The big difference is that today we have 2.5 billion people (PRC + India + etc) who have been economically liberated and are climbing out of poverty at a rapid clip. Aside from you occasional recession, this is going to put unremitting pressure on oil supplies and thus prices.
The current situation of cheap gasoline is going to be much more short lived than the 80s price crash. We'd have to have oil price deregulation again (40%+ of the world lives on subsidized petroleum) to have a durable trough and that's not likely given today's international geopolitics.
Does the manufacture of electric cars somehow reduce the supply of Luddite, NIMBY, and BANANA protestors who shut down any effort to improve power generation and transmission? There isn't going to be a durable majority for improvements until people start dying from the brownouts and blackouts.
It already exists with Alfresco. The 3.x version just coming out of beta about now is a reasonable alternative and has the advantage of actually interoperating with SharePoint and MS Office via the new specification, CMIS which MS has signed on to. There are interfaces to Alfresco for both MS Office and OOo. MS Office just thinks its talking to SharePoint.
In the actual situation, the commercialization of a legal product through export licensing to a chemical house in Europe was frustrated by local safety nazis. The US' balance of payments were made somewhat more negative because these people not only seized his materials but also his notes impinging on his free speech rights as well as his normal commercial rights.
It would be nice if you'd make room for the real world case that provoked the original article. Oops, I forgot, this is/.
In defense of the gun people, anytime a really bad government comes along high up on their "todo" list is to take away arms. They realize that there is only so far you can push an armed populace. This makes gun rights a political barrier much more than home chemistry labs. Hats off to them.
Hezbollah takes a great deal of pride in its military record. For a US official to falsely claim that the US military beat Hezbollah is a 1st order gaffe that significantly increases the chance that someone will take explosive exception to that false claim. People can and have died of this sort of thing.
You might find such a gaffe boring and not worth covering but that says more about you than about the newsworthiness of the mistake. Verbal mistakes that can cost lives are newsworthy, periode, end stop. Biden had howlers that fell in that category and those were buried. Palin didn't but was attacked much more severely.
By "the left" I mean to the left of the US center of public opinion. For an Australian socialist, the center of US public opinion may look hopelessly retrograde but you don't look too reasonable from our perspective either. The center of public opinion in the polity under discussion is, I hope, a reasonable and objective way to look at things.
Sen Biden made gaffe after gaffe on the campaign trail which were not covered as intensively as errors made by Gov Palin. Palin couldn't catch a break but what explains Biden's favorables other than press bias?
The free market is providing a cure. The circulation of all the outlets in the tank for Obama are themselves tanking. Nobody is talking about censorship here. These old dinosaur media outlets saw one last hurrah to exercise their old influence. They took it and some were swayed.
The ombudsman says that the press likes the new. But the press did not like Sarah Palin and she was newer than Obama. The ombudsman admits that Biden's coverage was too small. This is a faint whisper of the real problem, that the "experienced" foreign policy grey hair is a gaffe machine who regularly made mistakes in fact that would have caused serious questions being raised about Gov. Palin had she made them. But "old Joe" was excused and covered up for.
The problem is that the bias of the US press has been documented for quite a long time as being to the left and in favor of the US Democrat party. The press splits along media types with most major papers being of the left as are most TV outlets while talk radio tends towards the right. This spans across any political clan or personal force like Berlusconi. It's a persistent distortion of the world and it's a bad outcome for US politics.
The gaffeomatic now known as Vice President elect Joe Biden drew very little coverage for his many errors. I can sort of understand someone new to the national scene like Gov. Palin getting a detail wrong here or there. It happens. But when you're held out as the wise grey head whose experience is going to temper the youthful idealism at the top of the ticket, you should at least know that the US has never defeated Hezbollah in Lebanon. VP elect Biden made an elementary error of fact there that should have made the front pages. Instead it was treated as one more episode of "oh that's just Joe being Joe" which is how the press covered for Biden's many errors.
