I don't necessarily think that governments are *bad* at intervention; what could we compare them to? They're certainly less efficient than markets, but they can help correct market inefficiencies through taxes and regulation, and we need them for police protection and the like.
Okay, there is inefficiency, but sometimes you need to tolerate the inefficiency in order to have something that would otherwise not exist. I'm with you. I am reminded of Voltare(?)'s resposte to someone's comment "Life is hard": "Compared to what?".
People don't have to understand opportunity costs for society in a question like, "How much tax would *you* pay for the park?", so as long as they understand their own opportunity costs (which they must if they're acting rationally), measurement of preferences is feasible.
I does make a difference what you consider to be the default state of things, though, mostly due to transaction costs. From an initial position of freedom, rather than ownership, the question could be "What would I have to bribe you to given up the use of the park..?" Often a large part of the park's value is reflected in the prices of nearby houses, which is a clue, but it is always worth remembering that those who are resident are those who most value the facility, whereas the selling price is to those who almost by definition value it less (as they would otherwise already own such a house), and besides, people will appreciate it from further afield.
Actually, this is an important general point, which follows from the assumption that both sides gain from a trade: any calulation of productivity based upon price is in fact a lower bound, and thus there is no guarantee that an increased figure for productivity in fact reflects a real increase in productivity. That family restuarant that was assurped by the more apparently productive food chain could in fact have been delivering more value after all.
Irrationality is a real problem, and thank you for reminding me that feasibility of calculation is what we were talking about. Psychologists have something to say about it, and surveys such as, "What should you have done in hindsight regarding your purchase of xyz?" might be illustrative, but they're far from perfect.
Not only are people irrational, but they are irrational in particular ways. People are by and large creatures of habit, for example. This is one reason why a fast food chain can get away with delivering less value than a family restaurant. That is not the only factor: by being encouraged to experiment, to deviate from habit, people add to the diversity of their immediate and future experience, and quite possibly their past: a more varied life adds value to all of its experiences, as long as the incremental experience is good, neutral, or at least not too bad. More experience also adds to future freedom, and most probably future happiness.
From a freedom-based analysis, such insights are reasonable clear, if hard to quantify. The happiness-based analysis will tend to dismiss them as indirect factors, yet (because of the self-organised criticality of life), they are immensely leveraged, and treating minority activities and rare experiences as being statistically insignificant is quite possibly an inverted perspective. At the very least, such experiences are systematically underweighted.
The fact that people behave irrationally hurts economic analyses of any type, including normative analyses attempting to maximize societal happiness. The extent of this problem doesn't change what my definition of morality is, because I'm basing it on what I intuitively feel is the right definition, not on what is easy to calculate. Ease of calculation in many instances is a very good side effect only. I may not have said that earlier, and I'm sorry if I wasn't clear.
Comparison is a problem in practice, but we're all the same species, so we all experience the same things. It is a problem only because of our current technology, so it's not a problem in the theory.
We don't necessarily experience the same things: we have different pasts, and different trigger events. There is similarity, true, but not sameness. Also, in eliminating outliers for the sake of statistical consistency, we do more than superficial harm.
This is because both the accumulation of experience in an individual, and society at large exhibit self-organised criticality, so that outliers, far from being statistical noise, are critical to the dynamics of the system under study.
To emphasise freedom is to stress outliers more strongly; after all, they add to the choice space of society at large.
I get a lot of "happiness" from learning things, although it's a change in happiness that happens over a long period of time. Others may be different, and while I might have an instinctive urge to look down on them, I maintain that their happiness, whatever it may be, is morally equal to mine. I disagree with Mill on this, as I noted earlier.
With regard to the specifics of T.V. and education, it is likely that both should be subsidized by the government. Many argue that an educated populace has spillover benefits to the rest of society; free broadcast T.V. certainly does because of the monopoly problems created by copyright.
