Well, i think they should regulate banks less, and should have no restrictions whatsoever on at least early abortions. Once the fetus has some sort of mind AND has the potential to be a person (i wouldn't object to aborting a late term fetus with tay-sachs just as an example. Person may be a poor term choice, so forgive me if that bothers anyone, but I can't spend that much time on this) I do have issues with it. I do support all your final examples. None of this changes your point, since libertarians are a pretty small minority in this country. I'm used to being in a small group politically.
Whee... a not so subtle ad-hominem. So, you claim that conservatism embraces the disregard of the rights of others? Isn't it liberals who think it's just dandy to ignore Alice's right to not reward Bob for his stunning lack of work ethic? Just because some people use rights in ways you don't like doesn't give you the right to take those rights away...
Those events are known to be possible, and it is unwise to bet against anything like it ever happening to you. Whether or not to spend a portion of your income on medical insurance of savings for emergencies is something under your control. As for those with shitty parents, school, neighborhood, and job, there are cases of individuals working their way out. Which means it's possible, and that some of those who didn't did in fact contribute to themselves being where they are by failing to make better choices.
It's true that hard work and/or intelligence do not generally lead from poverty to incredible wealth... but they are enough to get anyone from poverty to middle class. Similarly, it's not that uncommon for people with inherited wealth that they have control over (a fair number of rich parents set up trusts to stop this) lose most of it.
The real issue is this: No circumstance affecting Bob, no matter how dire, which was not caused by Alice gives Bob the right to force Alice to support him. Alice may choose to do so, and that's great. It may be the right thing to do. I don't even really object to minimal social safty nets (in principle I do, but it's on the order of someone throwing a single bag of chips on my front lawn: not worth trying to prevent). I do object to claiming it's some sort of inherent right.
That is how liberal is defined outside the US, and used to be defined here. Hence some libertarians prefer to call themselves classical liberals instead of giving in to the cultures mutation of terms, in the same way hackers differentiate themselves from crackers, although with even less success.
"There is a direct correlation between welfare net and crime" [citation needed]. To the best of my knowledge, the relationship is unclear. You could have cited a harvard study, but it does not correct for the single parent family connection that the Cato link specifically mentioned. It's really fun to note that in support of the conclusion that greater income inequality causes bad outcomes, that article relies on citation 10, which defines income inequality as bad.
1. Nationalism is may be more common with conservatives than liberals, but that doesn't mean he wasn't a liberal nationalist. Nationalism is not a defining feature, but does have a weak correlation. Just as gun control is correlated the other way, but isn't a defining feature. 2. Godwin! 3. Feeding the troll: Given his general economic policy of control over business, a strong social safty net, etc. he was at least economically a left winger. Looking at the actual definitions of terms, liberal is not the opposite of conservatism or the same as left wing. Progressivism is. Since we have a fairly liberal country (lots of of liberty), progressives are slightly anti-liberal.
This may not be wise to admit... but I still occasionally poke at Monty Hall now and then.:p I agree with the standard conclusion, but I have never really liked the standard explanations. I'm pretty sure I could make a decent sounding argument using either of the following approaches. Could make for a fun pseudo proof, except that there's more than enough of those for Monty Hall already.:)
The problem looks different if you consider that the goats are distinct from each other, and fully enumerate every pattern of prizes, goats, guesses, and reveals instead of using some sort of rule to reduce the configurations you need to examine. Most monty hall arguments assert that the 2 different options for when the player initially guesses the correct door are each half as likely instead of just as likely as the other fully enumerated patterns. For each correct guess of 1 there are 2 possible reveals, while for each incorrect guess of one there is only one possible reveal, giving 2 patterns where you want to switch and 2 where you don't.
It also looks different if you consider possible configurations given a specific Guess and Reveal. Given a guess of 1, with a reveal of 2, their are 2 possible patterns compatible with that. 1,0,0 and 0,0,1. Each of those is equally likely. Effectively, all the reveal does is eliminate all but 2 possible configurations.
bulk of the population granted. bulk of the area is fairly sparse i think. I live in montana, so my perceptions are a bit skewed. I've only had coverage issues in semi rural areas, and lack of coverage is one weak point in the US.
