D'oh, formatting ate my math symbols. Above should read: We don't know what the mass of a neutrino is, but we do know they're light (m < 1 eV / c^2). Thus, a neutrino with total energy E = 10^15 eV has a Lorentz factor of gamma = E/m*c^2 > 10^15. Thus beta = v/c = sqrt(1-1/gamma^2) > 1-0.5*10^-30: the neutrino is moving at a velocity within 1 part in 10^30 of the speed of light.
Actually, rounding to the nearest 10^-20 m/s, it would be 299,792,458 m/s.
We don't know what the mass of a neutrino is, but we do know they're light ( 10^15. Thus beta = v/c = sqrt(1-1/gamma^2) 1-0.5*10^-30: the neutrino is moving at a velocity within 1 part in 10^30 of the speed of light.
I was careful in my example with a photo, because a photo isn't something illegal. Maybe you were hanging out with the victim before they got killed by someone else? A bag of weed or a gun with the serial filed off are indeed illegal things, that the cops can seize "from plain view." A photo is (usually) a perfectly legal thing, that police probably can't seize without a specific warrant. However, they've likely got probable cause to detain you on the spot and assure you can't destroy the photos/evidence while they're requesting a new warrant.
The same reasoning applies with those: in the first case, the guy would have been incriminating himself (admitting to the court that he was a criminal) by letting the court access those files.
It's a subtle distinction (law gets subtle!), but "incriminating yourself by letting the court access files" is not the same as "incriminating yourself by showing you can access files." The latter has been ruled to fall under 5th Amendment protections. The former is still a legally open question (the courts might not agree to consider it "incriminating yourself," and instead consider it "handing over a safe key to cooperate with evidence gathering").
Assuming your first case is this one (referenced in the the Wikipedia on 5th Amendment), it's important to note that, as in the article case, one of the important factors in not requiring a password be handed over was that "Neither do they know that Doe is capable of accessing the files." There may be instances where the court will require a password to be handed over to decrypt a not-known-to-be-incriminating file --- so far as I know, the courts haven't entirely ruled that out. Specifically, if the court "knows" (according to sufficient standards of evidence) that someone does have a password for a disk potentially containing (incriminating) evidence, then they may be able to demand the password --- again, this is a case yet to be hashed out (so far as I know) in court.
Right, I agree with you here. Your post above was "off the mark" because all your discussion and examples related to questions not relevant to this case. Your "examples from other recent court cases like this one" were *not* like this one: they reached different decisions based on different situations. You were worried about whether or not revealing the contents *on* one's drives would be self-incriminating; the key technical distinction that drove this case decision was whether *knowing a password* was self-incriminating. Your examples and discussion only distract from, rather than clarify, the principles needed to understand this particular ruling (hence "off the mark").
This is a close call, but I conclude that Feldman’s act of production, which would necessarily require his using a password of some type to decrypt the storage device, would be tantamount to telling the government something it does not already know with “reasonably particularity”—namely, that Feldman has personal access to and control over the encrypted storage devices.
You clearly have poor reading comprehension; don't go spouting off in your ignorance to confuse others.
“In short, the government already knows the names of the files (which indicate child pornography) and their probable existence on the encrypted hard drives. Under these facts, “[t]he existence and location of the [files] are a foregone conclusion.”
The thing "not known with reasonable particularity" was not whether illegal files were on the disks, but whether the defendant could access the disks himself:
But the following question remains: Is it reasonably clear, in the absence of compelled decryption,7 that Feldman actually has access to and control over the encrypted storage devices and, therefore, the files contained therein?
They can, however, use it as probable cause to get a second warrant to collect the new evidence. If police bust into your house with a warrant to search the kitchen for marijuana, and notice you have polaroids of a recent unsolved murder victim taped to the fridge, then they don't have to say "oops, we didn't see that." They can't take the photos or go rooting around the house for other evidence related to the murder on the existing warrant, but they can go back to a judge and request a new warrant (based on probable cause from testimony about seeing the photos) with different scope.
