the one thing you could be sure about regarding "common sense" is that it's far from common. The decisions of the majority are generally about as far from common sense as it is possible to be. Part of the reason for this, in my opinion, is that a simple majority vote lacks the feedback mechanisms inherent in any market system -- profit and loss -- and furthermore divides choices from personal consequences. Development of common sense requires a closed-loop decision process. (2) People already pay more for more resource-intensive choices. You just don't think they pay enough more. Who are you (or even "the majority") to make that decision? What gives you (pl.) the right to interfere? If you're trying to challenge the legitimacy of private ownership of the resources themselves then say so; otherwise you have no business telling anyone who they can buy from/sell to or at what price the exchange can be made.
Since "energy" is a scarce resource, and part of the commons...
I challenge this assertion. Scarcity is precisely the reason for private ownership. It is a framework designed to mediate exactly this sort of dispute. One could even say that private property rights are the outcome of mediating such disputes in the past. If resources (energy sources) are scarce, which I don't dispute, then they can't be regarded as commonly owned without running straight into the "trajedy of the commons." They must be privately owned.
...it is realistic to penalize those who use more of the resources. Taxes are just a method of social engineering. If we want to change behaviors, we can use taxes to encourage one behavior over others.
Good; you recognize that taxes are fundamentally a form of control -- a form of slavery, in other words, accomplished through systematic aggression in the form of theft backed by the threat of force. In a democracy taxes are exploitation of the complacent majority by the vocal special interests (minorities). (It can't work the other way, since that would be a represent a net loss to the ruling majority.) Unfortunately, you seem to be under the impression that this (taxes, social engineering, "encouraging" and "discouraging" behaviors in others through aggression) is actually a good thing.
[1] I don't share the belief that most people will make the best choices. I include myself in that group as well, lest you think I am setting myself up as judge. [2] That is why we have a system where groups of people in our society try to determine the best use of common resources. [3] We may not always agree on what "best use" means, and that is fine. We have debates, discussions and revolutions when we indulge in an excess of regulation or deregulation.
(1) Good, I feel the same way. See my point about "common sense" above. (2) These aren't "common resources"; they're owned by specific individuals and these individuals have the right to decide how they're used (always subject to the universal principle of non-aggression, of course), not some self-appointed or elected group of elite "leaders."
I also don't believe that the invisible hand of the market is the perfect arbiter in this situation. Eventually, the situation would work itself out in the market. But the market has no heart, and doesn't care if large numbers of people are hurt in the working out. Effective government provides a buffer against the inevitable bumps in the road of a perfectly free market.
Get one thing straight: I don't care about the "market". I care about one thing: aggression. I care about individual choices, and the liberty to make them free of coercion; I care
Bringing this back on topic, though, everyone is paying for increased emissions. The resources used to light that bulb are part of the commons. While mandating CFL's is probably going too far, it makes sense to tax the more costly (resource wise) alternative. It is simply making people pay for their increased use of resources.
Could you explain how "[t]he resources used to light that bulb are part of the commons"? As I see it each person is paying for their own electricity. In turn each electricity company is paying for its own fuel, and each fuel company is paying (ultimately) the rightful owners of the resources in question for the necessary raw materials. How is any part of this process related at all to some kind of "social commons"?
The answer to the commons issue is (obviously) private ownership. Here we already have private ownership; no further adjustment is necessary. The prices are exactly where they ought to be. In any event, who are you to say that current prices are "too low" or "too high"? Who made you the judge of whether others are using "too many" resources, such that you feel justified in levying a tax on their use?
> Cool, foldl cleaned mine up a bit. My thinking of it is muddled though.
The expression "foldl (\x y -> (2*x + bit y)) 0 w" is essentially equivalent to the following procedural pseudocode:
x = 0 for y in w x = 2 * x + bit(y) end return x
The foldl routine (along with the right-associative foldr) is extremely useful in transforming most kinds of "for [element] in [list]" control structures. Their actual Haskell definitions are (I believe, from memory):
foldl f b [] = b foldl f b (x:xs) = foldl f (f b x) xs
foldr f b [] = b foldr f b (x:xs) = f x (foldr f b xs)
Were you even trying to make sense? I couldn't tell... so many contradictions in just one post. To be honest I don't care particularly much, in an ideological sense, about capitalism itself. I only oppose aggression (the violation of rightfully acquired property rights). So long as you respect property rights we have no quarrel. ("Property rights" in this context are a superset of the basic civil rights -- free speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, free press, etc. These are a natural result of ownership of one's own body. Copyright (and patents) conflict with property itself, not just capitalism; that makes their enforcement a form of aggression.) However, any society that refrains from aggression already meets the critera for a free-market economy. It seems to me that you're trying to construct a system of positive rights, where everyone else owes you wherever you decide you "need". Such a system can never even be consistent, much less equitable. It is a system of universal slavery where the least productive individuals rule over the rest. In any event your rant about "monopolization of the money supply" illustrates your shallow understanding of how markets work. (Hint: The money we presently use is not the only medium of exchange possible. If one person, or a small number of people, had all the money it would be worthless to them, as everyone else would standardize on a different unit of exchange. A given currency only retains its marketability so long as it remains in widespread use. Monopolization would destroy its value.)
The US is basically the arm of corporations now, your fellow countrymen's blind adherence to extreme propertarianism and extreme capitalism are partly to blame.
