The effects are cumulative. Any more, I do most of my shopping (aside from groceries and the like) online. An extra $15 or $20 on a video card won't break the bank. But, over the course of a year, those taxes would add up to a significant amount, hundreds of dollars that could have been spent on other products. Multiply that by all the millions of people in a similar position, and you have a great deal of lost e-commerce revenue.
Before you get too excited, some information:
First, the rate of the tax. "Fair" tax (what a misnomer) supporters will tell you that the proposed fair tax rate is 23%. That is total BS. You have to look at the fine print. 23% is the tax inclusive rate. That means it's 23% of the price with tax. I take this example from a JPFO article which covers many of the points I make here, and is recommended reading (http://www.jpfo.org/fairtax.htm). Suppose you have a candy bar, and you pay $1.30 for it, including tax. The candy bar costs $1.00, and you pay $0.30 in tax. Tax inclusive means that the $0.30 you pay in tax is 23% of the $1.30 total, rather than 23% of the price of the actual item. Sneaky little semantic game they play there.
Second, this will have the effect of dramatically increasing individual Americans' reliance on the federal government on a day-to-day basis. Suddenly, everyone's on the dole. It's not bad enough that you have a good number of people stretching the budget and counting on their tax return checks once a year, now everyone's watching the mailbox hoping the fed will be good to them in the form of a rebate check EVERY MONTH. The effect of this dependence on the benevolence of the government is not good. A dependent populace is much more maleable, much more complacent. The damage it would do to the ability of citizens to develop as autonomous individuals capable of self-sufficiency would be devestating.
One of the most devestating effects of this tax system would be the massive black market that would erupt in the wake of it's implementation. Suddenly there's a black market for tax-free EVERYTHING. Such a black market would be enormous, possibly eclipsing the sales volumes of the "legitimate" government taxed market. This would create a new breed of criminal, the sales tax dodger. These people would be stigmatized, scapegoated for the nation's economic problems (of which many, many loom ahead, fair tax or no), and sentenced to inordinate prison terms, similar to what is done with non-violent drug offenders now.
The privacy implications are disturbing. If the fair tax was implemented, the only way to combat the resulting black market trafficing would be to track purchases for each and every citizen. The fair taxers talk about the stresses of April 15th, but the only way to validate that everyone has been paying their "fair share" (as the socialists like to say) of the tax, the government would have to track purchases, which means you've gone from reporting to the IRS regarding your income and tax totals from various sources to reporting EACH AND EVERY PURCHASE. For all intensive purposes, you've gone from filing a tax return to being audited every year. The only way to ensure accuracy and honesty on such an audit would be for the government to become even more apallingly intrusive than it is now ("the financial equivalent of a full rectal exam"). The government would undoubtedly use it as a means to justify further intrustions such as additional monitoring of our communications to ensure no one was buying tax-free online or by mail. Also, the manpower required to implement such an auditing system would be enormous. The fair tax FAQ talks of tax preparers and lobbyists being forced to find more productive pursuits, but in reality, most of them would end up absorbed into the new tax administration bureaucracy.
As to putting an end to lobbyists, I don't believe that for a second. Just as there is now, there will be rich and powerful lobby groups trying to convince the government to make the tax just a little more fair. Why should Bibles be taxed the same as porno? Textbooks the same as comic books? Why not tax cigarettes at a higher rate, since smoking is so un-P.C. now anyway? Lobbyists will not be going anywhere, they'll simply change their approach ever so slightly.
In short, the fair tax is a horrible idea. It has many more problems than I've attempted to delve in
The problem is, this is all based on flawed logic. These people seem to assume that if I wasn't able to buy products online tax-free, I would buy them anyway and pay tax on them. This is simply not true. I shop online because I can get better deals. I buy high-priced items like computer hardware online BECAUSE it's tax free. If I had to pay sales tax on these items, I wouldn't be able to afford many of them, and the overall volume of my purchases would decrease significantly. Because of this, the boom in tax revenue the government was expecting to extort from me is significantly reduced.
Yes, this legislation would provide a short-term boost in sales tax revenues, but it would also cause long term damage to the thriving marketplace that is the internet, harming the very source of that revenue.
It's a common misconception that prices are based on production costs. It is not just the movie industry, all sellers attempt to set prices at the highest point the market will bear while maximizing profits (set it too high, and too few units sell, too low and you lose potential profits). Basically, the idea is to set the price based on how much your target customer wants the product and is able to pay, regardless of how much it cost to produce (obviously, if it costs more to produce than what can be gained by selling at a tollerable market price, it is unprofitable, and foolish to produce for any reasons other than artistic). If there weren't so many people willing to pay $8.50 or more for a ticket to a crappy movie, ticket prices generally would drop (since Hollywood movies, generally, fall into the crappy category) as studios and theaters attempted to attract more customers.
If you notice, most theaters specializing in indie flicks charge lower ticket prices than a mainstream theater in the same area (that has always been my observation, at any rate). However, they're not just "nicer" and less "corporate" than the major theaters (not for their pricing, anyway). They're trying to maximize profits, just like their mainstream breathren. It's just that they generally have a smaller market, and the ballance between price and attendence that maximizes their profits is lower.
This principle is very simple, and operates as follows: perhaps the mainstream theater could get more attendence if it dropped prices my $0.50, but the increased attendence wouldn't make up for the per-ticket profit loss. On the other hand, they could raise prices by $0.50, thereby increasing per-ticket profits, but the increase wouldn't compensate for the loss of attendence. The idea is to find a balance. Same principles apply for the indie theaters.
If American interrest in indie flicks suddenly surged, you'd see a corresponding price increase at your local indie theater.
For most indie movies, it's a matter of the theater deciding to carry a low-budget movie that will attrack fewer patrons at a lower price, vs. a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster that will draw in the crowds at a high price. Call it greed if you will, but these companies exist purely to make a profit (that being separate from the artistic goals of some of their employees). The only time a mainstream theater will show an indie flick is if they believe they can make at least as much in ticket profits as with any of the other movies they could potentially show in its place.
