I love this quote that capitalism's a great theory, but that it "doesn't work in the real world." It always makes me wonder just how fragile the fantastical reinterpretation of history you maintain in your minds must be.
For instance, how might we interpret the indisputable rise of the US as the greatest economic story probably in the history of the world, coinciding nicely with its adoption of small government and capitalism? Ah, some may point to our boundless natural resources. But, of course, that wouldn't explain Japan, which has virtually no natural resources whatsoever; yet its power was never greater -- and the lives of its citizens never better -- than once it adopted a Western capitalist system post-WWII.
Cultural factors, perhaps? Hmm...maybe you'd want to go back to the books and study the differences in GNP between East Germany and West Germany post-WWII? Same culture; same decimated infrastructure; same history; same language. Yet West Germany's economy dwarfed that of East's; people scrambled to get from East to West, not the other way around.
Ah, but maybe it was a one-off thing. Then again, what about South Korea vs. North Korea? Hong Kong vs. China? Taiwan vs. China? The capitalist areas of India vs. those remote areas untouched by such an economic system? The UAE vs. Iran? Economy, culture, politics, and lifestyle are complex, so in any given case, there do exist extant factors like culture, religion, tradition, geography, instability, and so forth that come into play; but across the wide variety of examples in the world, an undeniable theme emerges. Maybe it's easier to do this the other way: Find a country that has rejected the tenets of capitalism, yet has people that are freer, happier, safer, healthier, or otherwise better off than a capitalist country, specifically BECAUSE of the rejection of capitalism. I'd be interested in that for sure.
"The thing is, you have to set your own priorities."
Haha, and so your solution to that is to have the government take more of my money and sink it into a one-size-fits-all priority of its omniscient determination?
"I bought several of his books and a slew of lectures on CD at ebay for $20 after I noticed my kid really liked the copy of Feynmann's Rainbow I got at the library. For less than the price of taking the family to McDonalds they are now intimately knowledgeable with one of the brightest minds of physics."
Thanks for proving my point. You were able to get all that education without an OC-3 going into your house! Amazing! You didn't even need a dial-up connection, after all the wailing about the educational opportunities it curtails. Wait, but you didn't even...need...a computer. Astounding. And here I was wondering just how someone like Feynman was able to learn all he did without 20M down like they have in S. Korea. (Nova's also on tape and DVD, as well as -- unbelievably -- TV itself. You could even use Tivo or another DVR to record it. That way your kid's brain won't atrophy too much.)
"Have some backbone lad or your going to get crushed."
Not in your world -- the government's there to save the day. Hard to lecture someone on this principle after you've gotten done whining about how hard it is to learn without being able to download *Nova videos* or how awful it would be to actually think about moving your business or family to where the opportunities are. (The US is, after all, only one of the most mobile societies in history.)
"The reason America is falling off the tech wagon is because we have collectively lost the dream. All the justification that that is the way capitalism works won't change that fact."
Interesting you should mention that, since I never justified the way things ARE based on capitalism -- I just argued against your proposed changes. Gov't-instituted monopolies are not capitalism, and neither are gov't subsidies to industry. The US is falling off LOTS of wagons -- including tech -- because we're LESS capitalist all the time. Hard to be capitalist when 30
You're arguing that I have no market in Internet connectivity when I just told you I can opt for cable, DSL, satellite, EDGE, etc.? Please explain. Keep in mind that pointing out differences of service capability (cable vs. satellite, for example) does not substitute for doing this. Capitalism does not attempt to make all alternatives equal; to do so in ANY area of life would be foolish.
Other countries "do a better job," through government assistance. As I said, a government can of course achieve a given goal faster than a capitalistic system, since it appropriates the resources of its citizens and focuses a bureaucracy to do so. That point has never been argued. What gets lost when the state does this is not the achievement of the goal, but the satisfaction of the precondition that the goal be a valuable use of resources. When a government draws resources from everyone to serve a need that only some of the population wants, it has wronged all the others, and necessarily placed an artificial priority on that task. If it weren't artificial, the government wouldn't have to legislate it, since the sheer demand of the populace would create profit potential great enough to spur an entire industry (which would then fulfill the need more efficiently than government ever could).
Again, to the extent that government (i.e. taxpayers) has subsidized an industry, that was bad. No reason to compound the problem by now trying to claim what's "rightfully ours." The sooner government steps out, the lower our losses as a society will be.
Finally, the concept of "reasonable profits" is ridiculous at the outset; profits at either a low or a high level can be "reasonable," as long as someone's willing to pay them. Sure, you can gripe, but if you pay, the price is evidently reasonable enough. Higher profits generally mean that a greater need is being met -- and that's not at all a bad thing.
They just aren't being used because the controlling corporations make more money not providing to the public they are supposedly serving and when communities try to do it themselves the corporate deep pockets work to legislate against this.
1) Corporations control their own assets, which is as it should be. If I own a limo service, you have no right to use it unless I allow you to, for whatever price I set. Don't like the price? Don't use the service. 2) Companies do not "supposedly" serve a community; companies exist solely to serve the interests of their shareholders -- that's what drives innovation, as much as idealists wish it weren't so. 3) Companies -- and individuals -- currently and always will do everything they can, including legislative action, to make things go their way. Again, that's their goal -- profit -- and no one should be surprised. The solution isn't to naively wish that they wouldn't do that, or spend tons of money trying to make them stop and clarify what should be allowed and what shouldn't. The solution is minimizing government power (as per the Constitution) to the point that bribing and influencing legislators would be useless, since they don't have money for discretionary projects, nor the power to force them onto unwilling taxpayers.
Recently I saw a show on PBS about how small markets are frequently refused service by the telcom industry because they aren't profitable while at the same time those telcos are using big money to buy off legistaltures to make it illegal for local governments to provide internet access because they claim it is anticompetitive.
See above, with the added note that for reasons altogether different (unwarranted and illegal use of taxpayer funds for pet projects like wireless coverage), local governments *shouldn't* be providing such things.
The case used on the program involved a mid-sized community whose main employer was unable to compete without broadband since they were required to have the connectivity to fulfill government contracts.
Sounds like a bad place to do business; the company should leave the town. Life has its vicissitudes, and no one should be guaranteed any good that someone else has to provide, wireless (or other) Internet access included.
Without broadband the community's main industry would be forced to leave.
Right. And...? I suppose you'd think the local economy would totally go down the tubes. That's almost never true; a community of people will ALWAYS have goods and services to exchange that make it worthwhile to live together. Other places will inevitably have competitive advantage in some, and perhaps many, things, but then you move there instead of wishing things were otherwise and suing someone to make it so.
When the town brought in broadband they had to fight the same telcos who originally said it was unprofitable to provide them with broadband were now saying that municipally provided broadband was anti-competetive.
Correct -- if it's not profitable for a company to do it, the need/want isn't great enough to justify it being done. If enough people want it (i.e. it's valuable enough), it will be profitable. If it's not profitable, it shouldn't exist, since there are other things that people value more (and therefore spend more of their money on instead) -- and that's where resources should go. Governments don't face this limitation, since they simply extort money from taxpayers, rather than requiring the inherent support that the market conveys. Of course a government can do it when a company can't -- you can't refuse it, or you go to jail for tax evasion.
If one company decided not to provide wireless, just to bilk more money from people (as you suggest), another company would provide it instead, forcing the first to do it, etc. We all know the story, and it's even truer of wireless than of hard assets like ground lines.
You seem to be a) assuming that this is a world of unlimited resources, and b) assuming that in this world, it's EVERYONE'S priority that they have better broadband than they do now.
A government such as Canada's, which expends a greater percentage of taxpayer funds toward more aggressive social programs than does the US, can always accomplish a given goal through sheer brute force. That's what bureaucracy is good at. Give them a goal, and lots of money and time, and they'll do it. Problem is, that goal will inevitably draw resources from other sources (from an American perspective, the free market via taxpayer pockets; from a Canadian perspective, perhaps, health care) -- that's the way a world of trade-offs and limited resources works. And chances are, the majority of people will disagree with your priority.
No broadband provider in any town I've ever lived in (in the US) has had a monopoly. Anywhere I've heard of such a thing, it's government-granted, which is clearly not free-market. I can choose between DSL, cable, satellite, and EDGE, among others. This is all not to mention the fact that I could pool with my neighbors via wireless to make it cheaper, or go to the library, or go to Starbucks or McDonald's or a dozen other establishments near me. My choices are not limited -- there's nothing remotely resembling a monopoly (not that that was your accusation). I opted for cable, and my downloads -- while perhaps they pale compared to some other countries -- are about 700K down, which is way beyond what I need for virtually any (legal) purpose.
And this business about education is ignorant. Technology brings information, sure -- but it's not in any way necessary for fundamental mechanics of science, reading, math, philosophy, foreign languages, or anything else. Even if it were, a dial-up account is plenty for looking up information online, let alone the fact that a set of Encarta discs won't even require that.
In a free society, there's no guarantee that you'll get a given good at whatever price you want it at -- you have to agree on a price with someone who's offering it. Finland and Canada may be able to get faster access for less money than in the US, but I can guarantee government contributes on both sides (monopolistic encouragement in the US, bureaucratic dedication in other countries), and I can also guarantee that said intervention hurts the consumer, the countries' economies, and innovation in other areas. Those hidden costs in both direct taxes and reduced economic activity should be added on to the access fees when they're quoted.
I don't think that's what he's saying. The logic here isn't too difficult. The killings by Hussein weren't just a slip-up, a moment in time, an aberration. He was a constant threat to his people, whether in the form of torture, rape, intimidation, imprisonment, or outright killing (and mass killing).
It's clearly bad that innocent people have died in the war -- there's no argument there, so you're not taking the moral high ground in mentioning it, nor are you exhibiting cold indifference on the behalf of people who disagree with you. What you are exhibiting is a lack of context and consideration of alternatives.
In any war, people (and yes, innocent people, too) will die. By the logic of saying "But people will die! That means it's wrong!" no war is ever right. There's of course much more to it than that. In this case, how many people would have died at Saddam's hand, either directly or indirectly (links with terrorists or other dictatorial states, either currently or in the future)...and then at the hands of his son....and then at the hands of his other son...and then whoever comes after that. Historically, democratic capitalism is the surest way to prevent genocide and war (and don't give me the "But it hasn't stopped the US, blah blah blah" -- how many democratic capitalisms attack other democratic capitalisms?).
Whether it was WISE or not, and whether it has been and will be implemented correctly or not, are other issues worthy of debate. But you can't argue the moralism of it without considering the BALANCE of deaths that would occur.
And I thank you for yours. It was mostly civil, certainly more than mine, and I'll try to keep it that way.
BTW, your reference to nazi-germany is hilarious. It has absolutely nothing to do with the Iraq-situation.
It's not supposed to. It has everything to do with defining "illegal invasion" within the context of history, with and having consistent logic. If anyone's to argue, terms that are extremely broad have to be defined. Some people consider any violation of a nation's sovereignty to be illegal, regardless of UN votes or anything else -- that frames a very different argument than one where illegality hinges on world opinion.
This must be your biased emotions, because I do not hate USA.
Your explanation here makes sense to me, and sorry for the accusation. After reading 40+ anti-US (not just anti-Iraq war) posts in here, with maybe 4 opposing posts mixed in, it gets hard to delineate on nuances. If I had bias toward you, it reflects the bias I read on/. here.
And I don't like being lied to and seeing the innocent being killed in Iraq for oil.
What I don't like is unfounded charges. We could argue all day on whether it was done for oil or not, so let's not. Suffice it to say that there's no good proof either way, so it's best not to level accusations based on feeling. The US has had plenty of uninterrupted oil for decades now -- do you think OPEC would lightly lose 25% of their total business by cutting us off? My gas prices have shot up in the past couple years since the war, too; it's $2.30 or so a gallon now; in 2000 or 2001 I remember it hitting $0.98. It'd be nice if there were a motivation for this charge.
