Good point. Below is the comment I posted to the blog about Ubuntu not having a price. Now, as far as the other "Unixes" go, I've been playing around with Solaris 10 on VirtualBox, and, my, that thing knows how to not be intuitive! And that's considering it uses Gnome. For instance, lots of critical updates aren't installed automatically, requiring you instead to do things manually in single user mode. The shell doesn't have tab auto-completion or a browseable command history. The "man" command uses "more" as it paging system, not "less", so you cannot go back up, only down. And so on and so forth. It's probably something you can change, sure, although I didn't reach that point yet. But then, it's no wonder these systems never had a chance of becoming popular, costing a lot or not. They make the most esoteric GNU CLI tools seem like paragons of user-friendliness...
When you purchase Windows for $300 or so on a store, what you're actually purchasing is support from Microsoft: a phone number where to call when there are problems, optional updates, these things. These features are absent when you use a pirated copy.
With Ubuntu it's the same: if you want support, you must pay Canonical. The base price is roughly the same of Windows, and you get a very similar package of services. If you don't pay, and prefer using the unsupported version, you are on your own.
Then complement by saying that, other than this, the difference between both is that through it's "anti-piracy" campaign Microsoft attempts to force users to pay, even those who aren't interested in support, while Canonical just doesn't care and will itself sell you an unsupported version for a low price if you also don't care for the full package of services. That contrary to Microsoft, Canonical just isn't in the business of forcing users to pay for something they don't want, need, care or will ever use.
Of course, this last bit isn't that accurate, as due to the GPL Canonical really wouldn't have a right to call free users pirates. But if it wished, it could only maintain source repositories open, not binary ones. In any case, we don't need to dwell into this level of detail when talking to newbies. At the generic level, this explanation is as much accurate as one might wish.
The important point, though, is that Ubuntu in fact has a price point, and if you were to purchase it boxed from a store shelve, that's what it would cost. The "free" Ubuntu we can download from an official Canonical web site is just like the "free" Windows we can download from a pirate website, but with one positive side aspect: it isn't actually illegal to use it.
No, theory does not always come before observation, it logically can't. That an observation may have come from before your current 'experiment' and may have caused the thoughts leading to your current experiment does not change this at all.
It logically must. For you to have your very first "observation", in any meaningful sense, you must have certain tastes that point you to that which will interest you, a certain level of logical reasoning, a certain attachment or detachment to this or that perspectives, and so on and so for. All of this form a subjective basis which leads you to perceive your very first observation. Absent this minimal theoretical framework, you simply won't notice that which would lead you to further new observations. A theory, no matter how simple, comes first. It only doesn't come first if you consider the process by which one learns to interact with the world, but even there, you still have a minimal set of core belief that you cannot depart with, such as that there's an external world, and in turn condition the way you interact with it.
If you make such a claim, how about providing the reasoning that demonstrates this? I did provide the reasoning for why it does so for the definition you provide, and what the scope of the subset is. Please provide such a reasoning yourself and demonstrate the limited scope.
Okay. Using your argumentation "method", or lack thereof, I can very well assume that anyone who says, as you did, that "a free market is a market free of anticompetitive influences", has a political motivation and an agenda, for he is "clearly" favoring political movements who strive for actions that will increase competition, even if they decrease the objective freedom of those involved.
If you feel this is an absurd mischaracterization of what you deem as a neutral take on the subject, I'll agree. For the same reason, that's how I see it when you do the same thing to my take on the subject.
Simply put, and contrary to what you insist in saying, saying that the proper definition of "a free market" is "that where individuals can deal with each other free of interference from 3rd parties" does not necessarily lead to a defense of this or that political movement. One can agree with this definition all the while taking what it defines as negative thing, then saying: "and that's why we are against free markets", as many political movements in fact do.
Here's a simple exercise. Suppose your definition was accepted all around the world by everyone, no matter who. Left, right, libertarians, everyone. Do you think this would change an iota on what libertarians defend? They would simply say: "Well, fine. Then we aren't exactly defenders of the 'free marker', we are defenders of freedom itself!!!" Then, in the same vein, someone else would take this definition of yours and start labeling himself as defender of "the free market". Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
I'm sure you can find a limited scope, but I am also sure you will have a very hard time demonstrating how that actually predetermines the situations in which the definition is usable.
Of course not. Rather the contrary, the "someone else" I mention above would easily be some subset of the social-democrats. Who do you think has always proposed and defended, for example, anti-trust laws? You definition works well for their use, all the while strongly limiting those who believe that no, a natural quasi-monopolistic situation in this or that context isn't a limitation on the market's freedom.
You can either make a convincing argument as to why the definition itself is not politically motivated, or you can stop using it. Everything else you do with regards to it is trying to cloud things.
Ah, it's very simple indeed. As implied above, the word "free" is in itself value neutral. Saying that a market is free in this or that sense doesn't carry with it, by its
Thoughts always predetermine observations. In the rare occasions where one's predetermined observations happen to not fit science advances, for sure. But most of the time the thought change comes first, and with it lots of changes in observation.
I'm sorry you don't understand that the very first step in scientific inquiry is about: developing a theory on what to observe. Science is never about the whole, it's always about subsets of the whole, subsets that must be delimited before any study can even begin. Your attempt at redefinitions create as much an arbitrary subset of reality as mine, and all your ad homines and assumptions about my hidden motivations, agendas and the like won't change this.
