I keep my entire CD collection on disk as FLAC, and then transcode to the lossy format(s) most useful to me at the time (currently Vorbis to play in my Rio Karma). If I ever need a new format I can go back to the FLAC and reencode without transcoding from another lossy format.
That's exactly why I switched to FLAC as well. When you choose a lossy codec, you're locking yourself in to it. With FLAC, I can reencode to anything else with minimal effort and no transcoding loss.
My flac albums are an average of 5 times larger than ogg vorbis (quality 6). Not that bad, and disk keeps getting cheaper.
...has nothing to do with 'intercepting' messages...
You are correct. But we should remember that actually intercepting your messages is quite easy for anyone on your subnet, or anyone controlling a router between you and GMail.
The login is SSL encrypted, but after that it's plaintext. It's a scalability issue.
I interviewed with a UK-based software consulting company that was just starting an office in Boston. The cultural differences were striking, and their attempts to hire "only the best talent" here were doomed by their lack of clue.
1. Everyone in their office was wearing a 3 piece suit. This isn't necessarily a problem by itself, but it tipped me off to their extremely conservative business philosophy. They seemed to stress consistency over innovation.
2. They gave me a programming test, telling me not to worry if I couldn't finish it in the time alotted, because no one can. Then I finished it in half the time given, and they looked genuinely shocked. Now, I'm pretty good, but I'm not some Hacker God. This worried me.
3. Then they offered me a salary 30% lower than the nearest competing offer.
While I don't doubt they found someone eventually, I seriously doubt they found someone good.
Is this kind of thing typical of UK companies? These guys claimed to have a long record of business success.
Ok, I can't resist one last post in this long, long thread. If you're interested in continuing the debate, email me. I'd be happy to.
Well, yes and no. Yes, each person owns his/her life and can do as he/she wishes.... as long as her/his actions do not cause misery and pain to others. And herein lies the rub. It is on that latter part of this "equation" (which was conspicuously missing in your version) that the pure "free market" ideology falls apart.
The latter part of the equation follows directly from the first. Self-ownership implies both rights and responsibilities (ie not violating other people's self-ownership). As for your formulation "not causing misery and pain", I'm not sure it's very useful as a standard - because just looking at your own examples so far, clearly there are times when you believe it is correct to cause someone pain. So other principles are required to sort things out. I would argue that those principles all comes down to 1) the legitimacy of self defense and 2) who owns what and why.
Regarding history: it is a truism that the victors write the history books. It is also obvious that every historian works through the distorting effects of his own ideology. If you learned history in school, any school, you have uncritically swallowed a large set of things that might not be true.
Compare the viewpoints for yourself. If you haven't compared the Keynesian, Chicago, and Austrian schools of economics, how do you really know which makes the most sense? (you have espoused a Keynesian view, by the way.) If you haven't read both Marx and Hayek, how do you decide if either or both are wrong? If you haven't spent any effort to learn the history of banking, how can you claim to understand the causes of the great depression? Did you know the US education system was consciouly modeled on Bismarck's Germany, a system explicitly designed to indoctrinate and pacify?
Before you accuse someone of religious devotion, inquire how they've come to believe what they believe. I once held opinions just like yours. I've done a lot of learning since then.
In fact, I could retort that we are all saturated from birth in a religion of state worship. Especially Democracy worship - have you ever bothered to read something critical of Democracy? Try Hans Herman-Hoppe.
Bottom line: all these arguments have been done before, in a depth that we cannot approach here. You accuse me of oversimplifying, but I'm quite sure that we are *both* oversimplifying. Neither of use will convince the other here. But if you want to send me references, I'm always willing to learn new things.
Cartels are highly unstable, as long as you assume each member places their own interest above the group. By underselling their partners, they get a larger piece of the market, even though they depress prices and cause overall cartell profits to drop. The fact that this happens is well-documented. The only successful cartels are backed by governments who can punish individual producers who don't follow the cartel rules (OPEC, for example - and even OPEC is rife with cheating amonst the various countries).
under ideal market conditions, one company will be slightly better then others, it will allow it to obtain higher market share and if done right, that will give it more resources to become more efficient etc.
I agree. But this isn't a bad thing, because as you point out, efficiency is increasing. This business only increases its market share by offering a better product or a lower price. So the consumers are winning throughout this process.
Now, you're suggesting that once a single business has market dominance, they'll start jacking up prices. They can try, but as soon as they do their efficiency is out the window, and they're ripe for destruction by a new entry.