I believe you've misspelled "corporatism" and/or "merchantilism". Copyright contradicts fundamental principles of capitalism and property rights. For that matter, when you get down to it, copyright was instigated (in the U.S.) as an attempt at social engineering, which is even more directly opposed to property rights (and thus also capitalism). Give credit where credit is due: copyright is an outgrowth of the "social democratic" mindset, not the apolitical market economy.
I see an idea as forever trapped inside one person's brain. Their existence does not depend on words or language. . . . Because it is impossible to transfer ideas directly from one brain to another, we depend on words and language to communicate, even with ourselves. . . . Language and communication, art, etc., -- all use of symbols -- are our way of getting around the fact that each individual's ideas are ultimately non-portable. We hope our language can generate in others the same ideas and emotions that prompted us in the first place.
Very well -- I'll accept that definition of "idea" for the purpose of this debate. I would argue that words, symbols, language, art, etc. are ideas of a sort themselves, at least to the extent that we can actually understand and use them -- perhaps they have a sort of dual nature, both physical and mental, in order to bridge the gap between the two domains -- but I'll let that pass for the time being. However, I don't really see how this definition advances your argument. My position on "copyright" follows naturally from the definitions I gave for property rights and contracts; it is these points which you must address if you wish to counter my conclusions.
As for the techicalities and corner cases you raised relating to homesteading, I realize that these questions exist but they really don't matter as much as one might think. The common law already addresses most of the details of homesteading, including cases of abandonment, unknowing trespass, etc. In most disputes the basic principle that the party with the earliest claim has priority is sufficient to decide one way or the other. Some things obviously establish a claim; other things obviously do not. In between there is a grey region where human judgement is necessary, taking into consideration the individual circumstances of the case. Over time, as more disputes are successfully resolved, the body of precedence grows and grey areas grow correspondingly more clear.
Homesteading is historic reality, but I don't necessarily agree that the first person to settle on a piece of land becomes its owner.
How else would you assign first ownership? If you don't exclusively assign ownership to the first user then you must either prohibit unowned resources from becoming property (on what basis?) and/or take things that are already owned by one person and reassign them to someone else (most people call that theft). Anyway, the details of homesteading are somewhat beside the point...
I don't agree that ideas are "Representations of abstract concepts (potentially) encoded in the form of a physical object". A representation of a thought is just that, a representation, not a thought. An object underlying an encoded form of that representation is just that, not an idea. It's very akin to someone being angry, and writing a note that says "I'm angry." The note is not the emotion, or the idea, of that person's anger.
I don't think we're speaking the same language here. As I understand things, to use your note example, the concepts of "anger", "emotion", "person", "self", "to be", etc. are all ideas. The words "I'm angry" -- not the written form, not even a particular pattern of synapses, just the words in the abstract -- are a thought, an idea constructed from less complex ideas. Of course any idea which exists in reality must have some physical representation, e.g. synaptic patterns in the brain, patterns of ink on paper, the shape of some physical object or group of objects. In turn, the abstract concept of the shape of a physical object can itself be an idea (see: geometry). Consequently, even if the words themselves are unintelligible, the patterns of ink on paper which make up your note create new ideas in an observer's brain. Patterns of ink on paper create corresponding patterns of synapses in a neural net; both represent the same abstract geometric idea. The note, one physical representation of an idea, begets a pattern of synapses, another representation of the same idea. From the synaptic patterns yet another representation can be created out of new paper and new ink: a "duplicate". Only the abstract pattern, the geometric idea, is actually employed in creating the duplicate. The note was merely the means of representing, and communicating, that idea from one neural net to another.
We appear to be arguing conclusions, which is pointless. Let's back up a bit. Of the following, which do you not agree with?
Property rights: Exclusive control over a particular combination of space and physical matter, defined in terms of (though not necessarily limited to) the logical interaction boundaries of the physical object. Violations are various subtypes of theft, infringement on the owner's exclusive control over the physical matter, and trespass, unwanted presence inside the object's space.
Homesteading: The means by which unowned land (i.e. natural resources) becomes owned. In essence the first person to make use of the resource becomes its owner.
Title-Transfer Contracts: The means by which property changes hands. A title-transfer contract is a voluntary agreement to transfer property matching a specified description at a given time when certain conditions are met. (The time and condition can be "now" and "unconditionally", of course.)
Ideas: Representations of abstract concepts (potentially) encoded in the form of a physical object; e.g. synapses in the brain, ink on paper, electrons or magnetic domains in a computer memory, light in fiber-optics, pressure waves in air. In accordance with the definition of "property rights" above ideas are not independently ownable, although of course the underlying physical object can be owned.
I understand, but I was saying was that, if e.g. garbage dumping became a common enough practice (for whatever reason), there would be nothing wrong with pre-empting the inevitable lawsuits by simply taxing the practice as it happened, and compensating the victims, and then anyone who thought that was insufficient could sue to recover the rest. The "tax" is thus justifiable as being, in essence, streamlined tort compensation.
