This is so sad. People often precede their "I have rights." routine with "I pay my taxes". We are led more and more to believe we pay the government for our rights, instead of them being innate to us and we having FORMED government to protect them.
That's kind of the GP's point. You can't suppose all/most other mail boxes have illegal drugs in them. You need reasonable suspicion, or evidence. And no, you can't get it by opening and looking at it just because you feel like it.
I believe we still live in an 'innocent until proven guilty' world, but who knows, these are terrible times with everything changing for the worse I don't know how long that doctrine will stand.
Big businessmen, not politicians, controlled the new industrialized America of the Gilded Age. Whereas past generations sent their best men into public service, in the last decades of the 1800s, young men were enticed by the private sector, where with a little persistence, hard work, and ruthlessness, one could reap enormous profits. These so-called "captains of industry" were not regulated by the government and did whatever they could to make as much money as possible. These industrialists' business practices were sometimes so unscrupulous that they were given the name "robber barons."
Doesn't it sound like the writer is a little biased against 'petty private sector wealth seeking' as opposed to 'noble public sector endeavors'? It makes it kind of hard for me to take it seriously.
If you're interested, here's a link to a small essay by D.T. Armentano on his view of the history of antitrust law and the 'robber barons' in America.
Actually, there is. It's called business regulations and monopoly laws. Ma Bell was broken up, not by the magic forces of the impartial market, but by monopoly laws. Prior to that, they WERE charging more than the market could bear, and they were refusing to budge. Ditto for the railway companies during the Gilded Age; that's how the big rail companies squeezed out competition and captured other infrastructure; they banded together and jointly raised prices to something that the owners couldn't pay, and then bought them out.
Uh, Ma Bell became a monopoly under sanction by the US Government. They might have not been 'broken up' by the market, but they surely weren't propped up by it either.
You are only correct in the railway example insofar that it was not strict laissez-faire at work. Governmental land grants, subsidies and other privileges were granted. But the long-haul/short-haul price discrimination worked exactly the way a competitive market should.
Competition over long trips made the prices ever lower, while in certain short haul scenarios the provider was able to charge a monopoly price. What the 'business regulations' you admire did was simply make all prices equal. To the HIGHER short haul prices. Some progress.:-)
It was the very railroad tycoons that sought regulation in the first place to rationally divide the market and restrict competition!
Face the facts of the past. The laissez-faire capitalist economy has been tried. These aren't new, exciting ideas that will fix the world; they're old, terrible ideas whose damage took years and lives to reverse.
I suppose by 'damage which took years and lives to reverse' you mean the unprecedented rise in the standard of living from the 19th to the early last century.
The idea that monopoly was rampant until the benevolent State came and started its 'trust-busting' is an utter myth. Dozens of companies today have a bigger market share than Rockefeller's Standard Oil had at the time it went to trial. Anti-trust legislation merely an anti-competitive gimmick welcomed by the big players which the consumers ultimately foot the bill for.
I'm no idealistic Randian who thinks powerful industrialists are the ubermensch of our time, on the contrary, it was in the interests of many of them to replace laissez-faire with our current trend of the borderline fascist State. But crimes have been commited on all sides. Unions have used force and even guns against strike breakers.
As aging ideas go, the philosophy of freedom is newer than the alternative: centralized authority and control. That is the old and terrible idea, friend.
There's nothing to stop people from charging obscene crossing fees to ferry over or pass the river.
But there is. In the 'imaginary libertarian paradise' there are no restraints on competition. No government licenses, no prior-restraint type regulations with hefty compliance costs, no special provisions on the tax code, no quotas or protective tariffs.
High prices are the signal to entrepreneurs that a profit can be made. A guy stupid enough to try to charge whatever the traffic can bear is simply signaling to the world that he wants some competition for that business, which will then force him to lower prices considerably.
There's nothing to prevent someone buying the land all around someone else's property, and literally starving them until they sell or abandon or die.
