So tell me what parts of "death for apostates" "you can rape women" "women are valued less then men" "death for homosexuals" "ban on gay marriage" etc, etc, etc. Is compatible with western culture?
None of it, obviously. But while we're on the subject, please tell me what part of "people should be punished for what they believe, rather than what they do" is compatible with western culture? Because that is what you are proposing. Personally, I couldn't care less what they believe so long as they behave themselves.
... or it should be like email where you've got both a "from" and "reply to" field.
That's essentially what we have now—ANI is "From:", and Caller ID is "Reply-To:". The problem is that the recipient of the call only gets the Caller ID, not the ANI. The solution is simple: implement a protocol to forward the ANI data along with Caller ID.
... I would be fine with a warrant that compels production of the contents of your phone.
They have the contents of the phone already, it's the contents of the defendant's mind that they want. To apply a non-technological analogy, the data on the phone (which they have) is written in a private language or code and they want the defendant to translate it for them.
No, they are breakable. We just don't know how many months or decades will pass before they become breakable.
"Months or decades" is under the assumption that there is some flaw in the algorithm, which (while not entirely unrealistic) is still a bit optimistic from the point of view of the codebreaker. Absent such a flaw, the time to break the code by brute force is on the order of billions of years with ideal computers using up all the matter and energy in our solar system. While not quite literally "unbreakable", that is close enough for practical use.
And then you have things like one-time pads, which (when properly implemented) are not even subject to brute-force searches and are mathematically proven to be unbreakable. The algorithm for a one-time pad is trivial; a child could use it to encrypt small messages even without the aid of a computer. The difficulties lie in securely sharing the pad with the intended recipient(s) and keeping it secret from others afterward. The advantages of the more complex algorithms are not that they are more resistant to cryptoanalysis than the one-time pad system which has been known for centuries—because they aren't—but rather that they remain reasonably secure even when the secret is small enough for a person to remember, that the secret can be reused for multiple messages, and, in the case of public-key crypto, that the secret does not need to be shared between the sender and the recipient.
Properly designed, everyone collects a UBI, except for the people in the 1% who actually earns so much money, they're the one's paying taxes to support UBI.
The 1% don't have enough wealth (let alone income) to pay for a meaningful UBI for the remaining 99%, even if you confiscated all of it—which would be obviously self-defeating unless you could somehow stop that wealth from fleeing the country the moment the proposal was seriously considered. More realistically it would be the upper 50-70% paying extra taxes so that the rest can receive a net increase in income, with the majority of the funding coming from the middle class. If you're above the median already you shouldn't expect UBI to raise your income. (The advantage to you would simply be that you are guaranteed the UBI even if your current income source dries up, which may open up more options for seeking better employment, or at least a greater sense of security.)
If you seized and sold off all of the stock for every company in the SP500 you would get $20 trillion, so that's great the corporations must have some money.
Not likely. Who would you be able to sell the stock to, after they'd seen what happened to the previous owners? What is to say that you won't simply seize it back from them after the sale?
Moreover, stock valuations do not imply that the corporations have money, but rather that their shareholders do. (And by "shareholders" I mostly mean the mutual funds in which you've invested your retirement savings via an IRA or 401k.) Even then the money is only theoretical until and unless the stock is actually sold. Or, taking the longer view, until the proceeds from the sale of the stocks are spent on consumer goods—you can't eat money, and we wouldn't want to neglect the effects of inflation.
In a lot of places, every student writes exams at the same time. Shutting down the internet for the 3-4 hours while every student writes exams is a cheap and easy way to keep them from cheating via Google.
This wasn't 3-4 hours, it was at least a full day. The shutdown started 4pm UK time on Tuesday and access was still not restored as of Wednesday afternoon.
It's not feasible in most Western nations because there's rarely a time where every single student is taking an exam...
Not only that, but the Internet is used by many people other than students taking exams. Even with every student taking exams at exactly the same time, it would be completely impractical to shut down the Internet in most Western nations even for 3-4 hours, let alone an entire day.
