If this lawsuit succeeds the native americans could only sue the catholic church for slander and defamation eg: saying they had no souls and could be slaughtered like animals or however manifest destiny is justified.
Except the Catholic Church never did either of those things. They're urban legends.
About your first allegation, it suffices to say that there's no point in converting something that has no soul. Besides, the Catholic Catechism teaches that everything that self-moves possesses a soul, and among those, everything that moves by virtue of reason to be human, body shape or color not being requirements. (Yes, Catholicism is "aliens ready" since the Middle Ages.) Case in point: the most important Catholic theologian for the first 1200 years of Western Church history, Saint Augustine, was black.
As for your second point, back in the beginning of the discoveries, you already had important Catholic theologians, such as Francisco de Vitoria, one of the creators of modern international law, writing extensively against the European subjugation of the New World. European crowned princes, of course, did it anyway. Politicians are the same, no matter whether they're in a monarchy or in a democracy.
Good reasons to criticize the Church do exists, but these two surely aren't listed among them.
. . . to mount the S3 bucket as a disk, you obviously need root access. But if you do, JungleDisk is hard to beat IMHO.
Not really. If the server kernel has FUSE enabled, and the user space tools are installed, any user member of the related group can mount a "jungledisked" S3 bucket in his userspace without the need for root access.
If they charged by the bit you bet your life they'll charge a lot more than they do now.
Nope. In fact, anywhere I can find a service under a "pay as you go" system, I subscribe to it instead of to the seemingly "cheaper" layered system provided by other companies. And guess what? In all cases I invariably end up paying less monthly than in the cheapest "fixed price" service provided by a competitor, all coupled to an absolutely outstanding service, since it's in the interested of a pay-as-you-go service provider that you use more of its services, not less, so they keep their customer service top notch.
For an example of metering applied to a service which, unlike your examples, are NOT utilities whose prices are heavily regulated by the government, see: american cellular providers.
A bad example. Cellular providers are a regulated market. A company bids for monopolistic rights at a frequency band, wins, and gets to do whatever the hell he wants. Bands are limited in number, thus you can only have a fixed amount of service provider. End result: a cartel, and mafia-level prices.
If anyone could build cellular antennas and tap into a frequency to provide unregulated services, do you really think a situation like this would have developed? It would be trivial to develop a protocol to make such a shared setup work, then open the frequencies to any application. Government got greedy though ("What? To let people use RF without artificial impediments? Without big-friendly-corpTM paying us billions for the privilege? ARE YOU CRAZY?!?"), and the result is what you see.
My preference is for metering by the bit. This would lead ISPs to provide as much bandwidth to their users, and to as many users, as materially possible, instead of the layered system we have nowadays. After all, more bandwidth = a more enjoyable online experience = more time spent in front of computer downloading and uploading = more profits.
There's no reason to treat bits differently from, say, electricity, gas or plumbing. It's a commodity. Use more, pay more. Short on money? Use less, pay less. REALLY short on money? Unplug your computer, use zero, pay zero.
ISPs have the right to stop costs from being dumped upon them, and therefore have the right to throttle, block, and/or prohibit P2P.
They have the right to stop costs from being dumped upon them, yes. They don't have the right to block an user from using the connection whatever way he wants. That right coupled to this non-right means they have in fact the right to pass costs to the user. And that's it. Don't block him, just charge him for his actual usage. Result: those using P2P pay more, those not using P2P pay less. Simple and perfectly fair for all parts involved.
Actually, for most of its history Socialism was an anti-private property, internationalist movement, focused on destroying what it saw as the artificial barriers that keep the international proletariat class separate. Capitalists, as a whole, while pro-private property, were however for the most part of the last centuries, strong defenders or trade barriers, zones of influence, monopolist rights, nationalistic discrimination against goods coming from abroad, etc. Sure, you also had an internationalist dissidence among pro-private property advocates, namely the classic liberals (nowadays called libertarians in the USA), but they were a small minority and no one listened to them.
It was only in the last few decades that this minority group got some influence and helped trigger what's now called "globalism". The odd thing, however, is that simultaneously, for some reason, most socialists gave up their internationalism to become nationalists instead.
Thus, from the old division "nationalist/private property" vs. "internationalism/state planning", we switched into "internationalism/private property" vs. "nationalism/state planning".
What's the reason for socialists abandoning internationalism and embracing nationalism at the same time capitalists were embracing internationalism? I have no idea. From a logical stand point, socialists should have gladly embraced the switch on perspective, and then started working from there. But that it's a pretty interesting inconsistence to observe from the, so to speak, "outside", it is! I myself find it pretty amusing, that's for sure.
By the way: I've replied something related to your remaining points in my reply to the parent, have a look.
The problem with your solution is that, almost anywhere protectionism was tried, it resulted in two things: more expensive products for the population (you yourself said it: barriers to cause products to cost more); general impoverishment of said population (their salary going to pay said increased costs).
You see, in USA you have both rich and poor states. If protectionism were good for the whole of a country, shouldn't it work as well between states of the same country? Shouldn't protectionists defend closing the borders of rich states to prevent poor states from stealing their wealth? Shouldn't rich states impose restriction to the immigration of poor state's citizens, so that they don't steal their jobs?
The problem isn't free trade between countries. Some places are good at producing 'x', others at producing 'y'. It's just logical that they exchange what they do better for what they do worse. There's no point in forcing everyone to do everything "just because", as this removes from everyone the ability to focus and improve and perfect that which they're really good at. The result is at best a well distributed mediocrity.
The problem is not taking into account, in establishing said trade of "best for best", other important factors, such as mutual freedom, without which things start to twist in bad directions pretty fast.
That's the point I was making. The "higher good" I mentioned is at the level of human rights. When human rights are respected, everything else adjusts smoothly. When they don't, and people in general insist on following this path, everyone is guilty of every violation, every torture, every rape, every state-mandated assassination, perpetrated in their benefit. There are no innocents.
Exactly, there's a HUGE amount of money in this. So what China wants, China gets.
The sad thing isn't that it's in China's interest, or in the news corporations' interest, or in anyone you can call "them" interest. The sad thing is that it's actually in "our" interest, because ultimately it's "us" who benefit from what happens there. This comic charge I found the other day explains it better than I could (yes, it's safe for work):
To fight something like this is almost impossible. It'd require millions of people all over most Western countries to chose suffering for the higher good. And we know it'd never happen, unfortunately.
