The Pentagon isn't a 'Federal building', it is a military building.
This is an inane distinction, given that the military is funded by federal taxes.
Let's make a logical deduction. Here are the premises:
1) There are 3 levels of government in the U.S.: federal, state, and local (municipal and county), which each own buildings attributable to their level of government
2) The military is an arm of the federal government (it says so in the Constitution)
Conclusion: buildings owned by the military are actually owned by the federal government, and therefore, are federal buildings.
You could make your argument about science labs too: Fermilab, Kennedy Space Center, Sandia, and so on. You could say "those aren't federal buildings, they're science labs!"
And yet, they are federally-funded, making them federal buildings.
We clearly recognize their differences for the purposes they serve -- federal military buildings are recognized as targets for war, but science buildings are not (IIRC). But they nevertheless are both federal buildings...
My point was, *if* you are poor, then capitalism *obviously* isn't good for you.
But you said that this point is self-evident. And it's not.
Whether capitalism is good for somebody depends on how you look at it. If you're looking at a single point in time (as you are), then arguably, at that very moment, capitalism might not be working very well for somebody. It depends on the person too.
But looked-at over a period of time (which is more-useful than looking at the tangent-in-time), if you compare the point at which one starts out to the point at which one ends up, typically, capitalism is good, even for the poor (hence my points about China and India). People who are poor at one point in time may not be at another point; they may get a decent job, start a successful business, win the lottery, etc..
And then there are the overall quality-of-life improvements that come with the evolution of actors in the system as a whole (e.g. more-efficient cars, faster & cheaper computers, etc.).
Your argument's logic can be extrapolated to an example that goes "if somebody is out of a job (i.e. very poor in terms of income), then capitalism isn't good for them."
And yet that's clearly not true; people who are out of a job at 1 point in their life aren't (usually) out of a job their whole lives. Indeed, even grossly-overpaid corporate executives get fired and are out of a job for a period of time before being hired-on elsewhere. But who would argue that capitalism isn't working for them, even while they're jobless?:-)
The same would apply to any other system too.
Certainly, and again, by the same logic, it depends on the time span (or point in time) being looked-at and the person...
No, it is not self-evident. That point is explained in the article, duh...
The question to ask yourself is "is socialism good for the poor?" Then look at the nations where socialism has been enacted to its largest degrees -- Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, East Germany, Vietnam, India, Maoist China, present-day North Korea -- and ask yourself if those are nations in which the poor would like living.
Indeed, the difference between capitalism and socialism was probably starkest and most-clearly explained by the difference between East and West Germany. On one side of the wall, there was prosperity and wealth and individuality and uniqueness and freedom; on the other, poverty, run-down, same-looking government-owned housing, and totalitarianism. Ever wonder why so many people in East Germany were happy to tear down the wall?
Figure it out doofus. Feel free to join the rest of us someday in realizing that socialism and communism have been proven, repeatedly and everywhere they've been tried, to be failed economic systems. Look around: even the "socialist" nations of Sweden, etc. have significant market (i.e. capitalist) elements to them; those nations simply round off the harder edges of capitalism with large welfare systems.
That said, those nations are facing fiscal distress because even *they* have too much socialist influence... But at least they have been more-prosperous, more stable and more free than more-strongly socialist nations like those I mentioned earlier.
If you need further evidence, talk to Jeffrey Sachs, the economist leading the war on extreme poverty worldwide. He wrote a piece in Time magazine recently (in the last month or so) pointing out that one of the reasons people in Africa and elsewhere have been so poor is because of socialist economies; he called such economies "mistakes."
Today, India and China are growing at torrid rates because of their market liberalizations and large populations of relatively well-educated people willing to work for pay rates that in the U.S. would be peanuts, but in those nations enables them to live as comfortably as the very well-to-do here in the U.S..
Their populations are becoming increasingly-wealthy as a result of globalization, and the same can occur in other nations -- if only economic illiterates who promote failed economic systems and policies would sit down and read an econ. text sometime.
That isn't to say there aren't some rough edges; China's healthcare system has worsened overall since their liberalizations and their environmental regulations haven't yet caught up with the fast-rising amount of pollution they have there, for example. But on the whole, they are improving and developing rapidly, and eventually they will grow their way out of such problems and join the developed world -- just as the U.S. did, just as Europe did, just as Japan did, just as Canada did, etc...
BTW, one last point. Look at Ronald Reagan's policies in the U.S., and compare them to this graph. Notice something? During Carter's years (1976-1980), the poverty rate rose, despite high taxes on the rich. From 1982-1990, it fell, during the "evil capitalist" reign of Ronald Reagan (who cut the top income tax rate from 70% to 28%) and Bush Sr.. It rose to 15% in 1990-1992, due to the recession, but has been dropping ever since then, with only a slight increase in income taxes instituted by Clinton (and cut again by Bush Jr.).
Today, after some 30 years of "creeping capitalism" (as capitalism's opponents might call it), we are at the same level of poverty as we were in the "golden era of American socialism", the 1960s. Capitalism not good for the poor? Don't bet on it.
1) "America" = the "United States of America" 2) "America" != "Canada" 3) "America" != "Mexico"
It should be plain from the above that the only nation with the name "America" in its full title is the USA. We may call everything north of the Panama Canal "the Americas", because that was at one time how the entire North American continent was referred, but there nevertheless is still only 1 "America".
There was no implication in my post that Canada is on another continent... If only you would recognize the difference between "North America" and "America", this wouldn't be an issue.
Though admittedly, for confusion's sake (because some people do get confused by the naming), perhaps I should've said "U.S."...
Looks like you're right; I should've read more-carefully. From TFA:
The American blog, being promoted by an all-news Canadian website, boasts that "Canada's Corruption Scandal Breaks Wide Open" and promises more to come. The owner of the Canadian website refused to comment yesterday.
