I happen to believe that we need to find a balance between the incentives offered to artists and our progression as a society. The only way we move forward is by making advances each generation, this applies not only to technological advances but to cultural advances too.
Our understanding of ourselves through our culture changes and is built on the advances made by those before us. If those advances are prevented from entering our common "tree of knowledge," it makes our progression as a species that much harder.
As far as providing incentives to artists, I feel that there needs to be a time frame within which the artist or the assigns can attempt to make money with a work, but there's no right to make money and if it hasn't happened for a while, then it probably won't happen.
My proposals are thus:
1. All works that are copyrighted must be registered -- no automatic copyright. There should be some nominal registration fee, such as $1. This allows people who want to use a work to find the creator or assign of that work. (It helps prevent the argument that if one can't find out who owns a work, then one can use it for free since they're not out anything because that person wouldn't know who to give the money to anyway).
2. Each year the re-registration fee goes up. I think the cost should be $2^(n-1) where n is the year of the registration starting at year 1. So, at the 14 years that the constitution discusses, the cost would be $8,192 which would be a pretty good cutoff for all but corporations. However, even corporate icons such as Mickey Mouse would be released in a generational time frame (at year 31, the cost is over a billion). This isn't that unfair considering Steamboat Willy ripped off Steamboat Bill.
What next, do you want your property taxes prorated for
the time you're on vacation as well?
If you don't want to pay state taxes while you're not in
the state, stop using state services. Make sure to call the police
and fire departments before you go on vacation and tell them they
won't need to come around to your place if anything happens while
you're gone.
This doesn't follow at all. Land can be legitimately taxed because it is
Always within a certain tax jurisiction
Gains its value largely by the actions of government and community within that juristiction
Has a price that represents an externality imposed on others (hence a tax on land value (not house value) is a tax on a tax: a recovery of lost community revenue (if the taxed money goes back to the community)
Police and fire can be paid for from property taxes (like in NH) because they add value to the property (in theory they should "pay their own way" by making the value of land go up by equal to or greater than the amount taxed away). Everyone pays for these services because they pay for a place to live which, in turn, goes to property taxes. These services are paid for while owners are out of juristiction, and rightly so, because they still give value to the owners by protecting property.
A laptop or item purchased outside of a juristiction cannot be simply stated to be the same species of thing. The laptop purchased outside of the juristiction in no way negatively impacted the juristiction by using any of its services. Unless you want to make an argument that they deprived the juristiction of future proceeds to be spent in that juristiction (which, because no one has a RIGHT to make money, is absurd), there is no reason to tax out of state purchases that do not use in state resources.
For taxing online content, one could argue that the data infrastructure is a state resource, but then why not tax every packet? Whis is an mp3 packet different than a wikipedia text packet? The point is, you can't, state service / infrastructure taxes get paid by ISPs and hence and end user via their internet bill. Data should not have tax tiers. Local stores get the benefits of police, etc, whereas data packets do not. The list goes on...
One question that I didn't see being asked at all here is "why should the university have to pay for the spam by devoting bandwidth and storage?"
Just because something is in the public sector doesn't give anyone carte blanche to externalize their costs to it.
The post office is in the public sector, yet you have to pay for mail with stamps. Roads are in the public sector, yet you have to pay taxes and automobile registration for their maintenance. So long as e-mail is free, it should be considered "delivered at server maintainer's discression."
This incident seems to be a case of trying to limit the amount of spam received to continue to provide service, not censor free speech.
The approach I take is that some private property is unwarranted and that most taxation is unwarranted. What one produces or procures through labor should be theirs to keep. The opportunities and resources one monopolizes, due to a shady government grant or equally shady notion of original appropriation, require the acceptance of and remuneration to society. Some taxes are theft, other taxes are theft's prevention.
Third is the "no quatering of troops in people's homes" one. But I agree with your overall sentiment: the bill of rights is rapidly becoming meaningless.
I just got a Mac Mini and the whole home/end, page up/page down thing annoyed me. I got it to work in the terminal and VI, but it took a little while to get it to work in general.
