The 3rd world nations are all countries that have thieving, lying governments over many years and haven't really had any environmental protections or worker safety laws. I have never seen anyplace as polluted as some spots I saw in Romania in 1990. They are cleaning things up now only because the partial introduction of capitalism allowed them to finance cleaner technologies.
As for work-related RSI, give me a break. Do you really believe that government control gives you better worker treatment? Where have you been during this century, another planet? Some jobs come with a physical cost to them. They always have. But if you earn enough, you can retire before the coal mine or factory cripples or kills you. Capitalism maximizes wages because it's not only the workers that bid for jobs but the entrepreneurs that bid for labor.
As for your hereditary aristocracy crack, you obviously don't check facts much. People move up and down the economic ladder quite rapidly in capitalism, more so than with any other system that's been tried. The poor can climb out of poverty and they often do in the US.
Even Marx understood that there was something called savings and something called investment. Both of these things are qualitatively different from consumption and all economists, including marxists, have separated them out into different categories.
If you would care to prove me wrong, please point out the economic theory that does not separate out savings, investment, and consumption into different categories.
Canada (socialized medicine) ships many patients to the US for treatment because they can't get things like transplants done in time to keep people alive. The delay time in this purely socialist system is much worse than in the part-socialist system of Medicare/aid and HMO.
One of the benefits of the little free market we have left in medicine in the US is that we can still see how much we are losing by adopting socialist pieces on the system. This 'well controlled' part is what is making the system sick. When the government pays less and less in reimbursements to the hospitals and doctors, somebody has to make up for it and congratulations, that's the private part of the medical system.
Fortunately, medical savings accounts are likely to improve things here and even Canada is starting to back away from total socialized medicine because too many people are dying in its care. Take a look at The Wall Street Journal of a few days back.
As far as antibiotics, this is a worldwide problem. The worst TB resistance problems in the world are in the former USSR, not a hotbed of capitalist medicine.
As far as Windows v. Linux, it is the government's refusal to prosecute MS for fraud ('anybody can program to the Windows API') that has allowed MS to gain its stranglehold on the OS and office suite markets. Capitalism requires that there be no violence, theft, or fraud and when the government doesn't step in, bad things do happen. But this is a failure of government, not the market.
Tides are local. A rising tide does lift all boats that are in the water and are where the tide is rising. Unlike the ocean though, economics is not a zero sum game. Intellectual creation allows for the very economic pie to grow, something that the anti-WTO people don't seem to realize.
The free market in paper and wood products in the US means that today, there is more forested land than there was when the first europeans landed here. Businesses aren't idiots. Not only are they cutting trees but they are also planting so that the future value of their lands doesn't go down.
When you don't have a free market you ted to get more pollution, more environmental degradation and less productive economic product out of the process to boot. Take a look at E. Europe and you will see that people are poorer and the environment is worse because they tried to run industrialized economies without a free market. When you do that, the 'stakeholders' that count are the ones with political clout, always a tiny minority.
So should we make voting compulsory with a fine for not participating?
As far as voting for capitalism that's what your elected representatives do. That's why we have republics not direct democracies. Its sad to see another victim of the brainwashing public schools
If Nike goes in and pays twice the local prevailing wage, the locals will be thrilled and Nike gets cheap shoes with very attentive workers and a line around the block to fill any openings. But they still make in a whole day what an American makes in 30 min.
This doesn't say as much about Nike as it does about the governments that created the situation where the general economy is so poor. Nike and the rest of these 1st world companies *raise* local wages. And they lose their trained workforce to other companies who are able to create a business plan that can outbid them for that labor by just a bit. Over the course of a few generations, these countries progress much faster with 1st world investment than without it.
The problem is the local governments aren't honest, they steal, they repress, and they use outsiders as whipping boys when the local politics go unstable.
If you want to get Nike out of a country, it's easy. Just build businesses in that country that price Nike out of the labor market. If you look at the company, they move their operations into a country as soon as it achieves a certain level of stability and when they progress to a certain higher level of economic progress, Nike moves right out again. Eventually (hopefully) they are going to run out of countries with screwed up government history and they will have to build a new business plan. It doesn't look like that's going to happen soon.
Actually, the US is a constitutional democratic republic. The last real direct democracy was in Athens thousands of years ago. A republic that votes for its government through the process of democracy and has a constitution that spells out the limits of government is the best that the world has come up with so far. Unfortunately, that isn't what the UN looks like.
