Similarly, the smell of newsprint and the act of folding and unfolding each section is very much tied up in my overall experience of reading the paper. I don't think that any e-reader, no matter the spiffy features, could replace all that.
That's exactly why I hate newspapers - they're so fucking inconvenient. Granted, I grew up with free news online, which beat the hell out of the Philadelphia Inquirer (here is just one extremely bullshitty long-form piece I found on their website in about 2.4 seconds, after wading through the four stories about solid precipitation falling from the sky).
On the other hand, I'd be willing to bet that I read more newspaper articles than you. It's amazing how much you miss by only reading one media source. Efficiency and breadth are much more compelling factors for me.
Microsoft's day is coming (see: decline of the desktop computer, where Windows dominates, and Apple's increasing share of the laptop market), and I agree with you that Microsoft should have fallen earlier, but it wasn't because of a lack of antitrust regulations and government bureaucrats poring over code to make sure it's up to their standards. Face it: if you're going to give people monopolies on their intellectual output (i.e., copyrights and patents), the market will coalesce into a monopoly.
I love the h1'd "My brother is getting married" part. Also, this guy's a terrible HTML coder - he vacillates between using quotes and not, doesn't keep a consistent case in his tags, missed the body end tag, etc., etc.
Amen. Face it - Microsoft's monopoly is crumbling in the face of Apple, netbooks, and cell phones, and to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure that the government stepping in and regulating computer code was gonna make it happen any faster.
At least in Romania, where piracy is also widespread, the only companies at risk from these sorts of things are large companies owned by politically-involved people. Prosecutions for software piracy are often pretexts for some other political offense. If you're just a small design shop, I don't see how it would benefit any bureaucrat to come after you.
Hopefully not. How the hell else do you think that news and video is going to get paid for without targeted advertising? (Music obviously will always be able to fall back on live performances, which is good since it would be pretty annoying to listen to ads for music.) Traditional online advertising is both annoying and inefficient – there's a reason why people actually sort of enjoy reading ads in when they're targeted to them (think: magazines).
Now U.S. car companies are paying the price for trying to satisfy the market.
No – they're paying the price for a tariff on imported light trucks and SUVs which caused US-based automakers to ratchet up their production of the vehicles above the market equilibrium.
Let's hope not. Biofuels based on corn and other food crops are bad for obvious reasons, but even non-food biofuels have their risks - among them degradation of the American/Canadian Great Plains, ecological degradation in the Third World, and the risk of invasive species (most of these non-food biofuels are fast-spreading grasses).
The most ecological energy policy is to stop the government from subsidizing oil (by building suburbia with land use restricitons), subsidizing coal, and subsidizing water. There is no magic fuel out there that will allow us to consume infinite amounts of cheap energy - nature made extracting energy expensive for a reason, and the government needs to get out of the business of trying to make it easier.
This is a point that is not mentioned nearly enough when people discuss drug policy - cocaine can be pretty bad, but it's nothing compared to crack. And you'll notice that crack is an overwhelmingly lower-class drug - even the crack dealers do coke, not crack. So it's very reasonable to believe that crack use would all but disappear if cocaine were legalized.
it'd probably cut back on all those unfortunate chippers who accidentally OD because they didn't know how strong their new batch of heroin was
This is a very important point. There are only two ways to unintentionally die of a heroin overdose: 1) you underestimate the purity, or 2) your dealer has cut the heroin with benzodiazepines. Both of these are direct results of the war on drugs, and deaths from these two causes would be reduced almost to nothing if heroin were legalized, as its purity and dosage would be properly labeled, and impurities would not exist (either because of government regulation or market competition, depending on where you stand in the statist-libertarian ideological spectrum). There is a third cause - mixing with alcohol - but most heroin addicts only turn to alcohol when they don't the money for heroin (or, as much heroin as they'd like), and if heroin were legal, it would be very cheap, and there'd be no reason for anyone to substitute alcohol (a substance much more dangerous and debilitating than heroin) for heroin.
I'm interested to find out your sources for the claim that government encouraged low density planning.
