Actually, our economy could grow if the government collected more taxes and then used the proceeds from tax collection to purchase goods and services from the private sector. My bone to pick is that agriculture subsidies and combat aircraft don't offer the best use of tax proceeds.
Oh hey, a real-life old-school Keynesian. You're a rare species nowadays :P
Well I'm definitely not of the opinion that lower taxes = more economic growth (and I wont even go further on that line of thought because the Laffer Curve is stupid) inherently or that higher taxes means lower economic growth and output. It all has to do with how efficiently the money is spent, the things we spend the money on, and the possible ROI from that expenditure.
There's so much wasteful spending in our government that my statement you quoted looks outright stupid based on reality but it is possible to have a positive ROI on expenditure from government purchased projects that were paid for using tax dollars and bonds.
Well, the reason nearly everyone abandoned Keynes for New Keynes is because eventually people'd realize the government was buying such and such, then prices would adjust until the ROI would be wiped out.
(actual the real reason was stagflation, but meh. This is how a new keynesian would criticise your model, anyway :P)
Well, why can't it? The USPS sells postal services.
It's complicated, but it mostly has to do with the drive for profits versus the drive for votes. Profits are the reward for running your business well. The more waste you can cut the higher your profits are. The more services you can provide, to the neediest people, the more profits you can make. If there is a way to provide something to someone and turn a profit, the free market will find it. Whoever finds it first will be rich, eventually more and more people will follow that path until the product becomes cheap.
If there is a county with no liquor store, the first one there is going to make lots of money. Then the second one will come to try and catch as much of the profits as possible. Maybe they set up at a different location so they are closer to some part of town (though the first one there would have the best location). Then a 3rd one comes and maybe it offers specialty products because they have third best location and are just new. There will come a point where adding more liquor-stores to that town won't bring in profit for the new stores.
Once that starts happening, the best Liquor stores stay in business and their competition is out of work. This is a good thing, the weak business failing is necessary and it's a good thing, it keeps things efficient. Also, with out of work liquor-store operators now in the market place, they can be hired by the successful stores cheaper. Or do something else with their labor. The market decided that they didn't really want that many liquor stores, so it kept the best and the others failed. (Best in terms of profits, if the store that sold your favourite brew went out of business, it's because they couldn't provide it to you at a profit).
Government doesn't act like this. They never have a motive for profit and can't go out of business. If government owns a liquor store it won't worry about going out of business, it won't try to innovate. Even if it does innovate, it would do so because a person was at that store and said "hey we could run this better if we only did it this way," which could just as easily happen in a private store. And the drive to innovate is much higher in private business, so that superstar of the government liquor store would be put to much better use at a private liquor store.
So Governments aren't designed to make profits, and they are missing a key factor that makes things effecient (going out of business). Governments are fueled by votes. That's where they get their power, and their authority. That's why political parties try capture votes where the think other parties are weak. Kinda like the liquor store example, there is a mad-dash to set up stores where there was no competition, and then once they were there then they had to compete to provide a better product. Government's product is policy. If people started caring about, say, the environment, then the political parties will have a mad-dash to set up a policy to entice you to vote for them.
Loklar on
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mrt144King of the NumbernamesRegistered Userregular
Actually, our economy could grow if the government collected more taxes and then used the proceeds from tax collection to purchase goods and services from the private sector. My bone to pick is that agriculture subsidies and combat aircraft don't offer the best use of tax proceeds.
Oh hey, a real-life old-school Keynesian. You're a rare species nowadays :P
Well I'm definitely not of the opinion that lower taxes = more economic growth (and I wont even go further on that line of thought because the Laffer Curve is stupid) inherently or that higher taxes means lower economic growth and output. It all has to do with how efficiently the money is spent, the things we spend the money on, and the possible ROI from that expenditure.
There's so much wasteful spending in our government that my statement you quoted looks outright stupid based on reality but it is possible to have a positive ROI on expenditure from government purchased projects that were paid for using tax dollars and bonds.
Well, the reason nearly everyone abandoned Keynes for New Keynes is because eventually people'd realize the government was buying such and such, then prices would adjust until the ROI would be wiped out.
(actual the real reason was stagflation, but meh. This is how a new keynesian would criticise your model, anyway :P)
The key examples of the government purchasing from the private sector for projects that have a definable ROI is mass transit/public transportation and electrical infrastructure. New Keynesians want to throw money into black pits at the HQs of companies that are failing.
It's the same way that Chomsky noted that a government-run steel mill would be a good idea for economic stimulus... the government has the capital to build and operate the mill, and the mill could produce cheap steel for local firms to work with. The mill would also employ a good section of the local population, who would drive other industries with their earnings. An entire new industrial sector would spring up with the cheap steel being offered in the region, one that would eventually produce enough tax dollars to more then cover the initial cost of the plant construction as well as the cost of subsidizing the price of the steel.
To be pedantic, the only part of that logic that a modern left-wing economic ideology would cite is the part I blue'd... the rest really is duplicable by private investment.
The obvious relevant modern example would be nuclear power plants, I suppose.
To me, government spending is best on things that would be unprofitable alltogether, or unprofitable in any sort of timescale that would make the private sector invest, but which pay dividends to society as a whole in the long term.
The government investing in alternative energy is a fantastic example of this - oil and coal still are vastly cheaper than the alternatives, but that doesn't mean the government investing in those alternatives is bad since it will ease the transition in the future.
Another real life example is DARPA and the internet, as I mentioned above. It might have been another decade or two before we had the internet without the government funding it, to say nothing of computers themselves.
To me, government spending is best on things that would be unprofitable alltogether, or unprofitable in any sort of timescale that would make the private sector invest, but which pay dividends to society as a whole in the long term.
The government investing in alternative energy is a fantastic example of this - oil and coal still are vastly cheaper than the alternatives, but that doesn't mean the government investing in those alternatives is bad since it will ease the transition in the future.
Another real life example is DARPA and the internet, as I mentioned above. It might have been another decade or two before we had the internet without the government funding it, to say nothing of computers themselves.
Limed for truth.
The free market won't ever do anything that isn't profitable. Put another way, it will always do things that are profitable. Even if you pass a law making cocaine selling illegal, the market forces are unrelenting and still find a way to provide the product to the people and turn a profit.
I don't like the example of wind-farms though. Because the free market could invest heavily in alternative power if it wanted to. And it likely is putting in just enough money and time into it as the expected payoff. Government is interfering with this for political reasons.
Unless you're going to make the argument that alternative energy is necessary as a safety issue. Because it is government's role to keep the population safe. So maybe that investment is like military-spending by other means. It's kind-of a wonky argument, but I'd be down for it. But if the government's purpose is to make money on this deal, then it's doing it wrong.
People don't need an incentive to make money. They will find a way and it will be better than the government's way.
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HachfaceNot the Minister Farrakhan you're thinking ofDammit, Shepard!Registered Userregular
Well, why can't it? The USPS sells postal services.
A whole bunch of nonsense.
Monetary profit is not the only motive for innovation. See: the Cold War, especially the Space Race. See also every university science department in the world.
Wealth is created from the utilization of resources. The financial structure of the organization utilizing the resources -- for-profit, nonprofit, private, public -- makes no difference.
Well, why can't it? The USPS sells postal services.
It's complicated, but it mostly has to do with the drive for profits versus the drive for votes. Profits are the reward for running your business well. The more waste you can cut the higher your profits are. The more services you can provide, to the neediest people, the more profits you can make. If there is a way to provide something to someone and turn a profit, the free market will find it. Whoever finds it first will be rich, eventually more and more people will follow that path until the product becomes cheap.
If there is a county with no liquor store, the first one there is going to make lots of money. Then the second one will come to try and catch as much of the profits as possible. Maybe they set up at a different location so they are closer to some part of town (though the first one there would have the best location). Then a 3rd one comes and maybe it offers specialty products because they have third best location and are just new. There will come a point where adding more liquor-stores to that town won't bring in profit for the new stores.
Once that starts happening, the best Liquor stores stay in business and their competition is out of work. This is a good thing, the weak business failing is necessary and it's a good thing, it keeps things efficient. Also, with out of work liquor-store operators now in the market place, they can be hired by the successful stores cheaper. Or do something else with their labor. The market decided that they didn't really want that many liquor stores, so it kept the best and the others failed. (Best in terms of profits, if the store that sold your favourite brew went out of business, it's because they couldn't provide it to you at a profit).
Government doesn't act like this. They never have a motive for profit and can't go out of business. If government owns a liquor store it won't worry about going out of business, it won't try to innovate. Even if it does innovate, it would do so because a person was at that store and said "hey we could run this better if we only did it this way," which could just as easily happen in a private store. And the drive to innovate is much higher in private business, so that superstar of the government liquor store would be put to much better use at a private liquor store.
So Governments aren't designed to make profits, and they are missing a key factor that makes things efficient (going out of business). Governments are fueled by votes. That's where they get their power, and their authority. That's why political parties try capture votes where the think other parties are weak. Kinda like the liquor store example, there is a mad-dash to set up stores where there was no competition, and then once they were there then they had to compete to provide a better product. Government's product is policy. If people started caring about, say, the environment, then the political parties will have a mad-dash to set up a policy to entice you to vote for them.
See, now we've moved from "government can't create anything" to "government can create things, but it's worse at doing so". Let's see if I can convince you to move even more...
I've highlighted one part of your argument orange. What it describes is decreasing returns to scale: the second liquor store isn't undercut by the larger first, so eventually there are numerous competitive small stores.