Lastly, the innocent were being killed in Iraq WITHOUT the war, on the order of (by estimates) over a million in the last couple decades. Didn't see it on TV? That might be because of the totalitarian regime not being nice enough to allow the cameras into the torture rooms. And while it certainly does seem that the WMD claims were false, false != lies. Please be objective on these things. The US, UK, and even the *Russian* intelligence (and Russia was against the war) concluded that Iraq was in long-term plans to strike back at the US, perhaps through terrorist cooperation. The US admin ran with some unfounded charges, it's true, and that was wrong. But by the time credible intel from a number of nations all points in one direction, it makes unfounded reports a lot more believable, and leads to irresponsible behavior in fact-checking. But don't blindly assert that the entire thing was built on lies, like Bush thought there was 0% threat from Iraq, and made it out to be 100%. That's not in line with the facts.
Seems like you are trying to pull another black or white-angle.
No, I'm far from B&W thinking. I didn't vote for Bush, nor do I think the admin handled the invasion or post-invasion extremely well. I also realize that that's really hard to do, and that the ideal will never be accomplished. I disagree with Bush on plenty of things, and libertarian that I am, I can argue against the war based on its use of American tax money for a war that may or may not fall within the "national defense" rubric. Nevertheless, as I said above, intel isn't perfect; and if I were President and receiving multi-national reports of WMD intentions and knew of terrorist willingness to use a nuke if it could be acquired, I'd be hard pressed to choose against taking action, when a nuke going off in an American city and killing maybe hundreds of thousands of people is in the balance.
I'd also note that N. Korea had weapons inspectors making regular visits there for 7 years, certifying that nothing was going on. This was just before their announcement that they possessed a nuclear program and had, in fact, developed warheads (the ones they're now threatening everyone with). Hence, diplomacy, talks, inspections, and good in
Yeah, in the case of Iraq, that IS the leftist view. The labels are there because they describe -- pretty accurately -- broad views on society, politics, economics, and religion that are generally bundled. That's not to say leftists don't differ in extremity and on particular issues, but the labels are nevertheless useful for an "at-a-glance" overview of someone's position on life. That's why they were invented. And X-vs-Y? All decisions are X-vs-Y, except that depending on the decision, you may have to use a lot more letters. When I say leftist, it's not contrasted with only rightist, but libertarian, moderate (centrist), etc., as well as more targeted labels (Rep, Dem, Socialist, Green, Fascist, Communist, Religious Right, etc.).
Bakri said he would like Britain to become an Islamic state but feared he would be deported before his dream was realized.
"I would like to see the Islamic flag fly, not only over number 10 Downing Street, but over the whole world," he said.
Looks like they're friendly and reasonable after all! I apologize.
Are you even following the war? It was the initial attack that destroyed the infrastructure of Iraq, NOT insurgents.
I've been following it, but not on Al Jazeera. It's a rather "duhhh" kind of point that US military "blew stuff up." They blew up areas of Iraq's already-awesome infrastructure (neglected for decades, according to Iraqis) to weaken Iraq's military. That's war. Unlike with the "insurgents," the point was not to do harm to the people, but to do harm to their government so that they could be more quickly and easily beaten, thus inflicting fewer war-related casualties, so that Iraqis could resume life with a democratic government. Immediately after the war, the US government began _rebuilding_ the infrastructure, repairing not only war-damaged areas, but also old stuff that just wasn't working well three decades on. The inhumanity of it all!
Meanwhile, mysources seem to think the "insurgents" (otherwise known as "terrorists," speaking of labels) ARE destroying infrastructure. *Specifically* to damage reconstruction efforts and harm the everyday Iraqis in the process. (There would be plenty more of these attacks if it weren't for Iraqi police and coalition soldiers preventing them.) But where, oh where, are THEIR reconstructive efforts?? If you can use moral relativism to equate these two kinds of damage, you've got severe issues well beyond your lack of logical prowess. (This is not to mention the fact that the terrorists don't need to rely on infrastructure attacks to harm Iraqis, when they can carbomb neighborhood children, gas stations, police stations, and stores, which they do quite frequently. You're right -- these "insurgents" are the ones to get behind!)
Let's recap: "NOT insurgents." Now, I wonder: what does a person like you do when faced with a multitude of facts, by a variety of more knowledgeable people than yourself, that contradict the very wrong (and very odd) claims that you've made?
BECAUSE THEY AREN'T ONES GOING ROUND CLAIMING TO BE MORALLY RIGHT!!
Yet again: do you actually believe these statements, or do you just hope that no one will argue against you? You DO realize that these people shout "Allah akbar" as the planes slam into the buildings, right? And the same when they behead people? And claim
"USA illegally invaded another country and aspect to be treated good?"
I wonder why you quoted me, since this comment doesn't address anything I said. At any rate, the US did invade Iraq, of that there is no argument. Was it illegal? What's your definition? Iraq's gov't didn't want us to. Neither did Germany's in WWII -- was that illegal and therefore wrong? Oh, maybe you're thinking of the UN. Well, the UN threatened action against Iraq in its resolutions, and then didn't follow up them, undermining its already laughable credibility and doing damage to its future prospects of viable threats.
I never said the US expects to be "treated good" -- that's your emotional bias speaking again. However, it's good that I didn't expect it. Despite introducing democracy and capitalism on a large scale to Iraq, despite 8 million Iraqis braving terrorist threats to vote on Jan. 30, despite many of them calling it the happiest day of their lives (or the greatest day in the history of Iraq), and despite the invasion precipitating moves toward freedom in Georgia, Lebanon, Ukraine, Kuwait, and Kyrgyzstan, just to name a few, plenty of people worldwide argue about the evil that was the Iraq invasion. Oh yeah, and all the emboldened democratic protests in countries like Iran and Egypt, as they see the process working in nearby countries. Also, Libya (another terrific non-democratic regime with a history of ties to terrorism) freely disarmed its nuclear program. Did you happen to "turn on the news" for those minor events?
But I guess your hatred of the US allows you to comfortably ignore all of these developments worldwide as people living under tyrannical regimes strive to overturn their governments and achieve the ability to VOTE, in their own countries, to be finally free from willful torture, rape, and imprisonment, to be treated as equals, to join the 21st century's economy and all its gains in living standards, and to break the shackles of radical Islamic rule. In other words, exactly what the US gave Iraqis. You COULD wait for the hundreds of millions of other people worldwide to finally achieve that for themselves after only a couple more generations live under such governments, all the while accusing the US of being the greatest evil in the universe, or you could flip the "brain-dead whiney liberal do-nothing peacenik socialist know-nothing" switch in your brain to its off position and support democracy.
"Like americans wouldn't have done the same thing if invaded and defeated by a country in the middle east or whatever."
Are you really such a moral relativist that you don't see the difference between a radical Islamic regime that denies women the right to vote or hold jobs, imprisons people whose IDEAS differ from theirs, censors the Internet, and deprives its people of making a comfortable living, and a democratic capitalism like the US? Give us all a break and hit some middle school logic books for some much-needed study time.
"In many ways, your logic is nothing but a rotten apple. Take a bite."
In every way, since nothing you mentioned even passingly confronted my argument -- you completely ignored the narrow topic at hand in favor of making sweeping accusations according to your preconceived notions -- you're not the right person to comment on logic.
Second, it's the risk-taking, exploratory, entrepreneurial spirit that endowed us with the resources -- and the drive -- we have to invest in further space ventures now. That same spirit is the most powerful tool we have to widely encourage education, intellectual development, and -- yes -- tolerance.
Specifically embodied, this tool is called democratic capitalism, which, incidentally, is exactly what the world's poor need right now. Not (the aptly-named) Band Aid or Live 8, not debt forgiveness, not handouts and smiles; freedom and economic development.
As many poor as there are in the world today, there would be many more without capitalism and the incentives it engenders. To curtail our endeavors by funneling their resources into even more charity drives that naively address symptoms rather than diseases, would be to do everyone involved a monumental disservice.
(The one caveat here is that our push farther into space should be a privatized effort, not a government-funded one.)
Evaluating neither the particular actions of the US military nor the commitment of the US government to adhere to the Constitution, this order of priorities is as it should be.
National defense (aka "the military") is specified as a constitutional role of government. NASA is not.
Hahaha, that's some truly hilarious lack of a clue, there. Thanks for taking the leftist perspective that the Islamists are peace-loving members of a glorious world community who want nothing better than to be left alone.
In reality, they want Israel gone, destroyed -- not just to live peacefully alongside Israel. They want to make every government in the world an ISLAMIC one. They feel they have the absolute, God-given right to kill those who contradict their beliefs (read on the Islamist who killed Theo Van Gogh). They think bloodshed is the work of God.
These people are still citing the f'ing CRUSADES as a reason to get back at Westerners? Do you actually think that's warranted? Are you that much of an insulated, emotionally driven, politically correct coward? They ALWAYS have a reason, and they ALWAYS will. It'll be the Crusades, or support for Israel, or a hidden Zionist agenda, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Kuwait, or someone in the States who dropped a Koran, or something else.
Thanks for saying you'll fly the plane yourself. It's amazing how you hypocritical bastards spend 10 times the effort criticizing America for falling outside international law and being vindictive and unilateralist, than you do criticizing Islamists for constantly doing whatever they want, including killing civilians as the primary target, beheading others, sabotaging water and electricity that keep Iraqis alive, and so on.
They don't hate freedom as a concept in itself; they hate freedom because freedom allows the choice of religion, the choice of sleeping around, the choice of sinning, the choice of not praying five times a day. Oh yeah, and the choice of women to speak, to vote, to hold jobs, to wear less than full-cover clothing, to sleep with those they wish, to speak their minds, and to have a part in government. Thanks for sticking up for the SANE ones, jackass. You'll be on the right side of history.
As for your position on force: Ever consider that all of the treaties passed and all the agreements reached through diplomatic means in bodies like the UN hinge on a spoken or unspoken threat of force? Without that ability, no treaty is binding, talk is just talk, and any country can do what it wants. The UN implied that force with Iraq, and then failed to back it up, which leads to a breakdown in the very authority and usefulness (what little there is) of the UN. The US and allies acted as the original resolutions intended, but as no one else had the spine to do because they're wimpy little leftist countries that want nothing more than to be alone in their little corners, sucking their thumbs as their populations dwindle and their economies rot due to those selfsame liberal policies.
Learn some logic, drop your bias, and start trying to live in a world that'll never embody your perfect leftist ideologies, instead of remaking it around your corrupted visions.
"In my opinion, anyone who sees a distinction between using this in Iraq and using it in the USA is extremely ignorant, naive, or worse. People are people, regardless of nationality."
No, THAT'S naive. If that's the case, then all the libs are wrong when they call Iraq a quagmire and assert that things are getting worse there all the time. I mean, according to your "logic," people are people with the same percentage of bad apples all around, right? So we should be having the same number of suicide bombers, roadside bombs, car bombs, mullahs gathering armed anti-American crowds in the streets, here in America as they do in Iraq.
WHAT?? Nowhere near as freaking many? We don't have islamists flooding in from neighboring countries to support the native bad elements? Well, looks like your theory is totally, ridiculously, lampoonishly wrong.
But people are people! There's no greater NEED to use an anti-riot weapon in Iraq than there is here, right?
Yeah, I know "people are people" is another favorite lib BS slogan that makes you all feel nice and fuzzy and part of the global community, but it doesn't jive with the (also-liberal) "Iraq as a violent, imploding quagmire" routine. Terrorists are all over Iraq, and they're there because American targets are nearby, not because otherwise peace-loving Muslims were "agitated" into terrorism due to America's "unfair" war.