I admit that at present, we have an economy dominated by large corporations that are difficult to compete with. But this is not a free market. The costs of regulation are borne disproportionately by smaller businesses - and this does indeed create an artificial barrier to entry. The big players maintain their position through legal action and lobby influence, neither of which are free market mechanisms. Government spending is a large fraction of GDP, so if you don't have the connections to get government contracts, in many industries you're completely sunk.
Given a level legal playing field and a government that keeps their hands off, small businesses have the advantage of being able to innovate much faster than larger businesses. This has happened repeatedly in the past and it still happens somewhat today, despite the problems with the system. Startups can and do succeed. Big, old, slow businesses die.
In a simplier conceptual scenario, imagine the humanity as a tribe on an island: once one person owns all the fields and all the fruit trees, no "free choice" is any longer possible for his "customers".
How many industries can you name in which a single entity has cornered the entire world market? I can only think of DeBeers with their diamonds, which, by the way was the result of British imperial policy in S. Africa, not a free market. But even that didn't last - the price of diamonds got high enough to inspire the invention of synthetics that are now indistinguishable.
Surely no one has ever come close to cornering the world market on food or shelter. There are a vast number of possibilties for producing either. This is not surprising, because if the world wasn't full of ways to keep humans alive, we wouldn't have gotten this far in the first place.
One only has to examine the conditions that existed during the industrial revolution to see what I meant.
One only has to examine the large increase in living standard experienced by even the lowest classes during the transistion from pre-industrial to industrial society. You're forgetting that people chose to live in factory towns because they perceieved it as a better deal than what they could get back home on the farm, or elsewhere. Furthermore, I'd add that wildly differing historical interpretations of this time period exist, precisely because it is so closely related to the ideological differences we've been discussing. The mainstream tends to present a version of history like yours, but of course that doesn't make it valid.
In fact, the opinions you've been presenting help maintain the status quo. Government wants you to believe that "government is also the solution". It's something that all political partisan
Bremer instituted rules to be applied to all Iraqi businesses. The idea was to stimulate a free market orgy and expectation was of investors killing each other in a wild stampede to invest.
Ok, thanks for clarifying. Nevertheless, it takes a big leap to claim that the failure of Iraqi reconstruction is an indictment of free markets. War causes poverty and suffering anywhere, no matter what the economic system - Iraq definitely still is at war. And the risks of war scare off investors. No surprise there.
You gotta eat, therefore you will do things to get food. From there flows all the other stuff people do. So as soon as you have a system where one group controls food and resources for some other: goodbye "voluntary".
I would agree with you that property is necessary for life. That is why the right to own property is inherent and inalienable. But I think your argument about what is "voluntary" and what constitutes "control" needs to be more closely examined.
Labor is certainly required to keep anyone alive, so in this sense, labor is never voluntary. It's simply the human condition. Somebody has to gather the nuts and berries. Thanks to the agricultural revolution and the development of specialization, we don't all need to literally grow food anymore. But the principal is still the same: we live by the fruits of our labor. There's no free lunch.
So buying food is not voluntary. But buying food from any specific producer is voluntary, in the sense that you can always go to another. And in a free market, there will always be such choices, because if the existing choices suck, it represents an opportunity for someone new to enter the market and do better, getting rich in the process.
True. The "peaceful people" are usually defined as "those who would be doing the violence if they were in charge".
So you're in favor of punishing people for the potential to commit crimes? What happened to innocent until proven guilty? Should we lock up all the young black males in the US simply because they're statistically more likely to commit crimes?
The violence can be economic or physical.
Your concept of economic violence is unclear to me. Now, I certainly agree that it is possible to do economic damage to another person or group. Like the prewar sanctions against Iraq, for example. Or you could steal someone's bike so he can't get to work. However, such things are only possible because they are backed up by physical violence/theft. I cannot think of an example of "economic violence" that isn't actually caused by the actual application of physical violence, or the threat thereof. Can you give me an example?
I was referring to the post-invasion attempts at "reconstruction", specifically to the Bremer rules which are basically a textbook adaptation of extreme market conditions as advocated by Rand.
If you really think a bunch of no-bid contracts to politically connected corporations constitutes a free market, you're confused. Furthermore, the whole shebang is being funded through coercive taxation. This is not capitalism, this is fascism. Here's a hint: if government is involved, it's probably not capitalism.
I have read that some Rand-ite knuckleheads are avid supporters of the war. But support for a tax-funded foreign adventure is ethically inconsistent for people who believe that taxation is slavery. And bombing other people's houses is inconsistent with property rights. So this loud minority is, quite obviously, wrong.