But not all industries have decreasing returns to scale. Sometimes industries have an optimum firm size that is very, very large: the worldwide demand for commercial aircraft suggests that the optimum number of firms to supply the entire world is probably only one, for instance.
In these cases, competition in the private sector simply produces one monopoly, with neither a profit incentive nor a voting incentive to improve efficiency. Then a regulated monopoly or government-run business could do better, don't you think?
Hardly. Unless there's suddenly a population of pro-life non-evangelicals out there to support your argument. There's nothing inherent in Objectivism or Libertarianism that gives fetuses rights over those that produce them.
You're changing the argument. Libertarianism is perfectly compatible with both pro-life or pro-choice, depending on when you think life begins.
An internally-consistent libertarian ethical philosophy that would affirm the State's responsibility to ensure that any woman who has conceived goes on to carry out in full her duties as a life-support device for a non-viable "person" is a dodgy proposition on theoretical ground. As a practical matter, though, Atomic Ross had the right of it. Pro-life libertarians are with rare exceptions a bunch of theocrats who slept through the chapter about market externalities in econ 101. We call their bizarre invisible hand fetish 'Libertarianism' because in our political tradition that's the name for the category they're stuffed in, but these people have always been and will always be more interested than property than liberty.
I'm sure there are real people out there who have convinced themselves that their intent to criminalize abortion is based solely in their sound commitment to maximization of personal freedoms, but every argument I have ever heard from those quarters ultimately revealed a hidden assumption that the freedom of a woman to control her physiology is less important than the freedom of The Family(tm) to keep popping out additions to its quiverfull. Patriarchy is rarely subtle, but we're often so accustomed to its pervasive influence that our ideas about what is good and valuable become shaped by it without our knowledge.
I'm not saying that abortion-on-demand is an intrinsic feature of libertarianism, but that every argument against it (that I have heard, in the American political tradition) is ultimately founded on wildly counter-libertarian theocratic ideas. Which is only to be expected, because the label 'libertarian' has come to describe little more than the thin veneer of academic thought supporting the policies of the right wing, domain of theocrats, and the old ideas about personal freedoms have fallen by the wayside.
To me, government spending is best on things that would be unprofitable alltogether, or unprofitable in any sort of timescale that would make the private sector invest, but which pay dividends to society as a whole in the long term.
The government investing in alternative energy is a fantastic example of this - oil and coal still are vastly cheaper than the alternatives, but that doesn't mean the government investing in those alternatives is bad since it will ease the transition in the future.
Another real life example is DARPA and the internet, as I mentioned above. It might have been another decade or two before we had the internet without the government funding it, to say nothing of computers themselves.
Limed for truth.
The free market won't ever do anything that isn't profitable. Put another way, it will always do things that are profitable. Even if you pass a law making cocaine selling illegal, the market forces are unrelenting and still find a way to provide the product to the people and turn a profit.
I don't like the example of wind-farms though. Because the free market could invest heavily in alternative power if it wanted to. And it likely is putting in just enough money and time into it as the expected payoff. Government is interfering with this for political reasons.
Unless you're going to make the argument that alternative energy is necessary as a safety issue. Because it is government's role to keep the population safe. So maybe that investment is like military-spending by other means. It's kind-of a wonky argument, but I'd be down for it. But if the government's purpose is to make money on this deal, then it's doing it wrong.
People don't need an incentive to make money. They will find a way and it will be better than the government's way.
Alternative energy is necessary for society to continue for more than the next twenty years or so, to say nothing of even global warming we're going to run into untenable supply issues that are either going to force an abrupt economy raping change or a slightly less abrupt change, depending on what the government does.
I will say that most of the government efforts in alternative energy have been token efforts at best. We really need to spend nothing on ethanol except research of other forms than corn, and need to spend alot more on wind farms and pure research into things like battery technology.
Alternatively we could go for a market based solution and dump the entire true cost of oil into the price of gasoline, every cent spent protecting supply lines switched from taxes to the cost per gallon.
I have a feeling even the staunchest market wanking capitalist will cry for the government to do something if they had to pay $9 a gallon though.
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mrt144King of the NumbernamesRegistered Userregular
To me, government spending is best on things that would be unprofitable alltogether, or unprofitable in any sort of timescale that would make the private sector invest, but which pay dividends to society as a whole in the long term.
The government investing in alternative energy is a fantastic example of this - oil and coal still are vastly cheaper than the alternatives, but that doesn't mean the government investing in those alternatives is bad since it will ease the transition in the future.
Another real life example is DARPA and the internet, as I mentioned above. It might have been another decade or two before we had the internet without the government funding it, to say nothing of computers themselves.
Limed for truth.
The free market won't ever do anything that isn't profitable. Put another way, it will always do things that are profitable. Even if you pass a law making cocaine selling illegal, the market forces are unrelenting and still find a way to provide the product to the people and turn a profit.
I don't like the example of wind-farms though. Because the free market could invest heavily in alternative power if it wanted to. And it likely is putting in just enough money and time into it as the expected payoff. Government is interfering with this for political reasons.
Unless you're going to make the argument that alternative energy is necessary as a safety issue. Because it is government's role to keep the population safe. So maybe that investment is like military-spending by other means. It's kind-of a wonky argument, but I'd be down for it. But if the government's purpose is to make money on this deal, then it's doing it wrong.
People don't need an incentive to make money. They will find a way and it will be better than the government's way.
Alternative energy is necessary for society to continue for more than the next twenty years or so, to say nothing of even global warming we're going to run into untenable supply issues that are either going to force an abrupt economy raping change or a slightly less abrupt change, depending on what the government does.
I will say that most of the government efforts in alternative energy have been token efforts at best. We really need to spend nothing on ethanol except research of other forms than corn, and need to spend alot more on wind farms and pure research into things like battery technology.
Alternatively we could go for a market based solution and dump the entire true cost of oil into the price of gasoline, every cent spent protecting supply lines come out of taxes and go into a gallon of gas.
I have a feeling even the staunchest market wanking capitalist will cry for the government to do something if they had to pay $9 a gallon though.
Well, why can't it? The USPS sells postal services.
It's complicated, but it mostly has to do with the drive for profits versus the drive for votes. Profits are the reward for running your business well. The more waste you can cut the higher your profits are. The more services you can provide, to the neediest people, the more profits you can make. If there is a way to provide something to someone and turn a profit, the free market will find it. Whoever finds it first will be rich, eventually more and more people will follow that path until the product becomes cheap.
If there is a county with no liquor store, the first one there is going to make lots of money. Then the second one will come to try and catch as much of the profits as possible. Maybe they set up at a different location so they are closer to some part of town (though the first one there would have the best location). Then a 3rd one comes and maybe it offers specialty products because they have third best location and are just new. There will come a point where adding more liquor-stores to that town won't bring in profit for the new stores.
Once that starts happening, the best Liquor stores stay in business and their competition is out of work. This is a good thing, the weak business failing is necessary and it's a good thing, it keeps things efficient. Also, with out of work liquor-store operators now in the market place, they can be hired by the successful stores cheaper. Or do something else with their labor. The market decided that they didn't really want that many liquor stores, so it kept the best and the others failed. (Best in terms of profits, if the store that sold your favourite brew went out of business, it's because they couldn't provide it to you at a profit).
Government doesn't act like this. They never have a motive for profit and can't go out of business. If government owns a liquor store it won't worry about going out of business, it won't try to innovate. Even if it does innovate, it would do so because a person was at that store and said "hey we could run this better if we only did it this way," which could just as easily happen in a private store. And the drive to innovate is much higher in private business, so that superstar of the government liquor store would be put to much better use at a private liquor store.
So Governments aren't designed to make profits, and they are missing a key factor that makes things efficient (going out of business). Governments are fueled by votes. That's where they get their power, and their authority. That's why political parties try capture votes where the think other parties are weak. Kinda like the liquor store example, there is a mad-dash to set up stores where there was no competition, and then once they were there then they had to compete to provide a better product. Government's product is policy. If people started caring about, say, the environment, then the political parties will have a mad-dash to set up a policy to entice you to vote for them.
See, now we've moved from "government can't create anything" to "government can create things, but it's worse at doing so". Let's see if I can convince you to move even more...
I've highlighted one part of your argument orange. What it describes is decreasing returns to scale: the second liquor store isn't undercut by the larger first, so eventually there are numerous competitive small stores.
But not all industries have decreasing returns to scale. Sometimes industries have an optimum firm size that is very, very large: the worldwide demand for commercial aircraft suggests that the optimum number of firms to supply the entire world is probably only one, for instance.
In these cases, competition in the private sector simply produces one monopoly, with neither a profit incentive nor a voting incentive to improve efficiency. Then a regulated monopoly or government-run business could do better, don't you think?
I actually haven't budged. All the government can do is create what the free-market has already done, in a worse way. So yea, I guess technically the government can make stuff, but it's like a drooling retard making stuff.
As for airliners and monopolies. In some cases a monopoly is more efficient than pure-competition. These are rare, and have to do with leading technology that requires massive start-up capital. But I'm okay with that. In your example where there is only room for 1 airplane company... well then maybe there should only be 1? Fact is we have a handful and they are all subsidized by taxpayers. So instead of 1 mega monopoly that's making lots of money, we have 4 struggling airplane producing companies that take a piece of everyone's paycheque just to stay alive.
To me, government spending is best on things that would be unprofitable alltogether, or unprofitable in any sort of timescale that would make the private sector invest, but which pay dividends to society as a whole in the long term.
The government investing in alternative energy is a fantastic example of this - oil and coal still are vastly cheaper than the alternatives, but that doesn't mean the government investing in those alternatives is bad since it will ease the transition in the future.
