I'm not going to disagree with your first example, because frankly, I think it's at least close to the truth. See my earlier posts about how US healthcare is NOT freemarket.
Your Social Security vs. Private Pensions argument isn't comparing apples to apples however. Social security operates nothing like a pension plan. If it were a pension plan, it would have to carry diverse assets in reserve in proportion to the present value of estimated future benefits. Basically, everyone running it would be in jail if it were a private pension. It's cheep to run because it doesn't have assets to manage, it's nothing more than a transfer payment from one generation to the next.
Medicare and Medicaid (which are VERY different programs with very different structures I might add) would have a massive increase in overhead if they suddenly covered everyone because they base their pricing off of what the private insurers pay. They also define their administive costs different than we define overhead for insurance companies (which isn't really insurance, if you go to that post I was talking about to start with). So again, apples to oranges comparison.
The adult may ask for the filter to be removed, and the library doesn't have to filter, but the library MAY choose to keep the filter in place. Afterall, why should may tax dollars pay for your internet porn habit. Freedom of speech doesn't imply that I also have to subsidize it.
Sorry, but I have to dispute your assertions about healthcare and education. The US doesn't have "free market" health care either, what we have is a private buyers club that is tied to employment. Largely due to the fact that healthcare purchased by the employer is a tax free benefit but out of pocket healthcare costs have to be paid with post tax money. This encourages people to buy healthcare plans (not insurace, cause that's not what it is).
Anyways, one of the reasons that "socialized medicine" is so much cheeper is because even with the large number of people not covered by employer health plans and government plans, patient outcomes are much better in the US than in other countries. Since health care is a "luxury" good (in econmspeak) you would expect a country with a higher average income to spend a greater percentage of its income on healthcare than one with a lower income. I utterly reject the notion that we should judge on "cost to cover" alone.
These articles give these ideas pretty good coverage.
http://techcentralstation.com/083104C.html
Of course Kyoto is a "right direction" (assuming of course that we agree about anthropogenic global warming and its costs). The question is cost/benefit to me. The scale arguement for the technology will hold true in the future and is not the only reason for cost reduction. All new technology (and manufacturing in general) has this feature. But there are underlying costs in the technology itself (a price floor if you will) I'm suggesting that in both secnarios there will be a rapid decline in costs, but that the ultimate floor will be lower for the better technology (usually in the succeeding generations of tech). Thus the arguement is not to massively adopt first gen technology and sink your costs into a less effective solution unless you really need to do it now!
And no, I'm not talking about major changes in your personal lifestyle. I'm talking about changes in corporate practices, along with major investment in research and infrastructure which will allow you and I to basically go about our lives with little change, since we're not driving SUVs hundreds of miles every week. People who _do_drive SUVs hundreds of miles a week ( lots of 'em here in the California bay area ), they might have to adjust a bit, though...
This is true, but everything has an opportunity cost. The point being that cleaning up the oil spill is better than not cleaning it up. Sure we would all be better off if the spill had never happened and the money was spent elseware, but that is true for all things that have an opportunity cost (what if enough food grew in the wild to feed us all, rather than farming, that would be preferred to having to spend resources to grow it ourselves) . I do conceed the point that GDP is not a perfect measure of well-being.
Three years is also about how much Kyoto would slow down the rise in temperature over the next 100 years. Effectively it buys us a couple years at most, at a year high cost (and you can bet that all the low hanging fruit will be picked first, meaning future reductions will be more costly). If we as a society decide that serious global warming IS going on, that it is anthropogenic, and that we should try to undo the damage (as opposed to just coping with the results), then we are going to need far larger reductions than Kyoto, and far larger reductions than we can do now without crippling the world's economy. Given this and that it will be far cheeper for future generations to make equivalent reductions in carbon-based fuels (better technology) than for us to do so now, I'd say we'd be better off spending the compliance costs of Kyoto on scientific research. Think about spending 4% more of GDP on research, heck, even a small fraction of that.
