I just don't get this attitude. Copyright is a social contract. It isn't part of a capitalist economy. It is defacto a subsidy for production of culture in the form of a government mandated monopoly. In a pure capitalist society you wouldn't have rights to control the replication of bits. Copyright IS by definition a form of socialism.
Here is the deal. We give companies and people a time limited, government mandated monopoly on the reproduction of a good because the cost to develop the good is large and the cost to reproduce it is very small. We throw in a few caveats to try to stop them abusing that monopoly. We do this with a good everyone has a right to have access to (national culture), and in return we expect a few things.
First off, don't abuse the monopoly. You get the financial benefit of a monopoly, that's it. You don't get to screw customers just because you are the only provider of a product. Secondly, respect the social contract. The monopoly is time limited and if you release a product in such a way that you establish a permanent monopoly you are abusing the social contract. DRM does exactly this because it is design to prevent works of art from being copied.
Here EA have basically done both. They have abused the social contract by putting DRM in the product in the first place. Then they have abused the monopoly by essentially infecting machines with a virus. That virus would not be there in a free market environment because competitors to EA would not be stupid enough to put it there.
The rule should be simple. You can have the protection of DRM, or you can have the protection of copyright. But you cant have both because one is a de facto permanent monopoly.
Now I happen to be one of those people who is prepared to put up with a bit of socialism if it increases net societal good. But if EA cant live up the the social contract then their monopoly should be withdrawn. That should be the penalty for abusing what is at the moment a pretty sweet deal (at least for the major content producers). Heck I wish I could still be getting paid for work I did today 100 years from now.
You are right. In my opinion the US is very bad at deciding how and when to nationalise things. I'd say that they are one of the worst in the Western world. That isn't a reason to not nationalise industries. That's a reason to fix the problems inherent to the US style of nationalisation.
Funnily enough I agree with you about banking but not for the reasons you list. Inflation is actually the fairest 'tax' because it always take in proportion to uninvested wealth (in that regard it is much better than income tax which effectively penalises you for working to get more rather than for what you already have). Too much inflation is of course bad, but then so is too much income tax.
I've thought about the banking system and what would be a better or fairer system and I honestly don't have any good answers for you. Of course we are conflating several related issues here. How should government borrowing be managed. How should can we ensure currency retains the ability to deliver value. How can we avoid distorting one particular market.
The gold standard sounds very nice in principle but the simple fact is that at golds current price there is way more money (just in the US alone) than exists golds to back it. Any return to the gold standard would require massively increasing the price of gold. This is probably not an insurmountable hurdle (buying enough gold to cover even a part of the amount of money in circulation would probably increase the price considerably), but gold is more than just a pretty metal. It is used in lots of industries including the manufacture of the computers we are having this conversation on. Those industries would suffer greatly.
Gold isn't inflation proof anyway. Discovery of a new source of gold could have devastating consequences for the economy. But the real nightmare scenario is rapid deflation cause by some new use of gold. Imagine a new wonder drug that cured obesity and required for it's manufacture gold. Or some new quantum computing device whose conventional components had to be gold. Suddenly money is worth more because I can exchange it for gold!
The gold standard also offers central banks fewer levers to pull when they want to change the supply of money.
The gold standard is not the solution to our ills. I'm not saying I have the solution (I don't). I will say this though. The gold standard is a worse solution to the problem of currency supply and delivery of value than the current one.
As for your example of New Zeeland and agricultural subsidies. I'm not surprised by what you say, I've known from looking at things like the CAP that small farmers are utterly screwed by the way farming subsidies are structured. I'm strongly in favour of CAP reform. I'd like to see more of the facts around the case you cite though (do you have a link?). I never intended to say there was not a better way to structure agriculture, merely that agricultural subsidies result in overproduction and that this prevents famine.
It's not that I believe that we should have the agricultural subsidies we have right now (on the contrary they suck and are bought and paid for by special intrests). It's that I know it is important to provide some incentive to over produce food.
This is something that is going to have to be explained to me because I really don't get it. Other than the libertarian argument that a free society doesn't get involved in the private affairs of citizens what is the argument against socialised medicine?
At least the libertarians can stand up and say "people without healthcare is the price we pay for a free society".
The rest of you, what is your objection to socialised medicine? The US spent 14% of it's GDP on healthcare in 1996. That is double what the UK was spending (about 7%)! The UK system is pretty good, it has it's flaws, but it is also half the price (actually less than half the price since the US has a slightly higher GDP per capita).
Now lets ask about the quality of service. In the UK there are problems. Some procedures have waiting lists. Some hospitals have cleanliness problems. But none of that compares with the stories I've heard about US insurance companies. Many of those problems would vanish or be greatly diminished if the UK spent double what we are currently spending.
You might argue something like "I don't want to pay for fat people!" or "I don't want to pay for smokers!". Great I understand that, but are you really willing to pay more for healthcare on principle? You collectively pay more for health care than Germany, Sweden, France Denmark or the United Kingdom! A big chunk of that cost is effectively socialised anyway, and what isn't is already a large burden on the middle class and the wealthy. The poor aren't saddled with he cost because they already have no money (they might be ruined by the cost but no one really benefits much from that). I get that you don't want to pay for health care for people who you perceive as not deserving it, but are you really willing pay more to avoid paying for them? Ignoring the futility of such an exercise, can we move on to how vindictive that seems?
At least the libertarians have a valid argument. Freedom has a cost and isn't always fair. Everyone else, shouldn't health care be about building the best system at the lowest price rather than the 'fairest' system?
While most of what you say has a nugget of truth to it, you bounce the word socialist around. I not really sure you know what socialism is.
A socialist wants to nationalise substantial parts of the economy, and usually doesn't want to do it to correct market inefficiencies but rather to achieve some other goal.
For example a socialist might want to nationalise the coal industry, or the trucking industry or the armaments industry. One reason they might give for nationalising the coal industry is "we must guarantee the energy supply". Another reason is "coal/land is a good that belongs to the entire country so everyone should share in the benefits". Another might be stability of the economy as you suggest.
Very few people are socialists. Those individuals you are talking about are probably social liberals. They believe that the economy has inherent inefficiencies. They believe net social welfare can be increased by part nationalisation or nationalisation of specific industries because those industries. This might be because certain industries naturally form monopolies, or provide peverse incentives. Market liberals largely disagree. They would argue that these market failures are either caused by government intervention, or are short term and will correct themselves.
We are all socialists to an extent (with the exception of anarcho-capitalists and their ilk) because we all think that the police, the early years education system, the military and the franchise should be nationalised institutions.