I appreciate the detailed response. Checking your link, the primary advantages of GSM come directly from government mandates as opposed to technical advantages. My basic point was that the CDMA technology was developed by a private company and likely wouldn't have been developed if the US had also had a legally imposed standard. Since later versions of GSM were dependent on CDMA (I meant to include that link in the initial post), I would argue that it was a good thing the US had a less regulated cell market, even if other features are more of a hassle from the user's perspective. Would you rather have GSM with say 1/3 of the bandwidth it now has if everything was GSM? Pricing is painful, i have to admit, as are locked phones. But it looks like an attempt to set a single standard to alleviate those issues would have made our networks worse off in the long run.
That's a nice straw man you are attacking. Let's take your points one by one.
1. Actually, this is not a necessary component of a free market. It may be a condition for free markets to be beneficial that most agents be mostly rational, but that's a different kettle of fish than saying a free market can't exist.
2. Not part of the assumptions of a free market. Often claimed to by by anti-free-market individuals as a straw man argument, and by others who have been exposed to those arguments. It's not even necessary for this to be true for the free market to be beneficial.
3. Accurate by definition. Your counter examples only work with government interference to protect them or they lack the power to set prices arbitrarily high. See #4
4. No artificial barriers to entry or exit is the accurate statement. If it cots money to lay cable, fine, but the company can't set prices too high without making it profitable to lay that new cable anyways at some point.
5. Hey, patents... a wholly owned creation of government action yet again.
Basically, your argument is "If we define X this way, such that the real world doesn't match it, then X can never possibly exist in the real world". Do I really need to explain the flaws with that?
Shittiest market by which specific criteria? Please note that saying 'The market sucks because it doesn't do what I think it should!" says something about you, but not necesarily about the market itself failing. Regarding cell phone markets, europe settled on GSM by government fiat a while back. The american system produced CDMA, which was a technically better system... and it was developed here because we didn't have an imposed standard. The tech has been adopted by others, but your 3G and 4G networks might not even exist without at least one relatively free market to allow companies to compete on broadcast standards.
As far as coverage goes, the US has a much lower population density which raises the per capita costs of cell coverage in the same way it raises the cost of passenger rail. Not the only factor by any means, but it at least contributes to the problem.
There is a natural limit on price fixing, based on the cost of entering the market. One side effect of every regulation applied to business is to increase start up costs. The very first step that limits new companies from jumping into the market is zoning laws, followed quickly by business licensing. You can't find a market dominated by a collusive cartel that doesn't have at least minimal government effort restricting the entry of new competitors, but I admit that's not particularly interesting when there is no place on earth without some sort of government control. The warlords in somalia count as small dictatorships at war with each other, so don't try point to it as some sort of libertarian paradise.
No, it does not create ALL ownership. It arguably creates ownership of land. I'm sure you've heard of the labor theory of value (which is crap), but you might look into the labor theory of property. If i create something, if nothing else i have the first chance to make use of it. If I am actively using something, the only way to take it from me is by force. If initiation of force is invalid, then at the vary least ownership of items currently in my possession exists without government.
Arguably, even rights recognized by every member of society are illusions. In that sense, ownership is illusionary, but at least it's compatible with equal rights and non-initiation of force. Society is perfectly capable of recognizing rights in the absence of government. If you live in the US, you should remember that our system is premised on the existence of natural rights.
Although I very much think that the false dichotomy of robots vs humans is foolish, and think we should be trying to get people into space as a goal in and of itself while still using robots for some purposes, it remains true that NASA is mostly a pork-barrel boondogle. I have much higher hopes for the various x-prize seekers than for anything decent to come from nasa.
I'd like to see what the actual rates are. 0.1% normally move towards the light (assuming it really is a poor choice for them) and 0.5% move towards the light with anti-depressants, I don't think it is a significant difference. 5 times larger means little without that context.