`You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.'
- Lyndon Johnson
First of all, let's get the Lexmark thing out of the way: they're not demanding that the cartridges be thrown away after one use. That would be retarded. They are demanding that the purchaser of the cartridge comply with the terms of the contract to which they agreed by opening the package, and return the empty cartridge after a single use, so that Lexmark can recycle the damn thing, not throw it in a landfill. Nothing is being wasted, and no one's hand is being forced. Consumers are free to choose not to buy Lexmark's cartridges if they don't agree to the terms of sale.
Second, as to capitalism. Captialism is an unrealized ideal. No nation (and certainly not this one) has ever allowed a free market to exist, let alone flourish. "Capitalism" is not responsible for the current state of the world, but rather its polar opposite, statism (and it's economic counterpart, socialism). Companies would not have the power to assert arbitrary and oppressive authority over the masses were it not for the fact that the political state exists and has, over the years, granted itself sweeping power to regulate the economy. Such an arrangement does not result in the protection of consumers, it results in an unholy marriage of private enterprise and the political state (a.k.a. socialism). The problem lies in the fact that the long arm of the political state is used to back those companies which bought a senator. In the words of PJ O'Rourke, "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first thing to be bought and sold are legislators." And that, my friend, is not capitalism. Capitalism, by definition, relies on an unregulated market (hence the term "free market"), and cannot coexist with a coercive political state (you obviously can't have a regulated unregulated market), and, thus, America is not a capitalist nation.
You say the marketplace is incapable of providing for an organized social entity because the component individuals that form the market are ignorant of the realities of the world. I contend that the truth is precisely the opposite. The political class views the entire economy as a maleable entity to be shaped at whim, with no concept or understanding of what is required to produce. It is the political class that is detached from reality. Markets are composed of a vast network of self-interrested individuals seeking to satisfy their needs. This is precisely why they are so efficient. Politicians are generally not economists, and have no superhuman insight as to what resources are needed in what quantity by what entity where. A politician in Washington D.C. has no idea if the local pharmacy in Spokane has seen a surge in demand for flu medication and needs to order more than usual. They cannot determine if a working family needs to set more money aside for college or can afford to take the family on vacation. They don't know if a steel mill would be better off to sell all their inventory to one or two customers, or spread it around. The individuals responsible for making these decisions devote their entire lives and/or carreers to the task of making those decisions correctly, and even they are not always accurate. How, then, can the political class claim to correctly make those decisions for every man, woman, child, and abortion in this country, while simultaneously dealing with other massively complex problems. It's not as if we are ruled by Plato's philosopher-kings. Not that private individuals are infallible, but they do have a much better understanding of the economic realities that directly impact their lives and businesses. Besides, what would make you think that a government, also composed of individuals, is any less fallable (look at the functionally-retarded president, for example)? You seek to have a political state protect you from those who seek to gain power over you and others, to exploit you, to exploit the environment, and generally take immoral license with anything they can. What makes you think that these aren't the very peop
Perhaps someone could explain to me how this advances the FCC's supposed goal of allocating scarce resources in the public interest? Once again, they are abusing their power and overstepping their bounds in order to expand those bounds and grab more power. This is the fundamental fault in all bureaucracies.
This should be a simple issue. The record companies are not claiming to own the music itself. No one is saying that Beethoven's 9th is owned by a particular company, as it is clearly a public domain work. However, a specific recording can be copyrighted. Anyone can perform the work without requesting permission, but permission should be required to play back a specific copyrighted performance of a public domain work.
Yes, because who really needs to understand basic math? I mean, the machines will always be there to do it for you, right? And the machines will always do everything perfectly, because there has never been any incidence of a machine operating incorrectly, so there's no need for basic math skills to check your work, or determine if the calculator's answer is even remotely reasonable.
You can't simply create technology, forget how it works, and assume it will work forever. That's the basis for plenty of distopian sci-fi, and for a good reason.
What you've just hit on is the big problem with the government's policy of mandatory minimum sentencing. It takes away the ability of the judge to consider extenuating circumstances when issuing a sentence.
Actually, what they're talking about for existing convicts is an early release. People who have a few years left to go, but who can get out early if the agree, on a voluntary basis, to be tracked in order to obtain an early release. Now if they try to apply the new law so that existing convicts who have already been sentenced are forced to undergo lifetime tracking, then they'd be violating the constitution's ex post facto clause, and it would be unconstitutional. So long as existing convicts agree to this voluntarily, there is no problem.
The scenario you paint is indeed one that needs to be viewed seriously. Remember, the correct way to analyze a proposed government program (unless you're an anarchist like me, in which case the correct answer is a resounding "Nay!") is by the damage it could do if abused, rather than the benefit it will incur if properly administered. This is another example of knee-jerk reactionary legislation, pumped out to score points with the constituency, rather than a serious attempt to solve a problem. And as the first poster pointed out, why stop with sex offenders? Why not non-violent, victimless drug "criminals"? The state loves to scapegoat them, so it seems the perfect opportunity. Hopefully, this legislation is shot down. It's not that I condone sex offenders, but this is extreme beyond all reason, and too readily adapted to whatever is the next crime of the moment.
Essentially, I view truly private, voluntary exchanges as freedom. Yes, the manufacturer may place restrictions on their product, but you have the choice to accept or decline the product on that basis, and seek an alternative. When such restrictions are legally enshrined, there is no alternative, all manufacturers are required to follow the rules, and the consumer is deprived of choice.
There's absolutely nothing inherently wrong about governmental inference, mostly since simple unregulated (laissez-faire) market economy is something almost no one likes or wants (it'd be actually pretty close to anarchy). Especially ones who understand the implications of such a system.
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Anarchy is incompatible with all kinds of capitalism. Anarchy means no rulers, capitalism is plutoracy, rule of the wealthy.