First, the only reason you need to "streamline" anything is that the courts aren't doing their job. There's no reason why a court ruling has to be any more expensive than the sort of tax you're proposing. Either way someone -- probably a consumer organization of some sort -- will have to investigate the polluter and gather evidence. One of the victims will have to file for arbitration and win a ruling against the polluter. At that point the polluter's actions are established fact and it ought to be trivial for the other victims to win similar rulings -- all they have to do is show that those same actions affected them. Why isn't it that simple? Well, you tell me -- what is the typical result of an enforced monopoly? Private arbitration exists, but only when both parties agree in advance on an arbiter. Private arbitration also lacks the use of most forms of non-aggressive (defensive) force that government courts wield. Put private arbiters on equal footing with government courts and I guarantee that the price of resolving disputes like this would decrease dramatically. (Obviously this would also mean taking some truly aggressive actions away from the government courts, too -- most contempt-of-court sentences, for example.)
Second, as another responder pointed out, the taxees and payees in your system does not precisely correspond to the offenders and victims. You can't just average everything out and expect the system to remain just; justice depends on all the little details you're trying to "streamline" away. If you're actually going to prove each offender's guilt, determine the harm caused to each victim by each offender, and transfer exactly that amount from each offender to each victim, then -- well congratulations, you've just reinvented the court system. If not then it's almost a certainty that you'd be stealing from some entities and overcompensating others, and probably losing a lot of the "compensation" to third parties in the process. The latter two obviously aren't much of a problem of themselves (from a rights p.o.v.), but the former is. Any private party that put such a system into practice would rightly be called a thief; I see no reason to hold a government organization to any lesser standard.
But if you're referring to making people pay for their torts through something called a "tax", I disagree. If someone e.g. dumps garbage on your lawn, they should pay for it. I see nothing wrong -- from a libertarian perspective -- of "taxing" "lawn garbage dumping" and applying the proceeds to its cleanup.
I don't think I disagree with the basic idea here, but what you're describing isn't a tax. Compensation for a tort is not taxation, and is determined on a case-by-case basis by the courts, not for all of society through a legislature. Up until fairly recently (the Industrial Revolution) this was exactly how pollution was handled, by the courts. That changed when the courts started taking cues from utilitarian calculus and merchantilism instead of the traditional common law; ergo our current dilemma.
If I create a manuscript on a stack of paper that I own, then I own the manuscript and exclusively possess all rights to that manuscript.
(Obviously.)
When I decide to publish that manuscript, I transfer certain limited rights to the publishers, who in turn transfers certain limited rights to the purchaser. If, for example, I do no stipulate that retail buyers will have the right to make and distribute multiple copies of the book they buy, they do not have that right. To argue that they do is to propose that rights in the book come from some source other than the book's auther [sic], which I categorically reject. (And, I don't think you can demonstrate otherwise, unless you make that a priori claim.)
What are you transferring rights in? The manuscript? But the purchasers aren't getting the manuscript; they have no need of any rights in it. "Rights in the book"? What "book"? The sequence of words embodied in your manuscript? No, that can't be right -- you said you aren't claiming to own ideas. The sequence of words that make up a novel are just as much an idea as the plot. The physical object bought by the purchaser, then? But as you've already stated that you don't own the ideas in other people's minds, specifically including the case where these ideas were created based on reading your manuscript, it would appear that you're attempting to say that "(unowned ideas, or ideas owned by A) + (property owned by A) --> (property owned by B)", which doesn't correspond to any theory of natural rights that I'm aware of. On what basis are you making such an extraordinary claim?
All the publisher -- or any other person -- needs is the right to observe the manuscript, to create ideas based on their representations in the manuscript. It can then encode representations of those ideas into its own property (publication). The right to merely observe the manuscript is implicit in both publication and purchase, and sufficient to create unlimited duplicates; no additional rights are necessary.
Re: Publishers -- You are very wrong about publishing. If you want to argue that publishers "have the same rights as anyone else" to any published work other than those for which they've contracted (as you've argued) why, then, aren't publishers copying their competitor's bestsellers and undercutting them on price?
I think any publishers would be surprised to know that they have not bought limited rights in a book. That's what the contract spells out: What the publishers has the right to do and what rights have been retained by the author. For example, an author might grant a publisher distribution rights in the U.S., but retain distribution rights elsewhere. You seem to be arguing a position that would nullify the publisher's legal obligation to distribute the book only in the U.S. as soon as the first retail copy rolls off the press.
The answer should be obvious: the legal system known as copyright. The debate, though, was over moral rights and natural law, not the technicalities of a legal system whose very legitimacy depends on those underlying principles. You are making a circular argument.
Information -- or ideas in someone's head -- is, as I've said several times, impossible to copy. So, the entire discussion centered on copying ideas is moot, because it is talking about something that cannot be done. Ideas are completely free, always. I've been addressing something else: Who has rights to the physical property created when someone encodes a representation of ideas on something?
First, physical property usually isn't created by encoding (representations of) ideas into it. All the physical ingredient involved in creating the final product are typically already owned. So who owned the physical property before it was encoded with a representation of these ideas? (Hint: Probably not the author/artist to whom you are attempting to reassign ownership.) Changing the form of a physical object does not normally affect its ownership. Why should the ownership of a physical object change just because its form was altered to represent a particular set of ideas?
If, as you argue, the act of publishing makes a book available for the [public] to do with as it pleases, how, then, can an author sell only limited rights to his publisher? The publisher is part of the public. Why doesn't the publisher acquire all the rights that, if I read you correctly, everyone else does? If an author does have the ability to transfer limited rights to a publisher, why, then, does he not have a similar right to transfer limited rights to the buying public?
