Just been through some of your comments. I don't totally agree with you, but you have many interesting things to say, and argue a good case.
Thanks. I don't require that anyone agree with me, just that one keeps an open mind. It seems that my views tend to draw the ire of all sides of the debate: the socialists, because I support the market economy and despise central planning; the communists, because I don't believe communism can scale to an entire society (although it may appear to work for a short time in small communities before evolving back into a market economy); and the statist capitalists, which is nearly everyone else, because I consider all aggression, including government aggression, a pure "deadweight loss" to the market. With so many opponents, it's nice to know that I've got a fan or two, even if they don't necessarily agree with me 100%.
As for scarcity, I think that oxygen is pretty valuable, despite its relative abundance. Also, in any volentary transaction, its value is higher than the price paid, so as to make the exchange worthwhile, which yields a major flaw in attempting to measure wealth; you hope that "all other things are equal" when making the comparison, but can never be sure.
Diamonds and the like are a different matter. Certainly they're pretty, but actually, they're a form of cash. A ladder is valuable because it helps you get to a rooftop; it would still have that value if there were an abundance of ladders.
First, I think we're using different definitions of "value" here. In economics, "value" usually refers to an individual's internal, unmeasurable scale of preferences (at a given time) as expressed through action. Thus, if a person chooses to buy a loaf of bread for $1.00, it expresses a value-judgement that the loaf of bread is worth more to it, at that moment, than the $1.00 given up in exchange. Thus, "value" is linked directly to "demand" (the total amount all such individuals are willing and able to give up for a loaf of bread).
The concept you are using, however, is typically labelled "utility": an (arbitrary) quantity assigned to the psychic satisfaction granted by a good. As it is generally estimated, oxygen does indeed have a higher utility than diamonds (diamonds being a luxury while oxygen is necessary for life), but few individuals would express through action the idea that, say, a liter of bottled oxygen (for breathing purposes) has a higher value than a diamond. Note that there are exceptions: extra oxygen may be worth something to someone who cannot breath properly, or to a mountain-climber unused to the thinner air. In such cases, the utility of the oxygen does not change (it remains necessary for life), but its scarcity, and thus its value, does (due either to increased demand in the former case, or decreased supply in the latter).
In the end, this is about society verses nature. That abundance destroys value is a fairly accurate social observation: we evolved so as to value having an edge over one another, and the ubiquitous cannot help in that, but we do still have basic needs and desires, and indeed, this is essential in a justification of capitalism, or else we're all just spinning hamster wheels. Poverty can be alleviated, it's simply a mistake to think that it can be eliminated through ever more government.
If I follow you correctly, I think I agree, with one caveat: even if we humans did not value "having an edge over one another", any non-primitive society must still have specialization of labour and thus trade and a market economy. Individuals engaged in trade often try to take advantage of the other's weaknesses and short-sightedness, but that is not an essential part of trade. It would, in fact, make for a more efficient market economy (with better allocation of resourc
The core issue here is scarcity vs abundance economics as well as the definition of wealth.
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This is a joke, right? There is no such thing as "abundance economics"; economics is, by definition, the study of the allocation of scarce resources. A world without scarcity would have no need of economics (or society, for that matter, since society itself is the result of trade and division of labour). What you are describing is the sociology of an unrealizable state of perfect abundance, which not even perfect matter replication could achieve. (Where would you get the energy? Or the raw materials?) In particular, time will never be abundant, regardless of advances in technology. Human labour will likewise remain scarce so long as the population does not exceed that which can be sustained at subsistance levels (a state even less likely in a wealthy society than in a poor one).
The natural instinct when faced with abundance is to share. Status in this society is based on who makes the biggest contrubutions to the community, who can give away the most, a person who hoardes is not rich (as he keeps it all to himself).
In your fictional world of abundance, what value would there be in such contributions? Abundance dictates that everyone has everything they want or need; what contribution would possibly add to such a state? Giving something away would be equivalent to throwing it away, as the recipient has no need of the gift. If there is such a need, then the state of abundance does not exist, as some individuals do not have all that they need. At the very least, "contributions to the community" must consist in part of one scarce resource: labour. Labour can be made more productive through technological advancements, but it cannot be replaced entirely, as it is (in any human society) grounded in purposeful human action. At the pinacle of human development it might consist of nothing more than the choice of which action to take, with the actual work accomplished by armies of robots, and yet that choice is still inescapably a form of scarce human labour.
A copy will have its own intrinsic value, but it is not limited by scarcity and thus the two systems have two incompatable definitions of value. Its the classic question: Which is more valuable, diamonds or air?
Just for the record, the old "paradox" of the relative values of diamonds and water (or air) was resolved decades ago with the advent of the subjective theory of value, which is the only theory of value supported by any modern school of economics, the labour and utility theories of value having both been thoroughly disproven. The "paradox" results from trying to establish univeral values for all diamonds vs. all the air, when in fact the decisions being made contrast a specific additional quantity of diamonds vs. a specific additional quantity of air according to the situation of a specific individual. Since air is abundant, meaning that everyone already has as much as he/she needs, no value is generally placed on additional air. In contrast, diamonds are relatively scarce, and few people have any; thus an additional diamond may have value to some individuals. Incidently, this demonstrates that scarcity does not reduce "the overall value of an item", since scarcity is in fact the only thing that can give any item any value at all. No one will give anything in exchange for an item abundantly available to all; full abundance eliminates value entirely.
Shouldn't it be mandatory in the workplace? There's no real competitive advantage to a lumberyard using these tools because they'll incur extra costs and the only benificiaries will be their mininum wage wood choppers.
I agree that it would be stupid to try and foist on hobbyists, but i'd probably get one if they were reasonably priced. My radial arm saw scares the crap out of me.
The competitive advantage to the lumberyard (assuming that this device is, in practice, effective in reducing risks to workers, which is far from proven) is that, assuming no interference from minimum-wage laws[1], the lumberyard which switched to these safer tools would be able to pay less per labour-hour in compensation for the risk of injury, and thus increase overall production without waiting to accumulate additional capital. In turn the workers benefit from a safer workplace, which they evidently preferred as they chose to accept a lower wage rate in exchange for a safer environment.
[1] In general, minimum-wage laws do nothing so well as creating institutional unemployment (and/or underemployment; a reduction in total labour-hours generally) among workers. They also, however, tend to eliminate the cost motivations for improving worker safety, since there's no business reason to spend money on safer tools when employee wages are already as low as they can legally become -- even if there are workers willing to accept a lower rate in a safer environment.
What exactly is special about those TLDs that they need to be allowed to do root delegation?
They're not allowed to, they're excluded from doing root delegation. Look closely at the option ruleset there.
I think the GP's right on this one. One of the previous comments (#15857938), quoting from the BIND release notes, indicated that the "exclude" list indicates exceptions to the root-delegation-only modifier; in other words, the domains listed are the ones that can provide undelegated responses, including wildcard domains. The default behavior (with no exclusion list) is to block all undelegated responses from the TLDs and the root domain.
Exactly. That's why, 30 years after the Clean Air Act, America's skies are in fact worse while the economy tanked.
Except, oh, wait. That didn't happen. In fact, the skies are vastly cleaner than they've been since the 1950s while the American economy has surged for 24 years with only two minor recessions.
The problem with air pollution can be directly traced to the (government's) courts' newfound refusal to treat pollution as a property-rights violation, as it had always been treated in the past. Once individuals and businesses could no longer sue for damages resulting from pollution, "external costs" started creeping in; industrial plants could dump waste into the air and water without worrying about the damage it would caused to others' property. The Clean Air Act and related legislation created an adequite, but much less fair, efficient, or effective, patch for the government's own failure to perform its primary duty. Such legislation would never have been necessary if the courts had done their job instead of propping up failed merchantilist policies.
Despite the mantra "Government can't work", the uncomfortable fact for neo-Friedman anarcho-capitalists is that, in fact, it can. Which is why the conservatives have officially seceded from the "reality based community" -- If you don't get the facts you like, change 'em.
Anarcho-capitalists have, to the best of my knowledge, never held that government interference in general necessarily leads to economic collapse. Rather, they generally hold that government interference in the market[1] (a) generally fails to achieve its intended aim[2] as individuals wise up to the changes and reimpose their original subjective valuations and (b) always, to the extent that it is enforced, inhibits the ability of the market to fulfill the demands of the consumers. Between these two points, unlimited interference would eliminate the market altogether, and thus leave the economy in total chaos, but limited interference would only make things mildly worse than they would have been without the interference. It is important to note that in a generally progressing economy (one in which the amount of capital goods and the productivity of labor are increasing) the interference need not result in an economic regression; the interference may simply limit the rate of progression.
The state of the market at any given time represents the best possible allocation of resources in the estimation of each individual member to the best of that member's knowledge and abilities. If there is any actual defect, it is within the ability of any member of that market to make a tidy profit from bringing about a better arrangement. Political interference is thus necessarily an attempt to impose an arrangement of resource allocation not believed to better represent the will of the consumers; if it was believed to be more efficient, its advocate would have more profitably implemented it through the normal market processes.