The first statement is correct, the second is misguided Marxism. The only way in which true laissez-faire capitalism can flourish is under a system of political anarchy. I make no secret of the fact that that is what I desire. All political states devolve to tyranny and oppression. Just look how effective our constitutional checks and ballances have proven in the long run. A nearly supremely powerful executive, a weakened and cowed judiciary, and an out-of-control, theiving Congress that enacts inflationary monetary policy. A state of political anarchy does not mean chaos, it means voluntary associations in all things, free of legitimized coercion. I am not naieve enough to believe that the world would suddenly be free of violence and hate and that everyone would be lovey-dovey happy all the time and go dancing through unspoiled dewey meadows on a fresh spring morning. But violence would not then be enshrined, legitimized, and legalized. People would be free to defend themselves. I'll stop before I end up posting a book on the subject.
As to the comment that capitalism entails rule of the wealthy, it sounds like this poster has been reading too much Marx. Capitalism isn't the rule of the wealthy. It becomes the rule of the wealthy only when a State is introduced to favor corporations and grant special favors to board members and lobbyists. Until then, consumers have as much power as producers. They can refuse to buy products. They can buy from competitors, encouraging innovation and competition. They can make their own products. They don't have to support a company if the company doesn't provide them with at least a percieved benefit (consumers are also free to make the wrong choices, so that percieved benefit may not be beneficial in other eyes, but economic value is in many ways subjective). That is the essence of capitalism - mutually voluntary exchange with mutual percieved benefits.
You do realize you are agreeing with me, yes? Patents are government intervention. In a true free-market system, companies protect their IP via a system of contracts, license agreements, and NDAs. Also, the DMCA is also government intervention, involving the forceful apparatus of the State in purely civil matters. In a free market, companies are free to place the same restrictions on their products as the DMCA does, but then it is up to consumers to determine if these restrictions are acceptable or not. If the market doesn't tolerate it, the company either changes its ways or fails, harming itself and those who chose (voluntarily, mind you) to work for them. Under the DMCA, neither consumers nor producers are given a choice. If the market finds the restrictions unacceptable, too bad so sad, the feddies call the shots. That is statism and fascism (and yes, it really is fascism. Fascism, economically, is a system whereby private ownership of the means of production is permitted in theory, but the government regulates and restricts it to the point that they effectively run it themselves). The point I was making was not that our current system is truly free-market and we must now guard against government intervention, but that the state of affairs that exists now does not promote freedom, or consumer choice, or private property rights. It is the antithesis of those things. When government dictates the terms of sale between private parties, that is fascism. When private parties negotiate the terms of sale themselves, and are free to accept or decline, that is freedom. Apparently you misinterpreted my statement, or I am misinterpreting your response, because it appears to me that you are arguing my point against my point. I am a political anarchist and strict free-market capitalist, so I oppose government in all its forms and functions.
No you didn't. You could code your own. And if you couldn't, there is no legitimate complaint about restrictions that companies choose to place on their rightfully owned software products. Because they didn't have to make their products available to the public for purchase. Without them, you would have no software. This is how a market system works. Companies try to maximize profits, consumers try to minimize costs and maximize value. Companies do this through a number of means. They cut production costs, they raise the price as high as the market will tolerate while maximizing total sales volume. Consumers accomplish their goal by voting with their checkbook. If a product doesn't meet their needs, or they believe it is priced too high, they can either buy a competing product or do without. The essentail characteristic though, is that the exchange was voluntary on both sides, and both parties knew the terms of sale beforehand. In a truly free market system (where there is no government to protect patents and companies protect their IP via civil means such as contracts, licensing, and NDAs), if there is no competing product, the company must truly have created something revolutionary, and is deserving of as high a profit as it can get, at whatever terms the market will tolerate. This isn't gouging, it's just compensation for exceptional creative and/or productive ability. They own it, they set the terms of sale. If the terms are unaccpetable, don't buy it. If sufficient numbers find it unacceptable, the company will be forced to change its practices or go out of business. That doesn't happen because the market for end-consumer software that can be modified, copied, and redistributed at will by volunteers is very, very small. What percentage of the general computer buying population do you really think is comprised of/.ers? Most people don't want or need or even remotely care about open source software. Because the bulk of their customers don't care, the software companies are not going to create OSS, as the can secure greater profits with their proprietary solutions (provided they play their cards right). It's simple economics: given that any specific entity has limited resources with which to fill customer demands, they secure the greatest profits by catering to the most profitable (generally the largest) market segments. I'm not saying that OSS has no place in the software world. Quite the contrary, it compliments the proprietary solutions I use quite nicely. But by its very nature, OSS software is only profitable when viewed as a service industry. Selling the software itself is useless when it has to be available for download anyway. And believe it or not, 99.99999% of companies exist to make a profit for the ones who own them (and the others usually exist to lobby the government on behalf of conglomerates who want to make money. Yet another reason to disband the apparatus of the State), or they would have no interrest in creating them. Do you really think RedHat was set up purely to promote Linux and spread the gospel of OSS? Of course not. While that may have been a side-benefit, they wanted to make money, and saw a way to do it with OSS. Will they ever make as much as a proprietary solution would allow them? I very sincerely doubt it.