This is a problem with any form of unrestricted capitalism and the true evil of Ayn Rand theories. They are an excercise in one of the oldest pursuits in "phillosophy": an attempt justify naked agression and dominantion in some "moral" terms.
Now I wholeheartedly agree that the system we have today is wrong. But this system is not capitalism - despite the rhetoric claiming so. Capitalism is the system you get when the only rule is "don't hurt others or take their stuff". Capitalism is the system designed to minimize aggression, by making all economic relations voluntary.
If you can suggest a better system, I'd love to hear about it. Every alternative I know of requires massive government-sponsored violence against peaceful people.
Governments, as a rule, hate real capitalism because it leaves them with vastly less power than they have today. Government is the problem.
What you have described is accurate, except for one thing: this is not "free trade", nor is it capitalism. Unfortunately, such terms have been co-opted to mean things very different from their original definitions.
The "free trade" agreements we hear about today are really sets of regulations that countries agree to impose. But regulated trade is the opposite of free trade. This is our modern doublespeak.
To take your example: the corporation in question only succeeds in lowering wages through government. But if the economy was truly free, the government wouldn't be getting involved, and certainly wouldn't be dictating wages.
Capitalism = market economy, laissez faire Fascism = government/business partnership
Now I ask: what part of our economy isn't up to its eyeballs in government involvement? So which system do we have? Apply the same reasoning to international affairs, and what we have is mercantilism, not free trade.
What does a RT work for less law have to do with minimum wage? RT work for less has nothing to do with the minimum wage.
Your calling it "Right to Work for Less" made me assume it was about minimum wages. I see now I was incorrect - the actual title is "Right to Work", and it says "No person shall be required, as a condition of employment, to [join a union, not join a union, be approved by a union]".
Sounds like a good law to me. I have personally known workers who were screwed over by unions. Unions deserve no special government protections - if they can't convince people to join, too bad for them.
I don't expect to convince you. I can only suggest you study some history and economics.
Good luck in your efforts to define liberalism other than how 99% of the world defines it.
There's actually a lot of disagreement about how to define it. See the Wikipedia article for the details.
This may be shocking to you, but some of us believe this is a good thing. And not because we're greedy corporate execs. But because we're coming from a vastly different set of assumptions.
I believe that minimum wage laws are both immoral and economically damaging for the poor. I'm happy to support the point in thoughtful debate, and I think you'll find I have not been brainwashed by the powers-that-be.
And before you condemn liberalism (in the classical sense, of course), realize that the world you see before you bears only a slight resemblance to a free market. As someone else's sig said, "corporatism != free market".
PS: Keynesianism has little to do with liberalism . Keynes advocated inflationary monetary and fiscal policy, whereas the old-school liberal (a la Thomas Jefferson) was a staunch supporter of hard money and government non-intervention.
...it could cause serious costs and embarrassment to oil companies, car companies, etc., who fail to take action to moderate their impact.
You can't blame the car and oil companies. That's just silly. The ultimate responsibility rests with the people who are funding these activities: their customers. It's the people driving the cars, consuming the oil, and drawing vast amounts of electricity who are responsible. That's just about all of us.
It's comforting to pass the buck, but it's simply wrong.
Boy, you must really hate science- which is built upon finding rules that make the world predictable.
Actually, my fascination with the science of big complex systems is part of the source for my argument. Science does a wonderful job of predicting things - but as the context gets larger and more complex, prediction gets harder and harder. Just because every water molecule in the world follows well-known laws of physics doesn't make long-term weather prediction easy.
Several billion human brains represents a staggering amount of complexity. Therefore I don't think that reliable predictions of socio-economic behavior are possible in the forseeable future.
Your argument closely follows the historical development of socialism - many advocates of state control of the economy called their system "scientific planning". The fact is, you can't plan and regulate a human system without making value judgements, and science can't help you with that.
What is the optimal way to allocate spectrum? How can you justify your solution? What will you do to the people who disagree with you? What recourse will you have when another political group wrests control over the allocations? These are the problems with any kind of coercive control.
Without a 401k or a 403b, how do I take care of retirement?
The problem with tax-deferred schemes like these is that if taxes go up by the time you retire, you would have been better off paying them up front.
Of course if taxes go down, you have it made. But considering the fiscal and monetary stupidity in the US right now, I'm not betting on lower taxes in the long term.
There are plenty of other ways to save and invest your money. The most important thing is simply that you spend less than you make, and you invest the difference in a diverse set of places. Make yourself a spreadsheet to predict your net worth over time assuming various rates of saving and interest.