AdScam inquiry spokesman Francois Perreault expressed shock at the publication ban breach, and said commission co-counsel Bernard Roy and Justice John Gomery will decide today whether to charge the Canadian website owner with contempt of court.
The blog is American and TFA also says the bloger is from the U.S., but the people promoting it are some Canadian website, whom the court may decide to charge with contempt (seeing as there isn't much Justice Gomery can do to an American in America doing the blogging; really, he ought to investigate leaks from within his own courtroom - after all, how is the American going to get the info otherwise?).
I find that list fascinating. On virtually every question where something is objectively (or at least reasonably) true or false (e.g. "0.02 Is sex a strictly human endeavour?"), the *true* probability is no more than 0.20 points in either direction, and in many cases, the probability is less than 0.05 away.
It's not a perfect system, clearly, but it's also more-right than wrong in many of the factually-proveable cases (e.g. "running is good exercise", "Tokyo is the capital of Japan", "Star Wars is based upon a true story", etc..
If that is a truly random selection, then I'm impressed... I'd be more-curious to know what its ratio of right/wrong answers is (defining "right" or "wrong" based on some agreed-upon amount of probability -- say, 0.08 -- from either 0.00 or 1.00, which define the fact as true or false), i.e., to determine the total rate at which Mindpixel project is correct...
FYI, if you RTFA, the blogger is not American, he is Canadian, hosting his content on a U.S. server.
Anyway kids, this is one of the great things about national sovereignty (as opposed to centralization and unification via, say, the United Nations):
Canada != U.S.
Canada's laws and judicial rulings don't apply in America any more than ours apply in Canada. There isn't a thing about our frosty-but-friendly neighbors to the north can do about it, except ask us (politely, no doubt) to remove the blog entry, but we don't have to comply unless we want to. Tough cookies for the Canadian judiciary. They can charge the blogger with contempt-of-court (which they're considering), but that's about it.
Still, IANAL. Whatever the law may be between the U.S. and Canada, the practical case is that the cat is out of the bag. The story is on the 'net, and the only way it's ever disappearing now is if people decide not to save it; there's no way the Canadian government can stop the story from spreading now, much as they may want to believe otherwise.
Just one nice example of why nations ought to remain separate and sovereign...:-)
And the alternative is... what? Government provision of goods/services, i.e. socialism (government ownership of all economic output, i.e., 100% taxation)?
And don't governments fail to "pretend to be good, they flagrantly disobey laws and get away with it" too? They do, and in part for that reason, socialism failed; the Berlin Wall fell, Soviet Russia collapsed, and every significant genuinely-socialist nation (former Soviet Russia, China, India, Vietnam, Nazi Germany) is no longer fully-socialist, having undergone a process of slow conversion to capitalist economics. The sole exception is North Korea, the last holdover from the Stalinist era -- and I wouldn't call them a "successful" country by any means (not even at extorting the U.S., which seems to be its goal as of late).
So if corporations are big and bad, and if governments are big and bad, what's the solution? Communism (i.e. a system in which all property is equally owned and there is no government and everybody works for "the greater good" of the community)?
But communism (real communism, not the "communism" people claimed Soviet Russia and China and North Korea live(d) by (i.e., they were communist in ideology, but socialist in actuality)) doesn't work because there's no incentive for people to care about the things they own. The problem is known as "tragedy of the commons." Real-world examples of communism -- including Chairman Mao's experiments in rural China during his "Great Leap Forward," and for a short time in pre-Revolution America (America was once a communist land - until they figured out that nobody was doing any work) -- have been a proven to be utter failures.
So, that leaves 1 other economic system: fascism (governments and business working together). But by definition, govn't and business works together; if you think things are bad now (and it could be argued that we have a fascist economy), things could be worse.
Milton Friedman once said it best in his book Free to Choose:
We have been forgetting the basic truth that the greatest threat to human freedom is the concentration of power, whether in the hands of government or anyone else. We have persuaded ourselves that it is safe to grant power, provided it is for good reasons.
(emphasis mine)
But then that brings us back to a capitalist system, in which we balance the power of the people against the power of business and against the power of a minimal (but powerful in the parts we do create) government; it's a 3-way balance that needs to be maintained, and all too often, the citizenry fails to keep its end of the bargain...
Consider 2 final facts:
1) Wal-Mart routinely tops the Fortune 500 list as America's biggest corporation. It's total revenues last year were around $260 billion. It seems pretty huge... until you consider that the U.S. Federal government took in tax revenues of about $2.4 trillion (or, $2,400 billion), making the government's tax revenues still 9 times larger than that of America's biggest (and some would say most-evil) corporation.
2) How many people did Wal-Mart kill last year? None? Or maybe 1 or 2 due to negligence (e.g. slip-and-fall)?
Now how many people did the U.S. government kill? Well, simply looking at Iraq and ignoring our death penalty laws, the "war" in Afghanistan, and so on, we know the U.S. government has killed thousands of people. So which entity is more-dangerous and more ruthless?
Corporations aren't perfect, governments are *far* from perfect, and the citizenry often makes stupid or uneducated decisions (like re-electing President Bush, hence the problem of mobocracy). Avoiding the concentration of power is critical.
Me, "I love my country; it's my government I'm worried about."
Your average blogger doesn't spend $10, let alone $1,000, and most political blogs are not for one specific SF candidate.
What difference does it make if it's $1, $10, $1000, or $100,000,000? Yours is an argument of scale.
But it's all free speech on the net. Any regulation of that speech would (normally, if McCain-Feingold wasn't upheld in the Supreme Court) be a violation of the 1st Amendment.
It doesn't matter how flashy or cool your website is or how much money you poured into it: if people ignore it, your site is worthless. Scale doesn't matter, quality content and the links to your site resulting from it do.
With that in mind, higher dollar amounts can certainly go to increased "research" (partisan studies) to post on the site, true, but politics has always been like that, and still is; McCain-Feingold doesn't change that.