The difference here is, in the one scenario, your choice of software impacts you (and possibly your company, or others with whom you voluntarily associate, depending), while others are free to excercise the same rights to choose the software they prefer. In the voting scenario, your choice to relinquish your rights to a political entity has a direct impact not only on you yourself, but on others in the same nation who would have chosen to preserve their freedoms. The key difference to understand here is the difference between natural rights and entitlements. You have a natural right to dispose of your property in any manner you choose, provided it does not impinge on the rights of others to do the same. So you are free to buy software with a restrictive license, as it does not prevent others from using the software of their choosing. Voting (and I'm sure I'll be flamed for this) is NOT a natural right. It is an entitlement granted by the state. Entitlements exist to favor some at the expense of the rights of others. It is not a natural right because the "right" to vote implies the right to choose one's government, the right to determine who will rule you. You cannot excercise that supposed "right" without violating the rights of others to do the same (unless you have a unanimous vote, which will never happen in a community of more than a couple people). Democracy is nothing but a power-struggle, mob rule. I want no one to rule me, I want no state, but the supposed "right" of others to choose their government prevents me from excercising my "right" to choose mine, forcing me to be ruled by a government to which I do not consent. This is an irreconcilable conflict, and one of the many reasons that government is illegitimate on any terms, democracy or otherwise. This is but one example. All entitlements exist in conflict with and at the expense of natural rights. The only truly legitimate state of affairs is individual sovereignty, where each person is their own master and ruler. All else is illegitimate use of force at the hands of the mob-majority.
And restrictive licensing agreements do not detract from your rights. Prior to agreeing to the license, you had no rights to the software, so while another license may grant you privledges above and beyond what the proprietary solutuion may offer, that does not mean that the proprietary solution detracts from your rights.
That example may work for some, but me, I'm a strict political anarchist (with a good dose of capitalist economics. And I mean. I do not view the state as performing any legitimate function that could not be performed better/with less coersion by the free market. I therefore view all forms of taxation as theft, and necessarily illegitimate. I'm not going into the economic theory of it, as that's a very, very long posting, and I'm tired of typing it into every political discussion. But I will say that the argument of good vs. bad use of tax dollars is entirely lost on me, as I see any use of tax dollars as bad. And the government has no more right to force a company to continue support for a product or turn over its code than a private consumer does (unless you support the idea that people in groups have rights that the individual members do not, in which case me and a mob of associates would like to know where you live). Just because the government has granted itself such priveledges, it doesn't make them rights, they're entitlements. Entitlements come for some at the expense of the rights of others.
As to consumers not knowing or caring about issue we're discussing, that's because the majority of/.ers are what is called a "niche market". We don't comprise a large enough market to convince huge companies to pander specifically to the geek demand. If we were talking professional IT products, it would be a different story, but when you're talking about mainstream consumer electronics or software, they cater to the vast majority of consumers that don't care, and if they want to implement a feature that won't offend that vast majority, it is entirely their perrogative.
You could replace the word "current" in each of those lines with the name of any president in, say, the last 150 years, and you'd still be dead-on. This isn't a new thing, it's politics as usual.
All states naturally devolve to tyranny. It's just a question of time.
Thank you! There just aren't enough people that understand that some projects are just better left to closed-source and for-profit companies to develop. People bitch and moan about people paying for software, but I'd like to see an open source project that could hold a candle to AutoCAD or 3D Studio Max or Maya, much less one that could keep the pace feature-wise. Some projects are just too developmentally intensive to undertake in a serious way as open source. The level of expertise required to develop some software is too high, the education required to do it well is too expensive, and could never be justified releasing as an open source project, unless you accept the premises of socialism (this appears to be the basis of Bill's communist comments).
How wrong you are. You are free to choose whether or not to use a product based on all factors, such as the license, format restrictions, etc. You are always free to not buy it, and either do without, or purchase a competing product that satisfies your requirements.
Likewise, companies are free to make business and marketing decisions that may harm their businesses.
The important thing to remember here is that freedom ends where government intervention begins. So long as the market is regulated by consumer decisions and PRIVATE efforts at change, freedom reigns and the sovereign consumer will get what they demand. If consumers are truly bothered by the restrictions of (to use your example) the Nikon white balance encryption, they won't buy Nikon, and Nikon's business will suffer. If not, Nikon may continue this practice. I do support the removal of this pointless encryption, but I show that support by buying other brands.
We're ignoring the big issue here. Namely, copyright infringment should be a civil matter with all the financial penalties that implies. By enacting these silly laws, we are criminalizing what should be a civil matter, i.e. the financial damages resulting from the infringement.
I do agree with a previous poster that we should do away with copyright laws, but for different reasons entirely. The individuals or groups that currently hold copyrights should be responsible for enforcing their intellectual property privately (for example, licensing agreements, terms of use, etc., all of which it could enforce via civil court or private arbitration), rather than fostering a rampant and parasitical bureaucracy. If you put a license agreement on the media you distribute, and the purchaser then violates that agreement, they are liable for resulting damages. It's just another example of another unnecessary function being performed by the state at the expense of the liberty of the victims (taxpayers).
Most HDTV cards will tune OTA HDTV, but there is supposed to be some kind of protection on most cable HDTV transmission, with the exception of the "must-carry" stations (i.e. local broadcast stations), and those you can pick up with an antenna anyway. To my understanding, most HD channels on cable cannot be tuned by these things.
On a side note, for those of you looking for an HDTV card, be it for your computer or a MythTV box, DON'T BUY ATI!!! The ATI HDTV Wonder is the worst crap I've ever used. At present, the DTV app doesn't work at all, and there's a 1-second delay on analog inputs, rendering it useless for gaming (try playing Sonic when everything is delayed by a second). Tech support is useless, they've been having me do driver reinstalls for months now. They swore up and down that it is fully compatible with a 6600GT card, but obviously not...
Sure, but how many ISPs guarantee a certain minimum bandwidth? Not many, I'd say. They'll assure you that you can connect, but all the ISPs I've dealt with will state your maximum bandwidth in the terms of service, but specifically disclaim any guarantee of a minimum bandwidth. Comcast does this, Qwest does it, according to my friend SBC does it, too. I assume all the major ISPs and most of the small guys do this. Is this unfair? No, because I agreed to it when I agreed to the TOS. I could have declined. And the ISP knows that if its customers are consistently having bandwidth issues, they'll go elsewhere. Enough people do this, and they'll be hurting financially, so they do their damndest to avoid it.
