What part of what happened here in any way resembles a free market? You have a corporation that has been given a government granted monopoly suing a city for violating an illegal contract by stealing money from its citizens to provide the service that the corporation was supposed to provide.
This is a battle between fascism and communism. Don't pretend that just because the word "corporation" is used that the system is anything like a free market.
It is not anti-capitalistic. Government corporations get near constant bailouts from the taxpayer, meaning that poorly run, non-profitable ventures continue indefinitely (see the the Post Office, Amtrak). Capitalism means individuals gather capital together to start businesses which generate profits if they succeed. If they don't, they are liquidated, and the poorly allocated resources are spent somewhere else where they will make more money, which benefits society.
Governmental systems aren't created through agreement, they are created by with force (ie at the barrel of a gun). If you don't believe me, stop paying your taxes and see what happens. Open a business without filing the "proper paperwork" and see what happens. Try doing anything productive and see how long it is before men with guns come knocking at your door telling you to stop. See how much time it takes for them to place their boots on the back of your neck and drag you off to a concrete box somewhere. That's if they don't shoot you first.
My city has private busses. They provide better service than the city busses ever did, even providing door to door service. They pay full taxes on their gas, and they would pay the full toll on any private roads they use. Society would benefit, as use is correlated with cost, meaning that the economy becomes more efficient, with those who can telecommuting rather than going in to work and wasting gas, wear on roads, etc.
Right, they granted a monopoly (which is fascist). Monopolies are just as bad as governments in most cases. If they paid based on the quality of the water rather than giving them assured income no matter the water quality, they would see better results within months.
Right, the rest is covered by use taxes on commercial trucks and shipping services. Just like they would be under a free market. Individuals would be able to use the road for little or no cost, perhaps a hundred dollar a year pass (which they would save in gas).
Those who use the roads the most should pay for it, and they do, except that right now they also fund huge bureaucracies, rather than just funding road repairs.
Fascist corporations benefitting from government-granted monopolies is hardly free market.
If you think we have a free market in this country, you're delusional. We have a controlled economy, just like the Soviets did. We exert total control through control of money (the Federal Reserve), and specific control though regulations such as the monopolies in the various utilities (meaning men with guns forcibly, or through treat of force, stop competition).
Capitalists aren't up in arms because this is fascism fighting communism. Whoever wins, we lose. Communism sounds great, except that it locks in the current state of things, and resists all change, discouraging innovation (no monetary incentive). Fascism doesn't sound great unless you're rich (then it sounds awesome), but it shows a similar lock down of innovation (patent trolls, anyone?), where government granted duopolies or oligopolies occasionally skirmish for customers, but by and large are content to sit together and feast off of the the riches they are draining from whatever nation they have insinuated themselves into.
A society advances only to the extent that it is free. We have more or less stopped our advance as a society (where are the flying cars? where is the ultra cheap nuclear energy? Blocked by government regulation, that's where). The internet is really the last place where freedom rings, but even that is on the verge, with internet taxes, deteriorating infrastructure, and now an executive off switch. Government is the problem, not the answer.
I'm as free market as anybody, but wiring is infrastructure, and I don't have a problem with infrastructure being provided by the government.
I hate to tell you, if you think that, then you most certainly are not as free market as anybody. Protection from competition is EXACTLY what causes poor service. My city had a monopoly on internet service until four years ago. Since I lived a bit outside of the city, this meant that there was no internet service for me, as the area was too small to be worth it for anyone to grant a monopoly. Once it opened up, within a year we had two wireless internet providers providing high speed internet, and now there are three (the new one is much better, with faster speeds, lower prices, and no download limits), which means that prices are coming down while quality is going up.
Monopolies in ANY sector breed bad service. Even in those cases where "natural" monopolies are codified, dropping the government mandated monopoly will put pressure on those services to keep their customer service an product quality up. Otherwise, you end up with a bunch of service providers that look more like the Post Office or the DMV than Google or Amazon (two companies that have prospered in a true free market environment--the internet).
Well, for one thing, the interstate system was built for national security reasons (Eisenhower wanted to be able to move mobile nuke launchers anywhere in the nation at a moment's notice, which is why overpasses are all the same height), not for ease of movement across the country.