Furthermore, all the anarcho-capitalist writings that I have run across (the ones associated with the Austrian school of economics, anyway) are very much fact-based and grounded in real-world history. In my estimation their theories have been much more successful both in explaining economic history and in predicting the outcomes of government policies than most of the mainstream (Keynesian) model-based theories, particularly in the areas of credit manipulation and tax-funded spending programs. To work, model-based systems must reduce future human action to a predictable component: a given intervention must always produce a given result or the model fails. Unfortunately for the Keynesians, humans don't work that way. We learn. As soon as people begin to adapt to the manipulation the intervention tends to lose its effectiveness. People tend to resist the manipulation of their activities; ever-increasing levels of intervention beco
Re:I wonder how long it will take before
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KDE 3.5.4 Released
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· Score: 1
And running on Sid is a fun way to learn how to fix a broken system. I seem to recall my first major problem I couldn't fix when Sid upgraded X.org from 6.9 to 7.0 (bug with X11R7 and kwin or something). Be careful with a Sid system as you might end up reinstalling crap a few times a year (make regular backups to prevent the hassle).
Perhaps that's true for some systems. I wouldn't know, since I've been running (more or less) my current installation without incident from Sid for four or five years now, with regular updates the entire time. The only reinstall was due to a hardware (HDD) failure, not a software issue. It does occasionally require manual conflict resolution (which is why they call it "unstable"), and sometime a simple "apt-get upgrade" will refuse to update specific software packages due to missing dependencies (don't use "dist-upgrade" without checking the "to-be-removed" list first, of course). I find it useful to list both the "unstable" and "testing" repositories in sources.list; that eliminates more of the version conflicts. On the whole, however, in my experience, the "unstable"/"testing" repository combination works quite well enough for normal desktop use. In any event, if the risk is too high for you, then use "testing" and don't complain about not having the "latest and greatest" software releases: the delay is an inevitable part of guaranteeing cross-package compatibility on the dozen different architectures Debian supports. The fact remains that the only repository that's more than a year out of date (not even that, really) is the "stable" one.
It's still a good idea to have regular backups, of course. Besides the hardware-failure isse there is always the possibility of accidental deletion or power-loss-induced data corruption.
Re:I wonder how long it will take before
on
KDE 3.5.4 Released
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· Score: 1
...it shows up in pkgsrc [pkgsrc.org]? I might actually get a chance to check it out this year. (boy am I glad I don't use debian any more!)
I hate to disappoint you, but I just installed KDE 3.5.4-2 from the offical Debian "Sid" repositories last night. It would seem that your complaint against Debian's package management is unfounded, at least for the desktop-oriented releases. Perhaps you were trying to run a desktop system out of the "stable" (server-oriented) repository? "Testing" and "unstable" are recommended for desktop systems; both are fairly up-to-date, although "testing" typically lags a release or two behind "unstable" ("Sid").
That's a circular argument - you can't use your own assertion that theft is wrong to prove that property is right.
I wasn't trying to use that statement to prove my point; I was simply pointing out that the conclusions tend to match people's innate sense of justice, whereas other systems which later reassign ownership fail to do so.
Do you write click-through EULAs for a living? I don't agree that my body is my property in the same sense that my possessions are my property - for example, my body responds directly to my will and nobody else's, whereas my possessions respond equally to the will of whoever happens to be holding them.
Ownership isn't defined by who the item responds to at all; it is defined by who has the right to exclusive control over the item. The statement was not at all like a click-through agreement; it was simply an expression of the basic logical tennent that you cannot consistently argue for a position that would make the argument itself impossible. If you do not have the right to exclusive control, i.e. ownership, of your body, then you cannot use it to engage in this argument (at least without violating the rights of others).
However, I do recognise that the only thing allowing me to stay in sovereign control of my body is a social norm forbidding individual violence - a norm that is backed up, ironically enough, by the threat of collective violence.
It isn't a question of individual vs. collective violence. Individual violence can be performed in self-defense, and collective violence can violate the "sovereign control of [your] body" just as easily (or rather more easily) than individual violence can. Furthermore, the rights of a group cannot exceed the rights of the individuals that make up that group. If individuals do not have a right to self-defense, then the group cannot have the right to defend its members. (The same may not be true of ability; a group may be capable of defense where an individual would be too weak to defend itself.) The proper categorization is not individual vs. collective, but rather aggression vs. self-defense -- and only with a sound theory of property rights can one tell the difference between the two.
Property rights depend on the concept of equality before the law - the question of whether or not you have the right to defend your property does not and must not depend on your identity, or on how much you contributed to the charitable police fund. Otherwise your libertarian utopia will quickly deteriorate into a kleptocracy where the rich get richer by robbing the poor with the tacit support of the police and courts.
I agree. Any just society depends on "equality before the law". I think it's a bit naive to assume that a democracy of any sort actually provides that equality, however, since the law itself is monopolized by a single legislature under the (presumed) control of the majority, and enforced by a monopoly on the police and court systems. Should that monopoly of defense happen to run amok (suppose that the majority believe stealing from the rich to be a fashionable pasttime, as has happened before), who would stop them? There can be no competitive defense organization of similar capability due to the legal monopoly, so the only meager defense is that of a civilian uprising: civil war. Even that is difficult when those whose rights are violated are a small enough minority group.
On the other hand, private defense would be competitive. There would be numerous defense organizations, and any given individual would subscribe to the one that provided the desired level of defense at an expense the individual was willing to pay. Any one organization that went awry, abusing its defensive capabilities to murder and steal, would be opposed by the others. The market in defense services provides a far more effective check-and-balan
No, becuase CEO's and oil companies are not forcing their rules upon us with the power of police and prisons and the military.
Who enforces property rights? Police, prisons and the military.
Libertarians claim to be opposed to coercion. Actually they're just opposed to coercion on behalf of the poor. Coercion on behalf of the rich is fine, it's called 'property rights'.
Property rights, when observed, protect the poor just as much as the wealthy. Without property rights consumption is impossible -- you can't use something up (food, for example) unless you can claim an exclusive right to it. Furthermore, you can't save for the future if the only exclusive rights are limited to immediate consumption. The only alternative to privately-owned property--that treats everyone equally--would be for everyone to have veto authority on how every consumable good is used. While completely fair, such a system would result in widespread starvation as the individual in question would die before managing to get approval from all the co-owners (or even a simple majority).
Having established that a system of private property is at a basic, immediate level a necessary component in any workable society, and that exclusive ownership must be assigned to some specific individual, the question becomes, "Who should be able to exercise exclusive control over any particular item?" There are a number of ways to assign initial ownership, but the only one that manager to do so without some outside (super-human?) authority to make the choice is that of homesteading: property becomes owned by the first individual to make use of it, or to transform it in some way. Only previously unowned property can be assigned this way, of course (since anything else would infringe on the exclusive control granted to the first user). However, property can be transfered from one person to another through mutally agreed-upon exchanges (i.e. contracts). It is important to note that any other form of transfer is necessarily against the will of the owner, and would constitute theft. It is also important to note that one of the items of private property being assigned is ownership of one's own body (who else should have the right to it?); the same arguments apply against universal co-ownership of our physical bodies as apply to the same system of ownership for property, vis., no one would be able to actually exercise their part ownership and the human race would starve to death. By responding to this (or even posting the parent comment) you are necessarily agreeing with this point, since you obviously did not consider it necessary to check with everyone else before employing your body and property in the act of posting; any arguments against these points are thus self-contradictory.
Libertarians tend to believe in a right to self-defense, along with the right to assist others in such defense. It is this right to self-defense that allows for punishment of anti-social behavior in kind. The enlistment of the aid of others (police, prison guards, soldiers) in such self-defense is not free; such services take up scarce materials and labor, and entail significant risks for those who choose to provide them. It is no less costly to fund defense services through theft (taxation) than it would be to do so voluntarily; rather, the theft simply compounds the issue. Clearly there is honor in providing defense for those who cannot defend themselves, but what of those who simply choose not to defend themselves? Is it honorable to encourage behavior that increases the costs of defense for everyone? Private defense charity would, no doubt, attempt to teach its recipients to manage their defense costs, and would withhold charity defense from those who refuse to do so; an all-encompassing public defense system has no hope of doing so.
Of course, if you can come up with a form of civil defense that (a) does not fund itself through thef
Participation in the "insurance" welfare plan is somewhat voluntary (although less so than you probably think), but is denied to broad categories of people who are either deemed high risk or are unable to afford it.
Dwelling on labels like "capitalist" and "socialist" does nothing to further your understanding of either insurance or welfare, which are both just mechanisms for spreading risk from the individual across a broader population. The real difference is simply how broadly you wish to spread it, and whether it will be denied to those most in need of it.
There is a world of difference between welfare "insurance" and voluntary insurance programs. Insurance is intended to average out the cost to each individual in a given risk class. The system is fair precisely because the premiums tend to reflect the actual risk entailed for each individual. A private insurance company is motivated to define the risk classes as narrowly as possible for the simple reason that few individuals wish to pay higher premiums than their specific risk would require, and the insurance company would become bankrupt if it charged premiums lower than the actual risk. Defining a broader risk class would force low-risk customers to subsidize high-risk customers, and on a unhampered market such endeavors would naturally bankrupt themselves as low-risk individuals patronized firms with narrower classes and lower premiums.