True, the publisher is part of the public and would normally not be prevented from duplicating any work they had access to. The trick is that prior to publication they don't have access to the work -- you have the only copy(s). You can thus make their access to your unpublished original contingent on a voluntary contract in which they agree pay you royalties (or whatever). You aren't granting them limited rights. They have the same rights as anyone else, but unlike the others they are bound by their contract with you. Obviously you could try to extend the same contract to the entire buying public, but that is (IMHO) unlikely to be effective unless the distribution of the work is rather exclusive to begin with. (Compare to the areas in which NDAs have historically proven effective.)
My insurance (and me, by proxy) is now going to pay for his medical costs because he couldn't take two seconds to buckle up? I may have made a mistake while driving, but because he took that mistake and amplified it, should I pay the price?
This is why insurance companies try to discriminate according to effective risk. The entire insurance industry is highly regulated -- mostly at the request of the larger insurance firms, because it works out in their favor -- but the general practice in unimpeded insurance organizations is to estimate the financial risk involved in an applicant's behavior as a factor in the determination of their premiums.
Insurance is not intended to function as a subsidy between different risk classes. Your premium, ideally, should be about equal to your total insurance risk: the sum (over all covered events) of the cost of the event multiplied by the probability of that event. Someone known to drive recklessly would have a higher probability; someone known not to wear a seat belt would have a higher cost. In either case their premiums than those of a safe driver to offset their greater insurance risk.
Of course, this is all in theory. In practice the large insurers realize that only a major insurance company can effectively subsidize insurance between divergent risk classes, and as a result they tend to lobby for "privacy" and "nondiscrimination" regulation to prevent their competition, the smaller insurers, from performing the kind of individual risk analysis needed to run an effective insurance organization. Some levels of risk analysis are still performed, but many relevant factors are excluded. (Consider the case of pre-existing conditions, for example, where the risk is a near certainty but the insurer is obligated to provide coverage regardless -- a forced subsidy.)
As usual, the government created the problem (at the behest of the insurance industry) and is now being asked to exercise additional authority to "fix" things.
Government regulation is not incompatible with a free market. In a free-market society, government exists to enforce agreements between people.
First, what do you mean here by "free market"? The only consistent definition I've run across for the term essentially means a nonaggressive market society (i.e. a society where ethical/moral behavior is defined in terms of property rights, homesteading, and contractual transfer of ownership). However, since governments are defined by "legitimate" aggression -- any organization that was not considered "legitimate", or did not employ aggression, would not be called a government -- the very existance of a government, much less government regulations, is by definition impossible in a free-market society. In a free-market society a "government" has no legitimacy -- from the definition, there can be no legitimate aggression in a free market -- and is thus no different from any other criminal organization.
On the other hand, you may have been making the common mistake of confusing "perfect competition" with "free market". That seems to occur all too frequently.
It is itself an agreement between the people to create a set of rules by which other disagreements can be resolved.
I think this is closer to the definition of the common law than to that of government. The common law is a protocol for resolving disputes -- and completely compatible with a free-market society. Government, on the other hand, does not primarily resolve disputes; it may occasionally do so, but its core purpose is closer to social engineering via organized aggression than genuine resolution of disputes between private parties.
For example, if the people say, "Dumping pollution into the rivers is bad", in a free market they get together to define "pollution" and enforce the rule. Government is only the mechanism by which that happens. The market is still entirely free.
This example is interesting because pollution was originally a common law, issue resolved through the courts; it had nothing to do with government rule-making. Some time during the Industrial Revolution, though, the courts decided to drop the property-rights approach to pollution disputes in favor of an ideology rooted in merchantilism and utilitarian calculus. (This ruling would never have been accepted in private arbitration, for obvious reasons, but this was a government court and its rulings thus generally beyond challenge.) If the courts had just done their job at the time and ruled according to property rights there wouldn't have been any opportunity for government to get involved, and the market would have remained free in that area.
While that's true, it's also true of all energy sources. When you tap tidal forces for electricity, you eventually transform that energy into waste heat. When you tap wind power, you eventually transform that energy into waste heat. When you tap direct solar power using solar panels, you're only adding latency to its conversion to heat.
So while it's technically true, it wouldn't be a very good argument against nuclear power.:-)
Entirely true, and I wasn't attempting to make an argument against nuclear power. I merely wanted to point out that the efficiency of the generator plants themselves was never in question, but rather the conversion of the energy stored in fissionable matter into waste heat through energy consumption -- which, as you point out, is true of every known form of energy production. (One could probably argue that solar, wind, and tidal generators are at least energy-neutral in this regard, since we would be absorbing the solar radiation whether we turned it into electricity or not, but if you look at it from a sufficiently long-term point of view everything, including nuclear fuel, turns to waste heat in the end whether we use it or not. It's just a matter of time.)
This must be the oddest argument I've ever heard against nuclear power. First and foremost, any escaped heat is wasted energy that could have been used for electricity. So plants try to loose as little as possible. However, they do lose some, but nowhere near enough to have an impact on global conditions.
I believe the point was that no matter how efficient the energy conversion process may be, in the end all the generated electricity will eventually be turned into heat as it's consumed. (I agree that this isn't on the same order of magnatude as the CO2 energy-trapping effect, though.)
Right, and in the case of racism, there's a very stong way to fight it: don't be racist. And has that worked? Go ask your local redneck.