Global warmingists and anti-global-warmingists are junk terms, but let's accept that and move on. They made no such claim. The only claim they have consistently made is that the global warming predictions consistently err on the side of catastrophic warming, and that those predictions would not match reality. The GP's post correctly points out one way in which their predictions are wrong. I'll go one better, and point out that Hansen showed 3 scenarios of warming to congress. Scenario C is the only one close to being accurate when you extend the data to the current day (some people have tried to debunk this by including only data up to 2000, which leaves scenario B within striking distance of actual data), but scenario C assumed that CO2 production remained flat due to government action. This didn't happen. Since, by their own admission, it takes about a decade to determine if their predictions pan out, we can't rule out OR confirm their newer models yet, but the models they had in the late 80's were clearly wrong.
Just because the government protects it doesn't make it a right. Rights are not creations of government. Government creates special privileges all the time however. Also, refusing to hire someone if they say something you don't like is NOT a violation of freedom of speech. It is an exercise of freedom of association.
That depends on the cost of living in their home town. I make a pretty good living doing IT work in Billings at just under 40k. I could make more elsewhere... but would be paying more for a smaller house among other things.
Augusto Pinochet? It is morbidly amusing to note that the only dictator to promote the free-market is the only dictator to voluntarily relinquish power.
He more or less accurately described what actually happened to the health system in this country over the past 40 years or so to drive up health costs. although it was never made mandatory, the system strongly encouraged employers to provide health care. I'm guessing he's thinking of HIPAA, which did put numerous requirements on employer coverage.
"People [need] to work in [the real world]" Fixed that for you. It's not the system that mean people have to work to make a living. It's a basic part of existence. The presence of other people does not absolve anyone of responsibility for their own well being. I disagree with your definition of force. Life requires actions be taken to sustain it or it ends. If you aren't taking the actions yourself, someone else is. The fact that those actions must be taken in order to live is not force. Force implies some sort of action, not inaction.
You know, that's exactly like saying because their line segments had width, and at a microscopic scale were a bit jagged instead of straight(damn that real world), they didn't actually create a triangle. While technically true, that sort of argument is at least similar to a No True Scotsman fallacy. They have to reach for places where reality diverged from their theory, and harp on them as distinguishing rather than accepting that for all intents and purposes, those nations did implement communism in the only way it can in fact be implemented.
If you have a theory about spherical cows of uniform density, you can't complain that it's not your fault real cows aren't spherical or of uniform density.
This is where proper definition of terms becomes important. People are only compelled to work in capitalist societies if you redefine compulsion to include "Letting nature take it's course" instead of "Do this or I will hurt you". The confusion between inaction and negative action underlies your argument, and every other "Free markets are exploitive!" argument ever produced. It is also wrong. Not helping someone who is about to die is not the same thing as killing someone yourself.
But the dictatorial power is an inherent flaw in any attempt to implement Marxism. Ignoring the flaws in the labor theory of value for the sake of argument, here is a simplified explanation why that is.
In any large enough collection of people, there will be some who don't choose to co-operate. If you don't accept some form of property, than there is no such thing as theft, and them taking enough to live without producing it themselves is legitimate. So someone somewhere has to produce more. But again, with no property, why should anyone produce? If you instead posit collective property, and then say the non-producer can't claim, then they aren't part of that collective ownership, which means you have at best a large oligarchy, which has some level of force to back it up. This still leaves the issue of people producing excess. Who decides what excess is? How do you decide who 'isn't producing enough' and doesn't provide them with the food they need to live? The very concept of making that decision, and the decision to punish failure to produce is inherently coercive, and slowly converts Marxism into some form of authoritarian control.
To alter your example, if someone says "All triangle have angles which sum to 180 degrees", you can't say "All triangles have a right angle, you fucking idiot" and have your complaint actually make sense. The flaws in communism are inherent, logical consequences of it's premises.