In the article's court case, the defendant was allowed to refuse to disclose a password not because the contents of the drive could be incriminating, but because disclosing the password itself reveals previously unknown information: that you know the password. If the court already considers it a proven fact that you know a password, and has a warrant for searching the drive, then you don't get 5th-ammendment protection against revealing the password, no matter what incriminating stuff could be on the drive. The 5th Amendment is typically interpreted to only cover the "contents of your head": you can't be required to provide potentially self-incriminating info about were on the night of November 3rd from the contents of your memory. Your appointments calendar in your desk safe, however, is not 5th-ammendment protected, so you might be required to hand over that combination.
So far as I can tell (IANAL), the 5th Amendment self-incrimination protections apply to the contents of your mind, not the contents of your safe. The contents of your safe are protected against "unreasonable search and seizures" under the 4th, which can be pried into under reasonable suspicion. If the government already knows (has established as fact in a court case) that you set the combination on a safe, then there's no 5th Amendment protection against being required to tell the combination (even if there are "unexpected" incriminating things in the safe) --- the incriminating items in this case are not the combination held in your mind (protected by the 5th), but the contents in the safe (not protected by the 5th). So, if the government has a 4th-amendement-satisfying cause to search the safe they know you control, you're illegally obstructing an investigation by not turning over the combo. In this particular case, the government didn't already know the defendant was the one who set up the encrypted drives: revealing the key would incriminate him of being in control of the drives, when someone else could have done it.
Your analysis is off-the-mark for this particular case. According to the judge's writeup linked in the summary, the prosecution in this case actually did have evidence that child porn files were being downloaded to the servers and saved to the encrypted disks. The reason that the defendant was granted 5th Amendment immunity is that the prosecution lacked evidence that he was the only person in control of the computers. Maybe someone else had broken in and set up the encryption without the defendant's knowledge? By turning over the encryption keys, the defendant would prove that he knew the encryption keys, and thus incriminate himself of being responsible for the porn-filled encrypted disks (instead of an unwitting victim of hacking).
Yes, from an "anthropic principle" perspective you've pretty much got to somehow end up with a universe with a matter/antimatter imbalance in order to have folks to see it. The interesting physics question, however, would be to understand how said necessary matter imbalance was produced. For example, perhaps matter and antimatter behave exactly the same, and we're just in a local "bubble" where early-universe statistical fluctuations coughed up a bit more matter. On the other hand, maybe we can find differences in the properties of matter and antimatter (which experiments like this indicate) that might allow one to be preferentially produced over the other.
Made in Asia... then shipped to the West to meet the demands of Western capitalists. Wal*Mart would never sell you the $0.78-production-cost item for $1.59 when they could sell you the (significantly inferior but cosmetically identical) $0.73-production-cost item for $1.59, and pocket the $0.05*(zillions of sales) difference for their shareholders.
OK, then let's hear those sentiments from Republican elected officials. It's true, you can find self-identified members of all parties that hold every position on every question; but that means approximately zilch and nada when the party leadership actually passing legislation is 99.9% unified behind particular stances. It's perfectly fair, e.g., to continue saying Republicans are the party of homophobic bigots, regardless of the existence of the Log Cabin Republicans, so long as Republican elected officials nearly unanimously come down on the homophobic bigot side of every gay-rights issue.
Some early timekeeping methods involved having a guy whose whole job was to watch while a bowl with a tiny hole in the bottom slowly filled and sank into a pool of water. When the bowl went under, it'd be dumped out and the process started again. Accuracy and fairness in timekeeping was considered critical for, e.g., divvying up access to water springs in arid regions.
So, while an egg-timer might not quite be as fancy as a housekeeper-sexbot, it's certainly a handy robot to automate timekeeping, that makes timekeeping capabilities available to a lot more people for a lot more tasks (e.g. boiling an egg) compared to when you'd need some dude to watch your water-clock bowl.
Yes, what used to happen (pre-1980) was that technology advances would allow a factory that once produced X widgets to now produce 2X widgets with the same labor resources. These increases in productivity were shared with the laborers: salaries increased from Y to 2*Y. This works out well for everyone: employees have twice as much money, so they can buy twice as many widgets (while employers double their earnings from twice the sale, too); the economy increases quality of life for everyone.
But then employers figured out they had the power to keep a bigger cut for themselves. So, over the next period, they kept paying workers the same amount while production went up. Instead of doubling widget production from X to 2*X, they lay off half the workers and continue producing X widgets (with half the salary costs). The working class still believes in the "American Dream," that in return for putting in hard work they and their children should be able to maintain or raise their standard of living; so, even though there's less salary getting spread around, folks load up on debt to keep consumption going (buying the same or larger widget quantities as they used to). By this mechanism, the accumulated wealth of the middle class gets gutted and moved to the bank accounts of the mega-rich.