I would say that the approach in question has worked at least as well as any other that does not itself involve actions which are themselves worse than racism.
without help like that, there is less motivation to create
I'm sure that the lack of million-dollar commissions also results in "less motivation to create" -- the point being that, while the purpose of granting copyright monopolies is ostensibly to encourage the sciences and "useful" arts, one does eventually reach a point of diminishing returns, both in terms of the amount of art and science created, and in terms of the utility of that increased amount. There is no need for the government to supply unlimited motivation, and it would, in fact, be counter-productive for it to do so. In my opinion we are already long past the point were the social benefits of copyrights and patents can be said to outweigh the costs.
Whilst I agree with the majority of it, what if there was a company in the UK called Joe Blogs Plumming, and there was also a company in Australia called Joe Blogs Plumming, who would own the rights to http://joeblogs/ [joeblogs]?
Simple: no one would. Instead you'd have Joe Blogs Plumming (UK) and Joe Blogs Plumming (AU). The host name would be replaced with a unique, random identifier, probably of variable length (for expansion); to get to a site you either (a) open a bookmark; (b) follow a (fixed) link from another site; or (c) perform a search. From a UI point of view you eliminate all visible references to the host name portion of the URL. The address bar, for example, becomes a configurable keyword search bar; tooltips show only the page title and the pathname portion of the URL. The user never has to worry about the DNS name of the host.
Anyway, it isn't really as though the hierarchial DNS system truly solved the problem of conflicting names in the first place (e.g. www.apple.com and www.applecorps.com).
Slashdot Mirror
Does your property cease to be yours when its stolen by a protection racket for failing to pay their fee? The case with government and property tax is no different. It's still rightfully your property, but it's been stolen from you with no hope of recovery.
When discussing the actions of a government I prefer to start by judging them according to their own bylaws (e.g. the Constitution), since such arguments are simpler and tend to appeal to a broader range of people. That doesn't mean I consider the Constitution to be a legitimate grant of authority to commit coercion, which means I consider all government acts (which could not have been performed by a private citizen) to be aggressive in nature and the government itself no different from any other criminal organization. (The only coercion I consider legitimate is proportional self-defense against prior aggression.)
Perhaps you stop and reread the Constitution before making such a sloppy argument. The Constitution allows Congress "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". Note that Congress isn't required to enact copyrights and patents; it merely has the ability to do so under the Constitution, with a very specific purpose: promoting "the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Copyrights and patents, in other words, are an attempt at social engineering, one which Congress can enact or withdraw at its leisure. They are also transient ("for limited times") whereas real property rights are permanent, passing from one generation to the next until the property is finally consumed or abandoned by its owner -- even presuming such ever occurs.
In contract, regular property rights are barely mentioned in the Constitution, because they were already thoroughly established in the Common Law; real property rights formed a background so obvious to the Constitution's authors that they saw no need to make them explicit; copyrights and patents had to be mentioned precisely because they were not part of that background. Congress can revoke them on a whim because they exist purely by Congressional decree. There are some (badly worded and poorly interpreted) clauses which Congress can abuse to violate traditional property rights under very specific circumstances, but as such rights do not originate with Congress it would take more than a simple decree to eliminate them entirely. (It would probably take a major Constitutional amendment, a change in the very nature of the government itself.)
The thing is, the government doesn't provide those services -- we do. We pay for them through taxes and inflation, and we provide them by staffing those organizations and producing the materials they use. The only part the government plays is in forcing everyone to go through them for services which any given taxpayer may never need or want, in the process eliminating any possiblity of competitive, cost-effective private production of those services for those who do want them.
Correlation != causality. Alternate reasoning: Government interference in everyday affairs increased in response to private improvements in economics (quality-of-living) and technology. In particular, improvements in the speed and reach of communications enabled a vast increase in the territory that could be ruled by a single government.
Answer me this: Which started first, economic growth or larger governments? I believe you'll find that economic improvements had a sizeable lead, one which the government has fortunately not proven capable of completely suppressing -- though they do try. Private advancement hold the potential to seriously weaken their grip.
The question isn't whether you want to pay taxes. You're obviously free to pay whatever "taxes" you want. (Though they wouldn't really be taxes if you choose to pay them -- they'd be donations instead.) No, the question is whether you have the right to make the rest of us pay those taxes to benefit you.
I wouldn't expect you to. That's why we have the social division of labor and trade. That has nothing to do with government or taxation, though -- just basic economics.
(1) Last I checked, the one thing you could be sure about regarding "common sense" is that it's far from common. The decisions of the majority are generally about as far from common sense as it is possible to be. Part of the reason for this, in my opinion, is that a simple majority vote lacks the feedback mechanisms inherent in any market system -- profit and loss -- and furthermore divides choices from personal consequences. Development of common sense requires a closed-loop decision process. (2) People already pay more for more resource-intensive choices. You just don't think they pay enough more. Who are you (or even "the majority") to make that decision? What gives you (pl.) the right to interfere? If you're trying to challenge the legitimacy of private ownership of the resources themselves then say so; otherwise you have no business telling anyone who they can buy from/sell to or at what price the exchange can be made.
I challenge this assertion. Scarcity is precisely the reason for private ownership. It is a framework designed to mediate exactly this sort of dispute. One could even say that private property rights are the outcome of mediating such disputes in the past. If resources (energy sources) are scarce, which I don't dispute, then they can't be regarded as commonly owned without running straight into the "trajedy of the commons." They must be privately owned.