I don't get it, why would I want to trust Microsoft, or anyone, with all my files?
For most common people out there, specially the younger ones, privacy isn't a concern. They favor convenience. Not having to do backups, not having to transfer specific files somewhere else, not having to worry with system maintenance, not having to call a technician to solve configuration issues, having everything you're interested in immediately available anywhere, all of these are too much of a temptation (provided it actually works) for most people to prefer privacy over it.
This of course doesn't apply to enterprises with their own servers and IT department. But home folk would love this.
That put, I must say that, even though I run Linux exclusively at my home computer, I trust my files to Amazon S3 via Jungle Disk as my remote backup service. Everything goes in there encrypted, obviously, but even so the files are still "out there".
Well, sometimes the suits do things right. For instance, I've read the idea for Kung Fu Panda, and not only that, but also the one to have actual combat scenes in there, not mocking combat, were both from a suit.
But we cannot deny that most of the time its suits who manage to wreak havoc over otherwise good scripts. "Hollywooded movies", as some call this, are an undeniable fact of life.
I myself don't find JavaScript cool, but I couldn't say the same about Prolog, Forth or LUA. On top of that, INTERCAL and LOLCODE also manage to be funny.;-)
On a more serious note, if you can "feel" something as uncool, others can feel them as cool. Feeling nothing translates into perfect indifference. And since you posted a comment, your post itself is proof that inanimate tools do cause emotions and sentiments, your own words notwithstanding.
I've never understood how such places (be they prisons or other institutions) are in any way suitable to help people actually recover/change.
I cannot talk about other institutions, but I know for sure that, at least historically, the prison system wasn't thought as a way to help people recover or change, and this probably extends to other cases.
The original notion was that, when someone becomes a threat to society, you had to protect society by removing the threat. In nomadic societies for instance, where having prisons isn't feasible, this was accomplished by, for example, cutting the hands of a thief so that he couldn't steal anymore, or castrating a raper so that he couldn't rape anymore, or throwing the criminal out from the tribe so he could live by his own rules (and most probably die alone and hungry in a few days anyway), or by simply killing him, and so on and so forth.
Sedentary societies, on the other hand, could afford places for criminals and other anti-social people. In the old Hebrew system, for instance, you had the very curious concept of special cities for non-intentional assassins, where they would live for, if I remember correctly, 3 years, after which they could come back to their villages (if they were still alive, of course).
Prisons, thus, were this: just a way to remove the threat someone represents by removing his from contact from the remaining of society. Whether they would be well cared for in there, whether they would get out worse or better, whether they would get out at all (for the most part there was no concept of proportionality between crime and imprisonment time, those in power just kept the condemned away for as long as they wish), were all very secondary concerns.
Thus, it's no surprise that institutions built around that model, or in any case still derived from it, don't fit well (if at all) with the current notion that imprisonment should rehabilitate the imprisoned. The best you can do while still keeping within the the older model is to try to be somewhat fair by linking the imprisonment time and harshness with the crime, but that's it.
Please notice, in addition, that the notion that the judicial system can work as a platform for rehabilitation, rather than as a system to preserve society from anti-social individuals, is itself still highly hypothetical. Thus it's no surprise that governments in general aren't willing to put tons of money into developing an alternative system with unclear results. All I know is that, being neither a psychologist nor a psychiatrist, I have no position on the subject.
In any case, my point is that, understood from its own perspective, the way the prison system works makes sense. It only doesn't if analyzed from some other set of principles.
That no scientific concept is true is a red herring, because praxeology is not a scientific concept. As I was saying.
Sure, Praxeology isn't a "scientific concept". It's a method or, if you prefer, a metatheory or a framework, much like, say, evolution. You use it to develop specific theories which in turn are testable. No framework itself is testable. For instance, you don't "test" mathematics, you use it to develop physical theories that are testable.
Angels causing gravity is not falsifiable. The theory of gravity is falsifiable.
You're confused. The theory of gravity is falsifiable. What is supposed to cause gravity isn't, no matter that it is you suppose causes gravity. If you say it's distortions in space-time, and I say it's angels, we're both being stupid. The only thing we actually know is that two things attract each other given this or that set of equations, period.
Show me the experiment that could falsify praxeology and I'll change my mind.
Why, sure! In 1923 Mises wrote an interesting book called "Socialism", where he developed a very detailed praxeological theory on what would be the necessary outcome of a purely planified economy. Mind you, no historical example of economic planifying existed at the time, the Russian revolution had happened just 5 years before and still hadn't had time to change anything significant. So, all you had were people in the different economic schools theorizing about it, some defending its advantages, others in doubt, others against it in principle, you get the picture. Thus, his theory on socialism stood there, to be either falsified or corroborated by hard historical data once it became available. And guess what? Once the communist block started to fall apart and people could get there to actually look what had happened, it turned out that Mises theory was corroborated in every single conclusion he draw.
Now, one might argue that this doesn't vindicate the Austrian School defense of the free market, that it only shows Praxeology as being useful for developing good theories on the effects of socialist and socialist-like systems. And I wouldn't be able to argue with you on that. There's yet no pure free market system as defended by the Austrians for we to verify whether their predictions about its behavior are right or wrong. But the success in reaching correct deductions about socialism surely suggests that theories developed under the praxeological framework don't lack merit.
. . . if any amount of time before A causes B is allowed, then any A could cause any B, and therefore there isn't any observation that could falsify this idea.
Since all economic theories are time-dependent, you're arguing against Economy as a whole. At least, against it being a hard science. I'd agree with that. Economics is a human science and suffers from all the drawbacks human sciences suffer.
This is obviously false, the money supply expanded tremendously in the 1920's and there was practically no inflation (graph).
Did the money stay within the US, or did it get exported? If the former, then I'll have to agree things are more complex. If the later, that offers explanation enough.
The money supply is not identical to the amount of currency in existence. If any private bank loans out 50% of its deposits, then it has increased the money supply by the amount it loaned out, no government involved. If everyone tries to get their deposits back at once, the money supply will decrease, no government involved.
Of course not. If the bank receives $1000 and loans out $500, keeping $500 within, the total continues to be $1000.
If an economy where the money supply was perfectly fixed has probably never existed, how can you sure it would be better?
I think that gravity is caused by tiny, invisible angels exerting downward force on things. We can't test that, but we can test its effects. My theory is simple, generic, and its effects are testable. Basic pseudoscience.
Sorry, but you have a very weak understanding of what science is.