The inevitable result is economic depression for the entire middle class (pushed over the edge by the housing bubble burst) --- suddenly, most everyone realizes they are broke; the bottom falls out of the economy. The rich take the money they've hoovered up from the American middle class to invest elsewhere (where profit margins are higher) and leave the US working class to rot in unemployment, falling wages, and decreasing standard of living. The "American Dream" that an industrious blue-collar worker could raise a family, put the kids through college, and retire with dignity secure in the knowledge that the next generation would have an even better life is dashed. Now Grandpa is going to be a Wal*Mart greeter, standing all day on screamingly painful arthritic legs, until age 75, and see his grandkids unable to afford college and doomed to minimum-wage drudgery or unemployment.
Um... ever heard of adjusting for inflation (as is done for the chart)? And even if the inflation adjustment isn't done to your exacting specifications, that it wouldn't change the fact that the increase (measured in the same inflation-adjusted quantities) in wages and productivity changed from tracking one another to strongly diverging?
That's because everybody likes to think that they are the good guy. Even when they make dick moves, they still think they're the good guy most of the time.
Exactly; I agree on this. But you think True Libertarians really are the exception-to-the-rule real good guys? So we can trust "free market" economies so long as we have enough of these incorruptible omniscient protectors of justice at the helm of the (minimalist) government legal system? For magical reasons, there won't be massive accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few (even by perfectly "legit" means, thanks to luck, speculation, economies of scale, rent, natural monopolies, capital/labor power disparities), who will eventually be able to subvert the system and usher in profitable monopoly-capitalism?
I'm quite sympathetic to libertarian thought outside the twisted American "right-libertarian" spectrum that embraces and becomes apologist for the most powerful forces of inequality and oppression. I encourage right-libertarians to expand their views by learning about left-libertarian/anarchist critiques/systems that also seek to devolve and redistribute power from authoritarian "big government" systems to the masses, without making the dumb mistake of putting oligarchs in charge.
It's true, income inequality (according to measures like the Gini Index) in China has just recently surpassed that of the (still increasingly unequal) US (see plot of historical Gini index from Wikipedia); and surpassing the US in income inequality is a bad sign of landing solidly in miserable-third-world-hellhole territory. Still, this is alongside huge overall economic growth compared to the US, so even the general population reaps a moderate benefit from the energy expenditure. I stand by my statement that China's "inefficient" use of energy is still more "efficient" at improving the condition of their general population than the USA's only-the-rich-capture-economic-gains "efficient" use of energy. Ideally, China would allocate its resources not to compete against the US for the position of more societal inequality.
Tee hee hee, you don't think "market-based" societies will fail because libertarians have such nice sounding high-minded ideals. Guess what, pick an existing murderous regime of whatever ideology you want, and I bet they'll say how much they love "rule of laws and justice" too. You set up a system unstable towards accumulation of power, where the greediest sociopaths have a nice positive feedback loop for converting "competitive free markets" into oligopoly and monopoly hellholes. There is zero actual evidence (no, long speculative counterfactual wankery by Hayek is not evidence) to support the libertarian dogma that real world "free markets" are actually a stable equilibrium, not just a temporary product of specific conditions that inevitably slides into increasing inequality (when the rich and powerful will gladly abandon high-minded "libertarian" ideals wherever it benefits them).
Who knows, but the economy will always find an equilibrium somewhere.
And if this equilibrium is the masses living in miserable slums, patrolled by the private goon armies of a tiny super-wealthy elite, like the "economic equilibrium" produced in many third-world countries with extreme wealth disparities? I'm not comforted that some equilibrium will be reached; I'm quite concerned about what the structure of said equilibrium is. "Just let unregulated market forces decide" has a terrible track record for producing pleasant equilibria.
People are not going to labor and make stuff with no compensation but the guarantee that others are doing the same, this goes against human nature.
Tell that to anyone who has ever written a book, played a song, painted a picture, or danced a dance without being paid for it. Tell that to anyone who has ever poured their time and money into a hobby with negative monetary returns --- taking photos, flying airplanes, watching the stars, climbing mountains, feeding the hungry, planting gardens, writing Free Software --- raising a family. Human nature is to ponder, create, aspire, help, love; to do so freely for the joy of living.
