Well, if you want to be exact, then this is more of a quantitative than qualitative distinction. You can already exit an existing state, or create a new one, it's just very costly (as you have to physically move yourself, your family and all your property, redo all existing contracts or move them to other providers) and/or there is a violent opposition.
I also think that systems bigger than Dunbar's number need to be either (hierarchical) planning or markets in order to work. And, once you have hierarchies, their primary goal becomes to perpetuate the hierarchy and to silence opposition (through propaganda and, if necessary, violence). So I don't really understand how collectivist anarchism is supposed to work. Unless there is no interaction beyond the scale of the local community, and I find it unlikely that apart from a bunch of wierdoes or psychopaths anyone would want that.
It's not really accurate. It's more accurate to say that anarchism tends to oppose hierarchies, but that's not fully accurate either, because anarchocapitalists are usually ok with hierarchically operated companies, and conservative anarchists tend to have conservative positions on family.
I must admit though that it's not clear to me how you can have collectives that work beyond the scale of Dunbar's number.
> Austrian religion (it's not a "school"), as usual does not make predictions. It doesn't use models so it can't do that. Austrian approach does not view economics as science, rather as a deductive study. So it cannot make predictions. This is why it clashes with mainstream economics, which attempts to be a science. I will leave open the question whether economics can or cannot be a science, rather I'll point out that I often see ideological assumptions (in particular the belief in central planning) bundled into what purports to be science.
> According to mainstream economy, deflation happens because consumers DO NOT HAVE MONEY to spend. So the producers have to cut prices to sell at least _something_. This in turn leads to wage decreases and layoffs. And this in turn leads to consumers having less money. Rinse, wash, repeat. You probably wanted to say "recessions happen because customers do not have money". Deflations (in the sense of falling price levels) occur in other situations too (for example increases in productivity that outpace the increase in the money supply) and don't necessarily have the effects associated with recession.
The Austrian approach (see http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Aus... ) to the business cycle is based on three issues: cluster of entrepreneurial errors, capital goods prices fluctuating more than those of consumer goods, and why the cycle tends to happen around changes in the money supply.
Let's take your argument, the customers losing money. Why are there whole sectors of economy that are unable to foresee this? If they foresaw it, they would have adjusted their production structure to the falling price level. But it comes unexpected to whole sectors rather than merely individual businesses. Your proposition does not explain why. The Austrians argue that this is due to faulty price signals caused by the changes in the money supply.
> Reality is often a little bit messier - wages rarely fall in nominal values, they tend to stick at zero growth. So nominal deflation doesn't appear, instead no-flation (1% inflation) happens. See: "European Union", "Japan". This does not explain, among other things, why: 1. There are situations where a falling price level does not cause a recession (say in the consumer electronics sector, or the examples from the Atkeson/Kehoe paper I linked)? 2. Whole sectors cannot foresee this and adjust in advance?
This post mixes several phenomena and omits other factors relevant for the positions. For example, "Once people start to understand what's happening, they stop buying things.". There are situations where a falling price level and a drop in consumer expenditures correlated positively, but there are also situations where they correlate negatively. I for example tend to behave exactly the opposite way as you describe: when the price of bitcoin is falling, I tend to cut my expenditures, and when it's rising, I tend to increase the expenditures. It's not the only factor influencing my decisions of course.
A while ago, two economists working at the Minneapolis Fed published a paper: https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/... where they analyse the empirical link between deflation (i.e. a falling price level) and depression, and find that outside of the Great Depression in the 1930s they can't find such a connection. They write: "A broad historical look finds many more periods of deflation with reasonable growth than with depression and many more periods of depression with inflation than with deflation."
As the Austrian school explains, the business cycle is caused by fractional reserve banking, and the recession is a necessary consequence of the misallocations that happen during the boom preceding the recession. But since mainstream economic schools lack a theory of capital, instead they view the business cycle through aggregate values, they can't assess the argument this way.
Well I'm a different guy but I also mostly live on crypto.
> Where do you spend your bitcoin for day to day living kind of stuff? If I need to pay for something and the recipient doesn't have a facility to process bitcoins, I use one of the payment processors to do the transaction on my behalf or trade bitcoins for fiat myself and then pay with fiat.
> How do you avoid problems with significant value swings that the market experiences since almost no one denominates their goods in bitcoins as the primary price. I don't care about the fluctuations. I view bitcoin as a superiour source of liquidity and that's more important to me than day-to-day pricing accuracy.