Your example of 'extreme enclosure' to get the owner to sell or leave is not logical or even likely. Wouldn't it make more sense for this desperate buyer to offer the money he spent on buying the 'enclosure' for the property he wanted in the first place? What if the neighboring owners are as stubborn as the original fella? What if one or more private roads pass his property? These guys aren't likely to sell their tarmac strips of land either.
You could just take your objecting argument to its logical conclusion and ask "My God! What if somebody buys the entire country? This is madness!".
If you think about it, in the world we live in, there is nothing stopping anyone from asking a ludicrous price for whatever good/service they provide, yet mysteriously we seem to manage.
Man, sorry, but you were a bit all over the place in your first paragraph. I'll try to stick to the private-property-as-solution-to-tragedy-of-the-commons-theme.
Ah, but they're not too big a problem to handle if you treat them as commons.
Also, while taking private property to extremes might solve many problems if we're all wise and all value things equally, that's a big "if". What if I want to do something on my property that will affect something that you value, but that the legal system does not protect? Say I'm upwind of you. What if I don't like deodorant? What if I want to fart? Or smoke? Or have a campfire? Or burn tires? Or burn oil? Or burn coal?...
Private property laws should protect the physical integrity of property. So if you have a campfire, fart, stink I would probably have to put up with it or buy an air purifier, unless your fart, due to a poisonous rare component, was causing actual harm to people within my property. Burning coal without a scrubber would cover my property with black soot. That would certainly get you sued.
Ownership of something that you didn't create is patently ludicrous! "That's MY tree": what did you do to deserve a tree? What does it mean to own something that simply exists? For that matter, whom do you sue if "your" tree dies due to human-induced climate change? And since trees are crucial to the health of the world (cleaning air, preventing topsoil loss, creating topsoil, making oxygen, sequestering carbon, habitat for animals that probably don't respect your notions of property,.....) trees are commons. This goes back to being a complicated problem to solve if everything is privately owned.
Is that your elephant? It spends time on the land owned by hundreds of people. Who owns the ivory in its tusks? Is that your bat? It kills mosquitoes on my lawn--if you kill it, I suffer.
Is that your gorilla? Here's something that is damn near as intelligent as your average Christian, but it has no interest in owning private property--does that mean that it is owned? How is owning any sentient being not slavery? Who gets to decide whether a lobster is sentient?
Also, who gave you the tree? In a free society I can cut down any tree I want. Do you want to take away my freedom?
I don't think it is. Most of the things I own I did not create. Your argument taken to its logical conclusion is quite ludicrous though. It would mean complete personal autarky. No more division of labor.
About the elephants and bats... fences have already been invented and private property rights do not protect the VALUE of property, but simply its physical integrity. If you own a house in the middle of nowhere and it's worth 100k, I buy a parcel of land next to it and build a 100 apartment skyscraper and your house is now worth 10k you can't sue me because you 'suffered'. I didn't infringe your rights, since there is no right to 'stable or rising property values'.
I really don't know how to answer the gorilla and lobster parts. I don't like eating lobster, for all that's worth. Shrimp, on the other hand...:-)
And, I don't know where you got that, but you have no right to cut down trees, as carrying a hatched while trespassing into someone's property will teach you.
What about children? If property is inherited, then we are not equal--we start out owning as much as our parents did, which should rub in how ridiculous that system is in a society in which we are "equal". If property is not inherited, what happens when the owner dies? Who gets the proceeds from the sale?
We can never be equal, we are all different. What we can do is recognize the same common rights to everyone, so at least someone with the misfortune of being born into poverty or shitty parents has the opportunity to rise as high as his innate talents ( and luck, of course ) can take him. If my parents give the
Then why is well-regulated militia" language attached to it? The sole statement we have that gives state-of-mind context to the 2nd amendment points toward it being with greater concern toward external threats than internal. Don't argue your rationales through other (dead, influential) people's mouths.
Also, anyone who claims that "The Founders" as a group thought/realized anything coherently; well, you're not actually paying enough attention to history. Almost every line of the Constitution was hard-fought over, and not by mythical founder-figures; by men, with constituencies. It's an important document, but not a magical one, and not one designed by perfect accord between supermen.