In fact, not you don't know gravity. You know objects, and know that they attract each other, and know how this attraction is described in equations. The underlying assumptions of said equations, be them "attraction at distance", or "distortions in space-time", or "gravitons flowing at the speed of light", are all unobservable concepts. All hard sciences are constructed upon said unobservables, and this causes no problem, because we see their macroscopic effects working as expected.
If you disagree, I'd like you to show me an "atom". And no, I don't mean a screen showing an image that you believe is an atom because there's an appendage to the machine called an "electronic tunneling microscope". I mean an atom itself.
The "scientific value" of an equation that describes how machine A connects to machine B and produces effect C is the equation itself. Either it fits with observable reality, by which I mean concrete macroscopic things, or it doesn't. The "fantastic entities" embedded in it, be them "atoms" or "invisible angels" or "chi" or "quantum fields" or "strings" or "meridians", are of no importance or concern whatsoever, and I, as a scientific instrumentalist, don't give a damn about them.
Go read Popper. No scientific theory or scientific concept is true. They're "still unfalsified" or "already falsified". Nothing more, nothing less.
So if lowering interest rates causes this latent economic chaos 10 years later, how to we know that Roosevelt's lowering interest rates had no immediate effects and wasn't instead the cause of the recession of 1953? If it's plausible that any lowering of interest rates at any point prior causes recessions, how can you really know which lowering of interest rates caused which recessions?
If you can describe the sequence of events that concretely happens the moment a lower interest is declared by the government, and I mean who got this money when, until it finally ended up spread all over society in the hands of common people purchasing bread and butter with it, you'll have the answer. Try the exercise. Then read about Hayek's triangles. Let's see if your conclusions differ.
Governments have always been able to issue bonds, so I'm not sure when this kind of gold standard ever existed. Fractional reserve banking anywhere in the private sector would mean that the supply of money > the supply of gold specie, for that matter. Both of these things certainly existed in the 19th century.
Yes. And it always resulted in the same thing, whenever a bank decided to issue more paper than it had gold in stock: inflation.
For that matter, gold itself isn't immune from this kind of manipulation, after all, governments can mix silver and thus multiply the available number of coins, as the Roman Empire used to do in its final days. I'd be all for purely fiat money, provided the amount of bills was fixed, and new ones printed only to replace old ones too damaged for circulation. That would result in the same benefits of a purely gold standard.
Yes. An increase in one year was counterbalanced by a decrease the next year, with the average staying remarkably stable, in a slow deflation distorted by just two peaks, around 1815 and 1865. The mean CPI for each decade in the 19th century:
Not a theory I've ever heard before. What exactly were these "cheap loans"? . . . Too much liquidity? During the Great Depression? Bank failures mean the opposite of too much liquidity. (And again, I'm not sure what by "cheap loans" you mean exactly. Lowering interest rates?)
Austrians and Freudians made strikingly similar rejections of the scientific method. von Mises thought that human behavior 1) could/should not be explained by theories that could be falsified, observed or make predictions, and 2) instead could be deducted axiomatically though "natural laws". And these laws can only be expressed verbally, not mathematically. And, of course, only a Austrian economist could interpret the laws correctly.
Have you actually read something from Mises, say, "Human Action", "Liberalism" or "Socialism"? What Mises affirms is much simpler than anything Freud ever suggested: that exchanges between individuals are determined by what each one wants at that exact moment, and that this "want" is a subjective matter, in the sense that one can say he wants "this" more than "that", but that they cannot quantify this "more". Since there's no "want unit" that you can use to measure "wants" (can you imagine yourself saying: "John here has a 105.204 Kwnt for a cheese sandwich; a 3.57 wnt for a new car; a 1.279 wnt for a new house; and right now his level of bathroom need is increasing at a +12.756 Kwnt/hr rate."?), then the very basic foundation of economic exchange is by definition outside mathematization.
This doesn't mean you cannot mathematize other related phenomena, such as prices, which are objective quantities. Or that you cannot historicize exchanges even under a barter system, for example by studying how many bananas purchased how many coconuts each day for the last decade at that Amazonian village. But a science of monetary prices, or a science of bananas per coconuts, is a derivative of a basic science that has no unit of measurement. Necessary conclusion: any science of Economics based solely on objective parameters is an incomplete science of Economics.
That doesn't mean Mises thought it impossible to measure subjective wants. He hypothesized that in future some kind of way to measure this could be developed, maybe through implants. But right then (and right now), objective quantization of personal wants is still outside the grasp of the researcher, so he must deal with this fundamental lack of information.
As for "interpreting", there's nothing to "interpret". Praxeology (the Austrian method) is simple, generic, and its effects are testable as much as anything else in human sciences.
Which all explains why today Austrian economics is taken about as seriously by economists as Freudian psychology is taken by psychologists.
Economists who believe their science only deals with money flows and prices don't take it easy when someone says this is just a part of it.
PS: A "gold standard" where the government can issue paper (such as "war bonds"), promising to give "in the future" gold to the person who
Actually, in almost all countries (at least Europe and South America are this way), "liberal" means someone who defends individual liberty in general, both economic and social, with strong emphasis on the economic side. USA is one of the very few exceptions, actually the only one I'm aware, where the liberal camp had a group split from it to become defenders solely of social liberty, and still get a firm hold the name.
Here in Brazil, for instance, we translate articles from the American English into Portuguese by using the word "liberal" for US' "libertarian", and "esquerdista" (leftwinger) or "socialista" (socialist) for US' "liberal".
The worse thing is that some translators aren't aware of this odd American usage, so they end up doing literal translations that end up sounding like this: "Obama, the libertarian candidate to the White House, will do this and that...":)
Even though these cases you mention are true, they actually reinforce rather than weaken it. That's because, you see, events such as those were so rare, so outside the normal way of things, that they ended up entering history books due to their extraordinary nature, what attests to the extreme stability gold has during for every single second outside those special events. Fiat money, on the other hand, is so weak and easy to tamper with that events such as those, rather than being the exception to the rule, are now the rule itself.
Thus, anyone who thinks the gold standard is bad because of some very, very rare inflationary circumstances, should also be against whatever has a multiple times worse effect. Gold might not be the perfect solution to this, but it surely gets near.
The raw number of "crisis" is one thing. Their effects are another. 20th century ones were much more devastating, just search for the raw inflationary numbers. Things became so bad that nowadays reaching a sustained rate of inflation became official policy for almost all major central banks, rather than the previous state of almost no-inflation. In other words, stay in place, don't move, or don't move as fast as the government wants you to, and that's enough for you to start becoming poorer.