Seriously?? It's not blindingly obvious??? I mean, this is really a topic that could be stretched on for volumes, but here are some places to get yourself started: Euclid and zoning, roads and the Great Depression, and then the ultimate comparison: what the free market built vs. what the government built. And let's not forget that VA home loans (the primary vehicle of homeownership in the immediate post-war years) were restricted primarily to single-family developments at a time when the housing stock was not nearly as suburban as it is today. There is actually a blog devoted to exactly the idea that free market development is significantly denser, more urbanistic, and more environmentally-friendly than what's come out of contemporary American land use policy, and pretty much every post is an example of what you're looking for -- marketurbanism.com. But don't take anyone's word for it: see for yourself. Go find old buildings (excluding rural/farm buildings), and you'll see that they are way denser than your typical 2008 suburban development. Now, of course this is attributable more to the automobile than anything else, but ask yourself: how did the automobile become so widespread? Clearly private entrepreneurs weren't making fortunes off of building roads -- this was the government's work.
I also understand that freedom is more important to you than market efficiency.
This is 100% false. I have absolutely no interest in abstract concepts like "freedom" -- for me it's all about which system humanity would be better under. If state planning worked, I'd be all for it -- I don't have a dog in this ideological fight. I'm purely a pragmatist.
And in a libertarian system, that is all government is for: to protect the property of the rich from the poor.
I'm an anarcho-capitalist. I do not believe in the government in any form. I don't mean to be rude, but you're assuming a lot about me that's just not true.
Again, I ask: what does your system offer non-property owners?
Property is but one productive input. Knowledge (i.e., "labor") is the most valuable, and it's difficult to monopolize that (unless you have the government behind you enforcing IP laws and censorship, that is!). But like I said, "my system" isn't what you think it is -- under anarcho-capitalism, if you yourself do not have the means to protect and defend your property, nobody will protect your "right" to it for you. It's a system that makes owning property a lot more onerous for non-occupants, which is something that I'd think you'd like.
Oil and car companies bought up the transit companies looooong after the government started favoring cars over other modes of transit. There's just no getting around the fact that cars work best (and are most profitable) when density is low, and mass transit the opposite, and the US government at all levels worked very hard at making density low, all the while subsidizing roads in a way that mass transit wasn't being subsidized at the time.
As for "natural monopolies," this is a concept that's used a lot in introductory microeconomics textbooks, but in reality, it's a lot more complicated and controversial than you're making it seem. And anyway, what of it? What does it matter if it's a "natural monopoly"? Is real estate then, too, a "natural monopoly," since you can't have two buildings in the same place? It's an overly broad and meaningless term.
The question isn't whether or not roads are a natural monopoly - the question is whether or not roads would exist, period, in a free market transportation system. And given the historical evidence, the answer would seem to be no - when transportation and land use were left up to the free market, people voted with their wallets and chose mass transit rather than using private vehicles on private roads.
As for mass transit have externalities that need to be subsidized, this was clearly not the case before the US government began favoring and subsidizing roads over mass transit. Before then, whether or not "benefit was maximized," the fact is that mass transit was much more prevalent than roads. So you're telling me that now the benefit of mass transit is maximized?? Sounds like it was a lot more widely provided by the free market than the supposedly-welfare maximizing government.
I don't count myself among them, but most Austrian economists believe that free banking is the most crucial feature of a free market.
But personally, I'm of the opinion that the most important sector of the economy is the land use/transportation sectors, which are heavily, heavily nationalized, and have incredibly detrimental impacts on the environment. Compare the relatively free market in transportation around the turn of the century (when the vast majority of urbanites and suburbanites used private mass transit to get around) to the highly unfree market we have today (where the vast majority of people in all places used nationalized roads and live in houses with zoning and land use restrictions that force them to live in suburbia or suburban style land use patterns). The difference is night and day...hardly just "always something."
(And last I checked, there were no neo-cons arguing that we need to get rid of zoning and minimum parking restrictions in order to return to a free market in land use and transportation. So while they might have tried almost every free market tactic that your limited imagination can come up with, you ought to realize that you're only imagining the free market policies that you've seen and heard discussed in the mainstream - but if you open your mind a little, you'll see that there are countless sectors of the economy that are definitely more statist than they are libertarian.)
Hahaha, that's the most ridiculous thing I've heard all day. Please, do let the audience know what countries have adopted Austrian school economics as policy - I'm dying to know!!