Create the file ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict
Paste the following in:
/* Changes home/end and pageup/pagedn keys to a Windoze like behavior */ { "\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLine:";/* home */ "\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLine:";/* end */ "$\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:";/* shift + home */ "$\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:";/* shift + end */
If I had to place my ideals under a specific label (though I hate political labels which are often used to avoid thinking about issues), I'd have to say I'm a progressive libertarian.
I'm with Mr. Badnarik 100% on most of his core stances (kudos too for recognizing state's rights in the drug war too). I'm a vehement believer in The Constitution (not that there aren't parts I don't agree with; I'd just prefer we obey it as written OR amend it - not pretend it says something else.) However, I'm curious about your stances on several things.
A stable dollar
You state, "The Constitution delegates the power to coin money to Congress. As your president, I'll insist that they discharge that responsibility instead of fobbing the job off on an external entity like the Fed. And I'll veto legislation for any such operation that doesn't meet the true test of money: It is either made of gold or silver, or can be redeemed for a fixed amount of gold or silver."
I take issue with the last sentence.
Money doesn't need to be redeemable for something in finite supply (in fact, as population increases, that's a bad thing) to be stable, it simply needs to be equally hard to earn. Tying the value of a dollar to a consumer price index or, even better, the population might be wiser.
It is also important to note that The Fed is not the external entity coining money. When banks and other lending institutions practice fractional reserve lending, they reduce the value of the dollar. [An explanation of this phenomenon can be found at http://www.progress.org/reform21.htm]
Would you propose or stand behind legislation to eliminate fractional reserve lending?
The social safety net
Centralized government programs have the net effect of making people less personally responsible. I think a lot of resistance to libertarianism comes from the feeling that they want to cut all the safety nets before something (private charity, LVT, whatever) is in place. Regardless, it would be disastrous to move immediately from a society in which the government has taken responsibility away from citizens to one where everyone is fully responsible for himself or herself.
What are your plans for migrating from one model to the other?
Government funding
The Federal Income Tax is clearly constitutional (yeah, I know Ohio wasn't a state until 1953), but it still is a tax on labor, which is deleterious. The same goes for a sales tax. Other ways to fund the valid functions of government include a "head tax" and recovery of the rental value of things such as land, the electromagnetic spectrum, pollution permits, etc.
New Zealand and Australia are experimenting with LVT while Iceland is experimenting with pollition permits and citizen's dividends. I think there is room to be U.S. to be more progressive and foster more equality while adhering to the basic tenets of libertarianism.
What is your plan for funding government while remaining consistent to core libertarian principles?
Intellectual property
Clearly patents and copyrights are government-granted and, therefore privileges but are necessary for a technologically advanced society. It seems that lately things have been getting out of hand leading in part to some of the problems you site as issues (such as the cost of medicine.)
What are your feelings on the current length of intellectual property claims and the veritable "patent mill" that the USPTO has become? How would steer intellectual property back toward the constitutional concept of "for a limited time?"
Use of most illegal drugs (including marijuana and cocaine) is actually falling. Use of alcohol among young people has also declined.
What they won't mention is that the most likely reason drug use goes down in one area is because people increase use of other drugs or find something else entirely (like whippits).
Exactly. I've been saying for years that no one has the "right" to profit.
If Apple seriously considers this theft then they should stop producing iChat since it steals banner ad revenue from AOL and uses AOL's servers (which actively, not passively costs them money).
It seems that people are too obsessed with getting election results quickly rather than looking to methods that are more secure but may take longer. I'd rather spend a few days tabulating votes than get results in an hour but be stuck with someone who didn't win the majority vote for the next four years.
Could be because it's late, but I didn't see anything on the website about the proposed system being verifiable (note: leaving the polling place with a reciept is not verification that the votes were tabulated correctly). I think many people miss this point - it's imperative to have OSS if we're to have e-voting, but what we want to get out of voting should guide our decision to use e-voting or not rather than compromising certain aspects of voting because we feel we need to make everything use computers.
That is not to say that there are not problems with paper ballots, but it seems that unverifiable computer vote tabulation merely lowers the barrier to vote fraud on a large scale.