Most people are also social liberals to some extent. They believe that fire departments, and some aspects of transportation should be nationalised too. Interestingly we think that the fire department should be nationalised not because they are just to important to leave the the private sector, but because doing them any other way creates moral hazards. Say we have private fire insurance and I decide I don't want to be insured. If my house catches fire then it is a big problem for my neighbours. So we make everyone get insurance by socialising it.
Most people are market liberals when it comes to most areas of the economy. Shoe manufacturers have plenty of incentives and competition and there aren't many potential moral hazards.
The trick isn't how much socialism vs free market do we need. The trick is deciding when we nationalise/regulate an industry because it is just to darn important and when do nationalise/regulate an industry because it is in everyone (or "almost everyones") best interest to do so? And of course how many people is enough to be "almost everyone". Under what circumstances do we interfere with the market? The grey areas are things like higher education, hospitals and health insurance, collective resources like sources of water or the electromagnetic spectrum. The banking system is another important area to consider, the entire idea that money has the ability to deliver value is based on a quasi nationalisation of part of the banking industry.
That is very distinct from trade. The real problem with 'free trade' is that we often gloablise labour without globalising other goods. The result is that the working class in the West compete with the working class in places like India or China where the costs of goods and services is generally much lower. In addition by opening up competition and gloablising labour you make aspects of labour regulation meaningless because the regulation just acts as an albatross around the necks of Western workers.
All the while other goods are not globalised. We encourage the formation of monopolies in the products of the west (medicines, mass culture, technological breakthroughs) via patents and copyrights. These monopolies then impose differential price structures (medicines are cheaper in some places and more expensive in others).
The difficulty with international trade and protectionism is that unless you can get other countries to play by the same rules (and our own companies to offer the same universal price on equivilant
Fine, sounds good. So I presume that all protectionist crap will be removed. We will be getting food at Indian prices, electronics at Chinese prices, consumer goods, etc?
The reason we cant do that is because regulation, unionised labour etc. drive up costs. This is actually a good thing from the perspective of net societal welfare (actually it looks like it is a good thing from the perspective of pure growth too given that high GDP growth and well regulated markets occur in tandem).
Problem with globalisation is that companies only want to globalise labour. And they want to globalise it in the sense of de facto reducing all labour laws to the most lax possible. They want the regulation that acts as a form of protectionism for themselves, but they want labour to get none.
The H-1B program is symptomatic of just such a desire. Basically indentured servitude. So I will make you a deal. The day costs of goods and services in the the West are parallel with costs in a currently developing country I will agree to globalising labour, unrestricted immigration with immigrants having exactly the same rights as citizens.
Until that day don't think you are fooling anyone with your ridiculous greed.
Another thing. There is no shortage of competent employees. If there were, the price of competent employees would rise to correct the imbalance.
Lets have a look at a comparable professions and see if your shortage theory holds up.
I'd say a Real Estate Attorney has a similar level of education to a Systems Administrator. The former are currently bringing in about $100,000 before bonuses and extras. The latter $70,000. If there was a short term shortage of good Systems administrators wouldn't the latter value be higher?
After I tell you it isn't a matter of employer counting you go counting employers. I'm not sure what exactly you hope to prove with that.
You then proceed to extrapolate from what I am assuming is your experience getting references from HR to everyone else. Not all references are provided by HR. Most jobs are still provided by SMEs and many of these don't even have a formal HR department. You get your reference from your boss.
You then go on to further reinforce my point without even realising it. If most people are getting a job via "networking/contacts/previous colleagues" then this is another hidden form of indirect collusion. Suddenly my list of potential employers has gone down from the 400 or so you know of in your area to the five or six that I know someone at! The pool of potential employers is now small enough to grant real monopsony power to my employer.
If the market isn't functioning then the 'market rate' at which the job is offered will be below what a functioning market would settle on. They don't have to lower the salary after seeing a CV, because it was below what a functioning market would settle on to start with!
You don't have to have direct collusion to have monopsony power.
There are lots of reasons that might explain why the labour market displays characteristics of a monopsony.
Just to give you an example consider references. They seem harmless enough, let the next employer know what to expect from an employee right? Except they can cause all employers to act like a single entity. Boss number one decides he doesn't like the fact that I don't do something not specified by my contract so he tells the next guy that I'm inflexible. In a competitive environment my CV doesn't make it to the first round of interviews for any future employer. And it looks suspicious if I don't use my last employer.
So without collusion, without the conspiracy you paint me as believing in a multitude of competing employers begin acting like one employer. The labour market has many characteristics of a monopsony.
You cant just simplify the situation down to a numbers game of counting the different employers and employment opportunities, you have to look at the whole market.
The labour market behaves like employers have monopsony power. You don't need a specific monopsony employer.
You make a good point with your last paragraph, unions can become monopsonies. That's an excellent argument for regulating unions just like we do companies. It isn't a good argument for an individual not to join a union in the short term.
Yeah, yeah. The standard American attitude to unions. And pretty much everything you have said is true, the problem is you are ignoring the giant elephant in the room.
Employers form a monopsony and will screw you for every penny they can given the chance and you are comparatively powerless to stop them.
If you work in IT you do not receive a fair wage for your labour. Now I'm not talking about the tired old communist mantra of "capitalists profit because they pay less for labour than it enhances the value of a good" crap. I'm talking about the fact that employers amalgamated over the economy behave like monopsonies. In IT the effect of the minimum wage is non-existant, it is below the monopsony wage. Without labour unions employers can (and do) routinely offer lower wages than a free market would settle on.
Organised labour almost certainly does everything you said it does. But I don't see any alternative to fighting monopsony power.
Being in a union is a selfish act. So is trying to get a monopoly or monopsony in any other market. Business people do it all the time without a seconds thought. Your employer does it all the time without a seconds thought. If these callous bastards are doing it why shouldn't labour? It is in your own best interest to do so because everyone else will screw you. In fact they already ARE screwing you.
I'm not saying labour unions are good. I'm saying that people who refuse to join unions are putting down their guns before they walk out into the firefight.
You want to do that in the vicious dog eat dog world we live in, feel free. Me, I'm not putting down my gun till every other son of a bitch agrees to as well.