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Well, i think they should regulate banks less, and should have no restrictions whatsoever on at least early abortions. Once the fetus has some sort of mind AND has the potential to be a person (i wouldn't object to aborting a late term fetus with tay-sachs just as an example. Person may be a poor term choice, so forgive me if that bothers anyone, but I can't spend that much time on this) I do have issues with it. I do support all your final examples. None of this changes your point, since libertarians are a pretty small minority in this country. I'm used to being in a small group politically.
Whee... a not so subtle ad-hominem. So, you claim that conservatism embraces the disregard of the rights of others? Isn't it liberals who think it's just dandy to ignore Alice's right to not reward Bob for his stunning lack of work ethic? Just because some people use rights in ways you don't like doesn't give you the right to take those rights away...
Those events are known to be possible, and it is unwise to bet against anything like it ever happening to you. Whether or not to spend a portion of your income on medical insurance of savings for emergencies is something under your control. As for those with shitty parents, school, neighborhood, and job, there are cases of individuals working their way out. Which means it's possible, and that some of those who didn't did in fact contribute to themselves being where they are by failing to make better choices.
It's true that hard work and/or intelligence do not generally lead from poverty to incredible wealth... but they are enough to get anyone from poverty to middle class. Similarly, it's not that uncommon for people with inherited wealth that they have control over (a fair number of rich parents set up trusts to stop this) lose most of it.
The real issue is this: No circumstance affecting Bob, no matter how dire, which was not caused by Alice gives Bob the right to force Alice to support him. Alice may choose to do so, and that's great. It may be the right thing to do. I don't even really object to minimal social safty nets (in principle I do, but it's on the order of someone throwing a single bag of chips on my front lawn: not worth trying to prevent). I do object to claiming it's some sort of inherent right.
That is how liberal is defined outside the US, and used to be defined here. Hence some libertarians prefer to call themselves classical liberals instead of giving in to the cultures mutation of terms, in the same way hackers differentiate themselves from crackers, although with even less success.
"There is a direct correlation between welfare net and crime" [citation needed]. To the best of my knowledge, the relationship is unclear. You could have cited a harvard study, but it does not correct for the single parent family connection that the Cato link specifically mentioned. It's really fun to note that in support of the conclusion that greater income inequality causes bad outcomes, that article relies on citation 10, which defines income inequality as bad.
1. Nationalism is may be more common with conservatives than liberals, but that doesn't mean he wasn't a liberal nationalist. Nationalism is not a defining feature, but does have a weak correlation. Just as gun control is correlated the other way, but isn't a defining feature.
2. Godwin!
3. Feeding the troll: Given his general economic policy of control over business, a strong social safty net, etc. he was at least economically a left winger. Looking at the actual definitions of terms, liberal is not the opposite of conservatism or the same as left wing. Progressivism is. Since we have a fairly liberal country (lots of of liberty), progressives are slightly anti-liberal.
This may not be wise to admit... but I still occasionally poke at Monty Hall now and then. :p I agree with the standard conclusion, but I have never really liked the standard explanations. I'm pretty sure I could make a decent sounding argument using either of the following approaches. Could make for a fun pseudo proof, except that there's more than enough of those for Monty Hall already. :)
The problem looks different if you consider that the goats are distinct from each other, and fully enumerate every pattern of prizes, goats, guesses, and reveals instead of using some sort of rule to reduce the configurations you need to examine. Most monty hall arguments assert that the 2 different options for when the player initially guesses the correct door are each half as likely instead of just as likely as the other fully enumerated patterns. For each correct guess of 1 there are 2 possible reveals, while for each incorrect guess of one there is only one possible reveal, giving 2 patterns where you want to switch and 2 where you don't.
It also looks different if you consider possible configurations given a specific Guess and Reveal. Given a guess of 1, with a reveal of 2, their are 2 possible patterns compatible with that. 1,0,0 and 0,0,1. Each of those is equally likely. Effectively, all the reveal does is eliminate all but 2 possible configurations.