Opponents of libertarian economics often say two things: a) that the market has shown us that it will failed when unregulated; and that b) there has never in history been something that is a perfectly free market. But how can you have it both ways? Either we've tried it and it's failed (in which case you have to be open to criticism that what we tried wasn't really a free market), or we've never tried it and thus can't know what it would be like (in which case you have to be open to criticism that certain markets have approached complete freedom if not attained it, and they have succeeded).
And thank god physicists didn't believe everything Adam Smith said. The truth is that liberal economics did not begin with Adam Smith, nor did they end with him. Newer schools of thought like the Austrian school have refined liberalism and indeed do argue that all government intervention is wrong, and that there is no such thing as a neutral action in that case - even the "rules of the game" themselves are important and not able to be divined by even the most skilled of government technocrats.
There is the Libertarian Party in the US, but it's very small and most "libertarians" are not "Libertarians" - i.e., most people with libertarian views do not belong to the Libertarian Party.
There are the Republicans, which theoretically are the party of economic libertarianism, and they probably are marginally (though only very marginally) pro-market than the Democrats in terms of economics, but they're very unlibertarian when it comes to social policy (drugs, sex, and violent content) and foreign policy (duh - invading other countries is not libertarian).
Weird that they don't include internet usage in here. And when they say "reading newspapers," does reading online count? And is it only newspapers? What about blogs? Aggregating internet use into one category would be kind of silly, considering there are many things you can do online (play games, watch Hulu/YouTube/pirated stuff, read newspapers and blogs, socialize, do chores and get practical information, etc.), but they should have at least tried.
Net neutrality would be an irrelevant issue if we'd just deregulate the spectrum, giving people access to a plethora of competitive wireless carriers (as opposed to now, where we auction off what in reality is infinitely divisible). As it is now people worry about what companies will do without net neutrality laws because our telecom regulation regime is such that it creates a few big heavyweights and doesn't allow much competition. But all you have to do is open the spectrum to use by anyone, and pretty soon Comcast and Verizon will lose their awesome market power.
Slashdot Mirror
Similarly, the smell of newsprint and the act of folding and unfolding each section is very much tied up in my overall experience of reading the paper. I don't think that any e-reader, no matter the spiffy features, could replace all that.
That's exactly why I hate newspapers - they're so fucking inconvenient. Granted, I grew up with free news online, which beat the hell out of the Philadelphia Inquirer (here is just one extremely bullshitty long-form piece I found on their website in about 2.4 seconds, after wading through the four stories about solid precipitation falling from the sky).
On the other hand, I'd be willing to bet that I read more newspaper articles than you. It's amazing how much you miss by only reading one media source. Efficiency and breadth are much more compelling factors for me.
Microsoft's day is coming (see: decline of the desktop computer, where Windows dominates, and Apple's increasing share of the laptop market), and I agree with you that Microsoft should have fallen earlier, but it wasn't because of a lack of antitrust regulations and government bureaucrats poring over code to make sure it's up to their standards. Face it: if you're going to give people monopolies on their intellectual output (i.e., copyrights and patents), the market will coalesce into a monopoly.
I love the h1'd "My brother is getting married" part. Also, this guy's a terrible HTML coder - he vacillates between using quotes and not, doesn't keep a consistent case in his tags, missed the body end tag, etc., etc.
Amen. Face it - Microsoft's monopoly is crumbling in the face of Apple, netbooks, and cell phones, and to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure that the government stepping in and regulating computer code was gonna make it happen any faster.
Not everyone sees upholding intellectual property monopolies as a moral duty.
At least in Romania, where piracy is also widespread, the only companies at risk from these sorts of things are large companies owned by politically-involved people. Prosecutions for software piracy are often pretexts for some other political offense. If you're just a small design shop, I don't see how it would benefit any bureaucrat to come after you.
but hopefully it will grow over time
Hopefully not. How the hell else do you think that news and video is going to get paid for without targeted advertising? (Music obviously will always be able to fall back on live performances, which is good since it would be pretty annoying to listen to ads for music.) Traditional online advertising is both annoying and inefficient – there's a reason why people actually sort of enjoy reading ads in when they're targeted to them (think: magazines).
Now U.S. car companies are paying the price for trying to satisfy the market.
No – they're paying the price for a tariff on imported light trucks and SUVs which caused US-based automakers to ratchet up their production of the vehicles above the market equilibrium.
Let's hope not. Biofuels based on corn and other food crops are bad for obvious reasons, but even non-food biofuels have their risks - among them degradation of the American/Canadian Great Plains, ecological degradation in the Third World, and the risk of invasive species (most of these non-food biofuels are fast-spreading grasses).