These are not true. You don't need to have historical data to detect a double spend, and the bitcoin blockchain isn't 100+ gigs yet, it's more like 60.
Whether they copied (i.e. if there was a causal link between Apple's and Samsung's products) is irrelevant from the point of view of patent law. Patent law does not provide the defense of "independent discovery". No matter how much evidence of Samsung's knowing about the features of iphone/ipad was provided, the patent law provides no reason to consider it in the trial.
Your reaction is yet another demonstration how patent law is misunderstood.
The reason why Bitcoin might attract illicit activities is because the state penalises the use of banking system for those, and thereby increases transaction costs for the participants in those activities. If the demand for those activities is inelastic, the participants would logically be more motivated to switch to a payment method with lower transaction costs (i.e. the network effect of the national currency is weaker for those people and easier to overcome). It's a result of contradictory goals pursued by the state, irrespective of whether one finds it agreeable or not.
Claiming that national currencies are "backed" by the state is one of the more popular economic fallacies. Currencies work due to the network effect, not due to "backing". If the parameters of the network negatively change (e.g. the critical mass increases or people leave because there is a sufficiently good substitute), the currency will collapse. No amount of "backing" by the state can avert that. The maximum it can do is to attempt to prevent people from leaving, but that might not be enough. All the countries that suffered from currency collapses had armies. North Korea and Russia rank at place 4 and 5 of active military personnel in the world, for example (and Soviet Union was probably even higher).
On the other hand, situations where only the state collapses do not lead to dramatic changes in the use of currency. In Somalia and Iraq, people continued using the local currency even after the collapse of the state. At best they amend their activities with foreign currencies (e.g. neighbouring countries or the currencies with the largest markets, such as the USD and EUR).
Both of these are consistent with the use of network effect as an explanation: currency collapsing does not correlate with the power of the state, but with the empirical features of the currency (e.g. hyperinflation).
This is not specific to currencies. Plenty of other things work like this as well, such as languages, operating systems, the internet or operating systems.
Bitcoin provides a system with lower transaction costs and a predictable inelastic supply, compared to our current system that combines a monetary base and other forms of money, whether they are created by the state or commercially. Transaction costs provide a reason to switch. Of course, there's still the network effect, which hinders migration. The BitInstant Debit Card is a type of a multi-homing solution, i.e. something that provides a way of bridging the two networks. This decreases the critical mass for the Bitcoin network.
Mmmm, you aren't allowing for the fact that without copyright anyone can sell YOUR work without paying you. That is not true. There are ways to make people pay you for selling "your" work even without copyright laws. See the post I referenced before.
Besides, how can you call a pirate a "competitor"? An author's competitor is another author, not a distributor. That may be your perception, but from economic point of view, IP laws grant people monopoly rents and IP piracy is outlawed competition.
It's only when the system is abused that problems arise. Any system can (and will) be abused. By giving privileges to interest groups this effect is not mitigated, only worsened. Which is my whole point. You cannot fix perceived unfairness by creating exceptions, it has the opposite effect. Exceptions create additional unfairness and increase demand for more exceptions.
You suggest that in order to make it "fairer" for authors, an exception (copyright laws) should be made. Then, in order for people not to abuse copyright, more laws should be created to create exceptions to exceptions.
This process has multiple disadvantages, most of them boil down to law being produced by a monopoly. As an anarcho-capitalist, I suggest that rather than having a one-size-fit-all law system, there should be multiple, privately produced, competing law systems.
I do not necessarily object to copyright (or IP laws), rather I object to monopolistic legal system and am pointing out that - it is not necessary to solve these issues centrally - it may not be necessary to solve them at all because market can handle it better
Hey, I'm not rabidly pro-IP, I was not claiming you are...
I'm just pointing out that there needs to be a system that allows people to profit from their own labor. And I'm just pointing out that a monopoly rent is not a prerequisite for profit. There already is a system that deals with profit. It is called the market:-).
I find the argumentation in the line of "How can an author make money if there is no copyright" silly. I could counter with "How can random_job_xyz make money if there is not a specific law that grants him special favours?" (which is equally silly). But I can understand the motivation for it. If your competition is outlawed (well, for sake let's say "regulated" instead of "outlawed"), obviously you'll claim that such laws are good. They benefit you, but they distort the supply/demand equilibrium. In the end, it is the consumers who have to pay the inflated prices.