Typical Example Mr. Golfplayer. Found a great little OSS application, needs compiling, uses Perl, running make, opps need to use CPAN, "Oh crap, company firewall blocks FTP",
You forgot about HTTP via the LWP module, or using an external call to wget. Think the company blocks outbound HTTP? (well, for call-center employees, yes, but for developers?)
If only more geeks considered the economics of what they're doing, as you have...
The logical extreme of the "all apps must be as fast as possible" argument is to code in ASM. I suggest that anybody who pushes this argument write every app in ASM. See how long it takes before this person gets fired for inefficiency...
Why are some coders hesitant to "use the right tool for the job"? ASM might be necessary if you're optimizing a crypto or compression loop, while C or C++ might be more appropriate for the rest of the app, but Perl or PHP are surely more-appropriate languages for web-scripting! Duh.
But no, we have these "code everything in C, C is the be-all end-all of languages" dolts...:(
Again, to restate my question: what research are we funding now which we may or may not see in practical use 20 years from now?
I'll give you a much-hated example: DARPA's Total Information Awareness. Neat concept (but we know its end-use, and we don't like it at all).
I occasionally peruse my university's copies of the various ACM publications it receives. I can't recall seeing anything particularly Earth-shattering in those either (the occasional data-mining technique aside), but then, I'm probably not creative/clever enough...
Touché.:-) I forgot CounterStrike... OK, "CS" needs definition, even here.
(If I felt like it, I'd try and argue that since/. has subdivisions -- BSD, Development, Science, Politics, Gaming, YRO, etc. -- that the use of "CS" is still dependent on which section the post is posted to. But since this one had no section definition, I can't argue that because/. isn't rigorous enough with their section-labeling for it to work...)
Why isn't it an editor's requirement to define every TLA in a headline?
Audience context.
This isn't a general news site, this is "News for Nerds." In the context of a nerdy audience, CS = "Computer Science".
Consider other contexts: * Sales or business news site: CS = "customer service" * Pr0n site: CS = "cock sucking" * Teen chat site (non-sexual): CS = "cool shit" (well, it could anyway) * Police: CS = "cop shot" * Chopstick site: CS = "chopsticks"
And so on. Context!:)
Typically though, it should only apply to basic, commonly-understood TLA's. What constitutes "basic, commonly-understood TLA's" is open to debate, but IMO, if it's a TLA found only in a technical paper, define it, and when in doubt, define it. But if it's one that your audience uses on a regular basis, don't define it. It's not a hard-and-fast rule (and maybe the best idea of all is to define TLA's in a dictionary somewhere on the site, for consistency's sake)...
So, what fundamental advances are currently being worked on? What are we funding now that we should see 20 years down the road?
That is what the grandparent is asking. Personally, agree w/ him -- we haven't had any *fundamental* advances in quite a while; after all, what fundamental advances were developed 20-25 years ago that we've seen released within the last 5 years?
This has been IT's problem since the dot-com boom gave out -- there's little in the way of fundamentals to build on that haven't already been built-upon. We may be applying technology to coincide with social changes -- e.g. distributed computing and P2P apps taking advantage of the fact that an ever-increasing number of people own computers (particularly as the price of computing has dropped so low due to economies-of-scale that nearly anybody can afford at least 1 box) -- but show me a fundamental *technology*, absent any social trends, that is completely new. (heck, P2P isn't new, and various CS profs (rightly) argued as much in the recent MGM v. Grokster USSC case)
I'm waiting, and so is the entire American IT industry.
Well, the alternative is to have a government that realizes its populace doesn't pay attention to it, so it goes ahead and does whatever it wants (which, for as much as it seems like the U.S. govn't does this, even with something like our Terri Schiavo case, fundamentally our age-old system of checks-and-balances prevented the theocrats that seem to have taken over our govn't from imposing their will on Schiavo - i.e., our system still mostly works, despite the heavy-handed and politically-advantaged attempts to flout it).
You know, like the famous quote "the price of liberty is eternal vigilance"?
We on this side of the pond laugh at Europeans for having governments which do things like regulate the curvature of cucumbers. (then again, we have some local/municipal laws that are almost as goofy, e.g. one in Florida which says one may not take a shower naked)
Still, in a way, I agree with you; there's too much politics on Slashdot and in most of the rest of the country too. I often wonder how much time we waste on politics that could've been spent doing something else more productive (or fun)...:-/
Economists still tend to be, ahh, skeptical of his "gold bug" tendencies. In fact, we'd call anyone else who said the same things a crackpot.
Are you sure he's much of a "gold bug" though? Unabashed gold bugs (like Austrian economist Mark Skousen) would suggest just the opposite. (which is just as well, IMO, as I'm no gold bug either... but then, WTF do I know, I'm just an Econ. minor, heh (though I often wonder if I should've made it my major when I started university, rather than CS)...)
IMO, Friedman really has 2 personalities when it comes to political economy (i.e., his normative economics) - his idealist side, and his practical side.
His ideals are pretty clearly more libertarian than classical liberal; he once said in an interview in Reason magazine that he'd "like to be a zero-government libertarian" (like his son, David), but when asked why he wasn't one, he noted that it's not feasible.
But in practice -- when he's suggested alternate ways to fund public education (via a public/private choice using vouchers, even though his ideal is to completely privatize education), when he's suggested that the Fed be run a particular way (even though his ideal is to dismantle it), when he's suggested (as in (IIRC) chapter 9 of Capitalism and Freedom) that we do actually need some sort of social safety net (for which he proposed his negative income tax) -- some of the less-sane, more-extreme libertarians, e.g. Rothbard, criticized him as being a "statist". But really, his practical suggestions (which he sees as leading in the direction of his ideals) are more classical liberal than libertarian in nature. Hence the sometimes-confusing dichotomy...