Private insurance is not truly denied to anyone any more than any other uneconomic product or resource is denied, but the risk that the individual poses (whether natural or behavior-related) may result in a premium greater than the individual is willing or able to pay. If anyone wishes such an individual to be given insurance, they are more than free to provide such charity out of their own resources; in such cases, the charity-inclined individual is personally responsible for absorbing the costs of any behavioral risk. Charity is very selective out of necessity, which is good because unlimited charity eliminates personal responsibility. On the other hand, any broadly-defined welfare "insurance" program would necessarily subsidize those who create their own risks (through risky behavior) as well as those whose risks are natural and uncontrollable. It would eliminate, or at least reduces significantly, the incentive to reduce one's own controllable risks which privately-funded insurance tends to create. Welface "insurance" is primarily defined by a subsidization of risky behavior, followed by totalitarian, coercive attempts to force such individuals to change their behavior -- in other words, it is defined by a distinct lack of personal responsibility.
Incidently, the labels appropriate to this discussion are "unhampered market economy" (a.k.a. capitalist economy) and "interventionalist economy". A "socialist" economy is one in which there is no market whatsoever; any system, no matter how regulated, which still possesses private, voluntary market is not socialist. On the other hand, socialism is the ultimate expression of interventionalism, so using the term to describe the general tendency toward interventionalism isn't entirely inaccurate.
My apologies, it would appear that it was actually referring to the use of a password "vault" to store the answer. In any event, since the point is to eliminate the use of the "secret" question, one could simply enter something long and random and then fail to record it anywhere. The effect would be the the same as storing it in the "vault", since the security of the answer would be the same as that of the password itself, and the answer is only useful (on most sites) for resetting the password. It is unlikely that either "vault" entry would be lost or compromised alone; in general both would be affected.
...which means you now have to have an insecure file on your computer storing your different made-up answer for each site, since giving every site the *same* made up answer to the same question would solve exactly nothing.
The whole point was that it was never going to use the account again. If it needs to order something else from the site, it'll just create a new account. Thus, there is no need to store the made-up passwords; when the session is over, the account will become inaccessible due to the erasure of both the original password and the correct answer to the "secret" question.
I let you into my house, you don[']t automatically have permission to use my telephone to call your aunt in China. You can connect to my [WiFi] but nothing short of written or spoken permission from myself gives you leave to use my [I]nternet connection.
The thing is, they aren't using your Internet connection -- your router is, on their behalf, in accordance with its advertised default functionality or your intentional programming. If you don't want your router to proxy Internet access for them, then program it not to. All WiFi routers support this. 802.11x is on unregulated spectrum; provided they stay within the frequency and power requirements (there are no protocol requirements), they (should) have just as much right to use it as anyone else. It's your responsibility to decide how you want your router to respond to any external tranceivers and to program it accordingly.
Standard disclaimer: IANAL and this is not legal advice. If you need legal advice, find a lawyer.
IANAL, but your machine is manipulating those bytes as they go by, and therefore you're tampering with their communications which may be legally protected.
IANAL either, but unless the law is completely insane (which is quite possible, so check with a real expert before trying anything), the only communication that "you're" participating in is that which occurs between "your" computer and the access-point. Any further requests are between the AP and its own nearest network gateway. A telco or ISP would be under contractual obligations regarding the security and privacy of any communications along the entire communications path, but since this is just a random open WAP there is no contract to fall back on. The router is (or should be) free to send back whatever it wishes, including manipulating/replacing any images it relays from the remote site. There's no guarantee that the router will relay the request to the remote site in the first place, so how can there be any obligation to forward any response at all, much less to forward it unmodified?
Incidently, prohibiting this would also affect access-control systems that substitute a login or TOS page for the first request. If you can't replace images in transit, you shouldn't be able to replace HTML files or DNS requests either.
Also, the lack of inherent obligations provides an opportunity for an enterprising individual to guarantee such non-interference and/or privacy in exchange for a reasonable contribution -- one way of adding value to a well-placed WAP connection. It can't be all that difficult to link a TOS front page to a payment site of some kind (PayPal perhaps?). Some well-integrated software for this would go a long way toward making open WAPs more ubiquitous.
So one Democratic nation on the other side of the world acting in a non-Democratic fashion and censoring... proves that Democracy doesn't work.
No, it proves that "democratic" and "libertarian" aren't the same thing: lack of censorship on principle is a libertarian (classical liberal) trait, one which the primarily democratic United States adopted as part of its Constitution. Censorship is not undemocratic, provided that the majority are in support of the censorship. Democracy alone does not ensure conformance to libertarian principles, but rather to the will of the voting majority (or their elected representatives). Democracy in the United States, on the other hand, is subservient to libertarian principles (i.e. "majority rule with minority rights"), which is not the case in most other democratic countries, which is why the U.S. is still (mostly) Free where most other "democratic experiments" have long since lapsed into totalitarianism.
This borders on yelling fire in a theater, because it isn't the theater owner that is getting hurt, it is the people getting trampled in the aisles...
And when there is a fire, how irresponsible is it to not yell fire?
Furthermore the justification behind the ruling in question was unusually weak. There is a very good reason that one must not falsely yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, which has nothing at all to do with "necessary" restrictions on free speech: it infringes on an agreement (contract) made with either the owner of the theatre or its patrons.
If the person yelling "Fire!" is the owner of the theatre, then it is breaking a contract made with each of the patrons to provide the theatric performance without purposeless interruptions. If it is instead one of the patrons, then it is breaking a contract made with the owner of the theatre to keep quite and respect the performance for the sake of the other patrons. There may also be specific, higher-penalty clauses on both contracts in regards to inciting a panic. Either way, the case could have been resolved through contract law alone. Even if speech itself is considered inalienable and cannot be legally prevented by a contract (as is my view), the contract can certainly impose fines for specific kinds of speech, because property is alienable. The fine is merely a conditional transfer of property rights; the condition can be anything the other party will agree to.
What you're missing is that the Company D would be a riskier investment given what happened to Company A. If it should fail, then Company E will be an even riskier investment. The perceived risk will increase and increase until Company B finally shows signs of real weakness, and successive challengers will have a harder and harder time getting funding. Do you actually have an example of an unregulated monopolist taken down through this successive challenger idea?
The increasing risk part is probably true, an indication that the monopoly is more capable of meeting the needs of the market (should it chose to do so) than any of the previous challengers, which would of course make yet another challenger a bad investment.
As for historical examples, I couldn't find any on short notice. Most of the relevant search terms seems to lead to pages discussing either regulation or the board game, neither of which was very helpful, and most of the discussions of monopoly policies deal strictly in abstract theory (on both sides of the issue). Monopolies overturned through natural causes don't seem to warrent much discussion (though that is no excuse for not locating one, I know). On the other hand, do you actually have an example of an unregulated monopolist that was able to profit from charging a "monopoly price" clearly greater than the ideal "competitive price" for the market? (Rothbard didn't believe that such a distinction exists (Link), and I am inclined to agree with him. How can you tell that a company is imposing a monopoly price, rather than simply adjusting to the new demands of the market? Regulation may lower prices (by shifting costs elsewhere), but this says nothing about what the competitive price would be in the absence of both monopolies and regulation.)
I also can't help but chuckle when I saw your $10M fab. Fabs easily cost billions of dollars.
True, the cost of the fab was completely arbitrary. It doesn't affect the analysis, so feel free to substitute a more believable cost.
Every business has a barrier to entry, and a new entrant always risks losing the resources they spent overcoming that barrier. If a monopolist is allowed to sell below cost to get rid of a competitor, it creates a chilling effect even if they later raise their prices. A new competitor must consider what happens if the monopolist does it again, and if the barrier to entry is already high (a fab, for example), the competitor will think twice and walk away instead.
You are wrong. Capital expenditures (a chip fab, for example) are not lost when a company fails. They merely pass into disuse for a time, and then change hands to a new upstart competitor. As long as the present methods (or sufficiently similar methods) of chip fabrication remain in demand such investments will retain their value. There are, of course, some costs which depreciate rapidly enough to be effectively lost should the company fail (recruiting, for example), but no sane company would invest resources in such areas until the solvancy of the company was guaranteed. To illustrate:
Company A invests $10M in durable chip fabrication capital (buildings, machinery, etc.).
Company B begins "dumping" its product to hold off competition, driving down prices.
Company A, realizing that the new low prices won't justify their investment, decides to cut its losses and enter a different market. This is where most analyses prematurely end. But what becomes of the capital investments? Are they a total loss? Of course not. They do not cease to exist with the desolution of the company. They still hold significant value.
Speculation Company(s) C buy(s) the capital in anticipation of future demand. Company A, or its constituent investors, use(s) the proceeds to enter a different market.
Some time passes. Prices approach their original levels. Demand for chip fabrication has increased, just as Companies A and C anticipated. (If their anticipation was incorrect, then they should lose resources as a result. Again, these resources are not destroyed, but rather are simply put to a better use.)