Since you brought up Nazi Germany, do you honestly think that as a Jew, and given German domestic support for the Nazis, you would've been able to find the same ratio of individuals who WOULDN'T try to turn you over and get you sent to a camp, by knocking on random doors as you would've in America at the same time? YOU are the one who's ignorant, naive, and *dangerous* if you really think that "people are people" when comparing the populace of a republic to that of a theocratic totalitarianism.
Those are valid points about the technology, and they've been made elsewhere in this thread. But that's a separate argument than the one that's being argued in this thread.
The arguments against this weapon have overwhelmingly set that possibility of long-term damage aside, and instead claimed that the government with ANY KIND of non-lethal weapon is a huge threat. That argument sidesteps particulars about the weapon, and that's the kind of argument THIS thread is on. The gov't using it without cause, supressing free speech, etc.
The GP poster is correctly saying that it's far better to have this weapon on-hand than to have to resort to gunning down swaths of people at the first hint of a threat to the soldiers'/officers' lives.
Ah, so you think that all the non-Americans who criticize exclusively the US for arming Saddam are also cherry-picking America because it was done "IN THEIR NAMES"? No, I don't think so, since they're _not American_. And I don't believe for a second that even the majority of Americans who do the same thing are doing it with this deeply-considered philosophical POV about the differences in expectations and so forth about all the other countries. Most of them -- and I wouldn't be surprised if you were among them until grandparent post -- probably don't KNOW any of the other countries contributed, they don't know HOW we or anyone else helped, and they don't know why. They just carry the meme as another anti-Bush, anti-GOP propaganda piece.
Perhaps, when you choose to spew more propaganda of this type, whether it be against the war in Iraq, the one in Afghanistan, or help for Saddam in the 80s, you could try contextualizing the situation and bringing a little logic to bear, rather than tripping your hair-trigger emotional responses that result in endless DNC-approved catchphrases like "Not in my name!!!" Maybe that's too much to ask.
Yeah, war isn't great. Neither is a totalitarian dictator lording his obscene riches over his populace, invading neighboring countries, gassing hundreds of thousands of his own people, maintaining rape rooms, stifling women's rights in general, torturing people in a multitude of ways, and choosing to build palaces rather than feed his people. The cost in terms of life and suffering in a war against said dictator, versus leaving him and his heirs in power for a few more decades? Almost undoubtedly lower; that is, of course, unless you're a *liberal* apologist. In that case, the facts need not be considered; war is wrong is wrong is wrong -- we need peace!! Who's against peace???
This world doesn't always offer the clean-cut choices of wrong and right -- it's most often the case that a less-than-ideal decision has to be made to forestall one that out-and-out sucks. The government in the 80s determined that Communism (you know, as embodied by the USSR, with its occupation and influence over many countries worldwide, its huge supply of arms to bad regimes, and its thousands of NUKES pointed at us) was probably a bigger threat than Saddam. Correct or incorrect as determined by history (and I think it'd be a tough case to go back to that era with its uncertainty and choose otherwise), it's intellectually dishonest to paint the gov't as being driven by evil and an uncaring attitude toward the poor and disenfranchised, and a wish to dominate the world. And yet, that's the story I get most often from libs.
Please. Take your non-thinking, biased, partisan, propagandist drivel elsewhere. Or, in fact, just keep it here -- Slashdot is your most natural home.
"Well, these are also a function of the input of absolutely massive amounts of really really cheap energy..."
Anything that can be done needs resources -- there's some immediate enabling factor you can point to as a direct catalyst for anything that gets done, so that doesn't help explain anything here.
Moreover, that cheap energy is, by and large, being produced not by the US, but by other countries that sell it in the larger global marketplace. Therefore, it's not a valid explanation of why the US is ahead. In addition, you may actually want to question WHY said energy is cheap and available in the first place; with honest research, you'd come to the conclusion that it's due to capitalism. Capitalistic ventures enabled the technology for: discovering, obtaining, refining, and transporting the oil; increasing competition to lower prices not just at the endpoints, but via reduced costs; the growth in alternative fuels; and so on.
"it rose at a time when many of the resources of Europe were already dwindling, and did not have to burn through resources in the two wars in quite the same way the Europeans did."
Don't make the mistake of thinking that resources make the country; Japan has almost none, and many South American countries are beyond gifted. See the contrast?
And for all that burning through resources, Germany and England, to name two obviously hard-hit countries in the wars, have done supremely well since WWII (and continue to do well now) -- just not as well as the US -- and their political, economic, and social systems differ accordingly. For another great example, do some reading up on the differences in GNP between East and West Germany post-WWII. Same country, same people, different political and economic systems -- very different outcomes.
You should need nothing more than common sense to realize that the more efficiently resources are used to produce things that people want, and the more efficiently they get to where they need to be, the less waste and the more productivity there are in a society. No system heretofore implemented can come close to rivaling capitalism in that very allocation of goods; it simply says, "I have what you want, and you have what I want -- let's find mutually agreeable terms and trade."
"Never forget that even Ethiopia used to be a superpower once...."
I think you mean a *power*... a regional power. We can point to plenty of countries that, through autocracy and sheer militarism, were able to take over some nearby land. That's worlds away from the wealth, comfort, power, and influence wielded by the US today. Also note that, in most cases like that, it's done at the expense of vast majorities of the populations in question. The US, on the other hand, is lent its strength by its empowered citizens.
"Yes, but the reasons why a libertarian government would become involved in the economy are very few: infringment of personal/property rights."
Yes, that's true.
"Many things that are regulated now - pollution, monopolies, rules against price fixing, etc - would not exist."
You'd have to be infringing someone else's individual (or corporate, but from an economic perspective, same thing in this instance) rights by disallowing them from, say, agreeing with another person/company on prices. Don't like the prices they've colluded to offer? Don't buy the product. Price fixing is a great way to keep prices artificially high, leaving plenty of room for competitors. A true monopoly comes along very rarely, and in all historical instances I've ever seen documented, they were government-enabled. Pollution's a problem, but many libertarians acknowledge the need for SOME sort of regulation here -- they just don't want it to be heavy-handed. Pollution fits into the category of "neighborhood effects," which affect private property negatively just as much as public property.
Side note: Microsoft? Absolutely, 100% not a monopoly in any meaningful sense of the word (i.e. economic). Anyone who espouses otherwise belies a woeful understanding of basic economics, or (more likely) is demonstrating blind bias.
"What you say about contracts being binding works both ways; I thought everyone on Slashdot knew the carelesness of the average person."
We do know that. And libertarians are a bit better at realizing the extent to which that carelessness is due to institutional coddling by government. It's an inevitable, inarguable fact of life that by downplaying the risks in an activity, you will increase the rate of that activity occurring. It's also a fact of life that the taxes used to encourage people thus to engage in poorly considered activities are being siphoned from individuals, companies, and other organizations that would use it to better the things we just talked about. And finally, as more taxes go through government hands, more of it is lost in the process, and more opportunities for corruption crop up.
"the majority of that wealth is concentrated in a tiny percentge of the people"
That's not a bad thing. A vast amount of wealth, period, is in the US. It does me no harm that Bill Gates has $50B, and in fact, the draw of that money is what inclined him to create the stuff he did, which I use on a regular basis to make MY money, let alone get personal stuff done. Economics is not a zero-sum game -- 95% could be concentrated in the top 5% of people, but in a society like the US, all the rest of us can still be doing great. And my statistics are worse than it really is. It seems that you're more worried about the unfairness of someone doing way better than other people, than you are about the optimal allocation of resources, leading to a richer society, both in the aggregate and on average.
"social programs serve to prevent 1/4 of the population from living in destitute conditions"
If you're talking about the US, that figure's way out of line. You think there are 75 million people in the US making a living on social programs? Welfare roles are probably at about 6 million or so now, if not lower (check Google). Other than that, there are other scattered programs here and there, but they won't even rival that number. I'd say you're too high by a factor of almost ten in the raw figures alone. Then there's your assumption that they're being saved from destitution... suffice to say, if you don't have a job, yeah, you'll probably get poorer and starve over time. Surely you don't think that even a tenth of those on welfare CAN'T get a job without it? Again, a hand with money will inevitably be accepted by some people in the place of their sweat.
I'm sure you're not considering social security, since that money was already taken from us in the first place. We'll be lucky if we get it all back with 0% interest, let alone the amount we COULD have.
Sure, government does a lot of stuff. But it does almost none of it well, and absolutely none of it better than companies could do. The incentives aren't there, and the results make that blatantly clear.
Libertarianism isn't about the "non-intervention" of government -- it's about a minimal government that, like any other government, should intervene in any activity that countermands its laws.
"That means that the government doesn't interfere with what companies want to do"
False. In the case of ANY libertarian ideal, contract law is a central tenet and must be enforced. The amazing thing is that, in the absence of overbearing bureaucracy, people tend to self-organize rather well and write (and sign) good contracts. A sale of stock in a corporation has an accompanying contract (dividends, transfer rights, board membership, etc.); if you're buying stock, look for one that requires the company's board to fully disclose its quarterly numbers. And its officers' stock holdings. And so on. If you don't do that, guess what -- take some personal responsibility and think about learning how to invest in a company before buying stock.
And what if the company publishes faulty numbers anyway? The "libertarian ideal" doesn't protect against that, does it? Surprise -- the company just violated contract with its shareholders (even ignoring tax fraud and other extra-contractual crimes). No law, however overbearing in terms, can keep someone from circumventing it. We're only talking about Enron because they got caught and punished. Is it because of libertarian ideals that your house got broken into? The causes of things like that are criminals, not principles. When you drive off a cliff, it's because you turned at the wrong time, not because the government left the guardrail off.
"The idea that we should be ruled by the dollar is, quite frankly, rather extreme and un-human."
This is your take on the free market, but frankly -- cultural development *around* capitalism aside -- you're dead wrong about it. It's about free and voluntary exchange, period. It works also on a pure barter system, no dollars necessary. It just so happens that free-market principles have also led to unprecedented growth in wealth, standards of living, lifespans, health, comfort, and scientific development, but feel free to argue against those if you find them, too, to be un-human and extreme.
Cool, thanks. That's what I thought. I just didn't want to go into full HTML mode and have to do s everywhere to separate paragraphs (but now I see that italics works in plain text mode). I was also hoping there was a "quote on reply" feature to eliminate some copy-pasting. Oh, well.:) Thanks again.
"I guess this is just where we differ. The world economy is not the first thing that comes to my mind when discussing outsourcing. You may think it is a defect in my thinking but I think the opposite is a defect in thinking. It is personal opinion I guess."
Nor I -- I'm an America-first kind of guy, based on both circumstance and principle. I don't think either one's a defect in thinking, though. It's just a matter of the community (e.g. the U.S. or the world) that one considers himself to be a part of, and which one he needs to be most concerned about for his own welfare. Differences in perspective and priority, I'd say.
I know what you're saying about something like biotech, but the thing is that the majority of those jobs are going to require retraining, yes, but not necessarily a higher education or anything like that. The people walking around in the labcoats, and the techies programming the systems, and any other researchers involved, are the tiny minority of new jobs created. There will be hordes of people manning pharmaceutical machines, building new facilities, maintaining equipment, answering phones, etc. There are vast quantities of low-tech work to be done in all industries, but with the newer, leading-edge ones, companies are a lot more likely to keep them here. They have a lot more direct control, the processes are newer and need immediate and constant monitoring, they're often not ready to cope with the added complexities of globalization yet, and margins are higher due to lower competition. (Not to mention the fact that fresh trade secrets may not be so safe to outsource to someplace like China.)