No thats fine then, you have a clear and well thought out position that while different from my own is based on what is important to you. If you are happy to remove any government assistance to corporate entities and turn limited liability into a contractual agreement creditors sign up for then I cant argue with you. I don't value my economic freedom as much as you and I'm prepared to make sacrifices in this area in an effort to increase equality and prevent abuse of power. I also believe that some government interference in the market can protect other rights that are important to me, especially when we are talking about the resources of the commons. I also believe that by and large if monopsonies or monopolies form, especially monopsonies in the employment market, society as a whole suffers. I believe that society suffers less if those monopolies or monopsonies are nationalised or heavily regulated. Sometimes social welfare can be improved by government intervention. Monopsonies in the labour market grant so much power to one group that they can amount to an abusive de facto government, they border on serfdom.
You are aware that the employment market has many of the characteristics of a monopsony right? It is all well and good to say that government shouldn't interfere but how do you correct the ensuing and inevitable market failure? If we are going to allow very large employers to form as a result of granting them limited liability status or by creating natural monopolies through copyright laws and patents then we should find a way to ensure that they do not abuse any monopsony power they might have in the employment market. Now if you are a true libertarian and you want to do away with limited liability status and government mandated monopolies entirely then that is another story, but don't harp on about government interference in the market when it was government interference that created many of the problems that these laws try to fix. Personally I don't mind a bit of government interference myself so I'm happy to have some version of the framework we have now.
And they have to be really punitive. They have to be high enough that Apple shareholders eyes bleed. Businesses of this size almost always act in a manner to forward their best interest without consideration of morals.
All Apple have done is what any large business will do when there is a law. If the PR implications and the impact on employee moral plus the risk of a court case times the cost of it are less than the cost of sticking to the law, they break the law. The only two variables we can change are how often they go to court and how much is extracted when they get there.
I said nothing about competitive, I said risky. Increasing pay across the board would reduce the perceived risk. So would introducing new permanent positions somewhere between a tenured professor (who should be paid something comparable to a professional football players wage) and a postdoc. Perhaps make them primarily teaching roles or some such. Having an environment where everyone fears for their job daily and has to move house once every two years doesn't do anyone any good.
I'm a man. I can think outside the box. My point wasn't all men are crap. It wasn't even that most men are crap or that men are crap at all. My point was that the current bounds of science were largely drawn by men, and there are huge benefits to having people who, by virtue of the population from which the are drawn, think differently. We have the statistics, certain kinds of outliers are more likely to be female than male. Getting more women into science will give us more of those individuals (hopefully).
The point I was making was that in the short term the pay off of having more women in the hard sciences might be even higher. These fields have been dominated by men for hundreds of years and it is far more likely they progressed primarily in directions most concordant with the distribution of male modes of thought.
You have drastically over simplified the problem and reduced my argument to a straw man.
I've seen precisely the argument I'm making in action. The scientist who brings in the most money in my department is a woman. She works in a field none of my other colleagues would touch because they just aren't interested because it is 'low prestige' and doesn't run with the prevailing culture. She is an exceptional research scientist. I'm not saying she does exceptional work because she is a woman, but being a woman made it more likely she would have an interest in a neglected field. I'm saying we need to make the most of the resources we have available and having a discipline 95% male isn't doing that.
The system wasn't designed by woman haters. I said the problem isn't discrimination. The problem is that the system encourages a vicious cycle because the system itself is inherently sexist.
"A shame, but if working in science means these people won't be working in another field, that's a catastrophe for that other field, right?"
Depends entirely on what those other fields are. There are optimisations to be made in the hard sciences. The hard sciences are pretty much the reason for the modern age, and many if not most of the civilisation threatening problem we now face will be solved by breakthrough in the physical sciences. Having something that important poorly configured is a catastrophe. You don't have to lose people in other disciplines just because you optimise one (and many disciplines which are wholly gender bias against men could do with reform too).
"Ah, our new drastically (sic) different risk-adverse overlords. Science has been fine for the past 100 years with a very low number of females, and it will be fine for another 100 years without changing this."
You are over generalising. You have assumed the reason that an exceptional individual doesn't go into the hard sciences is the same as the reason ordinary folks don't. Science might be fine, but it isn't optimal.
You may well be for more women in the sciences, but you haven't proposed one way to encourage that. You also haven't presented any compelling reason why you would want more women in science. I want more women in science because I see a vast under utilised pool of resources funnelled into less useful endeavours. I don't see why you care.
Risk, it comes down to risk. If we REALLY want to get more women into the sciences we need the make the risks of the profession lower.
By and large research has shown that the maxim that men and women are equally mentally competent is true. There are a few indications that maybe within specific skills men and women differ a little between populations, but by and large if there is a man who can do a job competently then there is a woman who can too.
However, women are statistically more risk averse. And science (especially the hard sciences) is an incredibly risky discipline to undertake as a profession. Better to be a lawyer or a doctor. And women agree with this assessment. Many countries now train more women in these professions than men.
The real problem with academia isn't discrimination. I've come across no discrimination working as a scientist. The problem isn't how hard academia is. Women are just as tough as men. The problem is that academia is playing roulette with your career, not to mention damn hard. 9 till 9 for pay nowhere near what you could earn in the private sector, no job security until you are in your mid to late 30s if you are lucky and get on a tenure track.
If we want to have more women in academia then the way academics are treated needs to change. Competent (but not brilliant) academics shouldn't fall by the wayside, and brilliant ones should be treated like rock stars.
This applies doubly so in the hard sciences where concrete metrics of achievement increase the perceived risk of those who are less confident.
We are failing young women and it doesn't just hurt them. While men and women are by and large similar, there are biological differences and exceptional individuals who think are certain way are more likely to be female than male. The value of someone who can think outside the box should not be underestimated, and up until now the box is largely drawn out by testosterone junkies. By engineering a system which dissuades women we not only lose out on a significant number of competent individuals undertaking research (a catastrophe in and of itself), but we lose out on those outliers whose drastically different modes of thought might spur important breakthroughs.
We NEED more women in the hard sciences. But quotas will just guarantee mediocrity at best, and at worst they we do more harm than good. Fixing the culture of academia will cost money. Money to pay for job security. Money to pay for an image change. Money to ensure the hard sciences are more cooperative and social. Money to pay higher wages.
But why fix a problem when you can pretend to on the cheap?
1. Most food shortages are not caused by governments. At least not in the way you are suggesting. Poverty stricken countries that cannot feed their population have food shortages for a number of reasons and blaming everything on government is very simplistic. The causes are as diverse as first world market manipulation through subsidy to civil wars.
As an example consider post war Europe. Before subsidies Europe did not have enough food to feed itself. If there was shortage people went hungry, perhaps even malnourished. Subsidies manipulated the market so that farmers over produced food. This is bad in good years, but in bad years it ensured food was still available. It is a simple calculation to perform. If the price of food in a good year was $10 per acre (supply exceeds demand), $20 per acre in a normal year, and $50 per acre in a bad year and almost all years are normal, then no farmer is going to develop much land that costs more than $20 dollars an acre to operate.