This is not about the importance of the exams so much as the fact that Ethiopia has not yet reached the point in their development where they are taking full advantage of what the Internet has to offer, both economically and socially. Once they do they won't be able to simply shut it off any more than most Western nations, even if they retain the same all-important exam system.
Again - not one free market advocate. Not Menger, not von Mises, not Rothbard, not Friedman is for anarchy.
Friedman and von Mises certainly weren't anarchists, but I'd thank you not to slander Rothbard, who actually was consistent in his opposition to the use of "political means" (i.e. government). Of course Rothbard never advocated for the popular misconception of anarchy as a chaotic free-for-all without rules of any kind—just the absence of rulers empowered to act without regard for the universal rules grounded in reciprocation which apply to everyone else.
Unfortunately von Mises was only a minarchist, which is to say that his positions on government were inconsistent at best. No doubt the contradiction inherent in relying on an institution empowered to employ the violence denied to everyone else was not lost on him, but unlike Rothbard he was simply unable to conceive of a better way. At least he did consistently argue against any form of intervention in the market itself, and limited the role of government to pure defense from violent criminals and external attackers. If that were all it did there would be no issue, of course, but he then proceeded to contradict himself by arguing first that the institution of government should have a monopoly on providing said defense, and also that it should have the power to impose what he considered "necessary" taxation—which makes the government no different from those criminals it is charged to defend against.
There is no substantial difference between taxing an activity and making that activity illegal, with violations punishable by equivalent fines. The purpose of taxes is raising funds, not changing behavior. Inequitable distribution of the tax burden for the sake of advancing a political agenda is something to be shunned.
If driving carries a negative externality—if you are violating someone else's property rights by operating your vehicle—then you are liable to the victim(s) for the harm you've caused them. That liability should be addressed through the courts, not waived by the government in exchange for paying them a bribe (pollution tax). To the extent that the government does not allow this to be addressed through the courts as a property right violation they are siding with the polluters.
It is, however, important that x includes ALL sources of income.
Hopefully you meant "profit" and not "income", or else you'll end up with crazy situations like e.g. buying a vehicle for $10,000 and selling it later that year for $9,000 being taxed as an income of $9,000, even though you lost $1,000 on the deal. They call it an "income tax" but the goal is really to tax profit, not income, which is why the system includes deductions. (Which then leads to endless arguments over which expenses should be considered deductible, which is why a VAT or sales tax—with a fixed, universal rebate so it isn't "regressive"—makes far more sense than any form of income tax.)
Penalizing short-term gains is also a really bad idea unless your intent is to subsidize the full-time traders with time and connections to ensure they get the best prices at the expense of the ordinary citizens who will end up paying the increased spread.
That is only true if we can 'create value' indefinitely; but that isn't actually true, because we don't create value, we extract finite resources, and the thing about finite resources is that they are finite...
Value is not "resources", and it isn't "money" either. Value is an abstract concept, but —a bit simplistically—you can think of it as the inverse of the gap between your ideal world and the world that actually exists. (Note that this implies that value is subjective: each individual has a different "ideal world".) Value is created for an individual whenever the state of the world moves a bit closer to their ideal.
Value is created in general, by which I mean for everyone, when value is increased from any one individual's perspective without a corresponding decrease in value for anyone else. With certain caveats (e.g. there isn't much anyone can do about someone whose sense of value depends on others doing poorly, or on other factors they have no legitimate influence over) this is the expected result of any voluntary interaction. Those who participate do so because it improves their value, and no one else is negatively affected.
To say that we are unable to "create value" is equivalent to saying that we already live in the best of all possible worlds; that nothing can be done to make the world even a bit more ideal for one person without having the opposite effect on someone else. That is a very bleak outlook, and, in my own humble opinion, very far from the truth.
Even libertarians should be in favor of not interferring with communities that want to regulate themselves.