The fact that the amendment starts with "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, (...)" does not mean that the following "the rights of the people to to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." ( my emphasis ) can have any other meaning. Can't be more literal than that.
I believe I read some Constitutional scholar declare that the expression 'to regulate' at the time had the meaning of 'to make regular' and NOT 'to meddle with it arbitrarily as we see fit'. Can't be 100% on that though, so, grain of salt.
I claim no 'collective consciousness' on the Fathers' part. But that the US Constitution or the Articles of the Confederation was fought over or not is immaterial. What is important is that an agreement was reached, and these documents resulted. It may not be a 'magical' document, but it is not just an 'important' one either. It is the supreme law of the land.
Note that your argument for powerless government falls apart upon the Articles of Confederation. It's a cold, hard truth that you can't actually dismantle government and maintain the benefits thereof. In your privatized rivers system; well, who enforces the torts? And if someone decides to take his balls and go home, well... if he's taking the middle of the Mississippi with him, what do you do?
I might have extremely liberal borderline anarcho-capitalist ideas, but I didn't make any point for 'powerless government' on the other post, just powerless to opress their own citizens.
On the subject of tort law, I suppose the same enforcer there is today. Doesn't the US judiciary handle these kinds of stuff?
Obviously rivers can't be moved, so I suppose if he wants to take his ball home he has to sell it and take the money he got for it with him.
What happens when someone owns a section of the highway, and then, through illness or injury, becomes unable to maintain it, but is unwilling to sell it?
So if your boss gets sick, the company you work for stops their activities? Everybody stays at home on semi-vacation until he feels better?
Now you may say some evil guy buy a part of the river and just keeps everybody out of it and boats can't go thru, people can't drink water out of it etc, etc.
The guy upstream would simply have to ferry stuff over the Mississipi baron, by air or land, to the more reasonable fellow downstream.
It's a ridiculous outcome, but I hope you'll agree that the premise was equally so.:)
Seriously, Tragedy of the commons shouldn't be that hard to understand.
It isn't, and I do understand it. But you must know that the tragedy of the commons is a result of LACK of private property rights.
Of course, privatizing the atmosphere or the ocean is a bit too big of a problem to tackle. But rivers or lakes are totally feasible. With a sufficiently sophisticated in tort law, rivers could be split into smaller segments for sale and upstream pollution would be liable for damages under property law.
And I really 'appreciated' you 'poking' fun at me on the 'quote mark' "'patent' 'thing'".:-)
Rights are enforced by the governments. You might have a natural right to free speech, but that doesn't matter unless someone prevents me from gagging you.
American Revolution kinda reinforces this point: despite the declarations of Natural Law, the very people who made them still kept slaves, because no one forced them to set them free. Slaves remained slaves until the government enforced their civil/human rights and forced the slave-owners to set them free. So, for all practical purposes, the government granted them freedom.
Natural Law is simply a basis for granting rights, but make no mistake: you only have the rights either you or someone else is willing and capable of enforcing. Since the government is the primary power center by definition, that means that you have the rights your government grants you.
Natural law states that we are endowed with certain rights. People institute a government to PROTECT these rights that we already possessed before government came into being. Its very important not to get that backwards. Might is not right.
With that in mind, you should really have a closer examination on your 'government as the primary power center' definition though. If a government is created by sovereign individuals to protect their own independence, what does it say to a government's legitimacy once their power is shifted from creator to the creature?
You are absolutely right that all rights presuppose the individuals capacity to defend them. That's why the 2nd Amendment is in the Constitution. The Founders realized that even a government instituted to protect a set of rights might in the future become the biggest threat to them, so they made sure there was a means of defense to people in such a shitty situation.
"Communal" resources don't need "regulating" to prevent "abuse". We use this little institution called 'private property rights', but that's not arbitrary prior-constraint case-by-case regulation, but LAWS.