Of course road signs and such would eventually become standardized. Hell, stop signs are the same between countries. You think there is a UN commission on stop signs that dictated that? We don't need governments to tell us how to do things. We need governments to force people to cooperate at gunpoint. That is the only reason to have a government, and since government is an incarnation of violence, implied or real (think about what happens if you refuse to pay your taxes, or refuse to comply with any given government regulation--guys with guns come out and force you to close down and/or take you to a concrete box and/or assault/murder you), it should be used as little as possible.
If it cost less to pay a toll than the amount of money a person pays for gas tax, I think most people would get behind privatizing roads, so long as it was done in a fair way (ie sold to the highest bidder, and the proceeds returned to the taxpayers, with the taxes that are used to pay for roads abolished immediately). In fact, you would probably find that most roads would be free for small vehicles to use, as the shipping companies would fund them. How do you think the railroads got built without being owned by the government?
Umm, yeah, we don't need them. Volunteer fire departments are more efficient and don't bankrupt cities with the longstanding obligations they create, as they have in California, and now in Houston.
When I had a house fire a few months ago, the first truck on the scene was from a volunteer fire department, and they got there something like 3 minutes after 911 was called. Damn efficient, and at no cost to the taxpayer.
1. Natural Rights are real. Any society that denies that ends in chaos. Just like any car company that employs engineers that don't believe in the laws of thermodynamics is going to wind up in bankruptcy. It has nothing to do with "nature", but has everything to do with human action. I would suggest you learn about rights before you go apeshit at people over the use of the word "natural", which has been used in this capacity since the days of Hobbes.
2. Rights come from the predilection of humans to use force in certain circumstances. The ability to apply force does not imply rights. The lack of force does not imply that the right has vanished. A fat old landlord may not be able o defend his property against the Marxist guerillas coming to take the fruits of his labor, but that does not mean that his right to his property has vanished, it is simply being violated, and the likely response that they will get is a hail of gunfire, or other retribution, whether it is from him, or from members of his family that observe his natural rights being violated, or even from a stranger who knows unfairness when he sees it. To say that a person does not have a right to property is to invalidate civilization.
3. Markets are anywhere that any form of voluntary exchange happens, whether it is a vendor exchanging fruit for disks of metal, or a fish attracting prey to a sea anemone in exchange for a safe haven. In human economies, the markets are the sum total of voluntary exchanges that occur between people, which gives the most powerful measure of humanity, in terms of needs and values. Any attempt to bypass the market, such as fixing prices of goods or wages, distorts those values, and pushes humans to act in nonsensical or evil ways. For example, the Federal Reserves lowering of interest rates in the early 2000's led to a plethora of 0% interest credit cards. People saw those, and realized that they could use that money to make money by investing their earnings and living off of the credit...until the Federal Reserve decided to raise rates, reducing employment, choking wages, and reducing the amount of credit available, such that many people got stuck with high credit card balances. In a free market, those interest rates never would have gotten so low as to encourage such behavior, unless there was simply a huge overabundance of savings and productivity.
Like most Marxists, you seem to have difficulty understanding the concept of rights and you don't understand how economies work or grow. Perhaps if you read this you will gain a better understanding. Perhaps you'll also see that we do NOT have a free market system in this country, and haven't had one for almost a hundred years.
Or it helps build highly muscular cyborgs from the future.
The only REAL solution here is NO exercise. None at all. Better that we end up with Terminators that look like the humans from Wall-E than Austrian supermen.
Understand, talking like a madman does not mean that you are a madman, it just means that your view of the world is divorced from reality. This is sadly normal, in this world gone mad. The world has been mad for a hundred years, getting worse with each passing year, as the twin diseases of socialism and fascism have crept into our schools and absolutely corrupted our political system.
Those with access to the factory would presumably under contract not to carry out such deeds (and would be punished according to the terms of the contract. If someone who was not authorized to get onto the factory floor broke in, then it was trespassing, and he would be arrested, and any profits from his sale of the ill gotten information would be seized. Further, if Random House were to issue a run of that book, they would be rightfully vilified by the media, with writers less likely to sign on with them due to their sullied name. Individuals would be less likely to buy their goods, as they are rushed (they had to rush to get it out of the door before Penguin), so they are of inferior quality, perhaps even lacking editing, possibly excluding pages or chapters.