Voters get to make their choice every couple years, from a small list chosen by the political establishment. In contrast, consumers vote every single day with every dollar they spend. They have a vast universe of choices for every dollar.
Ah, you subscribe to the idiot Adam Smith, who thinks that chaos makes things predictable.
Ah, from your username I see you subscribe to the idiot Marx, who thinks that people will work harmoniously for "the common good", if only they're threatened forcefully enough.
I certainly wouldn't claim that the market is predictable - unpredictability is exactly the point. Things will always be chaotic, which is why trying to regulate and plan them is both hopeless and fraught with injustice.
The world is NOT predictable, much to the chagrin of central planners everywhere. Individuals and small groups can react much faster than governments.
None of the links in that search look relevant. The top one is about the Lower East Side of Manhattan, an area that looks pretty highly utilized to me.
Yes, investors might try to buy up large chunks of spectrum. My point is that it doesn't matter - if too many people are hoarding spectrum without using it, the price will rise and they'll be increasingly tempted to sell. That's the whole point of prices.
At least with "public ownership" you can vote, hold office, campaign, and otherwise affect policy. With private ownership, you are pretty much SOL if things aren't going your way and you don't have the purchasing power to make a difference.
If you honestly believe that you can influence the FCC (or British equivalent), I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you...
With public ownership, you are pretty much SOL unless you're politically connected. I'd rather let the aggregated opinions of millions of consumers decide, thanks. If some new tech comes along, and people are willing to pay for it, it WILL get spectrum.
Your comment isn't really an argument - you're just saying that spectrum has never been owned before, and you can't imagine it being any different.
Private ownership of spectrum isn't fundamentally different than any other kind of property. You can't compare it to air, because spectrum is a scarce resource. Economics is all about the allocation of scarce resources.
Right now, radio stations stay out of each other's way because they have licenses allocated by the government. You could instead make those licenses into titles of ownership, and allow the stations to sell or trade them at will. If someone broadcasts in someone elses spectrum, they can be sued in civil court for something like trespassing.
If by hoarding, you mean people buying up spectrum and not actually using it, I don't think its possible. Assuming prices are allowed to float freely, spectrum will be expensive. If you buy it and don't use it, it's like buying an expensive piece of real estate and not building anything there.
Unless you can actually make productive use of your spectrum, you'll be better off selling it to someone who can.
technology consortiums will buy spectrum for their technology and when the technology grows old and die what corporate shareholder would sever the last limb propping up a technology?
You're missing the point. If spectrum is privately owned, that consortium would profit by selling their chunk to someone who could make more money with it. There's no incentive to hold onto unproductive spectrum.
Heh. I didn't figure out this was a joke until I got to the mules and horses part... there weren't any of either in the Americas until the Europeans brought them over.
Yes, but in 1775, none of the colonists had representation in their government, and they seceeded to get it. The situation was somewhat the opposite in 1860 -- the secessionists in fact had government representation.
You're falling into the democracy==liberty trap. Just because you have a representative in congress doesn't mean the government can do whatever they want to you - the federal government must abide by the Constitution. The southern states accused the north of violating the letter of the Constitution, which they clearly did.
That is the concept under which it was legitimate: that seceding from the Union represented the will of the people of those states and in this case a state should be allowed to secede, while the existence of unrepresented slaves clearly goes against that.
If that's true, the colonial rebellion didn't reflect "the will of the people" because women and slaves had no representation in the colonies... By your argument only a perfectly just state can have the right to secession.
We've all been taught from childhood that the North was justified and Lincoln was a hero. But the facts speak differently. Seek them out. This stuff is important, because it has had a profound impact on American since then. And many of the most persistence political problems in the world today (Kashmir, Iraq, former Yugoslavia) could be solved peacefully if only we would embrace the legitimacy of secession.
Naturally, powerful centralized governments hate the idea.
First, you can't use slavery to distinguish between the cases of 1776 and 1860. In both cases, the seceding states held slaves.
Second, the belief that a war was necessary to end slavery is ridiculous, considering that every other slave-owning nation of the world managed to end slavery peacefully through comepensated emancipation. Lincoln could have purchased every slave in the south at fair market value, and still spent less money than the cost of the war. By many metrics, slavery was already in decline.
Id' you'd like to learn more, I'd recommend "The Real Lincoln" by Thomas DiLorenzo.
The second amendment was primarily intended so that people could have another revolution if they ever needed to.
And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. - Thomas Jefferson, November 13, 1787
Actually, there was another revolution about 80 years later, but unfortunately it lost to a brutal dictator named Lincoln.