In any gold-like money system (it doesn't need to be gold, anything that isn't "tamperable" by 3rd parties, be it the government or other, works the same), you have booms and busts, all right. However, they're always local booms and busts, reflecting a multitude of changes in market, be them purely economical or other (for example, externalities). In other words, while a sector of economy might become problematic, another would be booming; if that one then goes kaput, a 3rd sector would be alright; then the 1st one can recover; and so on and so forth. The end result, if you consider the economy as a whole, is that you get in average a linear rate of economical growth.
When you change this system to that of fiat money, or any other kind of money that can freely tampered with, the economy as a whole ends up indexed by the monetary policy, and as a result, instead of a multitude of economic sectors each one having its own independent booms and busts, the economy becomes a single sector where all booms and all busts become synchronized and end up happening at the same time.
The important thing on all of this is that having huge synchronized boom/bust cycles is no better than having many small independent per sector booms/busts, because the average growth doesn't change. You simply switch from a slow but regular growth, where people on difficult sectors can switch to other, growing ones, to one of a fast growth of the whole followed by a hard or full stop of said growth followed by a fast growth of the whole etc.
Thus, while from the perspective of the nation as a whole, on the long range, it makes no difference, since the booms and busts cancel each other and the result is an average growth all the same, from the perspective of the individuals the synchronized cycle system is bad, since once the single sector becomes a mess, he has nowhere to move to.
Who then actually profits from the synchronized cycles? Just one group: politicians. The "boom half" of the cycle is amazing as far as votes (and taxes, and government money) go, while the "bust half" is amazing for getting the desperate people to vote in a new savior.
I've seen a theory that the reason for invading Iraq was that in late 2000 Saddam switched to using the Euro. Iran's promoting the same switch, and the talk of war with them keeps popping up.
Yep. It's actually a theory backed by Ron Paul. This the speech where he presented it to the House in 2006: The End of Dollar Hegemony.
I think you're seeing history inverted. I look at the 20th century, and I see cycles an interminable sequence of booms and busts mixed with inflationary and hyperinflationary phases. I look at the 19th century, and I see customer and other prices with almost perfect stability, so much that anyone could save money for bad times by simply storing it in their houses, rather than at some bank, as is required now.
You also talk about liquidity, but it was precisely the artificial liquidity created during Woodrow Wilson's government, by way of cheap loans at below market rates, that created the boom of bad investments that imploded in 1929. And then it was the New Deal that, by providing even more cheap loans and thus creating more (useless) liquidity, that extended what would have been self-correcting recession, into a full blown, decade-long depression.
I suggest you search for "1929" and "gold standard" at classic liberal sites such as the Mises Institute one. People usually accuse them of not using measurements as any good scientific method requires, but whenever I read them what I find the most are historical analyzes. These two search terms alone provide plenty of evidence, and good data.
b) The risk can be strongly minimized by doing what 19th century book authors did: publishing chapters, one at a time, in magazines, profiting (or not) with each issue. To complement my point above, whatever existed can be reproduced.
c) I know it does for the simple reason that there are people who will always prefer to purchase the original. For instance, myself. Even though I can download any film by visiting The Pirate Bay, I prefer to watch them in the movies. Some of those, I go see more than once, then purchase the original in DVD when it's released, then purchase the OST CD, etc. All of this, while two clicks would allow me to get them for free. And, yes, I also purchase lots of ebooks I could get for free the same way.
You clearly don't know marketing. "Cheap" isn't the sole thing that move people.
d) You don't need to fully privatize. You can keep the public service while not making it into a monopoly. Although USPS works, and works well, Fedex, DHL and UPS are out there getting money. Same goes for private paid for roads on the side of public ones. Or for private bodyguard services.
Public and private versions of a service, existing side-by-side for the choosing, is also concurrence.:-)
Sure, there was lots of technology back then, and a lot of well developed engineering techniques. But the point isn't that they didn't have technology, it's that they didn't see pursuing technological advancement as a goal in itself. Most such developments happened in a trial and error fashion, which after lots of cycles developed into some very specific set of rules valid for those cases. The notion of mechanical laws, where the same set of rules apply to very different kinds of objects, simply didn't exist. You had, so to speak, laws of ships, laws of walls, laws of bows and arrows, laws of pyramids, laws of elevated gardens, laws of streets, laws of swords, laws of shields, and so on and so forth. But you didn't have something like "F=ma" that was equally valid for ships, walls, bows, arrows, pyramids, gardens, streets, blacksmithing etc. That's the difference. The belief in the possibility of something like an "F=ma" is something that only came with Descartes and cia.
a) It could work because it did and does work. Maybe you're not aware of nowadays sci-fi anthologies or the importance of fanzines in the comics market, but it happens all the time.
b) There are lots of publishers that live by publishing works in the public domain. They don't seem to be disincentived by the fact dozens of other publishers publish the exact same books they do.
c) In such a copyrightless world, fraud would still be fraud. A "secondary" publisher that printed "OFFICIAL PUBLISHER OF JOHN DOE!!!" in big red letters in the cover, without being in such a contractual agreement with author John Doe, or that printed something like "THIS PUBLISHER SENDS 3% OF NET PROFITS FROM THIS BOOK'S SALE TO JOHN DOE!!!" without actually doing so, could be sued and go bankrupt pretty fast. Thus, readers would see at first glance whether they're purchasing something that supports the author or not.
I think you should learn some marketing. These things work.:-)
d) Well, if you don't think concurrence benefits the customer, I suggest you research what happens in countries where it doesn't exist, or to compare the before and after situation of countries where it didn't exist but now exists. There's a broad range of reasons why the Western countries managed to exponentially improve quality of life over the last centuries for its population, and concurrence is among those. Furthermore, historically monopolies and strict central planning have always shown to produce the opposite outcome.
Thus, yes, concurrence ultimately benefits the customer.
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If this lawsuit succeeds the native americans could only sue the catholic church for slander and defamation eg: saying they had no souls and could be slaughtered like animals or however manifest destiny is justified.
Except the Catholic Church never did either of those things. They're urban legends.
About your first allegation, it suffices to say that there's no point in converting something that has no soul. Besides, the Catholic Catechism teaches that everything that self-moves possesses a soul, and among those, everything that moves by virtue of reason to be human, body shape or color not being requirements. (Yes, Catholicism is "aliens ready" since the Middle Ages.) Case in point: the most important Catholic theologian for the first 1200 years of Western Church history, Saint Augustine, was black.