IIRC the population of Minneapolis/StPaul is higher than 350,000. It's closer to 1.5mil, isn't it? Of course that may only be true if you include the suburbs. But the US much more suburban than urban. Which is what I think the posters are getting at, not the the US is more rural, although that may be true, I'm not sure.
That is true, but a subsidy is not the same as being government run (A market is still setting prices and filling demand), Subsidies are less invasive than total government contro. And, in this case, the subsidy exists more for equality concerns than because of a market failure.
Spillover is another word for externalites, which falls under part B of your Wikipedia definition (cannot exclude people once created). Part A of the Wikipedia definition is just another word for non-rival.
With regards to roads as a public goods. Roads, police, and fire protection are not pure public goods since they are not perfectly non-rival and non-excludable. And example of a pure public good would be something like national defense, something which would benefit my neighbor at NO additional cost to me (marginal cost is zero, non-rival) and that the private sector could not force him to pay for (non-excludeable). Thus you have a free-rider problem.
The problem with non-rival goods is that they generally lead to monopolies. The problem with non-excludable goods(or bads) is that they lead to under(or over) production. This is why you have government intervention in these areas, if the degree of monopoly or under(over) production is large enough. That doesn't mean that the government will always provide these things though. It may only require changes in the law or technology to make goods excludable. Or the government may choose to regulate the monopoly rather than provide the service itself (monopolies still have an incentive to be efficient, unlike the government, even if their prices are capped). Basically, in the case of "market failure" we no longer have a perfect solution. So the question is, what solution would be the least bad. In the case of a pure public good you have a total market failure, so you have to have government intervention. But sometimes the market solution, though still not perfect, is still better than government intervention. It depends on the situation.
An alternative way to view it is this: Both problems are price problems. The problem with any non-rival good is trying to SET a market the price (since setting the price to the marginal cost (zero for purely non-rival goods) won't cover the total cost). The problem with non-excludable goods is trying to COLLECT that price.
Yeah, if the private sector ran roads you WOULD have to pay to drive on them, OTOH you wouldn't be paying the gas tax either. The government's primary advantage stems from eminent domain and the ability to force users to pay (since they can force us all to pay).
It's not even about whether it is a luxury or necessity. We don't have government owned farms growing all of our food do we, and I'd say that food is more necessary to our existance than Wi-Fi. It's about whether there are conditions that prevent the marketplace from providing it effectively. (non-rivalry and externalities in econspeak)
What does kool-aid have to do with my previous post? (Just for the record though, lemon ice is the best). I do not see any "1984" in my post. I do not deny that the US helped Saddam Hussein during his war with Iran (charter memeber of the Axis of Evil as well). Of course the goal with the Iraq Iran war (for the US) was to prevent the more powerful (and Soviet aided) Iran from gaining a major victory and achieving regional dominance. It was more a case of "the enemy of my enemy" that a real positive alliance.
Of course there are other interests involved, I'm certainly not suggesting that the US is wholly motived by unselfish concern for the oppressed everywhere. So why Iraq and not some other country? Partly it's beacause even the US has limits to its military resources. How many oppressive dictators are there in this world? In the case of Iraq, it appears to be a combination the prolonged nature of the problem (12 years of UN resolutions and fights over weapons inspectors), percieved threat, and level of repression. And that just covers the direct effects of any action or inaction. So I don't at all deny self interest. Just like the reason for the US civil war wasn't only about freeing slaves. Most events of this nature has a multitude of causes. Just because a war isn't only (or even primarily) about protecting freedom doesnt' mean that freedom isn't one of the objectives.
I read it, and it echo's what I just said. It wasn't that it COULDN'T be done. But that doing so would be much more expensive in lives and dollars, and it would also mean upsetting coalition partners. And it simply wasn't viewed as being important enough by the realist school of advisors who ran the foreign policy apparatus in the GHWB whitehouse.
Ironically, after 1991, the weapons inspectors found Iraq was much closer to having a nuclear weapon than the intelligence community believed. Which is pretty much the exact opposite of the result this time. I wonder if they had known how close Saddam actually was to producing nuclear weapons in 1991 if the decision might have been different. Remember, they knew Saddam had a weapons program, they just thought that he was years away from having the capability of building nuclear bomb and further from a long range delievery system.