The spillover benefits are far clearer from the perspective of freedom than that of happiness. The freedom of thought of an educated (rather than eg. trained) mind is large indeed, and educated people educate others in turn in the course of their lives. The educated travel a lot more, to pick a concrete example. This isn't about snobbery, but is rather about being aware of the forces that shape society. I look down upon (almost) no-one, and see it as a character flaw when I do, but my preference for education rests in a perception of quality which I do not believe is wholly subjective, even if it is hard to quantify.
This is why I linked Pirsig's conception of the Metaphysics of Quality earlier (if you can find the time, it's worth reading Lila, IMO, where this concept is brought across in the context of a novel), where Pirsig develops a theory of what constitutes quality that is fairly consistent, and not merely a matter of opinion. It may not be the final form of such a theory, but it indicates a (non-reactionary) way out of relativism which is epecially needed today that pure research is under attack in the manner that it is. It is harder than it was ten years ago to study mathematics in Britain, for example. All subjects are not equal, and education has a value of its own which is transmissive. Mathematicians help to sharpen up the quality of other subjects, for example.
Fair trade implies that you are getting a worse deal and diminishing your own happiness. For this to be a good utilitarian decision, someone else must be benefitting more than you are harmed. The free trade argument shows that, given equal marginal happiness for the two competing sellers, this isn't the case. Even if we drop the assumption of equal marginal happiness, and the marginal happiness of the protected seller is greater than the marginal happiness of the non-protected seller, you should still buy as if you were a hedonist, because the free trade argument still shows that the protected seller is less efficient, and then donate money to a charity serving those you would have protected.
There are a number of reasons why this doesn't work. The biggest is that free trade is good at maximising wealth, not quite as good at maximising happiness. The poorest of the world would be better off i
As the author says below, this statement is broadly correct, with possibly "corrupting" as the only contentious word. Through lobbying efforts, the consumer gets to make a less informed choice; this is arguably corruption. Even if this is a contentious point, it isn't a major misrepresentation, and the parent post is intended to enlarge the debate, rather than degenerate it.
Although the author has already addressed this, it's important to point out such abuse in the subject line, so that it is more readily seen by moderators.
I would say that the networks should really start looking into it -- in about 20 years all the politicians are going to be people who lived through the shutdown of napster, the lawsuits, and the general stupidity.
I think that you're being a little optimistic. The difference between now and then is that norms will have shifted, and "intellectual property" will appear fundemental. Ordinary people already fail to understand the arguments.
I'm pretty sure you can make a damned good case against the invasion of Iraq without having to resort to calling Bush a f..king moron.
Maybe, but as I don't know how events would have gone, so I don't know enough to judge.
He had no right to say it (socially)
He had no right to say it (morally)
Legally, he's free and clear.
Socially is dubious; by saying what he said, he probably advanced free speech (which tends to whither, if it isn't exercised), which is under threat from a Straussian (right) or PC (left) sense of "responsibility". By doing so, he therefore showed a strong adherence to American values while simultaneously executing a bad tactical move, and in any case, it is a social good to resist the advance of both leftist and rightist political correctness.
Morally is more difficult, and depends to some extent to whom he is seen to have an obligation. If his obligation is to the government, then it is, but if it is to the people, then the totality of values and interests need to be accounted for, and not merely moment-to-moment tactical advantage or government calculation.
Even if what he said was dubious (and certainly, it was shallow and pointless), his collegues were right to back him up: it is important that it is seen that political correctness isn't punished, so that the robustness of debate isn't undermined, or else Canadians will find themselves unrepresented, as international norms replace democracy.
If part of your job is in a higher level of government where you are concerned with the political ramifications of statements you make - where you can affect the political, economic, and physical safety of your country when your job is to ENHANCE it - you bet you ASS you give up the right to say anything except government policy.
You're confusing social and legal obligation. Certainly, giving away national secrets is illegal (you have no right), but ill-advised comments are not illegal, unless they are hate speech (intended to induce direct physical harm, not merely offensive).