How do you go about doing your italicized quoting in this system? It seems like a whole lot of work to do all the HTML markup for it.
Hey, I've had an account for a long time, but mostly just read before. What do you think is the easiest way to quote with this system? In the meantime, I forge ahead.
Of course I'm not talking about the guy who got laid off, and in fact, I don't know who he is, or where he fits in here. I'm saying that a company going into a country and taking advantage of cheap labor is typically a very good thing for that country, its workers, and its overall GDP and standards of living. If someone gets fired, he's probably still better off, since he did provide for him and his while he was employed -- now he's back to whatever options he had before the company got there...no net change, except he might have eaten well for a period there, and he's now got skills.
Oh, wait. You're talking about the domestic side of outsourcing, I see. My bad. Look, I definitely sympathize with laid-off workers, and being a programmer, I wouldn't be surprised if I get knifed by it at some point. But just like an example showing one woman using her H2 every day doesn't convict all H2 owners of doing that, showing the misery of a single guy laid off doesn't disprove that outsourcing has a net positive effect. You can't play both sides of the argument, lamenting the conditions of cheap laborers (who actually are bettered by outsourcing) and domestic workers who are laid off because of it. The world economy is net bettered by outsourcing, since money and resources are used and distributed more effectively. I'm not being callous when I say that there WILL be people put out by it, but it moves rote low-skilled jobs overseas so that the American economy can move into the next phase of growth, whether it's in space, energy, biotech, or whatnot. It keeps us ahead.
Quality and price have both been improved immensely by competition -- cheap overseas labor just floods the market with flimsy products, which makes it a lot easier to get poorly made stuff.
I'm with you on buying American. My only two cars have been Fords, on purpose. I pay a lot of heed to whether something is American-made or not, though foreign-made is unavoidable in a lot of cases. Intellectually I'm of the mind that it's better in the long run to simply buy Honda or something to force Ford and GM to wake up hard-core with regards to their defects, their poor design, and their low reliability, but it's hard for me to bite that bullet, at the same time.
"Exploit the work" by giving them the opportunity to take a job, make more money than they were already making, give them technical skills, and raise the GDP and standards of living of a country?
Yeah, India is really hurting now. So's Eastern Europe. I hear they're about ready to revolt from the exploitation of their cheap labor by Westerners. Oops, no, it's revitalizing (or, really, vitalizing) their economies. The need for work, combined with the technical skills gained and spread by early adopters, as well as the influx of foreign trainers to keep the skilled labor pool strong, means huge foreign investment in their economies and their induction into the world economy.
You're taking an idea and running with it. "Exploiting cheap labor" is a catchphrase used to immediately inject some sinister overtones into the topic of a company gaining huge advantages by hiring workers at cheaper rates than in their domestic economies. Guess what?? It's almost always good for both sides! The workers freely choose to work there. No one's saying it's paradise, but it's a step up, or they wouldn't have accepted the jobs.
"Exploiting," "taking advantage of," etc. are all true, and not in themselves bad. They've just got negative connotations. Of course, if you still want to bias your response, be sure to add "and putting their cigars out on the eyes of the workers" to your list. No one wants to work in unsafe conditions, and such is NOT part and parcel with cheap outsourcing. If you don't like unsafe conditions, campaign against THAT -- not cheap labor in general. Separate the issues and be logical.
Publix (or Safeway, or Wal-Mart, or whatever pleases you) doesn't sell you your bread out of benevolence -- it's all to make a buck. Does the lack of an altrustic motive rob the bread of its value? No -- just the opposite, since through competition prices are lowered and the value of your money (and therefore your labor) is increased, since you can now buy more bread with it.
Take an economics course, and actually think about it, instead of reacting emotionally to your apparent desire for us all to hold hands under a rainbow and share together, and do things only out of benevolence for our comrades. Not that I disagree with that metaphorical goal in the end, but free-market, low-regulation capitalism's the superior, if not the only, way to maximize the efficient allocation of goods to everyone who needs them.
Let's not lecture about jumping to conclusions until you drop your ignorant claim: "Just look at the blatant disregard for the envrionment that anyone who drives an H2 has."
It's absurd to think you know what regard anyone, let alone everyone, has for anything. Who cares if it's a useless status symbol? That may be a vapid truth, but it helps you none in actually showing that you're right when you suppose you know the truth about all those horrible, apathetic H2 owners. Congrats, you've learned to see an H2 on the road and immediately judge the person driving it. How open-minded you are!
You're basing your claim on YOUR suppositions about the resilience threshold of the environment, at the same time assuming some things about the usage of the H2s by their owners. It IS a huge, showy, expensive auto -- and plenty of people who own things like that own 3 or more cars, and take the showy one out (be it a BMW, a Thunderbird reissue, a vintage, or whatnot) very rarely, or even as much as once or a couple times a week. And guess what they're not doing when they do that? Driving the family from NY to FL on vacation. There are others who do use it as their primary vehicle, but that doesn't at all justify your blanket accusations.
Oh yeah, and thanks for bringing up their uselessness and status symbolism -- it exhibits that they ARE iconic (as an extreme example) of stuff you dislike. You hate H2s, but you love Chevy Suburbans and H1s, right? Excursions? Nope, if you're intellectually honest, you dislike those as gas guzzlers, too. But the H2 is iconic because it's the most overt (that's the one you brought up, right?), and you let that emotion take you to automatic and unjustified conclusions about their owners.
Look, the true point is that I shouldn't have to justify any of this: if you can't see the rash illogic of what you said, you shouldn't be a mathematician, a programmer, a scientist, or any other occupation that relies on reasoning abilities. And if you recognize it, admit it.
Yeah, H2s are more polluting than most other vehicles (if not all other consumer vehicles). What do you drive? Man, if you don't drive a hybrid or something better, I bet the Prius people really look down on YOU. And the cyclists and Segway folks look down on THEM.
Everyone's got their own view of what's acceptable and what the environment can tolerate, and as long as you intentionally stay beneath what YOU TRULY BELIEVE for that reason, it's true that you care about the environment. You can do better, sure, but you can't make up for everyone else who's over their limit -- there's no end to that. I'm sure plenty of H2 owners care about the environment, but think their use of the H2 is within the per capita environmental tolerance. You can call that foolish, if you want, or wrong, or naive -- but don't translate it into a character issue. That's foolish and unfair, illogical and elitist, and contrary to the principles of an enlightened society.
"Increasing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere and global surface and air temperatures." "I can measure the number of species that are driven to extinction annually." "The size of the whole in the ozone layer."
You could have been measuring these since the formation of Earth, or at least the rise of ecosystems. Way before people, in either case.
"Rates of asthma in areas where poultion is heavy vs areas where polution is light." "I can measure the size of the lower class." "I can also measure the multiple between a factory worker's an a CEO's pay." "I can measure the rate of workplace injuries."
You could have been measuring these since the beginning of human existence (or, for industrial/corporate ones, at least since the 1800s). Again, as with several others who have posted, you're stating the obvious, but doing nothing constructive with it. It's great to use know you can measure these things, but now apply that knowledge to the task of constructing a definition of what it means to actually "ruin" someone's life or the environment.
As I said, you could've measured many of them before humans graced the planet, and more of them before the rise of democracy and capitalism. So obviously the measurement alone establishes nothing at all about the circumstances under which you would claim that a corporation has destroyed someone's life. There are clear cases of where they have (their tractor rolled over a guy and killed him) and clear cases of where they haven't (they sent a guy a fruitcake for Christmas).
The vast middle area is what's important, since plenty of people (like you, I gather) are liberal and anti-corporate, and make incendiary claims with no back-up evidence about how "Corporation X built a factory in Chad and is ruining people's lives every day!" My understanding of the original poster's point is that you have absolutely got to have a prior definition of what it means to ruin someone's life, before you can fairly make claims like that. It's all too easy to emotionally react when there's something you intuitively don't like or think is unfair, and say, "See? This is what I'm talking about! Ruining people's lives!" It's harder to establish a definition beforehand, because then you've got to be objective and settle for a stationary target. (And more importantly, have to swallow it when something happens that you don't like, but which just doesn't fit that prior definition -- it's dishonest to continually alter it to encompass each new thing you emotionally reject.)
In the same way, you'd better have a prior definition of "monopoly" that you apply to MS (or M$, in zealot-speak...sorry if anyone didn't understand it the first time). Again, it's too easy to answer the question of "What exactly do you think a monopoly is, anyway?" with "Well, M$ is! If M$ ain't a monopoly, I don't know what is!" That goes back to the reasoning/definition vs. example thing.
Haha, okay, point out where I did, and you got me.
How about you refer back to what I actually said, and realize that I merely called for a context for those complaints. Sure, government can affect them -- and I'm against government affecting them, entirely. This conversation was about companies, anyway, not government.
Government can affect all those things, and so can companies, and so can the individual. It can be fair treatment or unfair treatment. But the entire point of this thread was to state a definition for, and not examples of, "ruining people's lives" and "ruining the environment." Grandparent post gave a bulleted list of items without any context. They all sound sad, but they bring us no closer to a definition without an explanation of the circumstances involved.
Even if I didn't understand what "power" is, that wouldn't be representative of Slashdot in general -- don't take things too far. That being said, I don't like it when people use loose terminology or try to drive home a point without defining terms, so I was asking you to clarify.
It's obvious that failing in any contractual situation is wrong -- I don't think anyone is debating that you should pay if you're contractually obligated to. Free market economics hinges on contract arrangements, so don't fault the free market for any of the things you describe (not that you are).
If there's a lack of understanding, it's yours with specific regard to the issue of the responsibilities of the actors involved here.
"Abuse of power also comes in the form of paying laborers saleries they cannot live on."
If they can't live on the salaries, they shouldn't accept a job there. I'll never understand this argument against a company opening a new plant, for instance, at what you consider low wages. For one thing, figures are often given in U.S. figures (e.g. 2 dollars a day! Can you believe that??), when in fact in many countries that's more than the people were already making. No one FORCES anyone to work there; therefore, if someone chooses to, they've evaluated the option to be better than whatever else was available to them. Ergo, more options, more possibility.
For a nation to stand on its own economically, to enrich its people consistently and continue an incline of living standards, they're going to have to ramp up industry. To do that, their workers need technical skills and experience, which is given to them by such factories. This is extremely crucial, and they will NEVER get out of their hole and join the world economy without it. It's a part of the argument that anti-corporate types often forget altogether. Foreign investment takes on the greatest importance in countries with few natural resources, since it's harder to get a toehold in modern production.
If a country has a large pool of cheap labor (freely chosen, remember!) and workers that are growing more skilled all the time, more companies will "take advantage" (ooh, evil phrase, because no one "taking advantage" of someone else can cause a good result, right?) of the opportunity. As this happens, competition increases, and wages and benefits increase. Skills become more widespread, and native people start to become managers. Then, some realize they can do things better (maybe even just because they understand the workers better), and start their own companies.
Witness India. Taiwan. Hong Kong. Eastern Europe. Tons more, particularly in Asia. No resources needed, just a large, cheap labor pool. Companies make a TON of money at first, sure -- more than necessary. That's neither wrong nor particularly long-lived. When people are willingly working for a company, don't second-guess them by assuming you know what's best, and they don't.
Just try to get past that nagging feeling in the back of your mind that because companies don't have benevolent intentions in mind, nothing good can come of their profiting. Profit is a measure of how big a misallocation of resources a company has found and is correcting (e.g. willing workers in an economically suppressed country), so the more a company makes, the more difference consumers will see in the prices and availability of goods.
This presupposes, of course, that the company isn't breaching the rule of law, and isn't a monopoly. (And a monopoly won't last long without artificial means such as copyrights and patents.)