Maybe because anarchy is often interpreted as a lack of order, whereas that is just one of possible meanings. Anarcho-capitalism does not object to order, it objects to attempts to achieve goals via a "territorial monopoly on the initiation of force" (don't get confused, that's just a fancy anarcho-capitalist alias for the state). The monopolistic characteristic of a state is seen as inefficient (counterproductive even) or immoral (or both).
Let me ask you something. If you don't think anyone else should be able to make money off it, do you mean that in absolute terms? Like perpetual, until the end of time, applicable to anyone, including hypothetical extraterrestrial aliens, without "fair use" exceptions such as research, critiques? And (with the risk of being called a reductionist), how big a proportion of a book should be protected by copyright? Does that cover individual characters too?
Unless you agree with an absolute definition of copyright as above, you obviously have to tolerate a certain amount of money being made off your work by other people.
If you don't want others making money off your work, then you have a simple solution: do not publish it. Obviously, this might leave you less satisfied with the outcome than the alternatives, so you'll end up with a compromise. I don't see why law should shift the outcome into favourising a specific business model.
How can an author make a living if he doesn't have the right to sell his book? Allow me please to answer without agreeing with the parent (he's self-proclaimed anarcho-communist, I'm an anarcho-capitalist).
There is no need to have exclusive rights (i.e. monopoly) on something in order to make money from it. Monopoly rent is just one of possible business models in the area of "intellectual property". Just as you can utilise creativity to produce a book, you can utilise creativity to come up with a profitable way to make money off it. I have been earning money all my adult life by producing "intellectual property", and I rarely (if ever) use the monopoly rent model.
Let's see if I understand your arguments correctly. You believe it is not fair if people are not equally wealthy, and it is also the cause of conflict.
I could not disagree more. The distribution of wealth is uneven because people are individuals and have different preferences, abilities, grow up and socialise in different environments.
The reason why conflicts arise is more scarcity of goods rather than unevenness of wealth distribution. Abolition of the concept of property does not solve this, it still needs to be decided how wealth is distributed, and who distributes it. And you'll always have people who are not satisfied by the outcome, and people who have more power than others.
By utilising the concept of property (and trade) you encourage people to make the decisions about the distribution for themselves, and they can use their own marginal utility for the decision making process. It allows for the division of labour and economies of scale. Without property (and trade), people lack important indicators and make worse decisions. Equal societies are poor societies.
In my opinion, private property is an emergent product of society complexity.
If you want to live in a propertyless society, go ahead, but don't expect me to finance it for you.
If you claim that property can "only be enforced by force", how is this different from the enforcement of non-property? In other words, why does your argument appear to suggest that without the concept of property, there is no need to use force for conflict resolution?
By the way, there are ways to enforce property (or anything for the matter) without force, and they are often much more effective. For example social and economic pressure.
You can't call downloading stealing, because downloading is not even illegal. Uploading is. Stealing is when person A takes stuff from person B (person A is doing something illegal). Copyright infringement is when person A gives stuff to person C that person B has rights to. Person C (downloader) is typically NOT breaking the law.
Comparing copyright infringement to stealing or embezzlement is based on superficial (and as demonstrated above, incorrect) similarities.
If you do not acknowledge property rights, how do you suggest to solve the problem of scarce goods? How will they be distributed and who will distribute them?
The more complex the social relationships are and the more people are participating in them, the less predictable are the needs and potential of an individual. Almost all goods are scarce: there is not enough of them for everyone to feel they have enough. The system of property rights promotes making responsible decisions with regards to what you want and encourages peaceful methods for obtaining it.
You can't have everything you want. Sometimes, this means making tough decisions. That it's tough does not mean it's unfair.
I'm an anarcho-capitalist too. My suggestion is that competing, privately produced, law, can deal with intellectual property as well.
There is no reason why there should only be one way to handle IP (i.e. why the government should decide it for everyone). There could be several ones, emphasizing various aspects.