Actually, .111... is exactly equal to 1/9. They are different ways to express the same value.
bulk of the population granted. bulk of the area is fairly sparse i think. I live in montana, so my perceptions are a bit skewed. I've only had coverage issues in semi rural areas, and lack of coverage is one weak point in the US.
I appreciate the detailed response. Checking your link, the primary advantages of GSM come directly from government mandates as opposed to technical advantages. My basic point was that the CDMA technology was developed by a private company and likely wouldn't have been developed if the US had also had a legally imposed standard. Since later versions of GSM were dependent on CDMA (I meant to include that link in the initial post), I would argue that it was a good thing the US had a less regulated cell market, even if other features are more of a hassle from the user's perspective. Would you rather have GSM with say 1/3 of the bandwidth it now has if everything was GSM? Pricing is painful, i have to admit, as are locked phones. But it looks like an attempt to set a single standard to alleviate those issues would have made our networks worse off in the long run.
That's a nice straw man you are attacking. Let's take your points one by one.
1. Actually, this is not a necessary component of a free market. It may be a condition for free markets to be beneficial that most agents be mostly rational, but that's a different kettle of fish than saying a free market can't exist.
2. Not part of the assumptions of a free market. Often claimed to by by anti-free-market individuals as a straw man argument, and by others who have been exposed to those arguments. It's not even necessary for this to be true for the free market to be beneficial.
3. Accurate by definition. Your counter examples only work with government interference to protect them or they lack the power to set prices arbitrarily high. See #4
4. No artificial barriers to entry or exit is the accurate statement. If it cots money to lay cable, fine, but the company can't set prices too high without making it profitable to lay that new cable anyways at some point.
5. Hey, patents... a wholly owned creation of government action yet again.
Basically, your argument is "If we define X this way, such that the real world doesn't match it, then X can never possibly exist in the real world". Do I really need to explain the flaws with that?
Shittiest market by which specific criteria? Please note that saying 'The market sucks because it doesn't do what I think it should!" says something about you, but not necesarily about the market itself failing. Regarding cell phone markets, europe settled on GSM by government fiat a while back. The american system produced CDMA, which was a technically better system... and it was developed here because we didn't have an imposed standard. The tech has been adopted by others, but your 3G and 4G networks might not even exist without at least one relatively free market to allow companies to compete on broadcast standards.
As far as coverage goes, the US has a much lower population density which raises the per capita costs of cell coverage in the same way it raises the cost of passenger rail. Not the only factor by any means, but it at least contributes to the problem.
There is a natural limit on price fixing, based on the cost of entering the market. One side effect of every regulation applied to business is to increase start up costs. The very first step that limits new companies from jumping into the market is zoning laws, followed quickly by business licensing. You can't find a market dominated by a collusive cartel that doesn't have at least minimal government effort restricting the entry of new competitors, but I admit that's not particularly interesting when there is no place on earth without some sort of government control. The warlords in somalia count as small dictatorships at war with each other, so don't try point to it as some sort of libertarian paradise.
No, it does not create ALL ownership. It arguably creates ownership of land. I'm sure you've heard of the labor theory of value (which is crap), but you might look into the labor theory of property. If i create something, if nothing else i have the first chance to make use of it. If I am actively using something, the only way to take it from me is by force. If initiation of force is invalid, then at the vary least ownership of items currently in my possession exists without government.
Arguably, even rights recognized by every member of society are illusions. In that sense, ownership is illusionary, but at least it's compatible with equal rights and non-initiation of force. Society is perfectly capable of recognizing rights in the absence of government. If you live in the US, you should remember that our system is premised on the existence of natural rights.
Although I very much think that the false dichotomy of robots vs humans is foolish, and think we should be trying to get people into space as a goal in and of itself while still using robots for some purposes, it remains true that NASA is mostly a pork-barrel boondogle. I have much higher hopes for the various x-prize seekers than for anything decent to come from nasa.
I'd like to see what the actual rates are. 0.1% normally move towards the light (assuming it really is a poor choice for them) and 0.5% move towards the light with anti-depressants, I don't think it is a significant difference. 5 times larger means little without that context.