The "unit of society" for libertarians is the individual, not the community. A libertarian would have no problem with individuals regulating their own behavior as part of a voluntary community which they joined of their own will and have the option of leaving. However, they would have a problem with a non-voluntary community—determined, for example, by birth or geographical boundaries—imposing regulations on its members by force. In practical terms, most "community standards" and "community laws" which would attempt to ban certain types of literature are of the latter category, involuntary rather than voluntary.
So the alternative would be dropping fire crackers and shooting gunman in a crowded public space knowing full well that there would be a panic and there would be a reasonable assumption that people might get hurt.
Even then, the liability for any damage resulting specifically from people panicking properly lies with those who panicked and, in their state of panic, took actions which harmed others—not whoever "caused" the panic. The latter is liable for trespass against the property owner and whatever damage resulted from their demonstration, but not the actions of others.
The proper response to a claim of fire in a crowded theater is an orderly exit. If you trample others in your haste to escape then you are personally responsible for that harm, whether or not there really is a fire.
Never mind that the original "fire in a crowded theater" case was a politically-charged travesty and more about doing an end-run around the 1st Amendment to punish political speech in opposition to the Draft than any literal fires. The court made that ruling only because the obviously correct alternative (ruling that speaking against the Draft was protected speech) would have resulted in the President and Congress stacking the court with lackeys until they got their desired response. (This was before the Supreme Court was formally limited to a maximum of nine justices.)
If you think about it, there's no fiscal difference between extracting $5000 in taxes from the economy from one location, vs. $10 taxes from 500 locations. e.g. A corporate tax just gets passed on to customers in the form of higher prices. The only difference is in the cost and manpower needed to collect the taxes.
To the tax collector, sure, the total amount collected is the same. Individual taxpayers tend to take a more, well, personal view. The form of the tax makes a big difference in how the tax burden is distributed.
People seem to like the idea of corporate taxes because they associate corporations with the "evil" 1%, but such taxes are actually rather regressive—they are passed on through small, hidden increases the prices of everything you buy, and thus have the most effect on those who spend most of their income on consumer goods. Shareholders take a hit too, of course, as well as employees—but remember that a significant portion of those "shareholders" actually consists of various retirement funds. In the end, a corporate tax hurts the conscientious middle-class taxpayer in at least three different ways: at the store, in their paycheck, and at retirement.
The economy does perfectly fine when the money doesn't move—provided it's doing so because that is the most economical choice and not because of some political interference or other throwing a wrench into the works. It's the government that has a funding problem when money stops moving, because they take their cut whenever money changes hands. Money staying in one place is of little value to them, so they push this narrative that the money has to keep flowing, because a higher velocity is in their own best interest, even though forcing money to move is ultimately just as destructive as forcing it to remain still. In the absence of interference the market naturally seeks the optimal velocity for maximizing the wealth of society as a whole; intervention which causes a shift away from that optimum point—in either direction—impoverishes us all. The same dynamic tension exists between saving/investment and consumption: neither is inherently good or bad, and society as a whole is not better off for artificially promoting one over the other.
Work you are forced to do but don't receive a direct income from, is called slavery.
Work you are forced to do is slavery even if you do receive a direct income from it. However, no one is being forced to do anything. It would be a job like any other—an "employer of last resort", so to speak. The deal is simple: anyone who shows up and makes a reasonable attempt to complete whatever tasks they are assigned is guaranteed the basic necessities. The average person should be more than capable of producing their own essential food, shelter, clothing, and other basic goods with time and energy to spare, given proper instruction and the advantages of modern technology. The goal would not be subsidy, but rather self-sufficiency. If you don't care for the deal you don't have to take it, but in that case you're on your own.
This awful analogy has done a huge amount of damage. A password is nothing like a key. A key is a physical object belonging to the defendant, or in the defendant's possession. Physical objects are subject to being located and seized under a warrant. A password or PIN is not a physical object subject to search or seizure, and has far more in common with the combination to a safe. The legal protection against being compelled to divulge the combination to a safe is much stronger than the protection granted to private property such as a key.