Also, you do not give up such a right to oppose the government, although to exercise your right might harm your career. If what you are saying were true, it would be absolutely impossible to have any kind of reasonable democratic debate; as an example, the question of how strongly to go into Europe has divided British cabinets through time. For the sake of a larger peace, and also for the sake of democracy, cabinet members have been allowed to campain against government policy without even being demoted.
Well, if by democratic you mean,
For all x elementof People, for all y elementof people, Valueofthehappinessof(x) = Valueofthehappinessof(y),
I don't think that it's comparable.
then that is exactly how I would compare different peoples's happinesses. I can see no reason why the happiness of those with educated minds should be favored over the happiness of the ignorant. Indeed, if society did, the ignorant would be more likely to remain ignorant, because many ignorant people wish to be educated, but are put off by the cost of it.
Mill had the idea that the joy of being cultured was superior to that of merely being indulgent. I agree with him. The outcome of this is that I am more willing to eg. pay higher taxes for others' education than I am to pay for better TV (for all), which is what my untaxed money could have otherwise done. I am not saying that an educated mind should scale more highly, but that the quality of education (including self-education) rates more highly than that of not being educated; mundane indulgent happiness is as valuable in both, but the quality of having an educated mind is usually worth being unhappy for, at least to some degree.
I'm not exactly sure how to parse this. For one thing, I don't know how you're defining "moral". Are you using the utilitarian definition? That's pretty much mine, although I'm in the process of writing a huge paper where the culmination is an extended definition.
For the purposes of this discussion, yes.
If you're talking about utilitarian morality, I don't think there's a contradiction here. If acting to make others happy makes a person happy, that's wonderful and his actions will lead to both his happiness and the happiness of others.
The point is that the acting utilitarian will find their behaviour to be optimal at a different point than the hedonist. Hedonism wasn't originally what it is now taken to be, BTW, but rather included as part of its justification that we take pleasure in doing good for others. If the utilitarian assumes all others to be hedonists, you'll get plenty of people acting similarly to how the couple do in The Gift of the Magi.
Now, in the (*snicker*) "fair trade" (*snicker*) example you use, that's actually not moral acting. People who bias their purchases toward "fair trade" products are buying based on their own preferences just like anyone else.
Ah, but the utilitarian will, quite possibly favour fair trade when, if it weren't for their adherence to utilitarianism, they'd have bought something else. Also, although I get tired of the political bullshit, don't think that fair trade is ridiculous at all. If I choose to value the education of the poor, and the intrinsic quality of their work (which is what mades fair trade superior to simple money transfer), that is, in my view, an honourable decision. It isn't only the PC who choose fair trade.
Those who understand economics know that buying "fair trade" products when they are more expensive or inferior diminishes the net happiness of the world, so they don't get value from knowing that American workers made it in an air conditioned facility with free Coke machines every 100 yards, or whatever.
I don't think that this is true. I suggest that you do something simple and take the log (or similar) of each person's wealth before you average it. A three-fold rise in the wage of someone very poor is clearly worth far more than an extra couple of cokes a day for an American factory worker. Maximising happiness (or related quality) reaches a different optimum than
I know that you misread my initial reply: yours doesn't make sense given mine.
My rules of argument tend to be: avoid ad homenium, and challenge hyperbole. This isn't about being on the left or right, but simply about undoing positive feedback loops, so that people are more likely to weigh things properly, and arrive at superior answers.
Politically, I am centrist on the economic axis, and libertarian on the social axis, and I agree that trickle-down is usually treated as an excuse, rather than just being a background effect, however, I prefer to assume goodwill in argument, for occasionally even bad people have good ideas.
Taxation is involentary spending, and yes, on it's own, it simply diminishes the money supply. However, taxation leads to spending, or to printing more money, both of which are redistributive.