At these higher prices, Company D decides to enter the chip fabrication market, purchasing the fab capital from Speculation Company(s) C (with reduced time-to-market as a result of Company A's investment). They are now in almost the same position as Company A was previously, but the market for chip fabrication has improved in the interim, so they have a better chance. Also, Company B's resources have been reduced by their practice of selling below the opportunity cost.
Either Company D succeeds in achieving a sustainable market share, or we go back to step 3 and repeat the process until the market conditions are right for competition. Some companies come out a bit ahead, some lose somewhat, but the overall trend is toward a reduction in the barriers to entry (as the fab capital approaches completion).
Like the GP, I do not believe that there are any forms of apolitical "monopolies" that can stave off competition indefinitely. There are some market conditions which make local monopolies more efficient than competition could possibly be (so-called "natural monopolies"), but these are not situations in which intervention could possibly improve matters; they aren't staving off competition, because there isn't any. Such monopolies are an indication of resistance to arbitrary turnover in the market, which is a good thing -- it reduces uncertainty. They are still subject to competition, having been granted no special political protection, but should not and will not be replaced unless they truly fail to meet the needs of the market on a continuing basis.
Be [a] man, and just admit that according to your ethic if you want something that's copyrighted it's ok to just take it.
First, I'll assume that by "just take it" you're not refering to actual theft -- involuntary transfer of property from one person to another -- but rather duplication (copyright infringement). A matter of semantics, perhaps, but important nonetheless. Anyway:
According to my ethic, in the absence of a contractual obligation which one has personally agreed to[1a,b] no one else has the right to prevent one from employing one's own labor (or the voluntary labor of another) in transforming one's own materials (or the same voluntarily supplied by another) into the likeness of any physical manifestation of an intentional pattern[3] which one has observed without violating anyone else's property rights[4].
That said, there is a trade-of between exercising one's freedom and not annoying the wrong people, people who can make my life (or yours) very miserable if they should choose to do so (with or without reason). I generally choose not to annoy such people if I can help it; this includes accomodating at least the spirit of copyright law, as misguided as it is. The logical parallel would be choosing not to resist an armed robbery -- it's not that the robbers are in the right, it's that I'd probably lose more than my money should I try to resist.
[1a] There is no other kind of contractual obligation.
[1b] A system of "copyright" could, possibly, be constructed as a network or hierarchy of contracts. Such a system, however, would be far more limited than what we currently know as "copyright", however, affecting only those who chose to agree to follow it.
[3] An engineering design, artistic expression, literary work, etc.
[4] There are no other kinds of rights; "human rights" and "property rights" are precisely equivalent. There are no property rights that are not also human rights, and human rights cannot exist in the absence of property rights. More information. "IP" is not property; "IP" "rights" and physical property rights are mutually exclusive, as they grant exclusive control over the same property to two different "owners".
Another "problem" with gambling is it's a zero-sum game [wikipedia.org], and many Americans (mostly conservatives) are business driven. They feel that anything getting in the way of economic growth should be banned or taxed.
Only if you ignore the non-monetary profit from the transaction, the part that prevents economics from being a zero-sum game in the first place. Sure, when gambling the total amount of money doesn't increase; it just changes hands from the gambler to the house (in general, statistically speaking). In the same way, a normal exchange doesn't create more of the items being exchanged, it just moves them from the hands of those who value them less to the hands of those who value them more. The gambler does receive something for his monetary losses: the entertainment value of the game and accompanying atmosphere, and the chance of winning (however small that might be). The gambler clearly prefered this to the money perceived to be at risk at the time of the choice. In retrospect, the risk may have been greater than anticipated, but this is primarily a matter of education and experience.[1] The house's net winnings are the payment for providing this service. In this way, gambling is no different than any other form of entertainment.
There is the issue of "gambling addiction", which apparently some people have trouble with. Such addictions are a social problem, which implies a social -- not legal -- solution (most likely involving better eduction in both economics and statistics). If actual chemical addiction wasn't enough to permanently outlaw alchohol, then why should the lesser addiction to gambling suggest that same failed prohibition? At most some of the conditions which serve to protect the addicted gamblers from the consequences should be removed: bankruptcy, and unnaturally easy credit (suppressed interest rates). The former cancels out the risks that would naturally curb excessive gambling, while the latter allows the gambler to continue to play (and lose) long after its own resources are exhausted, making the eventual shock all the worse when the easy credit runs out.
[1] We are ignoring, for the moment, the possibility of actual fraud: misrepresentation by the house of what the risks actually are (through cheating, for example). This is clearly wrong, and ought to be covered by the general-purpose laws against fraud rather than special-purpose gambling regulations.
Those "unfit" to vote are the type that keep well away from the ballot boxes, since they're all too busy picking the next American Idol.
False; voting correlates better with membership in a special interest group than with "fitness to vote." (Which is what, exactly? Knowledge of the issues? Willingness to take advantage of everyone else?) To show why this is the case, let's look at a hypothetical example: a proposal to spend $50 million on a bridge to nowhere, paid for by a $0.50 tax on each of 100 million citizens. The contractor will make some amount of profit, let's say 10% ($5 million). In an "ideal" (100% voting) situation, this would probably get shot down easily, as 99.999% of the citizens would probably vote against the proposal ($0.50 tax for no apparent benefit). However, the cost of just showing up at the poles is probably more than $0.50 (time, gas, lost opportunities), so each citizen would actually lose out by showing up to vote -- the one exception being the contractor (the special interest), who has $5 million worth of incentive to show up.
The actual cost of showing up is not insignificant. I would estimate that the time alone -- just to show up to vote, not including previous research on the issues and candidates -- is probably worth at least $5 to $10 to most individuals. (The minimum would be their pay at work during that time; their remaining leisure time is worth more to them than what they can make at work, or they would have spent that time working instead.) The cost of the special-interest project to each individual taxpayer would have to be greater than the cost of showing up to make it worthwhile, and few issues actually have that much impact per person. Note that I'm not supporting special-interest projects here; quite the contrary. However, it is disingenius for an individual to spend (the equivilent of) $5 or more voting to protect against a theft of $0.50 for yet another useless expenditure.
Non-neutral networks didn't really exist before, and there was generally a bit of outrage (and lawsuits) when it was discovered that a network was not being neutral.
Well, now they are actually able to get away with it. Now [(a)] they have an ad campaign, [(b)] they have [C]ongress on their side, and [(c)] the majority of the Internet is no longer educated about this subject. That means most people won't realize how it works. In fact, most people will easily be duped into thinking these violations of net neutrality are normal, or even somehow good for them.
I'll just stick to this part, since the rest logically depends on the point in dispute (that the Internet will become non-neutral without these regulations). Points (a) and (c) are essentially the same -- lack of basic information/understanding. This is something that you can solve without turning to the extremity of regulation. Start an ad campaign of your own, talk to people, explain why you consider the general principle of net-neutrality to be important (BTW, you don't have to convince me of that; I agree). In the long-term, people will see the results first-hand; misinformation can only help the telcos in the short-term. I'm willing to wait it out, myself.
I think (c) is the real problem. If Congress stays out of this entirely, then I don't think we have anything to worry about. The net may not remain entirely provider-neutral, but I don't think the telcos will manage to sell their customers on all the things they're hoping for, either; the final result will probably be a compromise, one which still gives the end-users what they want (which, granted, is basically small-file HTTP and e-mail at present) at a price that makes it worthwhile. The average Internet user will probably pay somewhat less, and the average Slashdotter somewhat more (no more subsidizing of high-bandwidth users, which is inherently unfair anyway).
I'm more worried about what Congress might do. Even if I thought regulation was the answer, I wouldn't trust Congress to carry it out. You think they'll actually manage to formulate a law that's 100% against the telcos, rather than a lopsided "compromise" that does even more to reinforce their position? Even when implemented right (something I do not trust Congress to do), regulation tends to benefit incumbents by raising the cost of entry, thus reducing competition. It's a short-term fix that inevitably creates long-term problems.
We've also had cell phones as a testbed for this sort of thing. On a cell phone, you can only use the software or services that your provider allows, and even then, you have to pay ridiculous fees for most of them. Imagine an Internet like that -- you get to use AIM, and nothing else, and you have to pay if you want AIM to work even reasonably well.
Odd that you should mention this, because as far as I can see the cell phone market is moving in the opposite direction: toward "net-neutrality" (or rather, provider/application neutrality). General-purpose data services are becoming more common, faster, and cheaper. Service is becoming more ubiquitous. In Europe, at least, the cell phones themselves are interchangeably between different providers through SIM chips. Cell phones started out non-neutral and are moving toward neutrality in response to customer demand, with no regulation required (not that they aren't regulated, but cell-phone service regulations aren't as intrusive as the proposed net-neutrality laws).
One last point: I don't see any reason why we can't just wait and see how things turn out. What's the hurry? If there really is a need for regulation, we can regulate just as well (better, in fact) after the telcos try out their plan. If nothing else, the proposed regulations are premature, and could end up causing more trouble than they solve. Congress said as much itself when the idea was first proposed.
This is not a conspiracy theory. This is not a communist plot. This is the simple truth: Without net neutrality, the Internet as we know it will be gone, and the American Internet will be as bad or worse than the Chinese "Internet".