Rights 'granted' by governments? Frankly...
Read about natural law and the American Revolution.
Yea, rocks don't need backups, but very few people could read them, and even less could 'etch' them.
I think the unprecedented decentralization and free flow of information of our time is far superior, even if the media we use is much less durable.
On the issue of formats he makes a very valid point tho. All we can do is support open formats and hope others follow our example so they gain momentum and become widespread and long lived.
Not to mention the fact that the US with all their might couldn't defeat the Vietcong. And that was in a foreign country. To have soldiers do what they did in Nam to THEIR OWN COUNTRYMEN would be an additional difficulty to consider.
Man, the US isn't a free market. The government interferes every sector of the economy, Federal regulations, taxes and governmental spending are ever increasing not decreasing, the government makes the money and people are forced to use it in all contracts by LAW for heaven's sake. I could go on.
I really understand and respect your opinion based on thinking that capitalism needs to be meddled with not to be 'bad', your opinion, fine.
But when using the word 'tail', please do not point at a 'leg'.:-)
If FDIC and the SEC did not exist, do you think that the banks would allow me to see their real balance sheets, or would they just tell me "The company expects its capital ratios at quarter-end to remain significantly above the levels for well-capitalized institutions and continues to be confident that it has sufficient liquidity and capital to support its operations while it returns to profitability [www.cbc.ca]"? (...wait, that's what they said WITH the regulators breathing down their necks. Another regulatory hurdle... would they have even bothered to try without them?)
I think I didn't get my 'regulation as a form of collusion' point across... Lemme try to restate it in a makeshift example.
We live on a society with free banking, no central bank, no depositor insurance, no securities or financial regulators. Suppose we got 10 banks to pick from. People care deeply where they deposit their money, since these are fractional reserve banks that will loan their monies out tenfold and if they fuck it up, people might lose their savings. The thing is, if just ONE of the ten banks decides to put out a monthly balance sheet that's accurate, the other nine have NO CHOICE but to do the same thing, or lose out their customers i.e. profits.
Now, these ten banks might collude and agree not to reveal financial information to the public. But that's the tricky part of forming a cartel without the government to discipline 'deal breakers': the benefit to screwing the other guys over by being the first to market with that advantage is too good for any greedy businessman to pass up.
Another thing, these 'capital ratings' expected for 'capitalized institutions' are defined by the regulatory agencies! The Fed itself sets the reserve ratio for all banks, so there goes another 'perk' consumers can base their 'where to deposit' decision on.
Not to mention that while that bank representative was lying his teeth out, their stock kept falling. In a world where movies hit file sharing sites before theaters you can't keep this kind of stuff buried. People will just keep shorting your stock while you assure them you're doing just fine.
Why? If the members' liabilities are actually limited, what does some guy in California (or China) care what happens to Manhattan, as long as he gets his money back before it does?
Opportunity cost. Just breaking even means you lost a profitable use of that capital somewhere else. Its even worse if the thing blows up before he gets his money back. Being a limited corp, their people will just shrug and say tough.
I suppose without limited liability laws limited corps would have have a tougher time getting financing while unlimited companies would enjoy a higher degree of investor confidence. Anyways, better than what we have now.
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This is so sad. People often precede their "I have rights." routine with "I pay my taxes". We are led more and more to believe we pay the government for our rights, instead of them being innate to us and we having FORMED government to protect them.
What in the hell is the world coming to?
That's kind of the GP's point. You can't suppose all/most other mail boxes have illegal drugs in them. You need reasonable suspicion, or evidence. And no, you can't get it by opening and looking at it just because you feel like it.
I believe we still live in an 'innocent until proven guilty' world, but who knows, these are terrible times with everything changing for the worse I don't know how long that doctrine will stand.
(...) a society heading down the path of "All that is not strictly and precisely forbidden is licit" is too sick to survive.
Funny, as a liberal I take the diametrically opposite view.
And I daresay history puts your theorem on a tight spot, since the less free the society, the quicker it marched towards self-destruction.