Tickle-down is meant to redistribute wealth; I was simply saying that:
It takes a generation, and
There are better ways of doing it.
Taxation achieves other things than redistributing wealth, this is true, but that is in addition to its effect on wealth redistribution, so you've completely failed to defect my point that it is superior to trickle-down.
A more competitive marketplace means that there is less profit to be had, as more value is delivered to the customer, which again is superior to trickle-down, which is why it is vital to have regulation that limits monopolies.
Yes, both poor and rich spend money; trickle-down simply put buffers on the process: there is an equilibrium that isn't one person with all the wealth.
The point that I was trying to make was that almost anything is superior to trickle-down (bar old-fashioned taxation of the people for the benefit of the court and gentry); it works, insofar as it does, at a pretty slow pace. There are better ways to achieve its purpose: redistribution.
That it doesn't work well enough doesn't mean that it doesn't function at all. I was simply attempting to move away from hyperbole.
For me, those two questions can only be answered by an individual himself, since only he knows what kinds of happiness are most important to this (and I know I'm not in Mill-land anymore by saying that:)
It still leaves the problem of how to compare different people's happiness. Certainly, you can say simply "it should be democratic", but then you lose all moral content favouring eg. an educated mind (which may in fact be "unhappier", but "richer") which might (for example) cost more than more rubbish TV.
1. People act to gain their own happiness, which in a very well-behaved argument means we don't need to do anything in that case except what makes ourselves happy.
Trouble is: it isn't true, preferences are not always well-ordered in practice, and fails to take into account that other individuals might also be moral actors. For several people to be attempting to maximise world happiness, but assuming that the others are seeking to maximise their own personal happiness must lead to some interesting contradicitions.
Interestingly, you're returning to Bentham here, who set out to reform the legal system on this basis.
2. When the market isn't perfect, statistics can be used to approximate the happiness lost or gained by spillover costs and benefits. For example, an economist might ask in a survey, "Would you be willing to pay an extra $500 in taxes per year in order to have a park in your neighborhood? If not, they may then ask, "What is the maximum amount in extra taxes per year you would pay to have a park in your neighborhood?"
So, while you can't get the actual figures in utils, you can get enough information out of people to do math with socially interesting results.
Granted, this is a valuable thing to do. You need to be careful, though: people habitually neglect opportunity costs, favouring the visible over the invisible. This is a big reason why the greatest freedom is superior to the greatest happiness, IMO. It is also a good reason why one should not always favour people getting what they want, although I would not, in most cases, stop them from doing so with their own resources. Freedom can allow solutions to emerge that may not always be as efficient as a centrally determined one in simple terms, but can allow for subtleties that the centrally determined solution would neglect.
Having said that, I recognise that a local park can greatly improve both freedom and happiness. Personally, I feel that a touch of anarchism has something to offer here: property is itself a restriction; the justification for property is that it allows there to be greater freedoms than immediate indulgence, but this isn't true in every case. The local park is in fact a reversion to a freer default state of non-ownership. The local authority might clean it and otherwise look after it, but that would come out of the rough calculus which leads to different qualities of ownership and responsibility.
Also, in Mill's utilitarianism, mathematical reasoning very much applies. The goal of his philosophy was to find a way to mathematically determine the morality of behavior.
Agreed. However, this is something that can never be done in practice. "Which is the greater happiness?", and "how much of happiness X is worth happiness Y?" are questions without consistent, non-arbitary answers.
A big flaw in utilitarianism is a consistent bias towards the calculable; no wonder statists love it so much! At least "the greatest freedom..." contains a countervailing bias towards non-interference.
Gates is pro-drm because that's the only way he can get media companies to make the media content his customers want available on his OS.
If they don't produce the content, they go where?
I suspect that this is more to do with advertising and monopoly. Media companies will "endorse" MS, and also refuse to support OSs that don't "play ball". Result: advantage, Gates. If MS didn't support DRM, there'd still be plenty of content. To all comers, and not just to MS.