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The effects are cumulative. Any more, I do most of my shopping (aside from groceries and the like) online. An extra $15 or $20 on a video card won't break the bank. But, over the course of a year, those taxes would add up to a significant amount, hundreds of dollars that could have been spent on other products. Multiply that by all the millions of people in a similar position, and you have a great deal of lost e-commerce revenue.
Before you get too excited, some information: First, the rate of the tax. "Fair" tax (what a misnomer) supporters will tell you that the proposed fair tax rate is 23%. That is total BS. You have to look at the fine print. 23% is the tax inclusive rate. That means it's 23% of the price with tax. I take this example from a JPFO article which covers many of the points I make here, and is recommended reading (http://www.jpfo.org/fairtax.htm). Suppose you have a candy bar, and you pay $1.30 for it, including tax. The candy bar costs $1.00, and you pay $0.30 in tax. Tax inclusive means that the $0.30 you pay in tax is 23% of the $1.30 total, rather than 23% of the price of the actual item. Sneaky little semantic game they play there.
Second, this will have the effect of dramatically increasing individual Americans' reliance on the federal government on a day-to-day basis. Suddenly, everyone's on the dole. It's not bad enough that you have a good number of people stretching the budget and counting on their tax return checks once a year, now everyone's watching the mailbox hoping the fed will be good to them in the form of a rebate check EVERY MONTH. The effect of this dependence on the benevolence of the government is not good. A dependent populace is much more maleable, much more complacent. The damage it would do to the ability of citizens to develop as autonomous individuals capable of self-sufficiency would be devestating.
One of the most devestating effects of this tax system would be the massive black market that would erupt in the wake of it's implementation. Suddenly there's a black market for tax-free EVERYTHING. Such a black market would be enormous, possibly eclipsing the sales volumes of the "legitimate" government taxed market. This would create a new breed of criminal, the sales tax dodger. These people would be stigmatized, scapegoated for the nation's economic problems (of which many, many loom ahead, fair tax or no), and sentenced to inordinate prison terms, similar to what is done with non-violent drug offenders now.
The privacy implications are disturbing. If the fair tax was implemented, the only way to combat the resulting black market trafficing would be to track purchases for each and every citizen. The fair taxers talk about the stresses of April 15th, but the only way to validate that everyone has been paying their "fair share" (as the socialists like to say) of the tax, the government would have to track purchases, which means you've gone from reporting to the IRS regarding your income and tax totals from various sources to reporting EACH AND EVERY PURCHASE. For all intensive purposes, you've gone from filing a tax return to being audited every year. The only way to ensure accuracy and honesty on such an audit would be for the government to become even more apallingly intrusive than it is now ("the financial equivalent of a full rectal exam"). The government would undoubtedly use it as a means to justify further intrustions such as additional monitoring of our communications to ensure no one was buying tax-free online or by mail. Also, the manpower required to implement such an auditing system would be enormous. The fair tax FAQ talks of tax preparers and lobbyists being forced to find more productive pursuits, but in reality, most of them would end up absorbed into the new tax administration bureaucracy.
As to putting an end to lobbyists, I don't believe that for a second. Just as there is now, there will be rich and powerful lobby groups trying to convince the government to make the tax just a little more fair. Why should Bibles be taxed the same as porno? Textbooks the same as comic books? Why not tax cigarettes at a higher rate, since smoking is so un-P.C. now anyway? Lobbyists will not be going anywhere, they'll simply change their approach ever so slightly.
In short, the fair tax is a horrible idea. It has many more problems than I've attempted to delve in
The problem is, this is all based on flawed logic. These people seem to assume that if I wasn't able to buy products online tax-free, I would buy them anyway and pay tax on them. This is simply not true. I shop online because I can get better deals. I buy high-priced items like computer hardware online BECAUSE it's tax free. If I had to pay sales tax on these items, I wouldn't be able to afford many of them, and the overall volume of my purchases would decrease significantly. Because of this, the boom in tax revenue the government was expecting to extort from me is significantly reduced.
Yes, this legislation would provide a short-term boost in sales tax revenues, but it would also cause long term damage to the thriving marketplace that is the internet, harming the very source of that revenue.
It's a common misconception that prices are based on production costs. It is not just the movie industry, all sellers attempt to set prices at the highest point the market will bear while maximizing profits (set it too high, and too few units sell, too low and you lose potential profits). Basically, the idea is to set the price based on how much your target customer wants the product and is able to pay, regardless of how much it cost to produce (obviously, if it costs more to produce than what can be gained by selling at a tollerable market price, it is unprofitable, and foolish to produce for any reasons other than artistic). If there weren't so many people willing to pay $8.50 or more for a ticket to a crappy movie, ticket prices generally would drop (since Hollywood movies, generally, fall into the crappy category) as studios and theaters attempted to attract more customers.
If you notice, most theaters specializing in indie flicks charge lower ticket prices than a mainstream theater in the same area (that has always been my observation, at any rate). However, they're not just "nicer" and less "corporate" than the major theaters (not for their pricing, anyway). They're trying to maximize profits, just like their mainstream breathren. It's just that they generally have a smaller market, and the ballance between price and attendence that maximizes their profits is lower.
This principle is very simple, and operates as follows: perhaps the mainstream theater could get more attendence if it dropped prices my $0.50, but the increased attendence wouldn't make up for the per-ticket profit loss. On the other hand, they could raise prices by $0.50, thereby increasing per-ticket profits, but the increase wouldn't compensate for the loss of attendence. The idea is to find a balance. Same principles apply for the indie theaters.
If American interrest in indie flicks suddenly surged, you'd see a corresponding price increase at your local indie theater.
For most indie movies, it's a matter of the theater deciding to carry a low-budget movie that will attrack fewer patrons at a lower price, vs. a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster that will draw in the crowds at a high price. Call it greed if you will, but these companies exist purely to make a profit (that being separate from the artistic goals of some of their employees). The only time a mainstream theater will show an indie flick is if they believe they can make at least as much in ticket profits as with any of the other movies they could potentially show in its place.