As for your second point, back in the beginning of the discoveries, you already had important Catholic theologians, such as Francisco de Vitoria, one of the creators of modern international law, writing extensively against the European subjugation of the New World. European crowned princes, of course, did it anyway. Politicians are the same, no matter whether they're in a monarchy or in a democracy.
Good reasons to criticize the Church do exists, but these two surely aren't listed among them.
. . . to mount the S3 bucket as a disk, you obviously need root access. But if you do, JungleDisk is hard to beat IMHO.
Not really. If the server kernel has FUSE enabled, and the user space tools are installed, any user member of the related group can mount a "jungledisked" S3 bucket in his userspace without the need for root access.
If they charged by the bit you bet your life they'll charge a lot more than they do now.
Nope. In fact, anywhere I can find a service under a "pay as you go" system, I subscribe to it instead of to the seemingly "cheaper" layered system provided by other companies. And guess what? In all cases I invariably end up paying less monthly than in the cheapest "fixed price" service provided by a competitor, all coupled to an absolutely outstanding service, since it's in the interested of a pay-as-you-go service provider that you use more of its services, not less, so they keep their customer service top notch.
For an example of metering applied to a service which, unlike your examples, are NOT utilities whose prices are heavily regulated by the government, see: american cellular providers.
A bad example. Cellular providers are a regulated market. A company bids for monopolistic rights at a frequency band, wins, and gets to do whatever the hell he wants. Bands are limited in number, thus you can only have a fixed amount of service provider. End result: a cartel, and mafia-level prices.
If anyone could build cellular antennas and tap into a frequency to provide unregulated services, do you really think a situation like this would have developed? It would be trivial to develop a protocol to make such a shared setup work, then open the frequencies to any application. Government got greedy though ("What? To let people use RF without artificial impediments? Without big-friendly-corpTM paying us billions for the privilege? ARE YOU CRAZY?!?"), and the result is what you see.
My preference is for metering by the bit. This would lead ISPs to provide as much bandwidth to their users, and to as many users, as materially possible, instead of the layered system we have nowadays. After all, more bandwidth = a more enjoyable online experience = more time spent in front of computer downloading and uploading = more profits.
There's no reason to treat bits differently from, say, electricity, gas or plumbing. It's a commodity. Use more, pay more. Short on money? Use less, pay less. REALLY short on money? Unplug your computer, use zero, pay zero.
ISPs have the right to stop costs from being dumped upon them, and therefore have the right to throttle, block, and/or prohibit P2P.
They have the right to stop costs from being dumped upon them, yes. They don't have the right to block an user from using the connection whatever way he wants. That right coupled to this non-right means they have in fact the right to pass costs to the user. And that's it. Don't block him, just charge him for his actual usage. Result: those using P2P pay more, those not using P2P pay less. Simple and perfectly fair for all parts involved.
Actually, for most of its history Socialism was an anti-private property, internationalist movement, focused on destroying what it saw as the artificial barriers that keep the international proletariat class separate. Capitalists, as a whole, while pro-private property, were however for the most part of the last centuries, strong defenders or trade barriers, zones of influence, monopolist rights, nationalistic discrimination against goods coming from abroad, etc. Sure, you also had an internationalist dissidence among pro-private property advocates, namely the classic liberals (nowadays called libertarians in the USA), but they were a small minority and no one listened to them.
It was only in the last few decades that this minority group got some influence and helped trigger what's now called "globalism". The odd thing, however, is that simultaneously, for some reason, most socialists gave up their internationalism to become nationalists instead.
Thus, from the old division "nationalist/private property" vs. "internationalism/state planning", we switched into "internationalism/private property" vs. "nationalism/state planning".
What's the reason for socialists abandoning internationalism and embracing nationalism at the same time capitalists were embracing internationalism? I have no idea. From a logical stand point, socialists should have gladly embraced the switch on perspective, and then started working from there. But that it's a pretty interesting inconsistence to observe from the, so to speak, "outside", it is! I myself find it pretty amusing, that's for sure.
By the way: I've replied something related to your remaining points in my reply to the parent, have a look.
The problem with your solution is that, almost anywhere protectionism was tried, it resulted in two things: more expensive products for the population (you yourself said it: barriers to cause products to cost more); general impoverishment of said population (their salary going to pay said increased costs).
You see, in USA you have both rich and poor states. If protectionism were good for the whole of a country, shouldn't it work as well between states of the same country? Shouldn't protectionists defend closing the borders of rich states to prevent poor states from stealing their wealth? Shouldn't rich states impose restriction to the immigration of poor state's citizens, so that they don't steal their jobs?
The problem isn't free trade between countries. Some places are good at producing 'x', others at producing 'y'. It's just logical that they exchange what they do better for what they do worse. There's no point in forcing everyone to do everything "just because", as this removes from everyone the ability to focus and improve and perfect that which they're really good at. The result is at best a well distributed mediocrity.
The problem is not taking into account, in establishing said trade of "best for best", other important factors, such as mutual freedom, without which things start to twist in bad directions pretty fast.
That's the point I was making. The "higher good" I mentioned is at the level of human rights. When human rights are respected, everything else adjusts smoothly. When they don't, and people in general insist on following this path, everyone is guilty of every violation, every torture, every rape, every state-mandated assassination, perpetrated in their benefit. There are no innocents.
Exactly, there's a HUGE amount of money in this. So what China wants, China gets.
The sad thing isn't that it's in China's interest, or in the news corporations' interest, or in anyone you can call "them" interest. The sad thing is that it's actually in "our" interest, because ultimately it's "us" who benefit from what happens there. This comic charge I found the other day explains it better than I could (yes, it's safe for work):
http://www.interfax-religion.com/img/527.jpg
To fight something like this is almost impossible. It'd require millions of people all over most Western countries to chose suffering for the higher good. And we know it'd never happen, unfortunately.
I don't get it, why would I want to trust Microsoft, or anyone, with all my files?
For most common people out there, specially the younger ones, privacy isn't a concern. They favor convenience. Not having to do backups, not having to transfer specific files somewhere else, not having to worry with system maintenance, not having to call a technician to solve configuration issues, having everything you're interested in immediately available anywhere, all of these are too much of a temptation (provided it actually works) for most people to prefer privacy over it.
This of course doesn't apply to enterprises with their own servers and IT department. But home folk would love this.