Slashdot Mirror
I love this quote that capitalism's a great theory, but that it "doesn't work in the real world." It always makes me wonder just how fragile the fantastical reinterpretation of history you maintain in your minds must be.
For instance, how might we interpret the indisputable rise of the US as the greatest economic story probably in the history of the world, coinciding nicely with its adoption of small government and capitalism? Ah, some may point to our boundless natural resources. But, of course, that wouldn't explain Japan, which has virtually no natural resources whatsoever; yet its power was never greater -- and the lives of its citizens never better -- than once it adopted a Western capitalist system post-WWII.
Cultural factors, perhaps? Hmm...maybe you'd want to go back to the books and study the differences in GNP between East Germany and West Germany post-WWII? Same culture; same decimated infrastructure; same history; same language. Yet West Germany's economy dwarfed that of East's; people scrambled to get from East to West, not the other way around.
Ah, but maybe it was a one-off thing. Then again, what about South Korea vs. North Korea? Hong Kong vs. China? Taiwan vs. China? The capitalist areas of India vs. those remote areas untouched by such an economic system? The UAE vs. Iran? Economy, culture, politics, and lifestyle are complex, so in any given case, there do exist extant factors like culture, religion, tradition, geography, instability, and so forth that come into play; but across the wide variety of examples in the world, an undeniable theme emerges. Maybe it's easier to do this the other way: Find a country that has rejected the tenets of capitalism, yet has people that are freer, happier, safer, healthier, or otherwise better off than a capitalist country, specifically BECAUSE of the rejection of capitalism. I'd be interested in that for sure.
"The thing is, you have to set your own priorities."
Haha, and so your solution to that is to have the government take more of my money and sink it into a one-size-fits-all priority of its omniscient determination?
"I bought several of his books and a slew of lectures on CD at ebay for $20 after I noticed my kid really liked the copy of Feynmann's Rainbow I got at the library. For less than the price of taking the family to McDonalds they are now intimately knowledgeable with one of the brightest minds of physics."
Thanks for proving my point. You were able to get all that education without an OC-3 going into your house! Amazing! You didn't even need a dial-up connection, after all the wailing about the educational opportunities it curtails. Wait, but you didn't even...need...a computer. Astounding. And here I was wondering just how someone like Feynman was able to learn all he did without 20M down like they have in S. Korea. (Nova's also on tape and DVD, as well as -- unbelievably -- TV itself. You could even use Tivo or another DVR to record it. That way your kid's brain won't atrophy too much.)
"Have some backbone lad or your going to get crushed."
Not in your world -- the government's there to save the day. Hard to lecture someone on this principle after you've gotten done whining about how hard it is to learn without being able to download *Nova videos* or how awful it would be to actually think about moving your business or family to where the opportunities are. (The US is, after all, only one of the most mobile societies in history.)
"The reason America is falling off the tech wagon is because we have collectively lost the dream. All the justification that that is the way capitalism works won't change that fact."
Interesting you should mention that, since I never justified the way things ARE based on capitalism -- I just argued against your proposed changes. Gov't-instituted monopolies are not capitalism, and neither are gov't subsidies to industry. The US is falling off LOTS of wagons -- including tech -- because we're LESS capitalist all the time. Hard to be capitalist when 30
You're arguing that I have no market in Internet connectivity when I just told you I can opt for cable, DSL, satellite, EDGE, etc.? Please explain. Keep in mind that pointing out differences of service capability (cable vs. satellite, for example) does not substitute for doing this. Capitalism does not attempt to make all alternatives equal; to do so in ANY area of life would be foolish.
Other countries "do a better job," through government assistance. As I said, a government can of course achieve a given goal faster than a capitalistic system, since it appropriates the resources of its citizens and focuses a bureaucracy to do so. That point has never been argued. What gets lost when the state does this is not the achievement of the goal, but the satisfaction of the precondition that the goal be a valuable use of resources. When a government draws resources from everyone to serve a need that only some of the population wants, it has wronged all the others, and necessarily placed an artificial priority on that task. If it weren't artificial, the government wouldn't have to legislate it, since the sheer demand of the populace would create profit potential great enough to spur an entire industry (which would then fulfill the need more efficiently than government ever could).
Again, to the extent that government (i.e. taxpayers) has subsidized an industry, that was bad. No reason to compound the problem by now trying to claim what's "rightfully ours." The sooner government steps out, the lower our losses as a society will be.
Finally, the concept of "reasonable profits" is ridiculous at the outset; profits at either a low or a high level can be "reasonable," as long as someone's willing to pay them. Sure, you can gripe, but if you pay, the price is evidently reasonable enough. Higher profits generally mean that a greater need is being met -- and that's not at all a bad thing.
They just aren't being used because the controlling corporations make more money not providing to the public they are supposedly serving and when communities try to do it themselves the corporate deep pockets work to legislate against this.
1) Corporations control their own assets, which is as it should be. If I own a limo service, you have no right to use it unless I allow you to, for whatever price I set. Don't like the price? Don't use the service. 2) Companies do not "supposedly" serve a community; companies exist solely to serve the interests of their shareholders -- that's what drives innovation, as much as idealists wish it weren't so. 3) Companies -- and individuals -- currently and always will do everything they can, including legislative action, to make things go their way. Again, that's their goal -- profit -- and no one should be surprised. The solution isn't to naively wish that they wouldn't do that, or spend tons of money trying to make them stop and clarify what should be allowed and what shouldn't. The solution is minimizing government power (as per the Constitution) to the point that bribing and influencing legislators would be useless, since they don't have money for discretionary projects, nor the power to force them onto unwilling taxpayers.
Recently I saw a show on PBS about how small markets are frequently refused service by the telcom industry because they aren't profitable while at the same time those telcos are using big money to buy off legistaltures to make it illegal for local governments to provide internet access because they claim it is anticompetitive.
See above, with the added note that for reasons altogether different (unwarranted and illegal use of taxpayer funds for pet projects like wireless coverage), local governments *shouldn't* be providing such things.
The case used on the program involved a mid-sized community whose main employer was unable to compete without broadband since they were required to have the connectivity to fulfill government contracts.
Sounds like a bad place to do business; the company should leave the town. Life has its vicissitudes, and no one should be guaranteed any good that someone else has to provide, wireless (or other) Internet access included.
Without broadband the community's main industry would be forced to leave.
Right. And...? I suppose you'd think the local economy would totally go down the tubes. That's almost never true; a community of people will ALWAYS have goods and services to exchange that make it worthwhile to live together. Other places will inevitably have competitive advantage in some, and perhaps many, things, but then you move there instead of wishing things were otherwise and suing someone to make it so.
When the town brought in broadband they had to fight the same telcos who originally said it was unprofitable to provide them with broadband were now saying that municipally provided broadband was anti-competetive.
Correct -- if it's not profitable for a company to do it, the need/want isn't great enough to justify it being done. If enough people want it (i.e. it's valuable enough), it will be profitable. If it's not profitable, it shouldn't exist, since there are other things that people value more (and therefore spend more of their money on instead) -- and that's where resources should go. Governments don't face this limitation, since they simply extort money from taxpayers, rather than requiring the inherent support that the market conveys. Of course a government can do it when a company can't -- you can't refuse it, or you go to jail for tax evasion.
If one company decided not to provide wireless, just to bilk more money from people (as you suggest), another company would provide it instead, forcing the first to do it, etc. We all know the story, and it's even truer of wireless than of hard assets like ground lines.
U.S. taxpayers have already paid a
You seem to be a) assuming that this is a world of unlimited resources, and b) assuming that in this world, it's EVERYONE'S priority that they have better broadband than they do now.
A government such as Canada's, which expends a greater percentage of taxpayer funds toward more aggressive social programs than does the US, can always accomplish a given goal through sheer brute force. That's what bureaucracy is good at. Give them a goal, and lots of money and time, and they'll do it. Problem is, that goal will inevitably draw resources from other sources (from an American perspective, the free market via taxpayer pockets; from a Canadian perspective, perhaps, health care) -- that's the way a world of trade-offs and limited resources works. And chances are, the majority of people will disagree with your priority.
No broadband provider in any town I've ever lived in (in the US) has had a monopoly. Anywhere I've heard of such a thing, it's government-granted, which is clearly not free-market. I can choose between DSL, cable, satellite, and EDGE, among others. This is all not to mention the fact that I could pool with my neighbors via wireless to make it cheaper, or go to the library, or go to Starbucks or McDonald's or a dozen other establishments near me. My choices are not limited -- there's nothing remotely resembling a monopoly (not that that was your accusation). I opted for cable, and my downloads -- while perhaps they pale compared to some other countries -- are about 700K down, which is way beyond what I need for virtually any (legal) purpose.
And this business about education is ignorant. Technology brings information, sure -- but it's not in any way necessary for fundamental mechanics of science, reading, math, philosophy, foreign languages, or anything else. Even if it were, a dial-up account is plenty for looking up information online, let alone the fact that a set of Encarta discs won't even require that.
In a free society, there's no guarantee that you'll get a given good at whatever price you want it at -- you have to agree on a price with someone who's offering it. Finland and Canada may be able to get faster access for less money than in the US, but I can guarantee government contributes on both sides (monopolistic encouragement in the US, bureaucratic dedication in other countries), and I can also guarantee that said intervention hurts the consumer, the countries' economies, and innovation in other areas. Those hidden costs in both direct taxes and reduced economic activity should be added on to the access fees when they're quoted.
I don't think that's what he's saying. The logic here isn't too difficult. The killings by Hussein weren't just a slip-up, a moment in time, an aberration. He was a constant threat to his people, whether in the form of torture, rape, intimidation, imprisonment, or outright killing (and mass killing).
It's clearly bad that innocent people have died in the war -- there's no argument there, so you're not taking the moral high ground in mentioning it, nor are you exhibiting cold indifference on the behalf of people who disagree with you. What you are exhibiting is a lack of context and consideration of alternatives.
In any war, people (and yes, innocent people, too) will die. By the logic of saying "But people will die! That means it's wrong!" no war is ever right. There's of course much more to it than that. In this case, how many people would have died at Saddam's hand, either directly or indirectly (links with terrorists or other dictatorial states, either currently or in the future)...and then at the hands of his son....and then at the hands of his other son...and then whoever comes after that. Historically, democratic capitalism is the surest way to prevent genocide and war (and don't give me the "But it hasn't stopped the US, blah blah blah" -- how many democratic capitalisms attack other democratic capitalisms?).
Whether it was WISE or not, and whether it has been and will be implemented correctly or not, are other issues worthy of debate. But you can't argue the moralism of it without considering the BALANCE of deaths that would occur.
Firstly, thank you for your long answer.
/. here.
And I thank you for yours. It was mostly civil, certainly more than mine, and I'll try to keep it that way.
BTW, your reference to nazi-germany is hilarious. It has absolutely nothing to do with the Iraq-situation.
It's not supposed to. It has everything to do with defining "illegal invasion" within the context of history, with and having consistent logic. If anyone's to argue, terms that are extremely broad have to be defined. Some people consider any violation of a nation's sovereignty to be illegal, regardless of UN votes or anything else -- that frames a very different argument than one where illegality hinges on world opinion.
This must be your biased emotions, because I do not hate USA.
Your explanation here makes sense to me, and sorry for the accusation. After reading 40+ anti-US (not just anti-Iraq war) posts in here, with maybe 4 opposing posts mixed in, it gets hard to delineate on nuances. If I had bias toward you, it reflects the bias I read on
And I don't like being lied to and seeing the innocent being killed in Iraq for oil.