Slashdot Mirror
I keep my entire CD collection on disk as FLAC, and then transcode to the lossy format(s) most useful to me at the time (currently Vorbis to play in my Rio Karma). If I ever need a new format I can go back to the FLAC and reencode without transcoding from another lossy format.
That's exactly why I switched to FLAC as well. When you choose a lossy codec, you're locking yourself in to it. With FLAC, I can reencode to anything else with minimal effort and no transcoding loss.
My flac albums are an average of 5 times larger than ogg vorbis (quality 6). Not that bad, and disk keeps getting cheaper.
...has nothing to do with 'intercepting' messages...
You are correct. But we should remember that actually intercepting your messages is quite easy for anyone on your subnet, or anyone controlling a router between you and GMail.
The login is SSL encrypted, but after that it's plaintext. It's a scalability issue.
I interviewed with a UK-based software consulting company that was just starting an office in Boston. The cultural differences were striking, and their attempts to hire "only the best talent" here were doomed by their lack of clue.
1. Everyone in their office was wearing a 3 piece suit. This isn't necessarily a problem by itself, but it tipped me off to their extremely conservative business philosophy. They seemed to stress consistency over innovation.
2. They gave me a programming test, telling me not to worry if I couldn't finish it in the time alotted, because no one can. Then I finished it in half the time given, and they looked genuinely shocked. Now, I'm pretty good, but I'm not some Hacker God. This worried me.
3. Then they offered me a salary 30% lower than the nearest competing offer.
While I don't doubt they found someone eventually, I seriously doubt they found someone good.
Is this kind of thing typical of UK companies? These guys claimed to have a long record of business success.
Ok, I can't resist one last post in this long, long thread. If you're interested in continuing the debate, email me. I'd be happy to.
Well, yes and no. Yes, each person owns his/her life and can do as he/she wishes.... as long as her/his actions do not cause misery and pain to others. And herein lies the rub. It is on that latter part of this "equation" (which was conspicuously missing in your version) that the pure "free market" ideology falls apart.
The latter part of the equation follows directly from the first. Self-ownership implies both rights and responsibilities (ie not violating other people's self-ownership). As for your formulation "not causing misery and pain", I'm not sure it's very useful as a standard - because just looking at your own examples so far, clearly there are times when you believe it is correct to cause someone pain. So other principles are required to sort things out. I would argue that those principles all comes down to 1) the legitimacy of self defense and 2) who owns what and why.
Regarding history: it is a truism that the victors write the history books. It is also obvious that every historian works through the distorting effects of his own ideology. If you learned history in school, any school, you have uncritically swallowed a large set of things that might not be true.
Compare the viewpoints for yourself. If you haven't compared the Keynesian, Chicago, and Austrian schools of economics, how do you really know which makes the most sense? (you have espoused a Keynesian view, by the way.) If you haven't read both Marx and Hayek, how do you decide if either or both are wrong? If you haven't spent any effort to learn the history of banking, how can you claim to understand the causes of the great depression? Did you know the US education system was consciouly modeled on Bismarck's Germany, a system explicitly designed to indoctrinate and pacify?
Before you accuse someone of religious devotion, inquire how they've come to believe what they believe. I once held opinions just like yours. I've done a lot of learning since then.
In fact, I could retort that we are all saturated from birth in a religion of state worship. Especially Democracy worship - have you ever bothered to read something critical of Democracy? Try Hans Herman-Hoppe.
Bottom line: all these arguments have been done before, in a depth that we cannot approach here. You accuse me of oversimplifying, but I'm quite sure that we are *both* oversimplifying. Neither of use will convince the other here. But if you want to send me references, I'm always willing to learn new things.
spontaneous formation of cartels
Cartels are highly unstable, as long as you assume each member places their own interest above the group. By underselling their partners, they get a larger piece of the market, even though they depress prices and cause overall cartell profits to drop. The fact that this happens is well-documented. The only successful cartels are backed by governments who can punish individual producers who don't follow the cartel rules (OPEC, for example - and even OPEC is rife with cheating amonst the various countries).
under ideal market conditions, one company will be slightly better then others, it will allow it to obtain higher market share and if done right, that will give it more resources to become more efficient etc.
I agree. But this isn't a bad thing, because as you point out, efficiency is increasing. This business only increases its market share by offering a better product or a lower price. So the consumers are winning throughout this process.
Now, you're suggesting that once a single business has market dominance, they'll start jacking up prices. They can try, but as soon as they do their efficiency is out the window, and they're ripe for destruction by a new entry.
