Today one does not have to show any id to enter a national park. The Bush administration clearly wants to turn America into a police state. I can only hope the Democrats in Congress grow a spine and repeal this monstrosity..
A huge per capita GDP coupled with spending with the highest percentage of the GDP ought to produce the best health care system in the world by an indisputable margin but it doesn't.
No, what I said is that I don't trust Microsoft to transfer a RETAIL licenses multiple times. I buy OEM because of this.
Mac OS does not require an activation key so I can run and version till the end of time or as long as I can find hardware from it. Yes, I have to run it on Apple hardware but that is not a restriction that matters to me. If it matters to you, I really don't care. Stick with Windows and enjoy it. The Mac is not religion to me so I don't care what you do.
Well, I'm pleased you know this, but if you think I was suggesting perfect price discrimination exists in practice, and certainly in the software market, I'm afraid this is a product of your own imagination, and not anything I wrote. The use of such a straw man may be emotionally satisfying, but it doesn't do anything to support your argument.
Now that you've made clear your posts apply only to magic economist land and not real world, the rest of us can safely ignore you. Those of us who live in the real world know that the Windows monopoly causes massive dis-utility through security holes, viruses, spyware, blue screens of death and general array of annoying computer problems Windows users face. If operating systems were actually a competitive market that wasn't dominated by a giant network effort, Windows could not survive in its present crappy form. It would have to evolve to a decent OS or die.
Going back to the point of this thread, most Mac users running Parallels or Linux users running VMWare do not value Windows enough to pay for overpriced Vista Ultimate. In a competitive market, any OS producer would gladly take $100 from the occasional virtualization user. In fact copies for virtualization ought to be cheaper than full copies since those users clearly don't value Windows much if they want to run it in VM rather than a primary OS.
Say I buy a Mac every three years. That's a lot more often than the 5 year old PC I kept around pre-Intel Macs for the occasional Windows use. If I have to have a whole another machine for Windows, I will literally only replace it once every 10 years or so. And considering the revenue is lot better on the Mac copies than the OEM price from Dell, it's a significant loss.
If I bought a retail version, I could transfer if it MS would let me. Regardless of what the license says, the activation process makes it easy for MS to thwart future transfers. Thus I've stuck OEM licenses since I don't trust being able to transfer retail ones indefinitely. Do you think MS will keep letting transfer once they discontinue support for XP?
Perfect price discrimination is a theoretical concept only especially in consumer markets. It is impossible to implement. How are would you assess every consumer's willingness to pay? Telepaths? If you ask me, I'll say $3 which is below marginal cost of production for software.
Try to imagine the price Microsoft would charge if there were a single edition of Vista
Considering that it's not going to possible raise OEM Windows pricing on low end PCs without risking new competition, I'll stick with $40-50 for OEMs. The threat of low-end PC makers using another OS which would happen if MS tried to charge them $200 for the OS has a huge impact of future revenue since it would risk breaking the Windows stranglehold on the OS market
The essence of the Schumpeterian view that monopolies are more innovative than competitive firms lies in the fact that a monopoly firm is guaranteed to reap the full value of any innovations it produces, and thus has a greater incentive to innovate.
This is complete garbage when it comes Windows. If there are no competitive threats and Windows monopoly were guaranteed, the only reason to innovate would be to raise consumer's willingness to pay which is not going to happen. Consumers are not willing to pay more for Vista than they were for XP evidenced by Vista's lack luster sales. A small percentage of the market might pay for Ultimate but most people don't care. If MS could get rid of the competition once and for all, their best financial would be to fire all the developers, and move term licensing so would everyone would have to keep paying every year and MS would not have to spend money on developing upgrades.
The odd part if that MS is ensuring both they get this revenue from me in the long run and I use Windows less by preventing Vista virtualization. With virtualization, I'll shell out for a copy of Windows every time I buy a Mac . The ability to run Windows in Parallels isn't worth a $400 copy Ultimate to me. Since this option is not available, I'll buy XP for the moment. When the XP option goes away, if I still really need to run a Windows apps, I'll shell out $400 for a POS Dell every 10 years or so of which Microsoft gets around $40 and I will hardly ever use it.