Why? Did these regulations exist before, while the Internet was being developed? What has prevented non-neutral networks from destroying the Internet up to this point, and how has that changed?
I think the whole net-neutrality issue a bit hysterical, myself. The Internet was created without these regulations, it has existed up till now without them, and I believe that it will continue to survive quite well enough in their absence. The Internet is decentralized, after all; if one provider, even a major one, tried to hold the Internet at ransom, the remaining providers would just find a way around it. The topology of the Internet (even that of the major backbones) isn't set in stone; no one provider is absolutely essential to the operation of the network in the long-term.
You make NH sound most unattractive; libertarian notions of freedom in many cases boil down to social Darwinism, and that's not even pleasant for the winners.
The concept of Social Darwinism is actually a rather recent invention; it's adoption was a disaster for the classical libertarian ideology (although its adherents didn't realize this at the time). Prior to Social Darwinism (and utilitarian economics in general[1]) the underlying basis for libertarianism was concrete ethical principles -- ownership of self (self-determination, "inalienable human rights") and ownership of property (based on "homesteading" and title-transfer contracts)[1] -- which are collectively known as "natural law". From these principles and a few simple and non-controversial observations of human behavior one can derive all the conclusions of the libertarian ideology. This was the form of libertarianism (a.k.a classical liberalism) that existed at the time of the American Revolution, and on which the United States was founded; likewise with the original Libertarian Party.
These principles are (IMHO) the ultimate expression of that ideal "majority rule with minority rights" which Americans supposedly hold so dear -- the actions of the majority dictate the allocations of resources (in accordance with economic principles), and yet all individuals hold certain absolute rights (negative rights[2]) which cannot be taken from them regardless of the wishes of the majority. A society which actually respected absolute minority rights[3] would be libertarian.
A good source for the information about classical liberalism (principle-based libertarianism) can be found in the writings of Murray Rothbard, particularly the book For a New Liberty, which includes detailed history and ideology as well as practical sketches of a working libertarian society.
[1] There are a number of issues with utilitarian ideology, but the main issue for the libertarians who chose to adopt it was that utilitarianism always tends to reduce to support for the status quo, possibly with an allowance for small, gradual changes (Social Darwinism). In contrast, a classical liberalist, on grounds of principle, must support (but not necessarily require) the immediate elimination of any and all coercive actions. The ideologies are fundamentally incompatible in this regard.
[2] There are two basic theories on natural rights: that of positive rights, and that of negative rights. A positive right is the right to something -- a right to food, or to shelter, or to a printing press or assembly hall, for example. As such, positive rights cannot be absolute, as it may be impossible to provide such goods to everyone in practice. Also, such goods can only be provided through the efforts of individuals, and thus a system of positive rights tends to imply a condition of enforced servitude of a portion of the population to subsidize the "rights" of the remainder. Negative rights, on the other hand, are the right not to be aggressed against by others. Instead of a right to food and shelter (presumable created by others) there is the right to procure food and shelter (through production and/or exchange) without interference. Instead of the right to a printing press or assembly hall, there is the right to procure a printing press or assembly hall and use it as one sees fit (while not infringing on the rights of others). Despite the name, negative rights actually allow a greater degree of freedom than positive rights; they are "allow by default, but deny infringement" instead of "deny by default, but allow specific actions." Furthermore, negative rights are absolute; they can apply for all humans in all circumstances. The U.S. Constitution was based on the idea of negative rights; the Bill of Rights was controversial precisely because many thought it both unnecessary and dangerous as an affirmation of the idea of positive rights
Perhaps you weren't aware of this fact, but economies of scale don't exist in every industry. They typically originate as relatively high fixed costs -- R&D, custom manufacturing; the sale price approaches the variable costs of production as the quantities increase. The variable costs, however, can only increase in response to elevated demand. After a certain point the (increasing) variable costs become the dominant term in the equation. There are even a few industies which tend to experience diseconomies of scale as the result of increasingly difficult logistics and beaurocratic overhead.
Economies of scale are the exception, not the rule. Most areas of the economy, including (in most cases) education, experience increasing prices as a result of elevated demand. There are only so many educators, after all, and each educator can only handle so many students at a time (although this factor is somewhat elastic); the natural result of having too many students and too few educators is that the cost of formal education will rise. Luckily, this should also have the effect of encouraging more people to become educators, thus heading off any long-term shortages (but not resulting in substantially lower long-term costs, provided demand remains high).
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks. I don't require that anyone agree with me, just that one keeps an open mind. It seems that my views tend to draw the ire of all sides of the debate: the socialists, because I support the market economy and despise central planning; the communists, because I don't believe communism can scale to an entire society (although it may appear to work for a short time in small communities before evolving back into a market economy); and the statist capitalists, which is nearly everyone else, because I consider all aggression, including government aggression, a pure "deadweight loss" to the market. With so many opponents, it's nice to know that I've got a fan or two, even if they don't necessarily agree with me 100%.
First, I think we're using different definitions of "value" here. In economics, "value" usually refers to an individual's internal, unmeasurable scale of preferences (at a given time) as expressed through action. Thus, if a person chooses to buy a loaf of bread for $1.00, it expresses a value-judgement that the loaf of bread is worth more to it, at that moment, than the $1.00 given up in exchange. Thus, "value" is linked directly to "demand" (the total amount all such individuals are willing and able to give up for a loaf of bread).
The concept you are using, however, is typically labelled "utility": an (arbitrary) quantity assigned to the psychic satisfaction granted by a good. As it is generally estimated, oxygen does indeed have a higher utility than diamonds (diamonds being a luxury while oxygen is necessary for life), but few individuals would express through action the idea that, say, a liter of bottled oxygen (for breathing purposes) has a higher value than a diamond. Note that there are exceptions: extra oxygen may be worth something to someone who cannot breath properly, or to a mountain-climber unused to the thinner air. In such cases, the utility of the oxygen does not change (it remains necessary for life), but its scarcity, and thus its value, does (due either to increased demand in the former case, or decreased supply in the latter).
If I follow you correctly, I think I agree, with one caveat: even if we humans did not value "having an edge over one another", any non-primitive society must still have specialization of labour and thus trade and a market economy. Individuals engaged in trade often try to take advantage of the other's weaknesses and short-sightedness, but that is not an essential part of trade. It would, in fact, make for a more efficient market economy (with better allocation of resourc
This is a joke, right? There is no such thing as "abundance economics"; economics is, by definition, the study of the allocation of scarce resources. A world without scarcity would have no need of economics (or society, for that matter, since society itself is the result of trade and division of labour). What you are describing is the sociology of an unrealizable state of perfect abundance, which not even perfect matter replication could achieve. (Where would you get the energy? Or the raw materials?) In particular, time will never be abundant, regardless of advances in technology. Human labour will likewise remain scarce so long as the population does not exceed that which can be sustained at subsistance levels (a state even less likely in a wealthy society than in a poor one).
In your fictional world of abundance, what value would there be in such contributions? Abundance dictates that everyone has everything they want or need; what contribution would possibly add to such a state? Giving something away would be equivalent to throwing it away, as the recipient has no need of the gift. If there is such a need, then the state of abundance does not exist, as some individuals do not have all that they need. At the very least, "contributions to the community" must consist in part of one scarce resource: labour. Labour can be made more productive through technological advancements, but it cannot be replaced entirely, as it is (in any human society) grounded in purposeful human action. At the pinacle of human development it might consist of nothing more than the choice of which action to take, with the actual work accomplished by armies of robots, and yet that choice is still inescapably a form of scarce human labour.
Just for the record, the old "paradox" of the relative values of diamonds and water (or air) was resolved decades ago with the advent of the subjective theory of value, which is the only theory of value supported by any modern school of economics, the labour and utility theories of value having both been thoroughly disproven. The "paradox" results from trying to establish univeral values for all diamonds vs. all the air, when in fact the decisions being made contrast a specific additional quantity of diamonds vs. a specific additional quantity of air according to the situation of a specific individual. Since air is abundant, meaning that everyone already has as much as he/she needs, no value is generally placed on additional air. In contrast, diamonds are relatively scarce, and few people have any; thus an additional diamond may have value to some individuals. Incidently, this demonstrates that scarcity does not reduce "the overall value of an item", since scarcity is in fact the only thing that can give any item any value at all. No one will give anything in exchange for an item abundantly available to all; full abundance eliminates value entirely.
The competitive advantage to the lumberyard (assuming that this device is, in practice, effective in reducing risks to workers, which is far from proven) is that, assuming no interference from minimum-wage laws[1], the lumberyard which switched to these safer tools would be able to pay less per labour-hour in compensation for the risk of injury, and thus increase overall production without waiting to accumulate additional capital. In turn the workers benefit from a safer workplace, which they evidently preferred as they chose to accept a lower wage rate in exchange for a safer environment.
[1] In general, minimum-wage laws do nothing so well as creating institutional unemployment (and/or underemployment; a reduction in total labour-hours generally) among workers. They also, however, tend to eliminate the cost motivations for improving worker safety, since there's no business reason to spend money on safer tools when employee wages are already as low as they can legally become -- even if there are workers willing to accept a lower rate in a safer environment.