9/11 didn't really "change everything" so much as it made people realize that the "stability" that they were protecting wasn't stable. It's didn't change the world, it changed our assumptions about it. If you want to argue about how much freedom is worth in terms of dollars and lives, and whether the US has any obligation to risk it's people and money for the freedom of others, then that's a debate worth having. Just remember that US history isn't to kind to that proposition. (Just look at how many other countries the US fought in, and how many wars were actually fought IN the US.)
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and too the republic for which it stands. One nation, under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
You aren't really pledging allegiance to a piece of cloth, you are pledging to uphold the ideas that the Flag represents. (Which, btw, is why so many people get upset about flag buring. They don't see flag burning as a way of protesting the policy(ies) of the US govmnt. To them buring the flag is means something deeper. It means essentially renouncing your citizenship and your belief in the ideas and ideals of the US itself. Really, it's treason AND blatant hypocracy to them, since you are effecively renouncing your citizenship, but doing it without actually having to give up the privilidges it provides. Trying to have the cake and eat it too....etc.) You are professing certain common ideals about what it means to be american. Because if you prefer tyranny to liberty, and oppression to justice, you really can't be "american" (sorry but USian just sounds SO bad). Of course there is room for debate about what some of these ideas mean in the concrete rather than the abstract. But the rejection of the most basic ideals (at least to me) indicates that you ought to renounce your citizenship. Put another way, what these ideas mean in a practical sense, their implementation in a logistical sense, and their exercise in the political realm are open to debate. But in order to have that debate, we at least need to agree on the most basic framework within which all this can take place (a constitutional democratic republic). We at least need some starting premises or beliefs on which everyone can agree.
With regard to the "under god" part. To me personally, it is an acknowledgement that the premises upon which the US was founded sprang from a religious belief that we are "endowded by our creator with certain unalienable rights". Now you don't have to necessarily believe in God (either in the Judeo-Christian sense, or in any sense at all) to believe in the idea of natural rights, but that is where the idea of natural rights originated from in the US tradition. Thus, IMHO, when you say "one nation under god" you aren't necessarily professing a personal belief in god, you are professing that you agree in principle with the ideas that our rights are not granted by man or the government, but our natural moral entitlement. Or, as someone else said much more eloquently, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the Governed".
You are correct the the US hasn't invited in UN weapons inspectors. But the US never agreed to do so either as a condition of a cease-fire agreement. So the comparison really isn't fair logically.
With regards to taking and holding Baghdad (which I agree would be impossible if the majority of Iraqis thought that the US had territorial/empire ambitions), it wasn't the military advisors that said that it couldn't be done in 1991 (Though they did warn that doing so would require more time, money, and cost more lives). The decision to leave Saddam in control stemmed more from our promises some of our coalition members (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, etc) than military necessity. It was hoped, at the time, that Iraqi's would take care of the dirty deed of diposing Saddam themselves after the 1991 Gulf War. Of course that didn't happen. Those who did rise up against him were crushed. (The mass graves you see now)
Actually, it makes sense if you think of gains in market share as an exponential process. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64.... once you manage to get 10% of the market you are only a couple doublings from having a majority of the market share.
What you said is mostly true, but right-of-way doesn't imply that the government "paid for" the the lines. Furthermore, some of the lines didn't use the public right-of-way, they got it from railroads (who got theirs from the gov last century!), but that isn't really the point. If you look at how this happened, it makes much more sense.
What happened is that the government realized that phone service, under the current technological regime of the time, would be a natural monopoly (due to falling average cost). Thus they made a deal. The government gave a local/regional carrier a monopoly and right-of-way like a public sector utility would have, under the condition that they could regulate the rates so the phone company still made a profit, but less than an unregulated monopoly would make. Consumers would be better off, since their rates would be lower than under competition or unregualted monopoly (due to the lower costs and the regulation of prices.