The most ecological energy policy is to stop the government from subsidizing oil (by building suburbia with land use restricitons), subsidizing coal, and subsidizing water. There is no magic fuel out there that will allow us to consume infinite amounts of cheap energy - nature made extracting energy expensive for a reason, and the government needs to get out of the business of trying to make it easier.
Yeah, this is what I've been saying - non-food biofuels are likely to be just as bad as corn ethanol and the like.
(cocaine rather than crack)
This is a point that is not mentioned nearly enough when people discuss drug policy - cocaine can be pretty bad, but it's nothing compared to crack. And you'll notice that crack is an overwhelmingly lower-class drug - even the crack dealers do coke, not crack. So it's very reasonable to believe that crack use would all but disappear if cocaine were legalized.
it'd probably cut back on all those unfortunate chippers who accidentally OD because they didn't know how strong their new batch of heroin was
This is a very important point. There are only two ways to unintentionally die of a heroin overdose: 1) you underestimate the purity, or 2) your dealer has cut the heroin with benzodiazepines. Both of these are direct results of the war on drugs, and deaths from these two causes would be reduced almost to nothing if heroin were legalized, as its purity and dosage would be properly labeled, and impurities would not exist (either because of government regulation or market competition, depending on where you stand in the statist-libertarian ideological spectrum). There is a third cause - mixing with alcohol - but most heroin addicts only turn to alcohol when they don't the money for heroin (or, as much heroin as they'd like), and if heroin were legal, it would be very cheap, and there'd be no reason for anyone to substitute alcohol (a substance much more dangerous and debilitating than heroin) for heroin.
(source)
I'm interested to find out your sources for the claim that government encouraged low density planning.
Seriously?? It's not blindingly obvious??? I mean, this is really a topic that could be stretched on for volumes, but here are some places to get yourself started: Euclid and zoning, roads and the Great Depression, and then the ultimate comparison: what the free market built vs. what the government built. And let's not forget that VA home loans (the primary vehicle of homeownership in the immediate post-war years) were restricted primarily to single-family developments at a time when the housing stock was not nearly as suburban as it is today. There is actually a blog devoted to exactly the idea that free market development is significantly denser, more urbanistic, and more environmentally-friendly than what's come out of contemporary American land use policy, and pretty much every post is an example of what you're looking for -- marketurbanism.com. But don't take anyone's word for it: see for yourself. Go find old buildings (excluding rural/farm buildings), and you'll see that they are way denser than your typical 2008 suburban development. Now, of course this is attributable more to the automobile than anything else, but ask yourself: how did the automobile become so widespread? Clearly private entrepreneurs weren't making fortunes off of building roads -- this was the government's work.
I also understand that freedom is more important to you than market efficiency.
This is 100% false. I have absolutely no interest in abstract concepts like "freedom" -- for me it's all about which system humanity would be better under. If state planning worked, I'd be all for it -- I don't have a dog in this ideological fight. I'm purely a pragmatist.
And in a libertarian system, that is all government is for: to protect the property of the rich from the poor.
I'm an anarcho-capitalist. I do not believe in the government in any form. I don't mean to be rude, but you're assuming a lot about me that's just not true.
Again, I ask: what does your system offer non-property owners?
Property is but one productive input. Knowledge (i.e., "labor") is the most valuable, and it's difficult to monopolize that (unless you have the government behind you enforcing IP laws and censorship, that is!). But like I said, "my system" isn't what you think it is -- under anarcho-capitalism, if you yourself do not have the means to protect and defend your property, nobody will protect your "right" to it for you. It's a system that makes owning property a lot more onerous for non-occupants, which is something that I'd think you'd like.
Oil and car companies bought up the transit companies looooong after the government started favoring cars over other modes of transit. There's just no getting around the fact that cars work best (and are most profitable) when density is low, and mass transit the opposite, and the US government at all levels worked very hard at making density low, all the while subsidizing roads in a way that mass transit wasn't being subsidized at the time.
As for "natural monopolies," this is a concept that's used a lot in introductory microeconomics textbooks, but in reality, it's a lot more complicated and controversial than you're making it seem. And anyway, what of it? What does it matter if it's a "natural monopoly"? Is real estate then, too, a "natural monopoly," since you can't have two buildings in the same place? It's an overly broad and meaningless term.