The press was in the tank for Obama/Biden and it was pretty obvious.
If you have a house that is that close to your neighbor, you know it as your homeowners insurance skyrockets as soon as one of your too close neighbors drops fire coverage. No fire company worth their salt would take that sort of contract. I wouldn't hire a fire company that would. If urban firefighting (what I think you're referring to) would ever go private, the smallest contracts would be at the natural dividing points where you could realistically make such a firebreak.
First of all, the general rule is that you should pay for fire protection. It's the civilized, safe thing to do. This is not true for everybody though. For example, a resort might find it more cost effective to run their own fire department and be guaranteed prompt service that they don't have to share. A farmer might do the same, calculating that any fire that threatened his house wouldn't be stopped by a far off municipal fire department. Under the model I'm describing/advocating they'd be able to opt out of any collective system while those who wanted to organize along more collective lines still could. They just could not force anybody to join who did not want to.
The failure to pay in a public system is dealt with by seizing the property and selling it off for nonpayment of taxes. The failure to pay in a private system is dealt with by creating a firebreak when a fire happens and letting the place burn down after ensuring that no life will be lost but otherwise leaving the property owner alone. Why you think seizing property is a better way to go for nonparticipation is beyond me.
The fire company does not deal with insurance companies. They know their own customers and if they had a deal with the insurance company, they would still not have to call. The "wildfire" type work is covered by the surrounding property owners who have contracted to keep their property safe.
Actually water isn't that cheap in the quantities that a fire department uses. Firehose consumption is a watchword denoting profligate usage. There's a reason for that.
Since I've posted several times subsequent to the original with factual backups, your criticism is, at best, mistaken.
Since you do not seem to have bothered looking at the rest of my responses, I'd suggest you start there. I won't recap.
In answer to your extreme theoretical, what I'm actually proposing is to be open to private provision, allow for competition, and have the state ready to exit any market in good order when we've figured out how to provision privately. Go beat your own straw men, they aren't mine to defend.
Garbage delivery, for instance, has been successfully privatized by simply selling off the government department (sometimes to an employee led group) and letting them rise and fall on their own going forward.
To this point, nobody's figured out how to make private provisioning for an army work in the modern age (though it has been done in the past in Italy's Condottieri age). Police have similar difficulties though private security seems a bit more realistic. Public schools have only a 150 year history at all and there is a vibrant private school system in the US even today so that's obviously possible. I've already covered firemen.
As to math, every situation's different and sometimes private provision makes sense while at other times public provision becomes necessary because nobody's come in to fill a basic need. The vast mass of all the think tank work that's been done internationally is overwhelmingly in favor of private provision. Go bother Heritage, Brookings, Cato, or some other relevant think tank for the numbers. Nobody seriously disagrees outside the communist nostalgics.
One can corrupt any system and proper regulation regarding honesty is essential whether the system is private or public. A major factor in the US crisis was political pressure including threatening bank charters if they did not take on more sub prime loans. This was done through revision of the Community Reinvestment Act. Several times the GOP Congress tried to get rid of this political stick beating on bankers to make objectively unwise loans but Fannie and Freddie executives who were profiting handsomely during the good times from the new practices spent on lobbying lavishly and they bought enough influence to get these reforms squashed.
At the same time the loan rating agencies were under pressure to green light these sub prime loans based on dubious criteria and they compromised their reputations to do so, again partially under the understanding that it wasn't really risky due to the implicit government guarantee of Fanny and Freddie.
The final bit of icing on the cake was the securitization of loans, opaque instruments that hid how much shit was in the shit sandwich. Once people started figuring out that they didn't know how much trouble they were in, it was off to the races and we got our banking crisis exacerbated by those opaque credit default swaps that were also mispriced because nobody knew how many stinker loans the government had shoveled on to any particular individual bank.
