"Also, this analogy fails spectacularly in the case of necessary goods. It does not take much imagination to envision a more realistic scenario wherein the baker through devious tactics ensures he has monopoly or oligopoly status and fixes the price of bread "
I'm not sure where you're going with this. Food is a necessary good. How is the free market "failing spectacularly" here?
And as far as your devious baker is concerned, by your own admission, this is not a free market. So I'm not exactly sure what lesson I'm supposed to draw from this.
More importantly, like the Grandparent's reply, it doesn't actually address my point -- i.e., why a company "owes" me anything other than offering me goods or services I need or want at a price I am willing to pay. The company could make just as persuasive a case that I owe it.
None of which really addresses anything I wrote -- e.g., why you think companies "owe" all the rest of us anything other than offering goods and services we want.
But then, the tone of your post suggests you are more of a "true believer" than anything else, leading me to doubt you have much to add in the way of discussion.
Absolutely false. It's been pointed out time and time again that union salaries + benefits + restrictive work rules impose a much greater cost/unit on UAW shops than they do on non-unionized shops.
And if they didn't, I mean, what would the point of a union be? The whole point of a union is to transfer wealth from owners and consumers to union members.
"If a company is going to profit from operating within a society, why shouldn't it be expected to support that society?"
Milton Friedman often spoke about this fallacy. It is based on a misunderstanding of the free market.
You think that when you use your money to buy a loaf of bread, the breadmaker profits. But this is only half-correct. *You profit, too.*
The breadmaker values the two dollars that you have more than he values the loaf of bread that he has; that is why he is willing to trade.
But by the same token, YOU value his loaf of bread more than you value the two dollars in your pocket. That is why YOU are willing to trade.
Your "profit" is the degree to which you value the bread more than you value the $2.
In a truly free market, then, companies don't owe "society" anything beyond what they already do: Provide goods and services that citizens value more than they value their own money.
Or, to put it another way: After you "sell" your dollars to the baker in exchange for his bread, do you still "owe" the baker something?
"The average Republican gets more financial aid from the US Government than they pay in taxes, the average Democrat gets less in financial aid from the US Government than they pay in taxes."
I really, really need a cite for these assertions. Do the figures include benefits/service to illegal immigrants? Do they include people who pay NO taxes? I'm not saying your assertions aren't true; just that I need to see the source before I unquestioningly accept them.
"[conservatives]...lead to authoritarianism" "[liberals]... lead to chaos"
This only holds true if you ignore Stalin, Mao, Pol pot, the French Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum.
Historically, revolutionaries who prefer high risk/high reward behavior eventually realize that for their high-reward scheme to work, everyone needs to buy in. Those who don't, well, you can't make an omelet without cracking a few eggs.
A few excerpts from the Wikipedia page:...violent land seizure...disputed presidential elections...opposition leaders mysteriously died...an opposing newspaper's printing press was bombed and its journalists tortured...widespread vote-rigging and intimidation...another election marred by allegations of election fraud and intimidation...a campaign marked by widespread intimidation, outright violence, and Mugabe's threat to continue the civil war if he lost...
1. As pointed out above, the US didn't put Saddam in power. This is just something some people WANT to believe. That doesn't make it so.
2. Your facts are wrong, or at least inaccurate. It's true that Saddam was a known thug. But from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, Saddam was widely considered by the West to be LESS thuggish than the alternatives. He was, in fact, considered a promising step toward the modernization of the Middle East. He was secular and RELATIVELY progressive; e.g., eliminating restrictions on women's education and the like.
The facts are more complex than you get in Slashdot posts. We all want to see things in a way that neatly wraps up all our preconceived ideas. So if you can't bear to think that the US actually removed a psychopathic dictator from power, you just look for any little grain that will let you rationalize it away -- like the idea that the US was responsible for Saddam in the first place.
Myth. Sadam didn't need U.S. help getting into power. There are some things that happen, believe it or not, without the all-powerful USA pulling strings behind the scenes.
Don't get me wrong -- the CIA was all over the Middle East in the mid-to-late 1950s, and they had peripheral involvement in just about everything. But there is no evidence whatsoever that the CIA played any kind of fundamental role in his acendancy to party power.