Until they have a verifiable electronic voting system (something kinda like David Chaum's idea a while back but with a few changes), I'd rather have paper votes that are counted locally by any resident who wants to be a counter and under the observation of anyone that cares to observe the process.
If you remove large nodes of influence, you reduce the ability for fraudsters to rig an election.
Granted, they don't have artists I'd heard elsewhere such as Nickle Creek and Sponge that audiolunchbox has, but they have at least four niceties:
You can get lossless FLAC-encoded mp3s or wav files. 99 cents per track is too much for compressed audio.
You can preview an entire album at 128kbs, no crappy 30 second clips. I've pulled things off onto my hard drive from Magnatunes to listen to more easily and paid for the things I've kept. A lot of times the context of lyrics or movements in a song is important and a 30 second preview doesn't cut it.
You can set your own price (between 5 and 18 dollars with half going to the artist). Some albums are not worth 99 cents per track, some are worth more. The listener should decide. Music cannot be based on production value - it's true value is determined by how much listeners esteem it.
No flash ads... yeah, yeah, I know, flash click to play...
It's a bit of a faf though, and I suspect many people will either not understand how to, not bother, or forget at least one address.
Agreed. I think the optimal solution to allow for independently certified e-mail. Certification authorities would raise the bar (by requiring REAL forms of ID) for getting a user id which would need to map to a public key. Normal users could have this taken care of by their ISP, after all, they know who's paying for the service. This id would be guaranteed by the certification authority to map to a person or business, though, to protect privacy, no personal information would be stored - only for creating an ID hash.
Recipients should be able to file a complaint once per message per sender. The rating of a person or business would be cumulative (though possibly normalizing toward zero over time as old ratings "drop off"), recipients could just set a maximum evil amount or whitelist specific ids/keys that'd otherwise be considered too evil. This makes it very easy for recipients as they don't have to do much work and they can still recieve mailings that they just signed up for.
If a spammer or some other malicious type sends out a million messages and everyone complains, he'd have to wait until his rating normalized before he could reasonably expect people to recieve his messages again. Additionally, due to the requirements of proving who you are before getting an address, one couldn't just create another account (which also has the side-effect of ruining his other business ventures or his personal life as his only recourses would be a legal name change for himself or his business, or using non-certified e-mail).
Just my two cents, but I firmly believe that it's the ease of getting an e-mail address and the vunerability of implicit trust that allow spam to be rampant. Phone companies just don't give out numbers, a similar model for e-mail would be beneficial (though it would require the collaboration of ISPs and possibly independent certification authorities). Furthermore, spam is a technical problem and needs a technical solution not a legal one.
Slashdot Mirror
I happen to believe that we need to find a balance between the incentives offered to artists and our progression as a society. The only way we move forward is by making advances each generation, this applies not only to technological advances but to cultural advances too. Our understanding of ourselves through our culture changes and is built on the advances made by those before us. If those advances are prevented from entering our common "tree of knowledge," it makes our progression as a species that much harder. As far as providing incentives to artists, I feel that there needs to be a time frame within which the artist or the assigns can attempt to make money with a work, but there's no right to make money and if it hasn't happened for a while, then it probably won't happen. My proposals are thus: 1. All works that are copyrighted must be registered -- no automatic copyright. There should be some nominal registration fee, such as $1. This allows people who want to use a work to find the creator or assign of that work. (It helps prevent the argument that if one can't find out who owns a work, then one can use it for free since they're not out anything because that person wouldn't know who to give the money to anyway). 2. Each year the re-registration fee goes up. I think the cost should be $2^(n-1) where n is the year of the registration starting at year 1. So, at the 14 years that the constitution discusses, the cost would be $8,192 which would be a pretty good cutoff for all but corporations. However, even corporate icons such as Mickey Mouse would be released in a generational time frame (at year 31, the cost is over a billion). This isn't that unfair considering Steamboat Willy ripped off Steamboat Bill.