That put, I must say that, even though I run Linux exclusively at my home computer, I trust my files to Amazon S3 via Jungle Disk as my remote backup service. Everything goes in there encrypted, obviously, but even so the files are still "out there".
Well, sometimes the suits do things right. For instance, I've read the idea for Kung Fu Panda, and not only that, but also the one to have actual combat scenes in there, not mocking combat, were both from a suit.
But we cannot deny that most of the time its suits who manage to wreak havoc over otherwise good scripts. "Hollywooded movies", as some call this, are an undeniable fact of life.
Since when is ANY programming language "cool"?
I myself don't find JavaScript cool, but I couldn't say the same about Prolog, Forth or LUA. On top of that, INTERCAL and LOLCODE also manage to be funny. ;-)
On a more serious note, if you can "feel" something as uncool, others can feel them as cool. Feeling nothing translates into perfect indifference. And since you posted a comment, your post itself is proof that inanimate tools do cause emotions and sentiments, your own words notwithstanding.
I've never understood how such places (be they prisons or other institutions) are in any way suitable to help people actually recover/change.
I cannot talk about other institutions, but I know for sure that, at least historically, the prison system wasn't thought as a way to help people recover or change, and this probably extends to other cases.
The original notion was that, when someone becomes a threat to society, you had to protect society by removing the threat. In nomadic societies for instance, where having prisons isn't feasible, this was accomplished by, for example, cutting the hands of a thief so that he couldn't steal anymore, or castrating a raper so that he couldn't rape anymore, or throwing the criminal out from the tribe so he could live by his own rules (and most probably die alone and hungry in a few days anyway), or by simply killing him, and so on and so forth.
Sedentary societies, on the other hand, could afford places for criminals and other anti-social people. In the old Hebrew system, for instance, you had the very curious concept of special cities for non-intentional assassins, where they would live for, if I remember correctly, 3 years, after which they could come back to their villages (if they were still alive, of course).
Prisons, thus, were this: just a way to remove the threat someone represents by removing his from contact from the remaining of society. Whether they would be well cared for in there, whether they would get out worse or better, whether they would get out at all (for the most part there was no concept of proportionality between crime and imprisonment time, those in power just kept the condemned away for as long as they wish), were all very secondary concerns.
Thus, it's no surprise that institutions built around that model, or in any case still derived from it, don't fit well (if at all) with the current notion that imprisonment should rehabilitate the imprisoned. The best you can do while still keeping within the the older model is to try to be somewhat fair by linking the imprisonment time and harshness with the crime, but that's it.
Please notice, in addition, that the notion that the judicial system can work as a platform for rehabilitation, rather than as a system to preserve society from anti-social individuals, is itself still highly hypothetical. Thus it's no surprise that governments in general aren't willing to put tons of money into developing an alternative system with unclear results. All I know is that, being neither a psychologist nor a psychiatrist, I have no position on the subject.
In any case, my point is that, understood from its own perspective, the way the prison system works makes sense. It only doesn't if analyzed from some other set of principles.
That no scientific concept is true is a red herring, because praxeology is not a scientific concept. As I was saying.
Sure, Praxeology isn't a "scientific concept". It's a method or, if you prefer, a metatheory or a framework, much like, say, evolution. You use it to develop specific theories which in turn are testable. No framework itself is testable. For instance, you don't "test" mathematics, you use it to develop physical theories that are testable.
Angels causing gravity is not falsifiable. The theory of gravity is falsifiable.
You're confused. The theory of gravity is falsifiable. What is supposed to cause gravity isn't, no matter that it is you suppose causes gravity. If you say it's distortions in space-time, and I say it's angels, we're both being stupid. The only thing we actually know is that two things attract each other given this or that set of equations, period.
Show me the experiment that could falsify praxeology and I'll change my mind.
Why, sure! In 1923 Mises wrote an interesting book called "Socialism", where he developed a very detailed praxeological theory on what would be the necessary outcome of a purely planified economy. Mind you, no historical example of economic planifying existed at the time, the Russian revolution had happened just 5 years before and still hadn't had time to change anything significant. So, all you had were people in the different economic schools theorizing about it, some defending its advantages, others in doubt, others against it in principle, you get the picture. Thus, his theory on socialism stood there, to be either falsified or corroborated by hard historical data once it became available. And guess what? Once the communist block started to fall apart and people could get there to actually look what had happened, it turned out that Mises theory was corroborated in every single conclusion he draw.
Now, one might argue that this doesn't vindicate the Austrian School defense of the free market, that it only shows Praxeology as being useful for developing good theories on the effects of socialist and socialist-like systems. And I wouldn't be able to argue with you on that. There's yet no pure free market system as defended by the Austrians for we to verify whether their predictions about its behavior are right or wrong. But the success in reaching correct deductions about socialism surely suggests that theories developed under the praxeological framework don't lack merit.
. . . if any amount of time before A causes B is allowed, then any A could cause any B, and therefore there isn't any observation that could falsify this idea.
Since all economic theories are time-dependent, you're arguing against Economy as a whole. At least, against it being a hard science. I'd agree with that. Economics is a human science and suffers from all the drawbacks human sciences suffer.
This is obviously false, the money supply expanded tremendously in the 1920's and there was practically no inflation (graph).
Did the money stay within the US, or did it get exported? If the former, then I'll have to agree things are more complex. If the later, that offers explanation enough.
The money supply is not identical to the amount of currency in existence. If any private bank loans out 50% of its deposits, then it has increased the money supply by the amount it loaned out, no government involved. If everyone tries to get their deposits back at once, the money supply will decrease, no government involved.
Of course not. If the bank receives $1000 and loans out $500, keeping $500 within, the total continues to be $1000.
If an economy where the money supply was perfectly fixed has probably never existed, how can you sure it would be better?
What in ec
I think that gravity is caused by tiny, invisible angels exerting downward force on things. We can't test that, but we can test its effects. My theory is simple, generic, and its effects are testable. Basic pseudoscience.
Sorry, but you have a very weak understanding of what science is.
In fact, not you don't know gravity. You know objects, and know that they attract each other, and know how this attraction is described in equations. The underlying assumptions of said equations, be them "attraction at distance", or "distortions in space-time", or "gravitons flowing at the speed of light", are all unobservable concepts. All hard sciences are constructed upon said unobservables, and this causes no problem, because we see their macroscopic effects working as expected.