For demonstration purposes, I came up with an example of how you can deal with IP without government intervention, and give a fair deal to both consumer and producer. A music group could provide certifications, which anyone can obtain. These certifications would allow you to attend their concerts, but at the same time would also allow them to sue you if you distribute their work or even obtain it via a different channel than official distributors. So, everyone would have a choice among:
- exchanging their music on P2P but not being able to attend their concerts - being able to attend their concerts but having to buy their music and not being able to share it on P2P - not giving a shit about either;-)
No government involved, noone is being ripped off, market forces take care of the balance. This allows new and innovative business models, whereas monopolistic IP laws tend to promote existing ones, which otherwise might not be financially viable anymore.
This example was simplified, the certifications and various IP systems would not be produced or enforced by the group directly. They would be produced by specialists and the group (or anyone for the matter) would choose a preexisting bundle of laws and a company enforcing those.
There is a book that came out last year, "Anarchy and the Law". It is a collection of studies about competing legal systems. It does not deal with IP, but deals with non-government based legal systems in general.
I would like to point out something that seems to be missing. Downloading is not illegal. To my knowledge, noone was accused of, or convicted of, illegal downloading. Read the legal documents from the famous cases if you do not believe me. None of them say anything about downloading. What p2p users are accused of is illegal (or unautorised) uploading. This makes the "stealing" analogy not only skewed but completely wrong. More appropriate analogy would be:
From my point of view the issue of compulsory taxation is actually a minor one. In reality, you can avoid a lot of taxes. For example, move to a country that has more reasonable tax system (I did). I do not mean to offend anyone, but taxes are paid by the poor, stupid and idealists.
I think more important is the efficiency issue. You seem to be under the impression that for some reason, government does not suffer from the imperfections that regular people do, as you mentioned, short sightedness, selfishness, etc. Governments comprise of people, therefore, are subject to the same limits, problems and errors (I don't even talk about moral issues). Indeed, one of my favourite anarchocapitalist authors, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, identifies several government features that make them a worse candidate to satisfactorily fulfil their functions. The most important one is lack of competition, which causes increasing prices and decreasing quality. Lack of competition causes lack of market value, which makes cost accounting impossible. So both consumers (citizens) and producers (government) cannot determine how well the services perform. How should protection be provided? You can have a police car that makes a round around your community once a day. Or you can give everyone a bodyguard or even a tank. Or both. Or something in between. Or give one a policeman and another one a tank. Or something completely different. How can you determine which is optimal? Without markets, you can't. Even if you have an ideal "transparent government", the issue of efficiency can't be solved by a monopoly.
He goes even a step farther, and claims that because government officials in democracy are caretakers and not owners (as it would be in a monarchy), this increases their propensity for short-sightedness (prioritising goals within the current election period).
I personally find it much more annoying not being able to opt-out of arbitrary laws and other services (and private companies being forbidden from providing me an alternative) than being forced to pay for them (I pay little anyway:-)).
Contrary to popular belief, downloading songs over p2p is not illegal. What is illegal is uploading (and, as it increasingly starts to look, making available for uploading). To my best knowledge, noone was ever accused of, or convicted of, downloading songs/movies over p2p. Comparing it to stealing is therefore a gross misinterpretation (from **AA's point of view obviously deliberate). A better (although still imprecise) analogy would be selling replica products.
Now back to the topic of length of copyrights. From economic point of view, a copyright (also patents and other types of so called "intellectual property") is a government-granted monopoly for specific products and services, meaning that the holder can exclude competitors from the market and earn the monopoly rent. As a result of excluding competition, the prices are driven upwards and quality downwards.
As an anarchocapitalist, I obviously object to government-granted monopolies and other means of forced redistribution. In my opinion, "intellectual property" law, just as any other law, should be produced*) and enforced privately by competing organisations and based on contracts. The "owners" of "intellectual property" should obtain their income by participating on the market, and not by using force to obtain monopoly rent.
*) Upon further deliberation, copyright law is actually produced privately already:-). It is just not subject to competition.
I see no reason why disabling sleep on the disk is somehow superior to telling linux to be more graceful when communicating with it. The reason why I use cron is that the disk is not permanently attached to the computer, and as I hinted, using dbus/hald/hotplug is probably preferable than using cron. I'm just too lazy to find out how that works.
