The grandparent is right. Air is less scarce than spectrum. But there's another difference. You pointed it out. You're calling air a shared resource. Some cultures have successfully considered land a shared resource, too. Sometimes, though, you can derive more value out of a resource by partitioning it and privatizing it. That would be difficult to do with air, but is easy to enforce with the spectrum.
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.
There are two reasons that I can think of that someone would buy up a natural resource (like land or spectrum) and not use it to its full potential (as opposed to merely "not actually using it"). Both are mentioned in my original post.
A real estate speculator (to use your example) might buy land only to sell when he thinks it will be more valuable, without trying to improve it or make productive use out of it.
Hoarding can make a resource more valuable by creating scarcity. It can also make poor use of a resource more profitable by eliminating competition.
There's also an ethical question about natural resources not subject to taxes. Theoretically, future members of a society with full property rights and no taxes could legally be excluded from owning anything, and used as de facto slaves.
1. Get _____ 3rd party candidate elected.
2. Get Bush out of office.
In reality, voting for the 3rd party candidate contributes to the failure of both goals (goal 1 is already at 100% failure). Voting for Kerry leaves goal 1 at its predetermined failure state, but actually does something towards goal 2.
It will contribute nothing towards goal 2 unless you cast a deciding vote to determine a deciding electoral college vote.
Of course, if you're going to look at the issue in more than a black & white sense, you might consider that people vote for a 3rd party for reasons other than to get the candidate elected in that race.
This vote will be cast to generate interest in libertarianism. I don't like the Libertarian Party platform in general (for instance, I'd support geolibertarianism), and I think there are some unresolved issues in the libertarian model, but I also think that libertarianism is the right direction from the point we are right now.
You tallied the votes incorrectly. You added up the number of victories that each candidate had on each individual ballot.
Condorcet tallying requires that you preserve pairwise tallying across ballots. So, in your example, Voter 1 and Voter 2 prefer Bush to Nader, and Voter 3 prefers Nader to Bush. The Bush-Nader pairwise tally is 2-1. Whether or not Voter 3 prefers Bush to any of the other candidates will not affect Bush-Nader pairwise tally.
Good example showing Condorcet beating approval voting. However, I would say that monotonicity gives approval voting a huge advantage over IRV, and the increased preference expression gives it a huge advantage over plurality.
Perfect markets (the ones conservatives crow about incessantly) require perfect information.
Yes. So would a perfect centralized government. The question for pragmatists is, which can better handle imperfect information? I would say a decentralized system can.
Think about that the next time you hear them blather on about wonders of the free market.
I've noticed a lot of backlash about the market recently. Usually, it consists of someone mentioning that markets aren't perfect without perfect information, and then implying that anyone who thinks that markets are fundamentally important are ranting, brainwashed ideologues. Then the person usually has nothing more to say on the subject.
It kind of reminds me when some were trying to pretend that the liberal bias of the media doesn't exist, and that, if anything, it had a conservative bias.
How odd that you argue against privatization in favor of continued public ownership of the spectrum and simultaneously apologize to "socialists" for your purportedly right-wing bent. You're on a slipperly slope there, sport. As penance, I assign you 5 hours of EIB listening.
Ugh. I'd rather watch 24 hours of Fox News. Anyway -- I'm speaking from a geolibertarian slant. There are no taxes on production, so everyone owns his work. However, taxes on the raw value of limited resources (land, frequencies) are not only permissible, but necessary, to prevent monopolization. Squatters' rights don't apply. This should be attractive to socialists, of course, since everyone gets an equal grab at the means of production (even those born after everything has been claimed). However, it is also an essentially decentralized system, which is probably the most important point in libertarianism. In short, it wasn't meant as an attack from the right. Rather, a criticism from--whatever direction geolibertarianism would be (the enlightened center? (I'm straddling the mountain peak with a slippery slope in all directions!;) )).
I think I'd rather live in a TV-controlled society than a church-controlled one.
I think America is getting to the point where just about everyone is paranoid about being surrounded by ideologues. Maybe that's because we are. One thing that seems to keep it going is the constant pitting of ideologies against each other.
For instance, Bush vs. Kerry: most voters don't seem to be passionate about the virtues of one of the candidates--they're whipped into hating and fearing the opposite agenda.
A TV-controlled society could be anything--so could a church-controlled one--all depending on the programming or doctrine, respectively. You don't get bonus points for hating churches as an ideological vehicle.
They aren't permanently sold, they're licensed. The FCC is taking back VHF and UHF, after all. They couldn't do that if they were "owned" like property.
And they do pay licensing fees, application fees, they pay a huge fee to petition the FCC to increase their broadcast power and range, for instance.
The grandparent still has a point. A continual tax rather than lump-sum fees could encourage a better market (apologies to socialist types to whom the word is anathema) for the allocation of frequencies. It could be easier for indies to buy some space and grow. I would expect television programming to improve.