I thought it was an interesting read, but:
Big businessmen, not politicians, controlled the new industrialized America of the Gilded Age. Whereas past generations sent their best men into public service, in the last decades of the 1800s, young men were enticed by the private sector, where with a little persistence, hard work, and ruthlessness, one could reap enormous profits. These so-called "captains of industry" were not regulated by the government and did whatever they could to make as much money as possible. These industrialists' business practices were sometimes so unscrupulous that they were given the name "robber barons."
Doesn't it sound like the writer is a little biased against 'petty private sector wealth seeking' as opposed to 'noble public sector endeavors'? It makes it kind of hard for me to take it seriously.
If you're interested, here's a link to a small essay by D.T. Armentano on his view of the history of antitrust law and the 'robber barons' in America.
Actually, there is. It's called business regulations and monopoly laws. Ma Bell was broken up, not by the magic forces of the impartial market, but by monopoly laws. Prior to that, they WERE charging more than the market could bear, and they were refusing to budge. Ditto for the railway companies during the Gilded Age; that's how the big rail companies squeezed out competition and captured other infrastructure; they banded together and jointly raised prices to something that the owners couldn't pay, and then bought them out.
Uh, Ma Bell became a monopoly under sanction by the US Government. They might have not been 'broken up' by the market, but they surely weren't propped up by it either.
You are only correct in the railway example insofar that it was not strict laissez-faire at work. Governmental land grants, subsidies and other privileges were granted. But the long-haul/short-haul price discrimination worked exactly the way a competitive market should.
Competition over long trips made the prices ever lower, while in certain short haul scenarios the provider was able to charge a monopoly price. What the 'business regulations' you admire did was simply make all prices equal. To the HIGHER short haul prices. Some progress. :-)
It was the very railroad tycoons that sought regulation in the first place to rationally divide the market and restrict competition!
Face the facts of the past. The laissez-faire capitalist economy has been tried. These aren't new, exciting ideas that will fix the world; they're old, terrible ideas whose damage took years and lives to reverse.
I suppose by 'damage which took years and lives to reverse' you mean the unprecedented rise in the standard of living from the 19th to the early last century.
The idea that monopoly was rampant until the benevolent State came and started its 'trust-busting' is an utter myth. Dozens of companies today have a bigger market share than Rockefeller's Standard Oil had at the time it went to trial. Anti-trust legislation merely an anti-competitive gimmick welcomed by the big players which the consumers ultimately foot the bill for.
I'm no idealistic Randian who thinks powerful industrialists are the ubermensch of our time, on the contrary, it was in the interests of many of them to replace laissez-faire with our current trend of the borderline fascist State. But crimes have been commited on all sides. Unions have used force and even guns against strike breakers.
As aging ideas go, the philosophy of freedom is newer than the alternative: centralized authority and control. That is the old and terrible idea, friend.
There's nothing to stop people from charging obscene crossing fees to ferry over or pass the river.
But there is. In the 'imaginary libertarian paradise' there are no restraints on competition. No government licenses, no prior-restraint type regulations with hefty compliance costs, no special provisions on the tax code, no quotas or protective tariffs.
High prices are the signal to entrepreneurs that a profit can be made. A guy stupid enough to try to charge whatever the traffic can bear is simply signaling to the world that he wants some competition for that business, which will then force him to lower prices considerably.
There's nothing to prevent someone buying the land all around someone else's property, and literally starving them until they sell or abandon or die.
Your example of 'extreme enclosure' to get the owner to sell or leave is not logical or even likely. Wouldn't it make more sense for this desperate buyer to offer the money he spent on buying the 'enclosure' for the property he wanted in the first place? What if the neighboring owners are as stubborn as the original fella? What if one or more private roads pass his property? These guys aren't likely to sell their tarmac strips of land either.
You could just take your objecting argument to its logical conclusion and ask "My God! What if somebody buys the entire country? This is madness!".
If you think about it, in the world we live in, there is nothing stopping anyone from asking a ludicrous price for whatever good/service they provide, yet mysteriously we seem to manage.
