It seems that you are advocating that there should be no such thing as patents. If so, who will develop pharmaceuticals?
There are multiple answers to this question, including academia, charitable biomedical research foundations, and possibly the open source model. But the most correct answer is that it doesn't matter, because patents are fundamentally unjust. We might give the same answer to the question of "without slaves, how will plantation owners gather their crops?".
By limiting quantities and the sizes of things that could be used as mixing/pressure vessels, some risk may have been mitigated.
And there you have it-- at the expense of inconveniencing tens of thousands of travelers every day, "some risk may have been mitigated." Better safe than sorry, right?
The problem is that the government's incentives are all slanted towards making sure that nothing bad happens on a plane (or more accurately, that nothing bad happening on a plane could be blamed on them). They have no incentive to take into account the costs they are imposing on travelers, nor whether the supposed risk reduction is actually worth those costs.
The whole point of a patents system is limited monopolies to help the market.
That's the intent, to be sure, but I think the parent's claim is that patents fail to achieve this.
Without such a system, there's nothing stopping me from spending 10 years in a shed developing a revolutionary new vacuum cleaner, bringing it to market - and then you waltzing into a shop, buying one, copying it and selling it for half the price I do.
That's the scenario patent advocates love to trot out, but try offering concrete examples and statistics, not hypotheticals. (Such as how patents allowed James Watt to retard the progress of the steam engine for decades, perhaps?)
The point of a capitalist society is that the "10 years in a shed" bit gets rewarded with a time-limited monopoly...
Whoa there, bucko. That's the "point" of patents, not of a "capitalist society." The "point" of capitalism, insofar as there can be said to be one, is that people trading freely with each other makes everyone better off. You'll no doubt notice that "trading freely" kind of conflicts with government-granted monopolies.
Where monopolies do harm the market is where the system is abused. The obvious solution to that is a system which isn't terribly open to abuse.
To me, the "obvious" answer is that such a system is not possible, because the underlying idea is fundamentally flawed (not to mention unjust).
If you do accept the idea of insurance, then socialized medicine (or at least a socialized insurance system) makes perfect sense.
Have you forgotten the point of the entire discussion? "Massachusetts Makes Health Insurance Mandatory." Mandatory insurance is what I was talking about, not voluntary, private insurance. I'm not sure how you can conclude that choosing to buy insurance is being "forced" to pay for someone else's treatment.
If you choose a name like that, then utter inanities like these, you should expect some brutal mocking.
For most people, "Just die", "Spend the next 10 years in excruciating pain and then die", "Become increasingly paralyzed over the next 15 years and then starve to death", and the like, are not acceptable options in a decision-finding process, even if they appear perfectly rational to anyone who's sufficiently sociopathic.
So those things don't happen in a socialized health care system? Of course they do, and whether an option is "acceptable" or not is determined entirely by what the other options are.
Oh, and nice ad hominem jab there at the end. Classy.
Do you really think that in all that time he hasn't paid more than enough taxes to cover this?
Everyone pays, everyone benefits
These two statements flatly contradict each other: if he has "paid more than enough taxes" to cover his treatment, then he is being harmed by the system overall. Shouldn't it be his choice to get insurance or not, as he sees fit?
The degree of the illness is not relevant, because the same decisions must be made in any case. My point is that while the demand for health care may be less elastic than for most other goods (not completely inelastic, as the parent seems to claim), that does not mean that the market works any less effectively on it as a result, nor that socialization would "fix" the supposed inefficiencies therein.
My point is this: the moment you start qualifying *why* someone should or shouldn't get care, it forces you to clearly define those lines. And by doing that -- you have to leave someone out. Lines get drawn for a reason, otherwise, your answer would simply be "healthcare for all people, regardless of why". So how do you draw those lines and determine what is "wasted" vs. "well spent???
Someone has to draw that line regardless, because we do not have infinite resources to spend treating ailments. And it seems to me the best way to determine whether treatment is "worth it" is to leave it up to the person in question, if he is willing to pay the costs associated with that treatment. In other words, no one should be forced to foot the bill for anyone else's treatment, period.
For now, it remains a fiction that corporations use as an excuse to raise prices and abuse consumers. Face it, the "law" of supply and demand hasn't been working since the 1980s and the "Free Market" has never been.
This is certainly a popular attitude, but neither popularity nor your say-so makes it true. If you actually bothered to present any arguments, I could refute them for you-- but I suspect you are more interested in railing against the "Free Market" than in logic.