Generally speaking, reasoning on the basis of the "cyberspace" analogy, where data and programs are visualized as physical objects in a fictional environment, is a recipe for bad legal precedents. Analogies have limits, and this one is not precise enough to be suitable for use in the courtroom. Information and physical property are not equivalent; the same rules do not apply. A case involving the compulsory disclosure of information should not be decided on the basis of precedents set for physical property.
If they are the latter things because the constitution says so, then they are, in fact, granted by the government.
First, these rights are not natural and inalienable because the Constitition claims them to be; the Constitution only reaffirms this to be true. These rights were already believed to be natural and inalienable long before the Constitution was authored. Second, the Constitution is a document by which "the people" grant powers to the government. Putting aside the obvious fact that no one involved had any authority to grant the government such power over anyone not directly involved in ratifying the Constitution, it was in any case never intended or structured as a grant of rights from the government to the people.
The authors of the Constitution were explicit in their belief that no government possesses any authority not granted to it by the consent of the governed; any rights apparently "granted" by the government to the people must therefore have originated with the people in the first place, and thus were not "granted" at all. Instead, the government simply acknowledges that it lacks the people's consent to violate a right which the people already possess.
To say that "there can be no free market in the absence of regulation" is equivalent to saying that there can be no free market, period. A regulated market, by definition, is not free.
Despite all his insights, Adam Smith contradicted himself on many points, including on the subject of regulation. Fortunately, we are not bound by his mistakes. The early pioneers in any field tend to get many things wrong, and it's nothing to be ashamed of. Those who come after will naturally keep the best parts and discard the mistakes. The idea that the market requires regulation is simply one of those areas that Smith got wrong. He couldn't see how certain problems could be solved while keeping the market free. However, others who later built on his work were able to find better solutions and do away with those inconsistencies.
It's not really that imbecile's fault - indeed they might not even agree with the law but still feel they have a duty to enforce it.
If their job would require them to enforce a law they believe to be unjust then they should resign rather than contribute to harming others through the enforcement of that law. The excuse that they were "just doing their job" does not shield them from responsibility for the consequences of their actions.
OTOH, taxation based on income treats everyone the same regardless of whether they spend their money wisely or foolishly.
So people who took advantage of the opportunities available to them should have to pay more taxes, while others who had exactly the same opportunities but choose not to exploit them should have to pay lower taxes and qualify more easily for government aid?
Taxation based on income does not treat everyone the same. Those who take better advantage of the opportunities that come their way are penalized compared to others who let those same opportunities pass by but were equally wise or foolish in spending what money they did earn.
Socialism did not create the Regulations and taxation under the guise of "permits".... "democracy" did.
"Democracy" applied to regulation and taxation is exactly socialism—"society" deciding how individuals' private property should be used, rather than the owner of the property.
OK, so the government owes us money. So what's the problem?
The problem is that any repayment you receive on that loan will be coming from the taxpayers, i.e. from you. That's great (for you) if you happen to hold an exceedingly large portfolio of government bonds, so that the net interest you receive fully offsets your taxes. Otherwise it's a net loss. From the average taxpayer's point of view it's simply bad debt, along the lines of buying consumer goods with a credit card and continually applying for more credit rather than paying it off each month.
So you were treating (**) as the free variable? That works, provided the operator actually appears as a function argument or local variable in an enclosing function context. References to global definitions do not create closures in Python. (The value of a global variable or function definition is looked up at each call, not captured as part of the lambda.) However, in that case you can't really refer to (**2) as "the squaring function" since (**) could do anything, not just exponentiation.
Slashdot Mirror
So tell me what parts of "death for apostates" "you can rape women" "women are valued less then men" "death for homosexuals" "ban on gay marriage" etc, etc, etc. Is compatible with western culture?