Understand that in a free market, a firms reputation is utterly paramount. If their reputation goes, there are a thousand other hungry young companies chomping at the bit to seize their market share. Certainly, incidents such as those that you mentioned will happen in a free market, as they do now. I recall a stolen copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows being released prior to the release of the book. It had little effect on sales, because there was no way for anyone to tell if it was real or not, and even if it was real, it suffered from the same problems I described above. Another example was the copy of X-Men Origins that was leaked, without special effects, some time prior to its release. If anything, it only added to the hype surrounding the movie. Such piracy is unlikely to affect the bottom line of the affected company, and if it does, it will do so in a positive manner 9 out of ten times. The rest of the time, it is shown that the product was crap, so people saved their money, which is a good thing.
However, that is far from the point that I was talking about. A more valid analogy would be some fool like Paris Hilton copyrighting the phrase "That's hot", and suing any author that used those two words (in or out of context). That is basically the way software patents work. Really basic processes or bits of code can be copyrighted, creating nightmare upon nightmare for anyone who wants to write a program for commercial use (or even non commercial use--Bill Gates is on record from the late 70's and early 80's threatening hobbyists with lawsuits for using "his" code). Even worse is the practice of copyrighting natural molecules, which is currently creating a logjam in the world of medicine and drug discovery, a world which my own company is attempting to break into (and can only attempt due to the wholly unique structure and mechanism of action of our compounds.
All of the problems you pointed out can and are solved by contract law. Authors sign contracts with publishers to print their material. Artists are funded. If they didn't, then those evil greedy printers would never have new material to print. Honestly, you talk like a madman. People don't just produce things for fun. If they don't get any monetary or other benefit from it, they wouldn't do it. It's like saying that if we got rid of the minimum wage, we would all immediately get our pay dropped to a penny a day, despite the fact that MOST of us make quite a bit more than minimum wage. Why do you think we get paid more than minimum wage? Because that is the price that most workers of the same skill set demand, and employers are willing and able to pay it.
I mean, geez, according to your logic, no-one ever makes any money off of open source software. This is demonstrably false.
You think power isn't concentrated in the hands of big corporations NOW? Are you insane? You can't run a software without a team of lawyers and a monster sized patent portfolio anymore. If IP is so great, why is it that the only real innovation is coming from open source? Why aren't there any new personal computing platforms out there? In the closed source world, all you have is mac and PC, companies that have been around for 30 years. You claim that dropping regulations, while the current regulatory scheme has in fact CREATED the same monopolies you rail against, and the rest of us groan about. In the open source world, we have had advance upon advance, without the huge expenditures required of those companies that operate as closed source by creating a hole in which IP laws do not apply (to an extent). Even then, we have had to build up a huge base of patents, having to reinvent the wheel every step of the way. Without IP law, there would be as many competing personal computing platforms as there are open source operating systems today. Freedom brings choice. Regulation brings monopoly. This is demonstrable in this case.
And please don't confuse the "free market" with "fascism", as you are doing. In a truly free market, corporations wouldn't even exist, because the corporate form is created by government interference (the artificial shielding of stockholders from liability for the actions of the companies that they own. Don't you think that patent trolling companies like SCO would have a harder time finding funding if their shareholders became liable for fraud committed in their name? It would also put an end to all this corporations owning corporations owning corporations liability division BS. The government basically allows any corporation to do any illegal act they want, simply by creating a corporate patsy with no funding to take the blame.
In conclusion, your interpretation of history is the same one we are taught in school, but it is highly inaccurate. It may be possible to impose outrageous demands on a single worker (that is debatable), but imposing them on a class of workers against their will is impossible, because another competing business will acquiesce to their demands and poach all of your skilled workers, forcing you to retrain a bunch of people on the street, who will simply leave for better working conditions if you don't change your foolish policies. This is called COMPETITION, and it is vital to free market economies. Though the socialists in the government love to claim that it was their laws that ended child labor and cut down the workweek, it wasn't, it was the law of supply and demand. As skilled workers became more in demand, thier wages and working conditions improved. As the fathers started earning more money, their wives and children no longer had to work to survive. Of course, we are well on our way to de-industrialization, so now most families have to have two wage earners to survive. No amount of additional legislation is going to stop that slide. We will see those same conditions that you abhor as a result of government policies and regula
Did you read the article? Obviously not. That or you lack the reading comprehension to understand what the nobel laureate is saying there. I would understand, since you seem to think that a dozen heavily armed men can hold a thousand snipers hostage. One skilled sniper can pin down a battalion. A thousand will send any occupying force fleeing for the hills.