Good; you recognize that taxes are fundamentally a form of control -- a form of slavery, in other words, accomplished through systematic aggression in the form of theft backed by the threat of force. In a democracy taxes are exploitation of the complacent majority by the vocal special interests (minorities). (It can't work the other way, since that would be a represent a net loss to the ruling majority.) Unfortunately, you seem to be under the impression that this (taxes, social engineering, "encouraging" and "discouraging" behaviors in others through aggression) is actually a good thing.
(1) Good, I feel the same way. See my point about "common sense" above. (2) These aren't "common resources"; they're owned by specific individuals and these individuals have the right to decide how they're used (always subject to the universal principle of non-aggression, of course), not some self-appointed or elected group of elite "leaders."
Get one thing straight: I don't care about the "market". I care about one thing: aggression. I care about individual choices, and the liberty to make them free of coercion; I care
Could you explain how "[t]he resources used to light that bulb are part of the commons"? As I see it each person is paying for their own electricity. In turn each electricity company is paying for its own fuel, and each fuel company is paying (ultimately) the rightful owners of the resources in question for the necessary raw materials. How is any part of this process related at all to some kind of "social commons"?
The answer to the commons issue is (obviously) private ownership. Here we already have private ownership; no further adjustment is necessary. The prices are exactly where they ought to be. In any event, who are you to say that current prices are "too low" or "too high"? Who made you the judge of whether others are using "too many" resources, such that you feel justified in levying a tax on their use?
> Cool, foldl cleaned mine up a bit. My thinking of it is muddled though.
The expression "foldl (\x y -> (2*x + bit y)) 0 w" is essentially equivalent to the following procedural pseudocode:
x = 0
for y in w
x = 2 * x + bit(y)
end
return x
The foldl routine (along with the right-associative foldr) is extremely useful in transforming most kinds of "for [element] in [list]" control structures. Their actual Haskell definitions are (I believe, from memory):
foldl f b [] = b
foldl f b (x:xs) = foldl f (f b x) xs
foldr f b [] = b
foldr f b (x:xs) = f x (foldr f b xs)
A typical expansion might be:
foldl (+) 0 [1,2,3,4]
== foldl (+) (0 + 1) [2,3,4]
== foldl (+) ((0 + 1) + 2) [3,4]
== foldl (+) (((0 + 1) + 2) + 3) [4]
== foldl (+) ((((0 + 1) + 2) + 3) + 4) []
== ((((0 + 1) + 2) + 3) + 4)
== 10
Another functional version, this time in Haskell:
import Char
bit '0' = 0
bit '1' = 1
binToChar w = chr $ foldl (\x y -> (2*x + bit y)) 0 w
main = print $ map binToChar $ words code
code = "01000010 01100101 00100000 01110011 01110101 01110010 01100101 00100000 " ++
"01110100 01101111 00100000 01100100 01110010 01101001 01101110 01101011 " ++
"00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01001111 01110110 " ++
"01100001 01101100 01110100 01101001 01101110 01100101 00101110"
Were you even trying to make sense? I couldn't tell... so many contradictions in just one post. To be honest I don't care particularly much, in an ideological sense, about capitalism itself. I only oppose aggression (the violation of rightfully acquired property rights). So long as you respect property rights we have no quarrel. ("Property rights" in this context are a superset of the basic civil rights -- free speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, free press, etc. These are a natural result of ownership of one's own body. Copyright (and patents) conflict with property itself, not just capitalism; that makes their enforcement a form of aggression.) However, any society that refrains from aggression already meets the critera for a free-market economy. It seems to me that you're trying to construct a system of positive rights, where everyone else owes you wherever you decide you "need". Such a system can never even be consistent, much less equitable. It is a system of universal slavery where the least productive individuals rule over the rest. In any event your rant about "monopolization of the money supply" illustrates your shallow understanding of how markets work. (Hint: The money we presently use is not the only medium of exchange possible. If one person, or a small number of people, had all the money it would be worthless to them, as everyone else would standardize on a different unit of exchange. A given currency only retains its marketability so long as it remains in widespread use. Monopolization would destroy its value.)
I believe you've misspelled "corporatism" and/or "merchantilism". Copyright contradicts fundamental principles of capitalism and property rights. For that matter, when you get down to it, copyright was instigated (in the U.S.) as an attempt at social engineering, which is even more directly opposed to property rights (and thus also capitalism). Give credit where credit is due: copyright is an outgrowth of the "social democratic" mindset, not the apolitical market economy.
Very well -- I'll accept that definition of "idea" for the purpose of this debate. I would argue that words, symbols, language, art, etc. are ideas of a sort themselves, at least to the extent that we can actually understand and use them -- perhaps they have a sort of dual nature, both physical and mental, in order to bridge the gap between the two domains -- but I'll let that pass for the time being. However, I don't really see how this definition advances your argument. My position on "copyright" follows naturally from the definitions I gave for property rights and contracts; it is these points which you must address if you wish to counter my conclusions.
As for the techicalities and corner cases you raised relating to homesteading, I realize that these questions exist but they really don't matter as much as one might think. The common law already addresses most of the details of homesteading, including cases of abandonment, unknowing trespass, etc. In most disputes the basic principle that the party with the earliest claim has priority is sufficient to decide one way or the other. Some things obviously establish a claim; other things obviously do not. In between there is a grey region where human judgement is necessary, taking into consideration the individual circumstances of the case. Over time, as more disputes are successfully resolved, the body of precedence grows and grey areas grow correspondingly more clear.