None of it, obviously. But while we're on the subject, please tell me what part of "people should be punished for what they believe, rather than what they do" is compatible with western culture? Because that is what you are proposing. Personally, I couldn't care less what they believe so long as they behave themselves.
... or it should be like email where you've got both a "from" and "reply to" field.
That's essentially what we have now—ANI is "From:", and Caller ID is "Reply-To:". The problem is that the recipient of the call only gets the Caller ID, not the ANI. The solution is simple: implement a protocol to forward the ANI data along with Caller ID.
... I would be fine with a warrant that compels production of the contents of your phone.
They have the contents of the phone already, it's the contents of the defendant's mind that they want. To apply a non-technological analogy, the data on the phone (which they have) is written in a private language or code and they want the defendant to translate it for them.
No, they are breakable. We just don't know how many months or decades will pass before they become breakable.
"Months or decades" is under the assumption that there is some flaw in the algorithm, which (while not entirely unrealistic) is still a bit optimistic from the point of view of the codebreaker. Absent such a flaw, the time to break the code by brute force is on the order of billions of years with ideal computers using up all the matter and energy in our solar system. While not quite literally "unbreakable", that is close enough for practical use.
And then you have things like one-time pads, which (when properly implemented) are not even subject to brute-force searches and are mathematically proven to be unbreakable. The algorithm for a one-time pad is trivial; a child could use it to encrypt small messages even without the aid of a computer. The difficulties lie in securely sharing the pad with the intended recipient(s) and keeping it secret from others afterward. The advantages of the more complex algorithms are not that they are more resistant to cryptoanalysis than the one-time pad system which has been known for centuries—because they aren't—but rather that they remain reasonably secure even when the secret is small enough for a person to remember, that the secret can be reused for multiple messages, and, in the case of public-key crypto, that the secret does not need to be shared between the sender and the recipient.
Properly designed, everyone collects a UBI, except for the people in the 1% who actually earns so much money, they're the one's paying taxes to support UBI.
The 1% don't have enough wealth (let alone income) to pay for a meaningful UBI for the remaining 99%, even if you confiscated all of it—which would be obviously self-defeating unless you could somehow stop that wealth from fleeing the country the moment the proposal was seriously considered. More realistically it would be the upper 50-70% paying extra taxes so that the rest can receive a net increase in income, with the majority of the funding coming from the middle class. If you're above the median already you shouldn't expect UBI to raise your income. (The advantage to you would simply be that you are guaranteed the UBI even if your current income source dries up, which may open up more options for seeking better employment, or at least a greater sense of security.)
If you seized and sold off all of the stock for every company in the SP500 you would get $20 trillion, so that's great the corporations must have some money.
Not likely. Who would you be able to sell the stock to, after they'd seen what happened to the previous owners? What is to say that you won't simply seize it back from them after the sale?
Moreover, stock valuations do not imply that the corporations have money, but rather that their shareholders do. (And by "shareholders" I mostly mean the mutual funds in which you've invested your retirement savings via an IRA or 401k.) Even then the money is only theoretical until and unless the stock is actually sold. Or, taking the longer view, until the proceeds from the sale of the stocks are spent on consumer goods—you can't eat money, and we wouldn't want to neglect the effects of inflation.
In a lot of places, every student writes exams at the same time. Shutting down the internet for the 3-4 hours while every student writes exams is a cheap and easy way to keep them from cheating via Google.
This wasn't 3-4 hours, it was at least a full day. The shutdown started 4pm UK time on Tuesday and access was still not restored as of Wednesday afternoon.
It's not feasible in most Western nations because there's rarely a time where every single student is taking an exam...
Not only that, but the Internet is used by many people other than students taking exams. Even with every student taking exams at exactly the same time, it would be completely impractical to shut down the Internet in most Western nations even for 3-4 hours, let alone an entire day.