We should work for our keep, for most of our lives. We're wired to need to - we value what we have if we work for it; otherwise we delight in destroying it.
Studies of hunter-gatherer societies, typical of the evolutionary conditions for which humans might be "wired," indicate rather low typical work loads. Actual "work" time is typically 2-4 hours per day; interspersed with a lot of lollygagging about, chatting, telling stories, playing games, singing songs, sitting about pondering. Of course, there are sometimes brief periods of highly strenuous work and intense need. But the idea that humans are "wired" to need 40+ hour weeks of toil, instead of spending most of their time in leisure and "artsy" pursuits, is an artifact of the development of labor-intensive agricultural societies during the latest tiny fraction of human evolutionary history.
But when the correlation empirically exists and causal mechanism is obvious, it's awfully hard to handwave away. Rich people keep more money from paying lower taxes and wages; invest in technology to let them fire workers while maintaining growing production levels; reap record profits, from which a smaller cut than ever is returned to improving middle-class conditions instead of further increasing the power of the rich. What else would you expect than the "rich get richer, everyone else gets poorer" obvious (and observed to be true) outcome of such a vicious cycle?
OK, so the inflation adjustment used for the chart may be significantly underestimated. That changes *nothing* about the fact that worker productivity and compensation track together perfectly for one period, then sharply diverge in another. So, if inflation is really worse than stated, then the productivity rise is a bit slower --- but worker compensation is falling correspondingly faster, rather than flatlining. No matter how you handwave (which you do an awful lot of, regardless of a complete lack of empirical support for your wacky theorizing), there is a sharp divergence between productivity and worker compensation that kicked in once the "lower taxes! deregulate!" hucksters gained the upper hand in controlling national policy. You might want a world where the 1% get richer and the 99% get poorer (which is exactly what we get as the obvious outcome of folks like you setting policy); I don't.
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D'oh, formatting ate my math symbols. Above should read:
We don't know what the mass of a neutrino is, but we do know they're light (m < 1 eV / c^2). Thus, a neutrino with total energy E = 10^15 eV has a Lorentz factor of gamma = E/m*c^2 > 10^15. Thus beta = v/c = sqrt(1-1/gamma^2) > 1-0.5*10^-30: the neutrino is moving at a velocity within 1 part in 10^30 of the speed of light.
Actually, rounding to the nearest 10^-20 m/s, it would be 299,792,458 m/s.
We don't know what the mass of a neutrino is, but we do know they're light ( 10^15. Thus beta = v/c = sqrt(1-1/gamma^2) 1-0.5*10^-30: the neutrino is moving at a velocity within 1 part in 10^30 of the speed of light.
I was careful in my example with a photo, because a photo isn't something illegal. Maybe you were hanging out with the victim before they got killed by someone else? A bag of weed or a gun with the serial filed off are indeed illegal things, that the cops can seize "from plain view." A photo is (usually) a perfectly legal thing, that police probably can't seize without a specific warrant. However, they've likely got probable cause to detain you on the spot and assure you can't destroy the photos/evidence while they're requesting a new warrant.
The same reasoning applies with those: in the first case, the guy would have been incriminating himself (admitting to the court that he was a criminal) by letting the court access those files.
It's a subtle distinction (law gets subtle!), but "incriminating yourself by letting the court access files" is not the same as "incriminating yourself by showing you can access files." The latter has been ruled to fall under 5th Amendment protections. The former is still a legally open question (the courts might not agree to consider it "incriminating yourself," and instead consider it "handing over a safe key to cooperate with evidence gathering").
Assuming your first case is this one (referenced in the the Wikipedia on 5th Amendment), it's important to note that, as in the article case, one of the important factors in not requiring a password be handed over was that "Neither do they know that Doe is capable of accessing the files." There may be instances where the court will require a password to be handed over to decrypt a not-known-to-be-incriminating file --- so far as I know, the courts haven't entirely ruled that out. Specifically, if the court "knows" (according to sufficient standards of evidence) that someone does have a password for a disk potentially containing (incriminating) evidence, then they may be able to demand the password --- again, this is a case yet to be hashed out (so far as I know) in court.