But if you really want to have a productive debate, I suggest you first try to understand what a market is. Yes, simply a market, without any qualification. Get this right first, and then go on trying to determine what adjectives can be applied to it, and in which way. There's nothing like going down to the basics.
PS.: Just to make things clear, my "political affiliation" is pre-modern, and radically non-libertarian. Somewhere in this thread I mentioned to which authors I subscribe. Seek around.
Generally speaking, the most similar body to a board of directors is "soviet russia's" politbureau.
True, true. But then, you also find huge companies that decide to break down into smaller units, and holdings who, although owning lots of companies, let them all operate as individual entities, provided royalties keep coming to the shareholders. In short, there's a lot of variation, and what forces these corporations to experiments with these different models is competition.
That's why our best defense against corporations isn't strong regulation, which they love because it blocks competition from arising, but rather to make it so that they have to keep competing and innovating and trying and erring and trying again and etc. etc. etc. Forcing corporations to work under the pressure of actual capitalism is the way to go.
Why the heck, then, all known corporations opt by the so-ill "comunist" strategies? If they are so fond of capitalism, why is it that they don't promote it within their own bussiness?
Huge corporations aren't fond of capitalism. They're fond of profits, which isn't the same thing. Capitalism is about competition, and in a competitive system, who's profiting today might stop profiting tomorrow and go bankrupt the next day. So, what a huge business want is always a way to prevent competition, guaranteeing for itself a constant, stable, and undisturbed source of profits. In other words, they want control, and if possible, absolute control. So much, in fact, that you don't see huge corporation refusing to make business with actual communist regimes (since you brought the subject). Quite the opposite, they historically have funded dictatorial regimes (communist and non-communist alike) whenever it was feasible. Why? Because it's much, much easier to make huge deals with a single individual, or a small group of individuals, who are all powerful over a country and thus able to determine what the whole population will do, than it is to do thousand of thousands of deals with individuals and small businesses spread over the same territory, all of which are able to seek and find alternative, better offers provided by its competitors.
That doesn't mean, of course, that there aren't exception to the rule. Some corporations in fact institute models of internal competition and purchasing/selling services to between departments, usually as an attempt to become more agile. But I don't know what's the percentage of corporation that do this, or what the actual effects are. Business management isn't an area I have studied much.
Marketing is not just words and creativity. Mostly it is about money and relations.
Relations I think are included, since they're also linked to "words". By what I mean, more specifically, rhetorics, i.e., the techniques for convincing another person to do something. As for employing money, exchanging is the basic reality of any market, free or otherwise, so there's not much to say in regards to it.
You cannot really mean that any upstart can easily match Microsoft's marketing budget and its relations to established outlets.
Easily it surely can't. But as for matching, it really depends. A clever entrepreneur would seek some niche field rather than trying to go in a collision path towards the 200 lb gorilla. Then, once in a better position, and less risk of going bankrupt, he might try, and maybe win. Look back 25 years and the "any upstart" is Microsoft itself, with the menacing gorilla being IBM. Who would think back then that the small interpreters manufacturer would end up forcing the old IBM to change its whole business model to not succumb? These things are possible, they actually happen, and more, they can happen over and over again in a succession of big companies being displaced or forced to change by small companies, that then grow big and suffer the same doom on the hands of a new small one.
Isn't Google doing this exact same thing to Microsoft as we speak? There you have it.:)
No. You forget the very basic notion that for a given bunch of people on a given land extension there can only be one government while you can have more than a company that by any practical means cannot be punished. You are mistaking "government" with plain old "power".
No, I'm not "mistaking" one for the other. I'm affirming one is the other.
Just because there's a common agreed upon body to state those clear limits. Such a body is called, oh surprise, "government". The fact that the government mandates the law have really nothing to do with it being elected by people, by god or by martians: it mandates the law... because it's the government.
No. It mandates the law because it has the power to enforce any law it wishes mandating. It's simple really, but people don't usually like what's implied in this, so they seek nicer sounding words and softer ways to express this concept without actually expressing it. The end result are contradictory statements, such as yours, that a "government without power" can exist, when in fact not having power equals to not having anything at all. As long as they don't have the force to at least engage in a civil war with a minimal probability of winning, they are no government at all, not even candidates to being a government someday, but just a bunch of people who would love to be a government, who talk a lot about how they'd handle things (or not be hunt, in the case of your slave trade example), but that in fact are no government at all.
"We believe that every man is born equal. .." makes for very good rhetoric, but at the same time, for a very small amount of reality.
That makes *two* ways, at least. There always will be "the one reason": now that government doesn't hold the legal monopoly to violence, anyone else is free to use it. That's not just a theoretical issue: history is plenty of examples where private indiviuals and incorporated organizations have used violence (and I'm meaning well-thought organized violence) as a means to reach their bussiness goals.
Correct. And that's why I'm not an anarchist. If you allow for free use of violence, society collapses, hard working but otherwise weak individuals are blocked from prospering, and only the worst of the human predators end up in a positive situation.
Then, the one you answer to is right: you are playing with words. You are trying to look libertarian when you are just playing the "true Scotish" falacy.