Those Windows licenses I buy for my Macs are much better return to Microsoft. They cost $90 at cost and Newegg's margins are probably pretty thin so would not be surprised if Microsoft get $65 out that deal. The licenses for the Mac would also be much more frequent.
I'm not surprised at Microsoft's stupidity on this issue. They are afraid that real competition is emerging and they think they can go back to good days where the Mac was a 3% platform with little prospect for growth and Linux as only used by hard-core geeks by using continuing to use Windows as wedge. This strategy hardly ever works by that never seems to stop a bunch of dumb scared VPs from insisting on it.
What the hell are you talking about? The efficiency of perfect competition means there is no economic profit for producers and quite a bit of consumer surplus for consumers. A monopoly is no where near as efficient as perfect competition absent some pretty dramatic economies of scale which would tend to create a monopoly.
Under a single a price there are 3 types of consumers. Those who would have paid more, and they get to keep the difference as consumer surplus which is not a dead weight loss. Those who would only pay the exact price. And finally those who find the product too expensive. Assuming the willingness to pay of the consumers not buying due to price is above marginal cost, there is a dead weight loss of foregone producer surplus. However that dead weight loss is not being avoided with Vista at relative to XP as there are no cheaper versions of Vista than XP. If there were perfect competition for operating systems, this dead weight loss would be avoided. Microsoft being to charge higher prices and reduce consumer surplus is not more efficient in any economic sense.
Your argument about monoploy investment is wrong as well. A monopoly or any other business will only invest in projects that have positive economic returns. Being a monopoly does not reduce the cost of capital to the business. All those profits are owned by shareholders. and the research is subject to the same return criteria as any another business.
Most people do not care whether the components are replaceable. The/. crowd can replace their own components but the average user is going to be paying expensive (relative to the cost of the hardware) and probably not very good technicians to make the swap. Considering how cheap the average computer is these days, its usually not worth it if you have to pay someone else.
Additionally, the lack of expandability point is becoming less and less relevant as the demand switches to laptops where no system is very expandable.
The reason I like my Macbook is that while it probably cost more to buy, it's MUCH cheaper in terms my time dealing with annoying problems and my time is short supply.
When the federal government guarantees an automatic franchise to all taker for access to any utility pole, there will be an argument that Net Neutrality can be taken care of by the market. I would still be skeptical due to minimum economic scale requirements limiting the number of entrants.
This is typical Republican faux free market propaganda. McCain wants to rig the market by the government ensuring through the FCC that there is very little actual competition and then claim that the high prices and poor service are the best the free market can provide, all the while raking in campaign contributions from those who benefit from the government enforced limited competition.
The Straight Talk Express has crashed and been replaced with a Campaign Contribution Brothel on wheels.
Because file systems are really slow when you are using thousands of files. I used to work on web optimizers and the separate files makes IE's look ups in its disk cache really slow. IE6 was terrible in this regard. Using a local proxy cache and disabling IE internal cache (through some nasty hackery) led to about 10% reduction in time to render cached pages. I moved on to other things so I don't know if IE7 cache is better or not.
Firefox gets caching correct. Your file system is not designed to deal efficiently with 1000s of little files.
It will be at least 10 years before software vendors stop supporting Vista maybe 15 since it will probably will take MS 10 years to get the next OS out. I just bought a copy of XP to run under Parallels. Could have bought Vista for the same price but its more of a memory hog and all I really need is the ability to run occasional Windows only app. I couldn't care less about the features in Vista or whatever comes after it.
I'm surprised everyone missed Microsoft's real reason for doing this. Vista 64-bit requires signed drivers. Yes you can disable driver signing on Vista but it something only about 5% of Windows users would feel comfortable doing. The next Windows will probably make disabling driver signing more difficult or maybe even impossible. Microsoft will have effectively locked down what you can run on your own hardware for Windows users.
The easiest a crime which is there is no way to prevent is for the criminal to brandish a weapon (gun, knife, etc) and demand access to your house, keys to your car, etc. There will always be crime. Our society could do a better job of permanently removing those who repeatedly commit crime but that's another story.
It's also impossible to secure any structure with windows. Glass is easy to break.