Police and fire can be paid for from property taxes (like in NH) because they add value to the property (in theory they should "pay their own way" by making the value of land go up by equal to or greater than the amount taxed away). Everyone pays for these services because they pay for a place to live which, in turn, goes to property taxes. These services are paid for while owners are out of juristiction, and rightly so, because they still give value to the owners by protecting property.
A laptop or item purchased outside of a juristiction cannot be simply stated to be the same species of thing. The laptop purchased outside of the juristiction in no way negatively impacted the juristiction by using any of its services. Unless you want to make an argument that they deprived the juristiction of future proceeds to be spent in that juristiction (which, because no one has a RIGHT to make money, is absurd), there is no reason to tax out of state purchases that do not use in state resources.
For taxing online content, one could argue that the data infrastructure is a state resource, but then why not tax every packet? Whis is an mp3 packet different than a wikipedia text packet? The point is, you can't, state service / infrastructure taxes get paid by ISPs and hence and end user via their internet bill. Data should not have tax tiers. Local stores get the benefits of police, etc, whereas data packets do not. The list goes on...
One question that I didn't see being asked at all here is "why should the university have to pay for the spam by devoting bandwidth and storage?"
Just because something is in the public sector doesn't give anyone carte blanche to externalize their costs to it.
The post office is in the public sector, yet you have to pay for mail with stamps. Roads are in the public sector, yet you have to pay taxes and automobile registration for their maintenance. So long as e-mail is free, it should be considered "delivered at server maintainer's discression."
This incident seems to be a case of trying to limit the amount of spam received to continue to provide service, not censor free speech.
The approach I take is that some private property is unwarranted and that most taxation is unwarranted. What one produces or procures through labor should be theirs to keep. The opportunities and resources one monopolizes, due to a shady government grant or equally shady notion of original appropriation, require the acceptance of and remuneration to society. Some taxes are theft, other taxes are theft's prevention.
Geolibertarian... the better libertarian.
Third is the "no quatering of troops in people's homes" one. But I agree with your overall sentiment: the bill of rights is rapidly becoming meaningless.
If an old lady can't defend herself against a purse snatcher, then she deserves to have her purse snatched?
-
Create the file ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict
- Paste the following in:
Note that this only works for Cocoa applications. You will have to close and reopen any applications that are open before the effects will take effectIf I had to place my ideals under a specific label (though I hate political labels which are often used to avoid thinking about issues), I'd have to say I'm a progressive libertarian.
I'm with Mr. Badnarik 100% on most of his core stances (kudos too for recognizing state's rights in the drug war too). I'm a vehement believer in The Constitution (not that there aren't parts I don't agree with; I'd just prefer we obey it as written OR amend it - not pretend it says something else.) However, I'm curious about your stances on several things.
A stable dollarYou state, "The Constitution delegates the power to coin money to Congress. As your president, I'll insist that they discharge that responsibility instead of fobbing the job off on an external entity like the Fed. And I'll veto legislation for any such operation that doesn't meet the true test of money: It is either made of gold or silver, or can be redeemed for a fixed amount of gold or silver."
I take issue with the last sentence.
Money doesn't need to be redeemable for something in finite supply (in fact, as population increases, that's a bad thing) to be stable, it simply needs to be equally hard to earn. Tying the value of a dollar to a consumer price index or, even better, the population might be wiser.
It is also important to note that The Fed is not the external entity coining money. When banks and other lending institutions practice fractional reserve lending, they reduce the value of the dollar. [An explanation of this phenomenon can be found at http://www.progress.org/reform21.htm]
Would you propose or stand behind legislation to eliminate fractional reserve lending?
The social safety netCentralized government programs have the net effect of making people less personally responsible. I think a lot of resistance to libertarianism comes from the feeling that they want to cut all the safety nets before something (private charity, LVT, whatever) is in place. Regardless, it would be disastrous to move immediately from a society in which the government has taken responsibility away from citizens to one where everyone is fully responsible for himself or herself.
What are your plans for migrating from one model to the other?