Another real life example is DARPA and the internet, as I mentioned above. It might have been another decade or two before we had the internet without the government funding it, to say nothing of computers themselves.
Limed for truth.
The free market won't ever do anything that isn't profitable. Put another way, it will always do things that are profitable. Even if you pass a law making cocaine selling illegal, the market forces are unrelenting and still find a way to provide the product to the people and turn a profit.
I don't like the example of wind-farms though. Because the free market could invest heavily in alternative power if it wanted to. And it likely is putting in just enough money and time into it as the expected payoff. Government is interfering with this for political reasons.
Unless you're going to make the argument that alternative energy is necessary as a safety issue. Because it is government's role to keep the population safe. So maybe that investment is like military-spending by other means. It's kind-of a wonky argument, but I'd be down for it. But if the government's purpose is to make money on this deal, then it's doing it wrong.
People don't need an incentive to make money. They will find a way and it will be better than the government's way.
Alternative energy is necessary for society to continue for more than the next twenty years or so, to say nothing of even global warming we're going to run into untenable supply issues that are either going to force an abrupt economy raping change or a slightly less abrupt change, depending on what the government does.
I will say that most of the government efforts in alternative energy have been token efforts at best. We really need to spend nothing on ethanol except research of other forms than corn, and need to spend alot more on wind farms and pure research into things like battery technology.
Alternatively we could go for a market based solution and dump the entire true cost of oil into the price of gasoline, every cent spent protecting supply lines come out of taxes and go into a gallon of gas.
I have a feeling even the staunchest market wanking capitalist will cry for the government to do something if they had to pay $9 a gallon though.
I don't think the staunchest one would.
Well excluding people rich enough to not give a shit
To me, government spending is best on things that would be unprofitable alltogether, or unprofitable in any sort of timescale that would make the private sector invest, but which pay dividends to society as a whole in the long term.
The government investing in alternative energy is a fantastic example of this - oil and coal still are vastly cheaper than the alternatives, but that doesn't mean the government investing in those alternatives is bad since it will ease the transition in the future.
Another real life example is DARPA and the internet, as I mentioned above. It might have been another decade or two before we had the internet without the government funding it, to say nothing of computers themselves.
Limed for truth.
The free market won't ever do anything that isn't profitable. Put another way, it will always do things that are profitable. Even if you pass a law making cocaine selling illegal, the market forces are unrelenting and still find a way to provide the product to the people and turn a profit.
I don't like the example of wind-farms though. Because the free market could invest heavily in alternative power if it wanted to. And it likely is putting in just enough money and time into it as the expected payoff. Government is interfering with this for political reasons.
Unless you're going to make the argument that alternative energy is necessary as a safety issue. Because it is government's role to keep the population safe. So maybe that investment is like military-spending by other means. It's kind-of a wonky argument, but I'd be down for it. But if the government's purpose is to make money on this deal, then it's doing it wrong.
People don't need an incentive to make money. They will find a way and it will be better than the government's way.
Alternative energy is necessary for society to continue for more than the next twenty years or so, to say nothing of even global warming we're going to run into untenable supply issues that are either going to force an abrupt economy raping change or a slightly less abrupt change, depending on what the government does.
I will say that most of the government efforts in alternative energy have been token efforts at best. We really need to spend nothing on ethanol except research of other forms than corn, and need to spend alot more on wind farms and pure research into things like battery technology.
Alternatively we could go for a market based solution and dump the entire true cost of oil into the price of gasoline, every cent spent protecting supply lines come out of taxes and go into a gallon of gas.
I have a feeling even the staunchest market wanking capitalist will cry for the government to do something if they had to pay $9 a gallon though.
I don't think the staunchest one would.
I know I wouldn't.
The reason why we have so many cars may be because people aren't paying the true cost for their oil. Also if we're subsidizing oil (as you said, that's the first I've heard about it) it makes it that much harder for alternative energy to catch-on. Because now not only does it have to be cheaper than oil, it also has to be cheaper than the oil-subsidies!
Great. I'm so glad the government stepped in to make sure I have cheap oil. Now there's global warming, a bazillion cars on the road, massive bailouts for the auto-sector, and a huge oil spill in the gulf coast.
Maybe paying 9 dollars for oil would've been okay?
Humans aren't great long term thinkers and have a very poor understanding of risk and probability. That's basically where the government should be stepping in to the economy.
The problem is as I've said elsewhere we tend to privatize profits and socialize risk instead of using government power to moderate risk and do things that are short term losses but long term gains (think infrastructure for example).
enlightenedbum on
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
To me, government spending is best on things that would be unprofitable alltogether, or unprofitable in any sort of timescale that would make the private sector invest, but which pay dividends to society as a whole in the long term.
The government investing in alternative energy is a fantastic example of this - oil and coal still are vastly cheaper than the alternatives, but that doesn't mean the government investing in those alternatives is bad since it will ease the transition in the future.
Another real life example is DARPA and the internet, as I mentioned above. It might have been another decade or two before we had the internet without the government funding it, to say nothing of computers themselves.
You're confusing libertarianism with anarchy, libertarians do not believe there should be "no government", they simply oppose big government.
Well again, they want to minimize government, because... why? Because it is an artificial construct that is necessarily in opposition to freedom, which--though it isn't advocated as such--is natural?
This is not the libertarian argument. The libertarian argument is that government is violence. And that in welfare maximization happens in the absence of violence. This of course fails in that it does not recognize that governments are not the only entities that can enact violence upon others.
Libertarians commit a lot of fallacies, but the naturalistic one surprisingly isn't one of them.
This is a problem that I have run into from time to time...what exactly do you think the "naturalistic fallacy" is? Because philosophically it has nothing to do with nature. The naturalistic fallacy is deriving an ought from an is. Basing things on what is natural isn't a fallacy. So, I think the answer to your question is no.
Basing things on what is natural is deriving an ought (what you're basing) from an is (what is natural). Its called the naturalistic fallacy because people commonly make arguments for things happening for what is "natural"
This should get moved to D&D(where it will degenerate into "FUCK ATLAS SHRUGGED GINOSFDNODNHGODSF" and be locked in 20 pages). But one of the things that any such discussion is going to pivot around is negative vs positive liberty, as libertarianism rejects positive liberty more or less completely, while social liberalism(aka US liberals) embraces it.
And this is one of the big fallacies of libertarianism. Negative liberty cannot exist without positive liberty.
We started a libertarian thread with no mention of Rand Paul's latest controversy with the Civil Rights Act?
This is disappointing.
Why? He's a terrible example of a libertarian.
No, quite the opposite. He is a very good example of what a libertarian is. I think it is instead you who does not understand what libertarianism is.
I mean, there are only a few ways you can attempt to describe libertarianism. Either in a theoretical way or a practical way. Theoretically no one is a true libertarian. There simply exist too many conflicting definitions. Practically the libertarian party and those who espouse its views and voting records are what libertarians are.
The same problem comes when labeling any political philosophy.
And knowing who Ron Paul has associated with, I'm wouldn't be surprised if his son was in the second group. But that's how it should be presented, not just OMG RAND PAUL HATES CIVIL RIGHTS
Eh. The Maddow interview was enough and not framed well. Rand is very much in the crazy camp. Not racist, but crazy none the less. Thinking that racism can simply be killed by the free market.
Exhibit A of neoliberal ideology: government never, ever generates surplus welfare.
What? No. If government never generated surplus welfare then there would be no reason for government. That is anarcho-capitalist thinking, not neo-liberal.
Businesses have to make business decisions to keep profits high, and if they act inefficiently they go out of business. Governments don't do this, they have no profit motivation to do better and are never worried about going out of business. Also business operates in a competitive environment where Government doesn't.
So business is always trying to meet the needs of their customers/clients. If they don't, a competitor will, so business is always trying to be as loyal as possible to their clients who are keeping profits high. Part of that loyalty, paradoxically, is to keep prices low because customers want that.
None of those things matter because organizational incentives can be corrected with personal incentives and intrinsic motivation is more important than both.
End of the day how businesses do and how government does depends on pretty much one common factor. How well the managers are. Profit motive et all doesn't end up making much of a difference.
So if it seems today that liberalism and libertarianism seem similar in certain respects, they probably are. They keep stealing each other's concepts and adapting it. Externalities and public goods are due to Paul Samuelson, a solidly liberal thinker. And, of course, few liberals today would advocate government setting prices on a regular basis.
Depends on what we're pricing. Few(educated) liberals today would like to get rid of the Fed. And that is basically what the Fed does.
Well, rich(er) people certainly drive the tax base. What's the figure, something 94% of all taxes are paid by the top 50% of all earners?
No. Not in the slightest. Income taxes are pretty skewed. But payroll taxes make up the other half of the tax base and those are payed by workers(evenly by anyone with an labor based income).
And that doesn't even cover state taxes which are typically regressive.
Well, the reason nearly everyone abandoned Keynes for New Keynes is because eventually people'd realize the government was buying such and such, then prices would adjust until the ROI would be wiped out.
(actual the real reason was stagflation, but meh. This is how a new keynesian would criticise your model, anyway :P)
But in the mean time we do make profits and prices don't adjust immediately. And even then if you're talking about externality correction...
So lets say that the free market reigns and one airplane company exists. Do you understand how monopolies make profits?
Lets make an easier example. Cable Internet. There is, reasonably, one one company in an equilbrium market for internet. Internet requires land lines, duplicate providers would need duplicate lines and laying land lines is very expensive. While at the same time, marginal costs of providing internet are basically zero.