Unlike in Friedman's ideal, I don't see the Fed as a terrible institution, despite some of its mistakes, such as their failure to elect a replacement chairman in the late 1920s after Benjamin Strong died (as my Monetary Policy prof. once described to us and to which Friedman partly attributes the exacerbation of the Depression). The ability to control inflation by controlling the money supply is awfully valuable, when it works (though given housing prices lately, I wonder what the *actual* total inflation rate is, rather than the more-often reported CPI of (currently) about 3%).
But then, given that I've lived only a few years longer than through the Greenspan era and given that he seems to be described variously as either "lucky" or "skilled" (skill which doesn't necessarily follow in other Fed chairmen), my view is probably colored by their relatively very good performance of the last 20 years. I didn't live through the Fed's failure before and during the Great Depression, nor did I even live through the stagflation of the 70's...
I could really use some seed comments at the website:)
I'll see what I can do, when I get the chance...:)
Given my fairly-limited sphere of influence though (of all my friends I talk to regularly, only 3 are politically and economically-interested: 2 are libertarians and 1 is a borderline socialist (nevermind the fall of the Berlin Wall, etc.)), might I also suggest making your blog's presence known on a few other econ. and/or law-related blogs:
* EconLog -- Arnold Kling (MIT PhD) writes there and regularly gets a fair number of comments
* Bradford DeLong's blog -- not a classical liberal or libertarian. But a lot of people seem to read his so-called "reality-based" blog, so in the name of garnering traffic to yours, it might be
2) Companies become less-prone to developing new goods/services, as they become taxed more with each successive level of complexity
This applies to *any* tax; it really has nothing to do with the VAT.
Well, I don't know about *any* tax -- an income tax doesn't explicitly tax the different levels of production as a VAT or sales tax does, for example (though the effects of income taxes are well-known, i.e., if we tax people too much (particularly the wealthy who have the money to start new businesses), it leads to reduced levels of new business investment, which restricts growth - here, the argument of to what degree an income tax limits goods/service complexity depends on the progressivity of the tax, but regardless, the income tax isn't a *direct* tax on a good's complexity or inter-business trade).
It never occurred to me to think of the VAT as a sales tax though, but that's effectively what it is (a tax on sales between different businesses at each step of production). It *is* silly and inconsistent of me I suppose to promote a sales tax on one hand and oppose the VAT on the other.:-) (I came around to this position in the process of writing a lengthy, hypothetical-filled response to your above point, which in the end only served to suggest the flaws of a VAT/sales tax and point out the practical lack of difference between the two taxes.)
But the lack of distinction begs the question of why we make a distinction at all between a sales tax and a VAT, to begin with, i.e., if we were to have a national sales tax, this would (in theory) apply both between businesses and between business and end-consumer -- just like a VAT. So what is the difference? Why generate this notion of a VAT in the first place if a national sales tax would (it seems) be effectively the same thing?
Or are we just using the VAT as a a synonym for a sales tax for the sake of creating synonyms?:P
You also might like http://dochawk.org/column.050324.html about classic liberals--you sound like one of us:)
Heh, thanks.:) That was an excellent piece, BTW, describing the basic schools of thought as well as any description I've ever seen.
Classical liberalism does basically underpin my views, rather than the more-extreme stances some libertarians (including the Libertarian Party) take, e.g. those of anarcho-capitalism, those who refuse to recognize market failures on the occasion they do occur (the factory smokestack polluting somebody else's shirt" example being the classic example), those who refuse to recognize the need for at least some amount of taxation for those services which cannot be fairly and stably provided by the market (e.g. the military, the police, the judicial system, at the bare minimum), etc..
In general, I find I pattern my views almost exactly to those of Milton Friedman, rather than Ayn Rand or Murray Rothbard. Like anybody, Friedman isn't perfect, but he seems to put up better arguments than any other classical liberal/"moderate libertarian" I've yet found (David Henderson seems pretty good too, based on what little of his work I've read so far).
Anyway, I've added your blog to my RSS aggregator, if that tells you anything.:-)
I think all the "real Republicans" have either shut up the last 4 years, realizing that their GOP has betrayed them, leaving them "politically homeless." They can't be Republicans, b/c the GOP is just as willing to implement fiscal irresponsibility as the Democrats, but they can't be Libertarians because they're "loony", and besides, libertarian economics in many cases runs counter to the desires of big business (despite the ignorant claims otherwise by every left-winger around). And obviously the socialists and Greens (same thing, really) are out...
So the "business Republicans", "western conservatives", "Reagan Republicans", etc. -- the economically/fiscally-conservative, socially-moderate Republicans -- they're all sitting on the bench, watching Bush play a miserable game of Republican politics, with a moderate-to-leftish fiscal policies and extremely-conservative social policies.
Re: a VAT... I argue vigorously against a VAT (and I'm troubled by the fact that Dennis Hastert, a BA in Economics and Speaker of the House, actually thinks it's somehow a good idea). Value-Added Taxes (VAT) are nothing but trouble as far as technological growth is concerned (that same growth which just so happens to swell the growth of the economy as a whole via increased efficiency in all manner of goods/services rendered)... Taxing each stage of production only serves to have 2 effects:
1) Companies bring various stages of production in-house, to avoid the tax, meaning (if conventional the business sense to outsource areas of non-specialty is to be believed as more-efficient than doing things in-house) that as businesses bring the various stages of production under their wing, they not only grow vastly-larger and become more unwieldly in their massiveness, but there exists fewer companies in the marketplace from which consumers can choose. In effect, a VAT encourages monopoly, which is rarely good for the consumer.
2) Companies become less-prone to developing new goods/services, as they become taxed more with each successive level of complexity (tax the iron-ore sold to the steel mill which makes the steel which then gets taxed when it is sold to Ford to make the car which is taxed again when it is finished and sold to the consumer). So a VAT limits innovation (and must be partly to blame for Europe's eroding economic strength).