But sadly, it's useless arguing with those who don't even know that they are slaves. Until you understand that, and see that you pay a higher portion of your income to your masters in government than did medieval serfs, and only SLIGHTLY less than an 18th century black slave. The only reason you aren't living in the same poverty as those poor bastards is because of those evil capitalists who "exploited" all those poor people by turning them into a flourishing middle class. We will live that way again, as the government continues to grow, halting all progress, and plunging us back into the unending hell of serfdom, as it did after the fall of the Roman Empire.
I beg to differ, as two of them operate on unregulated frequencies.
Taxes are not the only cost associated with operating a business. But costs are ADDITIVE. This means that adding more costs will make operations more expensive, meaning less competition. I never said anything about natural monopolies, which I agree do not exist, although by supporting the government in this case, you indirectly show support for the idea of one. Honestly, I can't believe that you are that stupid, but rather you are simply being willfully obstinate, probably to block out the cognitive dissonance.
The Microsoft monopoly was created by the government's legalization of the ludicrous notion of intellectual property. This encouraged Bill Gates and other Microsoft officials to begin hoarding patents and suing anyone else out of the market.
Do you know why Japan never invaded the United States? Simple, because EVERYONE was armed. They could never put down resistance in such a population. Switzerland maintained its neutrality by the same feature. Armed citizens can't be oppressed by any external force.
Somalia is not an anarchy, but rather it is a series of small despotic states. It also is not an armed society. You GREATLY underestimate the power of the rifle. Mere rifles become deadly precision in the hands of a population of marksmen.
Your ideology is disturbing, it reeks of Orwellian "Freedom is Slavery" doublespeak. You think that a system based on non-aggression and freedom leads directly to slavery and oppression, so you propose instituting slavery and oppression to stop our society from falling into slavery and oppression. This is madness of the type that our Orwellian overlords have wanted to instill their subjects with from the beginning.
The fact is that we came quite close to the Randian ideal in this country in the 1800's. "Liberals" seized onto the progress created by the industries that blossomed under the freedoms they detested, claiming that their guns had somehow made the people's lives better. If you have a speck of intellectual honesty, read this,and tell me that the industrial revolution, or the freedoms that spawned it, were a bad thing.
That's not libertarianism, it's fascism. The two are polar opposites. Libertarians have no problem with free software. If they do, then you know automatically that you aren't dealing with a libertarian. It's like someone claiming to be a fascist, but that says that all government and corporations are evil and should be abolished. It's completely different.
There is a nasty trend going on here that is attempting to redefine libertarianism as something that is pro-corporate welfare. You might as well redefine black as white, up as down (economic recovery!), and poor as rich. Stick with us, and we'll define our way to prosperity!
Interesting, a comment that is completely backwards. You wouldn't happen to be the boy with the upside down head from Family Guy, would you?
There isn't a single portion of libertarian economic philosophy that has been employed in government for at least the last 30 years, and in reality, it hasn't been practiced in well over a hundred years. It's the quasi Marxist Keynesian economic model that holds sway now, even though it was decisively proven wrong when there was a long period of high inflation without economic growth during the 70's. Stagflation was something that was posited to be impossible by Keynes. He apparently never foresaw hyperinflation either. The (libertarian) Austrians predicted both, in great detail, in the years or even decades leading up to those events.
Congratulations, you just restated the basis for Austrian economics, the principle libertarian economic theory. It's the Keynesians that think that economics can be fully understood mathematically. These are the people who run our government (badly) under both parties.
How do they get to make the rules when EVERYONE is armed, and any type of weapon or army that they can raise to institute rules that people don't want is similarly available to anyone else?
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What part of what happened here in any way resembles a free market? You have a corporation that has been given a government granted monopoly suing a city for violating an illegal contract by stealing money from its citizens to provide the service that the corporation was supposed to provide.