This is not about the importance of the exams so much as the fact that Ethiopia has not yet reached the point in their development where they are taking full advantage of what the Internet has to offer, both economically and socially. Once they do they won't be able to simply shut it off any more than most Western nations, even if they retain the same all-important exam system.
Again - not one free market advocate. Not Menger, not von Mises, not Rothbard, not Friedman is for anarchy.
Friedman and von Mises certainly weren't anarchists, but I'd thank you not to slander Rothbard, who actually was consistent in his opposition to the use of "political means" (i.e. government). Of course Rothbard never advocated for the popular misconception of anarchy as a chaotic free-for-all without rules of any kind—just the absence of rulers empowered to act without regard for the universal rules grounded in reciprocation which apply to everyone else.
But don't take my word for it. Just read what Rothbard had to say about government in The Ethics of Liberty and For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto.
Unfortunately von Mises was only a minarchist, which is to say that his positions on government were inconsistent at best. No doubt the contradiction inherent in relying on an institution empowered to employ the violence denied to everyone else was not lost on him, but unlike Rothbard he was simply unable to conceive of a better way. At least he did consistently argue against any form of intervention in the market itself, and limited the role of government to pure defense from violent criminals and external attackers. If that were all it did there would be no issue, of course, but he then proceeded to contradict himself by arguing first that the institution of government should have a monopoly on providing said defense, and also that it should have the power to impose what he considered "necessary" taxation—which makes the government no different from those criminals it is charged to defend against.
There is no substantial difference between taxing an activity and making that activity illegal, with violations punishable by equivalent fines. The purpose of taxes is raising funds, not changing behavior. Inequitable distribution of the tax burden for the sake of advancing a political agenda is something to be shunned.
If driving carries a negative externality—if you are violating someone else's property rights by operating your vehicle—then you are liable to the victim(s) for the harm you've caused them. That liability should be addressed through the courts, not waived by the government in exchange for paying them a bribe (pollution tax). To the extent that the government does not allow this to be addressed through the courts as a property right violation they are siding with the polluters.
It is, however, important that x includes ALL sources of income.
Hopefully you meant "profit" and not "income", or else you'll end up with crazy situations like e.g. buying a vehicle for $10,000 and selling it later that year for $9,000 being taxed as an income of $9,000, even though you lost $1,000 on the deal. They call it an "income tax" but the goal is really to tax profit, not income, which is why the system includes deductions. (Which then leads to endless arguments over which expenses should be considered deductible, which is why a VAT or sales tax—with a fixed, universal rebate so it isn't "regressive"—makes far more sense than any form of income tax.)
Penalizing short-term gains is also a really bad idea unless your intent is to subsidize the full-time traders with time and connections to ensure they get the best prices at the expense of the ordinary citizens who will end up paying the increased spread.
That is only true if we can 'create value' indefinitely; but that isn't actually true, because we don't create value, we extract finite resources, and the thing about finite resources is that they are finite ...
Value is not "resources", and it isn't "money" either. Value is an abstract concept, but —a bit simplistically—you can think of it as the inverse of the gap between your ideal world and the world that actually exists. (Note that this implies that value is subjective: each individual has a different "ideal world".) Value is created for an individual whenever the state of the world moves a bit closer to their ideal.
Value is created in general, by which I mean for everyone, when value is increased from any one individual's perspective without a corresponding decrease in value for anyone else. With certain caveats (e.g. there isn't much anyone can do about someone whose sense of value depends on others doing poorly, or on other factors they have no legitimate influence over) this is the expected result of any voluntary interaction. Those who participate do so because it improves their value, and no one else is negatively affected.
To say that we are unable to "create value" is equivalent to saying that we already live in the best of all possible worlds; that nothing can be done to make the world even a bit more ideal for one person without having the opposite effect on someone else. That is a very bleak outlook, and, in my own humble opinion, very far from the truth.
Even libertarians should be in favor of not interferring with communities that want to regulate themselves.