Does this really sound like a pure excess of the free market? Let's not swallow the spin of the Democrats who started the ball rolling with the CRA revisions in the late Clinton admin and protected them throughout the 8 years of the Bush admin.
I actually grew up in a social-but-not-socialism fire protection regime. It's called the volunteer fire fighting system. Lots of US municipalities use it. Social standing in the community is used to psychically reward people who volunteer to do the duty. So long as enough people step forward, it's a cheaper way to go and absolutely the best alternative of the three in use today in the USA (private for profit companies and municipality funded companies are the other two models).
There is nothing wrong with social provision of a service. Civic society is a great example of social provision without socialism.
Not everything has to be profit driven but when you leave open the door to profit driven provision, you maintain better systems overall even if you end up doing it socially. The granting of government monopolies, massive tax subsidy, and other aspects of socialism are a breeding ground for inefficiency and poor service over the long haul. There's no straw man about it.
If you can't afford to pay for fire protection, in the public system they seize your house for nonpayment of taxes and sell it to someone else. In the private system, you get to keep your house and be paranoid about fire safety. If you're unlucky, you get to write a check when your house is on fire.
Yeah, getting your house seized sounds so much better. Not!
Private fire departments (that do exist) will take your check on the spot and put out the fire. If the owners refuse to pay up, the private fire companies will go through the property to ensure nobody is trapped inside the building and act exactly like we do with wildfires in the woods, they'll make a fireline and stop the spread of the fire beyond the property line of the property owner that won't pay to save their own building when it's burning down.
It's a reasonable way to ensure that the stupid get what's coming to them without endangering innocents. So what's the problem?
There are three types of US fire departments. Professional state fire companies, private for profit fire companies, and volunteer fire brigades. I was raised in a 'village' with a population of about 15,000 who ran off the volunteer model. Their biggest expense was water. When you can provide social status and honor sufficient to motivate enough volunteers, this really is the best system. Private for-profit fire provision has long existed in the US where municipalities simply do not pay for state companies and they compete successfully for individual home service. Taxpayer funded fire companies tend to dominate large urban concentrations.
I agree that the postal service monopoly on 1st class mail (along with the legal fiction that the US government owns said mailboxes) is the heart of the US problem of postal service.
Local fire departments are actually a mixed case. Private fire protection provision is a long-standing reality, at least in the US, so the question is why should the state spend my tax dollars to make it impossible for me to get private service? What's the reason why private fire provision should automatically be driven out of the market?
The postal system survives based on a legal fiction in the US. You do not own your own mailbox. You pay for it but you don't own it so the police will actually (I had this happen to me once as a kid) intervene when they find someone other than a mail carrier putting something in the mailbox. UPS, for example, delivers to every address in the US. In the UK, I believe that the postal service was privatized in the Thatcher years. There's no inevitability about public post and no need in the modern world to keep legal monopolies on after you have 100% private coverage ready and able to compete if they were legally permitted to do so.
The interstate highway system is currently in the process of being concessioned out piece by piece to private operators. Private toll roads are coming on fairly strong and there's no doubt that the trend will continue.
What it comes down to is market failure is something that a lot of people claim in abstract but when you get right down to it, most of the time you have government making private efforts either illegal or pointless through massive subsidy from the public treasury. The limited cases where this is not true are shrinking as we figure out how to provision harder cases like roads. Collective ownership may be necessary so long as we have a failure of imagination, private finance, or entrepreneurial spirit but these are temporary things. Over the long run, people do figure out how to do things better in private markets.
This sort of thing has been argued out for decades. Going over it from the beginning *again* is intellectually insulting for anybody who's been paying attention (which by your three examples does not include you). So now that you've outed yourself as somewhat careless, I can address the objections in more detail. It was not a troll.
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Offshore/floating windmills or ocean current systems seem like reasonable candidates that aren't going to impinge on Hawaii's limited available space.
The big difference is that today we have 2.5 billion people (PRC + India + etc) who have been economically liberated and are climbing out of poverty at a rapid clip. Aside from you occasional recession, this is going to put unremitting pressure on oil supplies and thus prices.