Problem comes when you have a nice big market like we have today where farmers around the world are trying to compete with heavily subsidies first world farmers. Subsidies have made even cheap viable land in the third world unprofitable. So even in stable countries it is not desirable to grow much excess food. Even worse shipping over food aid for anything other than a crisis actually makes matters worse.
2. If you are living in poverty it makes perfect sense to have lots of offspring. After all, some might die, and you will need them to take care of you. Even more are going to die if you are malnourished. It is in the interest of the collective good to control population growth, but no in the interest of the individual. It is a giant game of prisoners dilemma. The poverty + western medicine and aid causes the population boom which causes yet more poverty. And we again make the situation worse by making it more desirable to rely on the west rather than fix problems. We also prop up the very fascists you mention which help cause all the poverty.
3. The bottom line is that both you and the GP appear to me to be ideologues. You think that government in all it's forms are bad, the GP thinks that simplistic government intervention and feel good economics are the way forward. The truth is much more complicated than either of you are presenting. You cant just take a situation with moral hazards or natural monopolies and pretend that the market will fix them, and you cant point at the markets insurance brokers (speculators) and assume that because sometimes they incorrectly allocate resources our best bet is to put them all up against the wall and let daddy government fix it all.
Here is my take on the original point. Some of the deposits of these rare materials have not be mined yet because the sources are not economically viable at the current price. If demand increases or supply drops then the price will rise, and these sites will become viable. All well and good. But there is a finite amount of these materials available. Eventually the cost of obtaining them will so high that they are not used in some consumer goods anymore, and instead used only where no substitute exists (or where the substitute is more expensive). So far this all sounds fine, the market has fixed the problem right? The only thing is that the market hasn't fixed anything here. All it has done is find the best fit solution. The problem still exists because the problem is an overal reduction in some quantity we care about (quality of life, GDP growth, take your pick). If tomorrow food spontaneously appeared in peoples fridges then general quality of life would go up (so would GDP growth eventually, after the shock of millions of famers having no jobs wore off). This because having lots of resources is a very good thing. Shortages aren't a problem because the market cant correct for them, they are a problem because they require us to allocate larger amounts of resources to obtaining necessarily materials.
Thing is that this really blurs the lines as to who did the copying. You cant easily point and say Person X violated copyright law. You can with a high degree of certainty say that copyright law has been broken, but the question is now, by who? Probably the person who distributed the key used to reconstruct the file is guilty of distribution. But we don't know, could be argued it was the person who has the different pieces of these files. This doesn't make distribution legal. It doesn't change the fact that the law has been broken. It does make it difficult to identify who actually did the breaking.
Your logic only works if you believe there is a free market in pharmaceuticals (or oil, or...).
Patents guarantee the exact opposite situation. Now I'm not saying we should do away with patents entirely, all I'm saying is don't be surprised when people who care about using the free market to deal with societies problems get a little bit pissed off when government intervention does the exact opposite of what it is supposed to do.
Patents are corporate welfare (or for want of a better way to put it, corporate socialism). If we are going to have a form of socialism I'd rather one that benefits more people, not less.
"You evidently either (A) don't know thing one about C++"
I think you mean thing zero.
But seriously, C++ is fine for what it is. It is a little old and in places it is showing it's age, but the alternatives all have problems (although I have to say Java is looking nicer and nicer).
There are certainly a few features C++ could do with, but I cant think what kind of problems you must have had to illicit this response. My compiler only spits out a warning if I declare a member function virtual without a virtual destructor. Of course it is bad practice not to complete a class anyway and if you have virtual functions the destructor should be virtual too.
C++ suffers largely because it is the language that is "good enough" to solve most problems. Sure python might be better for something, but why would I bother with getting good at python when C++ is good enough and I already know C++.
End of the day it is horses for courses and C++ is popular for a reason. That reason has very little (although sadly not nothing) to do with geek pissing contests.
Yes, and if we drop corporate tax breaks, make it illegal to operate overseas where labour conditions and safety laws make labour cheaper, drop any program that amounts to using foreign labour as indentured servants, remove all tariffs on goods and services, stop illegal use of monopoly power to manipulate markets, drop any and all laws pertaining to trade secrets, cancel any government mandated monopolies and end limited liability then we can talk about labour. I will compete globally if everyone else has to. But we will do labour deregulation last. I will put down my gun if you put down yours. And in the mean time don't be surprised if I try to get myself a better one. Don't point a bazooka at someone and complain when they cling desperately to their pistol.
Yeah Washington stuck vehemently to the rules of war, like not targeting officers during battle. And when the revolutionaries started to win the war there were no killings or expulsions of loyalists to Canada. Oh no everyone sat down and ate tea cakes. And lets not forget one of the reasons the war was fought, so that the American colonies could continue their genocidal push against the Native Americans. While I wouldn't compare Washington to the likes of Rudolf Hess, Don't kid yourself that the revolutionaries weren't prepared to do that which was necessary to see the realisation of their ideology, and while Washington (gentleman that he was) wouldn't have condoned such conduct, I doubt he would have had the authority to stop it. And while we are at it, lets not deify men who, while certainly heros of liberal thought, implicitly (and in some cases explicitly) endorsed slavery and the deprivation of indigenous peoples of their land. The restraint showed by both the loyalists and the revolutionaries in the revolutionary war was a result of the need to keep the populations of the colonies, the British Iles and other powers from intervening, not some overwhelming sense of morality. That being said you are right, the West doesn't fight for anything anymore. We fight against Communism, against Socialism, against anything slightly to the left of the political spectrum. Now we are fighting against Islamism too. Instead of fighting for liberalism we install and prop up Facists and Despots because we fear the repercussions of democratic elections, we fear the inhabitants of other countries becoming free. We should start fighting for what we believe, by any means that do not compromise the gains we have already made. Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, these men wrote instruction books. Instructions are completely useless without a clear objective. That doesn't mean that if you know what you want to achieve you can ignore all of the wisdom of the past.
"it is *better* for the environment to go shopping in your car"
You do know that you are still alive and burning energy when you go shopping right? I know it feels like you are dead when you see the price of peppers hit 95c at the local Co-op, but it only seems that way.