The problem with healthcare is that it is not elastic. If I have cancer, a broken leg or some other ailment I have to get it fixed - regardless of the cost.
Utterly wrong. If I have a cold, I can choose to go to a doctor, pop some pills to mask the symptoms, or sit at home with a cup of soup and a box of tissues and tough it out. The choice is similar for more serious ailments-- for example, my knee recently started giving me a lot of pain when I run, yet if treatment turns out expensive enough, I will probably just live with it. And for all our attempts to pretend otherwise, death is no different.
And even though a terminally-ill patient may indeed be willing to pay any amount of money to extend his life even a few days, eventually the costs become prohibitive by any measure. Is it worth $10,000 to extend a life by, say, a month? $100,000? $1,000,000? Someone has to make that decision, because we do not have infinite resources; and I do not see why having the government make that choice is in any way more efficient or humane. Far better to let the dying and their families choose how much to spend in continuing treatment.
And yes, that means some people will be too poor to afford the treatment they want; but that is a hard truth about the limitations of our technology and our resources, and socialism does not solve this. Instead it shifts the costs around, removing individual choice and creating an inefficient and inhumane system.
It also pays because you can remove the inefficent insurance companies. If everybody is covered then there is no need to have a bureaucracy to decide if a person is covered.
Funny, because bureaucracies arise most often in governments and in highly regulated industries, not in free markets.
I don't see anybody complaining about the socialised road, garabage collection, fire, police and military. When you trust the security of your nation to the government, why do you not trust your healthcare to them too?
I complain about them regularly, but one thing at a time. And I most certainly do not trust the security of the nation to "my" government.
So you got a gash in your hand because you were wandering around drunk, and your fellow taxpayers got to foot the bill for your stupidity. Fantastic. No wonder people act irresponsibly, if they know they won't have to pay for their mistakes.
The government's job is to assure that the market actually functions correctly.
That's a nice fantasy. Here's mine: the government's job is to ensure that we all have lollipops and gumdrops. And who defines "correctly"?
In a situation where you have a small number of large carriers who basically hold both consumers and content producers in their grips, you do not have a functioning market.
The only thing that is required for a "functioning market" is that people are free to try to buy and sell what they want, at the prices they want. (Notice that I said "try": there's no guarantee that anyone will be willing to complete the transaction at a given price.) You later qualify that with "well-functioning," but that again brings up the question of whose definition of "well" we are using.
All it would require is Congress to even mutter this, and I think you would see the market corrected in a fashion that is to the consumer's benefit.
What makes you think the market would necessarily change in a way that would benefit consumers? In order to answer that, you must explain how and why the broadband market is currently inefficient, and how the proposed regulations would remedy this situation. Keep in mind that regulations always produce inefficiencies in the form of overhead and inflexibility, so the improvement must be large enough to overcome this.
After all, the whole point of the market is consumers, and they should be the prime concern of both the government and the players big and small.
Where does this come from? Who decides what the "point" of a market is? And why should the market be more about consumers than about producers?
The basic idea of the copyright owner being the one who decides who gets copies of his work for a limited time is sound. I don't think even a hardened pirate can honestly argue against this.
Avoid ad hominem attacks (like calling copyright opponents "hardened pirates") if you want to be taken seriously. And you haven't been paying attention if you think no one would honestly argue against copyright (for example, see this article I wrote).
It's true that high barriers to entry can make so-called "predatory pricing" work in the short run, but in the long run the would-be monopolist ends up losing money in order to maintain its monopoly. And in any case, we are not talking about an industry with significant barriers to entry here, as pretty much anyone can produce an AMD-based laptop that's basically functionally identical to an Intel one.
If Intel were really interested in "trying to bring capability to young people" then why didn't they sign on with the OLPC project in the first place?
It's entirely possible that Intel agrees with the idea but disagrees with the implementation. OLPC is not necessarily the best way to "bring capability to young people" (though obviously Negroponte believes it is).
Such a tactic is used, of course, to driver others out of the market, so as to establish monopoly.
This is a common idea among armchair economists, but it does not actually work. Once the monopolist raises its prices again, what's to stop new competitors from cropping up?
Ah, so I have to pay Newton's and Leibniz's children to use calculus, right? And pay Shakespeare's descendants to put on a rendition of Romeo and Juliet?
Oh, and we should also ignore the segregation laws that codified and enforced the discrimination against blacks after emancipation.