I admit that at present, we have an economy dominated by large corporations that are difficult to compete with. But this is not a free market. The costs of regulation are borne disproportionately by smaller businesses - and this does indeed create an artificial barrier to entry. The big players maintain their position through legal action and lobby influence, neither of which are free market mechanisms. Government spending is a large fraction of GDP, so if you don't have the connections to get government contracts, in many industries you're completely sunk.
Given a level legal playing field and a government that keeps their hands off, small businesses have the advantage of being able to innovate much faster than larger businesses. This has happened repeatedly in the past and it still happens somewhat today, despite the problems with the system. Startups can and do succeed. Big, old, slow businesses die.
In a simplier conceptual scenario, imagine the humanity as a tribe on an island: once one person owns all the fields and all the fruit trees, no "free choice" is any longer possible for his "customers".
How many industries can you name in which a single entity has cornered the entire world market? I can only think of DeBeers with their diamonds, which, by the way was the result of British imperial policy in S. Africa, not a free market. But even that didn't last - the price of diamonds got high enough to inspire the invention of synthetics that are now indistinguishable.
Surely no one has ever come close to cornering the world market on food or shelter. There are a vast number of possibilties for producing either. This is not surprising, because if the world wasn't full of ways to keep humans alive, we wouldn't have gotten this far in the first place.
One only has to examine the conditions that existed during the industrial revolution to see what I meant.
One only has to examine the large increase in living standard experienced by even the lowest classes during the transistion from pre-industrial to industrial society. You're forgetting that people chose to live in factory towns because they perceieved it as a better deal than what they could get back home on the farm, or elsewhere. Furthermore, I'd add that wildly differing historical interpretations of this time period exist, precisely because it is so closely related to the ideological differences we've been discussing. The mainstream tends to present a version of history like yours, but of course that doesn't make it valid.
In fact, the opinions you've been presenting help maintain the status quo. Government wants you to believe that "government is also the solution". It's something that all political partisan
Bremer instituted rules to be applied to all Iraqi businesses. The idea was to stimulate a free market orgy and expectation was of investors killing each other in a wild stampede to invest.
Ok, thanks for clarifying. Nevertheless, it takes a big leap to claim that the failure of Iraqi reconstruction is an indictment of free markets. War causes poverty and suffering anywhere, no matter what the economic system - Iraq definitely still is at war. And the risks of war scare off investors. No surprise there.
You gotta eat, therefore you will do things to get food. From there flows all the other stuff people do. So as soon as you have a system where one group controls food and resources for some other: goodbye "voluntary".
I would agree with you that property is necessary for life. That is why the right to own property is inherent and inalienable. But I think your argument about what is "voluntary" and what constitutes "control" needs to be more closely examined.
Labor is certainly required to keep anyone alive, so in this sense, labor is never voluntary. It's simply the human condition. Somebody has to gather the nuts and berries. Thanks to the agricultural revolution and the development of specialization, we don't all need to literally grow food anymore. But the principal is still the same: we live by the fruits of our labor. There's no free lunch.
So buying food is not voluntary. But buying food from any specific producer is voluntary, in the sense that you can always go to another. And in a free market, there will always be such choices, because if the existing choices suck, it represents an opportunity for someone new to enter the market and do better, getting rich in the process.
True. The "peaceful people" are usually defined as "those who would be doing the violence if they were in charge".
So you're in favor of punishing people for the potential to commit crimes? What happened to innocent until proven guilty? Should we lock up all the young black males in the US simply because they're statistically more likely to commit crimes?
The violence can be economic or physical.
Your concept of economic violence is unclear to me. Now, I certainly agree that it is possible to do economic damage to another person or group. Like the prewar sanctions against Iraq, for example. Or you could steal someone's bike so he can't get to work. However, such things are only possible because they are backed up by physical violence/theft. I cannot think of an example of "economic violence" that isn't actually caused by the actual application of physical violence, or the threat thereof. Can you give me an example?
I was referring to the post-invasion attempts at "reconstruction", specifically to the Bremer rules which are basically a textbook adaptation of extreme market conditions as advocated by Rand.
If you really think a bunch of no-bid contracts to politically connected corporations constitutes a free market, you're confused. Furthermore, the whole shebang is being funded through coercive taxation. This is not capitalism, this is fascism. Here's a hint: if government is involved, it's probably not capitalism.
I have read that some Rand-ite knuckleheads are avid supporters of the war. But support for a tax-funded foreign adventure is ethically inconsistent for people who believe that taxation is slavery. And bombing other people's houses is inconsistent with property rights. So this loud minority is, quite obviously, wrong.