Actually, the WTO is a relatively new enforcement body that was created to handle trade disputes among nations in a fair manner. See their website for a brief history. They were created in 1995 as a successor to GATT which had been around since WW II.
Sorry, but not everybody is into the materialistic lifestyle. I believe that capitalism is a great human invention that makes it possible to sidestep the constant neo-malthusian cries of doom, doooooom that that ring throughout western academia and punditry.
But materialism is not a necessary outflow of capitalism. I want to be able to assure good medical treatment if my family gets sick, I don't ever want to see my children hungry, but the 40" TV can stay in the store, thank you very much. Capitalism gives you the capacity to make the consequences of your moral choices be powerful. Materialism means that you are making stupid moral choices.
I'm a believer in free trade because I think that people produce more than they consume when they don't have governments stealing most of the product of their labor. In the real world this has been the case (go ahead, post a real world case where I'm wrong, I dare you). Don't you have any compassion for the poor? Don't you want to let them live in dignity by their own labor instead of getting 1st world handouts with condoms a higher priority than antibiotics?
NAFTA and the WTO have problems because of their slow pace, not because they are going too fast.
Romanian peasents can't sell their food (all organic because they can't even afford bio-improved seed or modern feed) to the EU because of that oh-so-noble agricultural protectionism. End result? The west either is going to need to send aid, or the racists, the xenophobes, and the communist nostalgics are going to find a hungry, unemployed, humiliated audience for their hate.
This scene gets played out in country after country. The rich subsidize their own agriculture and industry and shut out the poor. Look at what the US does to carribean sugar, look at what the EU does to Balkan agriculture, it's all about the rich not allowing the poor to catch up by honest competition in markets where the rich nations aren't really competitive.
If the WTO goes forward, the multi-nationals will gain benefits, but it's the poor who will finally have a chance to get out from under crippling economic tarrif warfare and gain a respectable, place among the nations.
Actually, that would be life-sucking socialism. The dole has sucked all the entrepreneurial life out of the reservations. And talk about big government paternalism, have you ever heard about the 'trust account' scandal? They can't even figure out how many millions of indian dollars were stolen by government agents and how many were simply lost.
Indians in the reservation system have limits on their ability to start their own firms, mortgage their land (ownership must be tribal, not individual) and there is always the Bureau of Indian Affairs to kill off anything that smacks of commercial success.
Just ask yourself, would you start up a.com firm on reservation land? Why not? *THAT* is why the indians are in sad shape today.
Things are not as bleak as they seem. The government tries to restrict as much as it can get away with (as most governments do) but the government is divided into Fed/State/Local govts. and separated by legislative/executive/judicial. This was done mostly to trip up various wannabe tyrants and works pretty well in practice. The problems mostly arise when the mainstream media has an interest in promoting one or another brand of tyranny and the government gets useful cover at that point, see the unconstitutional restrictions on the 2nd amendment that have been successfully launched.
On this theory of better value via breakup isn't MS guilty of corporate malfeasance by not breaking up MS? The board of directors of MS is charged with maximizing shareholder value, not building a monolithic empire. If shareholders would get a better deal if MS broke up, the board is legally obligated to break up.
Unfortunately, the MS trial focuses on the wrong issues. MS lies to their developers (this is the entire win32 API... honest!) and they use unpublished OS tricks to improve their own applications performance. They change their products to intentionally break competitors products. They make their cross-platform products crippled for non-MS operating systems while promising comparable performance.
In short, MS is guilty of massive, systemic fraud along a wide range of issues and across a long time span.
MS shouldn't be the target of an anti-trust prosecution. They should be the target of a criminal RICO fraud prosecution.
This isn't the supreme court. It's district court. The appeal is first taken to a three judge panel, then the full district court, and only then to the supreme court.
Microsoft also can ask for the law to change, legitimizing their practices through the political process.
The appeals process is premature, there first has to be a final judgement rendered (which should be this spring). Only then can an appeal be drafted.
So justice has an expiration date? And on internet time no less. There are people collecting judgements for crimes committed against their parents and grandparents in WW II. Should MS be treated to a different standard of justice?
The market makes guesses about what the true value of something is. On any given day it's up or down but usually it's around the true value.
Occasionally the holder of an asset is spectacularly wrong about the true value, IPO offerings being a familiar case but you might also look at the value of the UK pound a few years back, the sad case of Bre-X, or the wild ride of Barings bank for some examples.