First, let me say I find the attitude of Slashdotters who don't care about the problem of phishing because they are savvy enough to avoid the problem unenlightened. Allowing an avenue for criminals to profit leads to more criminals who may branch out to other types of fraud. There's almost zero you can do to fully prevent identity theft if some institution comprises your social security number.
The browser would have to do something really noticeable like change the color of all the chrome to make it obvious you are on a bank site. Extended validation certs may be good enough in place of.bank if the notification to user was unmissable.
If adequate checking was done, it would certainly be possible to restrict.bank or any other system to legitimate entities. $50,000 is one deterrent. Ensuring the the institution is properly registered with government regulators would be another. Restricting the domain to institutions that have been around for at least would be another.
I don't buy the citi.com argument either. citi.com could be redirected to citi.bank.bank may not be the best solution but I give Mikko Hypponen credit for thinking about the problem. I haven't seem the naysayers here come up with better ideas.
No, If stores, banks, homes, businesses, etc. were designed in such a way as to prevent crime there would be no need for police.
Your attitude comes down victims are to blame for crime. Somebody broke into your house, it's your fault for not living in a underground bunker. Somebody mugs you at gun point it's your fault for carrying valuables or for not walking down the street with loaded weapon and getting into a gun fight with the mugger. If there weren't criminals, there would be no need for the police. The opportunity to commit crime does not make people criminals.
I like this idea and think it would work. You don't even have to disable the device. Just know where it is through the ip address would allow the police to retrieve and fine the person who bought stolen property.
Reid is not idiot because at least he's trying to do something about theft. His approach may not be good but at least bringing the issue forward may lead to a better solution. As another posted suggested above, having iTunes check the iPod serial number against a list of stolen ones everytime it syncs would solve the problem. When a stolen iPod syncs, the ip address would be locate the iPod quite well since the buyers of these stolen iPod are likely going to be syncing them at home and their ISP has their address. The miscreants that buy stolen goods can then be fined. If they bought the stolen goods using a traceable method like Ebay/Paypal thief could be apprehended too.
The police ought to track down stolen items. New York City proved that taking that vigorous enforcement of quality of life crimes cuts all crime.
I'm unconvinced that these procedures benefit me the taxpayer. Private companies almost always standardize on a particular brand of gear since having many brands increases training costs, requires additional overhead if consumables are involved and makes the people who support the gear less efficient since they now have to figure out manage multiple types of equipment. For your claim to be correct, the private sector which operates under a strong profit motive would have to be wrong and could increase profits by adopting government procurement policies. Seems unlikely to me that government procurement procedures would make the private sector more profitable.
The New York City Government obviously has too much money if they can waste money illegally spying on non-violent, peaceful groups. It seems highly doubtful that citizens of NYC approve of this use of their money. Therefore, the police budget should be cut and savings returned to citizens through reduced taxes.
Wow, the government by not acting would be interfering? It's clear you know very little about the how finance works.
The bank received a risk premium over the risk free interest rate when making a loan. The government being willing to take my money to help the bank collect its loan altered the risk premium. The bank now charges a smaller risk premium because it could count on free government help. And, yes, loans get made when there is no enforcement government enforcement mechanism. People lend money to governments including foreign ones all the time. Sometimes governments default. The risk of the default is factored into the risk premium lenders are willing to accept. That seems more "free" to me than courts run with tax dollars helping lenders collect. Notice, I did not say its preferable. It may well be a better system then not using the courts but it is most certainly interference.
All rules interfere. It's just matter of degree and frequently calculating the amount of interference is highly subjective. Personally, I think zoning rules are an severe interference with the free market. Zoning rules cause me to pay double for housing over what I would have to pay if they were eliminated. However, ever most so called libertarians would go crying to the government if an developer wanted to put up a 50 story apartment building next to their little slice of suburbia.
Moral of the story. People who make statements like "government should never interfere with the free market" are idiots.
I notice you haven't answered a single one my points. You've no given framework for dividing "ground rules" from interference to counter my claim that there is no difference and as such government interference is prerequisite of any functioning free market system. I can only be left to assume that you have zero evidence or reasoning for your beliefs.
By the way, some points of view are provably wrong. The earth is not not flat. The moon is not made of cottage cheese.