Is why more rich people this generation means a greater overall wealth next generation. On average, a trade made by a rich individual redistributes wealth.
This is not nearly as efficient as taxation, or a more competitive marketplace.
Is utilitarian. Stallman has consistently behaved as an "acting utilitarian" for something like "the greatest freedom of the greatest number", which incidently resolves most of the "contradictions" that the BSD crowd perceive in the GPL.
Once you've chosen a utilitarian basis from which to act, it leads to a lot of judgement calls. In this case, which freedoms are more important. Most of the arguments between Democrat and Republican supporters resolve to this issue (BTW, this is not true for politicians, which seek a compromise between this and enlarging their, and their party's empire).
Because of these judgement calls, mathematical reasoning simply doesn't apply, although it may inspire. I speak as a mathematician, myself.
On the other hand, property itself is an artificial concept.
Less so. A car can only have one driver (meaningfully) at any one time, for example. Physical items are limited.
I'm not saying that there isn't an excuse for such an incentive, insofar as it is one, but we should be aware of the degree of naturalness of our laws, if we are interested in freedom, which in practice means that regulation should work with the grain of things.
It's not that markets are artificial, it's that IP is artificial property. Literally: that ideas can be restricted in their domain of use is a human artifice.
You should understand, I come from a Anarcho-Syndicalist background, which is a slightly socialist leaning form of Anarchism, while Libertarianism is a very capitalist leaning form of Anarchy, and there's nothing an Anarchist hates more than another Anarchist who got it almost, but not quite right.;-)
Cool. When I was an anarchist, I sat awkwardly halfway between the ACs and ASs; I get the general sense that AC and AS are conventional political categories that appeal to our (partially socialised) human character.
With property as a positive right, it's humourous to see it as being seen as fundemental. The arguments within AC ranks about "Intellectual Property" make me smile to see how both sides distort and obscure the real issues. On my part, I distinguish "capitalism" (the doctorine of property) with "free market" (a freedom-based system of production and exchange).
Syndicalism, I see as a bastard child of anarchism and Marxism. Not to say that it has nothing to offer, but it weakens the potency of anarchism by minimising individualist solutions. It also risks approaching communitarianism, which is more restrictive than democracy, for sustained dissent is anti-community, rather than being a spur to improve the norms, and a source of future potential if the existing solution doesn't work out.
For anything like anarchism to function long-term, you need to start with love of diversity, and AC stamps on that by prescribing the solution. However, AS risks confounding "minority" with pre-indentified groups with a historical grievance, as presently occurs on the left. The (evolutionary) value of diversity is that one is ready for the future, whereas the leftist's concept is centred on the past.
It all comes to how one rates their freedom with safety. Some agree with the president (and the previous one) and his administration, that safety is more important than freedom. Others, myself included, argue that freedom is more important than safety.
It's not just about how far we are along a line between freedom and saftey; it's also about perception, and the inability of people to recognise the true meaning of probabilities such as one in a million.
Government is increasingly about perception, as is corporate life. "Language is reality" is the mantra expression the attitude that underlies this shift of attitude; it is a shift that originates on the left, but (especially post Leo Strauss) now encompasses the entire political spectrum. In practice, this is translated into "perception is reality", so that one "should" react to fears, rather than risks.
If it were all about a simple line between freedom and saftey, why isn't road saftey receiving more attention, for example?
You are supposed to be training them for the work place.
Not yet. If you do that from the beginning, they'll never learn fundementals.
Also, the lack of a need to get a product out of the door means that you can spend time on things that give a foundation. That educational requirements are different is an advantage. Which firms, for example, would spend three years teaching someone a maths degree? Yet those same firms would gladly hire a mathematician!
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Okay, there is inefficiency, but sometimes you need to tolerate the inefficiency in order to have something that would otherwise not exist. I'm with you. I am reminded of Voltare(?)'s resposte to someone's comment "Life is hard": "Compared to what?".