The "we put Saddam in power" thing is willful disbelief at its worst -- just a trope trotted out by those who can't bring themselves to admit that at least SOME good was done in forcibly removing a psychopathic dictator from power. The only rationalization they can come up with is, "Well, that wouldn't matter if the US was the one that put him there to begin with!" So they believe it.
WOW!! As a long-time editor, that Forbes article is CRAZY.
99 percent of the article is pure ad hominem. She continually blasts bromenshenk's study, but can never come out and say the study is actually wrong. Toward the end of the article, she enlists the aid of Dr. James Frazier. "Aha," the reader thinks: "Finally some real scientific criticism." But Dr. Frazier's criticism is -- more ad hominem!!
The author seems to think the study is shady because it doesn't rule out pesticides as possibly contributing... but then at the end of the article, is forced to concede that the study itself lays this out perfectly clearly!
Finally, some critical issues are glossed over. Like this:
"In June 2008 a district court judge in Pennsylvania defanged the beekeepers' lawsuit by siding with Bayer to exclude Mayer's testimony and the initial test results from a laboratory in Jacksonville, Fla., that had found significant amounts of Imidacloprid in the honeybee samples."
OK --- WHY!?! Why was the testimony excluded? What was the reason? Was it improper somehow?
When read with a close, critical eye, that article has serious, serious problems. A good editor would have raised all these points with the author before publication.
This may be the single worst Slashdot story thread I've ever seen.
Take you, for example. Please provide one single cite of an influential thinker who has "literal" (sic) said "The free market is perfect."
You say, "people," clearly indicating there are more than one. Seriously. ONE. SINGLE. CITE.
I'll help you narrow it down: A quick Google search turns up exactly zero hits. (Except for people saying "I'm not saying the free market is perfect..." and the like.)
Right. But it's NOT activist to strike down a law on the grounds that the constitution does not seem to authorize the government to do something -- like, require citizens to buy private insurance.
This is not like, say, Roe v. Wade. Many liberal law theorists -- Lawrence Tribe is probably the most prominent -- have pointed out that the Constitution says nothing about the right to an abortion, and that the members of the court simply "legislated from the bench," writing their own personal policy preferences into law. *That's* activism.
I agree that it's not a surprise. However, I don't know what your source is on the "forum-shopping" thing. As far as I know, the individual mandate has been challenged in courts around the country. Is that not the case?
I don't understand why people continue to trot out this old trope.
The question is: Is the judge determining, as best he can, whether the constitution grants the government the power to do a specific action; or is he simply substituting his *own personal policy preferences.*
Simply the fact that he is striking down a law doesn't mean anything. That's part of a judge's job.
And yet even the Obama administration has insisted that this is not a tax.
"For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase,” the president said last September, in a spirited exchange with George Stephanopoulos on the ABC News program “This Week.”
When Mr. Stephanopoulos said the penalty appeared to fit the dictionary definition of a tax, Mr. Obama replied, “I absolutely reject that notion.”
Erik, I'm not going to get into some drawn-out debate over this, but you're incorrect about LaHood not being highly placed enough to set government direction (WRT, of course, to transportation policy).
LaHood's peers are people like Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. These are not "go-betweens for the actual leaders." They *are* the leaders in their own respective areas. The only person they report to is the president himself.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting way to look at it!
- AJ
"Also, this analogy fails spectacularly in the case of necessary goods. It does not take much imagination to envision a more realistic scenario wherein the baker through devious tactics ensures he has monopoly or oligopoly status and fixes the price of bread "
I'm not sure where you're going with this. Food is a necessary good. How is the free market "failing spectacularly" here?
And as far as your devious baker is concerned, by your own admission, this is not a free market. So I'm not exactly sure what lesson I'm supposed to draw from this.
More importantly, like the Grandparent's reply, it doesn't actually address my point -- i.e., why a company "owes" me anything other than offering me goods or services I need or want at a price I am willing to pay. The company could make just as persuasive a case that I owe it.
- AJ
None of which really addresses anything I wrote -- e.g., why you think companies "owe" all the rest of us anything other than offering goods and services we want.