Global warmingists and anti-global-warmingists are junk terms, but let's accept that and move on. They made no such claim. The only claim they have consistently made is that the global warming predictions consistently err on the side of catastrophic warming, and that those predictions would not match reality. The GP's post correctly points out one way in which their predictions are wrong. I'll go one better, and point out that Hansen showed 3 scenarios of warming to congress. Scenario C is the only one close to being accurate when you extend the data to the current day (some people have tried to debunk this by including only data up to 2000, which leaves scenario B within striking distance of actual data), but scenario C assumed that CO2 production remained flat due to government action. This didn't happen. Since, by their own admission, it takes about a decade to determine if their predictions pan out, we can't rule out OR confirm their newer models yet, but the models they had in the late 80's were clearly wrong.
Just because the government protects it doesn't make it a right. Rights are not creations of government. Government creates special privileges all the time however. Also, refusing to hire someone if they say something you don't like is NOT a violation of freedom of speech. It is an exercise of freedom of association.
That depends on the cost of living in their home town. I make a pretty good living doing IT work in Billings at just under 40k. I could make more elsewhere... but would be paying more for a smaller house among other things.
Augusto Pinochet? It is morbidly amusing to note that the only dictator to promote the free-market is the only dictator to voluntarily relinquish power.
He more or less accurately described what actually happened to the health system in this country over the past 40 years or so to drive up health costs. although it was never made mandatory, the system strongly encouraged employers to provide health care. I'm guessing he's thinking of HIPAA, which did put numerous requirements on employer coverage.
"People [need] to work in [the real world]" Fixed that for you. It's not the system that mean people have to work to make a living. It's a basic part of existence. The presence of other people does not absolve anyone of responsibility for their own well being. I disagree with your definition of force. Life requires actions be taken to sustain it or it ends. If you aren't taking the actions yourself, someone else is. The fact that those actions must be taken in order to live is not force. Force implies some sort of action, not inaction.
That's what I assumed as well until i saw their picture of an example in the paper.
You know, that's exactly like saying because their line segments had width, and at a microscopic scale were a bit jagged instead of straight(damn that real world), they didn't actually create a triangle. While technically true, that sort of argument is at least similar to a No True Scotsman fallacy. They have to reach for places where reality diverged from their theory, and harp on them as distinguishing rather than accepting that for all intents and purposes, those nations did implement communism in the only way it can in fact be implemented.
If you have a theory about spherical cows of uniform density, you can't complain that it's not your fault real cows aren't spherical or of uniform density.
This is where proper definition of terms becomes important. People are only compelled to work in capitalist societies if you redefine compulsion to include "Letting nature take it's course" instead of "Do this or I will hurt you". The confusion between inaction and negative action underlies your argument, and every other "Free markets are exploitive!" argument ever produced. It is also wrong. Not helping someone who is about to die is not the same thing as killing someone yourself.
But the dictatorial power is an inherent flaw in any attempt to implement Marxism. Ignoring the flaws in the labor theory of value for the sake of argument, here is a simplified explanation why that is.
In any large enough collection of people, there will be some who don't choose to co-operate. If you don't accept some form of property, than there is no such thing as theft, and them taking enough to live without producing it themselves is legitimate. So someone somewhere has to produce more. But again, with no property, why should anyone produce? If you instead posit collective property, and then say the non-producer can't claim, then they aren't part of that collective ownership, which means you have at best a large oligarchy, which has some level of force to back it up. This still leaves the issue of people producing excess. Who decides what excess is? How do you decide who 'isn't producing enough' and doesn't provide them with the food they need to live? The very concept of making that decision, and the decision to punish failure to produce is inherently coercive, and slowly converts Marxism into some form of authoritarian control.
To alter your example, if someone says "All triangle have angles which sum to 180 degrees", you can't say "All triangles have a right angle, you fucking idiot" and have your complaint actually make sense. The flaws in communism are inherent, logical consequences of it's premises.