Knowing this would you support internet providers to have unlimited purview with what they charge
So lets say that the free market reigns and one airplane company exists. Do you understand how monopolies make profits?
Lets make an easier example. Cable Internet. There is, reasonably, one one company in an equilbrium market for internet. Internet requires land lines, duplicate providers would need duplicate lines and laying land lines is very expensive. While at the same time, marginal costs of providing internet are basically zero.
Knowing this would you support internet providers to have unlimited purview with what they charge
They can only charge what the market will accept. If it costs a million dollars to be on the net, no one will buy it. Or they'll get an alternative like Satellite or DSL.
Are cable internet prices even price-controlled? This is the first I've heard of it.
Just to go back to airliners, because it's a clear-er example.
We have 5 struggling mega-companies. All of them get tax payer money so they don't go down. I personally wouldn't mind if there were only 1 that made mega profits but didn't take a cut of my paycheque. And if it did make mega-profits, a crafty person, backed by bank-capitol, would find a way to build the same plane only a little bit cheaper for half of the mega profits.
Even if they were unsuccessful, the monopoly airplane builder would have keep doing good work inorder to be ready for these competitors that are trying to break into the market.
Of course I'd rather 5 companies that all competed with each other that didn't have government subsidies. But we don't have that either. I'm not sure fewer planes and more expensive (for users) flight would be a bad thing, some people could take a boat instead. And I'd rather flyers pay more than to tax some young family that's not going to fly anyway.
Oh right, the other problem with libertarianism is you need moral paragons both running the government and the major corporations. It's hilariously not unlike communism in that regard.
enlightenedbum on
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Just to go back to airliners, because it's a clear-er example.
We have 5 struggling mega-companies. All of them get tax payer money so they don't go down. I personally wouldn't mind if there were only 1 that made mega profits but didn't take a cut of my paycheque.
They would take a cut of your paycheque so long as you know anyone who travels by plane, travel by plane, or do business with people who travel or ship by plane.
They can only charge what the market will accept. If it costs a million dollars to be on the net, no one will buy it. Or they'll get an alternative like Satellite or DSL.
Are cable internet prices even price-controlled? This is the first I've heard of it.
Yes, but not very well. Cable companies typically have to negotiate with localities which leads to
1) low coverage in non-cities
2) high prices.
Compare the U.S. with Korea where speeds are 100 times faster and its cheaper in real dollars. This didn't happen by magic.
Edit; lets be clear here. Monopolies do exactly what taxes do to a market. Except instead of the govt getting the money and using it for a public good, a private individual gets the money.
The neo-liberal arguments for taxation is that the value of the govt getting the money and spending it on public goods outweighs the value of the deadweight loss.
There are no arguments against monopoly restrictions, they are always realizing net welfare gains. (Pareto efficiency is pointless to consider because many different points can be Pareto efficient) Saying "but i don't think we're spending our money well" is not an argument against government its an argument against management. Just as Enron is not an argument against business its an argument against corruption.
Goumindong on
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mrt144King of the NumbernamesRegistered Userregular
edited May 2010
Basically subsidies competition isn't competition at all.
Just to go back to airliners, because it's a clear-er example.
We have 5 struggling mega-companies. All of them get tax payer money so they don't go down. I personally wouldn't mind if there were only 1 that made mega profits but didn't take a cut of my paycheque.
They would take a cut of your paycheque so long as you know anyone who travels by plane, travel by plane, or do business with people who travel or ship by plane.
They can only charge what the market will accept. If it costs a million dollars to be on the net, no one will buy it. Or they'll get an alternative like Satellite or DSL.
Are cable internet prices even price-controlled? This is the first I've heard of it.
Yes, but not very well. Cable companies typically have to negotiate with localities which leads to
1) low coverage in non-cities
2) high prices.
Compare the U.S. with Korea where speeds are 100 times faster and its cheaper in real dollars. This didn't happen by magic.
Korea's infrastrcuture costs are probably a tiny fraction of the US's. I don't know how South Korea's population is spread out, but there is probably 1 huge city where almost everyone lives. It would be very inexpensive to build internet infrastructure for that city.
Edit - From Wikipedia
South Korea = 100K Square Kilometers. Population = 50 million.
United States = 9,820K Square Kilometers. Population = 300 Million.
So US has 10 times the area and 6 times the population. If I had to provide top-quality internet access, I'd rather do it for Korea. It's smaller, it's denser and Koreans love their internet more than anybody.
And yet it did not happen without govt intervention. Korea's density might be an issue if such internet existed in the United States in the locations where it were dense. But the free market will not provide those services for those prices even in the most dense cities.
It won't do it because monopoly pricing is welfare inefficient.
Prices are lower in Korea, bandwidth is higher, even when comparing locations that are just as dense.
Just to go back to airliners, because it's a clear-er example.
We have 5 struggling mega-companies. All of them get tax payer money so they don't go down. I personally wouldn't mind if there were only 1 that made mega profits but didn't take a cut of my paycheque.
They would take a cut of your paycheque so long as you know anyone who travels by plane, travel by plane, or do business with people who travel or ship by plane.
They can only charge what the market will accept. If it costs a million dollars to be on the net, no one will buy it. Or they'll get an alternative like Satellite or DSL.
Are cable internet prices even price-controlled? This is the first I've heard of it.
Yes, but not very well. Cable companies typically have to negotiate with localities which leads to
1) low coverage in non-cities
2) high prices.
Compare the U.S. with Korea where speeds are 100 times faster and its cheaper in real dollars. This didn't happen by magic.
Korea's infrastrcuture costs are probably a tiny fraction of the US's. I don't know how South Korea's population is spread out, but there is probably 1 huge city where almost everyone lives. It would be very inexpensive to build internet infrastructure for that city.
Japan, another example of better internet than the US, also enjoys a high population density. But it isn't just South Korea and Japan; broadband penetration - and even more so, broadband quality - is relatively stagnant in the US while every other country in the world that isn't too busy starving is booming terrifically. This is partly due to the newer technology they are deploying to catch up with our older technology, and partly to do with the relative ease of doubling a 5% broadband penetration to doubling 20%, but our power-mad ISP monopolies and the congress-critters in their pockets certainly aren't helping.
Libertarians would rightly note that the original fault lies with the government intervention in these markets, but many problems in the last two decades have been the result of the absence of continued intervention. For some reason this bunch of cockbites whose name starts with an "L" have been yelling that the best way to treat local monopolies propped up by taxpayer spending is not to regulate or make demands of them, but to go "hands off" and let the market do its thing. Except there is no market, because we created local monopolies with tax dollar investment. Capital-G Government is never going to be entirely decoupled from ISP service... nor should it be, given the infrastructure interest that any sane State ought to have in its information systems.
Retarded oversimplifications such as "leave Comcast alone and let their customers switch to DSL if they want to" are the source of the "glibertarian" stereotype: the guy who knows just enough about an issue to deliver a glib three-word solution ("The Free Market") to a complex and problematic situation that is woefully under-served by such child-like naiveté.
And yet it did not happen without govt intervention. Korea's density might be an issue if such internet existed in the United States in the locations where it were dense. But the free market will not provide those services for those prices even in the most dense cities.
It won't do it because monopoly pricing is welfare inefficient.
Prices are lower in Korea, bandwidth is higher, even when comparing locations that are just as dense.
Prices are lower for users.
All the resources the government uses inorder to make that happen are still costs, they just don't appear on your bill. And all of the lost efficiency is also kept off the books.
If Americans wanted faster internet, they could pay for it. But there aren't enough of you who want faster internet. You guys probably mostly scream for cheaper internet. Does anyone here really want 100X faster internet? I don't lag in Star Craft... I know I wouldn't pay much more for 100X internet.
As long as I can stream youtube, I'm happy. I think most users feel that way.
Just to go back to airliners, because it's a clear-er example.
We have 5 struggling mega-companies. All of them get tax payer money so they don't go down. I personally wouldn't mind if there were only 1 that made mega profits but didn't take a cut of my paycheque.
They would take a cut of your paycheque so long as you know anyone who travels by plane, travel by plane, or do business with people who travel or ship by plane.
They can only charge what the market will accept. If it costs a million dollars to be on the net, no one will buy it. Or they'll get an alternative like Satellite or DSL.
Are cable internet prices even price-controlled? This is the first I've heard of it.
Yes, but not very well. Cable companies typically have to negotiate with localities which leads to
1) low coverage in non-cities
2) high prices.
Compare the U.S. with Korea where speeds are 100 times faster and its cheaper in real dollars. This didn't happen by magic.
Korea's infrastrcuture costs are probably a tiny fraction of the US's. I don't know how South Korea's population is spread out, but there is probably 1 huge city where almost everyone lives. It would be very inexpensive to build internet infrastructure for that city.
Japan, another example of better internet than the US, also enjoys a high population density. But it isn't just South Korea and Japan; broadband penetration - and even more so, broadband quality - is relatively stagnant in the US while every other country in the world that isn't too busy starving is booming terrifically. This is partly due to the newer technology they are deploying to catch up with our older technology, and partly to do with the relative ease of doubling a 5% broadband penetration to doubling 20%, but our power-mad ISP monopolies and the congress-critters in their pockets certainly aren't helping.
Libertarians would rightly note that the original fault lies with the government intervention in these markets, but many problems in the last two decades have been the result of the absence of continued intervention. For some reason this bunch of cockbites whose name starts with an "L" have been yelling that the best way to treat local monopolies propped up by taxpayer spending is not to regulate or make demands of them, but to go "hands off" and let the market do its thing. Except there is no market, because we created local monopolies with tax dollar investment. Capital-G Government is never going to be entirely decoupled from ISP service... nor should it be, given the infrastructure interest that any sane State ought to have in its information systems.