What I don't like is unfounded charges. We could argue all day on whether it was done for oil or not, so let's not. Suffice it to say that there's no good proof either way, so it's best not to level accusations based on feeling. The US has had plenty of uninterrupted oil for decades now -- do you think OPEC would lightly lose 25% of their total business by cutting us off? My gas prices have shot up in the past couple years since the war, too; it's $2.30 or so a gallon now; in 2000 or 2001 I remember it hitting $0.98. It'd be nice if there were a motivation for this charge.
Lastly, the innocent were being killed in Iraq WITHOUT the war, on the order of (by estimates) over a million in the last couple decades. Didn't see it on TV? That might be because of the totalitarian regime not being nice enough to allow the cameras into the torture rooms. And while it certainly does seem that the WMD claims were false, false != lies. Please be objective on these things. The US, UK, and even the *Russian* intelligence (and Russia was against the war) concluded that Iraq was in long-term plans to strike back at the US, perhaps through terrorist cooperation. The US admin ran with some unfounded charges, it's true, and that was wrong. But by the time credible intel from a number of nations all points in one direction, it makes unfounded reports a lot more believable, and leads to irresponsible behavior in fact-checking. But don't blindly assert that the entire thing was built on lies, like Bush thought there was 0% threat from Iraq, and made it out to be 100%. That's not in line with the facts.
Seems like you are trying to pull another black or white-angle.
No, I'm far from B&W thinking. I didn't vote for Bush, nor do I think the admin handled the invasion or post-invasion extremely well. I also realize that that's really hard to do, and that the ideal will never be accomplished. I disagree with Bush on plenty of things, and libertarian that I am, I can argue against the war based on its use of American tax money for a war that may or may not fall within the "national defense" rubric. Nevertheless, as I said above, intel isn't perfect; and if I were President and receiving multi-national reports of WMD intentions and knew of terrorist willingness to use a nuke if it could be acquired, I'd be hard pressed to choose against taking action, when a nuke going off in an American city and killing maybe hundreds of thousands of people is in the balance.
I'd also note that N. Korea had weapons inspectors making regular visits there for 7 years, certifying that nothing was going on. This was just before their announcement that they possessed a nuclear program and had, in fact, developed warheads (the ones they're now threatening everyone with). Hence, diplomacy, talks, inspections, and good in
Yeah, in the case of Iraq, that IS the leftist view. The labels are there because they describe -- pretty accurately -- broad views on society, politics, economics, and religion that are generally bundled. That's not to say leftists don't differ in extremity and on particular issues, but the labels are nevertheless useful for an "at-a-glance" overview of someone's position on life. That's why they were invented. And X-vs-Y? All decisions are X-vs-Y, except that depending on the decision, you may have to use a lot more letters. When I say leftist, it's not contrasted with only rightist, but libertarian, moderate (centrist), etc., as well as more targeted labels (Rep, Dem, Socialist, Green, Fascist, Communist, Religious Right, etc.).
Oh, and back to the point at hand. This just out today: Attacks on UK will continue, radical cleric says
Looks like they're friendly and reasonable after all! I apologize.
Are you even following the war? It was the initial attack that destroyed the infrastructure of Iraq, NOT insurgents.
I've been following it, but not on Al Jazeera. It's a rather "duhhh" kind of point that US military "blew stuff up." They blew up areas of Iraq's already-awesome infrastructure (neglected for decades, according to Iraqis) to weaken Iraq's military. That's war. Unlike with the "insurgents," the point was not to do harm to the people, but to do harm to their government so that they could be more quickly and easily beaten, thus inflicting fewer war-related casualties, so that Iraqis could resume life with a democratic government. Immediately after the war, the US government began _rebuilding_ the infrastructure, repairing not only war-damaged areas, but also old stuff that just wasn't working well three decades on. The inhumanity of it all!
Meanwhile, my sources seem to think the "insurgents" (otherwise known as "terrorists," speaking of labels) ARE destroying infrastructure. *Specifically* to damage reconstruction efforts and harm the everyday Iraqis in the process. (There would be plenty more of these attacks if it weren't for Iraqi police and coalition soldiers preventing them.) But where, oh where, are THEIR reconstructive efforts?? If you can use moral relativism to equate these two kinds of damage, you've got severe issues well beyond your lack of logical prowess. (This is not to mention the fact that the terrorists don't need to rely on infrastructure attacks to harm Iraqis, when they can carbomb neighborhood children, gas stations, police stations, and stores, which they do quite frequently. You're right -- these "insurgents" are the ones to get behind!)
Let's recap: "NOT insurgents." Now, I wonder: what does a person like you do when faced with a multitude of facts, by a variety of more knowledgeable people than yourself, that contradict the very wrong (and very odd) claims that you've made?
BECAUSE THEY AREN'T ONES GOING ROUND CLAIMING TO BE MORALLY RIGHT!!
Yet again: do you actually believe these statements, or do you just hope that no one will argue against you? You DO realize that these people shout "Allah akbar" as the planes slam into the buildings, right? And the same when they behead people? And claim
"USA illegally invaded another country and aspect to be treated good?"
I wonder why you quoted me, since this comment doesn't address anything I said. At any rate, the US did invade Iraq, of that there is no argument. Was it illegal? What's your definition? Iraq's gov't didn't want us to. Neither did Germany's in WWII -- was that illegal and therefore wrong? Oh, maybe you're thinking of the UN. Well, the UN threatened action against Iraq in its resolutions, and then didn't follow up them, undermining its already laughable credibility and doing damage to its future prospects of viable threats.
I never said the US expects to be "treated good" -- that's your emotional bias speaking again. However, it's good that I didn't expect it. Despite introducing democracy and capitalism on a large scale to Iraq, despite 8 million Iraqis braving terrorist threats to vote on Jan. 30, despite many of them calling it the happiest day of their lives (or the greatest day in the history of Iraq), and despite the invasion precipitating moves toward freedom in Georgia, Lebanon, Ukraine, Kuwait, and Kyrgyzstan, just to name a few, plenty of people worldwide argue about the evil that was the Iraq invasion. Oh yeah, and all the emboldened democratic protests in countries like Iran and Egypt, as they see the process working in nearby countries. Also, Libya (another terrific non-democratic regime with a history of ties to terrorism) freely disarmed its nuclear program. Did you happen to "turn on the news" for those minor events?
But I guess your hatred of the US allows you to comfortably ignore all of these developments worldwide as people living under tyrannical regimes strive to overturn their governments and achieve the ability to VOTE, in their own countries, to be finally free from willful torture, rape, and imprisonment, to be treated as equals, to join the 21st century's economy and all its gains in living standards, and to break the shackles of radical Islamic rule. In other words, exactly what the US gave Iraqis. You COULD wait for the hundreds of millions of other people worldwide to finally achieve that for themselves after only a couple more generations live under such governments, all the while accusing the US of being the greatest evil in the universe, or you could flip the "brain-dead whiney liberal do-nothing peacenik socialist know-nothing" switch in your brain to its off position and support democracy.
"Like americans wouldn't have done the same thing if invaded and defeated by a country in the middle east or whatever."
Are you really such a moral relativist that you don't see the difference between a radical Islamic regime that denies women the right to vote or hold jobs, imprisons people whose IDEAS differ from theirs, censors the Internet, and deprives its people of making a comfortable living, and a democratic capitalism like the US? Give us all a break and hit some middle school logic books for some much-needed study time.
"In many ways, your logic is nothing but a rotten apple. Take a bite."
In every way, since nothing you mentioned even passingly confronted my argument -- you completely ignored the narrow topic at hand in favor of making sweeping accusations according to your preconceived notions -- you're not the right person to comment on logic.
First of all, that's not ironic.
Second, it's the risk-taking, exploratory, entrepreneurial spirit that endowed us with the resources -- and the drive -- we have to invest in further space ventures now. That same spirit is the most powerful tool we have to widely encourage education, intellectual development, and -- yes -- tolerance.
Specifically embodied, this tool is called democratic capitalism, which, incidentally, is exactly what the world's poor need right now. Not (the aptly-named) Band Aid or Live 8, not debt forgiveness, not handouts and smiles; freedom and economic development.
As many poor as there are in the world today, there would be many more without capitalism and the incentives it engenders. To curtail our endeavors by funneling their resources into even more charity drives that naively address symptoms rather than diseases, would be to do everyone involved a monumental disservice.
(The one caveat here is that our push farther into space should be a privatized effort, not a government-funded one.)
Evaluating neither the particular actions of the US military nor the commitment of the US government to adhere to the Constitution, this order of priorities is as it should be.
National defense (aka "the military") is specified as a constitutional role of government. NASA is not.
Hahaha, that's some truly hilarious lack of a clue, there. Thanks for taking the leftist perspective that the Islamists are peace-loving members of a glorious world community who want nothing better than to be left alone.
In reality, they want Israel gone, destroyed -- not just to live peacefully alongside Israel. They want to make every government in the world an ISLAMIC one. They feel they have the absolute, God-given right to kill those who contradict their beliefs (read on the Islamist who killed Theo Van Gogh). They think bloodshed is the work of God.
These people are still citing the f'ing CRUSADES as a reason to get back at Westerners? Do you actually think that's warranted? Are you that much of an insulated, emotionally driven, politically correct coward? They ALWAYS have a reason, and they ALWAYS will. It'll be the Crusades, or support for Israel, or a hidden Zionist agenda, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Kuwait, or someone in the States who dropped a Koran, or something else.
Thanks for saying you'll fly the plane yourself. It's amazing how you hypocritical bastards spend 10 times the effort criticizing America for falling outside international law and being vindictive and unilateralist, than you do criticizing Islamists for constantly doing whatever they want, including killing civilians as the primary target, beheading others, sabotaging water and electricity that keep Iraqis alive, and so on.
They don't hate freedom as a concept in itself; they hate freedom because freedom allows the choice of religion, the choice of sleeping around, the choice of sinning, the choice of not praying five times a day. Oh yeah, and the choice of women to speak, to vote, to hold jobs, to wear less than full-cover clothing, to sleep with those they wish, to speak their minds, and to have a part in government. Thanks for sticking up for the SANE ones, jackass. You'll be on the right side of history.
As for your position on force: Ever consider that all of the treaties passed and all the agreements reached through diplomatic means in bodies like the UN hinge on a spoken or unspoken threat of force? Without that ability, no treaty is binding, talk is just talk, and any country can do what it wants. The UN implied that force with Iraq, and then failed to back it up, which leads to a breakdown in the very authority and usefulness (what little there is) of the UN. The US and allies acted as the original resolutions intended, but as no one else had the spine to do because they're wimpy little leftist countries that want nothing more than to be alone in their little corners, sucking their thumbs as their populations dwindle and their economies rot due to those selfsame liberal policies.
Learn some logic, drop your bias, and start trying to live in a world that'll never embody your perfect leftist ideologies, instead of remaking it around your corrupted visions.
"In my opinion, anyone who sees a distinction between using this in Iraq and using it in the USA is extremely ignorant, naive, or worse. People are people, regardless of nationality."
No, THAT'S naive. If that's the case, then all the libs are wrong when they call Iraq a quagmire and assert that things are getting worse there all the time. I mean, according to your "logic," people are people with the same percentage of bad apples all around, right? So we should be having the same number of suicide bombers, roadside bombs, car bombs, mullahs gathering armed anti-American crowds in the streets, here in America as they do in Iraq.
WHAT?? Nowhere near as freaking many? We don't have islamists flooding in from neighboring countries to support the native bad elements? Well, looks like your theory is totally, ridiculously, lampoonishly wrong.
But people are people! There's no greater NEED to use an anti-riot weapon in Iraq than there is here, right?
Yeah, I know "people are people" is another favorite lib BS slogan that makes you all feel nice and fuzzy and part of the global community, but it doesn't jive with the (also-liberal) "Iraq as a violent, imploding quagmire" routine. Terrorists are all over Iraq, and they're there because American targets are nearby, not because otherwise peace-loving Muslims were "agitated" into terrorism due to America's "unfair" war.