How else would you assign first ownership? If you don't exclusively assign ownership to the first user then you must either prohibit unowned resources from becoming property (on what basis?) and/or take things that are already owned by one person and reassign them to someone else (most people call that theft). Anyway, the details of homesteading are somewhat beside the point...
I don't think we're speaking the same language here. As I understand things, to use your note example, the concepts of "anger", "emotion", "person", "self", "to be", etc. are all ideas. The words "I'm angry" -- not the written form, not even a particular pattern of synapses, just the words in the abstract -- are a thought, an idea constructed from less complex ideas. Of course any idea which exists in reality must have some physical representation, e.g. synaptic patterns in the brain, patterns of ink on paper, the shape of some physical object or group of objects. In turn, the abstract concept of the shape of a physical object can itself be an idea (see: geometry). Consequently, even if the words themselves are unintelligible, the patterns of ink on paper which make up your note create new ideas in an observer's brain. Patterns of ink on paper create corresponding patterns of synapses in a neural net; both represent the same abstract geometric idea. The note, one physical representation of an idea, begets a pattern of synapses, another representation of the same idea. From the synaptic patterns yet another representation can be created out of new paper and new ink: a "duplicate". Only the abstract pattern, the geometric idea, is actually employed in creating the duplicate. The note was merely the means of representing, and communicating, that idea from one neural net to another.
We appear to be arguing conclusions, which is pointless. Let's back up a bit. Of the following, which do you not agree with?
First, the only reason you need to "streamline" anything is that the courts aren't doing their job. There's no reason why a court ruling has to be any more expensive than the sort of tax you're proposing. Either way someone -- probably a consumer organization of some sort -- will have to investigate the polluter and gather evidence. One of the victims will have to file for arbitration and win a ruling against the polluter. At that point the polluter's actions are established fact and it ought to be trivial for the other victims to win similar rulings -- all they have to do is show that those same actions affected them. Why isn't it that simple? Well, you tell me -- what is the typical result of an enforced monopoly? Private arbitration exists, but only when both parties agree in advance on an arbiter. Private arbitration also lacks the use of most forms of non-aggressive (defensive) force that government courts wield. Put private arbiters on equal footing with government courts and I guarantee that the price of resolving disputes like this would decrease dramatically. (Obviously this would also mean taking some truly aggressive actions away from the government courts, too -- most contempt-of-court sentences, for example.)
Second, as another responder pointed out, the taxees and payees in your system does not precisely correspond to the offenders and victims. You can't just average everything out and expect the system to remain just; justice depends on all the little details you're trying to "streamline" away. If you're actually going to prove each offender's guilt, determine the harm caused to each victim by each offender, and transfer exactly that amount from each offender to each victim, then -- well congratulations, you've just reinvented the court system. If not then it's almost a certainty that you'd be stealing from some entities and overcompensating others, and probably losing a lot of the "compensation" to third parties in the process. The latter two obviously aren't much of a problem of themselves (from a rights p.o.v.), but the former is. Any private party that put such a system into practice would rightly be called a thief; I see no reason to hold a government organization to any lesser standard.
I don't think I disagree with the basic idea here, but what you're describing isn't a tax. Compensation for a tort is not taxation, and is determined on a case-by-case basis by the courts, not for all of society through a legislature. Up until fairly recently (the Industrial Revolution) this was exactly how pollution was handled, by the courts. That changed when the courts started taking cues from utilitarian calculus and merchantilism instead of the traditional common law; ergo our current dilemma.
(Obviously.)
What are you transferring rights in? The manuscript? But the purchasers aren't getting the manuscript; they have no need of any rights in it. "Rights in the book"? What "book"? The sequence of words embodied in your manuscript? No, that can't be right -- you said you aren't claiming to own ideas. The sequence of words that make up a novel are just as much an idea as the plot. The physical object bought by the purchaser, then? But as you've already stated that you don't own the ideas in other people's minds, specifically including the case where these ideas were created based on reading your manuscript, it would appear that you're attempting to say that "(unowned ideas, or ideas owned by A) + (property owned by A) --> (property owned by B)", which doesn't correspond to any theory of natural rights that I'm aware of. On what basis are you making such an extraordinary claim?
All the publisher -- or any other person -- needs is the right to observe the manuscript, to create ideas based on their representations in the manuscript. It can then encode representations of those ideas into its own property (publication). The right to merely observe the manuscript is implicit in both publication and purchase, and sufficient to create unlimited duplicates; no additional rights are necessary.
The answer should be obvious: the legal system known as copyright. The debate, though, was over moral rights and natural law, not the technicalities of a legal system whose very legitimacy depends on those underlying principles. You are making a circular argument.
First, physical property usually isn't created by encoding (representations of) ideas into it. All the physical ingredient involved in creating the final product are typically already owned. So who owned the physical property before it was encoded with a representation of these ideas? (Hint: Probably not the author/artist to whom you are attempting to reassign ownership.) Changing the form of a physical object does not normally affect its ownership. Why should the ownership of a physical object change just because its form was altered to represent a particular set of ideas?