This is a battle between fascism and communism. Don't pretend that just because the word "corporation" is used that the system is anything like a free market.
It is not anti-capitalistic. Government corporations get near constant bailouts from the taxpayer, meaning that poorly run, non-profitable ventures continue indefinitely (see the the Post Office, Amtrak). Capitalism means individuals gather capital together to start businesses which generate profits if they succeed. If they don't, they are liquidated, and the poorly allocated resources are spent somewhere else where they will make more money, which benefits society.
Governmental systems aren't created through agreement, they are created by with force (ie at the barrel of a gun). If you don't believe me, stop paying your taxes and see what happens. Open a business without filing the "proper paperwork" and see what happens. Try doing anything productive and see how long it is before men with guns come knocking at your door telling you to stop. See how much time it takes for them to place their boots on the back of your neck and drag you off to a concrete box somewhere. That's if they don't shoot you first.
My city has private busses. They provide better service than the city busses ever did, even providing door to door service. They pay full taxes on their gas, and they would pay the full toll on any private roads they use. Society would benefit, as use is correlated with cost, meaning that the economy becomes more efficient, with those who can telecommuting rather than going in to work and wasting gas, wear on roads, etc.
Right, they granted a monopoly (which is fascist). Monopolies are just as bad as governments in most cases. If they paid based on the quality of the water rather than giving them assured income no matter the water quality, they would see better results within months.
Right, the rest is covered by use taxes on commercial trucks and shipping services. Just like they would be under a free market. Individuals would be able to use the road for little or no cost, perhaps a hundred dollar a year pass (which they would save in gas).
Those who use the roads the most should pay for it, and they do, except that right now they also fund huge bureaucracies, rather than just funding road repairs.
Fascist corporations benefitting from government-granted monopolies is hardly free market.
If you think we have a free market in this country, you're delusional. We have a controlled economy, just like the Soviets did. We exert total control through control of money (the Federal Reserve), and specific control though regulations such as the monopolies in the various utilities (meaning men with guns forcibly, or through treat of force, stop competition).
Capitalists aren't up in arms because this is fascism fighting communism. Whoever wins, we lose. Communism sounds great, except that it locks in the current state of things, and resists all change, discouraging innovation (no monetary incentive). Fascism doesn't sound great unless you're rich (then it sounds awesome), but it shows a similar lock down of innovation (patent trolls, anyone?), where government granted duopolies or oligopolies occasionally skirmish for customers, but by and large are content to sit together and feast off of the the riches they are draining from whatever nation they have insinuated themselves into.
A society advances only to the extent that it is free. We have more or less stopped our advance as a society (where are the flying cars? where is the ultra cheap nuclear energy? Blocked by government regulation, that's where). The internet is really the last place where freedom rings, but even that is on the verge, with internet taxes, deteriorating infrastructure, and now an executive off switch. Government is the problem, not the answer.
I'm as free market as anybody, but wiring is infrastructure, and I don't have a problem with infrastructure being provided by the government.
I hate to tell you, if you think that, then you most certainly are not as free market as anybody. Protection from competition is EXACTLY what causes poor service. My city had a monopoly on internet service until four years ago. Since I lived a bit outside of the city, this meant that there was no internet service for me, as the area was too small to be worth it for anyone to grant a monopoly. Once it opened up, within a year we had two wireless internet providers providing high speed internet, and now there are three (the new one is much better, with faster speeds, lower prices, and no download limits), which means that prices are coming down while quality is going up.
Monopolies in ANY sector breed bad service. Even in those cases where "natural" monopolies are codified, dropping the government mandated monopoly will put pressure on those services to keep their customer service an product quality up. Otherwise, you end up with a bunch of service providers that look more like the Post Office or the DMV than Google or Amazon (two companies that have prospered in a true free market environment--the internet).
Well, for one thing, the interstate system was built for national security reasons (Eisenhower wanted to be able to move mobile nuke launchers anywhere in the nation at a moment's notice, which is why overpasses are all the same height), not for ease of movement across the country.