No, I'm not trying to look libertarian. I happen to accept libertarian economics, but that's it. When it comes to politics, I'm much more in line with the classical theories of a Thomas Aquinas, a Francisco de Vitoria, a Jean Bodin, an Hugo Grotius, a Thomas Hobbes, a John Locke, than with the anarcho-capitalism of an Ayn Rand, a Lew Rockwell, a Murray Rothbard or a Hans-Hermann Hoppe. My understanding of what a government is doesn't come out of thin air, it's an integral part a very old, very broad range of political theories. From its perspective, the recent attempts at over-limiting the concepts of state, government, sovereignty etc. by linking it to derivative aspects of power, rather than to power itself, are what doesn't make sense, not the other way around.
That's also the probable reason why what I say usually sounds so alien to all those who think on politics only from 19th-century onwards perspectives.;)
I finally understood what's the problem. You adopt the empiricist outlook, but don't know philosophy of science sufficiently to spot its shortcomings and weaknesses, as your table is a very naive and surpassed version of it. I'd suggest you to familiarize yourself with the works of Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos (who merges both) and Feyerabend (who opposes everyone). You'll see how the correct sequence not only is but historically has always been arisen from the "think" aspect. Newer versions of empiricism, such as Pragmatism, all have to deal with this, and so should you.
A good introduction to these authors is the book "What Is This Thing Called Science?" It's easy to find and will point you to the relevant texts.
You may believe it a borderline hypothetical case, and I say it is a case that is consistent with typical human behavior that you can observe every day, so not likely a corner case. In case you failed to notice, in many markets the situation would instantly occur if it wasn't prevented somewhat by regulations.
Declaring it so doesn't make it a truth. It's easy to say such generic things without going down into concrete examples and analyzing them from as many angles as possible.
I didn't read those, but . ..
No "but". Either you're talking about what actual thinkers actually say and fully comparing this to observed reality, or you're indulging in mere straw men, what in fact you do when it comes to history, psychology, and what you think is the libertarian take on both. Now, refusing to directly deal with counter-arguments, refusing to read authors who disagree with your position and might risk convincing you, and relying on straw men and ad hominem attacks, isn't what I'd call a positive intellectual attitude.
Anyway, if instead of attacking me for what you think I think, you were to actually ask what's my take on psychology, of which I didn't speak at all in this thread except to say it's independent of human praxis taken in itself (a realm of human experience you seem to not even acknowledge exists), I might surprise you for how far away I am from the libertarian position, which I, contrary to you, actually know and strongly disagree with. Not to mention my political preferences, of which I effectively mentioned nothing at all, you only went around wildly assuming. But since you said goodbye, I'll agree and just point you to my post history here on Slashdot, where you might find one or two things for reflection. Cya!
Then, when the customer has no choice due to many possible reasons for any serious amount of time, then no matter how free your market is in theory (someone 'could' enter the market in theory even if it is very difficult), it ends up being an effectively non free market.
Ah, now I got your point. Yes, in principle, as a borderline hypothetical case, this makes sense.
For that simple reason an unregulated market will always carry a risk of becomming an effectively non free market, hence . ..
But this does not. You don't offer any proof for this assertion. Besides, libertarian thinkers have dealt extensively with this hypothesis, a.k.a. the "natural monopoly theory". Have you perchance studied theirarguments before dismissing them as if they didn't exist? Or, worse, as if they didn't matter just because of who wrote them?
Your definition predetermines that the only way to achieve a free market is libertarian political ideas, and that makes yours absolutely unusable for any discussion, it is only usable for advocating libertarian political ideas, and hence it is a politically motivated definition.
You saying so without fully demonstrating it doesn't make it true. What if it's the other way around, and political movements just happened to arise from a well constructed theoretical framework? Historically the marginalist theory, including it's definition of free market, has been developed over a period spanning four or five VERY different economic systems, from late 14th century feudalism to the last decades of the 19th century. And even so, it only spawned a clear political movement in the early 20th century. Such historical oversimplifications and ad homines are all but warranted.
But what if the "consensual acts between two responsible individual[s]" consist of one hiring another to provide defense against such acts? According to your own definitions this isn't something that the government can rightfully interfere in, but as soon as this is admitted the "government" has lost its monopoly on defense services and has thus ceased to be a "government" at all, by any meaningful definition. Thus, a market with a minimal government, limited to enforcing contract and property law, is indistinguishable from a market with one or more private defense organizations and no government.
The difference between both scenarios is that the government institutes and enforces a minimal set of objective rules of interpersonal relationships that are valid even between individuals who have never explicitly agreed upon them among themselves. This provides for the minimal stability upon which such explicit agreements can be made.
Another way to express the same idea is the classical political theory concept (coming from as far as the Middle Age) according to which the purpose of a government is to "promote peace". By any means, if necessary. When a society isn't pacified enough so that people can confidently and meaningfully deal with each other, its government has failed and bankrupted, even if it nominally still exists and supposedly still enforces something.
Now, can everyone in a society be reasonable enough so that almost everyone is peaceful and trustful all by themselves? Well, this is hypothetically possibly, yes. But this wouldn't mean "no government", it would only mean that the government is shared by all. In other words, it doesn't matter whether a government is an official institution or a tacitly agreed upon system of never fully explicited rules (if at all): if there's peace, that's by definition a well governed society.