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I just don't get this attitude. Copyright is a social contract. It isn't part of a capitalist economy. It is defacto a subsidy for production of culture in the form of a government mandated monopoly. In a pure capitalist society you wouldn't have rights to control the replication of bits. Copyright IS by definition a form of socialism.
Here is the deal. We give companies and people a time limited, government mandated monopoly on the reproduction of a good because the cost to develop the good is large and the cost to reproduce it is very small. We throw in a few caveats to try to stop them abusing that monopoly. We do this with a good everyone has a right to have access to (national culture), and in return we expect a few things.
First off, don't abuse the monopoly. You get the financial benefit of a monopoly, that's it. You don't get to screw customers just because you are the only provider of a product. Secondly, respect the social contract. The monopoly is time limited and if you release a product in such a way that you establish a permanent monopoly you are abusing the social contract. DRM does exactly this because it is design to prevent works of art from being copied.
Here EA have basically done both. They have abused the social contract by putting DRM in the product in the first place. Then they have abused the monopoly by essentially infecting machines with a virus. That virus would not be there in a free market environment because competitors to EA would not be stupid enough to put it there.
The rule should be simple. You can have the protection of DRM, or you can have the protection of copyright. But you cant have both because one is a de facto permanent monopoly.
Now I happen to be one of those people who is prepared to put up with a bit of socialism if it increases net societal good. But if EA cant live up the the social contract then their monopoly should be withdrawn. That should be the penalty for abusing what is at the moment a pretty sweet deal (at least for the major content producers). Heck I wish I could still be getting paid for work I did today 100 years from now.
You are right. In my opinion the US is very bad at deciding how and when to nationalise things. I'd say that they are one of the worst in the Western world. That isn't a reason to not nationalise industries. That's a reason to fix the problems inherent to the US style of nationalisation.
Funnily enough I agree with you about banking but not for the reasons you list. Inflation is actually the fairest 'tax' because it always take in proportion to uninvested wealth (in that regard it is much better than income tax which effectively penalises you for working to get more rather than for what you already have). Too much inflation is of course bad, but then so is too much income tax.
I've thought about the banking system and what would be a better or fairer system and I honestly don't have any good answers for you. Of course we are conflating several related issues here. How should government borrowing be managed. How should can we ensure currency retains the ability to deliver value. How can we avoid distorting one particular market.
The gold standard sounds very nice in principle but the simple fact is that at golds current price there is way more money (just in the US alone) than exists golds to back it. Any return to the gold standard would require massively increasing the price of gold. This is probably not an insurmountable hurdle (buying enough gold to cover even a part of the amount of money in circulation would probably increase the price considerably), but gold is more than just a pretty metal. It is used in lots of industries including the manufacture of the computers we are having this conversation on. Those industries would suffer greatly.
Gold isn't inflation proof anyway. Discovery of a new source of gold could have devastating consequences for the economy. But the real nightmare scenario is rapid deflation cause by some new use of gold. Imagine a new wonder drug that cured obesity and required for it's manufacture gold. Or some new quantum computing device whose conventional components had to be gold. Suddenly money is worth more because I can exchange it for gold!
The gold standard also offers central banks fewer levers to pull when they want to change the supply of money.
The gold standard is not the solution to our ills. I'm not saying I have the solution (I don't). I will say this though. The gold standard is a worse solution to the problem of currency supply and delivery of value than the current one.
As for your example of New Zeeland and agricultural subsidies. I'm not surprised by what you say, I've known from looking at things like the CAP that small farmers are utterly screwed by the way farming subsidies are structured. I'm strongly in favour of CAP reform. I'd like to see more of the facts around the case you cite though (do you have a link?). I never intended to say there was not a better way to structure agriculture, merely that agricultural subsidies result in overproduction and that this prevents famine.
It's not that I believe that we should have the agricultural subsidies we have right now (on the contrary they suck and are bought and paid for by special intrests). It's that I know it is important to provide some incentive to over produce food.
This is something that is going to have to be explained to me because I really don't get it. Other than the libertarian argument that a free society doesn't get involved in the private affairs of citizens what is the argument against socialised medicine?
At least the libertarians can stand up and say "people without healthcare is the price we pay for a free society".
The rest of you, what is your objection to socialised medicine? The US spent 14% of it's GDP on healthcare in 1996. That is double what the UK was spending (about 7%)! The UK system is pretty good, it has it's flaws, but it is also half the price (actually less than half the price since the US has a slightly higher GDP per capita).
Now lets ask about the quality of service. In the UK there are problems. Some procedures have waiting lists. Some hospitals have cleanliness problems. But none of that compares with the stories I've heard about US insurance companies. Many of those problems would vanish or be greatly diminished if the UK spent double what we are currently spending.
You might argue something like "I don't want to pay for fat people!" or "I don't want to pay for smokers!". Great I understand that, but are you really willing to pay more for healthcare on principle? You collectively pay more for health care than Germany, Sweden, France Denmark or the United Kingdom! A big chunk of that cost is effectively socialised anyway, and what isn't is already a large burden on the middle class and the wealthy. The poor aren't saddled with he cost because they already have no money (they might be ruined by the cost but no one really benefits much from that). I get that you don't want to pay for health care for people who you perceive as not deserving it, but are you really willing pay more to avoid paying for them? Ignoring the futility of such an exercise, can we move on to how vindictive that seems?
At least the libertarians have a valid argument. Freedom has a cost and isn't always fair. Everyone else, shouldn't health care be about building the best system at the lowest price rather than the 'fairest' system?
While most of what you say has a nugget of truth to it, you bounce the word socialist around. I not really sure you know what socialism is.
A socialist wants to nationalise substantial parts of the economy, and usually doesn't want to do it to correct market inefficiencies but rather to achieve some other goal.
For example a socialist might want to nationalise the coal industry, or the trucking industry or the armaments industry. One reason they might give for nationalising the coal industry is "we must guarantee the energy supply". Another reason is "coal/land is a good that belongs to the entire country so everyone should share in the benefits". Another might be stability of the economy as you suggest.
Very few people are socialists. Those individuals you are talking about are probably social liberals. They believe that the economy has inherent inefficiencies. They believe net social welfare can be increased by part nationalisation or nationalisation of specific industries because those industries. This might be because certain industries naturally form monopolies, or provide peverse incentives. Market liberals largely disagree. They would argue that these market failures are either caused by government intervention, or are short term and will correct themselves.
We are all socialists to an extent (with the exception of anarcho-capitalists and their ilk) because we all think that the police, the early years education system, the military and the franchise should be nationalised institutions.