For the record, I have no problem with others using the same right-of-way, but if they are all selling the same technology, then they are likely just going to drive up the costs by laying redundant infrastructure. (some redundancy would be good). The question is, is the increase in average cost (since more providers means fewer customers to split the fixed costs over) offset by the other benefits of competition. The answer depends on the nature of the demand for the particular service.
He isn't talking about the dead weight loss, that's true for any monopoly, public or private. But a private company does have one thing the public sector doesn't, a profit incentive. Remember in both cases the price is nominally set by regulators. The private company has to lobby for rate increases with at least a somewhat adversarial PUC. I my mind, a regulated private monopoly is a small degree better than a public one (so sometimes there are other mitigating circumstances where it makes more sense for things to be publicly run).
The worst thing a goverment can do though, is to use the regulatory structure to artificially impede new competition actually capable of making a monopolistic market truly competitive. This happens way to often.
I haven't seen that, I have seen some coverage suggesting that he was easing strict new regulations (so that they would be less strict than the original proposal but stronger than current law.) But I haven't seen any on actual regression in environmental laws. If someone has some data on this to the contrary I'd really like to see it. (Cause I probably wouldn't be too happy if that was the case). I know this is kinda a late response, but oh well.
Slashdot Mirror
It WAS ratified by congress back during the 1990s and signed by Clinton. It is a treaty, not just an agreement.
I'm not going to disagree with your first example, because frankly, I think it's at least close to the truth. See my earlier posts about how US healthcare is NOT freemarket. Your Social Security vs. Private Pensions argument isn't comparing apples to apples however. Social security operates nothing like a pension plan. If it were a pension plan, it would have to carry diverse assets in reserve in proportion to the present value of estimated future benefits. Basically, everyone running it would be in jail if it were a private pension. It's cheep to run because it doesn't have assets to manage, it's nothing more than a transfer payment from one generation to the next. Medicare and Medicaid (which are VERY different programs with very different structures I might add) would have a massive increase in overhead if they suddenly covered everyone because they base their pricing off of what the private insurers pay. They also define their administive costs different than we define overhead for insurance companies (which isn't really insurance, if you go to that post I was talking about to start with). So again, apples to oranges comparison.
The adult may ask for the filter to be removed, and the library doesn't have to filter, but the library MAY choose to keep the filter in place. Afterall, why should may tax dollars pay for your internet porn habit. Freedom of speech doesn't imply that I also have to subsidize it.
These articles give these ideas pretty good coverage. http://techcentralstation.com/083104C.html
http://techcentralstation.com/092804C.html
http://techcentralstation.com/101404B.html
http://www.techcentralstation.com/021405D.html
Of course Kyoto is a "right direction" (assuming of course that we agree about anthropogenic global warming and its costs). The question is cost/benefit to me. The scale arguement for the technology will hold true in the future and is not the only reason for cost reduction. All new technology (and manufacturing in general) has this feature. But there are underlying costs in the technology itself (a price floor if you will) I'm suggesting that in both secnarios there will be a rapid decline in costs, but that the ultimate floor will be lower for the better technology (usually in the succeeding generations of tech). Thus the arguement is not to massively adopt first gen technology and sink your costs into a less effective solution unless you really need to do it now!
Oh, so anyone that doesn't see the evidence the same way you do must be motived by something other than the evidence? Talk about ad hominem!
Someone please mod up that last paragraph.
Doesn't that sorta negate your point?? :)
This is true, but everything has an opportunity cost. The point being that cleaning up the oil spill is better than not cleaning it up. Sure we would all be better off if the spill had never happened and the money was spent elseware, but that is true for all things that have an opportunity cost (what if enough food grew in the wild to feed us all, rather than farming, that would be preferred to having to spend resources to grow it ourselves) . I do conceed the point that GDP is not a perfect measure of well-being.