Besides, looks like this is not an issue anymore. Check this posting and the followups:
I have two FreeAgentDesktop 500G's and also had this problem. I found a solution on the web and adapted it slightly to be automatic. Create this script:
#!/bin/sh
for i in/sys/class/scsi_disk/*; do
if [ "`cat "$i/device/model"`" = "FreeAgentDesktop" ]; then
if [ "`cat "$i/allow_restart"`" -eq 0 ]; then
echo 1 > "$i/allow_restart"
fi
fi done
And put it into cron to run every 10 minutes (FreeAgentDesktops timeout is 15 minutes). I have it on ubuntu 7.04 but the only dependencies I recognise is to have kernel 2.6, sysfs and cron, which should not be an issue. I guess there is a nicer way to do this (e.g. script for dbus/hotplug), feel free to improve.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you want to be exact, then this is more of a quantitative than qualitative distinction. You can already exit an existing state, or create a new one, it's just very costly (as you have to physically move yourself, your family and all your property, redo all existing contracts or move them to other providers) and/or there is a violent opposition.
I also think that systems bigger than Dunbar's number need to be either (hierarchical) planning or markets in order to work. And, once you have hierarchies, their primary goal becomes to perpetuate the hierarchy and to silence opposition (through propaganda and, if necessary, violence). So I don't really understand how collectivist anarchism is supposed to work. Unless there is no interaction beyond the scale of the local community, and I find it unlikely that apart from a bunch of wierdoes or psychopaths anyone would want that.
It's not really accurate. It's more accurate to say that anarchism tends to oppose hierarchies, but that's not fully accurate either, because anarchocapitalists are usually ok with hierarchically operated companies, and conservative anarchists tend to have conservative positions on family.
I must admit though that it's not clear to me how you can have collectives that work beyond the scale of Dunbar's number.
> Austrian religion (it's not a "school"), as usual does not make predictions. It doesn't use models so it can't do that.
Austrian approach does not view economics as science, rather as a deductive study. So it cannot make predictions. This is why it clashes with mainstream economics, which attempts to be a science. I will leave open the question whether economics can or cannot be a science, rather I'll point out that I often see ideological assumptions (in particular the belief in central planning) bundled into what purports to be science.
> According to mainstream economy, deflation happens because consumers DO NOT HAVE MONEY to spend. So the producers have to cut prices to sell at least _something_. This in turn leads to wage decreases and layoffs. And this in turn leads to consumers having less money. Rinse, wash, repeat.
You probably wanted to say "recessions happen because customers do not have money". Deflations (in the sense of falling price levels) occur in other situations too (for example increases in productivity that outpace the increase in the money supply) and don't necessarily have the effects associated with recession.
The Austrian approach (see http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Aus... ) to the business cycle is based on three issues: cluster of entrepreneurial errors, capital goods prices fluctuating more than those of consumer goods, and why the cycle tends to happen around changes in the money supply.
Let's take your argument, the customers losing money. Why are there whole sectors of economy that are unable to foresee this? If they foresaw it, they would have adjusted their production structure to the falling price level. But it comes unexpected to whole sectors rather than merely individual businesses. Your proposition does not explain why. The Austrians argue that this is due to faulty price signals caused by the changes in the money supply.
> Reality is often a little bit messier - wages rarely fall in nominal values, they tend to stick at zero growth. So nominal deflation doesn't appear, instead no-flation (1% inflation) happens. See: "European Union", "Japan".
This does not explain, among other things, why:
1. There are situations where a falling price level does not cause a recession (say in the consumer electronics sector, or the examples from the Atkeson/Kehoe paper I linked)?
2. Whole sectors cannot foresee this and adjust in advance?
This post mixes several phenomena and omits other factors relevant for the positions. For example, "Once people start to understand what's happening, they stop buying things.". There are situations where a falling price level and a drop in consumer expenditures correlated positively, but there are also situations where they correlate negatively. I for example tend to behave exactly the opposite way as you describe: when the price of bitcoin is falling, I tend to cut my expenditures, and when it's rising, I tend to increase the expenditures. It's not the only factor influencing my decisions of course.
A while ago, two economists working at the Minneapolis Fed published a paper: https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/... where they analyse the empirical link between deflation (i.e. a falling price level) and depression, and find that outside of the Great Depression in the 1930s they can't find such a connection. They write: "A broad historical look finds many more periods of deflation with reasonable growth than with depression and many more periods of depression with inflation than with deflation."
As the Austrian school explains, the business cycle is caused by fractional reserve banking, and the recession is a necessary consequence of the misallocations that happen during the boom preceding the recession. But since mainstream economic schools lack a theory of capital, instead they view the business cycle through aggregate values, they can't assess the argument this way.