I suggest there is quite a body of historical evidence that shows that under influence of words, people do things that they actually wouldn't want to do, and that defy any reason.
This is of no consequence. A decision is always an atomistic event. At the moment you decide, that's what you wish to do, and you act accordingly. In praxeological terminology, that wish ended up being, at that precise instant, the first on your subjective valuation scale while you had the means to achieve it. If afterwards, reflecting on the incident, your subjective valuation scale gets reorganized in such a way that that same act gets thrown away from it, and you conclude your previous decision was a complete idiocy, that's a second event, upon wish you'll act if you also have the means at that moment. Uncertainty and imperfect knowledge the rules of the game. Pretend they're "bad" and you've entered the realm of fantasy economic, with their almost useless models of perfect this or perfect that.
The fact of the matter is that the "real economy" is always about the linking of such atomistic events of valuations coupled to means of action. Adding psychological analyzes to it might help you understand the "why" of this or that individual having this or that wish as the first on his scale at this or that moment, but it won't help you an iota in understanding economic science itself, for which the "contents" of the many subjective valuations are as much important as the contents of variables in logic, i.e., nothing at all.
Your definition depends on the assumption that the only real anti competitive factor is the government or government like bodies that can use violence or threaten it. Seeing how there are many that hold that 'barriers to entry' are also anti competitive, your assumption is definitely not shared by everyone.
So what? Now scientific certainty is defined and determined by the amount of people who "share assumptions"?
In any case, let's analyze this "shared assumption by many" you mention. What, objectively, would be a "barrier to entry"? Some say that energy production and distribution must be government regulated because it costs billions to build power plants and distribution lines, meaning someone must have tons and tons of money that he can expend as well as much, much time to wait until the new plant and lines start becoming profitable. Well, I must ask: what are the magical numbers for the parameters "cost", "time", "profit", "current competitors" and "affected people", below which one can positively say "there isn't a barrier to entry in this market", and above which it's positively certain that "there is a barrier to entry in this market"? Why can't I say, for example, that a cost of $5000, a time of 1.5 months, a profit of 25%, 5 current competitors and a total of 250 affected people, doesn't constitute a "barrier to entry", while a cost of $10 billion, a time of 20 years, a profit of 70%, 1 current competitor and a total of 25 millions affected people do constitute a "barrier to entry"? Just because these numbers are "huge"? Who's the one "authorized" to "define" what "huge" means?
Sorry, but your example of an (supposedly) as much valid alternative as mine is the only subjective one. It relies on either feelings, or hypothetical mathematical calculus where everything, from variables and their relationships, to their weights and units, is arbitrary. Libertarian economics, on the other hand, distinguishes clearly what are the subjective elements, what are the objective elements, and focus solely on the later, no matter how small their amount seems to be. That's because, no matter how small it is, if they're what we actually have, they're what an actual science must be built upon. Anything else are delusions of grandeur.
The definition I gave on the other hand does not depend on assumptions about what makes for anti competitive influences, and is neutral to how such a situation could be achieved.
But isn't the second part you wrote akin to saying "whenever a business exerts violence I call it a government" with the obvious effect that you can then claim that businesses never exert violence?
No, because it isn't the simply act of doing violence that turns someone or something into a government-like entity. It's the possibility of doing it on the open, with perfect impunity. Taking a typical example: in USA a judge can condemn someone to death. Sure, there are rules and all, but when you pass beyond the details and look at what this means, what you see? That a person (or a group) can command someone (or another group) to kill another person (or group), in the open, and both he and his commanded go unpunished and nonpunishable. This is what government is about: to be fully able to do what for others is prohibited, because there's no one above you to whom you must obey and who can punish you for not obeying.
So, a business that commits violence can have only one among two possible status: either there's nobody above it that can legitimately and legally punish it for doing so, meaning for all practical purposes it is a government-like entity; or there is someone above it who can legitimately and legally punish it and who has the actual power to do so. In the second case, if the violent act the business committed goes against the will of said someone, this business is just a criminal entity, and can be treated accordingly. If it doesn't, then it's nevertheless authorized by this someone, who's still the ultimate legal authority in the matter.
In a democracy there are clear legal limits on what businesses can do so far as violent acts go. For example, it can (usually) defend itself against robbers, by way of contracting private armed guards. But the moment a business goes beyond these limits, it's the obligation of the elected government to act and punish said business. And I qualify "elected" because, in a democracy, the actual government, or rather, the sovereign power, the one who can act without answering to no one, is the people itself, taken as a whole. This is what makes the whole difference.:)
preventing competition can easily be done without (threat of) violent means, by simple means of disinformation.
In other words, by marketing, i.e., words, of which the new competitor has as huge a stock as the already established company, sufficing for the former to be more clever than the later to deflect these attempts.
Marketing, FUD and the like can make customers wary of purchasing from a new player, sure. But they cannot prevent the new player from existing, nor do they guarantee victory for the old player. Preventing competition is something that only violence, or the threat of it, can achieve.
1. You provide a definition of what is not a free market and then say everything else is. I provide a definition of the condition that makes a free market 'free'.
No. The condition that makes a market free is two individuals being able to freely negotiate, period. Anything we add to this are just means to further detail the concept.