But then, the tone of your post suggests you are more of a "true believer" than anything else, leading me to doubt you have much to add in the way of discussion.
Cheers,
- AJ
Absolutely false. It's been pointed out time and time again that union salaries + benefits + restrictive work rules impose a much greater cost/unit on UAW shops than they do on non-unionized shops.
And if they didn't, I mean, what would the point of a union be? The whole point of a union is to transfer wealth from owners and consumers to union members.
- AJ
Your Holiness -
"If a company is going to profit from operating within a society, why shouldn't it be expected to support that society?"
Milton Friedman often spoke about this fallacy. It is based on a misunderstanding of the free market.
You think that when you use your money to buy a loaf of bread, the breadmaker profits. But this is only half-correct. *You profit, too.*
The breadmaker values the two dollars that you have more than he values the loaf of bread that he has; that is why he is willing to trade.
But by the same token, YOU value his loaf of bread more than you value the two dollars in your pocket. That is why YOU are willing to trade.
Your "profit" is the degree to which you value the bread more than you value the $2.
In a truly free market, then, companies don't owe "society" anything beyond what they already do: Provide goods and services that citizens value more than they value their own money.
Or, to put it another way: After you "sell" your dollars to the baker in exchange for his bread, do you still "owe" the baker something?
- AJ
Of course, dolphins rarely mistype their own initials, so what do I know?
- AJ
Where are dolphin hospitals?
- AH
Nuff said
"The average Republican gets more financial aid from the US Government than they pay in taxes, the average Democrat gets less in financial aid from the US Government than they pay in taxes."
I really, really need a cite for these assertions. Do the figures include benefits/service to illegal immigrants? Do they include people who pay NO taxes? I'm not saying your assertions aren't true; just that I need to see the source before I unquestioningly accept them.
- AJ
"[conservatives]...lead to authoritarianism" ... lead to chaos"
"[liberals]
This only holds true if you ignore Stalin, Mao, Pol pot, the French Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum.
Historically, revolutionaries who prefer high risk/high reward behavior eventually realize that for their high-reward scheme to work, everyone needs to buy in. Those who don't, well, you can't make an omelet without cracking a few eggs.
- AJ
You keep posting that link. What exactly in it do you believe supports your proposition?
- AJ
Dear H4rr4r:
It evidently has escaped your notice that Iran and Iraq are two different countries. We are talking about Iraq in this conversation.
Sincerely,
- AJ
Circular logic. The reformers were the ones trying to get Mugabe OUT of power.
- AJ
A few excerpts from the Wikipedia page: ...violent land seizure...disputed presidential elections...opposition leaders mysteriously died...an opposing newspaper's printing press was bombed and its journalists tortured...widespread vote-rigging and intimidation...another election marred by allegations of election fraud and intimidation...a campaign marked by widespread intimidation, outright violence, and Mugabe's threat to continue the civil war if he lost...
etc etc.
I pointed out in a different post how you simply believe what you want to believe, facts be damned. This is another example.
I've read the Wikipedia article, and actually followed the source notes. Now, which of them do you claim actually supports your point?
- AJ
PS The only thing that makes me think you might be right were all the F-16s, M-1 tanks and M-16s the Iraqi military used.
OH WAIT A MINUTE! Those were MiGs, Soviet T-72s and AK-47s! My mistake.
1. As pointed out above, the US didn't put Saddam in power. This is just something some people WANT to believe. That doesn't make it so.
2. Your facts are wrong, or at least inaccurate. It's true that Saddam was a known thug. But from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, Saddam was widely considered by the West to be LESS thuggish than the alternatives. He was, in fact, considered a promising step toward the modernization of the Middle East. He was secular and RELATIVELY progressive; e.g., eliminating restrictions on women's education and the like.
The facts are more complex than you get in Slashdot posts. We all want to see things in a way that neatly wraps up all our preconceived ideas. So if you can't bear to think that the US actually removed a psychopathic dictator from power, you just look for any little grain that will let you rationalize it away -- like the idea that the US was responsible for Saddam in the first place.