Of course road signs and such would eventually become standardized. Hell, stop signs are the same between countries. You think there is a UN commission on stop signs that dictated that? We don't need governments to tell us how to do things. We need governments to force people to cooperate at gunpoint. That is the only reason to have a government, and since government is an incarnation of violence, implied or real (think about what happens if you refuse to pay your taxes, or refuse to comply with any given government regulation--guys with guns come out and force you to close down and/or take you to a concrete box and/or assault/murder you), it should be used as little as possible.
If it cost less to pay a toll than the amount of money a person pays for gas tax, I think most people would get behind privatizing roads, so long as it was done in a fair way (ie sold to the highest bidder, and the proceeds returned to the taxpayers, with the taxes that are used to pay for roads abolished immediately). In fact, you would probably find that most roads would be free for small vehicles to use, as the shipping companies would fund them. How do you think the railroads got built without being owned by the government?
Umm, yeah, we don't need them. Volunteer fire departments are more efficient and don't bankrupt cities with the longstanding obligations they create, as they have in California, and now in Houston.
When I had a house fire a few months ago, the first truck on the scene was from a volunteer fire department, and they got there something like 3 minutes after 911 was called. Damn efficient, and at no cost to the taxpayer.
It's hard to think naughty thoughts when your eyes are melting out of your skull from pepper spray.
1. Natural Rights are real. Any society that denies that ends in chaos. Just like any car company that employs engineers that don't believe in the laws of thermodynamics is going to wind up in bankruptcy. It has nothing to do with "nature", but has everything to do with human action. I would suggest you learn about rights before you go apeshit at people over the use of the word "natural", which has been used in this capacity since the days of Hobbes.
2. Rights come from the predilection of humans to use force in certain circumstances. The ability to apply force does not imply rights. The lack of force does not imply that the right has vanished. A fat old landlord may not be able o defend his property against the Marxist guerillas coming to take the fruits of his labor, but that does not mean that his right to his property has vanished, it is simply being violated, and the likely response that they will get is a hail of gunfire, or other retribution, whether it is from him, or from members of his family that observe his natural rights being violated, or even from a stranger who knows unfairness when he sees it. To say that a person does not have a right to property is to invalidate civilization.
3. Markets are anywhere that any form of voluntary exchange happens, whether it is a vendor exchanging fruit for disks of metal, or a fish attracting prey to a sea anemone in exchange for a safe haven. In human economies, the markets are the sum total of voluntary exchanges that occur between people, which gives the most powerful measure of humanity, in terms of needs and values. Any attempt to bypass the market, such as fixing prices of goods or wages, distorts those values, and pushes humans to act in nonsensical or evil ways. For example, the Federal Reserves lowering of interest rates in the early 2000's led to a plethora of 0% interest credit cards. People saw those, and realized that they could use that money to make money by investing their earnings and living off of the credit...until the Federal Reserve decided to raise rates, reducing employment, choking wages, and reducing the amount of credit available, such that many people got stuck with high credit card balances. In a free market, those interest rates never would have gotten so low as to encourage such behavior, unless there was simply a huge overabundance of savings and productivity.
Like most Marxists, you seem to have difficulty understanding the concept of rights and you don't understand how economies work or grow. Perhaps if you read this you will gain a better understanding. Perhaps you'll also see that we do NOT have a free market system in this country, and haven't had one for almost a hundred years.
Or it helps build highly muscular cyborgs from the future.
The only REAL solution here is NO exercise. None at all. Better that we end up with Terminators that look like the humans from Wall-E than Austrian supermen.
Then we have to build shover robots to protect us.
Understand, talking like a madman does not mean that you are a madman, it just means that your view of the world is divorced from reality. This is sadly normal, in this world gone mad. The world has been mad for a hundred years, getting worse with each passing year, as the twin diseases of socialism and fascism have crept into our schools and absolutely corrupted our political system.
Those with access to the factory would presumably under contract not to carry out such deeds (and would be punished according to the terms of the contract. If someone who was not authorized to get onto the factory floor broke in, then it was trespassing, and he would be arrested, and any profits from his sale of the ill gotten information would be seized. Further, if Random House were to issue a run of that book, they would be rightfully vilified by the media, with writers less likely to sign on with them due to their sullied name. Individuals would be less likely to buy their goods, as they are rushed (they had to rush to get it out of the door before Penguin), so they are of inferior quality, perhaps even lacking editing, possibly excluding pages or chapters.