I don't live in the US, unfortunately. :-/
Sorry about the frickin big post, but yours was no picnic either. :D
Man, sorry, but you were a bit all over the place in your first paragraph. I'll try to stick to the private-property-as-solution-to-tragedy-of-the-commons-theme.
Ah, but they're not too big a problem to handle if you treat them as commons.
Also, while taking private property to extremes might solve many problems if we're all wise and all value things equally, that's a big "if". What if I want to do something on my property that will affect something that you value, but that the legal system does not protect? Say I'm upwind of you. What if I don't like deodorant? What if I want to fart? Or smoke? Or have a campfire? Or burn tires? Or burn oil? Or burn coal? ...
Private property laws should protect the physical integrity of property. So if you have a campfire, fart, stink I would probably have to put up with it or buy an air purifier, unless your fart, due to a poisonous rare component, was causing actual harm to people within my property. Burning coal without a scrubber would cover my property with black soot. That would certainly get you sued.
Ownership of something that you didn't create is patently ludicrous! "That's MY tree": what did you do to deserve a tree? What does it mean to own something that simply exists? For that matter, whom do you sue if "your" tree dies due to human-induced climate change? And since trees are crucial to the health of the world (cleaning air, preventing topsoil loss, creating topsoil, making oxygen, sequestering carbon, habitat for animals that probably don't respect your notions of property, .....) trees are commons. This goes back to being a complicated problem to solve if everything is privately owned.
Is that your elephant? It spends time on the land owned by hundreds of people. Who owns the ivory in its tusks? Is that your bat? It kills mosquitoes on my lawn--if you kill it, I suffer.
Is that your gorilla? Here's something that is damn near as intelligent as your average Christian, but it has no interest in owning private property--does that mean that it is owned? How is owning any sentient being not slavery? Who gets to decide whether a lobster is sentient?
Also, who gave you the tree? In a free society I can cut down any tree I want. Do you want to take away my freedom?
I don't think it is. Most of the things I own I did not create. Your argument taken to its logical conclusion is quite ludicrous though. It would mean complete personal autarky. No more division of labor.
About the elephants and bats... fences have already been invented and private property rights do not protect the VALUE of property, but simply its physical integrity. If you own a house in the middle of nowhere and it's worth 100k, I buy a parcel of land next to it and build a 100 apartment skyscraper and your house is now worth 10k you can't sue me because you 'suffered'. I didn't infringe your rights, since there is no right to 'stable or rising property values'.
I really don't know how to answer the gorilla and lobster parts. I don't like eating lobster, for all that's worth. Shrimp, on the other hand... :-)
And, I don't know where you got that, but you have no right to cut down trees, as carrying a hatched while trespassing into someone's property will teach you.
What about children? If property is inherited, then we are not equal--we start out owning as much as our parents did, which should rub in how ridiculous that system is in a society in which we are "equal". If property is not inherited, what happens when the owner dies? Who gets the proceeds from the sale?
We can never be equal, we are all different. What we can do is recognize the same common rights to everyone, so at least someone with the misfortune of being born into poverty or shitty parents has the opportunity to rise as high as his innate talents ( and luck, of course ) can take him. If my parents give the
Then why is well-regulated militia" language attached to it? The sole statement we have that gives state-of-mind context to the 2nd amendment points toward it being with greater concern toward external threats than internal. Don't argue your rationales through other (dead, influential) people's mouths.
Also, anyone who claims that "The Founders" as a group thought/realized anything coherently; well, you're not actually paying enough attention to history. Almost every line of the Constitution was hard-fought over, and not by mythical founder-figures; by men, with constituencies. It's an important document, but not a magical one, and not one designed by perfect accord between supermen.
The fact that the amendment starts with "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, (...)" does not mean that the following "the rights of the people to to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." ( my emphasis ) can have any other meaning. Can't be more literal than that.