I think the GP's right on this one. One of the previous comments (#15857938), quoting from the BIND release notes, indicated that the "exclude" list indicates exceptions to the root-delegation-only modifier; in other words, the domains listed are the ones that can provide undelegated responses, including wildcard domains. The default behavior (with no exclusion list) is to block all undelegated responses from the TLDs and the root domain.
The problem with air pollution can be directly traced to the (government's) courts' newfound refusal to treat pollution as a property-rights violation, as it had always been treated in the past. Once individuals and businesses could no longer sue for damages resulting from pollution, "external costs" started creeping in; industrial plants could dump waste into the air and water without worrying about the damage it would caused to others' property. The Clean Air Act and related legislation created an adequite, but much less fair, efficient, or effective, patch for the government's own failure to perform its primary duty. Such legislation would never have been necessary if the courts had done their job instead of propping up failed merchantilist policies.
Anarcho-capitalists have, to the best of my knowledge, never held that government interference in general necessarily leads to economic collapse. Rather, they generally hold that government interference in the market[1] (a) generally fails to achieve its intended aim[2] as individuals wise up to the changes and reimpose their original subjective valuations and (b) always, to the extent that it is enforced, inhibits the ability of the market to fulfill the demands of the consumers. Between these two points, unlimited interference would eliminate the market altogether, and thus leave the economy in total chaos, but limited interference would only make things mildly worse than they would have been without the interference. It is important to note that in a generally progressing economy (one in which the amount of capital goods and the productivity of labor are increasing) the interference need not result in an economic regression; the interference may simply limit the rate of progression.
The state of the market at any given time represents the best possible allocation of resources in the estimation of each individual member to the best of that member's knowledge and abilities. If there is any actual defect, it is within the ability of any member of that market to make a tidy profit from bringing about a better arrangement. Political interference is thus necessarily an attempt to impose an arrangement of resource allocation not believed to better represent the will of the consumers; if it was believed to be more efficient, its advocate would have more profitably implemented it through the normal market processes.
Furthermore, all the anarcho-capitalist writings that I have run across (the ones associated with the Austrian school of economics, anyway) are very much fact-based and grounded in real-world history. In my estimation their theories have been much more successful both in explaining economic history and in predicting the outcomes of government policies than most of the mainstream (Keynesian) model-based theories, particularly in the areas of credit manipulation and tax-funded spending programs. To work, model-based systems must reduce future human action to a predictable component: a given intervention must always produce a given result or the model fails. Unfortunately for the Keynesians, humans don't work that way. We learn. As soon as people begin to adapt to the manipulation the intervention tends to lose its effectiveness. People tend to resist the manipulation of their activities; ever-increasing levels of intervention beco
Perhaps that's true for some systems. I wouldn't know, since I've been running (more or less) my current installation without incident from Sid for four or five years now, with regular updates the entire time. The only reinstall was due to a hardware (HDD) failure, not a software issue. It does occasionally require manual conflict resolution (which is why they call it "unstable"), and sometime a simple "apt-get upgrade" will refuse to update specific software packages due to missing dependencies (don't use "dist-upgrade" without checking the "to-be-removed" list first, of course). I find it useful to list both the "unstable" and "testing" repositories in sources.list; that eliminates more of the version conflicts. On the whole, however, in my experience, the "unstable"/"testing" repository combination works quite well enough for normal desktop use. In any event, if the risk is too high for you, then use "testing" and don't complain about not having the "latest and greatest" software releases: the delay is an inevitable part of guaranteeing cross-package compatibility on the dozen different architectures Debian supports. The fact remains that the only repository that's more than a year out of date (not even that, really) is the "stable" one.
It's still a good idea to have regular backups, of course. Besides the hardware-failure isse there is always the possibility of accidental deletion or power-loss-induced data corruption.
I hate to disappoint you, but I just installed KDE 3.5.4-2 from the offical Debian "Sid" repositories last night. It would seem that your complaint against Debian's package management is unfounded, at least for the desktop-oriented releases. Perhaps you were trying to run a desktop system out of the "stable" (server-oriented) repository? "Testing" and "unstable" are recommended for desktop systems; both are fairly up-to-date, although "testing" typically lags a release or two behind "unstable" ("Sid").
I wasn't trying to use that statement to prove my point; I was simply pointing out that the conclusions tend to match people's innate sense of justice, whereas other systems which later reassign ownership fail to do so.
Ownership isn't defined by who the item responds to at all; it is defined by who has the right to exclusive control over the item. The statement was not at all like a click-through agreement; it was simply an expression of the basic logical tennent that you cannot consistently argue for a position that would make the argument itself impossible. If you do not have the right to exclusive control, i.e. ownership, of your body, then you cannot use it to engage in this argument (at least without violating the rights of others).
It isn't a question of individual vs. collective violence. Individual violence can be performed in self-defense, and collective violence can violate the "sovereign control of [your] body" just as easily (or rather more easily) than individual violence can. Furthermore, the rights of a group cannot exceed the rights of the individuals that make up that group. If individuals do not have a right to self-defense, then the group cannot have the right to defend its members. (The same may not be true of ability; a group may be capable of defense where an individual would be too weak to defend itself.) The proper categorization is not individual vs. collective, but rather aggression vs. self-defense -- and only with a sound theory of property rights can one tell the difference between the two.
I agree. Any just society depends on "equality before the law". I think it's a bit naive to assume that a democracy of any sort actually provides that equality, however, since the law itself is monopolized by a single legislature under the (presumed) control of the majority, and enforced by a monopoly on the police and court systems. Should that monopoly of defense happen to run amok (suppose that the majority believe stealing from the rich to be a fashionable pasttime, as has happened before), who would stop them? There can be no competitive defense organization of similar capability due to the legal monopoly, so the only meager defense is that of a civilian uprising: civil war. Even that is difficult when those whose rights are violated are a small enough minority group.
On the other hand, private defense would be competitive. There would be numerous defense organizations, and any given individual would subscribe to the one that provided the desired level of defense at an expense the individual was willing to pay. Any one organization that went awry, abusing its defensive capabilities to murder and steal, would be opposed by the others. The market in defense services provides a far more effective check-and-balan
Property rights, when observed, protect the poor just as much as the wealthy. Without property rights consumption is impossible -- you can't use something up (food, for example) unless you can claim an exclusive right to it. Furthermore, you can't save for the future if the only exclusive rights are limited to immediate consumption. The only alternative to privately-owned property--that treats everyone equally--would be for everyone to have veto authority on how every consumable good is used. While completely fair, such a system would result in widespread starvation as the individual in question would die before managing to get approval from all the co-owners (or even a simple majority).
Having established that a system of private property is at a basic, immediate level a necessary component in any workable society, and that exclusive ownership must be assigned to some specific individual, the question becomes, "Who should be able to exercise exclusive control over any particular item?" There are a number of ways to assign initial ownership, but the only one that manager to do so without some outside (super-human?) authority to make the choice is that of homesteading: property becomes owned by the first individual to make use of it, or to transform it in some way. Only previously unowned property can be assigned this way, of course (since anything else would infringe on the exclusive control granted to the first user). However, property can be transfered from one person to another through mutally agreed-upon exchanges (i.e. contracts). It is important to note that any other form of transfer is necessarily against the will of the owner, and would constitute theft. It is also important to note that one of the items of private property being assigned is ownership of one's own body (who else should have the right to it?); the same arguments apply against universal co-ownership of our physical bodies as apply to the same system of ownership for property, vis., no one would be able to actually exercise their part ownership and the human race would starve to death. By responding to this (or even posting the parent comment) you are necessarily agreeing with this point, since you obviously did not consider it necessary to check with everyone else before employing your body and property in the act of posting; any arguments against these points are thus self-contradictory.
Libertarians tend to believe in a right to self-defense, along with the right to assist others in such defense. It is this right to self-defense that allows for punishment of anti-social behavior in kind. The enlistment of the aid of others (police, prison guards, soldiers) in such self-defense is not free; such services take up scarce materials and labor, and entail significant risks for those who choose to provide them. It is no less costly to fund defense services through theft (taxation) than it would be to do so voluntarily; rather, the theft simply compounds the issue. Clearly there is honor in providing defense for those who cannot defend themselves, but what of those who simply choose not to defend themselves? Is it honorable to encourage behavior that increases the costs of defense for everyone? Private defense charity would, no doubt, attempt to teach its recipients to manage their defense costs, and would withhold charity defense from those who refuse to do so; an all-encompassing public defense system has no hope of doing so.
Of course, if you can come up with a form of civil defense that (a) does not fund itself through thef
There is a world of difference between welfare "insurance" and voluntary insurance programs. Insurance is intended to average out the cost to each individual in a given risk class. The system is fair precisely because the premiums tend to reflect the actual risk entailed for each individual. A private insurance company is motivated to define the risk classes as narrowly as possible for the simple reason that few individuals wish to pay higher premiums than their specific risk would require, and the insurance company would become bankrupt if it charged premiums lower than the actual risk. Defining a broader risk class would force low-risk customers to subsidize high-risk customers, and on a unhampered market such endeavors would naturally bankrupt themselves as low-risk individuals patronized firms with narrower classes and lower premiums.