Understand that in a free market, a firms reputation is utterly paramount. If their reputation goes, there are a thousand other hungry young companies chomping at the bit to seize their market share. Certainly, incidents such as those that you mentioned will happen in a free market, as they do now. I recall a stolen copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows being released prior to the release of the book. It had little effect on sales, because there was no way for anyone to tell if it was real or not, and even if it was real, it suffered from the same problems I described above. Another example was the copy of X-Men Origins that was leaked, without special effects, some time prior to its release. If anything, it only added to the hype surrounding the movie. Such piracy is unlikely to affect the bottom line of the affected company, and if it does, it will do so in a positive manner 9 out of ten times. The rest of the time, it is shown that the product was crap, so people saved their money, which is a good thing.
However, that is far from the point that I was talking about. A more valid analogy would be some fool like Paris Hilton copyrighting the phrase "That's hot", and suing any author that used those two words (in or out of context). That is basically the way software patents work. Really basic processes or bits of code can be copyrighted, creating nightmare upon nightmare for anyone who wants to write a program for commercial use (or even non commercial use--Bill Gates is on record from the late 70's and early 80's threatening hobbyists with lawsuits for using "his" code). Even worse is the practice of copyrighting natural molecules, which is currently creating a logjam in the world of medicine and drug discovery, a world which my own company is attempting to break into (and can only attempt due to the wholly unique structure and mechanism of action of our compounds.
All of the problems you pointed out can and are solved by contract law. Authors sign contracts with publishers to print their material. Artists are funded. If they didn't, then those evil greedy printers would never have new material to print. Honestly, you talk like a madman. People don't just produce things for fun. If they don't get any monetary or other benefit from it, they wouldn't do it. It's like saying that if we got rid of the minimum wage, we would all immediately get our pay dropped to a penny a day, despite the fact that MOST of us make quite a bit more than minimum wage. Why do you think we get paid more than minimum wage? Because that is the price that most workers of the same skill set demand, and employers are willing and able to pay it.
I mean, geez, according to your logic, no-one ever makes any money off of open source software. This is demonstrably false.
You think power isn't concentrated in the hands of big corporations NOW? Are you insane? You can't run a software without a team of lawyers and a monster sized patent portfolio anymore. If IP is so great, why is it that the only real innovation is coming from open source? Why aren't there any new personal computing platforms out there? In the closed source world, all you have is mac and PC, companies that have been around for 30 years. You claim that dropping regulations, while the current regulatory scheme has in fact CREATED the same monopolies you rail against, and the rest of us groan about. In the open source world, we have had advance upon advance, without the huge expenditures required of those companies that operate as closed source by creating a hole in which IP laws do not apply (to an extent). Even then, we have had to build up a huge base of patents, having to reinvent the wheel every step of the way. Without IP law, there would be as many competing personal computing platforms as there are open source operating systems today. Freedom brings choice. Regulation brings monopoly. This is demonstrable in this case.
And please don't confuse the "free market" with "fascism", as you are doing. In a truly free market, corporations wouldn't even exist, because the corporate form is created by government interference (the artificial shielding of stockholders from liability for the actions of the companies that they own. Don't you think that patent trolling companies like SCO would have a harder time finding funding if their shareholders became liable for fraud committed in their name? It would also put an end to all this corporations owning corporations owning corporations liability division BS. The government basically allows any corporation to do any illegal act they want, simply by creating a corporate patsy with no funding to take the blame.
In conclusion, your interpretation of history is the same one we are taught in school, but it is highly inaccurate. It may be possible to impose outrageous demands on a single worker (that is debatable), but imposing them on a class of workers against their will is impossible, because another competing business will acquiesce to their demands and poach all of your skilled workers, forcing you to retrain a bunch of people on the street, who will simply leave for better working conditions if you don't change your foolish policies. This is called COMPETITION, and it is vital to free market economies. Though the socialists in the government love to claim that it was their laws that ended child labor and cut down the workweek, it wasn't, it was the law of supply and demand. As skilled workers became more in demand, thier wages and working conditions improved. As the fathers started earning more money, their wives and children no longer had to work to survive. Of course, we are well on our way to de-industrialization, so now most families have to have two wage earners to survive. No amount of additional legislation is going to stop that slide. We will see those same conditions that you abhor as a result of government policies and regula
Did you read the article? Obviously not. That or you lack the reading comprehension to understand what the nobel laureate is saying there. I would understand, since you seem to think that a dozen heavily armed men can hold a thousand snipers hostage. One skilled sniper can pin down a battalion. A thousand will send any occupying force fleeing for the hills.