I does make a difference what you consider to be the default state of things, though, mostly due to transaction costs. From an initial position of freedom, rather than ownership, the question could be "What would I have to bribe you to given up the use of the park..?" Often a large part of the park's value is reflected in the prices of nearby houses, which is a clue, but it is always worth remembering that those who are resident are those who most value the facility, whereas the selling price is to those who almost by definition value it less (as they would otherwise already own such a house), and besides, people will appreciate it from further afield.
Actually, this is an important general point, which follows from the assumption that both sides gain from a trade: any calulation of productivity based upon price is in fact a lower bound, and thus there is no guarantee that an increased figure for productivity in fact reflects a real increase in productivity. That family restuarant that was assurped by the more apparently productive food chain could in fact have been delivering more value after all.
Not only are people irrational, but they are irrational in particular ways. People are by and large creatures of habit, for example. This is one reason why a fast food chain can get away with delivering less value than a family restaurant. That is not the only factor: by being encouraged to experiment, to deviate from habit, people add to the diversity of their immediate and future experience, and quite possibly their past: a more varied life adds value to all of its experiences, as long as the incremental experience is good, neutral, or at least not too bad. More experience also adds to future freedom, and most probably future happiness.
From a freedom-based analysis, such insights are reasonable clear, if hard to quantify. The happiness-based analysis will tend to dismiss them as indirect factors, yet (because of the self-organised criticality of life), they are immensely leveraged, and treating minority activities and rare experiences as being statistically insignificant is quite possibly an inverted perspective. At the very least, such experiences are systematically underweighted.
Well, I'm glad that you're trying to do the righ
We don't necessarily experience the same things: we have different pasts, and different trigger events. There is similarity, true, but not sameness. Also, in eliminating outliers for the sake of statistical consistency, we do more than superficial harm.
This is because both the accumulation of experience in an individual, and society at large exhibit self-organised criticality, so that outliers, far from being statistical noise, are critical to the dynamics of the system under study.
To emphasise freedom is to stress outliers more strongly; after all, they add to the choice space of society at large.
The spillover benefits are far clearer from the perspective of freedom than that of happiness. The freedom of thought of an educated (rather than eg. trained) mind is large indeed, and educated people educate others in turn in the course of their lives. The educated travel a lot more, to pick a concrete example. This isn't about snobbery, but is rather about being aware of the forces that shape society. I look down upon (almost) no-one, and see it as a character flaw when I do, but my preference for education rests in a perception of quality which I do not believe is wholly subjective, even if it is hard to quantify.
This is why I linked Pirsig's conception of the Metaphysics of Quality earlier (if you can find the time, it's worth reading Lila, IMO, where this concept is brought across in the context of a novel), where Pirsig develops a theory of what constitutes quality that is fairly consistent, and not merely a matter of opinion. It may not be the final form of such a theory, but it indicates a (non-reactionary) way out of relativism which is epecially needed today that pure research is under attack in the manner that it is. It is harder than it was ten years ago to study mathematics in Britain, for example. All subjects are not equal, and education has a value of its own which is transmissive. Mathematicians help to sharpen up the quality of other subjects, for example.
There are a number of reasons why this doesn't work. The biggest is that free trade is good at maximising wealth, not quite as good at maximising happiness. The poorest of the world would be better off i
As the author says below, this statement is broadly correct, with possibly "corrupting" as the only contentious word. Through lobbying efforts, the consumer gets to make a less informed choice; this is arguably corruption. Even if this is a contentious point, it isn't a major misrepresentation, and the parent post is intended to enlarge the debate, rather than degenerate it.
Although the author has already addressed this, it's important to point out such abuse in the subject line, so that it is more readily seen by moderators.