If you disagree, I'd like you to show me an "atom". And no, I don't mean a screen showing an image that you believe is an atom because there's an appendage to the machine called an "electronic tunneling microscope". I mean an atom itself.
The "scientific value" of an equation that describes how machine A connects to machine B and produces effect C is the equation itself. Either it fits with observable reality, by which I mean concrete macroscopic things, or it doesn't. The "fantastic entities" embedded in it, be them "atoms" or "invisible angels" or "chi" or "quantum fields" or "strings" or "meridians", are of no importance or concern whatsoever, and I, as a scientific instrumentalist, don't give a damn about them.
Go read Popper. No scientific theory or scientific concept is true. They're "still unfalsified" or "already falsified". Nothing more, nothing less.
So if lowering interest rates causes this latent economic chaos 10 years later, how to we know that Roosevelt's lowering interest rates had no immediate effects and wasn't instead the cause of the recession of 1953? If it's plausible that any lowering of interest rates at any point prior causes recessions, how can you really know which lowering of interest rates caused which recessions?
If you can describe the sequence of events that concretely happens the moment a lower interest is declared by the government, and I mean who got this money when, until it finally ended up spread all over society in the hands of common people purchasing bread and butter with it, you'll have the answer. Try the exercise. Then read about Hayek's triangles. Let's see if your conclusions differ.
Governments have always been able to issue bonds, so I'm not sure when this kind of gold standard ever existed. Fractional reserve banking anywhere in the private sector would mean that the supply of money > the supply of gold specie, for that matter. Both of these things certainly existed in the 19th century.
Yes. And it always resulted in the same thing, whenever a bank decided to issue more paper than it had gold in stock: inflation.
For that matter, gold itself isn't immune from this kind of manipulation, after all, governments can mix silver and thus multiply the available number of coins, as the Roman Empire used to do in its final days. I'd be all for purely fiat money, provided the amount of bills was fixed, and new ones printed only to replace old ones too damaged for circulation. That would result in the same benefits of a purely gold standard.
Perfect stability, eh?
Yes. An increase in one year was counterbalanced by a decrease the next year, with the average staying remarkably stable, in a slow deflation distorted by just two peaks, around 1815 and 1865. The mean CPI for each decade in the 19th century:
1800's: $46.50
1810's: $51.50
1820's: $35.80
1830's: $31.50
1840's: $28.00
1850's: $26.30
1860's: $38.00
1870's: $33.40
1880's: $27.70
1890's: $25.90
Compare this to the 20th century:
1900's: $26.60
1910's: $34.32
1920's: $52.62
1930's: $42.48
1940's: $56.22
1950's: $80.98
1960's: $95.92
1970's: $156.97
1980's: $313.44
1990's: $449.10
IMHO, enough said.
Not a theory I've ever heard before. What exactly were these "cheap loans"? . . . Too much liquidity? During the Great Depression? Bank failures mean the opposite of too much liquidity. (And again, I'm not sure what by "cheap loans" you mean exactly. Lowering interest rates?)
Yes. Artificially lowering interest rates below natural market equilibrium level.
Austrians and Freudians made strikingly similar rejections of the scientific method. von Mises thought that human behavior 1) could/should not be explained by theories that could be falsified, observed or make predictions, and 2) instead could be deducted axiomatically though "natural laws". And these laws can only be expressed verbally, not mathematically. And, of course, only a Austrian economist could interpret the laws correctly.
Have you actually read something from Mises, say, "Human Action", "Liberalism" or "Socialism"? What Mises affirms is much simpler than anything Freud ever suggested: that exchanges between individuals are determined by what each one wants at that exact moment, and that this "want" is a subjective matter, in the sense that one can say he wants "this" more than "that", but that they cannot quantify this "more". Since there's no "want unit" that you can use to measure "wants" (can you imagine yourself saying: "John here has a 105.204 Kwnt for a cheese sandwich; a 3.57 wnt for a new car; a 1.279 wnt for a new house; and right now his level of bathroom need is increasing at a +12.756 Kwnt/hr rate."?), then the very basic foundation of economic exchange is by definition outside mathematization.
This doesn't mean you cannot mathematize other related phenomena, such as prices, which are objective quantities. Or that you cannot historicize exchanges even under a barter system, for example by studying how many bananas purchased how many coconuts each day for the last decade at that Amazonian village. But a science of monetary prices, or a science of bananas per coconuts, is a derivative of a basic science that has no unit of measurement. Necessary conclusion: any science of Economics based solely on objective parameters is an incomplete science of Economics.
That doesn't mean Mises thought it impossible to measure subjective wants. He hypothesized that in future some kind of way to measure this could be developed, maybe through implants. But right then (and right now), objective quantization of personal wants is still outside the grasp of the researcher, so he must deal with this fundamental lack of information.
As for "interpreting", there's nothing to "interpret". Praxeology (the Austrian method) is simple, generic, and its effects are testable as much as anything else in human sciences.
Which all explains why today Austrian economics is taken about as seriously by economists as Freudian psychology is taken by psychologists.
Economists who believe their science only deals with money flows and prices don't take it easy when someone says this is just a part of it.
PS: A "gold standard" where the government can issue paper (such as "war bonds"), promising to give "in the future" gold to the person who
Actually, in almost all countries (at least Europe and South America are this way), "liberal" means someone who defends individual liberty in general, both economic and social, with strong emphasis on the economic side. USA is one of the very few exceptions, actually the only one I'm aware, where the liberal camp had a group split from it to become defenders solely of social liberty, and still get a firm hold the name.
Here in Brazil, for instance, we translate articles from the American English into Portuguese by using the word "liberal" for US' "libertarian", and "esquerdista" (leftwinger) or "socialista" (socialist) for US' "liberal".
The worse thing is that some translators aren't aware of this odd American usage, so they end up doing literal translations that end up sounding like this: "Obama, the libertarian candidate to the White House, will do this and that..." :)
Even though these cases you mention are true, they actually reinforce rather than weaken it. That's because, you see, events such as those were so rare, so outside the normal way of things, that they ended up entering history books due to their extraordinary nature, what attests to the extreme stability gold has during for every single second outside those special events. Fiat money, on the other hand, is so weak and easy to tamper with that events such as those, rather than being the exception to the rule, are now the rule itself.
Thus, anyone who thinks the gold standard is bad because of some very, very rare inflationary circumstances, should also be against whatever has a multiple times worse effect. Gold might not be the perfect solution to this, but it surely gets near.