Well I'm a different guy but I also mostly live on crypto.
> Where do you spend your bitcoin for day to day living kind of stuff?
If I need to pay for something and the recipient doesn't have a facility to process bitcoins, I use one of the payment processors to do the transaction on my behalf or trade bitcoins for fiat myself and then pay with fiat.
> How do you avoid problems with significant value swings that the market experiences since almost no one denominates their goods in bitcoins as the primary price.
I don't care about the fluctuations. I view bitcoin as a superiour source of liquidity and that's more important to me than day-to-day pricing accuracy.
These are not true. You don't need to have historical data to detect a double spend, and the bitcoin blockchain isn't 100+ gigs yet, it's more like 60.
How did you come to the conclusion that bitcoin was a pyramid scheme, and why do you use the past tense? It isn't a pyramid scheme anymore?
Whether they copied (i.e. if there was a causal link between Apple's and Samsung's products) is irrelevant from the point of view of patent law. Patent law does not provide the defense of "independent discovery". No matter how much evidence of Samsung's knowing about the features of iphone/ipad was provided, the patent law provides no reason to consider it in the trial.
Your reaction is yet another demonstration how patent law is misunderstood.
The reason why Bitcoin might attract illicit activities is because the state penalises the use of banking system for those, and thereby increases transaction costs for the participants in those activities. If the demand for those activities is inelastic, the participants would logically be more motivated to switch to a payment method with lower transaction costs (i.e. the network effect of the national currency is weaker for those people and easier to overcome). It's a result of contradictory goals pursued by the state, irrespective of whether one finds it agreeable or not.
Claiming that national currencies are "backed" by the state is one of the more popular economic fallacies. Currencies work due to the network effect, not due to "backing". If the parameters of the network negatively change (e.g. the critical mass increases or people leave because there is a sufficiently good substitute), the currency will collapse. No amount of "backing" by the state can avert that. The maximum it can do is to attempt to prevent people from leaving, but that might not be enough. All the countries that suffered from currency collapses had armies. North Korea and Russia rank at place 4 and 5 of active military personnel in the world, for example (and Soviet Union was probably even higher).
On the other hand, situations where only the state collapses do not lead to dramatic changes in the use of currency. In Somalia and Iraq, people continued using the local currency even after the collapse of the state. At best they amend their activities with foreign currencies (e.g. neighbouring countries or the currencies with the largest markets, such as the USD and EUR).
Both of these are consistent with the use of network effect as an explanation: currency collapsing does not correlate with the power of the state, but with the empirical features of the currency (e.g. hyperinflation).
This is not specific to currencies. Plenty of other things work like this as well, such as languages, operating systems, the internet or operating systems.
Bitcoin provides a system with lower transaction costs and a predictable inelastic supply, compared to our current system that combines a monetary base and other forms of money, whether they are created by the state or commercially. Transaction costs provide a reason to switch. Of course, there's still the network effect, which hinders migration. The BitInstant Debit Card is a type of a multi-homing solution, i.e. something that provides a way of bridging the two networks. This decreases the critical mass for the Bitcoin network.
You suggest that in order to make it "fairer" for authors, an exception (copyright laws) should be made. Then, in order for people not to abuse copyright, more laws should be created to create exceptions to exceptions.
This process has multiple disadvantages, most of them boil down to law being produced by a monopoly. As an anarcho-capitalist, I suggest that rather than having a one-size-fit-all law system, there should be multiple, privately produced, competing law systems.
I do not necessarily object to copyright (or IP laws), rather I object to monopolistic legal system and am pointing out that
- it is not necessary to solve these issues centrally
- it may not be necessary to solve them at all because market can handle it better
I find the argumentation in the line of "How can an author make money if there is no copyright" silly. I could counter with "How can random_job_xyz make money if there is not a specific law that grants him special favours?" (which is equally silly). But I can understand the motivation for it. If your competition is outlawed (well, for sake let's say "regulated" instead of "outlawed"), obviously you'll claim that such laws are good. They benefit you, but they distort the supply/demand equilibrium. In the end, it is the consumers who have to pay the inflated prices.