2. You fail to account for human psychology and esp. the way humans deal with information. Its too bad, but humans are not perfect, and the world is not ideal. If both were different, your line of thought would be perfectly usable.
No, I don't. Re-read my first post in this sub-thread. The first think I talk there is about humans not being perfect. And about straw man arguments. It fits.;)
Bottomline, you present a definition that is meant to further a political agenda, not one that can be used to determine if there is a free market or not independent of political agenda.
Of course not. It's a ruler. It delimits two extremes. Now, it's obvious that any real economy will fit somewhere in between these two extremes, but pretending they both cannot be effectively used for analysis because in themselves they cannot be found anywhere is, simply put, absurd. Where this to be taken seriously and we should trash all works in political sciences, economy and many other fields. Nonsense.
The political agendas (plural) show up in that you always have people defending an economy to go to some specific point in the line. But that says nothing about the line itself, except maybe that it can (also) be used for purposes other than pure analysis.
wherever you look you find incumbent businesses or business groups who prevent competition from arising
True. But look at how they do it. Excluding support by the owner of the means of violence (the government), a business or business group has only one way to avoid competition from arising: providing goods and/or services at a quality and service level that makes it uninteresting for any would-be competitor to try. Now, sure, there are some kind of dirty ways to do this exact thing, such as by dumping. But dumping is a time-limited strategy, since a company cuts from its own flesh when doing it. If it keeps dumping so for too long, it risks going bankrupt, what means that sooner or later, usually sooner, it stops the dumping.
You should take a closer look at the behavior of business in history and right now; current examples are most easily found in areas of the work where governments are not strong enough to prevent people and organizations with power from acting like they please.
Ah, yes. But that's because my understanding of "government" is broad. For me, "government" is anyone (person or group) able to give orders and not receive them, or, as you call it, which in the end is the same thing, to "act as they please". If there's a region where an entity that elsewhere is called "a company" is the effective ruling power (thus, "government-like"), then that entity is that region's government, even if nominally the "actual", "official" government is another entity.
A free market is a market free of anti competitive influences.
Only governments and government-like organization, i.e., persons who threat the usage of violent means, can prevent competition from arising.
This means your definition and mine are the same, only expressed with other words. For example, if you and I wanted to start a business together to compete on some market segment, and the government said "no", either directly or, as is more common, indirectly (for example, by requesting the fulfilling of all means of useless bureaucratic requirements that only a full team of very expensive lawyers could actually understand), that would be "government interfering in consensual acts between two responsible individual that don't affect unrelated 3rd parties".
Absent violent means (and this includes any law system that allows a competitor to crush another through legal means, which is as far of a free market as one can get in a democracy), nothing prevents anyone from competing with any old established player, no matter how big and menacing it seems to be.
Hayek et al. do not have a monopoly on the term. Just because they define "free market" in a certain way does not mean that opposing definitions or view points are a priori invalid. It's a fact that I will be always at a disadvantage compared to corporations and industry groups who employ whole organizations whose sole purpose is to spin and lie until the cows come home (that is, marketing and lobbying experts).
If you have government interfering in consensual acts between two responsible individual that don't affect unrelated 3rd parties, you have a market that isn't free. That's as precise and to the point a definition as you can get. Of course, the government interfering in acts that do affect unrelated 3rd parties, or preventing a party from cheating the other, isn't an interference in, but rather a defense of, the free market. It's a fine line, and the ideal government, for a libertarian, is that which keeps exactly at it, neither doing more than it should, nor doing less than it must.
I do not have the time nor the inclination to fully research every item I buy or eat.
True. But then, there's still fine limit between what only the government can do on this regards, and what can be left to market solutions such as industry-supported "seals of quality", quality standards, pro-consumer media, etc.
"Small government" doesn't mean "no government". It means sufficient government. But no more than that.
Stop bringing up "pure free markets" in discussions about capitalism, really. Pure free markets have properties that will never exist in reality, such as equally complete and correct information for all players.
No, it does not. Who talks about "complete information" are Keynesian economists who themselves develop these hypothetical models, then misattribute them to the (actual) free market theorists all the while showing they don't exist in reality, as a means of defending their system of government-managed semi-free market economy. It's a typical case of straw man argument.
When you go read actual free market theorists, such as Friedrich Hayek and other libertarians, you can clearly and undoubtedly see they starting with the exact opposite assumption. For them, knowledge of the present is always partial, incomplete, uncertain and most of the time subjective, and even more so when we talk about the future, and that's why free market is better. Were it not the case and a planned economy would be feasible. But since it isn't actually the case, then millions and millions of partially-knowledgeable people reacting almost instantly to fast changes happening around them ends up necessarily producing a better outcome than a bunch of partially-knowledgeable central planners whose decisions, all of which are almost by definition knowledgeless, are not only slow in reacting to changes, but all have the potential of badly affecting huge amounts of people in the same, simultaneous, exact way.
Hayek even went so far as to analyze whether technological advances in data gathering and information processing could in theory reach a point where a managed or planned economy would be able to surpass the effectiveness of fast-reacting, imperfect-knowledge-based free market. His conclusion? That if a planned economy had access to infinite processing power, infinite memory etc. it would still reach, at best, the same effectiveness of the free market. But surpass it? Nope, sorry.