Retarded oversimplifications such as "leave Comcast alone and let their customers switch to DSL if they want to" are the source of the "glibertarian" stereotype: the guy who knows just enough about an issue to deliver a glib three-word solution ("The Free Market") to a complex and problematic issue that is woefully under-served by such child-like naiveté.
Well in my defense, I did try to not-talk about broadband, and I said it was something I wasn't familiar with.
But thank you for the limed part. If there's already been a bunch of government intervention, you no longer have a good libertarian approach. If the government spends a trillion dollars to keep you from being bankrupt, then yea I guess they can lay down a few rules. Because just giving tax payers money away for nothing is really really dumb.
I mean, there are only a few ways you can attempt to describe libertarianism. Either in a theoretical way or a practical way. Theoretically no one is a true libertarian. There simply exist too many conflicting definitions. Practically the libertarian party and those who espouse its views and voting records are what libertarians are.
The same problem comes when labeling any political philosophy.
This is where I disagree. It is possible to generally hew to the tenets of whatever flavor of libertarianism you prefer without embracing them all whole heartedly or joining the Libertarian party. This then leads to strategic voting concerns whereby relatively moderate libertarians will align with one of the two major political parties. Maybe in a different electoral system you would get a more true picture, but I don't think you can given our current system.
I mean, by a similiar token, you cannot say that the Green party represents all environmentalists.
Saammiel on
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
I mean, by a similiar token, you cannot say that the Green party represents all environmentalists.
While I admit I'm not freshly familiar with the platform issues of the Green Party, I think I can safely say that their core values don't explicitly and purposefully fly in the face of environmentalism and communal economics.
I can't say a similar thing about the Libertarian Party.
The reason why we have so many cars may be because people aren't paying the true cost for their oil. Also if we're subsidizing oil (as you said, that's the first I've heard about it) it makes it that much harder for alternative energy to catch-on. Because now not only does it have to be cheaper than oil, it also has to be cheaper than the oil-subsidies!
Great. I'm so glad the government stepped in to make sure I have cheap oil. Now there's global warming, a bazillion cars on the road, massive bailouts for the auto-sector, and a huge oil spill in the gulf coast.
Maybe paying 9 dollars for oil would've been okay?
Well part of the problem of contemporary right wing economics in the US is the complete failure to grasp exactly what the government does with all their tax dollars, part of the problem with right wing energy policy is the lack of understanding of externalities. These two make sweet love and produce glorious bad policy.
Any money not paid by BP to fix the oil spilled (and I seriously doubt they'll foot 100% of the bill) is an invisible externality of oil that will be paid for with tax dollars, just as one example.
Libertarians would rightly note that the original fault lies with the government intervention in these markets,
This is not true. Without govt intervention there would be no such markets. They simply would not exist. Any that did pop up would quickly become monopolies.
The govt of the U.S. did not intervene to create monopolies in the first place. It built the infrastructure then sold it. (or paid people to build it). That does not create monopolies as much as any act of building infrastructure creates monopolies.
Prices are lower for users.
All the resources the government uses inorder to make that happen are still costs, they just don't appear on your bill. And all of the lost efficiency is also kept off the books.
You mean gained efficiency actually. In the case of a monopoly the govt does not have to do but regulate. They can do so by regulating prices lower and so getting more people on at the same coverage, regulating quality higher(which is really the same thing as regulating prices lower really), or some combination of the two.
The company still is making profit, just not as much, and more gains go back into society.
To get a better grasp of how this work, it might be valuable for you to read a bit about minimum wages under monopsony conditions(which is exactly what we're discussing except a price floor rather than cap due to demand control rather than supply control), which, while not an "uncontentious" topic, certainly has plenty of documentation. Or something on the basic argument for the removal(or limitations) of copyright law. Relaxing copyright law does the same thing as regulating monopolies in this instance, except in repeated instances you don't have problems with new content creation(since we aren't dealing with newly created goods and since we're still allowing some monopoly profits but not all)
E.G. lets steal a picture from wikipedia
Monopoly prices
If we have a price cap between Pm and Pc then Marginal Revenue is flat on the level of the price cap until it hits the demand curve (at which point it reverts to its original position.
Such by setting a price cap between Pm and Pc (or increasing quality via regulation) we can reduce deadweight loss without any costs but enforcement.
When I wrote that "the original fault lies with government intervention," the 'fault' to which I refer isn't that these monopolies were created at all; it's that after their creation they have become pseudo-private enterprises, and in their pursuit of year-to-year (or even month-to-month) profitability they conveniently forgot about the infrastructure upgrades (fiber) they had once promised the taxpayer who created them. They have little interest in exciting new technologies like WiMax, or even hostility towards them, because their copper networks have been making them money for decades and they have no motivation to change that. Their services in general are just barely good enough to challenge their (usually sole) competitor, whose different technology (usually cable vs. DSL) would assure that their markets are already somewhat separated to begin with.
Monopolies are occasionally the most efficient solution to a problem, but they can't be controlled by the market; they require regulation. Deregulating telecoms was a dumb move, and it was a dumb move made by politicians, not the Invisible Hand, because the Invisible Hand has limitations to its reach, as the obvious and necessary role of government in the creation of the internet should show. I was not being complimentary when I acknowledged that the libertarians are right to blame government intervention; the truly deleterious intervention came when their ideals guided the shift from public to private control of internet infrastructure. We wouldn't have the monopolies without the government, but the monopolies wouldn't be a problem without the libertarians.
Since the topic is libertarianism i wanted to share something that I saw in response to a blog a bit ago that I quite liked.
Its written by a "more crazy than less crazy" libertarian, but kinda exemplifies the libertarianism I wish was the "opposition". Its not perfect(it certainly could use a bit of a editing in the language department), but there are a lot of little lines that i liked. Such as "Trade exists without government, but markets do not"
Curt Doolittle Wrote:
"From a libertarian point of view, it would be inconsistent to advocate legalizing marijuana and banning trans fats."
Actually, the two issues are different.
Marijuana
The only reasons to ban marijuana are:
1) Because it impedes the mind, and therefore choice, and choice is a necessary capacity, and necessary assumption, in the libertarian model. This is a technical concept, not a practical one.
2) Because you can expose others to risk due to impaired judgement, largely while driving a vehicle. This concept is both technical and practical.
Justifying the application of force must be both technical (epistemically rational) and practical (materially implementable). Epistemic applications alone are infinite and open to error. (ie: laws should be enforceable not specious.)
Trans fats
Foods are a voluntary health issue, not an externalized risk issue or capacity issue. The libertarian concept of freedom allows people to harm themselves. However, since it is not possible to make a rational choice over the content of goods , regulating labeling is not a question of freedom but a question of limiting fraud or accidental harm in a market.
Libertarianism's Failures
Classical liberalism is an outgrowth of conservatism. Libertarianism is an outgrowth of Classical Liberalism. Rothbardian anarchism is an outgrowth of libertarianism. The only articulated philosophy is the Rothbardian. But Rothbard succeeded by avoiding the problem of creating markets, and advocating a religion of property under the auspices of natural law. Hoppe improved this line of thinking by developing private institutions that provided public goods. But these methods are flawed because they start with non-violence and trade, rather than the human capacity for violence and fraud, and the necessity of building and creating markets. In that sense, while anarchists have made innovations ( monarchic inter-temporal incentives, private insurance institutions ) they have failed to provide an answer for advances in abstract forms of property, and as such are providing solutions that are regressive as did Marx.
A market is a joint stock company that was invested in by the fraternal order of soldiers who then collected fees for their service in creating that market. Market administrators determine the citeria for merchants and products to compete in the arena of the market, and provide registration for product types as needed to reflect advances in product technology. Merchants enter the market by registering products such that they meet the market criteria so that the shareholders experience an appreciation in value. The common people gain access to the market by respecting property, which is a material forgone opportunity cost. Everyone pays, and everyone profits from market participation.
The Problem Of A False History
The history of economic thought is the history of demonizing monarchs for the purpose of transferring control of the market from it's military founders, to the vendors - the middle classes. This demonization is nothing but falsehood. As it turns out, kings were kinder to their populations than are republican and democratic governments. But because of this demonization, the causal origin of civilization, of cities, of markets, of prosperity, and of western culture itself, is obscured by the rhetoric of demonizing the nobility who created this culture under which we prosper.
Despite it's variety of logical strengths, libertarian philosophy contains a number of errors, the most influential of which is in confusing the role of government as necessarily social in nature or necessarily defensive in nature, or a tool of class exploitation, versus the historical and causal origin of government as a protector and regulator of markets.
Markets are the primary social institution of post tribal man. Governments have no reason for existence outside of Markets. Government IS a market function, because the purpose of government is determining the rules of the market which funds the government. Trade exists without government, but markets do not. Advanced markets for the trading of abstracts do not.
All forms of property beyond portable personal property (several property) require registration, and rules for exchange in the market. The primary difference between trade and market is anonymity whereby the market operator places some guarantee on the products offered so that the market's shareholders can create a competitive advantage against other markets, and to reduce the cost of conflict administration within the market.
The difference in cultures is simply in the definition of ownership of different forms of property that they permit in their markets, and the terms by which they permit products entry. And these differences are material: the more granular the property the more liquidity and velocity it produces, and the greater the division of knowledge and labor that is possible.
This culture of Market-Making is one of the three causal differences for western civilization versus the central and eastern models. (The other two differences being military tactics that required enfranchisement - leading to debate, reason an science, and IQ distribution mixed with resource and transport availability.).