The current situation of cheap gasoline is going to be much more short lived than the 80s price crash. We'd have to have oil price deregulation again (40%+ of the world lives on subsidized petroleum) to have a durable trough and that's not likely given today's international geopolitics.
Does the manufacture of electric cars somehow reduce the supply of Luddite, NIMBY, and BANANA protestors who shut down any effort to improve power generation and transmission? There isn't going to be a durable majority for improvements until people start dying from the brownouts and blackouts.
Generally your network share doesn't have version control nor does it allow for rich metadata tagging.
SharePoint and Alfresco (and anybody else working in this space) are going to be able to do more. Why wouldn't you take advantage of that?
It already exists with Alfresco. The 3.x version just coming out of beta about now is a reasonable alternative and has the advantage of actually interoperating with SharePoint and MS Office via the new specification, CMIS which MS has signed on to. There are interfaces to Alfresco for both MS Office and OOo. MS Office just thinks its talking to SharePoint.
In the actual situation, the commercialization of a legal product through export licensing to a chemical house in Europe was frustrated by local safety nazis. The US' balance of payments were made somewhat more negative because these people not only seized his materials but also his notes impinging on his free speech rights as well as his normal commercial rights.
It would be nice if you'd make room for the real world case that provoked the original article. Oops, I forgot, this is /.
In defense of the gun people, anytime a really bad government comes along high up on their "todo" list is to take away arms. They realize that there is only so far you can push an armed populace. This makes gun rights a political barrier much more than home chemistry labs. Hats off to them.
Hezbollah takes a great deal of pride in its military record. For a US official to falsely claim that the US military beat Hezbollah is a 1st order gaffe that significantly increases the chance that someone will take explosive exception to that false claim. People can and have died of this sort of thing.
You might find such a gaffe boring and not worth covering but that says more about you than about the newsworthiness of the mistake. Verbal mistakes that can cost lives are newsworthy, periode, end stop. Biden had howlers that fell in that category and those were buried. Palin didn't but was attacked much more severely.
No bias? Give me a break.
By "the left" I mean to the left of the US center of public opinion. For an Australian socialist, the center of US public opinion may look hopelessly retrograde but you don't look too reasonable from our perspective either. The center of public opinion in the polity under discussion is, I hope, a reasonable and objective way to look at things.
Sen Biden made gaffe after gaffe on the campaign trail which were not covered as intensively as errors made by Gov Palin. Palin couldn't catch a break but what explains Biden's favorables other than press bias?
Actually by their standards, every news station in the world is extremely reactionary. The DPRK is a creature of the left, not the right.
The free market is providing a cure. The circulation of all the outlets in the tank for Obama are themselves tanking. Nobody is talking about censorship here. These old dinosaur media outlets saw one last hurrah to exercise their old influence. They took it and some were swayed.
The takeaway message is don't get fooled again.
The ombudsman says that the press likes the new. But the press did not like Sarah Palin and she was newer than Obama. The ombudsman admits that Biden's coverage was too small. This is a faint whisper of the real problem, that the "experienced" foreign policy grey hair is a gaffe machine who regularly made mistakes in fact that would have caused serious questions being raised about Gov. Palin had she made them. But "old Joe" was excused and covered up for.
The problem is that the bias of the US press has been documented for quite a long time as being to the left and in favor of the US Democrat party. The press splits along media types with most major papers being of the left as are most TV outlets while talk radio tends towards the right. This spans across any political clan or personal force like Berlusconi. It's a persistent distortion of the world and it's a bad outcome for US politics.
The gaffeomatic now known as Vice President elect Joe Biden drew very little coverage for his many errors. I can sort of understand someone new to the national scene like Gov. Palin getting a detail wrong here or there. It happens. But when you're held out as the wise grey head whose experience is going to temper the youthful idealism at the top of the ticket, you should at least know that the US has never defeated Hezbollah in Lebanon. VP elect Biden made an elementary error of fact there that should have made the front pages. Instead it was treated as one more episode of "oh that's just Joe being Joe" which is how the press covered for Biden's many errors.