`You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.'
- Lyndon Johnson
First of all, let's get the Lexmark thing out of the way: they're not demanding that the cartridges be thrown away after one use. That would be retarded. They are demanding that the purchaser of the cartridge comply with the terms of the contract to which they agreed by opening the package, and return the empty cartridge after a single use, so that Lexmark can recycle the damn thing, not throw it in a landfill. Nothing is being wasted, and no one's hand is being forced. Consumers are free to choose not to buy Lexmark's cartridges if they don't agree to the terms of sale.
Second, as to capitalism. Captialism is an unrealized ideal. No nation (and certainly not this one) has ever allowed a free market to exist, let alone flourish. "Capitalism" is not responsible for the current state of the world, but rather its polar opposite, statism (and it's economic counterpart, socialism). Companies would not have the power to assert arbitrary and oppressive authority over the masses were it not for the fact that the political state exists and has, over the years, granted itself sweeping power to regulate the economy. Such an arrangement does not result in the protection of consumers, it results in an unholy marriage of private enterprise and the political state (a.k.a. socialism). The problem lies in the fact that the long arm of the political state is used to back those companies which bought a senator. In the words of PJ O'Rourke, "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first thing to be bought and sold are legislators." And that, my friend, is not capitalism. Capitalism, by definition, relies on an unregulated market (hence the term "free market"), and cannot coexist with a coercive political state (you obviously can't have a regulated unregulated market), and, thus, America is not a capitalist nation.
You say the marketplace is incapable of providing for an organized social entity because the component individuals that form the market are ignorant of the realities of the world. I contend that the truth is precisely the opposite. The political class views the entire economy as a maleable entity to be shaped at whim, with no concept or understanding of what is required to produce. It is the political class that is detached from reality. Markets are composed of a vast network of self-interrested individuals seeking to satisfy their needs. This is precisely why they are so efficient. Politicians are generally not economists, and have no superhuman insight as to what resources are needed in what quantity by what entity where. A politician in Washington D.C. has no idea if the local pharmacy in Spokane has seen a surge in demand for flu medication and needs to order more than usual. They cannot determine if a working family needs to set more money aside for college or can afford to take the family on vacation. They don't know if a steel mill would be better off to sell all their inventory to one or two customers, or spread it around. The individuals responsible for making these decisions devote their entire lives and/or carreers to the task of making those decisions correctly, and even they are not always accurate. How, then, can the political class claim to correctly make those decisions for every man, woman, child, and abortion in this country, while simultaneously dealing with other massively complex problems. It's not as if we are ruled by Plato's philosopher-kings. Not that private individuals are infallible, but they do have a much better understanding of the economic realities that directly impact their lives and businesses. Besides, what would make you think that a government, also composed of individuals, is any less fallable (look at the functionally-retarded president, for example)? You seek to have a political state protect you from those who seek to gain power over you and others, to exploit you, to exploit the environment, and generally take immoral license with anything they can. What makes you think that these aren't the very peop
Perhaps someone could explain to me how this advances the FCC's supposed goal of allocating scarce resources in the public interest? Once again, they are abusing their power and overstepping their bounds in order to expand those bounds and grab more power. This is the fundamental fault in all bureaucracies.
Oh please, and who the hell will ever need more than 640K?
This should be a simple issue. The record companies are not claiming to own the music itself. No one is saying that Beethoven's 9th is owned by a particular company, as it is clearly a public domain work. However, a specific recording can be copyrighted. Anyone can perform the work without requesting permission, but permission should be required to play back a specific copyrighted performance of a public domain work.
Yes, because who really needs to understand basic math? I mean, the machines will always be there to do it for you, right? And the machines will always do everything perfectly, because there has never been any incidence of a machine operating incorrectly, so there's no need for basic math skills to check your work, or determine if the calculator's answer is even remotely reasonable.
You can't simply create technology, forget how it works, and assume it will work forever. That's the basis for plenty of distopian sci-fi, and for a good reason.
What you've just hit on is the big problem with the government's policy of mandatory minimum sentencing. It takes away the ability of the judge to consider extenuating circumstances when issuing a sentence.
Actually, what they're talking about for existing convicts is an early release. People who have a few years left to go, but who can get out early if the agree, on a voluntary basis, to be tracked in order to obtain an early release. Now if they try to apply the new law so that existing convicts who have already been sentenced are forced to undergo lifetime tracking, then they'd be violating the constitution's ex post facto clause, and it would be unconstitutional. So long as existing convicts agree to this voluntarily, there is no problem.
The scenario you paint is indeed one that needs to be viewed seriously. Remember, the correct way to analyze a proposed government program (unless you're an anarchist like me, in which case the correct answer is a resounding "Nay!") is by the damage it could do if abused, rather than the benefit it will incur if properly administered. This is another example of knee-jerk reactionary legislation, pumped out to score points with the constituency, rather than a serious attempt to solve a problem. And as the first poster pointed out, why stop with sex offenders? Why not non-violent, victimless drug "criminals"? The state loves to scapegoat them, so it seems the perfect opportunity. Hopefully, this legislation is shot down. It's not that I condone sex offenders, but this is extreme beyond all reason, and too readily adapted to whatever is the next crime of the moment.
Essentially, I view truly private, voluntary exchanges as freedom. Yes, the manufacturer may place restrictions on their product, but you have the choice to accept or decline the product on that basis, and seek an alternative. When such restrictions are legally enshrined, there is no alternative, all manufacturers are required to follow the rules, and the consumer is deprived of choice.
There's absolutely nothing inherently wrong about governmental inference, mostly since simple unregulated (laissez-faire) market economy is something almost no one likes or wants (it'd be actually pretty close to anarchy). Especially ones who understand the implications of such a system.