Probably the worst aspect of a VAT, however, is that it is a tax which is invisible to the end-consumer; you and I wouldn't see the tax, except as it is hidden behind the price of the product. Because it's invisible to the consumer, there is less incentive for them to oppose it, and to oppose its growth. It's the same problem we have in income taxes vs. consumption taxes -- income taxes are filed (though not collected) once a year, at the opposite end of the year from when elections are held, so politicians have a "lag time" in which they wait for the public to realize how much they pay in income taxes before they go on their usual spending sprees.
Contrast this with a sales tax, which slaps the consumer in the face every time he/she buys something; it makes being taxed bluntly-distasteful to the consumer. If we are to strive for lower taxes (as any "real Republican" or libertarian would typically pine for), this is certainly preferable to income taxes, and even moreso than a VAT...
Slashdot Mirror
This is an inane distinction, given that the military is funded by federal taxes.
Let's make a logical deduction. Here are the premises:
1) There are 3 levels of government in the U.S.: federal, state, and local (municipal and county), which each own buildings attributable to their level of government
2) The military is an arm of the federal government (it says so in the Constitution)
Conclusion: buildings owned by the military are actually owned by the federal government, and therefore, are federal buildings.
You could make your argument about science labs too: Fermilab, Kennedy Space Center, Sandia, and so on. You could say "those aren't federal buildings, they're science labs!"
And yet, they are federally-funded, making them federal buildings.
We clearly recognize their differences for the purposes they serve -- federal military buildings are recognized as targets for war, but science buildings are not (IIRC). But they nevertheless are both federal buildings...
Glad you're enjoying the discussion.......
But you said that this point is self-evident. And it's not.
Whether capitalism is good for somebody depends on how you look at it. If you're looking at a single point in time (as you are), then arguably, at that very moment, capitalism might not be working very well for somebody. It depends on the person too.
But looked-at over a period of time (which is more-useful than looking at the tangent-in-time), if you compare the point at which one starts out to the point at which one ends up, typically, capitalism is good, even for the poor (hence my points about China and India). People who are poor at one point in time may not be at another point; they may get a decent job, start a successful business, win the lottery, etc..
And then there are the overall quality-of-life improvements that come with the evolution of actors in the system as a whole (e.g. more-efficient cars, faster & cheaper computers, etc.).
Your argument's logic can be extrapolated to an example that goes "if somebody is out of a job (i.e. very poor in terms of income), then capitalism isn't good for them."
And yet that's clearly not true; people who are out of a job at 1 point in their life aren't (usually) out of a job their whole lives. Indeed, even grossly-overpaid corporate executives get fired and are out of a job for a period of time before being hired-on elsewhere. But who would argue that capitalism isn't working for them, even while they're jobless?
Certainly, and again, by the same logic, it depends on the time span (or point in time) being looked-at and the person...
No, it is not self-evident. That point is explained in the article, duh...
The question to ask yourself is "is socialism good for the poor?" Then look at the nations where socialism has been enacted to its largest degrees -- Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, East Germany, Vietnam, India, Maoist China, present-day North Korea -- and ask yourself if those are nations in which the poor would like living.
Indeed, the difference between capitalism and socialism was probably starkest and most-clearly explained by the difference between East and West Germany. On one side of the wall, there was prosperity and wealth and individuality and uniqueness and freedom; on the other, poverty, run-down, same-looking government-owned housing, and totalitarianism. Ever wonder why so many people in East Germany were happy to tear down the wall?
Figure it out doofus. Feel free to join the rest of us someday in realizing that socialism and communism have been proven, repeatedly and everywhere they've been tried, to be failed economic systems. Look around: even the "socialist" nations of Sweden, etc. have significant market (i.e. capitalist) elements to them; those nations simply round off the harder edges of capitalism with large welfare systems.
That said, those nations are facing fiscal distress because even *they* have too much socialist influence... But at least they have been more-prosperous, more stable and more free than more-strongly socialist nations like those I mentioned earlier.
If you need further evidence, talk to Jeffrey Sachs, the economist leading the war on extreme poverty worldwide. He wrote a piece in Time magazine recently (in the last month or so) pointing out that one of the reasons people in Africa and elsewhere have been so poor is because of socialist economies; he called such economies "mistakes."
Today, India and China are growing at torrid rates because of their market liberalizations and large populations of relatively well-educated people willing to work for pay rates that in the U.S. would be peanuts, but in those nations enables them to live as comfortably as the very well-to-do here in the U.S..
Their populations are becoming increasingly-wealthy as a result of globalization, and the same can occur in other nations -- if only economic illiterates who promote failed economic systems and policies would sit down and read an econ. text sometime.
That isn't to say there aren't some rough edges; China's healthcare system has worsened overall since their liberalizations and their environmental regulations haven't yet caught up with the fast-rising amount of pollution they have there, for example. But on the whole, they are improving and developing rapidly, and eventually they will grow their way out of such problems and join the developed world -- just as the U.S. did, just as Europe did, just as Japan did, just as Canada did, etc...
BTW, one last point. Look at Ronald Reagan's policies in the U.S., and compare them to this graph. Notice something? During Carter's years (1976-1980), the poverty rate rose, despite high taxes on the rich. From 1982-1990, it fell, during the "evil capitalist" reign of Ronald Reagan (who cut the top income tax rate from 70% to 28%) and Bush Sr.. It rose to 15% in 1990-1992, due to the recession, but has been dropping ever since then, with only a slight increase in income taxes instituted by Clinton (and cut again by Bush Jr.).
Today, after some 30 years of "creeping capitalism" (as capitalism's opponents might call it), we are at the same level of poverty as we were in the "golden era of American socialism", the 1960s. Capitalism not good for the poor? Don't bet on it.
I remand you to my other post in this thread in which I show that no, Canadians are not, in fact, American. They are "North Americans", and could be said to be part of the "Americas", but they are not "American".
We define "America", where:
1) "America" = the "United States of America"
2) "America" != "Canada"
3) "America" != "Mexico"
It should be plain from the above that the only nation with the name "America" in its full title is the USA. We may call everything north of the Panama Canal "the Americas", because that was at one time how the entire North American continent was referred, but there nevertheless is still only 1 "America".