Most people are also social liberals to some extent. They believe that fire departments, and some aspects of transportation should be nationalised too. Interestingly we think that the fire department should be nationalised not because they are just to important to leave the the private sector, but because doing them any other way creates moral hazards. Say we have private fire insurance and I decide I don't want to be insured. If my house catches fire then it is a big problem for my neighbours. So we make everyone get insurance by socialising it.
Most people are market liberals when it comes to most areas of the economy. Shoe manufacturers have plenty of incentives and competition and there aren't many potential moral hazards.
The trick isn't how much socialism vs free market do we need. The trick is deciding when we nationalise/regulate an industry because it is just to darn important and when do nationalise/regulate an industry because it is in everyone (or "almost everyones") best interest to do so? And of course how many people is enough to be "almost everyone". Under what circumstances do we interfere with the market? The grey areas are things like higher education, hospitals and health insurance, collective resources like sources of water or the electromagnetic spectrum. The banking system is another important area to consider, the entire idea that money has the ability to deliver value is based on a quasi nationalisation of part of the banking industry.
That is very distinct from trade. The real problem with 'free trade' is that we often gloablise labour without globalising other goods. The result is that the working class in the West compete with the working class in places like India or China where the costs of goods and services is generally much lower. In addition by opening up competition and gloablising labour you make aspects of labour regulation meaningless because the regulation just acts as an albatross around the necks of Western workers.
All the while other goods are not globalised. We encourage the formation of monopolies in the products of the west (medicines, mass culture, technological breakthroughs) via patents and copyrights. These monopolies then impose differential price structures (medicines are cheaper in some places and more expensive in others).
The difficulty with international trade and protectionism is that unless you can get other countries to play by the same rules (and our own companies to offer the same universal price on equivilant
Fine, sounds good. So I presume that all protectionist crap will be removed. We will be getting food at Indian prices, electronics at Chinese prices, consumer goods, etc?
The reason we cant do that is because regulation, unionised labour etc. drive up costs. This is actually a good thing from the perspective of net societal welfare (actually it looks like it is a good thing from the perspective of pure growth too given that high GDP growth and well regulated markets occur in tandem).
Problem with globalisation is that companies only want to globalise labour. And they want to globalise it in the sense of de facto reducing all labour laws to the most lax possible. They want the regulation that acts as a form of protectionism for themselves, but they want labour to get none.
The H-1B program is symptomatic of just such a desire. Basically indentured servitude. So I will make you a deal. The day costs of goods and services in the the West are parallel with costs in a currently developing country I will agree to globalising labour, unrestricted immigration with immigrants having exactly the same rights as citizens.
Until that day don't think you are fooling anyone with your ridiculous greed.
Another thing. There is no shortage of competent employees. If there were, the price of competent employees would rise to correct the imbalance.
Lets have a look at a comparable professions and see if your shortage theory holds up.
I'd say a Real Estate Attorney has a similar level of education to a Systems Administrator. The former are currently bringing in about $100,000 before bonuses and extras. The latter $70,000. If there was a short term shortage of good Systems administrators wouldn't the latter value be higher?
After I tell you it isn't a matter of employer counting you go counting employers. I'm not sure what exactly you hope to prove with that.
You then proceed to extrapolate from what I am assuming is your experience getting references from HR to everyone else. Not all references are provided by HR. Most jobs are still provided by SMEs and many of these don't even have a formal HR department. You get your reference from your boss.
You then go on to further reinforce my point without even realising it. If most people are getting a job via "networking/contacts/previous colleagues" then this is another hidden form of indirect collusion. Suddenly my list of potential employers has gone down from the 400 or so you know of in your area to the five or six that I know someone at! The pool of potential employers is now small enough to grant real monopsony power to my employer.
If the market isn't functioning then the 'market rate' at which the job is offered will be below what a functioning market would settle on. They don't have to lower the salary after seeing a CV, because it was below what a functioning market would settle on to start with!
You don't have to have direct collusion to have monopsony power.
There are lots of reasons that might explain why the labour market displays characteristics of a monopsony.
Just to give you an example consider references. They seem harmless enough, let the next employer know what to expect from an employee right? Except they can cause all employers to act like a single entity. Boss number one decides he doesn't like the fact that I don't do something not specified by my contract so he tells the next guy that I'm inflexible. In a competitive environment my CV doesn't make it to the first round of interviews for any future employer. And it looks suspicious if I don't use my last employer.
So without collusion, without the conspiracy you paint me as believing in a multitude of competing employers begin acting like one employer. The labour market has many characteristics of a monopsony.
You cant just simplify the situation down to a numbers game of counting the different employers and employment opportunities, you have to look at the whole market.
You misunderstood me.
The labour market behaves like employers have monopsony power. You don't need a specific monopsony employer.
You make a good point with your last paragraph, unions can become monopsonies. That's an excellent argument for regulating unions just like we do companies. It isn't a good argument for an individual not to join a union in the short term.
Yeah, yeah. The standard American attitude to unions. And pretty much everything you have said is true, the problem is you are ignoring the giant elephant in the room.
Employers form a monopsony and will screw you for every penny they can given the chance and you are comparatively powerless to stop them.
If you work in IT you do not receive a fair wage for your labour. Now I'm not talking about the tired old communist mantra of "capitalists profit because they pay less for labour than it enhances the value of a good" crap. I'm talking about the fact that employers amalgamated over the economy behave like monopsonies. In IT the effect of the minimum wage is non-existant, it is below the monopsony wage. Without labour unions employers can (and do) routinely offer lower wages than a free market would settle on.
Organised labour almost certainly does everything you said it does. But I don't see any alternative to fighting monopsony power.
Being in a union is a selfish act. So is trying to get a monopoly or monopsony in any other market. Business people do it all the time without a seconds thought. Your employer does it all the time without a seconds thought. If these callous bastards are doing it why shouldn't labour? It is in your own best interest to do so because everyone else will screw you. In fact they already ARE screwing you.
I'm not saying labour unions are good. I'm saying that people who refuse to join unions are putting down their guns before they walk out into the firefight.
You want to do that in the vicious dog eat dog world we live in, feel free. Me, I'm not putting down my gun till every other son of a bitch agrees to as well.
No thats fine then, you have a clear and well thought out position that while different from my own is based on what is important to you. If you are happy to remove any government assistance to corporate entities and turn limited liability into a contractual agreement creditors sign up for then I cant argue with you.
I don't value my economic freedom as much as you and I'm prepared to make sacrifices in this area in an effort to increase equality and prevent abuse of power. I also believe that some government interference in the market can protect other rights that are important to me, especially when we are talking about the resources of the commons.