Making the rules picks winners and losers. An individual might make a great slave whipping plantation owner but is denied the opportunity to use that "skill." I'm glad would be slave owners have to find something else to do. But to say the government didn't pick winners and losers when that decision was made is a sign of low intellectual capacity.
I can give you can example closer to the modern day. If a bank loans someone money who decides not to repay, what would they do? Run to court and try to get a judgment. That court is funded by my tax dollars. Why should I pay to help the bank recover the money? The government using my money to help enforce the debt makes the bank a winner and borrow a loser. Whether or not you think this should be the natural or proper order of things or not is irrelevant to the fact the coercive taxation power of government was used to help the bank be more profitable. The government is now deciding which contracts be enforced and how. There may be multiple lenders who back stiffed. Who gets paid first? Winners and losers are picked by the government and not by the market.
I insult your intelligence since you don't have a point view. You are a Libertarian parrot. Labeling something a "ground rule" does change the fact government is doing and it's a interference with the freedom of the market. A point of view requires real thought instead of repeating babble you've heard from someone else.
It is never appropriate for governments to interfere with the markets.
I find this statement comical. Markets don't exist without government providing enforcement of contracts. The true free market with zero government intervention is everyone try steal by means of force from everyone else since police and courts are interference with market forces.
Contract enforcement creates the situation where the government has to decide what kinds of contracts can be enforced. Should slavery contracts be enforced? Should a contract be valid because someone literally held a gun to your head and made you sign it? Deciding which contracts to enforce and which to invalidate is interference. Only intellectual midgets think a pure free market can exist in the absence of government of creating and enforcing the rules of the market.
Did you ban all laptops? If customer data is on a laptop and it leaves the building, you do not have control over it. That laptop could get stolen and you've lost of the data. The problem *might* solved if the data was store encrypted but we know from the data compromise incidents, that's rarely the case.
Slashdot Mirror
One can pay in cash.
Today one does not have to show any id to enter a national park. The Bush administration clearly wants to turn America into a police state. I can only hope the Democrats in Congress grow a spine and repeal this monstrosity..
Cuba has a great medical system...as long as you are one of the elites.
US has per capita GDP 10x of Cuba ( 43,500 vs 4,000 That any comparison can be made between the health care system in Cuba and the US says there is something seriously wrong with the health care system in US, especially because the US spends highest percentage of GDP of any nation in the world
A huge per capita GDP coupled with spending with the highest percentage of the GDP ought to produce the best health care system in the world by an indisputable margin but it doesn't.
No, what I said is that I don't trust Microsoft to transfer a RETAIL licenses multiple times. I buy OEM because of this.
Mac OS does not require an activation key so I can run and version till the end of time or as long as I can find hardware from it. Yes, I have to run it on Apple hardware but that is not a restriction that matters to me. If it matters to you, I really don't care. Stick with Windows and enjoy it. The Mac is not religion to me so I don't care what you do.
Well, I'm pleased you know this, but if you think I was suggesting perfect price discrimination exists in practice, and certainly in the software market, I'm afraid this is a product of your own imagination, and not anything I wrote. The use of such a straw man may be emotionally satisfying, but it doesn't do anything to support your argument.
Now that you've made clear your posts apply only to magic economist land and not real world, the rest of us can safely ignore you. Those of us who live in the real world know that the Windows monopoly causes massive dis-utility through security holes, viruses, spyware, blue screens of death and general array of annoying computer problems Windows users face. If operating systems were actually a competitive market that wasn't dominated by a giant network effort, Windows could not survive in its present crappy form. It would have to evolve to a decent OS or die.
Going back to the point of this thread, most Mac users running Parallels or Linux users running VMWare do not value Windows enough to pay for overpriced Vista Ultimate. In a competitive market, any OS producer would gladly take $100 from the occasional virtualization user. In fact copies for virtualization ought to be cheaper than full copies since those users clearly don't value Windows much if they want to run it in VM rather than a primary OS.
Say I buy a Mac every three years. That's a lot more often than the 5 year old PC I kept around pre-Intel Macs for the occasional Windows use. If I have to have a whole another machine for Windows, I will literally only replace it once every 10 years or so. And considering the revenue is lot better on the Mac copies than the OEM price from Dell, it's a significant loss.