Since you brought up Nazi Germany, do you honestly think that as a Jew, and given German domestic support for the Nazis, you would've been able to find the same ratio of individuals who WOULDN'T try to turn you over and get you sent to a camp, by knocking on random doors as you would've in America at the same time? YOU are the one who's ignorant, naive, and *dangerous* if you really think that "people are people" when comparing the populace of a republic to that of a theocratic totalitarianism.
Logic is a wonderful tool.
Those are valid points about the technology, and they've been made elsewhere in this thread. But that's a separate argument than the one that's being argued in this thread.
The arguments against this weapon have overwhelmingly set that possibility of long-term damage aside, and instead claimed that the government with ANY KIND of non-lethal weapon is a huge threat. That argument sidesteps particulars about the weapon, and that's the kind of argument THIS thread is on. The gov't using it without cause, supressing free speech, etc.
The GP poster is correctly saying that it's far better to have this weapon on-hand than to have to resort to gunning down swaths of people at the first hint of a threat to the soldiers'/officers' lives.
Ah, so you think that all the non-Americans who criticize exclusively the US for arming Saddam are also cherry-picking America because it was done "IN THEIR NAMES"? No, I don't think so, since they're _not American_. And I don't believe for a second that even the majority of Americans who do the same thing are doing it with this deeply-considered philosophical POV about the differences in expectations and so forth about all the other countries. Most of them -- and I wouldn't be surprised if you were among them until grandparent post -- probably don't KNOW any of the other countries contributed, they don't know HOW we or anyone else helped, and they don't know why. They just carry the meme as another anti-Bush, anti-GOP propaganda piece.
Perhaps, when you choose to spew more propaganda of this type, whether it be against the war in Iraq, the one in Afghanistan, or help for Saddam in the 80s, you could try contextualizing the situation and bringing a little logic to bear, rather than tripping your hair-trigger emotional responses that result in endless DNC-approved catchphrases like "Not in my name!!!" Maybe that's too much to ask.
Yeah, war isn't great. Neither is a totalitarian dictator lording his obscene riches over his populace, invading neighboring countries, gassing hundreds of thousands of his own people, maintaining rape rooms, stifling women's rights in general, torturing people in a multitude of ways, and choosing to build palaces rather than feed his people. The cost in terms of life and suffering in a war against said dictator, versus leaving him and his heirs in power for a few more decades? Almost undoubtedly lower; that is, of course, unless you're a *liberal* apologist. In that case, the facts need not be considered; war is wrong is wrong is wrong -- we need peace!! Who's against peace???
This world doesn't always offer the clean-cut choices of wrong and right -- it's most often the case that a less-than-ideal decision has to be made to forestall one that out-and-out sucks. The government in the 80s determined that Communism (you know, as embodied by the USSR, with its occupation and influence over many countries worldwide, its huge supply of arms to bad regimes, and its thousands of NUKES pointed at us) was probably a bigger threat than Saddam. Correct or incorrect as determined by history (and I think it'd be a tough case to go back to that era with its uncertainty and choose otherwise), it's intellectually dishonest to paint the gov't as being driven by evil and an uncaring attitude toward the poor and disenfranchised, and a wish to dominate the world. And yet, that's the story I get most often from libs.
Please. Take your non-thinking, biased, partisan, propagandist drivel elsewhere. Or, in fact, just keep it here -- Slashdot is your most natural home.
"Well, these are also a function of the input of absolutely massive amounts of really really cheap energy..."
Anything that can be done needs resources -- there's some immediate enabling factor you can point to as a direct catalyst for anything that gets done, so that doesn't help explain anything here.
Moreover, that cheap energy is, by and large, being produced not by the US, but by other countries that sell it in the larger global marketplace. Therefore, it's not a valid explanation of why the US is ahead. In addition, you may actually want to question WHY said energy is cheap and available in the first place; with honest research, you'd come to the conclusion that it's due to capitalism. Capitalistic ventures enabled the technology for: discovering, obtaining, refining, and transporting the oil; increasing competition to lower prices not just at the endpoints, but via reduced costs; the growth in alternative fuels; and so on.
"it rose at a time when many of the resources of Europe were already dwindling, and did not have to burn through resources in the two wars in quite the same way the Europeans did."
Don't make the mistake of thinking that resources make the country; Japan has almost none, and many South American countries are beyond gifted. See the contrast?
And for all that burning through resources, Germany and England, to name two obviously hard-hit countries in the wars, have done supremely well since WWII (and continue to do well now) -- just not as well as the US -- and their political, economic, and social systems differ accordingly. For another great example, do some reading up on the differences in GNP between East and West Germany post-WWII. Same country, same people, different political and economic systems -- very different outcomes.
You should need nothing more than common sense to realize that the more efficiently resources are used to produce things that people want, and the more efficiently they get to where they need to be, the less waste and the more productivity there are in a society. No system heretofore implemented can come close to rivaling capitalism in that very allocation of goods; it simply says, "I have what you want, and you have what I want -- let's find mutually agreeable terms and trade."
"Never forget that even Ethiopia used to be a superpower once...."
I think you mean a *power*... a regional power. We can point to plenty of countries that, through autocracy and sheer militarism, were able to take over some nearby land. That's worlds away from the wealth, comfort, power, and influence wielded by the US today. Also note that, in most cases like that, it's done at the expense of vast majorities of the populations in question. The US, on the other hand, is lent its strength by its empowered citizens.
-Prophasi
"Yes, but the reasons why a libertarian government would become involved in the economy are very few: infringment of personal/property rights."
Yes, that's true.
"Many things that are regulated now - pollution, monopolies, rules against price fixing, etc - would not exist."
You'd have to be infringing someone else's individual (or corporate, but from an economic perspective, same thing in this instance) rights by disallowing them from, say, agreeing with another person/company on prices. Don't like the prices they've colluded to offer? Don't buy the product. Price fixing is a great way to keep prices artificially high, leaving plenty of room for competitors. A true monopoly comes along very rarely, and in all historical instances I've ever seen documented, they were government-enabled. Pollution's a problem, but many libertarians acknowledge the need for SOME sort of regulation here -- they just don't want it to be heavy-handed. Pollution fits into the category of "neighborhood effects," which affect private property negatively just as much as public property.
Side note: Microsoft? Absolutely, 100% not a monopoly in any meaningful sense of the word (i.e. economic). Anyone who espouses otherwise belies a woeful understanding of basic economics, or (more likely) is demonstrating blind bias.
"What you say about contracts being binding works both ways; I thought everyone on Slashdot knew the carelesness of the average person."
We do know that. And libertarians are a bit better at realizing the extent to which that carelessness is due to institutional coddling by government. It's an inevitable, inarguable fact of life that by downplaying the risks in an activity, you will increase the rate of that activity occurring. It's also a fact of life that the taxes used to encourage people thus to engage in poorly considered activities are being siphoned from individuals, companies, and other organizations that would use it to better the things we just talked about. And finally, as more taxes go through government hands, more of it is lost in the process, and more opportunities for corruption crop up.
"the majority of that wealth is concentrated in a tiny percentge of the people"
That's not a bad thing. A vast amount of wealth, period, is in the US. It does me no harm that Bill Gates has $50B, and in fact, the draw of that money is what inclined him to create the stuff he did, which I use on a regular basis to make MY money, let alone get personal stuff done. Economics is not a zero-sum game -- 95% could be concentrated in the top 5% of people, but in a society like the US, all the rest of us can still be doing great. And my statistics are worse than it really is. It seems that you're more worried about the unfairness of someone doing way better than other people, than you are about the optimal allocation of resources, leading to a richer society, both in the aggregate and on average.
"social programs serve to prevent 1/4 of the population from living in destitute conditions"
If you're talking about the US, that figure's way out of line. You think there are 75 million people in the US making a living on social programs? Welfare roles are probably at about 6 million or so now, if not lower (check Google). Other than that, there are other scattered programs here and there, but they won't even rival that number. I'd say you're too high by a factor of almost ten in the raw figures alone. Then there's your assumption that they're being saved from destitution... suffice to say, if you don't have a job, yeah, you'll probably get poorer and starve over time. Surely you don't think that even a tenth of those on welfare CAN'T get a job without it? Again, a hand with money will inevitably be accepted by some people in the place of their sweat.
I'm sure you're not considering social security, since that money was already taken from us in the first place. We'll be lucky if we get it all back with 0% interest, let alone the amount we COULD have.
Sure, government does a lot of stuff. But it does almost none of it well, and absolutely none of it better than companies could do. The incentives aren't there, and the results make that blatantly clear.
-Prophasi
Libertarianism isn't about the "non-intervention" of government -- it's about a minimal government that, like any other government, should intervene in any activity that countermands its laws.
"That means that the government doesn't interfere with what companies want to do"
False. In the case of ANY libertarian ideal, contract law is a central tenet and must be enforced. The amazing thing is that, in the absence of overbearing bureaucracy, people tend to self-organize rather well and write (and sign) good contracts. A sale of stock in a corporation has an accompanying contract (dividends, transfer rights, board membership, etc.); if you're buying stock, look for one that requires the company's board to fully disclose its quarterly numbers. And its officers' stock holdings. And so on. If you don't do that, guess what -- take some personal responsibility and think about learning how to invest in a company before buying stock.
And what if the company publishes faulty numbers anyway? The "libertarian ideal" doesn't protect against that, does it? Surprise -- the company just violated contract with its shareholders (even ignoring tax fraud and other extra-contractual crimes). No law, however overbearing in terms, can keep someone from circumventing it. We're only talking about Enron because they got caught and punished. Is it because of libertarian ideals that your house got broken into? The causes of things like that are criminals, not principles. When you drive off a cliff, it's because you turned at the wrong time, not because the government left the guardrail off.
"The idea that we should be ruled by the dollar is, quite frankly, rather extreme and un-human."
This is your take on the free market, but frankly -- cultural development *around* capitalism aside -- you're dead wrong about it. It's about free and voluntary exchange, period. It works also on a pure barter system, no dollars necessary. It just so happens that free-market principles have also led to unprecedented growth in wealth, standards of living, lifespans, health, comfort, and scientific development, but feel free to argue against those if you find them, too, to be un-human and extreme.
-Prophasi
Cool, thanks. That's what I thought. I just didn't want to go into full HTML mode and have to do :) Thanks again.
s everywhere to separate paragraphs (but now I see that italics works in plain text mode). I was also hoping there was a "quote on reply" feature to eliminate some copy-pasting. Oh, well.
"I guess this is just where we differ. The world economy is not the first thing that comes to my mind when discussing outsourcing. You may think it is a defect in my thinking but I think the opposite is a defect in thinking. It is personal opinion I guess."
Nor I -- I'm an America-first kind of guy, based on both circumstance and principle. I don't think either one's a defect in thinking, though. It's just a matter of the community (e.g. the U.S. or the world) that one considers himself to be a part of, and which one he needs to be most concerned about for his own welfare. Differences in perspective and priority, I'd say.
I know what you're saying about something like biotech, but the thing is that the majority of those jobs are going to require retraining, yes, but not necessarily a higher education or anything like that. The people walking around in the labcoats, and the techies programming the systems, and any other researchers involved, are the tiny minority of new jobs created. There will be hordes of people manning pharmaceutical machines, building new facilities, maintaining equipment, answering phones, etc. There are vast quantities of low-tech work to be done in all industries, but with the newer, leading-edge ones, companies are a lot more likely to keep them here. They have a lot more direct control, the processes are newer and need immediate and constant monitoring, they're often not ready to cope with the added complexities of globalization yet, and margins are higher due to lower competition. (Not to mention the fact that fresh trade secrets may not be so safe to outsource to someplace like China.)