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Anarchy is incompatible with all kinds of capitalism. Anarchy means no rulers, capitalism is plutoracy, rule of the wealthy.
The first statement is correct, the second is misguided Marxism. The only way in which true laissez-faire capitalism can flourish is under a system of political anarchy. I make no secret of the fact that that is what I desire. All political states devolve to tyranny and oppression. Just look how effective our constitutional checks and ballances have proven in the long run. A nearly supremely powerful executive, a weakened and cowed judiciary, and an out-of-control, theiving Congress that enacts inflationary monetary policy. A state of political anarchy does not mean chaos, it means voluntary associations in all things, free of legitimized coercion. I am not naieve enough to believe that the world would suddenly be free of violence and hate and that everyone would be lovey-dovey happy all the time and go dancing through unspoiled dewey meadows on a fresh spring morning. But violence would not then be enshrined, legitimized, and legalized. People would be free to defend themselves. I'll stop before I end up posting a book on the subject.
As to the comment that capitalism entails rule of the wealthy, it sounds like this poster has been reading too much Marx. Capitalism isn't the rule of the wealthy. It becomes the rule of the wealthy only when a State is introduced to favor corporations and grant special favors to board members and lobbyists. Until then, consumers have as much power as producers. They can refuse to buy products. They can buy from competitors, encouraging innovation and competition. They can make their own products. They don't have to support a company if the company doesn't provide them with at least a percieved benefit (consumers are also free to make the wrong choices, so that percieved benefit may not be beneficial in other eyes, but economic value is in many ways subjective). That is the essence of capitalism - mutually voluntary exchange with mutual percieved benefits.
You do realize you are agreeing with me, yes? Patents are government intervention. In a true free-market system, companies protect their IP via a system of contracts, license agreements, and NDAs. Also, the DMCA is also government intervention, involving the forceful apparatus of the State in purely civil matters. In a free market, companies are free to place the same restrictions on their products as the DMCA does, but then it is up to consumers to determine if these restrictions are acceptable or not. If the market doesn't tolerate it, the company either changes its ways or fails, harming itself and those who chose (voluntarily, mind you) to work for them. Under the DMCA, neither consumers nor producers are given a choice. If the market finds the restrictions unacceptable, too bad so sad, the feddies call the shots. That is statism and fascism (and yes, it really is fascism. Fascism, economically, is a system whereby private ownership of the means of production is permitted in theory, but the government regulates and restricts it to the point that they effectively run it themselves). The point I was making was not that our current system is truly free-market and we must now guard against government intervention, but that the state of affairs that exists now does not promote freedom, or consumer choice, or private property rights. It is the antithesis of those things. When government dictates the terms of sale between private parties, that is fascism. When private parties negotiate the terms of sale themselves, and are free to accept or decline, that is freedom. Apparently you misinterpreted my statement, or I am misinterpreting your response, because it appears to me that you are arguing my point against my point. I am a political anarchist and strict free-market capitalist, so I oppose government in all its forms and functions.
No you didn't. You could code your own. And if you couldn't, there is no legitimate complaint about restrictions that companies choose to place on their rightfully owned software products. Because they didn't have to make their products available to the public for purchase. Without them, you would have no software. This is how a market system works. Companies try to maximize profits, consumers try to minimize costs and maximize value. Companies do this through a number of means. They cut production costs, they raise the price as high as the market will tolerate while maximizing total sales volume. Consumers accomplish their goal by voting with their checkbook. If a product doesn't meet their needs, or they believe it is priced too high, they can either buy a competing product or do without. The essentail characteristic though, is that the exchange was voluntary on both sides, and both parties knew the terms of sale beforehand. In a truly free market system (where there is no government to protect patents and companies protect their IP via civil means such as contracts, licensing, and NDAs), if there is no competing product, the company must truly have created something revolutionary, and is deserving of as high a profit as it can get, at whatever terms the market will tolerate. This isn't gouging, it's just compensation for exceptional creative and/or productive ability. They own it, they set the terms of sale. If the terms are unaccpetable, don't buy it. If sufficient numbers find it unacceptable, the company will be forced to change its practices or go out of business. That doesn't happen because the market for end-consumer software that can be modified, copied, and redistributed at will by volunteers is very, very small. What percentage of the general computer buying population do you really think is comprised of /.ers? Most people don't want or need or even remotely care about open source software. Because the bulk of their customers don't care, the software companies are not going to create OSS, as the can secure greater profits with their proprietary solutions (provided they play their cards right). It's simple economics: given that any specific entity has limited resources with which to fill customer demands, they secure the greatest profits by catering to the most profitable (generally the largest) market segments. I'm not saying that OSS has no place in the software world. Quite the contrary, it compliments the proprietary solutions I use quite nicely. But by its very nature, OSS software is only profitable when viewed as a service industry. Selling the software itself is useless when it has to be available for download anyway. And believe it or not, 99.99999% of companies exist to make a profit for the ones who own them (and the others usually exist to lobby the government on behalf of conglomerates who want to make money. Yet another reason to disband the apparatus of the State), or they would have no interrest in creating them. Do you really think RedHat was set up purely to promote Linux and spread the gospel of OSS? Of course not. While that may have been a side-benefit, they wanted to make money, and saw a way to do it with OSS. Will they ever make as much as a proprietary solution would allow them? I very sincerely doubt it.