Three years is also about how much Kyoto would slow down the rise in temperature over the next 100 years. Effectively it buys us a couple years at most, at a year high cost (and you can bet that all the low hanging fruit will be picked first, meaning future reductions will be more costly). If we as a society decide that serious global warming IS going on, that it is anthropogenic, and that we should try to undo the damage (as opposed to just coping with the results), then we are going to need far larger reductions than Kyoto, and far larger reductions than we can do now without crippling the world's economy. Given this and that it will be far cheeper for future generations to make equivalent reductions in carbon-based fuels (better technology) than for us to do so now, I'd say we'd be better off spending the compliance costs of Kyoto on scientific research. Think about spending 4% more of GDP on research, heck, even a small fraction of that.
IIRC the population of Minneapolis/StPaul is higher than 350,000. It's closer to 1.5mil, isn't it? Of course that may only be true if you include the suburbs. But the US much more suburban than urban. Which is what I think the posters are getting at, not the the US is more rural, although that may be true, I'm not sure.
That is true, but a subsidy is not the same as being government run (A market is still setting prices and filling demand), Subsidies are less invasive than total government contro. And, in this case, the subsidy exists more for equality concerns than because of a market failure.
With regards to roads as a public goods. Roads, police, and fire protection are not pure public goods since they are not perfectly non-rival and non-excludable. And example of a pure public good would be something like national defense, something which would benefit my neighbor at NO additional cost to me (marginal cost is zero, non-rival) and that the private sector could not force him to pay for (non-excludeable). Thus you have a free-rider problem.
The problem with non-rival goods is that they generally lead to monopolies. The problem with non-excludable goods(or bads) is that they lead to under(or over) production. This is why you have government intervention in these areas, if the degree of monopoly or under(over) production is large enough. That doesn't mean that the government will always provide these things though. It may only require changes in the law or technology to make goods excludable. Or the government may choose to regulate the monopoly rather than provide the service itself (monopolies still have an incentive to be efficient, unlike the government, even if their prices are capped). Basically, in the case of "market failure" we no longer have a perfect solution. So the question is, what solution would be the least bad. In the case of a pure public good you have a total market failure, so you have to have government intervention. But sometimes the market solution, though still not perfect, is still better than government intervention. It depends on the situation.
An alternative way to view it is this: Both problems are price problems. The problem with any non-rival good is trying to SET a market the price (since setting the price to the marginal cost (zero for purely non-rival goods) won't cover the total cost). The problem with non-excludable goods is trying to COLLECT that price.
Just because they sold to Iraq in the 1990s doesn't mean that they didn't sell to Iran in the 1980s.
Yeah, if the private sector ran roads you WOULD have to pay to drive on them, OTOH you wouldn't be paying the gas tax either. The government's primary advantage stems from eminent domain and the ability to force users to pay (since they can force us all to pay).
It's not even about whether it is a luxury or necessity. We don't have government owned farms growing all of our food do we, and I'd say that food is more necessary to our existance than Wi-Fi. It's about whether there are conditions that prevent the marketplace from providing it effectively. (non-rivalry and externalities in econspeak)
Of course there are other interests involved, I'm certainly not suggesting that the US is wholly motived by unselfish concern for the oppressed everywhere. So why Iraq and not some other country? Partly it's beacause even the US has limits to its military resources. How many oppressive dictators are there in this world? In the case of Iraq, it appears to be a combination the prolonged nature of the problem (12 years of UN resolutions and fights over weapons inspectors), percieved threat, and level of repression. And that just covers the direct effects of any action or inaction. So I don't at all deny self interest. Just like the reason for the US civil war wasn't only about freeing slaves. Most events of this nature has a multitude of causes. Just because a war isn't only (or even primarily) about protecting freedom doesnt' mean that freedom isn't one of the objectives.
Ironically, after 1991, the weapons inspectors found Iraq was much closer to having a nuclear weapon than the intelligence community believed. Which is pretty much the exact opposite of the result this time. I wonder if they had known how close Saddam actually was to producing nuclear weapons in 1991 if the decision might have been different. Remember, they knew Saddam had a weapons program, they just thought that he was years away from having the capability of building nuclear bomb and further from a long range delievery system.