This is a problem with any form of unrestricted capitalism and the true evil of Ayn Rand theories. They are an excercise in one of the oldest pursuits in "phillosophy": an attempt justify naked agression and dominantion in some "moral" terms.
Now I wholeheartedly agree that the system we have today is wrong. But this system is not capitalism - despite the rhetoric claiming so. Capitalism is the system you get when the only rule is "don't hurt others or take their stuff". Capitalism is the system designed to minimize aggression, by making all economic relations voluntary.
If you can suggest a better system, I'd love to hear about it. Every alternative I know of requires massive government-sponsored violence against peaceful people.
Governments, as a rule, hate real capitalism because it leaves them with vastly less power than they have today. Government is the problem.
What you have described is accurate, except for one thing: this is not "free trade", nor is it capitalism. Unfortunately, such terms have been co-opted to mean things very different from their original definitions.
The "free trade" agreements we hear about today are really sets of regulations that countries agree to impose. But regulated trade is the opposite of free trade. This is our modern doublespeak.
To take your example: the corporation in question only succeeds in lowering wages through government. But if the economy was truly free, the government wouldn't be getting involved, and certainly wouldn't be dictating wages.
Capitalism = market economy, laissez faire
Fascism = government/business partnership
Now I ask: what part of our economy isn't up to its eyeballs in government involvement? So which system do we have? Apply the same reasoning to international affairs, and what we have is mercantilism, not free trade.
What does a RT work for less law have to do with minimum wage? RT work for less has nothing to do with the minimum wage.
Your calling it "Right to Work for Less" made me assume it was about minimum wages. I see now I was incorrect - the actual title is "Right to Work", and it says "No person shall be required, as a condition of employment, to [join a union, not join a union, be approved by a union]".
Sounds like a good law to me. I have personally known workers who were screwed over by unions. Unions deserve no special government protections - if they can't convince people to join, too bad for them.
I don't expect to convince you. I can only suggest you study some history and economics.
Good luck in your efforts to define liberalism other than how 99% of the world defines it.
There's actually a lot of disagreement about how to define it. See the Wikipedia article for the details.
They passed a right-to-work-for-less law...
This may be shocking to you, but some of us believe this is a good thing. And not because we're greedy corporate execs. But because we're coming from a vastly different set of assumptions.
I believe that minimum wage laws are both immoral and economically damaging for the poor. I'm happy to support the point in thoughtful debate, and I think you'll find I have not been brainwashed by the powers-that-be.
And before you condemn liberalism (in the classical sense, of course), realize that the world you see before you bears only a slight resemblance to a free market. As someone else's sig said, "corporatism != free market".
PS: Keynesianism has little to do with liberalism . Keynes advocated inflationary monetary and fiscal policy, whereas the old-school liberal (a la Thomas Jefferson) was a staunch supporter of hard money and government non-intervention.
...it could cause serious costs and embarrassment to oil companies, car companies, etc., who fail to take action to moderate their impact.
You can't blame the car and oil companies. That's just silly. The ultimate responsibility rests with the people who are funding these activities: their customers. It's the people driving the cars, consuming the oil, and drawing vast amounts of electricity who are responsible. That's just about all of us.
It's comforting to pass the buck, but it's simply wrong.
Boy, you must really hate science- which is built upon finding rules that make the world predictable.
Actually, my fascination with the science of big complex systems is part of the source for my argument. Science does a wonderful job of predicting things - but as the context gets larger and more complex, prediction gets harder and harder. Just because every water molecule in the world follows well-known laws of physics doesn't make long-term weather prediction easy.
Several billion human brains represents a staggering amount of complexity. Therefore I don't think that reliable predictions of socio-economic behavior are possible in the forseeable future.
Your argument closely follows the historical development of socialism - many advocates of state control of the economy called their system "scientific planning". The fact is, you can't plan and regulate a human system without making value judgements, and science can't help you with that.
What is the optimal way to allocate spectrum? How can you justify your solution? What will you do to the people who disagree with you? What recourse will you have when another political group wrests control over the allocations? These are the problems with any kind of coercive control.
Without a 401k or a 403b, how do I take care of retirement?
The problem with tax-deferred schemes like these is that if taxes go up by the time you retire, you would have been better off paying them up front.
Of course if taxes go down, you have it made. But considering the fiscal and monetary stupidity in the US right now, I'm not betting on lower taxes in the long term.
There are plenty of other ways to save and invest your money. The most important thing is simply that you spend less than you make, and you invest the difference in a diverse set of places. Make yourself a spreadsheet to predict your net worth over time assuming various rates of saving and interest.