Right, I agree with you here. Your post above was "off the mark" because all your discussion and examples related to questions not relevant to this case. Your "examples from other recent court cases like this one" were *not* like this one: they reached different decisions based on different situations. You were worried about whether or not revealing the contents *on* one's drives would be self-incriminating; the key technical distinction that drove this case decision was whether *knowing a password* was self-incriminating. Your examples and discussion only distract from, rather than clarify, the principles needed to understand this particular ruling (hence "off the mark").
Also, from the ruling:
This is a close call, but I conclude that Feldman’s act of production, which would necessarily require his using a password of some type to decrypt the storage device, would be tantamount to telling the government something it does not already know with “reasonably particularity”—namely, that Feldman has personal access to and control over the encrypted storage devices.
You clearly have poor reading comprehension; don't go spouting off in your ignorance to confuse others.
Read The Effing Ruling:
“In short, the government already knows the names of the files (which indicate child pornography) and their probable existence on the encrypted hard drives. Under these facts, “[t]he existence and location of the [files] are a foregone conclusion.”
The thing "not known with reasonable particularity" was not whether illegal files were on the disks, but whether the defendant could access the disks himself:
But the following question remains: Is it reasonably clear, in the absence of compelled decryption,7 that Feldman actually has access to and control over the encrypted storage devices and, therefore, the files contained therein?
They can, however, use it as probable cause to get a second warrant to collect the new evidence. If police bust into your house with a warrant to search the kitchen for marijuana, and notice you have polaroids of a recent unsolved murder victim taped to the fridge, then they don't have to say "oops, we didn't see that." They can't take the photos or go rooting around the house for other evidence related to the murder on the existing warrant, but they can go back to a judge and request a new warrant (based on probable cause from testimony about seeing the photos) with different scope.
In the article's court case, the defendant was allowed to refuse to disclose a password not because the contents of the drive could be incriminating, but because disclosing the password itself reveals previously unknown information: that you know the password. If the court already considers it a proven fact that you know a password, and has a warrant for searching the drive, then you don't get 5th-ammendment protection against revealing the password, no matter what incriminating stuff could be on the drive. The 5th Amendment is typically interpreted to only cover the "contents of your head": you can't be required to provide potentially self-incriminating info about were on the night of November 3rd from the contents of your memory. Your appointments calendar in your desk safe, however, is not 5th-ammendment protected, so you might be required to hand over that combination.
So far as I can tell (IANAL), the 5th Amendment self-incrimination protections apply to the contents of your mind, not the contents of your safe. The contents of your safe are protected against "unreasonable search and seizures" under the 4th, which can be pried into under reasonable suspicion. If the government already knows (has established as fact in a court case) that you set the combination on a safe, then there's no 5th Amendment protection against being required to tell the combination (even if there are "unexpected" incriminating things in the safe) --- the incriminating items in this case are not the combination held in your mind (protected by the 5th), but the contents in the safe (not protected by the 5th). So, if the government has a 4th-amendement-satisfying cause to search the safe they know you control, you're illegally obstructing an investigation by not turning over the combo. In this particular case, the government didn't already know the defendant was the one who set up the encrypted drives: revealing the key would incriminate him of being in control of the drives, when someone else could have done it.
Your analysis is off-the-mark for this particular case. According to the judge's writeup linked in the summary, the prosecution in this case actually did have evidence that child porn files were being downloaded to the servers and saved to the encrypted disks. The reason that the defendant was granted 5th Amendment immunity is that the prosecution lacked evidence that he was the only person in control of the computers. Maybe someone else had broken in and set up the encryption without the defendant's knowledge? By turning over the encryption keys, the defendant would prove that he knew the encryption keys, and thus incriminate himself of being responsible for the porn-filled encrypted disks (instead of an unwitting victim of hacking).
Yes, from an "anthropic principle" perspective you've pretty much got to somehow end up with a universe with a matter/antimatter imbalance in order to have folks to see it. The interesting physics question, however, would be to understand how said necessary matter imbalance was produced. For example, perhaps matter and antimatter behave exactly the same, and we're just in a local "bubble" where early-universe statistical fluctuations coughed up a bit more matter. On the other hand, maybe we can find differences in the properties of matter and antimatter (which experiments like this indicate) that might allow one to be preferentially produced over the other.