Umm, "imposing costs on the source" is essentially what pollution credits are doing. In his link about the environment, Badnarik says explicity that he opposes these. If the government we have now uses pollution credits for certain types of pollution (and is investigating extending their use), how is voting for Badnarik going to help shift policies in that direction? It is his intention to shift policies in the exact opposite direction.
Badnarik doesn't seem to be promoting the flavour of libertarianism that I'd like to see implemented. However, since he is unlikely to be elected, I believe a vote for him is effectively support for (i) general Libertarian Party policy principles and (ii) greater media coverage and public discourse. I also believe that as it grows and begins to nip at the heels of viability, the LP will be more interested in practical features of libertarianism that are consistent with its philisophic core (Land Value Tax and its corrolaries, imposing costs for externalities, etc).
I flirted with libertarianism when I was in college, but soon realized the fundamental problem with it: all success is predicated on people behaving a certain way, a way which 10,000 years of human experience shows is antithetical to human nature. (This by the way, is true of many ideologies - communism, facsim, etc.) As an example, the libertarian view on pollution (in a nutshell) is that government should not be involved....
You are using pollution as an example of an "externality." Many detractors of libertarianism bring this up. The short answer is that it is well within the scope of a libertarian government to address externalities, by, say, imposing costs on the source. Whether the idea is practical is another matter. Also, while libertarianism philisophically can accomodate this solution (and may even require it), the platform of the Libertarian Party may exclude it. However, I'd still vote for the LP to throw my weight into shifting policies and discussion in that general direction.
and in fact that top 1% has been _very_ active in things like buying politicians to get various forms of corporate welfare like H-1b/L-1 expansion and getting granted the use of the public airwaves free of charge
Corporate welfare: would be out under the libertarian system.
Public airwaves: taxing use of these is a natural extension to the idea of the Land Value Tax.
...The key concept here is "cost of insurance" is zero for land only if you discount the cost of national defense and other societal structures that guarantee land rights. Think about government as reinsurer of last resort and you can start to see that not all assets of a given value have the same cost of ownership. For example, skyscrapers that are symbolic of some hated value system world-wide will necessarily have a higher reinsurance premium associated with them than will some number of undeveloped desert land of comparable value. This is where actuaries make their money.
The net asset tax would use the value of the assets as a heuristic for determining the cost of insurance, then? It makes sense to me except for a couple of things:
What value would be placed on a citizen's life, which the government would also ostensibly be protecting with the same defense system? If it is very large, each citizen would essentially owe the same amount.
You mention that hated skyscrapers would have a higher cost of insurance--which is true--but being hated wouldn't increase their value. I imagine there are many assets which have a cost of insurance that doesn't line up well with their value.
Would a citizen with twice the assets be entitled to twice the protective force?
In a strictly libertarian society, the costs of protection of rights fall on the owners of those rights -- not on the general public.
Are you saying that a strictly libertarian society would charge per-use fees for the protection of rights, or general fees? Because I don't think that the former is necessary to qualify as strictly libertarian, and the latter would essentially be "the general public" paying the costs.
I read some of your white paper on a comprehensive net asset tax. Isn't it a tax on production if the tax I pay increases when I make improvements on an asset that I've registered? Wouldn't it be better to tax solely on the unimproved value of the raw resource?
How do you feel about geolibertarianism? Are you for, against, or indifferent to the idea of a Land Value Tax as a way to charge for control of resources without taxing productivity?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, at least I was the first in this thread to mention it.
Note that they came from cord blood; they weren't embryonic stem cells.
That's because we bought them off.
The grandparent is right. Air is less scarce than spectrum. But there's another difference. You pointed it out. You're calling air a shared resource. Some cultures have successfully considered land a shared resource, too. Sometimes, though, you can derive more value out of a resource by partitioning it and privatizing it. That would be difficult to do with air, but is easy to enforce with the spectrum.
There are two reasons that I can think of that someone would buy up a natural resource (like land or spectrum) and not use it to its full potential (as opposed to merely "not actually using it"). Both are mentioned in my original post.
A real estate speculator (to use your example) might buy land only to sell when he thinks it will be more valuable, without trying to improve it or make productive use out of it.
Hoarding can make a resource more valuable by creating scarcity. It can also make poor use of a resource more profitable by eliminating competition.
There's also an ethical question about natural resources not subject to taxes. Theoretically, future members of a society with full property rights and no taxes could legally be excluded from owning anything, and used as de facto slaves.
This is a good idea, as long as there will be a natural resource tax to reduce hoarding and speculation.
It will contribute nothing towards goal 2 unless you cast a deciding vote to determine a deciding electoral college vote.
Of course, if you're going to look at the issue in more than a black & white sense, you might consider that people vote for a 3rd party for reasons other than to get the candidate elected in that race.
This vote will be cast to generate interest in libertarianism. I don't like the Libertarian Party platform in general (for instance, I'd support geolibertarianism), and I think there are some unresolved issues in the libertarian model, but I also think that libertarianism is the right direction from the point we are right now.