9/11 didn't really "change everything" so much as it made people realize that the "stability" that they were protecting wasn't stable. It's didn't change the world, it changed our assumptions about it. If you want to argue about how much freedom is worth in terms of dollars and lives, and whether the US has any obligation to risk it's people and money for the freedom of others, then that's a debate worth having. Just remember that US history isn't to kind to that proposition. (Just look at how many other countries the US fought in, and how many wars were actually fought IN the US.)
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and too the republic for which it stands. One nation, under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
You aren't really pledging allegiance to a piece of cloth, you are pledging to uphold the ideas that the Flag represents. (Which, btw, is why so many people get upset about flag buring. They don't see flag burning as a way of protesting the policy(ies) of the US govmnt. To them buring the flag is means something deeper. It means essentially renouncing your citizenship and your belief in the ideas and ideals of the US itself. Really, it's treason AND blatant hypocracy to them, since you are effecively renouncing your citizenship, but doing it without actually having to give up the privilidges it provides. Trying to have the cake and eat it too....etc.) You are professing certain common ideals about what it means to be american. Because if you prefer tyranny to liberty, and oppression to justice, you really can't be "american" (sorry but USian just sounds SO bad). Of course there is room for debate about what some of these ideas mean in the concrete rather than the abstract. But the rejection of the most basic ideals (at least to me) indicates that you ought to renounce your citizenship. Put another way, what these ideas mean in a practical sense, their implementation in a logistical sense, and their exercise in the political realm are open to debate. But in order to have that debate, we at least need to agree on the most basic framework within which all this can take place (a constitutional democratic republic). We at least need some starting premises or beliefs on which everyone can agree.
With regard to the "under god" part. To me personally, it is an acknowledgement that the premises upon which the US was founded sprang from a religious belief that we are "endowded by our creator with certain unalienable rights". Now you don't have to necessarily believe in God (either in the Judeo-Christian sense, or in any sense at all) to believe in the idea of natural rights, but that is where the idea of natural rights originated from in the US tradition. Thus, IMHO, when you say "one nation under god" you aren't necessarily professing a personal belief in god, you are professing that you agree in principle with the ideas that our rights are not granted by man or the government, but our natural moral entitlement. Or, as someone else said much more eloquently, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the Governed".
Yeah, it's about much more than a scrap of cloth.
With regards to taking and holding Baghdad (which I agree would be impossible if the majority of Iraqis thought that the US had territorial/empire ambitions), it wasn't the military advisors that said that it couldn't be done in 1991 (Though they did warn that doing so would require more time, money, and cost more lives). The decision to leave Saddam in control stemmed more from our promises some of our coalition members (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, etc) than military necessity. It was hoped, at the time, that Iraqi's would take care of the dirty deed of diposing Saddam themselves after the 1991 Gulf War. Of course that didn't happen. Those who did rise up against him were crushed. (The mass graves you see now)
Slackware 10 (and maybe even 9.1?) was kernel 2.6 ready. It had all the required userspace stuff and libs to run 2.6, it just wasn't the default.
Actually, it makes sense if you think of gains in market share as an exponential process. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64.... once you manage to get 10% of the market you are only a couple doublings from having a majority of the market share.
For the record, I have no problem with others using the same right-of-way, but if they are all selling the same technology, then they are likely just going to drive up the costs by laying redundant infrastructure. (some redundancy would be good). The question is, is the increase in average cost (since more providers means fewer customers to split the fixed costs over) offset by the other benefits of competition. The answer depends on the nature of the demand for the particular service.
The worst thing a goverment can do though, is to use the regulatory structure to artificially impede new competition actually capable of making a monopolistic market truly competitive. This happens way to often.
I haven't seen that, I have seen some coverage suggesting that he was easing strict new regulations (so that they would be less strict than the original proposal but stronger than current law.) But I haven't seen any on actual regression in environmental laws. If someone has some data on this to the contrary I'd really like to see it. (Cause I probably wouldn't be too happy if that was the case). I know this is kinda a late response, but oh well.