I believe I read some Constitutional scholar declare that the expression 'to regulate' at the time had the meaning of 'to make regular' and NOT 'to meddle with it arbitrarily as we see fit'. Can't be 100% on that though, so, grain of salt.
I claim no 'collective consciousness' on the Fathers' part. But that the US Constitution or the Articles of the Confederation was fought over or not is immaterial. What is important is that an agreement was reached, and these documents resulted. It may not be a 'magical' document, but it is not just an 'important' one either. It is the supreme law of the land.
Note that your argument for powerless government falls apart upon the Articles of Confederation. It's a cold, hard truth that you can't actually dismantle government and maintain the benefits thereof. In your privatized rivers system; well, who enforces the torts? And if someone decides to take his balls and go home, well... if he's taking the middle of the Mississippi with him, what do you do?
I might have extremely liberal borderline anarcho-capitalist ideas, but I didn't make any point for 'powerless government' on the other post, just powerless to opress their own citizens.
On the subject of tort law, I suppose the same enforcer there is today. Doesn't the US judiciary handle these kinds of stuff?
Obviously rivers can't be moved, so I suppose if he wants to take his ball home he has to sell it and take the money he got for it with him.
What happens when someone owns a section of the highway, and then, through illness or injury, becomes unable to maintain it, but is unwilling to sell it?
So if your boss gets sick, the company you work for stops their activities? Everybody stays at home on semi-vacation until he feels better?
Now you may say some evil guy buy a part of the river and just keeps everybody out of it and boats can't go thru, people can't drink water out of it etc, etc.
The guy upstream would simply have to ferry stuff over the Mississipi baron, by air or land, to the more reasonable fellow downstream.
It's a ridiculous outcome, but I hope you'll agree that the premise was equally so. :)
Yea, and I'm pretty excited about it. People might call me a "Paultard". :-)
Seriously, Tragedy of the commons shouldn't be that hard to understand.
It isn't, and I do understand it. But you must know that the tragedy of the commons is a result of LACK of private property rights.
Of course, privatizing the atmosphere or the ocean is a bit too big of a problem to tackle. But rivers or lakes are totally feasible. With a sufficiently sophisticated in tort law, rivers could be split into smaller segments for sale and upstream pollution would be liable for damages under property law.
And I really 'appreciated' you 'poking' fun at me on the 'quote mark' "'patent' 'thing'". :-)
Rights are enforced by the governments. You might have a natural right to free speech, but that doesn't matter unless someone prevents me from gagging you.
American Revolution kinda reinforces this point: despite the declarations of Natural Law, the very people who made them still kept slaves, because no one forced them to set them free. Slaves remained slaves until the government enforced their civil/human rights and forced the slave-owners to set them free. So, for all practical purposes, the government granted them freedom.
Natural Law is simply a basis for granting rights, but make no mistake: you only have the rights either you or someone else is willing and capable of enforcing. Since the government is the primary power center by definition, that means that you have the rights your government grants you.
Natural law states that we are endowed with certain rights. People institute a government to PROTECT these rights that we already possessed before government came into being. Its very important not to get that backwards. Might is not right.
With that in mind, you should really have a closer examination on your 'government as the primary power center' definition though. If a government is created by sovereign individuals to protect their own independence, what does it say to a government's legitimacy once their power is shifted from creator to the creature?
You are absolutely right that all rights presuppose the individuals capacity to defend them. That's why the 2nd Amendment is in the Constitution. The Founders realized that even a government instituted to protect a set of rights might in the future become the biggest threat to them, so they made sure there was a means of defense to people in such a shitty situation.
What nonsense.
"Communal" resources don't need "regulating" to prevent "abuse". We use this little institution called 'private property rights', but that's not arbitrary prior-constraint case-by-case regulation, but LAWS.
Rights 'granted' by governments? Frankly...
Read about natural law and the American Revolution.
Yea!
Today is the day when a respected and acclaimed scientist is tagged "wrong" by an AC and I'm just rolling with it. Fuck it!