Condorcet tallying requires that you preserve pairwise tallying across ballots. So, in your example, Voter 1 and Voter 2 prefer Bush to Nader, and Voter 3 prefers Nader to Bush. The Bush-Nader pairwise tally is 2-1. Whether or not Voter 3 prefers Bush to any of the other candidates will not affect Bush-Nader pairwise tally.
Good example showing Condorcet beating approval voting. However, I would say that monotonicity gives approval voting a huge advantage over IRV, and the increased preference expression gives it a huge advantage over plurality.
Yes. So would a perfect centralized government. The question for pragmatists is, which can better handle imperfect information? I would say a decentralized system can.
Think about that the next time you hear them blather on about wonders of the free market.
I've noticed a lot of backlash about the market recently. Usually, it consists of someone mentioning that markets aren't perfect without perfect information, and then implying that anyone who thinks that markets are fundamentally important are ranting, brainwashed ideologues. Then the person usually has nothing more to say on the subject.
It kind of reminds me when some were trying to pretend that the liberal bias of the media doesn't exist, and that, if anything, it had a conservative bias.
I think there's good reason to.
Maybe he could debate the grand-uncle post's left nard.
Ugh. I'd rather watch 24 hours of Fox News. Anyway -- I'm speaking from a geolibertarian slant. There are no taxes on production, so everyone owns his work. However, taxes on the raw value of limited resources (land, frequencies) are not only permissible, but necessary, to prevent monopolization. Squatters' rights don't apply. This should be attractive to socialists, of course, since everyone gets an equal grab at the means of production (even those born after everything has been claimed). However, it is also an essentially decentralized system, which is probably the most important point in libertarianism. In short, it wasn't meant as an attack from the right. Rather, a criticism from--whatever direction geolibertarianism would be (the enlightened center? (I'm straddling the mountain peak with a slippery slope in all directions! ;) )).
I think America is getting to the point where just about everyone is paranoid about being surrounded by ideologues. Maybe that's because we are. One thing that seems to keep it going is the constant pitting of ideologies against each other.
For instance, Bush vs. Kerry: most voters don't seem to be passionate about the virtues of one of the candidates--they're whipped into hating and fearing the opposite agenda.
A TV-controlled society could be anything--so could a church-controlled one--all depending on the programming or doctrine, respectively. You don't get bonus points for hating churches as an ideological vehicle.
I would argue that they are the same, too. That's why I'd hope to see a Land Value Tax equivalent for the airwaves.
The grandparent still has a point. A continual tax rather than lump-sum fees could encourage a better market (apologies to socialist types to whom the word is anathema) for the allocation of frequencies. It could be easier for indies to buy some space and grow. I would expect television programming to improve.
Badnarik doesn't seem to be promoting the flavour of libertarianism that I'd like to see implemented. However, since he is unlikely to be elected, I believe a vote for him is effectively support for (i) general Libertarian Party policy principles and (ii) greater media coverage and public discourse. I also believe that as it grows and begins to nip at the heels of viability, the LP will be more interested in practical features of libertarianism that are consistent with its philisophic core (Land Value Tax and its corrolaries, imposing costs for externalities, etc).
You are using pollution as an example of an "externality." Many detractors of libertarianism bring this up. The short answer is that it is well within the scope of a libertarian government to address externalities, by, say, imposing costs on the source. Whether the idea is practical is another matter. Also, while libertarianism philisophically can accomodate this solution (and may even require it), the platform of the Libertarian Party may exclude it. However, I'd still vote for the LP to throw my weight into shifting policies and discussion in that general direction.
Corporate welfare: would be out under the libertarian system.
Public airwaves: taxing use of these is a natural extension to the idea of the Land Value Tax.
The net asset tax would use the value of the assets as a heuristic for determining the cost of insurance, then? It makes sense to me except for a couple of things:
What value would be placed on a citizen's life, which the government would also ostensibly be protecting with the same defense system? If it is very large, each citizen would essentially owe the same amount.
You mention that hated skyscrapers would have a higher cost of insurance--which is true--but being hated wouldn't increase their value. I imagine there are many assets which have a cost of insurance that doesn't line up well with their value.
Would a citizen with twice the assets be entitled to twice the protective force?
Are you saying that a strictly libertarian society would charge per-use fees for the protection of rights, or general fees? Because I don't think that the former is necessary to qualify as strictly libertarian, and the latter would essentially be "the general public" paying the costs.
I read some of your white paper on a comprehensive net asset tax. Isn't it a tax on production if the tax I pay increases when I make improvements on an asset that I've registered? Wouldn't it be better to tax solely on the unimproved value of the raw resource?
How do you feel about geolibertarianism? Are you for, against, or indifferent to the idea of a Land Value Tax as a way to charge for control of resources without taxing productivity?
FL?
Far-off Lands?
Foreign Leadership Camp?
Fish Lake?
Oh, I get it, he's from Fish Lake.
Oh. This belongs under Your Rights Online, then.