Even Google finds "USA" = "America" as a definition.
There was no implication in my post that Canada is on another continent... If only you would recognize the difference between "North America" and "America", this wouldn't be an issue.
Though admittedly, for confusion's sake (because some people do get confused by the naming), perhaps I should've said "U.S."...
The blog is American and TFA also says the bloger is from the U.S., but the people promoting it are some Canadian website, whom the court may decide to charge with contempt (seeing as there isn't much Justice Gomery can do to an American in America doing the blogging; really, he ought to investigate leaks from within his own courtroom - after all, how is the American going to get the info otherwise?).
I find that list fascinating. On virtually every question where something is objectively (or at least reasonably) true or false (e.g. "0.02 Is sex a strictly human endeavour?"), the *true* probability is no more than 0.20 points in either direction, and in many cases, the probability is less than 0.05 away.
It's not a perfect system, clearly, but it's also more-right than wrong in many of the factually-proveable cases (e.g. "running is good exercise", "Tokyo is the capital of Japan", "Star Wars is based upon a true story", etc..
If that is a truly random selection, then I'm impressed... I'd be more-curious to know what its ratio of right/wrong answers is (defining "right" or "wrong" based on some agreed-upon amount of probability -- say, 0.08 -- from either 0.00 or 1.00, which define the fact as true or false), i.e., to determine the total rate at which Mindpixel project is correct...
FYI, if you RTFA, the blogger is not American, he is Canadian, hosting his content on a U.S. server.
:-)
Anyway kids, this is one of the great things about national sovereignty (as opposed to centralization and unification via, say, the United Nations):
Canada != U.S.
Canada's laws and judicial rulings don't apply in America any more than ours apply in Canada. There isn't a thing about our frosty-but-friendly neighbors to the north can do about it, except ask us (politely, no doubt) to remove the blog entry, but we don't have to comply unless we want to. Tough cookies for the Canadian judiciary. They can charge the blogger with contempt-of-court (which they're considering), but that's about it.
Still, IANAL. Whatever the law may be between the U.S. and Canada, the practical case is that the cat is out of the bag. The story is on the 'net, and the only way it's ever disappearing now is if people decide not to save it; there's no way the Canadian government can stop the story from spreading now, much as they may want to believe otherwise.
Just one nice example of why nations ought to remain separate and sovereign...
And don't governments fail to "pretend to be good, they flagrantly disobey laws and get away with it" too? They do, and in part for that reason, socialism failed; the Berlin Wall fell, Soviet Russia collapsed, and every significant genuinely-socialist nation (former Soviet Russia, China, India, Vietnam, Nazi Germany) is no longer fully-socialist, having undergone a process of slow conversion to capitalist economics. The sole exception is North Korea, the last holdover from the Stalinist era -- and I wouldn't call them a "successful" country by any means (not even at extorting the U.S., which seems to be its goal as of late).
So if corporations are big and bad, and if governments are big and bad, what's the solution? Communism (i.e. a system in which all property is equally owned and there is no government and everybody works for "the greater good" of the community)?
But communism (real communism, not the "communism" people claimed Soviet Russia and China and North Korea live(d) by (i.e., they were communist in ideology, but socialist in actuality)) doesn't work because there's no incentive for people to care about the things they own. The problem is known as "tragedy of the commons." Real-world examples of communism -- including Chairman Mao's experiments in rural China during his "Great Leap Forward," and for a short time in pre-Revolution America (America was once a communist land - until they figured out that nobody was doing any work) -- have been a proven to be utter failures.
So, that leaves 1 other economic system: fascism (governments and business working together). But by definition, govn't and business works together; if you think things are bad now (and it could be argued that we have a fascist economy), things could be worse.
Milton Friedman once said it best in his book Free to Choose:
(emphasis mine)
But then that brings us back to a capitalist system, in which we balance the power of the people against the power of business and against the power of a minimal (but powerful in the parts we do create) government; it's a 3-way balance that needs to be maintained, and all too often, the citizenry fails to keep its end of the bargain...
Consider 2 final facts:
1) Wal-Mart routinely tops the Fortune 500 list as America's biggest corporation. It's total revenues last year were around $260 billion. It seems pretty huge... until you consider that the U.S. Federal government took in tax revenues of about $2.4 trillion (or, $2,400 billion), making the government's tax revenues still 9 times larger than that of America's biggest (and some would say most-evil) corporation.
2) How many people did Wal-Mart kill last year? None? Or maybe 1 or 2 due to negligence (e.g. slip-and-fall)?
Now how many people did the U.S. government kill? Well, simply looking at Iraq and ignoring our death penalty laws, the "war" in Afghanistan, and so on, we know the U.S. government has killed thousands of people. So which entity is more-dangerous and more ruthless?
Corporations aren't perfect, governments are *far* from perfect, and the citizenry often makes stupid or uneducated decisions (like re-electing President Bush, hence the problem of mobocracy). Avoiding the concentration of power is critical.
Me, "I love my country; it's my government I'm worried about."
That's what I think every time I see a post about "OSS as a business or used in business."
But I get flamed for saying so...
What difference does it make if it's $1, $10, $1000, or $100,000,000? Yours is an argument of scale.
But it's all free speech on the net. Any regulation of that speech would (normally, if McCain-Feingold wasn't upheld in the Supreme Court) be a violation of the 1st Amendment.
It doesn't matter how flashy or cool your website is or how much money you poured into it: if people ignore it, your site is worthless. Scale doesn't matter, quality content and the links to your site resulting from it do.
With that in mind, higher dollar amounts can certainly go to increased "research" (partisan studies) to post on the site, true, but politics has always been like that, and still is; McCain-Feingold doesn't change that.
You forgot about HTTP via the LWP module, or using an external call to wget. Think the company blocks outbound HTTP? (well, for call-center employees, yes, but for developers?)