What now? The 20th century has been a lot more stable than the 19th in economic terms.
The raw number of "crisis" is one thing. Their effects are another. 20th century ones were much more devastating, just search for the raw inflationary numbers. Things became so bad that nowadays reaching a sustained rate of inflation became official policy for almost all major central banks, rather than the previous state of almost no-inflation. In other words, stay in place, don't move, or don't move as fast as the government wants you to, and that's enough for you to start becoming poorer.
The "gold theorists" answer to this is simple:
In any gold-like money system (it doesn't need to be gold, anything that isn't "tamperable" by 3rd parties, be it the government or other, works the same), you have booms and busts, all right. However, they're always local booms and busts, reflecting a multitude of changes in market, be them purely economical or other (for example, externalities). In other words, while a sector of economy might become problematic, another would be booming; if that one then goes kaput, a 3rd sector would be alright; then the 1st one can recover; and so on and so forth. The end result, if you consider the economy as a whole, is that you get in average a linear rate of economical growth.
When you change this system to that of fiat money, or any other kind of money that can freely tampered with, the economy as a whole ends up indexed by the monetary policy, and as a result, instead of a multitude of economic sectors each one having its own independent booms and busts, the economy becomes a single sector where all booms and all busts become synchronized and end up happening at the same time.
The important thing on all of this is that having huge synchronized boom/bust cycles is no better than having many small independent per sector booms/busts, because the average growth doesn't change. You simply switch from a slow but regular growth, where people on difficult sectors can switch to other, growing ones, to one of a fast growth of the whole followed by a hard or full stop of said growth followed by a fast growth of the whole etc.
Thus, while from the perspective of the nation as a whole, on the long range, it makes no difference, since the booms and busts cancel each other and the result is an average growth all the same, from the perspective of the individuals the synchronized cycle system is bad, since once the single sector becomes a mess, he has nowhere to move to.
Who then actually profits from the synchronized cycles? Just one group: politicians. The "boom half" of the cycle is amazing as far as votes (and taxes, and government money) go, while the "bust half" is amazing for getting the desperate people to vote in a new savior.
That's all there is to it.
I've seen a theory that the reason for invading Iraq was that in late 2000 Saddam switched to using the Euro. Iran's promoting the same switch, and the talk of war with them keeps popping up.
Yep. It's actually a theory backed by Ron Paul. This the speech where he presented it to the House in 2006: The End of Dollar Hegemony.
I think you're seeing history inverted. I look at the 20th century, and I see cycles an interminable sequence of booms and busts mixed with inflationary and hyperinflationary phases. I look at the 19th century, and I see customer and other prices with almost perfect stability, so much that anyone could save money for bad times by simply storing it in their houses, rather than at some bank, as is required now.
You also talk about liquidity, but it was precisely the artificial liquidity created during Woodrow Wilson's government, by way of cheap loans at below market rates, that created the boom of bad investments that imploded in 1929. And then it was the New Deal that, by providing even more cheap loans and thus creating more (useless) liquidity, that extended what would have been self-correcting recession, into a full blown, decade-long depression.
I suggest you search for "1929" and "gold standard" at classic liberal sites such as the Mises Institute one. People usually accuse them of not using measurements as any good scientific method requires, but whenever I read them what I find the most are historical analyzes. These two search terms alone provide plenty of evidence, and good data.
Oh my, this is brilliant idea! Please provide more information. You may have got some small and valuable gem there!
a) Whatever exists can be reproduced. ;-)
b) The risk can be strongly minimized by doing what 19th century book authors did: publishing chapters, one at a time, in magazines, profiting (or not) with each issue. To complement my point above, whatever existed can be reproduced.
c) I know it does for the simple reason that there are people who will always prefer to purchase the original. For instance, myself. Even though I can download any film by visiting The Pirate Bay, I prefer to watch them in the movies. Some of those, I go see more than once, then purchase the original in DVD when it's released, then purchase the OST CD, etc. All of this, while two clicks would allow me to get them for free. And, yes, I also purchase lots of ebooks I could get for free the same way.
You clearly don't know marketing. "Cheap" isn't the sole thing that move people.
d) You don't need to fully privatize. You can keep the public service while not making it into a monopoly. Although USPS works, and works well, Fedex, DHL and UPS are out there getting money. Same goes for private paid for roads on the side of public ones. Or for private bodyguard services.
Public and private versions of a service, existing side-by-side for the choosing, is also concurrence. :-)
Sure, there was lots of technology back then, and a lot of well developed engineering techniques. But the point isn't that they didn't have technology, it's that they didn't see pursuing technological advancement as a goal in itself. Most such developments happened in a trial and error fashion, which after lots of cycles developed into some very specific set of rules valid for those cases. The notion of mechanical laws, where the same set of rules apply to very different kinds of objects, simply didn't exist. You had, so to speak, laws of ships, laws of walls, laws of bows and arrows, laws of pyramids, laws of elevated gardens, laws of streets, laws of swords, laws of shields, and so on and so forth. But you didn't have something like "F=ma" that was equally valid for ships, walls, bows, arrows, pyramids, gardens, streets, blacksmithing etc. That's the difference. The belief in the possibility of something like an "F=ma" is something that only came with Descartes and cia.
a) It could work because it did and does work. Maybe you're not aware of nowadays sci-fi anthologies or the importance of fanzines in the comics market, but it happens all the time.
b) There are lots of publishers that live by publishing works in the public domain. They don't seem to be disincentived by the fact dozens of other publishers publish the exact same books they do.
c) In such a copyrightless world, fraud would still be fraud. A "secondary" publisher that printed "OFFICIAL PUBLISHER OF JOHN DOE!!!" in big red letters in the cover, without being in such a contractual agreement with author John Doe, or that printed something like "THIS PUBLISHER SENDS 3% OF NET PROFITS FROM THIS BOOK'S SALE TO JOHN DOE!!!" without actually doing so, could be sued and go bankrupt pretty fast. Thus, readers would see at first glance whether they're purchasing something that supports the author or not.
I think you should learn some marketing. These things work. :-)
d) Well, if you don't think concurrence benefits the customer, I suggest you research what happens in countries where it doesn't exist, or to compare the before and after situation of countries where it didn't exist but now exists. There's a broad range of reasons why the Western countries managed to exponentially improve quality of life over the last centuries for its population, and concurrence is among those. Furthermore, historically monopolies and strict central planning have always shown to produce the opposite outcome.
Thus, yes, concurrence ultimately benefits the customer.