Private insurance is not truly denied to anyone any more than any other uneconomic product or resource is denied, but the risk that the individual poses (whether natural or behavior-related) may result in a premium greater than the individual is willing or able to pay. If anyone wishes such an individual to be given insurance, they are more than free to provide such charity out of their own resources; in such cases, the charity-inclined individual is personally responsible for absorbing the costs of any behavioral risk. Charity is very selective out of necessity, which is good because unlimited charity eliminates personal responsibility. On the other hand, any broadly-defined welfare "insurance" program would necessarily subsidize those who create their own risks (through risky behavior) as well as those whose risks are natural and uncontrollable. It would eliminate, or at least reduces significantly, the incentive to reduce one's own controllable risks which privately-funded insurance tends to create. Welface "insurance" is primarily defined by a subsidization of risky behavior, followed by totalitarian, coercive attempts to force such individuals to change their behavior -- in other words, it is defined by a distinct lack of personal responsibility.
Incidently, the labels appropriate to this discussion are "unhampered market economy" (a.k.a. capitalist economy) and "interventionalist economy". A "socialist" economy is one in which there is no market whatsoever; any system, no matter how regulated, which still possesses private, voluntary market is not socialist. On the other hand, socialism is the ultimate expression of interventionalism, so using the term to describe the general tendency toward interventionalism isn't entirely inaccurate.
My apologies, it would appear that it was actually referring to the use of a password "vault" to store the answer. In any event, since the point is to eliminate the use of the "secret" question, one could simply enter something long and random and then fail to record it anywhere. The effect would be the the same as storing it in the "vault", since the security of the answer would be the same as that of the password itself, and the answer is only useful (on most sites) for resetting the password. It is unlikely that either "vault" entry would be lost or compromised alone; in general both would be affected.
The whole point was that it was never going to use the account again. If it needs to order something else from the site, it'll just create a new account. Thus, there is no need to store the made-up passwords; when the session is over, the account will become inaccessible due to the erasure of both the original password and the correct answer to the "secret" question.
The thing is, they aren't using your Internet connection -- your router is, on their behalf, in accordance with its advertised default functionality or your intentional programming. If you don't want your router to proxy Internet access for them, then program it not to. All WiFi routers support this. 802.11x is on unregulated spectrum; provided they stay within the frequency and power requirements (there are no protocol requirements), they (should) have just as much right to use it as anyone else. It's your responsibility to decide how you want your router to respond to any external tranceivers and to program it accordingly.
Standard disclaimer: IANAL and this is not legal advice. If you need legal advice, find a lawyer.
IANAL either, but unless the law is completely insane (which is quite possible, so check with a real expert before trying anything), the only communication that "you're" participating in is that which occurs between "your" computer and the access-point. Any further requests are between the AP and its own nearest network gateway. A telco or ISP would be under contractual obligations regarding the security and privacy of any communications along the entire communications path, but since this is just a random open WAP there is no contract to fall back on. The router is (or should be) free to send back whatever it wishes, including manipulating/replacing any images it relays from the remote site. There's no guarantee that the router will relay the request to the remote site in the first place, so how can there be any obligation to forward any response at all, much less to forward it unmodified?
Incidently, prohibiting this would also affect access-control systems that substitute a login or TOS page for the first request. If you can't replace images in transit, you shouldn't be able to replace HTML files or DNS requests either.
Also, the lack of inherent obligations provides an opportunity for an enterprising individual to guarantee such non-interference and/or privacy in exchange for a reasonable contribution -- one way of adding value to a well-placed WAP connection. It can't be all that difficult to link a TOS front page to a payment site of some kind (PayPal perhaps?). Some well-integrated software for this would go a long way toward making open WAPs more ubiquitous.
No, it proves that "democratic" and "libertarian" aren't the same thing: lack of censorship on principle is a libertarian (classical liberal) trait, one which the primarily democratic United States adopted as part of its Constitution. Censorship is not undemocratic, provided that the majority are in support of the censorship. Democracy alone does not ensure conformance to libertarian principles, but rather to the will of the voting majority (or their elected representatives). Democracy in the United States, on the other hand, is subservient to libertarian principles (i.e. "majority rule with minority rights"), which is not the case in most other democratic countries, which is why the U.S. is still (mostly) Free where most other "democratic experiments" have long since lapsed into totalitarianism.
Furthermore the justification behind the ruling in question was unusually weak. There is a very good reason that one must not falsely yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, which has nothing at all to do with "necessary" restrictions on free speech: it infringes on an agreement (contract) made with either the owner of the theatre or its patrons.
If the person yelling "Fire!" is the owner of the theatre, then it is breaking a contract made with each of the patrons to provide the theatric performance without purposeless interruptions. If it is instead one of the patrons, then it is breaking a contract made with the owner of the theatre to keep quite and respect the performance for the sake of the other patrons. There may also be specific, higher-penalty clauses on both contracts in regards to inciting a panic. Either way, the case could have been resolved through contract law alone. Even if speech itself is considered inalienable and cannot be legally prevented by a contract (as is my view), the contract can certainly impose fines for specific kinds of speech, because property is alienable. The fine is merely a conditional transfer of property rights; the condition can be anything the other party will agree to.
The increasing risk part is probably true, an indication that the monopoly is more capable of meeting the needs of the market (should it chose to do so) than any of the previous challengers, which would of course make yet another challenger a bad investment.
As for historical examples, I couldn't find any on short notice. Most of the relevant search terms seems to lead to pages discussing either regulation or the board game, neither of which was very helpful, and most of the discussions of monopoly policies deal strictly in abstract theory (on both sides of the issue). Monopolies overturned through natural causes don't seem to warrent much discussion (though that is no excuse for not locating one, I know). On the other hand, do you actually have an example of an unregulated monopolist that was able to profit from charging a "monopoly price" clearly greater than the ideal "competitive price" for the market? (Rothbard didn't believe that such a distinction exists (Link), and I am inclined to agree with him. How can you tell that a company is imposing a monopoly price, rather than simply adjusting to the new demands of the market? Regulation may lower prices (by shifting costs elsewhere), but this says nothing about what the competitive price would be in the absence of both monopolies and regulation.)
True, the cost of the fab was completely arbitrary. It doesn't affect the analysis, so feel free to substitute a more believable cost.
You are wrong. Capital expenditures (a chip fab, for example) are not lost when a company fails. They merely pass into disuse for a time, and then change hands to a new upstart competitor. As long as the present methods (or sufficiently similar methods) of chip fabrication remain in demand such investments will retain their value. There are, of course, some costs which depreciate rapidly enough to be effectively lost should the company fail (recruiting, for example), but no sane company would invest resources in such areas until the solvancy of the company was guaranteed. To illustrate:
Like the GP, I do not believe that there are any forms of apolitical "monopolies" that can stave off competition indefinitely. There are some market conditions which make local monopolies more efficient than competition could possibly be (so-called "natural monopolies"), but these are not situations in which intervention could possibly improve matters; they aren't staving off competition, because there isn't any. Such monopolies are an indication of resistance to arbitrary turnover in the market, which is a good thing -- it reduces uncertainty. They are still subject to competition, having been granted no special political protection, but should not and will not be replaced unless they truly fail to meet the needs of the market on a continuing basis.
First, I'll assume that by "just take it" you're not refering to actual theft -- involuntary transfer of property from one person to another -- but rather duplication (copyright infringement). A matter of semantics, perhaps, but important nonetheless. Anyway:
According to my ethic, in the absence of a contractual obligation which one has personally agreed to[1a,b] no one else has the right to prevent one from employing one's own labor (or the voluntary labor of another) in transforming one's own materials (or the same voluntarily supplied by another) into the likeness of any physical manifestation of an intentional pattern[3] which one has observed without violating anyone else's property rights[4].
That said, there is a trade-of between exercising one's freedom and not annoying the wrong people, people who can make my life (or yours) very miserable if they should choose to do so (with or without reason). I generally choose not to annoy such people if I can help it; this includes accomodating at least the spirit of copyright law, as misguided as it is. The logical parallel would be choosing not to resist an armed robbery -- it's not that the robbers are in the right, it's that I'd probably lose more than my money should I try to resist.
[1a] There is no other kind of contractual obligation.
[1b] A system of "copyright" could, possibly, be constructed as a network or hierarchy of contracts. Such a system, however, would be far more limited than what we currently know as "copyright", however, affecting only those who chose to agree to follow it.
[3] An engineering design, artistic expression, literary work, etc.
[4] There are no other kinds of rights; "human rights" and "property rights" are precisely equivalent. There are no property rights that are not also human rights, and human rights cannot exist in the absence of property rights. More information. "IP" is not property; "IP" "rights" and physical property rights are mutually exclusive, as they grant exclusive control over the same property to two different "owners".