How do you go about doing your italicized quoting in this system? It seems like a whole lot of work to do all the HTML markup for it.
Hey, I've had an account for a long time, but mostly just read before. What do you think is the easiest way to quote with this system? In the meantime, I forge ahead.
Of course I'm not talking about the guy who got laid off, and in fact, I don't know who he is, or where he fits in here. I'm saying that a company going into a country and taking advantage of cheap labor is typically a very good thing for that country, its workers, and its overall GDP and standards of living. If someone gets fired, he's probably still better off, since he did provide for him and his while he was employed -- now he's back to whatever options he had before the company got there...no net change, except he might have eaten well for a period there, and he's now got skills.
Oh, wait. You're talking about the domestic side of outsourcing, I see. My bad. Look, I definitely sympathize with laid-off workers, and being a programmer, I wouldn't be surprised if I get knifed by it at some point. But just like an example showing one woman using her H2 every day doesn't convict all H2 owners of doing that, showing the misery of a single guy laid off doesn't disprove that outsourcing has a net positive effect. You can't play both sides of the argument, lamenting the conditions of cheap laborers (who actually are bettered by outsourcing) and domestic workers who are laid off because of it. The world economy is net bettered by outsourcing, since money and resources are used and distributed more effectively. I'm not being callous when I say that there WILL be people put out by it, but it moves rote low-skilled jobs overseas so that the American economy can move into the next phase of growth, whether it's in space, energy, biotech, or whatnot. It keeps us ahead.
Quality and price have both been improved immensely by competition -- cheap overseas labor just floods the market with flimsy products, which makes it a lot easier to get poorly made stuff.
I'm with you on buying American. My only two cars have been Fords, on purpose. I pay a lot of heed to whether something is American-made or not, though foreign-made is unavoidable in a lot of cases. Intellectually I'm of the mind that it's better in the long run to simply buy Honda or something to force Ford and GM to wake up hard-core with regards to their defects, their poor design, and their low reliability, but it's hard for me to bite that bullet, at the same time.
"Exploit the work" by giving them the opportunity to take a job, make more money than they were already making, give them technical skills, and raise the GDP and standards of living of a country?
Yeah, India is really hurting now. So's Eastern Europe. I hear they're about ready to revolt from the exploitation of their cheap labor by Westerners. Oops, no, it's revitalizing (or, really, vitalizing) their economies. The need for work, combined with the technical skills gained and spread by early adopters, as well as the influx of foreign trainers to keep the skilled labor pool strong, means huge foreign investment in their economies and their induction into the world economy.
You're taking an idea and running with it. "Exploiting cheap labor" is a catchphrase used to immediately inject some sinister overtones into the topic of a company gaining huge advantages by hiring workers at cheaper rates than in their domestic economies. Guess what?? It's almost always good for both sides! The workers freely choose to work there. No one's saying it's paradise, but it's a step up, or they wouldn't have accepted the jobs.
"Exploiting," "taking advantage of," etc. are all true, and not in themselves bad. They've just got negative connotations. Of course, if you still want to bias your response, be sure to add "and putting their cigars out on the eyes of the workers" to your list. No one wants to work in unsafe conditions, and such is NOT part and parcel with cheap outsourcing. If you don't like unsafe conditions, campaign against THAT -- not cheap labor in general. Separate the issues and be logical.
Publix (or Safeway, or Wal-Mart, or whatever pleases you) doesn't sell you your bread out of benevolence -- it's all to make a buck. Does the lack of an altrustic motive rob the bread of its value? No -- just the opposite, since through competition prices are lowered and the value of your money (and therefore your labor) is increased, since you can now buy more bread with it.
Take an economics course, and actually think about it, instead of reacting emotionally to your apparent desire for us all to hold hands under a rainbow and share together, and do things only out of benevolence for our comrades. Not that I disagree with that metaphorical goal in the end, but free-market, low-regulation capitalism's the superior, if not the only, way to maximize the efficient allocation of goods to everyone who needs them.
Let's not lecture about jumping to conclusions until you drop your ignorant claim: "Just look at the blatant disregard for the envrionment that anyone who drives an H2 has."
It's absurd to think you know what regard anyone, let alone everyone, has for anything. Who cares if it's a useless status symbol? That may be a vapid truth, but it helps you none in actually showing that you're right when you suppose you know the truth about all those horrible, apathetic H2 owners. Congrats, you've learned to see an H2 on the road and immediately judge the person driving it. How open-minded you are!
You're basing your claim on YOUR suppositions about the resilience threshold of the environment, at the same time assuming some things about the usage of the H2s by their owners. It IS a huge, showy, expensive auto -- and plenty of people who own things like that own 3 or more cars, and take the showy one out (be it a BMW, a Thunderbird reissue, a vintage, or whatnot) very rarely, or even as much as once or a couple times a week. And guess what they're not doing when they do that? Driving the family from NY to FL on vacation. There are others who do use it as their primary vehicle, but that doesn't at all justify your blanket accusations.
Oh yeah, and thanks for bringing up their uselessness and status symbolism -- it exhibits that they ARE iconic (as an extreme example) of stuff you dislike. You hate H2s, but you love Chevy Suburbans and H1s, right? Excursions? Nope, if you're intellectually honest, you dislike those as gas guzzlers, too. But the H2 is iconic because it's the most overt (that's the one you brought up, right?), and you let that emotion take you to automatic and unjustified conclusions about their owners.
Look, the true point is that I shouldn't have to justify any of this: if you can't see the rash illogic of what you said, you shouldn't be a mathematician, a programmer, a scientist, or any other occupation that relies on reasoning abilities. And if you recognize it, admit it.
Yeah, H2s are more polluting than most other vehicles (if not all other consumer vehicles). What do you drive? Man, if you don't drive a hybrid or something better, I bet the Prius people really look down on YOU. And the cyclists and Segway folks look down on THEM.
Everyone's got their own view of what's acceptable and what the environment can tolerate, and as long as you intentionally stay beneath what YOU TRULY BELIEVE for that reason, it's true that you care about the environment. You can do better, sure, but you can't make up for everyone else who's over their limit -- there's no end to that. I'm sure plenty of H2 owners care about the environment, but think their use of the H2 is within the per capita environmental tolerance. You can call that foolish, if you want, or wrong, or naive -- but don't translate it into a character issue. That's foolish and unfair, illogical and elitist, and contrary to the principles of an enlightened society.
"Increasing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere and global surface and air temperatures."
"I can measure the number of species that are driven to extinction annually."
"The size of the whole in the ozone layer."
You could have been measuring these since the formation of Earth, or at least the rise of ecosystems. Way before people, in either case.
"Rates of asthma in areas where poultion is heavy vs areas where polution is light."
"I can measure the size of the lower class."
"I can also measure the multiple between a factory worker's an a CEO's pay."
"I can measure the rate of workplace injuries."
You could have been measuring these since the beginning of human existence (or, for industrial/corporate ones, at least since the 1800s). Again, as with several others who have posted, you're stating the obvious, but doing nothing constructive with it. It's great to use know you can measure these things, but now apply that knowledge to the task of constructing a definition of what it means to actually "ruin" someone's life or the environment.
As I said, you could've measured many of them before humans graced the planet, and more of them before the rise of democracy and capitalism. So obviously the measurement alone establishes nothing at all about the circumstances under which you would claim that a corporation has destroyed someone's life. There are clear cases of where they have (their tractor rolled over a guy and killed him) and clear cases of where they haven't (they sent a guy a fruitcake for Christmas).
The vast middle area is what's important, since plenty of people (like you, I gather) are liberal and anti-corporate, and make incendiary claims with no back-up evidence about how "Corporation X built a factory in Chad and is ruining people's lives every day!" My understanding of the original poster's point is that you have absolutely got to have a prior definition of what it means to ruin someone's life, before you can fairly make claims like that. It's all too easy to emotionally react when there's something you intuitively don't like or think is unfair, and say, "See? This is what I'm talking about! Ruining people's lives!" It's harder to establish a definition beforehand, because then you've got to be objective and settle for a stationary target. (And more importantly, have to swallow it when something happens that you don't like, but which just doesn't fit that prior definition -- it's dishonest to continually alter it to encompass each new thing you emotionally reject.)
In the same way, you'd better have a prior definition of "monopoly" that you apply to MS (or M$, in zealot-speak...sorry if anyone didn't understand it the first time). Again, it's too easy to answer the question of "What exactly do you think a monopoly is, anyway?" with "Well, M$ is! If M$ ain't a monopoly, I don't know what is!" That goes back to the reasoning/definition vs. example thing.
Haha, okay, point out where I did, and you got me.
How about you refer back to what I actually said, and realize that I merely called for a context for those complaints. Sure, government can affect them -- and I'm against government affecting them, entirely. This conversation was about companies, anyway, not government.
Government can affect all those things, and so can companies, and so can the individual. It can be fair treatment or unfair treatment. But the entire point of this thread was to state a definition for, and not examples of, "ruining people's lives" and "ruining the environment." Grandparent post gave a bulleted list of items without any context. They all sound sad, but they bring us no closer to a definition without an explanation of the circumstances involved.
Even if I didn't understand what "power" is, that wouldn't be representative of Slashdot in general -- don't take things too far. That being said, I don't like it when people use loose terminology or try to drive home a point without defining terms, so I was asking you to clarify.
It's obvious that failing in any contractual situation is wrong -- I don't think anyone is debating that you should pay if you're contractually obligated to. Free market economics hinges on contract arrangements, so don't fault the free market for any of the things you describe (not that you are).
If there's a lack of understanding, it's yours with specific regard to the issue of the responsibilities of the actors involved here.
"Abuse of power also comes in the form of paying laborers saleries they cannot live on."
If they can't live on the salaries, they shouldn't accept a job there. I'll never understand this argument against a company opening a new plant, for instance, at what you consider low wages. For one thing, figures are often given in U.S. figures (e.g. 2 dollars a day! Can you believe that??), when in fact in many countries that's more than the people were already making. No one FORCES anyone to work there; therefore, if someone chooses to, they've evaluated the option to be better than whatever else was available to them. Ergo, more options, more possibility.
For a nation to stand on its own economically, to enrich its people consistently and continue an incline of living standards, they're going to have to ramp up industry. To do that, their workers need technical skills and experience, which is given to them by such factories. This is extremely crucial, and they will NEVER get out of their hole and join the world economy without it. It's a part of the argument that anti-corporate types often forget altogether. Foreign investment takes on the greatest importance in countries with few natural resources, since it's harder to get a toehold in modern production.
If a country has a large pool of cheap labor (freely chosen, remember!) and workers that are growing more skilled all the time, more companies will "take advantage" (ooh, evil phrase, because no one "taking advantage" of someone else can cause a good result, right?) of the opportunity. As this happens, competition increases, and wages and benefits increase. Skills become more widespread, and native people start to become managers. Then, some realize they can do things better (maybe even just because they understand the workers better), and start their own companies.
Witness India. Taiwan. Hong Kong. Eastern Europe. Tons more, particularly in Asia. No resources needed, just a large, cheap labor pool. Companies make a TON of money at first, sure -- more than necessary. That's neither wrong nor particularly long-lived. When people are willingly working for a company, don't second-guess them by assuming you know what's best, and they don't.
Just try to get past that nagging feeling in the back of your mind that because companies don't have benevolent intentions in mind, nothing good can come of their profiting. Profit is a measure of how big a misallocation of resources a company has found and is correcting (e.g. willing workers in an economically suppressed country), so the more a company makes, the more difference consumers will see in the prices and availability of goods.
This presupposes, of course, that the company isn't breaching the rule of law, and isn't a monopoly. (And a monopoly won't last long without artificial means such as copyrights and patents.)