- AJ
Myth. Sadam didn't need U.S. help getting into power. There are some things that happen, believe it or not, without the all-powerful USA pulling strings behind the scenes.
Don't get me wrong -- the CIA was all over the Middle East in the mid-to-late 1950s, and they had peripheral involvement in just about everything. But there is no evidence whatsoever that the CIA played any kind of fundamental role in his acendancy to party power.
The "we put Saddam in power" thing is willful disbelief at its worst -- just a trope trotted out by those who can't bring themselves to admit that at least SOME good was done in forcibly removing a psychopathic dictator from power. The only rationalization they can come up with is, "Well, that wouldn't matter if the US was the one that put him there to begin with!" So they believe it.
- AJ
WOW!! As a long-time editor, that Forbes article is CRAZY.
99 percent of the article is pure ad hominem. She continually blasts bromenshenk's study, but can never come out and say the study is actually wrong. Toward the end of the article, she enlists the aid of Dr. James Frazier. "Aha," the reader thinks: "Finally some real scientific criticism." But Dr. Frazier's criticism is -- more ad hominem!!
The author seems to think the study is shady because it doesn't rule out pesticides as possibly contributing... but then at the end of the article, is forced to concede that the study itself lays this out perfectly clearly!
Finally, some critical issues are glossed over. Like this:
"In June 2008 a district court judge in Pennsylvania defanged the beekeepers' lawsuit by siding with Bayer to exclude Mayer's testimony and the initial test results from a laboratory in Jacksonville, Fla., that had found significant amounts of Imidacloprid in the honeybee samples."
OK --- WHY!?! Why was the testimony excluded? What was the reason? Was it improper somehow?
When read with a close, critical eye, that article has serious, serious problems. A good editor would have raised all these points with the author before publication.
- AJ
This may be the single worst Slashdot story thread I've ever seen.
Take you, for example. Please provide one single cite of an influential thinker who has "literal" (sic) said "The free market is perfect."
You say, "people," clearly indicating there are more than one. Seriously. ONE. SINGLE. CITE.
I'll help you narrow it down: A quick Google search turns up exactly zero hits. (Except for people saying "I'm not saying the free market is perfect..." and the like.)
Come on, Geekoid.
ONE. SINGLE. CITE.
- Alaska Jack
Right. But it's NOT activist to strike down a law on the grounds that the constitution does not seem to authorize the government to do something -- like, require citizens to buy private insurance.
This is not like, say, Roe v. Wade. Many liberal law theorists -- Lawrence Tribe is probably the most prominent -- have pointed out that the Constitution says nothing about the right to an abortion, and that the members of the court simply "legislated from the bench," writing their own personal policy preferences into law. *That's* activism.
- AJ
Your self-righteous rant *completely disregarded* the point you seem to be replying to.
Go ahead, re-read it. It's only a few sentences.
- AJ
I agree that it's not a surprise. However, I don't know what your source is on the "forum-shopping" thing. As far as I know, the individual mandate has been challenged in courts around the country. Is that not the case?
- AJ
I don't understand why people continue to trot out this old trope.
The question is: Is the judge determining, as best he can, whether the constitution grants the government the power to do a specific action; or is he simply substituting his *own personal policy preferences.*
Simply the fact that he is striking down a law doesn't mean anything. That's part of a judge's job.
- AJ
And yet even the Obama administration has insisted that this is not a tax.
"For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase,” the president said last September, in a spirited exchange with George Stephanopoulos on the ABC News program “This Week.”
When Mr. Stephanopoulos said the penalty appeared to fit the dictionary definition of a tax, Mr. Obama replied, “I absolutely reject that notion.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/health/policy/18health.html
To put it another way, if what you say is true, why didn't the administration simply levy a tax?
(Not trying to be snotty here; I genuinely don't know the answer to this.)
- Alaska Jack
Erik, I'm not going to get into some drawn-out debate over this, but you're incorrect about LaHood not being highly placed enough to set government direction (WRT, of course, to transportation policy).
LaHood's peers are people like Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. These are not "go-betweens for the actual leaders." They *are* the leaders in their own respective areas. The only person they report to is the president himself.
- AJ