Libertarians confuse fear of abuses by the government with the necessity of constraining the government to the maintenance of the rules of the market, and the value in those rules as a means of increasing the productivity of the market and their yield from that market.
Conservatives lack the ability to articulate their concepts in other than moral terms. Libertarians do significantly better. But both systems of thought are lacking in an understanding of what they argue for.
Libertarians, despite being a minority selling a minority philosophy, seek to create a nation governed by a 'religion of property' in order to exit the influence of government when in fact, government is responsible for making the market, and libertarians should lobby for additional rules to limit the state. Not limiting it to social activities of dubious non-market nature, but to it's role in regulating the market and evolutionary increases in defining the ever expanding set of objects and options we refer to as property, and which we frequently trade, so that we, as a people, maintain a competitive advantage against other markets.
The problems with the anarchic movement are substantive in that they do not account for market-enhancing asymmetries, versus market-harming asymmetries. In other words, they are advocating the 'buyer beware' ethic of the Bazaar, rather than the 'seller responsibility' that is required of participants in the Market. This is not an advantage to the shareholders (citizens).
The problem with our institutions is that they do not separate redistributive efforts from market efforts. Libertarians (of which I am a member of the group of theorists) would be better served by abandoning our rhetoric of monarchic criticism, and instead develop a language and metaphysics such that we can provide an institutional response to an increasingly complex world in which we must register, trade and police a market of increasingly vast and complex products and services, so that we may maintain our competitive advantage over the rest of the world.
And abandon luddite religions of all sorts. That includes all forms of the church of government.
Instead, a rational epistemology can be applied if we simply look at the material problem of building and maintaining markets in an increasing division of knowledge and labor, where most of our inventions are abstractions that like large numbers, are beyond the ability of our perceptions. That is the one and only important function of government, after territorial defense and the policing of trade routes.
And the implementation of the application of rationalism, is in separating our institutions such that redistribution is held by one house, and market regulation by another. Further, our separation of banking, including the currency, credit and interest (which has replaced our code of laws as our primary means of maintaining social order) is insufficient for the current state of our division of knowledge and labor.
That is Post-Rothbardian libertarianism. And it is the only rational alternative to encroaching socialism.
Libertarianism was hijacked by Rothbard simply because Hayek, Parsons, Popper and Mises failed. And both Rothbard and Hoppe created extraordinary epistemological and institutional value with their research program. But they have failed, as did the libertarians, and the classical liberals, and the conservatives before them, to create a system of institutions capable of providing an alternative to the anti-market anti-civilization sentiments and philosophy of socialism by failing to articulate the causal purpose of government as market maker, and to create institutions that expand and evolve along with the objects that we exchange in that market.
And that is your solution membership in any Church: the articulated causality of the market and it's institutions and the purpose of government by the technique which we call 'reason'.
RE: Time to pick a fight
Absolutely. And to abandon the dictum of non violence as a religious principle and embrace violence as a necessary virtue, and a requisite for making and maintaining a market.
I was not being complimentary when I acknowledged that the libertarians are right to blame government intervention; the truly deleterious intervention came when their ideals guided the shift from public to private control of internet infrastructure.
That kind of labeling destroys the entire purpose of a label. Under that method everything is government intervention.
Rather the government was intervening and then stopped. Stopping the intervention is not "some other intervention"
Consider these possibilities for your actions:
Your set of actions consist in three subsets.
1) Things you cannot do (because you are prohibited)
2) Things you cannot do (because you are unable)
3) Things that you can do.
This should contain all of the possible things that you might ever do. Since there are only things you can do or cannot do, and only things that you cannot do because you're prohibited or because you're unable.
With no government(or violence at all) there are only two states. Since we just defined away the possibility of prevention then only 2 and 3 can exist.
Such, if we add govt we can only change two things we can make things that we cannot do because we're unable into things that we can do by adding means. And we can make things that we can do into things that we cannot do by adding prevention.
moving from 1 to 3 is only possible when intervention is relaxed. When government is lessened.
Fake Edit: Yes we are excepting the possibility of other entities preventing said action and govt stopping that prevention. But that is not relevant to the discussion on cable companies and could reasonably be considered a move from 2 to 3.
Real edit: within that framework the govts job would be to maximize the things that you can do by limiting the things that you can do that cause others to not be able to do things and vise-versa. A problem with govt intervention would be when the limitation from 3 to 1 does not cause at least a greater move from 2 to 3. Going the other way could not be a problem with govt intervention.
This of course is a pretty simple model, but i hope it gets the point across when trying to define what is and what isn't govt intervention.
Since the topic is libertarianism i wanted to share something that I saw in response to a blog a bit ago that I quite liked.
Its written by a "more crazy than less crazy" libertarian, but kinda exemplifies the libertarianism I wish was the "opposition". Its not perfect, but there are a lot of little lines that i liked. Such as "Trade exists without government, but markets do not"
Curt Doolittle Wrote:
"From a libertarian point of view, it would be inconsistent to advocate legalizing marijuana and banning trans fats."
Actually, the two issues are different.
Marijuana
The only reasons to ban marijuana are:
1) Because it impedes the mind, and therefore choice, and choice is a necessary capacity, and necessary assumption, in the libertarian model. This is a technical concept, not a practical one.
2) Because you can expose others to risk due to impaired judgement, largely while driving a vehicle. This concept is both technical and practical.
Justifying the application of force must be both technical (epistemically rational) and practical (materially implementable). Epistemic applications alone are infinite and open to error. (ie: laws should be enforceable not specious.)
Trans fats
Foods are a voluntary health issue, not an externalized risk issue or capacity issue. The libertarian concept of freedom allows people to harm themselves. However, since it is not possible to make a rational choice over the content of goods , regulating labeling is not a question of freedom but a question of limiting fraud or accidental harm in a market.
Libertarianism's Failures
Classical liberalism is an outgrowth of conservatism. Libertarianism is an outgrowth of Classical Liberalism. Rothbardian anarchism is an outgrowth of libertarianism. The only articulated philosophy is the Rothbardian. But Rothbard succeeded by avoiding the problem of creating markets, and advocating a religion of property under the auspices of natural law. Hoppe improved this line of thinking by developing private institutions that provided public goods. But these methods are flawed because they start with non-violence and trade, rather than the human capacity for violence and fraud, and the necessity of building and creating markets. In that sense, while anarchists have made innovations ( monarchic inter-temporal incentives, private insurance institutions ) they have failed to provide an answer for advances in abstract forms of property, and as such are providing solutions that are regressive as did Marx.
A market is a joint stock company that was invested in by the fraternal order of soldiers who then collected fees for their service in creating that market. Market administrators determine the citeria for merchants and products to compete in the arena of the market, and provide registration for product types as needed to reflect advances in product technology. Merchants enter the market by registering products such that they meet the market criteria so that the shareholders experience an appreciation in value. The common people gain access to the market by respecting property, which is a material forgone opportunity cost. Everyone pays, and everyone profits from market participation.
The Problem Of A False History
The history of economic thought is the history of demonizing monarchs for the purpose of transferring control of the market from it's military founders, to the vendors - the middle classes. This demonization is nothing but falsehood. As it turns out, kings were kinder to their populations than are republican and democratic governments. But because of this demonization, the causal origin of civilization, of cities, of markets, of prosperity, and of western culture itself, is obscured by the rhetoric of demonizing the nobility who created this culture under which we prosper.
Despite it's variety of logical strengths, libertarian philosophy contains a number of errors, the most influential of which is in confusing the role of government as necessarily social in nature or necessarily defensive in nature, or a tool of class exploitation, versus the historical and causal origin of government as a protector and regulator of markets.
Markets are the primary social institution of post tribal man. Governments have no reason for existence outside of Markets. Government IS a market function, because the purpose of government is determining the rules of the market which funds the government. Trade exists without government, but markets do not. Advanced markets for the trading of abstracts do not.
All forms of property beyond portable personal property (several property) require registration, and rules for exchange in the market. The primary difference between trade and market is anonymity whereby the market operator places some guarantee on the products offered so that the market's shareholders can create a competitive advantage against other markets, and to reduce the cost of conflict administration within the market.
The difference in cultures is simply in the definition of ownership of different forms of property that they permit in their markets, and the terms by which they permit products entry. And these differences are material: the more granular the property the more liquidity and velocity it produces, and the greater the division of knowledge and labor that is possible.
This culture of Market-Making is one of the three causal differences for western civilization versus the central and eastern models. (The other two differences being military tactics that required enfranchisement - leading to debate, reason an science, and IQ distribution mixed with resource and transport availability.).
Libertarians confuse fear of abuses by the government with the necessity of constraining the government to the maintenance of the rules of the market, and the value in those rules as a means of increasing the productivity of the market and their yield from that market.
Conservatives lack the ability to articulate their concepts in other than moral terms. Libertarians do significantly better. But both systems of thought are lacking in an understanding of what they argue for.
Libertarians, despite being a minority selling a minority philosophy, seek to create a nation governed by a 'religion of property' in order to exit the influence of government when in fact, government is responsible for making the market, and libertarians should lobby for additional rules to limit the state. Not limiting it to social activities of dubious non-market nature, but to it's role in regulating the market and evolutionary increases in defining the ever expanding set of objects and options we refer to as property, and which we frequently trade, so that we, as a people, maintain a competitive advantage against other markets.
The problems with the anarchic movement are substantive in that they do not account for market-enhancing asymmetries, versus market-harming asymmetries. In other words, they are advocating the 'buyer beware' ethic of the Bazaar, rather than the 'seller responsibility' that is required of participants in the Market. This is not an advantage to the shareholders (citizens).