The difference here is, in the one scenario, your choice of software impacts you (and possibly your company, or others with whom you voluntarily associate, depending), while others are free to excercise the same rights to choose the software they prefer. In the voting scenario, your choice to relinquish your rights to a political entity has a direct impact not only on you yourself, but on others in the same nation who would have chosen to preserve their freedoms. The key difference to understand here is the difference between natural rights and entitlements. You have a natural right to dispose of your property in any manner you choose, provided it does not impinge on the rights of others to do the same. So you are free to buy software with a restrictive license, as it does not prevent others from using the software of their choosing. Voting (and I'm sure I'll be flamed for this) is NOT a natural right. It is an entitlement granted by the state. Entitlements exist to favor some at the expense of the rights of others. It is not a natural right because the "right" to vote implies the right to choose one's government, the right to determine who will rule you. You cannot excercise that supposed "right" without violating the rights of others to do the same (unless you have a unanimous vote, which will never happen in a community of more than a couple people). Democracy is nothing but a power-struggle, mob rule. I want no one to rule me, I want no state, but the supposed "right" of others to choose their government prevents me from excercising my "right" to choose mine, forcing me to be ruled by a government to which I do not consent. This is an irreconcilable conflict, and one of the many reasons that government is illegitimate on any terms, democracy or otherwise. This is but one example. All entitlements exist in conflict with and at the expense of natural rights. The only truly legitimate state of affairs is individual sovereignty, where each person is their own master and ruler. All else is illegitimate use of force at the hands of the mob-majority.
And restrictive licensing agreements do not detract from your rights. Prior to agreeing to the license, you had no rights to the software, so while another license may grant you privledges above and beyond what the proprietary solutuion may offer, that does not mean that the proprietary solution detracts from your rights.
That example may work for some, but me, I'm a strict political anarchist (with a good dose of capitalist economics. And I mean. I do not view the state as performing any legitimate function that could not be performed better/with less coersion by the free market. I therefore view all forms of taxation as theft, and necessarily illegitimate. I'm not going into the economic theory of it, as that's a very, very long posting, and I'm tired of typing it into every political discussion. But I will say that the argument of good vs. bad use of tax dollars is entirely lost on me, as I see any use of tax dollars as bad. And the government has no more right to force a company to continue support for a product or turn over its code than a private consumer does (unless you support the idea that people in groups have rights that the individual members do not, in which case me and a mob of associates would like to know where you live). Just because the government has granted itself such priveledges, it doesn't make them rights, they're entitlements. Entitlements come for some at the expense of the rights of others.
/.ers are what is called a "niche market". We don't comprise a large enough market to convince huge companies to pander specifically to the geek demand. If we were talking professional IT products, it would be a different story, but when you're talking about mainstream consumer electronics or software, they cater to the vast majority of consumers that don't care, and if they want to implement a feature that won't offend that vast majority, it is entirely their perrogative.
As to consumers not knowing or caring about issue we're discussing, that's because the majority of
You could replace the word "current" in each of those lines with the name of any president in, say, the last 150 years, and you'd still be dead-on. This isn't a new thing, it's politics as usual.
All states naturally devolve to tyranny. It's just a question of time.
Thank you! There just aren't enough people that understand that some projects are just better left to closed-source and for-profit companies to develop. People bitch and moan about people paying for software, but I'd like to see an open source project that could hold a candle to AutoCAD or 3D Studio Max or Maya, much less one that could keep the pace feature-wise. Some projects are just too developmentally intensive to undertake in a serious way as open source. The level of expertise required to develop some software is too high, the education required to do it well is too expensive, and could never be justified releasing as an open source project, unless you accept the premises of socialism (this appears to be the basis of Bill's communist comments).
This is not freedom. This is restriction.
How wrong you are. You are free to choose whether or not to use a product based on all factors, such as the license, format restrictions, etc. You are always free to not buy it, and either do without, or purchase a competing product that satisfies your requirements.
Likewise, companies are free to make business and marketing decisions that may harm their businesses.
The important thing to remember here is that freedom ends where government intervention begins. So long as the market is regulated by consumer decisions and PRIVATE efforts at change, freedom reigns and the sovereign consumer will get what they demand. If consumers are truly bothered by the restrictions of (to use your example) the Nikon white balance encryption, they won't buy Nikon, and Nikon's business will suffer. If not, Nikon may continue this practice. I do support the removal of this pointless encryption, but I show that support by buying other brands.
We're ignoring the big issue here. Namely, copyright infringment should be a civil matter with all the financial penalties that implies. By enacting these silly laws, we are criminalizing what should be a civil matter, i.e. the financial damages resulting from the infringement.
I do agree with a previous poster that we should do away with copyright laws, but for different reasons entirely. The individuals or groups that currently hold copyrights should be responsible for enforcing their intellectual property privately (for example, licensing agreements, terms of use, etc., all of which it could enforce via civil court or private arbitration), rather than fostering a rampant and parasitical bureaucracy. If you put a license agreement on the media you distribute, and the purchaser then violates that agreement, they are liable for resulting damages. It's just another example of another unnecessary function being performed by the state at the expense of the liberty of the victims (taxpayers).
Most HDTV cards will tune OTA HDTV, but there is supposed to be some kind of protection on most cable HDTV transmission, with the exception of the "must-carry" stations (i.e. local broadcast stations), and those you can pick up with an antenna anyway. To my understanding, most HD channels on cable cannot be tuned by these things.
On a side note, for those of you looking for an HDTV card, be it for your computer or a MythTV box, DON'T BUY ATI!!! The ATI HDTV Wonder is the worst crap I've ever used. At present, the DTV app doesn't work at all, and there's a 1-second delay on analog inputs, rendering it useless for gaming (try playing Sonic when everything is delayed by a second). Tech support is useless, they've been having me do driver reinstalls for months now. They swore up and down that it is fully compatible with a 6600GT card, but obviously not...
Sure, but how many ISPs guarantee a certain minimum bandwidth? Not many, I'd say. They'll assure you that you can connect, but all the ISPs I've dealt with will state your maximum bandwidth in the terms of service, but specifically disclaim any guarantee of a minimum bandwidth. Comcast does this, Qwest does it, according to my friend SBC does it, too. I assume all the major ISPs and most of the small guys do this. Is this unfair? No, because I agreed to it when I agreed to the TOS. I could have declined. And the ISP knows that if its customers are consistently having bandwidth issues, they'll go elsewhere. Enough people do this, and they'll be hurting financially, so they do their damndest to avoid it.