Morally is more difficult, and depends to some extent to whom he is seen to have an obligation. If his obligation is to the government, then it is, but if it is to the people, then the totality of values and interests need to be accounted for, and not merely moment-to-moment tactical advantage or government calculation.
Even if what he said was dubious (and certainly, it was shallow and pointless), his collegues were right to back him up: it is important that it is seen that political correctness isn't punished, so that the robustness of debate isn't undermined, or else Canadians will find themselves unrepresented, as international norms replace democracy.
Also, you do not give up such a right to oppose the government, although to exercise your right might harm your career. If what you are saying were true, it would be absolutely impossible to have any kind of reasonable democratic debate; as an example, the question of how strongly to go into Europe has divided British cabinets through time. For the sake of a larger peace, and also for the sake of democracy, cabinet members have been allowed to campain against government policy without even being demoted.
I don't think that it's comparable.
Mill had the idea that the joy of being cultured was superior to that of merely being indulgent. I agree with him. The outcome of this is that I am more willing to eg. pay higher taxes for others' education than I am to pay for better TV (for all), which is what my untaxed money could have otherwise done. I am not saying that an educated mind should scale more highly, but that the quality of education (including self-education) rates more highly than that of not being educated; mundane indulgent happiness is as valuable in both, but the quality of having an educated mind is usually worth being unhappy for, at least to some degree.
Robert Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality has something to offer here, I believe.
For the purposes of this discussion, yes.
The point is that the acting utilitarian will find their behaviour to be optimal at a different point than the hedonist. Hedonism wasn't originally what it is now taken to be, BTW, but rather included as part of its justification that we take pleasure in doing good for others. If the utilitarian assumes all others to be hedonists, you'll get plenty of people acting similarly to how the couple do in The Gift of the Magi.
Ah, but the utilitarian will, quite possibly favour fair trade when, if it weren't for their adherence to utilitarianism, they'd have bought something else. Also, although I get tired of the political bullshit, don't think that fair trade is ridiculous at all. If I choose to value the education of the poor, and the intrinsic quality of their work (which is what mades fair trade superior to simple money transfer), that is, in my view, an honourable decision. It isn't only the PC who choose fair trade.
I don't think that this is true. I suggest that you do something simple and take the log (or similar) of each person's wealth before you average it. A three-fold rise in the wage of someone very poor is clearly worth far more than an extra couple of cokes a day for an American factory worker. Maximising happiness (or related quality) reaches a different optimum than
My rules of argument tend to be: avoid ad homenium, and challenge hyperbole. This isn't about being on the left or right, but simply about undoing positive feedback loops, so that people are more likely to weigh things properly, and arrive at superior answers.
Politically, I am centrist on the economic axis, and libertarian on the social axis, and I agree that trickle-down is usually treated as an excuse, rather than just being a background effect, however, I prefer to assume goodwill in argument, for occasionally even bad people have good ideas.
Tickle-down is meant to redistribute wealth; I was simply saying that:
Taxation achieves other things than redistributing wealth, this is true, but that is in addition to its effect on wealth redistribution, so you've completely failed to defect my point that it is superior to trickle-down.
A more competitive marketplace means that there is less profit to be had, as more value is delivered to the customer, which again is superior to trickle-down, which is why it is vital to have regulation that limits monopolies.
Yes, both poor and rich spend money; trickle-down simply put buffers on the process: there is an equilibrium that isn't one person with all the wealth.
The point that I was trying to make was that almost anything is superior to trickle-down (bar old-fashioned taxation of the people for the benefit of the court and gentry); it works, insofar as it does, at a pretty slow pace. There are better ways to achieve its purpose: redistribution.
That it doesn't work well enough doesn't mean that it doesn't function at all. I was simply attempting to move away from hyperbole.
Interestingly, you're returning to Bentham here, who set out to reform the legal system on this basis.