It's unfortunate that, since anti-free-market theorist keep misrepresenting what libertarians think and say, they don't take the time to study and understand these fine analytical points. If they did, actually productive talk could be established. Alas, they don't, and it doesn't.
Separation of church and state can mean one of two things: either all religion is removed from the public sphere, or all religions are included without any preference.
I don't see the reason for the first to be preferred over the second. The place was a church on campus and had a cross. This isn't the government defending a religion. It's simply that no Muslim group asked for a mosque to be built on campus, or a Jewish group asked for a synagogue on campus, or a Shintoist group for a shrine on campus, or... well, you get the picture. Now, if one asked for something like that, and had students there who would benefit from it, and was willing to pay for it to be built, and there was free space available etc., and even so the campus refused, then you'd have the government giving preference to one religion over others.
Refusing all religion rather than allowing them all is merely the cheap exit out. I myself wouldn't mind a religious block on every public campus. Preventing religions for the sake of the separation between church and state is excludent. Inclusion might be a little more expensive and require some extra bureaucracy, but it serves the same purpose and doesn't cause as much ill will as exclusion does.
From an environmental point of view, we should hope it's false because if there is substantially more oil and gas than we think there is, we will sooner or later transform Earth into Venus.
Not necessarily. Even if the abiogenic hypothesis was shown to be correct, that wouldn't necessarily mean either that there are that many more reserves out there, or that Earth's "oil production rate" is higher/faster than our consumption rate. For all practical effects, reserves might "dry up" in an abiogenic oil scenario as much as it does in a fossil oil scenario, the only difference between both theories being that, in the abiogenic one, in millions of years Earth would have developed new oil reserves, while in the fossil one that's either unlikely, or would take substantially more time.
Let me ask something related. I have a kind of slow home machine running Ubuntu (an old 1st gen AMD Sempron 2300+ @ 1.56 GHz, DDR1, SATA1, AGP, you get the picture), and I'd like to have some additional OSes available as virtual machines to just play around and maybe, eventually, who knows, do something useful in them. But all as a simple end user, someone who, in Windows, would be playing on something easy such as Virtual PC (which I in fact used before removing Windows and switching to Ubuntu).
So, from all the virtualization options available, which one do you or others reading this think would suit me the best? I've heard good things about VirtualBox and VMware Server, but this as far as I know...
Of course that wealth must "go" somewhere still - to realtors - saved in banks etc., but then where?
Well, any money that enters a bank doesn't stay there. The bank lends it to people and companies who need or want it. In the first case, it's more products being purchased, meaning companies are driven to increase production and contract workers they wouldn't otherwise. In the second case, it's usually to allow the company to grow. Going from here to there this money in the end means you having more customers.
I think another issue is that many people today buy all that junk on credit. Can people really afford all that stuff, or are they lending money to pay for it? I hate and avoid debt so I won't buy something unnecessary on credit.
Well, lending money for consumption is usually a bad deal, but it actually depends on how crazily the government distorts the economy. I've read cases where people in USA (I'm not American, by the way) can borrow money and have a rate that's lower than inflation, meaning that saving the money to purchase the good once you actually could would be worse. In this case it makes sense to lend and pay on debt. But otherwise, not at all.
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It logically must. For you to have your very first "observation", in any meaningful sense, you must have certain tastes that point you to that which will interest you, a certain level of logical reasoning, a certain attachment or detachment to this or that perspectives, and so on and so for. All of this form a subjective basis which leads you to perceive your very first observation. Absent this minimal theoretical framework, you simply won't notice that which would lead you to further new observations. A theory, no matter how simple, comes first. It only doesn't come first if you consider the process by which one learns to interact with the world, but even there, you still have a minimal set of core belief that you cannot depart with, such as that there's an external world, and in turn condition the way you interact with it.
Okay. Using your argumentation "method", or lack thereof, I can very well assume that anyone who says, as you did, that "a free market is a market free of anticompetitive influences", has a political motivation and an agenda, for he is "clearly" favoring political movements who strive for actions that will increase competition, even if they decrease the objective freedom of those involved.
If you feel this is an absurd mischaracterization of what you deem as a neutral take on the subject, I'll agree. For the same reason, that's how I see it when you do the same thing to my take on the subject.
Simply put, and contrary to what you insist in saying, saying that the proper definition of "a free market" is "that where individuals can deal with each other free of interference from 3rd parties" does not necessarily lead to a defense of this or that political movement. One can agree with this definition all the while taking what it defines as negative thing, then saying: "and that's why we are against free markets", as many political movements in fact do.
Here's a simple exercise. Suppose your definition was accepted all around the world by everyone, no matter who. Left, right, libertarians, everyone. Do you think this would change an iota on what libertarians defend? They would simply say: "Well, fine. Then we aren't exactly defenders of the 'free marker', we are defenders of freedom itself!!!" Then, in the same vein, someone else would take this definition of yours and start labeling himself as defender of "the free market". Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Of course not. Rather the contrary, the "someone else" I mention above would easily be some subset of the social-democrats. Who do you think has always proposed and defended, for example, anti-trust laws? You definition works well for their use, all the while strongly limiting those who believe that no, a natural quasi-monopolistic situation in this or that context isn't a limitation on the market's freedom.