If I bought a retail version, I could transfer if it MS would let me. Regardless of what the license says, the activation process makes it easy for MS to thwart future transfers. Thus I've stuck OEM licenses since I don't trust being able to transfer retail ones indefinitely. Do you think MS will keep letting transfer once they discontinue support for XP?
In a monopoly with perfect price discrimination
Perfect price discrimination is a theoretical concept only especially in consumer markets. It is impossible to implement. How are would you assess every consumer's willingness to pay? Telepaths? If you ask me, I'll say $3 which is below marginal cost of production for software.
Try to imagine the price Microsoft would charge if there were a single edition of Vista
Considering that it's not going to possible raise OEM Windows pricing on low end PCs without risking new competition, I'll stick with $40-50 for OEMs. The threat of low-end PC makers using another OS which would happen if MS tried to charge them $200 for the OS has a huge impact of future revenue since it would risk breaking the Windows stranglehold on the OS market
The essence of the Schumpeterian view that monopolies are more innovative than competitive firms lies in the fact that a monopoly firm is guaranteed to reap the full value of any innovations it produces, and thus has a greater incentive to innovate.
This is complete garbage when it comes Windows. If there are no competitive threats and Windows monopoly were guaranteed, the only reason to innovate would be to raise consumer's willingness to pay which is not going to happen. Consumers are not willing to pay more for Vista than they were for XP evidenced by Vista's lack luster sales. A small percentage of the market might pay for Ultimate but most people don't care. If MS could get rid of the competition once and for all, their best financial would be to fire all the developers, and move term licensing so would everyone would have to keep paying every year and MS would not have to spend money on developing upgrades.
The odd part if that MS is ensuring both they get this revenue from me in the long run and I use Windows less by preventing Vista virtualization. With virtualization, I'll shell out for a copy of Windows every time I buy a Mac . The ability to run Windows in Parallels isn't worth a $400 copy Ultimate to me. Since this option is not available, I'll buy XP for the moment. When the XP option goes away, if I still really need to run a Windows apps, I'll shell out $400 for a POS Dell every 10 years or so of which Microsoft gets around $40 and I will hardly ever use it.
Those Windows licenses I buy for my Macs are much better return to Microsoft. They cost $90 at cost and Newegg's margins are probably pretty thin so would not be surprised if Microsoft get $65 out that deal. The licenses for the Mac would also be much more frequent.
I'm not surprised at Microsoft's stupidity on this issue. They are afraid that real competition is emerging and they think they can go back to good days where the Mac was a 3% platform with little prospect for growth and Linux as only used by hard-core geeks by using continuing to use Windows as wedge. This strategy hardly ever works by that never seems to stop a bunch of dumb scared VPs from insisting on it.
What the hell are you talking about? The efficiency of perfect competition means there is no economic profit for producers and quite a bit of consumer surplus for consumers. A monopoly is no where near as efficient as perfect competition absent some pretty dramatic economies of scale which would tend to create a monopoly.
Under a single a price there are 3 types of consumers. Those who would have paid more, and they get to keep the difference as consumer surplus which is not a dead weight loss. Those who would only pay the exact price. And finally those who find the product too expensive. Assuming the willingness to pay of the consumers not buying due to price is above marginal cost, there is a dead weight loss of foregone producer surplus. However that dead weight loss is not being avoided with Vista at relative to XP as there are no cheaper versions of Vista than XP. If there were perfect competition for operating systems, this dead weight loss would be avoided. Microsoft being to charge higher prices and reduce consumer surplus is not more efficient in any economic sense.
Your argument about monoploy investment is wrong as well. A monopoly or any other business will only invest in projects that have positive economic returns. Being a monopoly does not reduce the cost of capital to the business. All those profits are owned by shareholders. and the research is subject to the same return criteria as any another business.
Most people do not care whether the components are replaceable. The /. crowd can replace their own components but the average user is going to be paying expensive (relative to the cost of the hardware) and probably not very good technicians to make the swap. Considering how cheap the average computer is these days, its usually not worth it if you have to pay someone else.