The problem with our institutions is that they do not separate redistributive efforts from market efforts. Libertarians (of which I am a member of the group of theorists) would be better served by abandoning our rhetoric of monarchic criticism, and instead develop a language and metaphysics such that we can provide an institutional response to an increasingly complex world in which we must register, trade and police a market of increasingly vast and complex products and services, so that we may maintain our competitive advantage over the rest of the world.
And abandon luddite religions of all sorts. That includes all forms of the church of government.
Instead, a rational epistemology can be applied if we simply look at the material problem of building and maintaining markets in an increasing division of knowledge and labor, where most of our inventions are abstractions that like large numbers, are beyond the ability of our perceptions. That is the one and only important function of government, after territorial defense and the policing of trade routes.
And the implementation of the application of rationalism, is in separating our institutions such that redistribution is held by one house, and market regulation by another. Further, our separation of banking, including the currency, credit and interest (which has replaced our code of laws as our primary means of maintaining social order) is insufficient for the current state of our division of knowledge and labor.
That is Post-Rothbardian libertarianism. And it is the only rational alternative to encroaching socialism.
Libertarianism was hijacked by Rothbard simply because Hayek, Parsons, Popper and Mises failed. And both Rothbard and Hoppe created extraordinary epistemological and institutional value with their research program. But they have failed, as did the libertarians, and the classical liberals, and the conservatives before them, to create a system of institutions capable of providing an alternative to the anti-market anti-civilization sentiments and philosophy of socialism by failing to articulate the causal purpose of government as market maker, and to create institutions that expand and evolve along with the objects that we exchange in that market.
And that is your solution membership in any Church: the articulated causality of the market and it's institutions and the purpose of government by the technique which we call 'reason'.
RE: Time to pick a fight
Absolutely. And to abandon the dictum of non violence as a religious principle and embrace violence as a necessary virtue, and a requisite for making and maintaining a market.
In the sequence of cooperative social protocols beginning with manners ( limited personal consequences to one’s status), followed by ethics (externalized consequences of actions wherein one may be subject to retribution) , followed by morals (fully externalized consequences wherein one may steal from others unaccountably or irreversibly), Morality consists of those common habitual principles and descriptive statements by which which we codify and distribute the cultural rules of economic constraint whereby individuals pay for membership in the benefit structure of the group.
I was not being complimentary when I acknowledged that the libertarians are right to blame government intervention; the truly deleterious intervention came when their ideals guided the shift from public to private control of internet infrastructure.
That kind of labeling destroys the entire purpose of a label. Under that method everything is government intervention.
Rather the government was intervening and then stopped. Stopping the intervention is not "some other intervention"
I am not the most clear writer, but it should have at least been apparent that I was not trying to re-label deregulation as intervention of the sort which a libertarian would oppose; that would be ridiculous, and precisely counter to the point of my post. The point being that the problem with ISPs in America is the market-warping monopolies initially born of government intervention, and this is a problem in the first place because the bunch of idiots who are the subject of this thread thought that the market would be a better way to handle these institutions. They were wrong.
In a hypothetical libertarian fairyland where DARPANET was developed in an AT&T lab, we would still be dealing with a bunch of shitty monopolies, I'm sure. But that doesn't change the historical fact that the shitty monopolies we're dealing with now have their roots in public enterprise, and their failures can be clearly connected to public decisions. But this doesn't vindicate the libertarian opinion that government ruins everything; precisely the opposite: the way the government ruined this thing is by listening to the libs and passing infrastructure into the invisible hands of "the market."
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Just like the title asks. Is libertarianism, and I understand that it's a squishy, general term with a lot of variance among actual libertarians, resting, fundamentally, on a big naturalistic fallacy? To err on the side of--indeed, to generally advocate--no government (the state of nature)?
No, or at least not necessarily. For instance, Anarchy, State, and Utopia doesn't argue that because it's the state of nature not to have government interference therefore government interference is bad. The badness of government interference is much closer to a primitive data point than it is to something derived--it generally has to do with the supreme value of freedom. In fact, Anarchy, State, and Utopia spends most of its time trying to figure out ways to have and to justify a sometimes coercive state given the general premise about the value of freedom. The point is most definitely not to get back to the state of nature.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited May 2010
There's actually quite a lot of room for poking libertarianism from the angle of "conventional economic models just do not approximate reality".
I've always looked at libertarianism as something that is coming from the vaguely right direction, and having all of its fundamental ideas adjusted by reality as it hits it.
The non-existence of perfect information, infinitely large market, rational agents etc all suggest that there is a lot of room for a government that will help make the market more "ideal", but most libertarians are opposed to this out of principles that seem based on assumptions that just aren't true.
Just like the title asks. Is libertarianism, and I understand that it's a squishy, general term with a lot of variance among actual libertarians, resting, fundamentally, on a big naturalistic fallacy? To err on the side of--indeed, to generally advocate--no government (the state of nature)?
No, or at least not necessarily. For instance, Anarchy, State, and Utopia doesn't argue that because it's the state of nature not to have government interference therefore government interference is bad. The badness of government interference is much closer to a primitive data point than it is to something derived--it generally has to do with the supreme value of freedom. In fact, Anarchy, State, and Utopia spends most of its time trying to figure out ways to have and to justify a sometimes coercive state given the general premise about the value of freedom. The point is most definitely not to get back to the state of nature.
I don't think that one need necessarily have "the state of nature" or something akin to it in mind to be committing a naturalistic fallacy. One can be preferring something for its own sake without a conscious preference for nature, and be committing a naturalistic fallacy. That is, "nature" doesn't have to be in mind for a naturalistic fallacy to be made.
I don't think most people who commit the naturalistic fallacy have a desire to get back to a state of nature, I think the naturalistic fallacy is more focused on specific goods or services and is not generally applied constantly across the myriad sets of things that a person is inclined to care about.
Just like the title asks. Is libertarianism, and I understand that it's a squishy, general term with a lot of variance among actual libertarians, resting, fundamentally, on a big naturalistic fallacy? To err on the side of--indeed, to generally advocate--no government (the state of nature)?
No, or at least not necessarily. For instance, Anarchy, State, and Utopia doesn't argue that because it's the state of nature not to have government interference therefore government interference is bad. The badness of government interference is much closer to a primitive data point than it is to something derived--it generally has to do with the supreme value of freedom. In fact, Anarchy, State, and Utopia spends most of its time trying to figure out ways to have and to justify a sometimes coercive state given the general premise about the value of freedom. The point is most definitely not to get back to the state of nature.
I don't think that one need necessarily have "the state of nature" or something akin to it in mind to be committing a naturalistic fallacy. One can be preferring something for its own sake without a conscious preference for nature, and be committing a naturalistic fallacy. That is, "nature" doesn't have to be in mind for a naturalistic fallacy to be made.
I don't think most people who commit the naturalistic fallacy have a desire to get back to a state of nature, I think the naturalistic fallacy is more focused on specific goods or services and is not generally applied constantly across the myriad sets of things that a person is inclined to care about.
The naturalistic fallacy doesn't actually have anything to do with nature. It's simply the mistake of assuming that something happening means that it is good. For an example, look at Nash on Canadian health care.
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Well, the reason nearly everyone abandoned Keynes for New Keynes is because eventually people'd realize the government was buying such and such, then prices would adjust until the ROI would be wiped out.
(actual the real reason was stagflation, but meh. This is how a new keynesian would criticise your model, anyway :P)
It's complicated, but it mostly has to do with the drive for profits versus the drive for votes. Profits are the reward for running your business well. The more waste you can cut the higher your profits are. The more services you can provide, to the neediest people, the more profits you can make. If there is a way to provide something to someone and turn a profit, the free market will find it. Whoever finds it first will be rich, eventually more and more people will follow that path until the product becomes cheap.
If there is a county with no liquor store, the first one there is going to make lots of money. Then the second one will come to try and catch as much of the profits as possible. Maybe they set up at a different location so they are closer to some part of town (though the first one there would have the best location). Then a 3rd one comes and maybe it offers specialty products because they have third best location and are just new. There will come a point where adding more liquor-stores to that town won't bring in profit for the new stores.
Once that starts happening, the best Liquor stores stay in business and their competition is out of work. This is a good thing, the weak business failing is necessary and it's a good thing, it keeps things efficient. Also, with out of work liquor-store operators now in the market place, they can be hired by the successful stores cheaper. Or do something else with their labor. The market decided that they didn't really want that many liquor stores, so it kept the best and the others failed. (Best in terms of profits, if the store that sold your favourite brew went out of business, it's because they couldn't provide it to you at a profit).
Government doesn't act like this. They never have a motive for profit and can't go out of business. If government owns a liquor store it won't worry about going out of business, it won't try to innovate. Even if it does innovate, it would do so because a person was at that store and said "hey we could run this better if we only did it this way," which could just as easily happen in a private store. And the drive to innovate is much higher in private business, so that superstar of the government liquor store would be put to much better use at a private liquor store.
So Governments aren't designed to make profits, and they are missing a key factor that makes things effecient (going out of business). Governments are fueled by votes. That's where they get their power, and their authority. That's why political parties try capture votes where the think other parties are weak. Kinda like the liquor store example, there is a mad-dash to set up stores where there was no competition, and then once they were there then they had to compete to provide a better product. Government's product is policy. If people started caring about, say, the environment, then the political parties will have a mad-dash to set up a policy to entice you to vote for them.
The key examples of the government purchasing from the private sector for projects that have a definable ROI is mass transit/public transportation and electrical infrastructure. New Keynesians want to throw money into black pits at the HQs of companies that are failing.