Heh, that's funny, I live in Brazil and never heard of that story. See how far we came on that information thing? You heard it before I did. :P
I'm running the AMD64 version since Alpha 2 and I love the bastard. I've been using Ubuntu since 8.04 and it's the best since that.
Fast boot, fast operation, Java works, Flash works, Wine works, tho I still use WinXP to have the occasional left 4 dead funfest. :-)
I wonder what Ubuntu Zesty Zebra will be like if they keep this pace up. Very exciting.
Yea, rocks don't need backups, but very few people could read them, and even less could 'etch' them.
I think the unprecedented decentralization and free flow of information of our time is far superior, even if the media we use is much less durable.
On the issue of formats he makes a very valid point tho. All we can do is support open formats and hope others follow our example so they gain momentum and become widespread and long lived.
"You're a thought criminal!"
Not to mention the fact that the US with all their might couldn't defeat the Vietcong. And that was in a foreign country. To have soldiers do what they did in Nam to THEIR OWN COUNTRYMEN would be an additional difficulty to consider.
Quit the sniveling. He wouldn't be elected President if he wasn't the top liar of his class. :-)
That would be both a laugh and historically coherent. Obama being remembered as a 'laissez faire' ideologue.
So, you'd rather be screwed by a strong strapping male rather than a limp dicked guy.
I mean, you're still taking it up the ass, but you appreciate the gesture?
Screw the UN, freaking self-important parasites.
Grrrrrr, liberals, grrrrrr :-)
Man, the US isn't a free market. The government interferes every sector of the economy, Federal regulations, taxes and governmental spending are ever increasing not decreasing, the government makes the money and people are forced to use it in all contracts by LAW for heaven's sake. I could go on.
I really understand and respect your opinion based on thinking that capitalism needs to be meddled with not to be 'bad', your opinion, fine.
But when using the word 'tail', please do not point at a 'leg'. :-)
If FDIC and the SEC did not exist, do you think that the banks would allow me to see their real balance sheets, or would they just tell me "The company expects its capital ratios at quarter-end to remain significantly above the levels for well-capitalized institutions and continues to be confident that it has sufficient liquidity and capital to support its operations while it returns to profitability [www.cbc.ca]"? (...wait, that's what they said WITH the regulators breathing down their necks. Another regulatory hurdle... would they have even bothered to try without them?)
I think I didn't get my 'regulation as a form of collusion' point across... Lemme try to restate it in a makeshift example.
We live on a society with free banking, no central bank, no depositor insurance, no securities or financial regulators. Suppose we got 10 banks to pick from. People care deeply where they deposit their money, since these are fractional reserve banks that will loan their monies out tenfold and if they fuck it up, people might lose their savings. The thing is, if just ONE of the ten banks decides to put out a monthly balance sheet that's accurate, the other nine have NO CHOICE but to do the same thing, or lose out their customers i.e. profits.
Now, these ten banks might collude and agree not to reveal financial information to the public. But that's the tricky part of forming a cartel without the government to discipline 'deal breakers': the benefit to screwing the other guys over by being the first to market with that advantage is too good for any greedy businessman to pass up.
Another thing, these 'capital ratings' expected for 'capitalized institutions' are defined by the regulatory agencies! The Fed itself sets the reserve ratio for all banks, so there goes another 'perk' consumers can base their 'where to deposit' decision on.
Not to mention that while that bank representative was lying his teeth out, their stock kept falling. In a world where movies hit file sharing sites before theaters you can't keep this kind of stuff buried. People will just keep shorting your stock while you assure them you're doing just fine.
Why? If the members' liabilities are actually limited, what does some guy in California (or China) care what happens to Manhattan, as long as he gets his money back before it does?
Opportunity cost. Just breaking even means you lost a profitable use of that capital somewhere else. Its even worse if the thing blows up before he gets his money back. Being a limited corp, their people will just shrug and say tough.
I suppose without limited liability laws limited corps would have have a tougher time getting financing while unlimited companies would enjoy a higher degree of investor confidence. Anyways, better than what we have now.