The press was in the tank for Obama/Biden and it was pretty obvious.
If you have a house that is that close to your neighbor, you know it as your homeowners insurance skyrockets as soon as one of your too close neighbors drops fire coverage. No fire company worth their salt would take that sort of contract. I wouldn't hire a fire company that would. If urban firefighting (what I think you're referring to) would ever go private, the smallest contracts would be at the natural dividing points where you could realistically make such a firebreak.
First of all, the general rule is that you should pay for fire protection. It's the civilized, safe thing to do. This is not true for everybody though. For example, a resort might find it more cost effective to run their own fire department and be guaranteed prompt service that they don't have to share. A farmer might do the same, calculating that any fire that threatened his house wouldn't be stopped by a far off municipal fire department. Under the model I'm describing/advocating they'd be able to opt out of any collective system while those who wanted to organize along more collective lines still could. They just could not force anybody to join who did not want to.
The failure to pay in a public system is dealt with by seizing the property and selling it off for nonpayment of taxes. The failure to pay in a private system is dealt with by creating a firebreak when a fire happens and letting the place burn down after ensuring that no life will be lost but otherwise leaving the property owner alone. Why you think seizing property is a better way to go for nonparticipation is beyond me.
The fire company does not deal with insurance companies. They know their own customers and if they had a deal with the insurance company, they would still not have to call.
The "wildfire" type work is covered by the surrounding property owners who have contracted to keep their property safe.
Actually water isn't that cheap in the quantities that a fire department uses. Firehose consumption is a watchword denoting profligate usage. There's a reason for that.
Since I've posted several times subsequent to the original with factual backups, your criticism is, at best, mistaken.
Since you do not seem to have bothered looking at the rest of my responses, I'd suggest you start there. I won't recap.
In answer to your extreme theoretical, what I'm actually proposing is to be open to private provision, allow for competition, and have the state ready to exit any market in good order when we've figured out how to provision privately. Go beat your own straw men, they aren't mine to defend.
Garbage delivery, for instance, has been successfully privatized by simply selling off the government department (sometimes to an employee led group) and letting them rise and fall on their own going forward.
To this point, nobody's figured out how to make private provisioning for an army work in the modern age (though it has been done in the past in Italy's Condottieri age). Police have similar difficulties though private security seems a bit more realistic. Public schools have only a 150 year history at all and there is a vibrant private school system in the US even today so that's obviously possible. I've already covered firemen.
As to math, every situation's different and sometimes private provision makes sense while at other times public provision becomes necessary because nobody's come in to fill a basic need. The vast mass of all the think tank work that's been done internationally is overwhelmingly in favor of private provision. Go bother Heritage, Brookings, Cato, or some other relevant think tank for the numbers. Nobody seriously disagrees outside the communist nostalgics.
One can corrupt any system and proper regulation regarding honesty is essential whether the system is private or public. A major factor in the US crisis was political pressure including threatening bank charters if they did not take on more sub prime loans. This was done through revision of the Community Reinvestment Act. Several times the GOP Congress tried to get rid of this political stick beating on bankers to make objectively unwise loans but Fannie and Freddie executives who were profiting handsomely during the good times from the new practices spent on lobbying lavishly and they bought enough influence to get these reforms squashed.
At the same time the loan rating agencies were under pressure to green light these sub prime loans based on dubious criteria and they compromised their reputations to do so, again partially under the understanding that it wasn't really risky due to the implicit government guarantee of Fanny and Freddie.
The final bit of icing on the cake was the securitization of loans, opaque instruments that hid how much shit was in the shit sandwich. Once people started figuring out that they didn't know how much trouble they were in, it was off to the races and we got our banking crisis exacerbated by those opaque credit default swaps that were also mispriced because nobody knew how many stinker loans the government had shoveled on to any particular individual bank.