In a democratic republic like the Unites States, the laws generally follow popular opinion. Anti-discrimination laws only came about after public opinion had already begun to shift away from the old prejudices, and at that point the market could and did handle the issue better than laws ever could.
Ah, and I suppose you believe that it was noble Lincoln who single-handedly ended slavery. It had nothing to do with the fact that public opinion in the North was already swinging against slavery, and that Lincoln was merely seeking a convenient justification for his tyrannical war.
Let's also not mention the Fugitive Slave Law that helped the South prevent slaves from escaping to the North, without which abolitionists in the North would have had a much easier time combating slavery even without the Emancipation Proclamation.
As far as I can tell this would require some sort of new scientific discoveries to even be possible.
Only if the "soul" is posited to exist within the universe, as an entity composed of some sort of matter or energy. If not, we are incapable of testing its existence experimentally, making it a question for philosophy rather than for science.
The stock market is too large, complex, and chaotic a system to accurately forecast.
It's worse than that: even if an accurate model could be constructed, the moment it got out in the wild, it would become useless due to speculation based on its own predictions.
The result of a segregated society has been universally shown to be disfavourable.
Suppose that scientific studies showed that the result of taking all your property and giving it to (say) the World Wildlife Fund would be "favorable" (never mind the problem of what, exactly, "favorable" means). Would that justify it? Would you complain that your rights were being violated?
Sucks that we have to limit personal liberty to get people to be civil to each other, but there ya go.
"Sucks that we have to limit personal liberty to get slaves to run our cotton farms, but there ya go."
Slashdot Mirror
A "death knoll"? Are the newspapers going to roll down it and hit their heads?
The problem is that the government's incentives are all slanted towards making sure that nothing bad happens on a plane (or more accurately, that nothing bad happening on a plane could be blamed on them). They have no incentive to take into account the costs they are imposing on travelers, nor whether the supposed risk reduction is actually worth those costs.
Oh, and nice ad hominem jab there at the end. Classy.
The degree of the illness is not relevant, because the same decisions must be made in any case. My point is that while the demand for health care may be less elastic than for most other goods (not completely inelastic, as the parent seems to claim), that does not mean that the market works any less effectively on it as a result, nor that socialization would "fix" the supposed inefficiencies therein.
And even though a terminally-ill patient may indeed be willing to pay any amount of money to extend his life even a few days, eventually the costs become prohibitive by any measure. Is it worth $10,000 to extend a life by, say, a month? $100,000? $1,000,000? Someone has to make that decision, because we do not have infinite resources; and I do not see why having the government make that choice is in any way more efficient or humane. Far better to let the dying and their families choose how much to spend in continuing treatment.
And yes, that means some people will be too poor to afford the treatment they want; but that is a hard truth about the limitations of our technology and our resources, and socialism does not solve this. Instead it shifts the costs around, removing individual choice and creating an inefficient and inhumane system. Funny, because bureaucracies arise most often in governments and in highly regulated industries, not in free markets. I complain about them regularly, but one thing at a time. And I most certainly do not trust the security of the nation to "my" government.
So you got a gash in your hand because you were wandering around drunk, and your fellow taxpayers got to foot the bill for your stupidity. Fantastic. No wonder people act irresponsibly, if they know they won't have to pay for their mistakes.
Much like the iPod.
It's true that high barriers to entry can make so-called "predatory pricing" work in the short run, but in the long run the would-be monopolist ends up losing money in order to maintain its monopoly. And in any case, we are not talking about an industry with significant barriers to entry here, as pretty much anyone can produce an AMD-based laptop that's basically functionally identical to an Intel one.
Ah, so I have to pay Newton's and Leibniz's children to use calculus, right? And pay Shakespeare's descendants to put on a rendition of Romeo and Juliet?
Oh, and we should also ignore the segregation laws that codified and enforced the discrimination against blacks after emancipation.
In a democratic republic like the Unites States, the laws generally follow popular opinion. Anti-discrimination laws only came about after public opinion had already begun to shift away from the old prejudices, and at that point the market could and did handle the issue better than laws ever could.
Ah, and I suppose you believe that it was noble Lincoln who single-handedly ended slavery. It had nothing to do with the fact that public opinion in the North was already swinging against slavery, and that Lincoln was merely seeking a convenient justification for his tyrannical war.
Let's also not mention the Fugitive Slave Law that helped the South prevent slaves from escaping to the North, without which abolitionists in the North would have had a much easier time combating slavery even without the Emancipation Proclamation.