<_MSIE_XZ92 MS_FONT_TP = "comic sans" Q_BINARY_BLOB = "89FF372198A" BRWSR_FOO_P = "unidiv/flimblargle">Great idea!</_MSIE_XZ92>
This post optimized for viewing with with MSIE 9.3.
Made in Asia... then shipped to the West to meet the demands of Western capitalists. Wal*Mart would never sell you the $0.78-production-cost item for $1.59 when they could sell you the (significantly inferior but cosmetically identical) $0.73-production-cost item for $1.59, and pocket the $0.05*(zillions of sales) difference for their shareholders.
OK, then let's hear those sentiments from Republican elected officials. It's true, you can find self-identified members of all parties that hold every position on every question; but that means approximately zilch and nada when the party leadership actually passing legislation is 99.9% unified behind particular stances. It's perfectly fair, e.g., to continue saying Republicans are the party of homophobic bigots, regardless of the existence of the Log Cabin Republicans, so long as Republican elected officials nearly unanimously come down on the homophobic bigot side of every gay-rights issue.
Some early timekeeping methods involved having a guy whose whole job was to watch while a bowl with a tiny hole in the bottom slowly filled and sank into a pool of water. When the bowl went under, it'd be dumped out and the process started again. Accuracy and fairness in timekeeping was considered critical for, e.g., divvying up access to water springs in arid regions.
So, while an egg-timer might not quite be as fancy as a housekeeper-sexbot, it's certainly a handy robot to automate timekeeping, that makes timekeeping capabilities available to a lot more people for a lot more tasks (e.g. boiling an egg) compared to when you'd need some dude to watch your water-clock bowl.
Yes, what used to happen (pre-1980) was that technology advances would allow a factory that once produced X widgets to now produce 2X widgets with the same labor resources. These increases in productivity were shared with the laborers: salaries increased from Y to 2*Y. This works out well for everyone: employees have twice as much money, so they can buy twice as many widgets (while employers double their earnings from twice the sale, too); the economy increases quality of life for everyone.
But then employers figured out they had the power to keep a bigger cut for themselves. So, over the next period, they kept paying workers the same amount while production went up. Instead of doubling widget production from X to 2*X, they lay off half the workers and continue producing X widgets (with half the salary costs). The working class still believes in the "American Dream," that in return for putting in hard work they and their children should be able to maintain or raise their standard of living; so, even though there's less salary getting spread around, folks load up on debt to keep consumption going (buying the same or larger widget quantities as they used to). By this mechanism, the accumulated wealth of the middle class gets gutted and moved to the bank accounts of the mega-rich.
The inevitable result is economic depression for the entire middle class (pushed over the edge by the housing bubble burst) --- suddenly, most everyone realizes they are broke; the bottom falls out of the economy. The rich take the money they've hoovered up from the American middle class to invest elsewhere (where profit margins are higher) and leave the US working class to rot in unemployment, falling wages, and decreasing standard of living. The "American Dream" that an industrious blue-collar worker could raise a family, put the kids through college, and retire with dignity secure in the knowledge that the next generation would have an even better life is dashed. Now Grandpa is going to be a Wal*Mart greeter, standing all day on screamingly painful arthritic legs, until age 75, and see his grandkids unable to afford college and doomed to minimum-wage drudgery or unemployment.
Um... ever heard of adjusting for inflation (as is done for the chart)? And even if the inflation adjustment isn't done to your exacting specifications, that it wouldn't change the fact that the increase (measured in the same inflation-adjusted quantities) in wages and productivity changed from tracking one another to strongly diverging?
That's because everybody likes to think that they are the good guy. Even when they make dick moves, they still think they're the good guy most of the time.
Exactly; I agree on this. But you think True Libertarians really are the exception-to-the-rule real good guys? So we can trust "free market" economies so long as we have enough of these incorruptible omniscient protectors of justice at the helm of the (minimalist) government legal system? For magical reasons, there won't be massive accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few (even by perfectly "legit" means, thanks to luck, speculation, economies of scale, rent, natural monopolies, capital/labor power disparities), who will eventually be able to subvert the system and usher in profitable monopoly-capitalism?
I'm quite sympathetic to libertarian thought outside the twisted American "right-libertarian" spectrum that embraces and becomes apologist for the most powerful forces of inequality and oppression. I encourage right-libertarians to expand their views by learning about left-libertarian/anarchist critiques/systems that also seek to devolve and redistribute power from authoritarian "big government" systems to the masses, without making the dumb mistake of putting oligarchs in charge.