I also believe that by and large if monopsonies or monopolies form, especially monopsonies in the employment market, society as a whole suffers. I believe that society suffers less if those monopolies or monopsonies are nationalised or heavily regulated. Sometimes social welfare can be improved by government intervention. Monopsonies in the labour market grant so much power to one group that they can amount to an abusive de facto government, they border on serfdom.
You are aware that the employment market has many of the characteristics of a monopsony right? It is all well and good to say that government shouldn't interfere but how do you correct the ensuing and inevitable market failure?
If we are going to allow very large employers to form as a result of granting them limited liability status or by creating natural monopolies through copyright laws and patents then we should find a way to ensure that they do not abuse any monopsony power they might have in the employment market.
Now if you are a true libertarian and you want to do away with limited liability status and government mandated monopolies entirely then that is another story, but don't harp on about government interference in the market when it was government interference that created many of the problems that these laws try to fix.
Personally I don't mind a bit of government interference myself so I'm happy to have some version of the framework we have now.
The solution is actually just two words.
Punitive Damages
And they have to be really punitive. They have to be high enough that Apple shareholders eyes bleed. Businesses of this size almost always act in a manner to forward their best interest without consideration of morals.
All Apple have done is what any large business will do when there is a law. If the PR implications and the impact on employee moral plus the risk of a court case times the cost of it are less than the cost of sticking to the law, they break the law. The only two variables we can change are how often they go to court and how much is extracted when they get there.
Everything else is just loopholes.
I said nothing about competitive, I said risky. Increasing pay across the board would reduce the perceived risk. So would introducing new permanent positions somewhere between a tenured professor (who should be paid something comparable to a professional football players wage) and a postdoc. Perhaps make them primarily teaching roles or some such. Having an environment where everyone fears for their job daily and has to move house once every two years doesn't do anyone any good.
I'm a man. I can think outside the box. My point wasn't all men are crap. It wasn't even that most men are crap or that men are crap at all. My point was that the current bounds of science were largely drawn by men, and there are huge benefits to having people who, by virtue of the population from which the are drawn, think differently. We have the statistics, certain kinds of outliers are more likely to be female than male. Getting more women into science will give us more of those individuals (hopefully).
The point I was making was that in the short term the pay off of having more women in the hard sciences might be even higher. These fields have been dominated by men for hundreds of years and it is far more likely they progressed primarily in directions most concordant with the distribution of male modes of thought.
You have drastically over simplified the problem and reduced my argument to a straw man.
I've seen precisely the argument I'm making in action. The scientist who brings in the most money in my department is a woman. She works in a field none of my other colleagues would touch because they just aren't interested because it is 'low prestige' and doesn't run with the prevailing culture. She is an exceptional research scientist. I'm not saying she does exceptional work because she is a woman, but being a woman made it more likely she would have an interest in a neglected field. I'm saying we need to make the most of the resources we have available and having a discipline 95% male isn't doing that.
The system wasn't designed by woman haters. I said the problem isn't discrimination. The problem is that the system encourages a vicious cycle because the system itself is inherently sexist.
"A shame, but if working in science means these people won't be working in another field, that's a catastrophe for that other field, right?"
Depends entirely on what those other fields are. There are optimisations to be made in the hard sciences. The hard sciences are pretty much the reason for the modern age, and many if not most of the civilisation threatening problem we now face will be solved by breakthrough in the physical sciences. Having something that important poorly configured is a catastrophe. You don't have to lose people in other disciplines just because you optimise one (and many disciplines which are wholly gender bias against men could do with reform too).
"Ah, our new drastically (sic) different risk-adverse overlords. Science has been fine for the past 100 years with a very low number of females, and it will be fine for another 100 years without changing this."
You are over generalising. You have assumed the reason that an exceptional individual doesn't go into the hard sciences is the same as the reason ordinary folks don't. Science might be fine, but it isn't optimal.
You may well be for more women in the sciences, but you haven't proposed one way to encourage that. You also haven't presented any compelling reason why you would want more women in science. I want more women in science because I see a vast under utilised pool of resources funnelled into less useful endeavours. I don't see why you care.
Risk, it comes down to risk. If we REALLY want to get more women into the sciences we need the make the risks of the profession lower.
By and large research has shown that the maxim that men and women are equally mentally competent is true. There are a few indications that maybe within specific skills men and women differ a little between populations, but by and large if there is a man who can do a job competently then there is a woman who can too.
However, women are statistically more risk averse. And science (especially the hard sciences) is an incredibly risky discipline to undertake as a profession. Better to be a lawyer or a doctor. And women agree with this assessment. Many countries now train more women in these professions than men.
The real problem with academia isn't discrimination. I've come across no discrimination working as a scientist. The problem isn't how hard academia is. Women are just as tough as men. The problem is that academia is playing roulette with your career, not to mention damn hard. 9 till 9 for pay nowhere near what you could earn in the private sector, no job security until you are in your mid to late 30s if you are lucky and get on a tenure track.
If we want to have more women in academia then the way academics are treated needs to change. Competent (but not brilliant) academics shouldn't fall by the wayside, and brilliant ones should be treated like rock stars.
This applies doubly so in the hard sciences where concrete metrics of achievement increase the perceived risk of those who are less confident.
We are failing young women and it doesn't just hurt them. While men and women are by and large similar, there are biological differences and exceptional individuals who think are certain way are more likely to be female than male. The value of someone who can think outside the box should not be underestimated, and up until now the box is largely drawn out by testosterone junkies. By engineering a system which dissuades women we not only lose out on a significant number of competent individuals undertaking research (a catastrophe in and of itself), but we lose out on those outliers whose drastically different modes of thought might spur important breakthroughs.
We NEED more women in the hard sciences. But quotas will just guarantee mediocrity at best, and at worst they we do more harm than good. Fixing the culture of academia will cost money. Money to pay for job security. Money to pay for an image change. Money to ensure the hard sciences are more cooperative and social. Money to pay higher wages.
But why fix a problem when you can pretend to on the cheap?
1. Most food shortages are not caused by governments. At least not in the way you are suggesting. Poverty stricken countries that cannot feed their population have food shortages for a number of reasons and blaming everything on government is very simplistic. The causes are as diverse as first world market manipulation through subsidy to civil wars.
As an example consider post war Europe. Before subsidies Europe did not have enough food to feed itself. If there was shortage people went hungry, perhaps even malnourished. Subsidies manipulated the market so that farmers over produced food. This is bad in good years, but in bad years it ensured food was still available. It is a simple calculation to perform. If the price of food in a good year was $10 per acre (supply exceeds demand), $20 per acre in a normal year, and $50 per acre in a bad year and almost all years are normal, then no farmer is going to develop much land that costs more than $20 dollars an acre to operate.