Granted, this is a valuable thing to do. You need to be careful, though: people habitually neglect opportunity costs, favouring the visible over the invisible. This is a big reason why the greatest freedom is superior to the greatest happiness, IMO. It is also a good reason why one should not always favour people getting what they want, although I would not, in most cases, stop them from doing so with their own resources. Freedom can allow solutions to emerge that may not always be as efficient as a centrally determined one in simple terms, but can allow for subtleties that the centrally determined solution would neglect.Having said that, I recognise that a local park can greatly improve both freedom and happiness. Personally, I feel that a touch of anarchism has something to offer here: property is itself a restriction; the justification for property is that it allows there to be greater freedoms than immediate indulgence, but this isn't true in every case. The local park is in fact a reversion to a freer default state of non-ownership. The local authority might clean it and otherwise look after it, but that would come out of the rough calculus which leads to different qualities of ownership and responsibility.
I made some related notes on Coase's Theorem earlier.
-- nt --
A big flaw in utilitarianism is a consistent bias towards the calculable; no wonder statists love it so much! At least "the greatest freedom..." contains a countervailing bias towards non-interference.
I suspect that this is more to do with advertising and monopoly. Media companies will "endorse" MS, and also refuse to support OSs that don't "play ball". Result: advantage, Gates. If MS didn't support DRM, there'd still be plenty of content. To all comers, and not just to MS.
This is not nearly as efficient as taxation, or a more competitive marketplace.
Once you've chosen a utilitarian basis from which to act, it leads to a lot of judgement calls. In this case, which freedoms are more important. Most of the arguments between Democrat and Republican supporters resolve to this issue (BTW, this is not true for politicians, which seek a compromise between this and enlarging their, and their party's empire).
Because of these judgement calls, mathematical reasoning simply doesn't apply, although it may inspire. I speak as a mathematician, myself.
I'm not saying that there isn't an excuse for such an incentive, insofar as it is one, but we should be aware of the degree of naturalness of our laws, if we are interested in freedom, which in practice means that regulation should work with the grain of things.
It's not that markets are artificial, it's that IP is artificial property. Literally: that ideas can be restricted in their domain of use is a human artifice.
With property as a positive right, it's humourous to see it as being seen as fundemental. The arguments within AC ranks about "Intellectual Property" make me smile to see how both sides distort and obscure the real issues. On my part, I distinguish "capitalism" (the doctorine of property) with "free market" (a freedom-based system of production and exchange).
Syndicalism, I see as a bastard child of anarchism and Marxism. Not to say that it has nothing to offer, but it weakens the potency of anarchism by minimising individualist solutions. It also risks approaching communitarianism, which is more restrictive than democracy, for sustained dissent is anti-community, rather than being a spur to improve the norms, and a source of future potential if the existing solution doesn't work out.
For anything like anarchism to function long-term, you need to start with love of diversity, and AC stamps on that by prescribing the solution. However, AS risks confounding "minority" with pre-indentified groups with a historical grievance, as presently occurs on the left. The (evolutionary) value of diversity is that one is ready for the future, whereas the leftist's concept is centred on the past.
IIRC, there were more than two parties at the last election in the US.
Government is increasingly about perception, as is corporate life. "Language is reality" is the mantra expression the attitude that underlies this shift of attitude; it is a shift that originates on the left, but (especially post Leo Strauss) now encompasses the entire political spectrum. In practice, this is translated into "perception is reality", so that one "should" react to fears, rather than risks.
If it were all about a simple line between freedom and saftey, why isn't road saftey receiving more attention, for example?
Also, the lack of a need to get a product out of the door means that you can spend time on things that give a foundation. That educational requirements are different is an advantage. Which firms, for example, would spend three years teaching someone a maths degree? Yet those same firms would gladly hire a mathematician!
Cat is the way to go. As follows:
/* success */ ./a.out
$> cat > hello.c
#include <stdio.h>
int main (void) {
printf ("Hello World!\n");
return 0;
}
^d
$> gcc hello.c
$>