DR-Dos seems to be one of those cases if Caldera wins. Novell can then add the selling of DR-DOS to their long line of missed opportunities.
We are not even close to approaching the maximum limit that this planet can hold. We could put the entire population of the world in Texas and have them each have 1/8 of an acre of land with the entire rest of the planet for agriculture, industry, and garbage disposal. If estimates on the maximum carrying capacity of Earth were reasonable, we would have run out of oil, food, and a host of materials by now according to ZPG advocates like the Club of Rome.
There is more than enough food to feed the world. Famine is caused by governments stealing food/resources from people at this point. There was a recent Nobel prize in economics given to Amartya Sen that demonstrates this conclusively.
If you wish to have less children, that's your option but you are going to have to drag millions of people forcibly into medical clinics for those snip, snip operations you advocate. That's tyranny of the worst, most intrusive kind. This is what's happening day in and day out in China where forced abortion and infanticide are a daily occurence.
ZPG is evil in the large and the small sense of the word.
... or a bad one. If we have control over our own transmissions, if we have the ability to pass messages back and forth to one another without the state monitoring them, this new communications system has the capacity to be the best thing since the internet. In fact it will be an interesting subsection of the internet.
What we need to watch out for is technology with no off switch, no individual control, no anonymizing capability, and mandatory transmissions. If somebody can push a button and make your transponder trip (which is the current case with EZ Pass in NY), it's a bad thing because such technology can be defeated by criminals but honest people will be entangled by it since they won't be defeating it.
What you haven't established yet is that there *is* a car problem. Communist societies are almost universally car unfriendly, not for environmental reasons (in fact more government tends to produce worse environments) but because cars provide personal freedom and are corrosive to control.
If fuel cell vehicles were to become economically practical and you could run your car on combining hydrogen and oxygen, surprise, surprise, you would still have people who would be against cars.
Apple has come out with an open source competitor to DirectX called Open Play. Has anybody done any work on this? This is not only a boost for Apple but may also be one for Linux. If Open play can be leveraged across platforms so that game makers can have seamless network support from day one this will take away one of the huge arguments against developing for smaller markets.
There is a chess scoring system. You play, you win, and your rating goes up depending on who you play. The US scoring system is available from here among other places.
Slashdot Mirror
The 3rd world nations are all countries that have thieving, lying governments over many years and haven't really had any environmental protections or worker safety laws. I have never seen anyplace as polluted as some spots I saw in Romania in 1990. They are cleaning things up now only because the partial introduction of capitalism allowed them to finance cleaner technologies.
As for work-related RSI, give me a break. Do you really believe that government control gives you better worker treatment? Where have you been during this century, another planet? Some jobs come with a physical cost to them. They always have. But if you earn enough, you can retire before the coal mine or factory cripples or kills you. Capitalism maximizes wages because it's not only the workers that bid for jobs but the entrepreneurs that bid for labor.
As for your hereditary aristocracy crack, you obviously don't check facts much. People move up and down the economic ladder quite rapidly in capitalism, more so than with any other system that's been tried. The poor can climb out of poverty and they often do in the US.
DB
Even Marx understood that there was something called savings and something called investment. Both of these things are qualitatively different from consumption and all economists, including marxists, have separated them out into different categories.
If you would care to prove me wrong, please point out the economic theory that does not separate out savings, investment, and consumption into different categories.
DB
Canada (socialized medicine) ships many patients to the US for treatment because they can't get things like transplants done in time to keep people alive. The delay time in this purely socialist system is much worse than in the part-socialist system of Medicare/aid and HMO.
One of the benefits of the little free market we have left in medicine in the US is that we can still see how much we are losing by adopting socialist pieces on the system. This 'well controlled' part is what is making the system sick. When the government pays less and less in reimbursements to the hospitals and doctors, somebody has to make up for it and congratulations, that's the private part of the medical system.
Fortunately, medical savings accounts are likely to improve things here and even Canada is starting to back away from total socialized medicine because too many people are dying in its care. Take a look at The Wall Street Journal of a few days back.
As far as antibiotics, this is a worldwide problem. The worst TB resistance problems in the world are in the former USSR, not a hotbed of capitalist medicine.
As far as Windows v. Linux, it is the government's refusal to prosecute MS for fraud ('anybody can program to the Windows API') that has allowed MS to gain its stranglehold on the OS and office suite markets. Capitalism requires that there be no violence, theft, or fraud and when the government doesn't step in, bad things do happen. But this is a failure of government, not the market.