Only if you ignore the non-monetary profit from the transaction, the part that prevents economics from being a zero-sum game in the first place. Sure, when gambling the total amount of money doesn't increase; it just changes hands from the gambler to the house (in general, statistically speaking). In the same way, a normal exchange doesn't create more of the items being exchanged, it just moves them from the hands of those who value them less to the hands of those who value them more. The gambler does receive something for his monetary losses: the entertainment value of the game and accompanying atmosphere, and the chance of winning (however small that might be). The gambler clearly prefered this to the money perceived to be at risk at the time of the choice. In retrospect, the risk may have been greater than anticipated, but this is primarily a matter of education and experience.[1] The house's net winnings are the payment for providing this service. In this way, gambling is no different than any other form of entertainment.
There is the issue of "gambling addiction", which apparently some people have trouble with. Such addictions are a social problem, which implies a social -- not legal -- solution (most likely involving better eduction in both economics and statistics). If actual chemical addiction wasn't enough to permanently outlaw alchohol, then why should the lesser addiction to gambling suggest that same failed prohibition? At most some of the conditions which serve to protect the addicted gamblers from the consequences should be removed: bankruptcy, and unnaturally easy credit (suppressed interest rates). The former cancels out the risks that would naturally curb excessive gambling, while the latter allows the gambler to continue to play (and lose) long after its own resources are exhausted, making the eventual shock all the worse when the easy credit runs out.
[1] We are ignoring, for the moment, the possibility of actual fraud: misrepresentation by the house of what the risks actually are (through cheating, for example). This is clearly wrong, and ought to be covered by the general-purpose laws against fraud rather than special-purpose gambling regulations.
False; voting correlates better with membership in a special interest group than with "fitness to vote." (Which is what, exactly? Knowledge of the issues? Willingness to take advantage of everyone else?) To show why this is the case, let's look at a hypothetical example: a proposal to spend $50 million on a bridge to nowhere, paid for by a $0.50 tax on each of 100 million citizens. The contractor will make some amount of profit, let's say 10% ($5 million). In an "ideal" (100% voting) situation, this would probably get shot down easily, as 99.999% of the citizens would probably vote against the proposal ($0.50 tax for no apparent benefit). However, the cost of just showing up at the poles is probably more than $0.50 (time, gas, lost opportunities), so each citizen would actually lose out by showing up to vote -- the one exception being the contractor (the special interest), who has $5 million worth of incentive to show up.
The actual cost of showing up is not insignificant. I would estimate that the time alone -- just to show up to vote, not including previous research on the issues and candidates -- is probably worth at least $5 to $10 to most individuals. (The minimum would be their pay at work during that time; their remaining leisure time is worth more to them than what they can make at work, or they would have spent that time working instead.) The cost of the special-interest project to each individual taxpayer would have to be greater than the cost of showing up to make it worthwhile, and few issues actually have that much impact per person. Note that I'm not supporting special-interest projects here; quite the contrary. However, it is disingenius for an individual to spend (the equivilent of) $5 or more voting to protect against a theft of $0.50 for yet another useless expenditure.
I'll just stick to this part, since the rest logically depends on the point in dispute (that the Internet will become non-neutral without these regulations). Points (a) and (c) are essentially the same -- lack of basic information/understanding. This is something that you can solve without turning to the extremity of regulation. Start an ad campaign of your own, talk to people, explain why you consider the general principle of net-neutrality to be important (BTW, you don't have to convince me of that; I agree). In the long-term, people will see the results first-hand; misinformation can only help the telcos in the short-term. I'm willing to wait it out, myself.
I think (c) is the real problem. If Congress stays out of this entirely, then I don't think we have anything to worry about. The net may not remain entirely provider-neutral, but I don't think the telcos will manage to sell their customers on all the things they're hoping for, either; the final result will probably be a compromise, one which still gives the end-users what they want (which, granted, is basically small-file HTTP and e-mail at present) at a price that makes it worthwhile. The average Internet user will probably pay somewhat less, and the average Slashdotter somewhat more (no more subsidizing of high-bandwidth users, which is inherently unfair anyway).
I'm more worried about what Congress might do. Even if I thought regulation was the answer, I wouldn't trust Congress to carry it out. You think they'll actually manage to formulate a law that's 100% against the telcos, rather than a lopsided "compromise" that does even more to reinforce their position? Even when implemented right (something I do not trust Congress to do), regulation tends to benefit incumbents by raising the cost of entry, thus reducing competition. It's a short-term fix that inevitably creates long-term problems.
Odd that you should mention this, because as far as I can see the cell phone market is moving in the opposite direction: toward "net-neutrality" (or rather, provider/application neutrality). General-purpose data services are becoming more common, faster, and cheaper. Service is becoming more ubiquitous. In Europe, at least, the cell phones themselves are interchangeably between different providers through SIM chips. Cell phones started out non-neutral and are moving toward neutrality in response to customer demand, with no regulation required (not that they aren't regulated, but cell-phone service regulations aren't as intrusive as the proposed net-neutrality laws).
One last point: I don't see any reason why we can't just wait and see how things turn out. What's the hurry? If there really is a need for regulation, we can regulate just as well (better, in fact) after the telcos try out their plan. If nothing else, the proposed regulations are premature, and could end up causing more trouble than they solve. Congress said as much itself when the idea was first proposed.
Why? Did these regulations exist before, while the Internet was being developed? What has prevented non-neutral networks from destroying the Internet up to this point, and how has that changed?
I think the whole net-neutrality issue a bit hysterical, myself. The Internet was created without these regulations, it has existed up till now without them, and I believe that it will continue to survive quite well enough in their absence. The Internet is decentralized, after all; if one provider, even a major one, tried to hold the Internet at ransom, the remaining providers would just find a way around it. The topology of the Internet (even that of the major backbones) isn't set in stone; no one provider is absolutely essential to the operation of the network in the long-term.
The concept of Social Darwinism is actually a rather recent invention; it's adoption was a disaster for the classical libertarian ideology (although its adherents didn't realize this at the time). Prior to Social Darwinism (and utilitarian economics in general[1]) the underlying basis for libertarianism was concrete ethical principles -- ownership of self (self-determination, "inalienable human rights") and ownership of property (based on "homesteading" and title-transfer contracts)[1] -- which are collectively known as "natural law". From these principles and a few simple and non-controversial observations of human behavior one can derive all the conclusions of the libertarian ideology. This was the form of libertarianism (a.k.a classical liberalism) that existed at the time of the American Revolution, and on which the United States was founded; likewise with the original Libertarian Party.
These principles are (IMHO) the ultimate expression of that ideal "majority rule with minority rights" which Americans supposedly hold so dear -- the actions of the majority dictate the allocations of resources (in accordance with economic principles), and yet all individuals hold certain absolute rights (negative rights[2]) which cannot be taken from them regardless of the wishes of the majority. A society which actually respected absolute minority rights[3] would be libertarian.
A good source for the information about classical liberalism (principle-based libertarianism) can be found in the writings of Murray Rothbard, particularly the book For a New Liberty, which includes detailed history and ideology as well as practical sketches of a working libertarian society.
[1] There are a number of issues with utilitarian ideology, but the main issue for the libertarians who chose to adopt it was that utilitarianism always tends to reduce to support for the status quo, possibly with an allowance for small, gradual changes (Social Darwinism). In contrast, a classical liberalist, on grounds of principle, must support (but not necessarily require) the immediate elimination of any and all coercive actions. The ideologies are fundamentally incompatible in this regard.
[2] There are two basic theories on natural rights: that of positive rights, and that of negative rights. A positive right is the right to something -- a right to food, or to shelter, or to a printing press or assembly hall, for example. As such, positive rights cannot be absolute, as it may be impossible to provide such goods to everyone in practice. Also, such goods can only be provided through the efforts of individuals, and thus a system of positive rights tends to imply a condition of enforced servitude of a portion of the population to subsidize the "rights" of the remainder. Negative rights, on the other hand, are the right not to be aggressed against by others. Instead of a right to food and shelter (presumable created by others) there is the right to procure food and shelter (through production and/or exchange) without interference. Instead of the right to a printing press or assembly hall, there is the right to procure a printing press or assembly hall and use it as one sees fit (while not infringing on the rights of others). Despite the name, negative rights actually allow a greater degree of freedom than positive rights; they are "allow by default, but deny infringement" instead of "deny by default, but allow specific actions." Furthermore, negative rights are absolute; they can apply for all humans in all circumstances. The U.S. Constitution was based on the idea of negative rights; the Bill of Rights was controversial precisely because many thought it both unnecessary and dangerous as an affirmation of the idea of positive rights
Perhaps you weren't aware of this fact, but economies of scale don't exist in every industry. They typically originate as relatively high fixed costs -- R&D, custom manufacturing; the sale price approaches the variable costs of production as the quantities increase. The variable costs, however, can only increase in response to elevated demand. After a certain point the (increasing) variable costs become the dominant term in the equation. There are even a few industies which tend to experience diseconomies of scale as the result of increasingly difficult logistics and beaurocratic overhead.
Economies of scale are the exception, not the rule. Most areas of the economy, including (in most cases) education, experience increasing prices as a result of elevated demand. There are only so many educators, after all, and each educator can only handle so many students at a time (although this factor is somewhat elastic); the natural result of having too many students and too few educators is that the cost of formal education will rise. Luckily, this should also have the effect of encouraging more people to become educators, thus heading off any long-term shortages (but not resulting in substantially lower long-term costs, provided demand remains high).