Maybe because anarchy is often interpreted as a lack of order, whereas that is just one of possible meanings. Anarcho-capitalism does not object to order, it objects to attempts to achieve goals via a "territorial monopoly on the initiation of force" (don't get confused, that's just a fancy anarcho-capitalist alias for the state). The monopolistic characteristic of a state is seen as inefficient (counterproductive even) or immoral (or both).
Let me ask you something. If you don't think anyone else should be able to make money off it, do you mean that in absolute terms? Like perpetual, until the end of time, applicable to anyone, including hypothetical extraterrestrial aliens, without "fair use" exceptions such as research, critiques? And (with the risk of being called a reductionist), how big a proportion of a book should be protected by copyright? Does that cover individual characters too?
Unless you agree with an absolute definition of copyright as above, you obviously have to tolerate a certain amount of money being made off your work by other people.
If you don't want others making money off your work, then you have a simple solution: do not publish it. Obviously, this might leave you less satisfied with the outcome than the alternatives, so you'll end up with a compromise. I don't see why law should shift the outcome into favourising a specific business model.
I posted an example about how musicians can make money without copyright (or in general without a unified law structure) at another part of the thread, you can check it out here:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=563921&cid=23542629
There is no need to have exclusive rights (i.e. monopoly) on something in order to make money from it. Monopoly rent is just one of possible business models in the area of "intellectual property". Just as you can utilise creativity to produce a book, you can utilise creativity to come up with a profitable way to make money off it. I have been earning money all my adult life by producing "intellectual property", and I rarely (if ever) use the monopoly rent model.
Let's see if I understand your arguments correctly. You believe it is not fair if people are not equally wealthy, and it is also the cause of conflict.
I could not disagree more. The distribution of wealth is uneven because people are individuals and have different preferences, abilities, grow up and socialise in different environments.
The reason why conflicts arise is more scarcity of goods rather than unevenness of wealth distribution. Abolition of the concept of property does not solve this, it still needs to be decided how wealth is distributed, and who distributes it. And you'll always have people who are not satisfied by the outcome, and people who have more power than others.
By utilising the concept of property (and trade) you encourage people to make the decisions about the distribution for themselves, and they can use their own marginal utility for the decision making process. It allows for the division of labour and economies of scale. Without property (and trade), people lack important indicators and make worse decisions. Equal societies are poor societies.
In my opinion, private property is an emergent product of society complexity.
If you want to live in a propertyless society, go ahead, but don't expect me to finance it for you.
If you claim that property can "only be enforced by force", how is this different from the enforcement of non-property? In other words, why does your argument appear to suggest that without the concept of property, there is no need to use force for conflict resolution?
By the way, there are ways to enforce property (or anything for the matter) without force, and they are often much more effective. For example social and economic pressure.
You can't call downloading stealing, because downloading is not even illegal. Uploading is. Stealing is when person A takes stuff from person B (person A is doing something illegal). Copyright infringement is when person A gives stuff to person C that person B has rights to. Person C (downloader) is typically NOT breaking the law.
Comparing copyright infringement to stealing or embezzlement is based on superficial (and as demonstrated above, incorrect) similarities.
If you do not acknowledge property rights, how do you suggest to solve the problem of scarce goods? How will they be distributed and who will distribute them?
The more complex the social relationships are and the more people are participating in them, the less predictable are the needs and potential of an individual. Almost all goods are scarce: there is not enough of them for everyone to feel they have enough. The system of property rights promotes making responsible decisions with regards to what you want and encourages peaceful methods for obtaining it.
You can't have everything you want. Sometimes, this means making tough decisions. That it's tough does not mean it's unfair.
I'm an anarcho-capitalist too. My suggestion is that competing, privately produced, law, can deal with intellectual property as well.
;-)
There is no reason why there should only be one way to handle IP (i.e. why the government should decide it for everyone). There could be several ones, emphasizing various aspects.
For demonstration purposes, I came up with an example of how you can deal with IP without government intervention, and give a fair deal to both consumer and producer. A music group could provide certifications, which anyone can obtain. These certifications would allow you to attend their concerts, but at the same time would also allow them to sue you if you distribute their work or even obtain it via a different channel than official distributors. So, everyone would have a choice among:
- exchanging their music on P2P but not being able to attend their concerts
- being able to attend their concerts but having to buy their music and not being able to share it on P2P
- not giving a shit about either
No government involved, noone is being ripped off, market forces take care of the balance. This allows new and innovative business models, whereas monopolistic IP laws tend to promote existing ones, which otherwise might not be financially viable anymore.