If only more geeks considered the economics of what they're doing, as you have...
:(
The logical extreme of the "all apps must be as fast as possible" argument is to code in ASM. I suggest that anybody who pushes this argument write every app in ASM. See how long it takes before this person gets fired for inefficiency...
Why are some coders hesitant to "use the right tool for the job"? ASM might be necessary if you're optimizing a crypto or compression loop, while C or C++ might be more appropriate for the rest of the app, but Perl or PHP are surely more-appropriate languages for web-scripting! Duh.
But no, we have these "code everything in C, C is the be-all end-all of languages" dolts...
You can't ignore this grass lobby!
Again, to restate my question: what research are we funding now which we may or may not see in practical use 20 years from now?
I'll give you a much-hated example: DARPA's Total Information Awareness. Neat concept (but we know its end-use, and we don't like it at all).
I occasionally peruse my university's copies of the various ACM publications it receives. I can't recall seeing anything particularly Earth-shattering in those either (the occasional data-mining technique aside), but then, I'm probably not creative/clever enough...
Touché. :-) I forgot CounterStrike... OK, "CS" needs definition, even here.
/. has subdivisions -- BSD, Development, Science, Politics, Gaming, YRO, etc. -- that the use of "CS" is still dependent on which section the post is posted to. But since this one had no section definition, I can't argue that because /. isn't rigorous enough with their section-labeling for it to work...)
(If I felt like it, I'd try and argue that since
Audience context.
This isn't a general news site, this is "News for Nerds." In the context of a nerdy audience, CS = "Computer Science".
Consider other contexts:
* Sales or business news site: CS = "customer service"
* Pr0n site: CS = "cock sucking"
* Teen chat site (non-sexual): CS = "cool shit" (well, it could anyway)
* Police: CS = "cop shot"
* Chopstick site: CS = "chopsticks"
And so on. Context!
Typically though, it should only apply to basic, commonly-understood TLA's. What constitutes "basic, commonly-understood TLA's" is open to debate, but IMO, if it's a TLA found only in a technical paper, define it, and when in doubt, define it. But if it's one that your audience uses on a regular basis, don't define it. It's not a hard-and-fast rule (and maybe the best idea of all is to define TLA's in a dictionary somewhere on the site, for consistency's sake)...
John Titor? Is that you?
So, what fundamental advances are currently being worked on? What are we funding now that we should see 20 years down the road?
That is what the grandparent is asking. Personally, agree w/ him -- we haven't had any *fundamental* advances in quite a while; after all, what fundamental advances were developed 20-25 years ago that we've seen released within the last 5 years?
This has been IT's problem since the dot-com boom gave out -- there's little in the way of fundamentals to build on that haven't already been built-upon. We may be applying technology to coincide with social changes -- e.g. distributed computing and P2P apps taking advantage of the fact that an ever-increasing number of people own computers (particularly as the price of computing has dropped so low due to economies-of-scale that nearly anybody can afford at least 1 box) -- but show me a fundamental *technology*, absent any social trends, that is completely new. (heck, P2P isn't new, and various CS profs (rightly) argued as much in the recent MGM v. Grokster USSC case)
I'm waiting, and so is the entire American IT industry.
Well, the alternative is to have a government that realizes its populace doesn't pay attention to it, so it goes ahead and does whatever it wants (which, for as much as it seems like the U.S. govn't does this, even with something like our Terri Schiavo case, fundamentally our age-old system of checks-and-balances prevented the theocrats that seem to have taken over our govn't from imposing their will on Schiavo - i.e., our system still mostly works, despite the heavy-handed and politically-advantaged attempts to flout it).
:-/
You know, like the famous quote "the price of liberty is eternal vigilance"?
Better that than governments which allow relatively high unemployment rates, etc.
We on this side of the pond laugh at Europeans for having governments which do things like regulate the curvature of cucumbers. (then again, we have some local/municipal laws that are almost as goofy, e.g. one in Florida which says one may not take a shower naked)
Still, in a way, I agree with you; there's too much politics on Slashdot and in most of the rest of the country too. I often wonder how much time we waste on politics that could've been spent doing something else more productive (or fun)...
Would you complain so much if the post were "late, unfunny *and* anti-American"?
Just a thought from the other side of the pond...
Are you sure he's much of a "gold bug" though? Unabashed gold bugs (like Austrian economist Mark Skousen) would suggest just the opposite. (which is just as well, IMO, as I'm no gold bug either... but then, WTF do I know, I'm just an Econ. minor, heh (though I often wonder if I should've made it my major when I started university, rather than CS)...)
IMO, Friedman really has 2 personalities when it comes to political economy (i.e., his normative economics) - his idealist side, and his practical side.
His ideals are pretty clearly more libertarian than classical liberal; he once said in an interview in Reason magazine that he'd "like to be a zero-government libertarian" (like his son, David), but when asked why he wasn't one, he noted that it's not feasible.
But in practice -- when he's suggested alternate ways to fund public education (via a public/private choice using vouchers, even though his ideal is to completely privatize education), when he's suggested that the Fed be run a particular way (even though his ideal is to dismantle it), when he's suggested (as in (IIRC) chapter 9 of Capitalism and Freedom) that we do actually need some sort of social safety net (for which he proposed his negative income tax) -- some of the less-sane, more-extreme libertarians, e.g. Rothbard, criticized him as being a "statist". But really, his practical suggestions (which he sees as leading in the direction of his ideals) are more classical liberal than libertarian in nature. Hence the sometimes-confusing dichotomy...
Unlike in Friedman's ideal, I don't see the Fed as a terrible institution, despite some of its mistakes, such as their failure to elect a replacement chairman in the late 1920s after Benjamin Strong died (as my Monetary Policy prof. once described to us and to which Friedman partly attributes the exacerbation of the Depression). The ability to control inflation by controlling the money supply is awfully valuable, when it works (though given housing prices lately, I wonder what the *actual* total inflation rate is, rather than the more-often reported CPI of (currently) about 3%).