It's true, income inequality (according to measures like the Gini Index) in China has just recently surpassed that of the (still increasingly unequal) US (see plot of historical Gini index from Wikipedia); and surpassing the US in income inequality is a bad sign of landing solidly in miserable-third-world-hellhole territory. Still, this is alongside huge overall economic growth compared to the US, so even the general population reaps a moderate benefit from the energy expenditure. I stand by my statement that China's "inefficient" use of energy is still more "efficient" at improving the condition of their general population than the USA's only-the-rich-capture-economic-gains "efficient" use of energy. Ideally, China would allocate its resources not to compete against the US for the position of more societal inequality.
Tee hee hee, you don't think "market-based" societies will fail because libertarians have such nice sounding high-minded ideals. Guess what, pick an existing murderous regime of whatever ideology you want, and I bet they'll say how much they love "rule of laws and justice" too. You set up a system unstable towards accumulation of power, where the greediest sociopaths have a nice positive feedback loop for converting "competitive free markets" into oligopoly and monopoly hellholes. There is zero actual evidence (no, long speculative counterfactual wankery by Hayek is not evidence) to support the libertarian dogma that real world "free markets" are actually a stable equilibrium, not just a temporary product of specific conditions that inevitably slides into increasing inequality (when the rich and powerful will gladly abandon high-minded "libertarian" ideals wherever it benefits them).
Who knows, but the economy will always find an equilibrium somewhere.
And if this equilibrium is the masses living in miserable slums, patrolled by the private goon armies of a tiny super-wealthy elite, like the "economic equilibrium" produced in many third-world countries with extreme wealth disparities? I'm not comforted that some equilibrium will be reached; I'm quite concerned about what the structure of said equilibrium is. "Just let unregulated market forces decide" has a terrible track record for producing pleasant equilibria.
People are not going to labor and make stuff with no compensation but the guarantee that others are doing the same, this goes against human nature.
Tell that to anyone who has ever written a book, played a song, painted a picture, or danced a dance without being paid for it. Tell that to anyone who has ever poured their time and money into a hobby with negative monetary returns --- taking photos, flying airplanes, watching the stars, climbing mountains, feeding the hungry, planting gardens, writing Free Software --- raising a family. Human nature is to ponder, create, aspire, help, love; to do so freely for the joy of living.
We should work for our keep, for most of our lives. We're wired to need to - we value what we have if we work for it; otherwise we delight in destroying it.
Studies of hunter-gatherer societies, typical of the evolutionary conditions for which humans might be "wired," indicate rather low typical work loads. Actual "work" time is typically 2-4 hours per day; interspersed with a lot of lollygagging about, chatting, telling stories, playing games, singing songs, sitting about pondering. Of course, there are sometimes brief periods of highly strenuous work and intense need. But the idea that humans are "wired" to need 40+ hour weeks of toil, instead of spending most of their time in leisure and "artsy" pursuits, is an artifact of the development of labor-intensive agricultural societies during the latest tiny fraction of human evolutionary history.
But when the correlation empirically exists and causal mechanism is obvious, it's awfully hard to handwave away. Rich people keep more money from paying lower taxes and wages; invest in technology to let them fire workers while maintaining growing production levels; reap record profits, from which a smaller cut than ever is returned to improving middle-class conditions instead of further increasing the power of the rich. What else would you expect than the "rich get richer, everyone else gets poorer" obvious (and observed to be true) outcome of such a vicious cycle?
OK, so the inflation adjustment used for the chart may be significantly underestimated. That changes *nothing* about the fact that worker productivity and compensation track together perfectly for one period, then sharply diverge in another. So, if inflation is really worse than stated, then the productivity rise is a bit slower --- but worker compensation is falling correspondingly faster, rather than flatlining. No matter how you handwave (which you do an awful lot of, regardless of a complete lack of empirical support for your wacky theorizing), there is a sharp divergence between productivity and worker compensation that kicked in once the "lower taxes! deregulate!" hucksters gained the upper hand in controlling national policy. You might want a world where the 1% get richer and the 99% get poorer (which is exactly what we get as the obvious outcome of folks like you setting policy); I don't.