Additionally, the lack of expandability point is becoming less and less relevant as the demand switches to laptops where no system is very expandable.
The reason I like my Macbook is that while it probably cost more to buy, it's MUCH cheaper in terms my time dealing with annoying problems and my time is short supply.
When the federal government guarantees an automatic franchise to all taker for access to any utility pole, there will be an argument that Net Neutrality can be taken care of by the market. I would still be skeptical due to minimum economic scale requirements limiting the number of entrants.
This is typical Republican faux free market propaganda. McCain wants to rig the market by the government ensuring through the FCC that there is very little actual competition and then claim that the high prices and poor service are the best the free market can provide, all the while raking in campaign contributions from those who benefit from the government enforced limited competition.
The Straight Talk Express has crashed and been replaced with a Campaign Contribution Brothel on wheels.
Because file systems are really slow when you are using thousands of files. I used to work on web optimizers and the separate files makes IE's look ups in its disk cache really slow. IE6 was terrible in this regard. Using a local proxy cache and disabling IE internal cache (through some nasty hackery) led to about 10% reduction in time to render cached pages. I moved on to other things so I don't know if IE7 cache is better or not.
Firefox gets caching correct. Your file system is not designed to deal efficiently with 1000s of little files.
It will be at least 10 years before software vendors stop supporting Vista maybe 15 since it will probably will take MS 10 years to get the next OS out. I just bought a copy of XP to run under Parallels. Could have bought Vista for the same price but its more of a memory hog and all I really need is the ability to run occasional Windows only app. I couldn't care less about the features in Vista or whatever comes after it.
I'm surprised everyone missed Microsoft's real reason for doing this. Vista 64-bit requires signed drivers. Yes you can disable driver signing on Vista but it something only about 5% of Windows users would feel comfortable doing. The next Windows will probably make disabling driver signing more difficult or maybe even impossible. Microsoft will have effectively locked down what you can run on your own hardware for Windows users.
The easiest a crime which is there is no way to prevent is for the criminal to brandish a weapon (gun, knife, etc) and demand access to your house, keys to your car, etc. There will always be crime. Our society could do a better job of permanently removing those who repeatedly commit crime but that's another story.
It's also impossible to secure any structure with windows. Glass is easy to break.
First, let me say I find the attitude of Slashdotters who don't care about the problem of phishing because they are savvy enough to avoid the problem unenlightened. Allowing an avenue for criminals to profit leads to more criminals who may branch out to other types of fraud. There's almost zero you can do to fully prevent identity theft if some institution comprises your social security number.
.bank if the notification to user was unmissable.
.bank or any other system to legitimate entities. $50,000 is one deterrent. Ensuring the the institution is properly registered with government regulators would be another. Restricting the domain to institutions that have been around for at least would be another.
.bank may not be the best solution but I give Mikko Hypponen credit for thinking about the problem. I haven't seem the naysayers here come up with better ideas.
The browser would have to do something really noticeable like change the color of all the chrome to make it obvious you are on a bank site. Extended validation certs may be good enough in place of
If adequate checking was done, it would certainly be possible to restrict
I don't buy the citi.com argument either. citi.com could be redirected to citi.bank
No, If stores, banks, homes, businesses, etc. were designed in such a way as to prevent crime there would be no need for police.
Your attitude comes down victims are to blame for crime. Somebody broke into your house, it's your fault for not living in a underground bunker. Somebody mugs you at gun point it's your fault for carrying valuables or for not walking down the street with loaded weapon and getting into a gun fight with the mugger. If there weren't criminals, there would be no need for the police. The opportunity to commit crime does not make people criminals.
I like this idea and think it would work. You don't even have to disable the device. Just know where it is through the ip address would allow the police to retrieve and fine the person who bought stolen property.
Reid is not idiot because at least he's trying to do something about theft. His approach may not be good but at least bringing the issue forward may lead to a better solution. As another posted suggested above, having iTunes check the iPod serial number against a list of stolen ones everytime it syncs would solve the problem. When a stolen iPod syncs, the ip address would be locate the iPod quite well since the buyers of these stolen iPod are likely going to be syncing them at home and their ISP has their address. The miscreants that buy stolen goods can then be fined. If they bought the stolen goods using a traceable method like Ebay/Paypal thief could be apprehended too.