But then, given that I've lived only a few years longer than through the Greenspan era and given that he seems to be described variously as either "lucky" or "skilled" (skill which doesn't necessarily follow in other Fed chairmen), my view is probably colored by their relatively very good performance of the last 20 years. I didn't live through the Fed's failure before and during the Great Depression, nor did I even live through the stagflation of the 70's...
I'll see what I can do, when I get the chance... :)
Given my fairly-limited sphere of influence though (of all my friends I talk to regularly, only 3 are politically and economically-interested: 2 are libertarians and 1 is a borderline socialist (nevermind the fall of the Berlin Wall, etc.)), might I also suggest making your blog's presence known on a few other econ. and/or law-related blogs:
* EconLog -- Arnold Kling (MIT PhD) writes there and regularly gets a fair number of comments
* The Becker-Posner blog -- the Gary Becker and judge Posner blog...
* Bradford DeLong's blog -- not a classical liberal or libertarian. But a lot of people seem to read his so-called "reality-based" blog, so in the name of garnering traffic to yours, it might be
Well, I don't know about *any* tax -- an income tax doesn't explicitly tax the different levels of production as a VAT or sales tax does, for example (though the effects of income taxes are well-known, i.e., if we tax people too much (particularly the wealthy who have the money to start new businesses), it leads to reduced levels of new business investment, which restricts growth - here, the argument of to what degree an income tax limits goods/service complexity depends on the progressivity of the tax, but regardless, the income tax isn't a *direct* tax on a good's complexity or inter-business trade).
It never occurred to me to think of the VAT as a sales tax though, but that's effectively what it is (a tax on sales between different businesses at each step of production). It *is* silly and inconsistent of me I suppose to promote a sales tax on one hand and oppose the VAT on the other.
But the lack of distinction begs the question of why we make a distinction at all between a sales tax and a VAT, to begin with, i.e., if we were to have a national sales tax, this would (in theory) apply both between businesses and between business and end-consumer -- just like a VAT. So what is the difference? Why generate this notion of a VAT in the first place if a national sales tax would (it seems) be effectively the same thing?
Or are we just using the VAT as a a synonym for a sales tax for the sake of creating synonyms?
Heh, thanks.
Classical liberalism does basically underpin my views, rather than the more-extreme stances some libertarians (including the Libertarian Party) take, e.g. those of anarcho-capitalism, those who refuse to recognize market failures on the occasion they do occur (the factory smokestack polluting somebody else's shirt" example being the classic example), those who refuse to recognize the need for at least some amount of taxation for those services which cannot be fairly and stably provided by the market (e.g. the military, the police, the judicial system, at the bare minimum), etc..
In general, I find I pattern my views almost exactly to those of Milton Friedman, rather than Ayn Rand or Murray Rothbard. Like anybody, Friedman isn't perfect, but he seems to put up better arguments than any other classical liberal/"moderate libertarian" I've yet found (David Henderson seems pretty good too, based on what little of his work I've read so far).
Anyway, I've added your blog to my RSS aggregator, if that tells you anything.
Oooh ooh! *raises hand* :)
I think all the "real Republicans" have either shut up the last 4 years, realizing that their GOP has betrayed them, leaving them "politically homeless." They can't be Republicans, b/c the GOP is just as willing to implement fiscal irresponsibility as the Democrats, but they can't be Libertarians because they're "loony", and besides, libertarian economics in many cases runs counter to the desires of big business (despite the ignorant claims otherwise by every left-winger around). And obviously the socialists and Greens (same thing, really) are out...
So the "business Republicans", "western conservatives", "Reagan Republicans", etc. -- the economically/fiscally-conservative, socially-moderate Republicans -- they're all sitting on the bench, watching Bush play a miserable game of Republican politics, with a moderate-to-leftish fiscal policies and extremely-conservative social policies.
Re: a VAT... I argue vigorously against a VAT (and I'm troubled by the fact that Dennis Hastert, a BA in Economics and Speaker of the House, actually thinks it's somehow a good idea). Value-Added Taxes (VAT) are nothing but trouble as far as technological growth is concerned (that same growth which just so happens to swell the growth of the economy as a whole via increased efficiency in all manner of goods/services rendered)... Taxing each stage of production only serves to have 2 effects:
1) Companies bring various stages of production in-house, to avoid the tax, meaning (if conventional the business sense to outsource areas of non-specialty is to be believed as more-efficient than doing things in-house) that as businesses bring the various stages of production under their wing, they not only grow vastly-larger and become more unwieldly in their massiveness, but there exists fewer companies in the marketplace from which consumers can choose. In effect, a VAT encourages monopoly, which is rarely good for the consumer.
2) Companies become less-prone to developing new goods/services, as they become taxed more with each successive level of complexity (tax the iron-ore sold to the steel mill which makes the steel which then gets taxed when it is sold to Ford to make the car which is taxed again when it is finished and sold to the consumer). So a VAT limits innovation (and must be partly to blame for Europe's eroding economic strength).
Probably the worst aspect of a VAT, however, is that it is a tax which is invisible to the end-consumer; you and I wouldn't see the tax, except as it is hidden behind the price of the product. Because it's invisible to the consumer, there is less incentive for them to oppose it, and to oppose its growth. It's the same problem we have in income taxes vs. consumption taxes -- income taxes are filed (though not collected) once a year, at the opposite end of the year from when elections are held, so politicians have a "lag time" in which they wait for the public to realize how much they pay in income taxes before they go on their usual spending sprees.
Contrast this with a sales tax, which slaps the consumer in the face every time he/she buys something; it makes being taxed bluntly-distasteful to the consumer. If we are to strive for lower taxes (as any "real Republican" or libertarian would typically pine for), this is certainly preferable to income taxes, and even moreso than a VAT...