Ah, it's very simple indeed. As implied above, the word "free" is in itself value neutral. Saying that a market is free in this or that sense doesn't carry with it, by its
I'm sorry you don't understand that the very first step in scientific inquiry is about: developing a theory on what to observe. Science is never about the whole, it's always about subsets of the whole, subsets that must be delimited before any study can even begin. Your attempt at redefinitions create as much an arbitrary subset of reality as mine, and all your ad homines and assumptions about my hidden motivations, agendas and the like won't change this.
But if you really want to have a productive debate, I suggest you first try to understand what a market is. Yes, simply a market, without any qualification. Get this right first, and then go on trying to determine what adjectives can be applied to it, and in which way. There's nothing like going down to the basics.
PS.: Just to make things clear, my "political affiliation" is pre-modern, and radically non-libertarian. Somewhere in this thread I mentioned to which authors I subscribe. Seek around.
That's why our best defense against corporations isn't strong regulation, which they love because it blocks competition from arising, but rather to make it so that they have to keep competing and innovating and trying and erring and trying again and etc. etc. etc. Forcing corporations to work under the pressure of actual capitalism is the way to go.
That doesn't mean, of course, that there aren't exception to the rule. Some corporations in fact institute models of internal competition and purchasing/selling services to between departments, usually as an attempt to become more agile. But I don't know what's the percentage of corporation that do this, or what the actual effects are. Business management isn't an area I have studied much.
Isn't Google doing this exact same thing to Microsoft as we speak? There you have it.
"We believe that every man is born equal. .
That's also the probable reason why what I say usually sounds so alien to all those who think on politics only from 19th-century onwards perspectives.
A good introduction to these authors is the book "What Is This Thing Called Science?" It's easy to find and will point you to the relevant texts.
Anyway, if instead of attacking me for what you think I think, you were to actually ask what's my take on psychology, of which I didn't speak at all in this thread except to say it's independent of human praxis taken in itself (a realm of human experience you seem to not even acknowledge exists), I might surprise you for how far away I am from the libertarian position, which I, contrary to you, actually know and strongly disagree with. Not to mention my political preferences, of which I effectively mentioned nothing at all, you only went around wildly assuming. But since you said goodbye, I'll agree and just point you to my post history here on Slashdot, where you might find one or two things for reflection. Cya!
Another way to express the same idea is the classical political theory concept (coming from as far as the Middle Age) according to which the purpose of a government is to "promote peace". By any means, if necessary. When a society isn't pacified enough so that people can confidently and meaningfully deal with each other, its government has failed and bankrupted, even if it nominally still exists and supposedly still enforces something.
Now, can everyone in a society be reasonable enough so that almost everyone is peaceful and trustful all by themselves? Well, this is hypothetically possibly, yes. But this wouldn't mean "no government", it would only mean that the government is shared by all. In other words, it doesn't matter whether a government is an official institution or a tacitly agreed upon system of never fully explicited rules (if at all): if there's peace, that's by definition a well governed society.
This is of no consequence. A decision is always an atomistic event. At the moment you decide, that's what you wish to do, and you act accordingly. In praxeological terminology, that wish ended up being, at that precise instant, the first on your subjective valuation scale while you had the means to achieve it. If afterwards, reflecting on the incident, your subjective valuation scale gets reorganized in such a way that that same act gets thrown away from it, and you conclude your previous decision was a complete idiocy, that's a second event, upon wish you'll act if you also have the means at that moment. Uncertainty and imperfect knowledge the rules of the game. Pretend they're "bad" and you've entered the realm of fantasy economic, with their almost useless models of perfect this or perfect that.
The fact of the matter is that the "real economy" is always about the linking of such atomistic events of valuations coupled to means of action. Adding psychological analyzes to it might help you understand the "why" of this or that individual having this or that wish as the first on his scale at this or that moment, but it won't help you an iota in understanding economic science itself, for which the "contents" of the many subjective valuations are as much important as the contents of variables in logic, i.e., nothing at all.
So what? Now scientific certainty is defined and determined by the amount of people who "share assumptions"?
In any case, let's analyze this "shared assumption by many" you mention. What, objectively, would be a "barrier to entry"? Some say that energy production and distribution must be government regulated because it costs billions to build power plants and distribution lines, meaning someone must have tons and tons of money that he can expend as well as much, much time to wait until the new plant and lines start becoming profitable. Well, I must ask: what are the magical numbers for the parameters "cost", "time", "profit", "current competitors" and "affected people", below which one can positively say "there isn't a barrier to entry in this market", and above which it's positively certain that "there is a barrier to entry in this market"? Why can't I say, for example, that a cost of $5000, a time of 1.5 months, a profit of 25%, 5 current competitors and a total of 250 affected people, doesn't constitute a "barrier to entry", while a cost of $10 billion, a time of 20 years, a profit of 70%, 1 current competitor and a total of 25 millions affected people do constitute a "barrier to entry"? Just because these numbers are "huge"? Who's the one "authorized" to "define" what "huge" means?