This example was simplified, the certifications and various IP systems would not be produced or enforced by the group directly. They would be produced by specialists and the group (or anyone for the matter) would choose a preexisting bundle of laws and a company enforcing those.
There is a book that came out last year, "Anarchy and the Law". It is a collection of studies about competing legal systems. It does not deal with IP, but deals with non-government based legal systems in general.
Cheers,
Peter
(disclaimer: I am the poster of the AC post)
:-)).
From my point of view the issue of compulsory taxation is actually a minor one. In reality, you can avoid a lot of taxes. For example, move to a country that has more reasonable tax system (I did). I do not mean to offend anyone, but taxes are paid by the poor, stupid and idealists.
I think more important is the efficiency issue. You seem to be under the impression that for some reason, government does not suffer from the imperfections that regular people do, as you mentioned, short sightedness, selfishness, etc. Governments comprise of people, therefore, are subject to the same limits, problems and errors (I don't even talk about moral issues). Indeed, one of my favourite anarchocapitalist authors, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, identifies several government features that make them a worse candidate to satisfactorily fulfil their functions. The most important one is lack of competition, which causes increasing prices and decreasing quality. Lack of competition causes lack of market value, which makes cost accounting impossible. So both consumers (citizens) and producers (government) cannot determine how well the services perform. How should protection be provided? You can have a police car that makes a round around your community once a day. Or you can give everyone a bodyguard or even a tank. Or both. Or something in between. Or give one a policeman and another one a tank. Or something completely different. How can you determine which is optimal? Without markets, you can't. Even if you have an ideal "transparent government", the issue of efficiency can't be solved by a monopoly.
He goes even a step farther, and claims that because government officials in democracy are caretakers and not owners (as it would be in a monarchy), this increases their propensity for short-sightedness (prioritising goals within the current election period).
I personally find it much more annoying not being able to opt-out of arbitrary laws and other services (and private companies being forbidden from providing me an alternative) than being forced to pay for them (I pay little anyway
Contrary to popular belief, downloading songs over p2p is not illegal. What is illegal is uploading (and, as it increasingly starts to look, making available for uploading). To my best knowledge, noone was ever accused of, or convicted of, downloading songs/movies over p2p. Comparing it to stealing is therefore a gross misinterpretation (from **AA's point of view obviously deliberate). A better (although still imprecise) analogy would be selling replica products.
:-). It is just not subject to competition.
Now back to the topic of length of copyrights. From economic point of view, a copyright (also patents and other types of so called "intellectual property") is a government-granted monopoly for specific products and services, meaning that the holder can exclude competitors from the market and earn the monopoly rent. As a result of excluding competition, the prices are driven upwards and quality downwards.
As an anarchocapitalist, I obviously object to government-granted monopolies and other means of forced redistribution. In my opinion, "intellectual property" law, just as any other law, should be produced*) and enforced privately by competing organisations and based on contracts. The "owners" of "intellectual property" should obtain their income by participating on the market, and not by using force to obtain monopoly rent.
*) Upon further deliberation, copyright law is actually produced privately already
I see no reason why disabling sleep on the disk is somehow superior to telling linux to be more graceful when communicating with it. The reason why I use cron is that the disk is not permanently attached to the computer, and as I hinted, using dbus/hald/hotplug is probably preferable than using cron. I'm just too lazy to find out how that works.
Besides, looks like this is not an issue anymore. Check this posting and the followups:
http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-usb-users@lists.sourceforge.net/msg19677.html
Apparently you don't need to worry about this with new kernels.
I have two FreeAgentDesktop 500G's and also had this problem. I found a solution on the web and adapted it slightly to be automatic. Create this script:
/sys/class/scsi_disk/*; do
#!/bin/sh
for i in
if [ "`cat "$i/device/model"`" = "FreeAgentDesktop" ]; then
if [ "`cat "$i/allow_restart"`" -eq 0 ]; then
echo 1 > "$i/allow_restart"
fi
fi
done
And put it into cron to run every 10 minutes (FreeAgentDesktops timeout is 15 minutes). I have it on ubuntu 7.04 but the only dependencies I recognise is to have kernel 2.6, sysfs and cron, which should not be an issue. I guess there is a nicer way to do this (e.g. script for dbus/hotplug), feel free to improve.