The police ought to track down stolen items. New York City proved that taking that vigorous enforcement of quality of life crimes cuts all crime.
I'm unconvinced that these procedures benefit me the taxpayer. Private companies almost always standardize on a particular brand of gear since having many brands increases training costs, requires additional overhead if consumables are involved and makes the people who support the gear less efficient since they now have to figure out manage multiple types of equipment. For your claim to be correct, the private sector which operates under a strong profit motive would have to be wrong and could increase profits by adopting government procurement policies. Seems unlikely to me that government procurement procedures would make the private sector more profitable.
The New York City Government obviously has too much money if they can waste money illegally spying on non-violent, peaceful groups. It seems highly doubtful that citizens of NYC approve of this use of their money. Therefore, the police budget should be cut and savings returned to citizens through reduced taxes.
Wow, the government by not acting would be interfering? It's clear you know very little about the how finance works.
The bank received a risk premium over the risk free interest rate when making a loan. The government being willing to take my money to help the bank collect its loan altered the risk premium. The bank now charges a smaller risk premium because it could count on free government help. And, yes, loans get made when there is no enforcement government enforcement mechanism. People lend money to governments including foreign ones all the time. Sometimes governments default. The risk of the default is factored into the risk premium lenders are willing to accept. That seems more "free" to me than courts run with tax dollars helping lenders collect. Notice, I did not say its preferable. It may well be a better system then not using the courts but it is most certainly interference.
All rules interfere. It's just matter of degree and frequently calculating the amount of interference is highly subjective. Personally, I think zoning rules are an severe interference with the free market. Zoning rules cause me to pay double for housing over what I would have to pay if they were eliminated. However, ever most so called libertarians would go crying to the government if an developer wanted to put up a 50 story apartment building next to their little slice of suburbia.
Moral of the story. People who make statements like "government should never interfere with the free market" are idiots.
I notice you haven't answered a single one my points. You've no given framework for dividing "ground rules" from interference to counter my claim that there is no difference and as such government interference is prerequisite of any functioning free market system. I can only be left to assume that you have zero evidence or reasoning for your beliefs.
By the way, some points of view are provably wrong. The earth is not not flat. The moon is not made of cottage cheese.
Making the rules picks winners and losers. An individual might make a great slave whipping plantation owner but is denied the opportunity to use that "skill." I'm glad would be slave owners have to find something else to do. But to say the government didn't pick winners and losers when that decision was made is a sign of low intellectual capacity.
I can give you can example closer to the modern day. If a bank loans someone money who decides not to repay, what would they do? Run to court and try to get a judgment. That court is funded by my tax dollars. Why should I pay to help the bank recover the money? The government using my money to help enforce the debt makes the bank a winner and borrow a loser. Whether or not you think this should be the natural or proper order of things or not is irrelevant to the fact the coercive taxation power of government was used to help the bank be more profitable. The government is now deciding which contracts be enforced and how. There may be multiple lenders who back stiffed. Who gets paid first? Winners and losers are picked by the government and not by the market.
I insult your intelligence since you don't have a point view. You are a Libertarian parrot. Labeling something a "ground rule" does change the fact government is doing and it's a interference with the freedom of the market. A point of view requires real thought instead of repeating babble you've heard from someone else.
It is never appropriate for governments to interfere with the markets.
I find this statement comical. Markets don't exist without government providing enforcement of contracts. The true free market with zero government intervention is everyone try steal by means of force from everyone else since police and courts are interference with market forces.
Contract enforcement creates the situation where the government has to decide what kinds of contracts can be enforced. Should slavery contracts be enforced? Should a contract be valid because someone literally held a gun to your head and made you sign it? Deciding which contracts to enforce and which to invalidate is interference. Only intellectual midgets think a pure free market can exist in the absence of government of creating and enforcing the rules of the market.
Did you ban all laptops? If customer data is on a laptop and it leaves the building, you do not have control over it. That laptop could get stolen and you've lost of the data. The problem *might* solved if the data was store encrypted but we know from the data compromise incidents, that's rarely the case.