True, the publisher is part of the public and would normally not be prevented from duplicating any work they had access to. The trick is that prior to publication they don't have access to the work -- you have the only copy(s). You can thus make their access to your unpublished original contingent on a voluntary contract in which they agree pay you royalties (or whatever). You aren't granting them limited rights. They have the same rights as anyone else, but unlike the others they are bound by their contract with you. Obviously you could try to extend the same contract to the entire buying public, but that is (IMHO) unlikely to be effective unless the distribution of the work is rather exclusive to begin with. (Compare to the areas in which NDAs have historically proven effective.)
This is why insurance companies try to discriminate according to effective risk. The entire insurance industry is highly regulated -- mostly at the request of the larger insurance firms, because it works out in their favor -- but the general practice in unimpeded insurance organizations is to estimate the financial risk involved in an applicant's behavior as a factor in the determination of their premiums.
Insurance is not intended to function as a subsidy between different risk classes. Your premium, ideally, should be about equal to your total insurance risk: the sum (over all covered events) of the cost of the event multiplied by the probability of that event. Someone known to drive recklessly would have a higher probability; someone known not to wear a seat belt would have a higher cost. In either case their premiums than those of a safe driver to offset their greater insurance risk.
Of course, this is all in theory. In practice the large insurers realize that only a major insurance company can effectively subsidize insurance between divergent risk classes, and as a result they tend to lobby for "privacy" and "nondiscrimination" regulation to prevent their competition, the smaller insurers, from performing the kind of individual risk analysis needed to run an effective insurance organization. Some levels of risk analysis are still performed, but many relevant factors are excluded. (Consider the case of pre-existing conditions, for example, where the risk is a near certainty but the insurer is obligated to provide coverage regardless -- a forced subsidy.)
As usual, the government created the problem (at the behest of the insurance industry) and is now being asked to exercise additional authority to "fix" things.
First, what do you mean here by "free market"? The only consistent definition I've run across for the term essentially means a nonaggressive market society (i.e. a society where ethical/moral behavior is defined in terms of property rights, homesteading, and contractual transfer of ownership). However, since governments are defined by "legitimate" aggression -- any organization that was not considered "legitimate", or did not employ aggression, would not be called a government -- the very existance of a government, much less government regulations, is by definition impossible in a free-market society. In a free-market society a "government" has no legitimacy -- from the definition, there can be no legitimate aggression in a free market -- and is thus no different from any other criminal organization.
On the other hand, you may have been making the common mistake of confusing "perfect competition" with "free market". That seems to occur all too frequently.
I think this is closer to the definition of the common law than to that of government. The common law is a protocol for resolving disputes -- and completely compatible with a free-market society. Government, on the other hand, does not primarily resolve disputes; it may occasionally do so, but its core purpose is closer to social engineering via organized aggression than genuine resolution of disputes between private parties.
This example is interesting because pollution was originally a common law, issue resolved through the courts; it had nothing to do with government rule-making. Some time during the Industrial Revolution, though, the courts decided to drop the property-rights approach to pollution disputes in favor of an ideology rooted in merchantilism and utilitarian calculus. (This ruling would never have been accepted in private arbitration, for obvious reasons, but this was a government court and its rulings thus generally beyond challenge.) If the courts had just done their job at the time and ruled according to property rights there wouldn't have been any opportunity for government to get involved, and the market would have remained free in that area.
Entirely true, and I wasn't attempting to make an argument against nuclear power. I merely wanted to point out that the efficiency of the generator plants themselves was never in question, but rather the conversion of the energy stored in fissionable matter into waste heat through energy consumption -- which, as you point out, is true of every known form of energy production. (One could probably argue that solar, wind, and tidal generators are at least energy-neutral in this regard, since we would be absorbing the solar radiation whether we turned it into electricity or not, but if you look at it from a sufficiently long-term point of view everything, including nuclear fuel, turns to waste heat in the end whether we use it or not. It's just a matter of time.)
I believe the point was that no matter how efficient the energy conversion process may be, in the end all the generated electricity will eventually be turned into heat as it's consumed. (I agree that this isn't on the same order of magnatude as the CO2 energy-trapping effect, though.)
I would say that the approach in question has worked at least as well as any other that does not itself involve actions which are themselves worse than racism.
What about their intentions do you consider dishonorable? Illegal, certainly, but what dishonor is there in opposing or violating an unjust law?
I'm sure that the lack of million-dollar commissions also results in "less motivation to create" -- the point being that, while the purpose of granting copyright monopolies is ostensibly to encourage the sciences and "useful" arts, one does eventually reach a point of diminishing returns, both in terms of the amount of art and science created, and in terms of the utility of that increased amount. There is no need for the government to supply unlimited motivation, and it would, in fact, be counter-productive for it to do so. In my opinion we are already long past the point were the social benefits of copyrights and patents can be said to outweigh the costs.
Simple: no one would. Instead you'd have Joe Blogs Plumming (UK) and Joe Blogs Plumming (AU). The host name would be replaced with a unique, random identifier, probably of variable length (for expansion); to get to a site you either (a) open a bookmark; (b) follow a (fixed) link from another site; or (c) perform a search. From a UI point of view you eliminate all visible references to the host name portion of the URL. The address bar, for example, becomes a configurable keyword search bar; tooltips show only the page title and the pathname portion of the URL. The user never has to worry about the DNS name of the host.
Anyway, it isn't really as though the hierarchial DNS system truly solved the problem of conflicting names in the first place (e.g. www.apple.com and www.applecorps.com).