Does this really sound like a pure excess of the free market? Let's not swallow the spin of the Democrats who started the ball rolling with the CRA revisions in the late Clinton admin and protected them throughout the 8 years of the Bush admin.
I actually grew up in a social-but-not-socialism fire protection regime. It's called the volunteer fire fighting system. Lots of US municipalities use it. Social standing in the community is used to psychically reward people who volunteer to do the duty. So long as enough people step forward, it's a cheaper way to go and absolutely the best alternative of the three in use today in the USA (private for profit companies and municipality funded companies are the other two models).
There is nothing wrong with social provision of a service. Civic society is a great example of social provision without socialism.
Not everything has to be profit driven but when you leave open the door to profit driven provision, you maintain better systems overall even if you end up doing it socially. The granting of government monopolies, massive tax subsidy, and other aspects of socialism are a breeding ground for inefficiency and poor service over the long haul. There's no straw man about it.
If you can't afford to pay for fire protection, in the public system they seize your house for nonpayment of taxes and sell it to someone else. In the private system, you get to keep your house and be paranoid about fire safety. If you're unlucky, you get to write a check when your house is on fire.
Yeah, getting your house seized sounds so much better. Not!
Private fire departments (that do exist) will take your check on the spot and put out the fire. If the owners refuse to pay up, the private fire companies will go through the property to ensure nobody is trapped inside the building and act exactly like we do with wildfires in the woods, they'll make a fireline and stop the spread of the fire beyond the property line of the property owner that won't pay to save their own building when it's burning down.
It's a reasonable way to ensure that the stupid get what's coming to them without endangering innocents. So what's the problem?
There are three types of US fire departments. Professional state fire companies, private for profit fire companies, and volunteer fire brigades. I was raised in a 'village' with a population of about 15,000 who ran off the volunteer model. Their biggest expense was water. When you can provide social status and honor sufficient to motivate enough volunteers, this really is the best system. Private for-profit fire provision has long existed in the US where municipalities simply do not pay for state companies and they compete successfully for individual home service. Taxpayer funded fire companies tend to dominate large urban concentrations.
I agree that the postal service monopoly on 1st class mail (along with the legal fiction that the US government owns said mailboxes) is the heart of the US problem of postal service.
Local fire departments are actually a mixed case. Private fire protection provision is a long-standing reality, at least in the US, so the question is why should the state spend my tax dollars to make it impossible for me to get private service? What's the reason why private fire provision should automatically be driven out of the market?
The postal system survives based on a legal fiction in the US. You do not own your own mailbox. You pay for it but you don't own it so the police will actually (I had this happen to me once as a kid) intervene when they find someone other than a mail carrier putting something in the mailbox. UPS, for example, delivers to every address in the US. In the UK, I believe that the postal service was privatized in the Thatcher years. There's no inevitability about public post and no need in the modern world to keep legal monopolies on after you have 100% private coverage ready and able to compete if they were legally permitted to do so.
The interstate highway system is currently in the process of being concessioned out piece by piece to private operators. Private toll roads are coming on fairly strong and there's no doubt that the trend will continue.
What it comes down to is market failure is something that a lot of people claim in abstract but when you get right down to it, most of the time you have government making private efforts either illegal or pointless through massive subsidy from the public treasury. The limited cases where this is not true are shrinking as we figure out how to provision harder cases like roads. Collective ownership may be necessary so long as we have a failure of imagination, private finance, or entrepreneurial spirit but these are temporary things. Over the long run, people do figure out how to do things better in private markets.
This sort of thing has been argued out for decades. Going over it from the beginning *again* is intellectually insulting for anybody who's been paying attention (which by your three examples does not include you). So now that you've outed yourself as somewhat careless, I can address the objections in more detail. It was not a troll.