The question isn't whether or not roads are a natural monopoly - the question is whether or not roads would exist, period, in a free market transportation system. And given the historical evidence, the answer would seem to be no - when transportation and land use were left up to the free market, people voted with their wallets and chose mass transit rather than using private vehicles on private roads.
As for mass transit have externalities that need to be subsidized, this was clearly not the case before the US government began favoring and subsidizing roads over mass transit. Before then, whether or not "benefit was maximized," the fact is that mass transit was much more prevalent than roads. So you're telling me that now the benefit of mass transit is maximized?? Sounds like it was a lot more widely provided by the free market than the supposedly-welfare maximizing government.
I don't count myself among them, but most Austrian economists believe that free banking is the most crucial feature of a free market.
But personally, I'm of the opinion that the most important sector of the economy is the land use/transportation sectors, which are heavily, heavily nationalized, and have incredibly detrimental impacts on the environment. Compare the relatively free market in transportation around the turn of the century (when the vast majority of urbanites and suburbanites used private mass transit to get around) to the highly unfree market we have today (where the vast majority of people in all places used nationalized roads and live in houses with zoning and land use restrictions that force them to live in suburbia or suburban style land use patterns). The difference is night and day...hardly just "always something."
(And last I checked, there were no neo-cons arguing that we need to get rid of zoning and minimum parking restrictions in order to return to a free market in land use and transportation. So while they might have tried almost every free market tactic that your limited imagination can come up with, you ought to realize that you're only imagining the free market policies that you've seen and heard discussed in the mainstream - but if you open your mind a little, you'll see that there are countless sectors of the economy that are definitely more statist than they are libertarian.)
Federal Reserve = Austrian-based policy????
Stop...you're just embarrassing yourself.
...er, by "thank god physicists didn't believe everything Adam Smith said," I mean Isaac Newton.
Hahaha, that's the most ridiculous thing I've heard all day. Please, do let the audience know what countries have adopted Austrian school economics as policy - I'm dying to know!!
Opponents of libertarian economics often say two things: a) that the market has shown us that it will failed when unregulated; and that b) there has never in history been something that is a perfectly free market. But how can you have it both ways? Either we've tried it and it's failed (in which case you have to be open to criticism that what we tried wasn't really a free market), or we've never tried it and thus can't know what it would be like (in which case you have to be open to criticism that certain markets have approached complete freedom if not attained it, and they have succeeded).
Even Adam Smith knew...
And thank god physicists didn't believe everything Adam Smith said. The truth is that liberal economics did not begin with Adam Smith, nor did they end with him. Newer schools of thought like the Austrian school have refined liberalism and indeed do argue that all government intervention is wrong, and that there is no such thing as a neutral action in that case - even the "rules of the game" themselves are important and not able to be divined by even the most skilled of government technocrats.
There is the Libertarian Party in the US, but it's very small and most "libertarians" are not "Libertarians" - i.e., most people with libertarian views do not belong to the Libertarian Party.
There are the Republicans, which theoretically are the party of economic libertarianism, and they probably are marginally (though only very marginally) pro-market than the Democrats in terms of economics, but they're very unlibertarian when it comes to social policy (drugs, sex, and violent content) and foreign policy (duh - invading other countries is not libertarian).
Actually, alumni preferences take up way more slots than affirmative action. More likely some asshole from Long Island is taking your daughter's spot.
http://rationalitate.blogspot.com/2008/03/rigged-college-admissions.html
Weird that they don't include internet usage in here. And when they say "reading newspapers," does reading online count? And is it only newspapers? What about blogs? Aggregating internet use into one category would be kind of silly, considering there are many things you can do online (play games, watch Hulu/YouTube/pirated stuff, read newspapers and blogs, socialize, do chores and get practical information, etc.), but they should have at least tried.
Net neutrality would be an irrelevant issue if we'd just deregulate the spectrum, giving people access to a plethora of competitive wireless carriers (as opposed to now, where we auction off what in reality is infinitely divisible). As it is now people worry about what companies will do without net neutrality laws because our telecom regulation regime is such that it creates a few big heavyweights and doesn't allow much competition. But all you have to do is open the spectrum to use by anyone, and pretty soon Comcast and Verizon will lose their awesome market power.