Voters get to make their choice every couple years, from a small list chosen by the political establishment. In contrast, consumers vote every single day with every dollar they spend. They have a vast universe of choices for every dollar.
Which system is more free and open?
Ah, you subscribe to the idiot Adam Smith, who thinks that chaos makes things predictable.
Ah, from your username I see you subscribe to the idiot Marx, who thinks that people will work harmoniously for "the common good", if only they're threatened forcefully enough.
I certainly wouldn't claim that the market is predictable - unpredictability is exactly the point. Things will always be chaotic, which is why trying to regulate and plan them is both hopeless and fraught with injustice.
The world is NOT predictable, much to the chagrin of central planners everywhere. Individuals and small groups can react much faster than governments.
Spectrum is different from air because spectrum is scarce, and air is not. Yet.
None of the links in that search look relevant. The top one is about the Lower East Side of Manhattan, an area that looks pretty highly utilized to me.
Yes, investors might try to buy up large chunks of spectrum. My point is that it doesn't matter - if too many people are hoarding spectrum without using it, the price will rise and they'll be increasingly tempted to sell. That's the whole point of prices.
At least with "public ownership" you can vote, hold office, campaign, and otherwise affect policy. With private ownership, you are pretty much SOL if things aren't going your way and you don't have the purchasing power to make a difference.
If you honestly believe that you can influence the FCC (or British equivalent), I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you...
With public ownership, you are pretty much SOL unless you're politically connected. I'd rather let the aggregated opinions of millions of consumers decide, thanks. If some new tech comes along, and people are willing to pay for it, it WILL get spectrum.
Your comment isn't really an argument - you're just saying that spectrum has never been owned before, and you can't imagine it being any different.
Private ownership of spectrum isn't fundamentally different than any other kind of property. You can't compare it to air, because spectrum is a scarce resource. Economics is all about the allocation of scarce resources.
Right now, radio stations stay out of each other's way because they have licenses allocated by the government. You could instead make those licenses into titles of ownership, and allow the stations to sell or trade them at will. If someone broadcasts in someone elses spectrum, they can be sued in civil court for something like trespassing.
If by hoarding, you mean people buying up spectrum and not actually using it, I don't think its possible. Assuming prices are allowed to float freely, spectrum will be expensive. If you buy it and don't use it, it's like buying an expensive piece of real estate and not building anything there.
Unless you can actually make productive use of your spectrum, you'll be better off selling it to someone who can.
technology consortiums will buy spectrum for their technology and when the technology grows old and die what corporate shareholder would sever the last limb propping up a technology?
You're missing the point. If spectrum is privately owned, that consortium would profit by selling their chunk to someone who could make more money with it. There's no incentive to hold onto unproductive spectrum.
Heh. I didn't figure out this was a joke until I got to the mules and horses part... there weren't any of either in the Americas until the Europeans brought them over.
You're falling into the democracy==liberty trap. Just because you have a representative in congress doesn't mean the government can do whatever they want to you - the federal government must abide by the Constitution. The southern states accused the north of violating the letter of the Constitution, which they clearly did.
That is the concept under which it was legitimate: that seceding from the Union represented the will of the people of those states and in this case a state should be allowed to secede, while the existence of unrepresented slaves clearly goes against that.
If that's true, the colonial rebellion didn't reflect "the will of the people" because women and slaves had no representation in the colonies... By your argument only a perfectly just state can have the right to secession.
We've all been taught from childhood that the North was justified and Lincoln was a hero. But the facts speak differently. Seek them out. This stuff is important, because it has had a profound impact on American since then. And many of the most persistence political problems in the world today (Kashmir, Iraq, former Yugoslavia) could be solved peacefully if only we would embrace the legitimacy of secession.
Naturally, powerful centralized governments hate the idea.
There are two problems with your argument:
First, you can't use slavery to distinguish between the cases of 1776 and 1860. In both cases, the seceding states held slaves.
Second, the belief that a war was necessary to end slavery is ridiculous, considering that every other slave-owning nation of the world managed to end slavery peacefully through comepensated emancipation. Lincoln could have purchased every slave in the south at fair market value, and still spent less money than the cost of the war. By many metrics, slavery was already in decline.
Id' you'd like to learn more, I'd recommend "The Real Lincoln" by Thomas DiLorenzo.
And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. - Thomas Jefferson, November 13, 1787
Actually, there was another revolution about 80 years later, but unfortunately it lost to a brutal dictator named Lincoln.