But sadly, it's useless arguing with those who don't even know that they are slaves. Until you understand that, and see that you pay a higher portion of your income to your masters in government than did medieval serfs, and only SLIGHTLY less than an 18th century black slave. The only reason you aren't living in the same poverty as those poor bastards is because of those evil capitalists who "exploited" all those poor people by turning them into a flourishing middle class. We will live that way again, as the government continues to grow, halting all progress, and plunging us back into the unending hell of serfdom, as it did after the fall of the Roman Empire.
I'm glad to meet someone with the ability to see the difference. That is an excellent analysis.
I beg to differ, as two of them operate on unregulated frequencies.
Taxes are not the only cost associated with operating a business. But costs are ADDITIVE. This means that adding more costs will make operations more expensive, meaning less competition. I never said anything about natural monopolies, which I agree do not exist, although by supporting the government in this case, you indirectly show support for the idea of one. Honestly, I can't believe that you are that stupid, but rather you are simply being willfully obstinate, probably to block out the cognitive dissonance.
The Microsoft monopoly was created by the government's legalization of the ludicrous notion of intellectual property. This encouraged Bill Gates and other Microsoft officials to begin hoarding patents and suing anyone else out of the market.
For a full explanation, have a look at this.
Do you know why Japan never invaded the United States? Simple, because EVERYONE was armed. They could never put down resistance in such a population. Switzerland maintained its neutrality by the same feature. Armed citizens can't be oppressed by any external force.
Somalia is not an anarchy, but rather it is a series of small despotic states. It also is not an armed society. You GREATLY underestimate the power of the rifle. Mere rifles become deadly precision in the hands of a population of marksmen.
Your ideology is disturbing, it reeks of Orwellian "Freedom is Slavery" doublespeak. You think that a system based on non-aggression and freedom leads directly to slavery and oppression, so you propose instituting slavery and oppression to stop our society from falling into slavery and oppression. This is madness of the type that our Orwellian overlords have wanted to instill their subjects with from the beginning.
The fact is that we came quite close to the Randian ideal in this country in the 1800's. "Liberals" seized onto the progress created by the industries that blossomed under the freedoms they detested, claiming that their guns had somehow made the people's lives better. If you have a speck of intellectual honesty, read this,and tell me that the industrial revolution, or the freedoms that spawned it, were a bad thing.
That's not libertarianism, it's fascism. The two are polar opposites. Libertarians have no problem with free software. If they do, then you know automatically that you aren't dealing with a libertarian. It's like someone claiming to be a fascist, but that says that all government and corporations are evil and should be abolished. It's completely different.
There is a nasty trend going on here that is attempting to redefine libertarianism as something that is pro-corporate welfare. You might as well redefine black as white, up as down (economic recovery!), and poor as rich. Stick with us, and we'll define our way to prosperity!
Interesting, a comment that is completely backwards. You wouldn't happen to be the boy with the upside down head from Family Guy, would you?
There isn't a single portion of libertarian economic philosophy that has been employed in government for at least the last 30 years, and in reality, it hasn't been practiced in well over a hundred years. It's the quasi Marxist Keynesian economic model that holds sway now, even though it was decisively proven wrong when there was a long period of high inflation without economic growth during the 70's. Stagflation was something that was posited to be impossible by Keynes. He apparently never foresaw hyperinflation either. The (libertarian) Austrians predicted both, in great detail, in the years or even decades leading up to those events.
I'm curious, where do you poop from?
Congratulations, you just restated the basis for Austrian economics, the principle libertarian economic theory. It's the Keynesians that think that economics can be fully understood mathematically. These are the people who run our government (badly) under both parties.
Wow, so not all libertarians are the opposite of libertarians (fascists)? I'm happy to know that.
How do they get to make the rules when EVERYONE is armed, and any type of weapon or army that they can raise to institute rules that people don't want is similarly available to anyone else?