DB
Silly rabbit...
Tides are local. A rising tide does lift all boats that are in the water and are where the tide is rising. Unlike the ocean though, economics is not a zero sum game. Intellectual creation allows for the very economic pie to grow, something that the anti-WTO people don't seem to realize.
DB
The free market in paper and wood products in the US means that today, there is more forested land than there was when the first europeans landed here. Businesses aren't idiots. Not only are they cutting trees but they are also planting so that the future value of their lands doesn't go down.
When you don't have a free market you ted to get more pollution, more environmental degradation and less productive economic product out of the process to boot. Take a look at E. Europe and you will see that people are poorer and the environment is worse because they tried to run industrialized economies without a free market. When you do that, the 'stakeholders' that count are the ones with political clout, always a tiny minority.
DB
So should we make voting compulsory with a fine for not participating?
As far as voting for capitalism that's what your elected representatives do. That's why we have republics not direct democracies. Its sad to see another victim of the brainwashing public schools
DB
If Nike goes in and pays twice the local prevailing wage, the locals will be thrilled and Nike gets cheap shoes with very attentive workers and a line around the block to fill any openings. But they still make in a whole day what an American makes in 30 min.
This doesn't say as much about Nike as it does about the governments that created the situation where the general economy is so poor. Nike and the rest of these 1st world companies *raise* local wages. And they lose their trained workforce to other companies who are able to create a business plan that can outbid them for that labor by just a bit. Over the course of a few generations, these countries progress much faster with 1st world investment than without it.
The problem is the local governments aren't honest, they steal, they repress, and they use outsiders as whipping boys when the local politics go unstable.
If you want to get Nike out of a country, it's easy. Just build businesses in that country that price Nike out of the labor market. If you look at the company, they move their operations into a country as soon as it achieves a certain level of stability and when they progress to a certain higher level of economic progress, Nike moves right out again. Eventually (hopefully) they are going to run out of countries with screwed up government history and they will have to build a new business plan. It doesn't look like that's going to happen soon.
DB
Golly gee, those police dogs and fire hoses in the civil rights days weren't provocation I guess. What a crock.
Doesn't anybody remember Bull Connor anymore?
DB
Actually, the US is a constitutional democratic republic. The last real direct democracy was in Athens thousands of years ago. A republic that votes for its government through the process of democracy and has a constitution that spells out the limits of government is the best that the world has come up with so far. Unfortunately, that isn't what the UN looks like.
DB
DB
Sorry, but not everybody is into the materialistic lifestyle. I believe that capitalism is a great human invention that makes it possible to sidestep the constant neo-malthusian cries of doom, doooooom that that ring throughout western academia and punditry.
But materialism is not a necessary outflow of capitalism. I want to be able to assure good medical treatment if my family gets sick, I don't ever want to see my children hungry, but the 40" TV can stay in the store, thank you very much. Capitalism gives you the capacity to make the consequences of your moral choices be powerful. Materialism means that you are making stupid moral choices.
I'm a believer in free trade because I think that people produce more than they consume when they don't have governments stealing most of the product of their labor. In the real world this has been the case (go ahead, post a real world case where I'm wrong, I dare you). Don't you have any compassion for the poor? Don't you want to let them live in dignity by their own labor instead of getting 1st world handouts with condoms a higher priority than antibiotics?
NAFTA and the WTO have problems because of their slow pace, not because they are going too fast.
DB
Romanian peasents can't sell their food (all organic because they can't even afford bio-improved seed or modern feed) to the EU because of that oh-so-noble agricultural protectionism. End result? The west either is going to need to send aid, or the racists, the xenophobes, and the communist nostalgics are going to find a hungry, unemployed, humiliated audience for their hate.
This scene gets played out in country after country. The rich subsidize their own agriculture and industry and shut out the poor. Look at what the US does to carribean sugar, look at what the EU does to Balkan agriculture, it's all about the rich not allowing the poor to catch up by honest competition in markets where the rich nations aren't really competitive.
If the WTO goes forward, the multi-nationals will gain benefits, but it's the poor who will finally have a chance to get out from under crippling economic tarrif warfare and gain a respectable, place among the nations.
DB
Actually, that would be life-sucking socialism. The dole has sucked all the entrepreneurial life out of the reservations. And talk about big government paternalism, have you ever heard about the 'trust account' scandal? They can't even figure out how many millions of indian dollars were stolen by government agents and how many were simply lost.