Government funding The Federal Income Tax is clearly constitutional (yeah, I know Ohio wasn't a state until 1953), but it still is a tax on labor, which is deleterious. The same goes for a sales tax. Other ways to fund the valid functions of government include a "head tax" and recovery of the rental value of things such as land, the electromagnetic spectrum, pollution permits, etc.New Zealand and Australia are experimenting with LVT while Iceland is experimenting with pollition permits and citizen's dividends. I think there is room to be U.S. to be more progressive and foster more equality while adhering to the basic tenets of libertarianism.
What is your plan for funding government while remaining consistent to core libertarian principles?
Intellectual propertyClearly patents and copyrights are government-granted and, therefore privileges but are necessary for a technologically advanced society. It seems that lately things have been getting out of hand leading in part to some of the problems you site as issues (such as the cost of medicine.)
What are your feelings on the current length of intellectual property claims and the veritable "patent mill" that the USPTO has become? How would steer intellectual property back toward the constitutional concept of "for a limited time?"
Most Libertarians fall in the huge gray area between that and a privately-run society.
Indeed. I think it is fairly well-recognized that the most sucessful societies employ a combination of public and private services.Use of most illegal drugs (including marijuana and cocaine) is actually falling. Use of alcohol among young people has also declined.
What they won't mention is that the most likely reason drug use goes down in one area is because people increase use of other drugs or find something else entirely (like whippits).
Exactly. I've been saying for years that no one has the "right" to profit.
If Apple seriously considers this theft then they should stop producing iChat since it steals banner ad revenue from AOL and uses AOL's servers (which actively, not passively costs them money).
http://www.firearmsandliberty.com/unabridged.2nd.h tml
It seems that people are too obsessed with getting election results quickly rather than looking to methods that are more secure but may take longer. I'd rather spend a few days tabulating votes than get results in an hour but be stuck with someone who didn't win the majority vote for the next four years.
Could be because it's late, but I didn't see anything on the website about the proposed system being verifiable (note: leaving the polling place with a reciept is not verification that the votes were tabulated correctly). I think many people miss this point - it's imperative to have OSS if we're to have e-voting, but what we want to get out of voting should guide our decision to use e-voting or not rather than compromising certain aspects of voting because we feel we need to make everything use computers.
That is not to say that there are not problems with paper ballots, but it seems that unverifiable computer vote tabulation merely lowers the barrier to vote fraud on a large scale.
Until they have a verifiable electronic voting system (something kinda like David Chaum's idea a while back but with a few changes), I'd rather have paper votes that are counted locally by any resident who wants to be a counter and under the observation of anyone that cares to observe the process.
If you remove large nodes of influence, you reduce the ability for fraudsters to rig an election.
It's a bit of a faf though, and I suspect many people will either not understand how to, not bother, or forget at least one address.
Agreed. I think the optimal solution to allow for independently certified e-mail. Certification authorities would raise the bar (by requiring REAL forms of ID) for getting a user id which would need to map to a public key. Normal users could have this taken care of by their ISP, after all, they know who's paying for the service. This id would be guaranteed by the certification authority to map to a person or business, though, to protect privacy, no personal information would be stored - only for creating an ID hash.
Recipients should be able to file a complaint once per message per sender. The rating of a person or business would be cumulative (though possibly normalizing toward zero over time as old ratings "drop off"), recipients could just set a maximum evil amount or whitelist specific ids/keys that'd otherwise be considered too evil. This makes it very easy for recipients as they don't have to do much work and they can still recieve mailings that they just signed up for.
If a spammer or some other malicious type sends out a million messages and everyone complains, he'd have to wait until his rating normalized before he could reasonably expect people to recieve his messages again. Additionally, due to the requirements of proving who you are before getting an address, one couldn't just create another account (which also has the side-effect of ruining his other business ventures or his personal life as his only recourses would be a legal name change for himself or his business, or using non-certified e-mail).
Just my two cents, but I firmly believe that it's the ease of getting an e-mail address and the vunerability of implicit trust that allow spam to be rampant. Phone companies just don't give out numbers, a similar model for e-mail would be beneficial (though it would require the collaboration of ISPs and possibly independent certification authorities). Furthermore, spam is a technical problem and needs a technical solution not a legal one.
I dunno, Coast Guard?