The "unit of society" for libertarians is the individual, not the community. A libertarian would have no problem with individuals regulating their own behavior as part of a voluntary community which they joined of their own will and have the option of leaving. However, they would have a problem with a non-voluntary community—determined, for example, by birth or geographical boundaries—imposing regulations on its members by force. In practical terms, most "community standards" and "community laws" which would attempt to ban certain types of literature are of the latter category, involuntary rather than voluntary.
So the alternative would be dropping fire crackers and shooting gunman in a crowded public space knowing full well that there would be a panic and there would be a reasonable assumption that people might get hurt.
Even then, the liability for any damage resulting specifically from people panicking properly lies with those who panicked and, in their state of panic, took actions which harmed others—not whoever "caused" the panic. The latter is liable for trespass against the property owner and whatever damage resulted from their demonstration, but not the actions of others.
The proper response to a claim of fire in a crowded theater is an orderly exit. If you trample others in your haste to escape then you are personally responsible for that harm, whether or not there really is a fire.
Never mind that the original "fire in a crowded theater" case was a politically-charged travesty and more about doing an end-run around the 1st Amendment to punish political speech in opposition to the Draft than any literal fires. The court made that ruling only because the obviously correct alternative (ruling that speaking against the Draft was protected speech) would have resulted in the President and Congress stacking the court with lackeys until they got their desired response. (This was before the Supreme Court was formally limited to a maximum of nine justices.)
If you think about it, there's no fiscal difference between extracting $5000 in taxes from the economy from one location, vs. $10 taxes from 500 locations. e.g. A corporate tax just gets passed on to customers in the form of higher prices. The only difference is in the cost and manpower needed to collect the taxes.
To the tax collector, sure, the total amount collected is the same. Individual taxpayers tend to take a more, well, personal view. The form of the tax makes a big difference in how the tax burden is distributed.
People seem to like the idea of corporate taxes because they associate corporations with the "evil" 1%, but such taxes are actually rather regressive—they are passed on through small, hidden increases the prices of everything you buy, and thus have the most effect on those who spend most of their income on consumer goods. Shareholders take a hit too, of course, as well as employees—but remember that a significant portion of those "shareholders" actually consists of various retirement funds. In the end, a corporate tax hurts the conscientious middle-class taxpayer in at least three different ways: at the store, in their paycheck, and at retirement.
The economy does perfectly fine when the money doesn't move—provided it's doing so because that is the most economical choice and not because of some political interference or other throwing a wrench into the works. It's the government that has a funding problem when money stops moving, because they take their cut whenever money changes hands. Money staying in one place is of little value to them, so they push this narrative that the money has to keep flowing, because a higher velocity is in their own best interest, even though forcing money to move is ultimately just as destructive as forcing it to remain still. In the absence of interference the market naturally seeks the optimal velocity for maximizing the wealth of society as a whole; intervention which causes a shift away from that optimum point—in either direction—impoverishes us all. The same dynamic tension exists between saving/investment and consumption: neither is inherently good or bad, and society as a whole is not better off for artificially promoting one over the other.
minimal volunteer requirement
Work you are forced to do but don't receive a direct income from, is called slavery.
Work you are forced to do is slavery even if you do receive a direct income from it. However, no one is being forced to do anything. It would be a job like any other—an "employer of last resort", so to speak. The deal is simple: anyone who shows up and makes a reasonable attempt to complete whatever tasks they are assigned is guaranteed the basic necessities. The average person should be more than capable of producing their own essential food, shelter, clothing, and other basic goods with time and energy to spare, given proper instruction and the advantages of modern technology. The goal would not be subsidy, but rather self-sufficiency. If you don't care for the deal you don't have to take it, but in that case you're on your own.
Voluntary gainful employment is not slavery.
But can see the comparison to a key.
This awful analogy has done a huge amount of damage. A password is nothing like a key. A key is a physical object belonging to the defendant, or in the defendant's possession. Physical objects are subject to being located and seized under a warrant. A password or PIN is not a physical object subject to search or seizure, and has far more in common with the combination to a safe. The legal protection against being compelled to divulge the combination to a safe is much stronger than the protection granted to private property such as a key.