Sorry, but your example of an (supposedly) as much valid alternative as mine is the only subjective one. It relies on either feelings, or hypothetical mathematical calculus where everything, from variables and their relationships, to their weights and units, is arbitrary. Libertarian economics, on the other hand, distinguishes clearly what are the subjective elements, what are the objective elements, and focus solely on the later, no matter how small their amount seems to be. That's because, no matter how small it is, if they're what we actually have, they're what an actual science must be built upon. Anything else are delusions of grandeur.
So, a business that commits violence can have only one among two possible status: either there's nobody above it that can legitimately and legally punish it for doing so, meaning for all practical purposes it is a government-like entity; or there is someone above it who can legitimately and legally punish it and who has the actual power to do so. In the second case, if the violent act the business committed goes against the will of said someone, this business is just a criminal entity, and can be treated accordingly. If it doesn't, then it's nevertheless authorized by this someone, who's still the ultimate legal authority in the matter.
In a democracy there are clear legal limits on what businesses can do so far as violent acts go. For example, it can (usually) defend itself against robbers, by way of contracting private armed guards. But the moment a business goes beyond these limits, it's the obligation of the elected government to act and punish said business. And I qualify "elected" because, in a democracy, the actual government, or rather, the sovereign power, the one who can act without answering to no one, is the people itself, taken as a whole. This is what makes the whole difference.
Marketing, FUD and the like can make customers wary of purchasing from a new player, sure. But they cannot prevent the new player from existing, nor do they guarantee victory for the old player. Preventing competition is something that only violence, or the threat of it, can achieve.No. The condition that makes a market free is two individuals being able to freely negotiate, period. Anything we add to this are just means to further detail the concept.No, I don't. Re-read my first post in this sub-thread. The first think I talk there is about humans not being perfect. And about straw man arguments. It fits.
The political agendas (plural) show up in that you always have people defending an economy to go to some specific point in the line. But that says nothing about the line itself, except maybe that it can (also) be used for purposes other than pure analysis.
This means your definition and mine are the same, only expressed with other words. For example, if you and I wanted to start a business together to compete on some market segment, and the government said "no", either directly or, as is more common, indirectly (for example, by requesting the fulfilling of all means of useless bureaucratic requirements that only a full team of very expensive lawyers could actually understand), that would be "government interfering in consensual acts between two responsible individual that don't affect unrelated 3rd parties".
Absent violent means (and this includes any law system that allows a competitor to crush another through legal means, which is as far of a free market as one can get in a democracy), nothing prevents anyone from competing with any old established player, no matter how big and menacing it seems to be.
"Small government" doesn't mean "no government". It means sufficient government. But no more than that.
When you go read actual free market theorists, such as Friedrich Hayek and other libertarians, you can clearly and undoubtedly see they starting with the exact opposite assumption. For them, knowledge of the present is always partial, incomplete, uncertain and most of the time subjective, and even more so when we talk about the future, and that's why free market is better. Were it not the case and a planned economy would be feasible. But since it isn't actually the case, then millions and millions of partially-knowledgeable people reacting almost instantly to fast changes happening around them ends up necessarily producing a better outcome than a bunch of partially-knowledgeable central planners whose decisions, all of which are almost by definition knowledgeless, are not only slow in reacting to changes, but all have the potential of badly affecting huge amounts of people in the same, simultaneous, exact way.
Hayek even went so far as to analyze whether technological advances in data gathering and information processing could in theory reach a point where a managed or planned economy would be able to surpass the effectiveness of fast-reacting, imperfect-knowledge-based free market. His conclusion? That if a planned economy had access to infinite processing power, infinite memory etc. it would still reach, at best, the same effectiveness of the free market. But surpass it? Nope, sorry.
It's unfortunate that, since anti-free-market theorist keep misrepresenting what libertarians think and say, they don't take the time to study and understand these fine analytical points. If they did, actually productive talk could be established. Alas, they don't, and it doesn't.
Separation of church and state can mean one of two things: either all religion is removed from the public sphere, or all religions are included without any preference.
I don't see the reason for the first to be preferred over the second. The place was a church on campus and had a cross. This isn't the government defending a religion. It's simply that no Muslim group asked for a mosque to be built on campus, or a Jewish group asked for a synagogue on campus, or a Shintoist group for a shrine on campus, or... well, you get the picture. Now, if one asked for something like that, and had students there who would benefit from it, and was willing to pay for it to be built, and there was free space available etc., and even so the campus refused, then you'd have the government giving preference to one religion over others.
Refusing all religion rather than allowing them all is merely the cheap exit out. I myself wouldn't mind a religious block on every public campus. Preventing religions for the sake of the separation between church and state is excludent. Inclusion might be a little more expensive and require some extra bureaucracy, but it serves the same purpose and doesn't cause as much ill will as exclusion does.
Don't forget Spore's team version using in-game graphics.
Let me ask something related. I have a kind of slow home machine running Ubuntu (an old 1st gen AMD Sempron 2300+ @ 1.56 GHz, DDR1, SATA1, AGP, you get the picture), and I'd like to have some additional OSes available as virtual machines to just play around and maybe, eventually, who knows, do something useful in them. But all as a simple end user, someone who, in Windows, would be playing on something easy such as Virtual PC (which I in fact used before removing Windows and switching to Ubuntu).
So, from all the virtualization options available, which one do you or others reading this think would suit me the best? I've heard good things about VirtualBox and VMware Server, but this as far as I know...