Problem comes when you have a nice big market like we have today where farmers around the world are trying to compete with heavily subsidies first world farmers. Subsidies have made even cheap viable land in the third world unprofitable. So even in stable countries it is not desirable to grow much excess food. Even worse shipping over food aid for anything other than a crisis actually makes matters worse.
2. If you are living in poverty it makes perfect sense to have lots of offspring. After all, some might die, and you will need them to take care of you. Even more are going to die if you are malnourished. It is in the interest of the collective good to control population growth, but no in the interest of the individual. It is a giant game of prisoners dilemma. The poverty + western medicine and aid causes the population boom which causes yet more poverty. And we again make the situation worse by making it more desirable to rely on the west rather than fix problems. We also prop up the very fascists you mention which help cause all the poverty.
3. The bottom line is that both you and the GP appear to me to be ideologues. You think that government in all it's forms are bad, the GP thinks that simplistic government intervention and feel good economics are the way forward. The truth is much more complicated than either of you are presenting. You cant just take a situation with moral hazards or natural monopolies and pretend that the market will fix them, and you cant point at the markets insurance brokers (speculators) and assume that because sometimes they incorrectly allocate resources our best bet is to put them all up against the wall and let daddy government fix it all.
Here is my take on the original point. Some of the deposits of these rare materials have not be mined yet because the sources are not economically viable at the current price. If demand increases or supply drops then the price will rise, and these sites will become viable. All well and good. But there is a finite amount of these materials available. Eventually the cost of obtaining them will so high that they are not used in some consumer goods anymore, and instead used only where no substitute exists (or where the substitute is more expensive). So far this all sounds fine, the market has fixed the problem right? The only thing is that the market hasn't fixed anything here. All it has done is find the best fit solution. The problem still exists because the problem is an overal reduction in some quantity we care about (quality of life, GDP growth, take your pick). If tomorrow food spontaneously appeared in peoples fridges then general quality of life would go up (so would GDP growth eventually, after the shock of millions of famers having no jobs wore off). This because having lots of resources is a very good thing. Shortages aren't a problem because the market cant correct for them, they are a problem because they require us to allocate larger amounts of resources to obtaining necessarily materials.
So shortages are bad even though the market can f
Thing is that this really blurs the lines as to who did the copying. You cant easily point and say Person X violated copyright law. You can with a high degree of certainty say that copyright law has been broken, but the question is now, by who?
Probably the person who distributed the key used to reconstruct the file is guilty of distribution. But we don't know, could be argued it was the person who has the different pieces of these files.
This doesn't make distribution legal. It doesn't change the fact that the law has been broken. It does make it difficult to identify who actually did the breaking.
Your logic only works if you believe there is a free market in pharmaceuticals (or oil, or...).
Patents guarantee the exact opposite situation. Now I'm not saying we should do away with patents entirely, all I'm saying is don't be surprised when people who care about using the free market to deal with societies problems get a little bit pissed off when government intervention does the exact opposite of what it is supposed to do.
Patents are corporate welfare (or for want of a better way to put it, corporate socialism). If we are going to have a form of socialism I'd rather one that benefits more people, not less.
"You evidently either (A) don't know thing one about C++"
I think you mean thing zero.
But seriously, C++ is fine for what it is. It is a little old and in places it is showing it's age, but the alternatives all have problems (although I have to say Java is looking nicer and nicer).
There are certainly a few features C++ could do with, but I cant think what kind of problems you must have had to illicit this response. My compiler only spits out a warning if I declare a member function virtual without a virtual destructor. Of course it is bad practice not to complete a class anyway and if you have virtual functions the destructor should be virtual too.
C++ suffers largely because it is the language that is "good enough" to solve most problems. Sure python might be better for something, but why would I bother with getting good at python when C++ is good enough and I already know C++.
End of the day it is horses for courses and C++ is popular for a reason. That reason has very little (although sadly not nothing) to do with geek pissing contests.
Yes, and if we drop corporate tax breaks, make it illegal to operate overseas where labour conditions and safety laws make labour cheaper, drop any program that amounts to using foreign labour as indentured servants, remove all tariffs on goods and services, stop illegal use of monopoly power to manipulate markets, drop any and all laws pertaining to trade secrets, cancel any government mandated monopolies and end limited liability then we can talk about labour.
I will compete globally if everyone else has to.
But we will do labour deregulation last. I will put down my gun if you put down yours. And in the mean time don't be surprised if I try to get myself a better one. Don't point a bazooka at someone and complain when they cling desperately to their pistol.
Please give us an example of one of your revolutionary ideas. It would be the simplest way to determine if you are a kook or not.
Yeah Washington stuck vehemently to the rules of war, like not targeting officers during battle. And when the revolutionaries started to win the war there were no killings or expulsions of loyalists to Canada. Oh no everyone sat down and ate tea cakes.
And lets not forget one of the reasons the war was fought, so that the American colonies could continue their genocidal push against the Native Americans.
While I wouldn't compare Washington to the likes of Rudolf Hess, Don't kid yourself that the revolutionaries weren't prepared to do that which was necessary to see the realisation of their ideology, and while Washington (gentleman that he was) wouldn't have condoned such conduct, I doubt he would have had the authority to stop it. And while we are at it, lets not deify men who, while certainly heros of liberal thought, implicitly (and in some cases explicitly) endorsed slavery and the deprivation of indigenous peoples of their land. The restraint showed by both the loyalists and the revolutionaries in the revolutionary war was a result of the need to keep the populations of the colonies, the British Iles and other powers from intervening, not some overwhelming sense of morality.
That being said you are right, the West doesn't fight for anything anymore. We fight against Communism, against Socialism, against anything slightly to the left of the political spectrum. Now we are fighting against Islamism too. Instead of fighting for liberalism we install and prop up Facists and Despots because we fear the repercussions of democratic elections, we fear the inhabitants of other countries becoming free.
We should start fighting for what we believe, by any means that do not compromise the gains we have already made. Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, these men wrote instruction books. Instructions are completely useless without a clear objective. That doesn't mean that if you know what you want to achieve you can ignore all of the wisdom of the past.
"it is *better* for the environment to go shopping in your car"
You do know that you are still alive and burning energy when you go shopping right? I know it feels like you are dead when you see the price of peppers hit 95c at the local Co-op, but it only seems that way.