Generally speaking, reasoning on the basis of the "cyberspace" analogy, where data and programs are visualized as physical objects in a fictional environment, is a recipe for bad legal precedents. Analogies have limits, and this one is not precise enough to be suitable for use in the courtroom. Information and physical property are not equivalent; the same rules do not apply. A case involving the compulsory disclosure of information should not be decided on the basis of precedents set for physical property.
If they are the latter things because the constitution says so, then they are, in fact, granted by the government.
First, these rights are not natural and inalienable because the Constitition claims them to be; the Constitution only reaffirms this to be true. These rights were already believed to be natural and inalienable long before the Constitution was authored. Second, the Constitution is a document by which "the people" grant powers to the government. Putting aside the obvious fact that no one involved had any authority to grant the government such power over anyone not directly involved in ratifying the Constitution, it was in any case never intended or structured as a grant of rights from the government to the people.
The authors of the Constitution were explicit in their belief that no government possesses any authority not granted to it by the consent of the governed; any rights apparently "granted" by the government to the people must therefore have originated with the people in the first place, and thus were not "granted" at all. Instead, the government simply acknowledges that it lacks the people's consent to violate a right which the people already possess.
To say that "there can be no free market in the absence of regulation" is equivalent to saying that there can be no free market, period. A regulated market, by definition, is not free.
Despite all his insights, Adam Smith contradicted himself on many points, including on the subject of regulation. Fortunately, we are not bound by his mistakes. The early pioneers in any field tend to get many things wrong, and it's nothing to be ashamed of. Those who come after will naturally keep the best parts and discard the mistakes. The idea that the market requires regulation is simply one of those areas that Smith got wrong. He couldn't see how certain problems could be solved while keeping the market free. However, others who later built on his work were able to find better solutions and do away with those inconsistencies.
It's not really that imbecile's fault - indeed they might not even agree with the law but still feel they have a duty to enforce it.
If their job would require them to enforce a law they believe to be unjust then they should resign rather than contribute to harming others through the enforcement of that law. The excuse that they were "just doing their job" does not shield them from responsibility for the consequences of their actions.
OTOH, taxation based on income treats everyone the same regardless of whether they spend their money wisely or foolishly.
So people who took advantage of the opportunities available to them should have to pay more taxes, while others who had exactly the same opportunities but choose not to exploit them should have to pay lower taxes and qualify more easily for government aid?
Taxation based on income does not treat everyone the same. Those who take better advantage of the opportunities that come their way are penalized compared to others who let those same opportunities pass by but were equally wise or foolish in spending what money they did earn.
Socialism did not create the Regulations and taxation under the guise of "permits".... "democracy" did.
"Democracy" applied to regulation and taxation is exactly socialism—"society" deciding how individuals' private property should be used, rather than the owner of the property.
OK, so the government owes us money. So what's the problem?
The problem is that any repayment you receive on that loan will be coming from the taxpayers, i.e. from you. That's great (for you) if you happen to hold an exceedingly large portfolio of government bonds, so that the net interest you receive fully offsets your taxes. Otherwise it's a net loss. From the average taxpayer's point of view it's simply bad debt, along the lines of buying consumer goods with a credit card and continually applying for more credit rather than paying it off each month.
How can I make [the large margin on the right] go away?
Install Stylebot for Chrome/Chromium, or whatever the equivalent extension is for your browser, and add this CSS override to negate the custom margin:
div#comments.a2commentwrap { margin-right: auto; }
So you were treating (**) as the free variable? That works, provided the operator actually appears as a function argument or local variable in an enclosing function context. References to global definitions do not create closures in Python. (The value of a global variable or function definition is looked up at each call, not captured as part of the lambda.) However, in that case you can't really refer to (**2) as "the squaring function" since (**) could do anything, not just exponentiation.