.com firm on reservation land? Why not? *THAT* is why the indians are in sad shape today.
Indians in the reservation system have limits on their ability to start their own firms, mortgage their land (ownership must be tribal, not individual) and there is always the Bureau of Indian Affairs to kill off anything that smacks of commercial success.
Just ask yourself, would you start up a
DB
Things are not as bleak as they seem. The government tries to restrict as much as it can get away with (as most governments do) but the government is divided into Fed/State/Local govts. and separated by legislative/executive/judicial. This was done mostly to trip up various wannabe tyrants and works pretty well in practice. The problems mostly arise when the mainstream media has an interest in promoting one or another brand of tyranny and the government gets useful cover at that point, see the unconstitutional restrictions on the 2nd amendment that have been successfully launched.
DB
I would guess that when Apple moves over to PDF for its display systems (see OS X this spring folks) you are likely to get what you are asking for.
TML
On this theory of better value via breakup isn't MS guilty of corporate malfeasance by not breaking up MS? The board of directors of MS is charged with maximizing shareholder value, not building a monolithic empire. If shareholders would get a better deal if MS broke up, the board is legally obligated to break up.
TML
Unfortunately, the MS trial focuses on the wrong issues. MS lies to their developers (this is the entire win32 API... honest!) and they use unpublished OS tricks to improve their own applications performance. They change their products to intentionally break competitors products. They make their cross-platform products crippled for non-MS operating systems while promising comparable performance.
In short, MS is guilty of massive, systemic fraud along a wide range of issues and across a long time span.
MS shouldn't be the target of an anti-trust prosecution. They should be the target of a criminal RICO fraud prosecution.
TML
This isn't the supreme court. It's district court. The appeal is first taken to a three judge panel, then the full district court, and only then to the supreme court.
Microsoft also can ask for the law to change, legitimizing their practices through the political process.
The appeals process is premature, there first has to be a final judgement rendered (which should be this spring). Only then can an appeal be drafted.
TML
So justice has an expiration date? And on internet time no less. There are people collecting judgements for crimes committed against their parents and grandparents in WW II. Should MS be treated to a different standard of justice?
TML
The market makes guesses about what the true value of something is. On any given day it's up or down but usually it's around the true value.
Occasionally the holder of an asset is spectacularly wrong about the true value, IPO offerings being a familiar case but you might also look at the value of the UK pound a few years back, the sad case of Bre-X, or the wild ride of Barings bank for some examples.
DR-Dos seems to be one of those cases if Caldera wins. Novell can then add the selling of DR-DOS to their long line of missed opportunities.
TML
We are not even close to approaching the maximum limit that this planet can hold. We could put the entire population of the world in Texas and have them each have 1/8 of an acre of land with the entire rest of the planet for agriculture, industry, and garbage disposal. If estimates on the maximum carrying capacity of Earth were reasonable, we would have run out of oil, food, and a host of materials by now according to ZPG advocates like the Club of Rome.
There is more than enough food to feed the world. Famine is caused by governments stealing food/resources from people at this point. There was a recent Nobel prize in economics given to Amartya Sen that demonstrates this conclusively.
If you wish to have less children, that's your option but you are going to have to drag millions of people forcibly into medical clinics for those snip, snip operations you advocate. That's tyranny of the worst, most intrusive kind. This is what's happening day in and day out in China where forced abortion and infanticide are a daily occurence.
ZPG is evil in the large and the small sense of the word.
TML
... or a bad one. If we have control over our own transmissions, if we have the ability to pass messages back and forth to one another without the state monitoring them, this new communications system has the capacity to be the best thing since the internet. In fact it will be an interesting subsection of the internet.
What we need to watch out for is technology with no off switch, no individual control, no anonymizing capability, and mandatory transmissions. If somebody can push a button and make your transponder trip (which is the current case with EZ Pass in NY), it's a bad thing because such technology can be defeated by criminals but honest people will be entangled by it since they won't be defeating it.
TML
What you haven't established yet is that there *is* a car problem. Communist societies are almost universally car unfriendly, not for environmental reasons (in fact more government tends to produce worse environments) but because cars provide personal freedom and are corrosive to control.
If fuel cell vehicles were to become economically practical and you could run your car on combining hydrogen and oxygen, surprise, surprise, you would still have people who would be against cars.
TML
TML
TML