To be pedantic, the only part of that logic that a modern left-wing economic ideology would cite is the part I blue'd... the rest really is duplicable by private investment.
The obvious relevant modern example would be nuclear power plants, I suppose.
The government investing in alternative energy is a fantastic example of this - oil and coal still are vastly cheaper than the alternatives, but that doesn't mean the government investing in those alternatives is bad since it will ease the transition in the future.
Another real life example is DARPA and the internet, as I mentioned above. It might have been another decade or two before we had the internet without the government funding it, to say nothing of computers themselves.
Limed for truth.
The free market won't ever do anything that isn't profitable. Put another way, it will always do things that are profitable. Even if you pass a law making cocaine selling illegal, the market forces are unrelenting and still find a way to provide the product to the people and turn a profit.
I don't like the example of wind-farms though. Because the free market could invest heavily in alternative power if it wanted to. And it likely is putting in just enough money and time into it as the expected payoff. Government is interfering with this for political reasons.
Unless you're going to make the argument that alternative energy is necessary as a safety issue. Because it is government's role to keep the population safe. So maybe that investment is like military-spending by other means. It's kind-of a wonky argument, but I'd be down for it. But if the government's purpose is to make money on this deal, then it's doing it wrong.
People don't need an incentive to make money. They will find a way and it will be better than the government's way.
Monetary profit is not the only motive for innovation. See: the Cold War, especially the Space Race. See also every university science department in the world.
Wealth is created from the utilization of resources. The financial structure of the organization utilizing the resources -- for-profit, nonprofit, private, public -- makes no difference.
See, now we've moved from "government can't create anything" to "government can create things, but it's worse at doing so". Let's see if I can convince you to move even more...
I've highlighted one part of your argument orange. What it describes is decreasing returns to scale: the second liquor store isn't undercut by the larger first, so eventually there are numerous competitive small stores.
But not all industries have decreasing returns to scale. Sometimes industries have an optimum firm size that is very, very large: the worldwide demand for commercial aircraft suggests that the optimum number of firms to supply the entire world is probably only one, for instance.
In these cases, competition in the private sector simply produces one monopoly, with neither a profit incentive nor a voting incentive to improve efficiency. Then a regulated monopoly or government-run business could do better, don't you think?
An internally-consistent libertarian ethical philosophy that would affirm the State's responsibility to ensure that any woman who has conceived goes on to carry out in full her duties as a life-support device for a non-viable "person" is a dodgy proposition on theoretical ground. As a practical matter, though, Atomic Ross had the right of it. Pro-life libertarians are with rare exceptions a bunch of theocrats who slept through the chapter about market externalities in econ 101. We call their bizarre invisible hand fetish 'Libertarianism' because in our political tradition that's the name for the category they're stuffed in, but these people have always been and will always be more interested than property than liberty.
I'm sure there are real people out there who have convinced themselves that their intent to criminalize abortion is based solely in their sound commitment to maximization of personal freedoms, but every argument I have ever heard from those quarters ultimately revealed a hidden assumption that the freedom of a woman to control her physiology is less important than the freedom of The Family(tm) to keep popping out additions to its quiverfull. Patriarchy is rarely subtle, but we're often so accustomed to its pervasive influence that our ideas about what is good and valuable become shaped by it without our knowledge.
I'm not saying that abortion-on-demand is an intrinsic feature of libertarianism, but that every argument against it (that I have heard, in the American political tradition) is ultimately founded on wildly counter-libertarian theocratic ideas. Which is only to be expected, because the label 'libertarian' has come to describe little more than the thin veneer of academic thought supporting the policies of the right wing, domain of theocrats, and the old ideas about personal freedoms have fallen by the wayside.
Alternative energy is necessary for society to continue for more than the next twenty years or so, to say nothing of even global warming we're going to run into untenable supply issues that are either going to force an abrupt economy raping change or a slightly less abrupt change, depending on what the government does.
I will say that most of the government efforts in alternative energy have been token efforts at best. We really need to spend nothing on ethanol except research of other forms than corn, and need to spend alot more on wind farms and pure research into things like battery technology.
Alternatively we could go for a market based solution and dump the entire true cost of oil into the price of gasoline, every cent spent protecting supply lines switched from taxes to the cost per gallon.
I have a feeling even the staunchest market wanking capitalist will cry for the government to do something if they had to pay $9 a gallon though.
I don't think the staunchest one would.
I actually haven't budged. All the government can do is create what the free-market has already done, in a worse way. So yea, I guess technically the government can make stuff, but it's like a drooling retard making stuff.
As for airliners and monopolies. In some cases a monopoly is more efficient than pure-competition. These are rare, and have to do with leading technology that requires massive start-up capital. But I'm okay with that. In your example where there is only room for 1 airplane company... well then maybe there should only be 1? Fact is we have a handful and they are all subsidized by taxpayers. So instead of 1 mega monopoly that's making lots of money, we have 4 struggling airplane producing companies that take a piece of everyone's paycheque just to stay alive.
It's dumb.
Well excluding people rich enough to not give a shit
I know I wouldn't.
The reason why we have so many cars may be because people aren't paying the true cost for their oil. Also if we're subsidizing oil (as you said, that's the first I've heard about it) it makes it that much harder for alternative energy to catch-on. Because now not only does it have to be cheaper than oil, it also has to be cheaper than the oil-subsidies!
Great. I'm so glad the government stepped in to make sure I have cheap oil. Now there's global warming, a bazillion cars on the road, massive bailouts for the auto-sector, and a huge oil spill in the gulf coast.
Maybe paying 9 dollars for oil would've been okay?
The problem is as I've said elsewhere we tend to privatize profits and socialize risk instead of using government power to moderate risk and do things that are short term losses but long term gains (think infrastructure for example).
That's green.
This is lime.
This is not the libertarian argument. The libertarian argument is that government is violence. And that in welfare maximization happens in the absence of violence. This of course fails in that it does not recognize that governments are not the only entities that can enact violence upon others.
Libertarians commit a lot of fallacies, but the naturalistic one surprisingly isn't one of them. Basing things on what is natural is deriving an ought (what you're basing) from an is (what is natural). Its called the naturalistic fallacy because people commonly make arguments for things happening for what is "natural" And this is one of the big fallacies of libertarianism. Negative liberty cannot exist without positive liberty. No, quite the opposite. He is a very good example of what a libertarian is. I think it is instead you who does not understand what libertarianism is.
I mean, there are only a few ways you can attempt to describe libertarianism. Either in a theoretical way or a practical way. Theoretically no one is a true libertarian. There simply exist too many conflicting definitions. Practically the libertarian party and those who espouse its views and voting records are what libertarians are.
The same problem comes when labeling any political philosophy. Eh. The Maddow interview was enough and not framed well. Rand is very much in the crazy camp. Not racist, but crazy none the less. Thinking that racism can simply be killed by the free market.
He is "privatize the sidewalks" crazy. What? No. If government never generated surplus welfare then there would be no reason for government. That is anarcho-capitalist thinking, not neo-liberal. None of those things matter because organizational incentives can be corrected with personal incentives and intrinsic motivation is more important than both.
End of the day how businesses do and how government does depends on pretty much one common factor. How well the managers are. Profit motive et all doesn't end up making much of a difference. Depends on what we're pricing. Few(educated) liberals today would like to get rid of the Fed. And that is basically what the Fed does. No. Not in the slightest. Income taxes are pretty skewed. But payroll taxes make up the other half of the tax base and those are payed by workers(evenly by anyone with an labor based income).
And that doesn't even cover state taxes which are typically regressive. But in the mean time we do make profits and prices don't adjust immediately. And even then if you're talking about externality correction... So lets say that the free market reigns and one airplane company exists. Do you understand how monopolies make profits?
Lets make an easier example. Cable Internet. There is, reasonably, one one company in an equilbrium market for internet. Internet requires land lines, duplicate providers would need duplicate lines and laying land lines is very expensive. While at the same time, marginal costs of providing internet are basically zero.
Knowing this would you support internet providers to have unlimited purview with what they charge
They can only charge what the market will accept. If it costs a million dollars to be on the net, no one will buy it. Or they'll get an alternative like Satellite or DSL.
Are cable internet prices even price-controlled? This is the first I've heard of it.
We have 5 struggling mega-companies. All of them get tax payer money so they don't go down. I personally wouldn't mind if there were only 1 that made mega profits but didn't take a cut of my paycheque. And if it did make mega-profits, a crafty person, backed by bank-capitol, would find a way to build the same plane only a little bit cheaper for half of the mega profits.
Even if they were unsuccessful, the monopoly airplane builder would have keep doing good work inorder to be ready for these competitors that are trying to break into the market.
Of course I'd rather 5 companies that all competed with each other that didn't have government subsidies. But we don't have that either. I'm not sure fewer planes and more expensive (for users) flight would be a bad thing, some people could take a boat instead. And I'd rather flyers pay more than to tax some young family that's not going to fly anyway.
Yes, but not very well. Cable companies typically have to negotiate with localities which leads to
1) low coverage in non-cities
2) high prices.
Compare the U.S. with Korea where speeds are 100 times faster and its cheaper in real dollars. This didn't happen by magic.
Edit; lets be clear here. Monopolies do exactly what taxes do to a market. Except instead of the govt getting the money and using it for a public good, a private individual gets the money.
The neo-liberal arguments for taxation is that the value of the govt getting the money and spending it on public goods outweighs the value of the deadweight loss.
There are no arguments against monopoly restrictions, they are always realizing net welfare gains. (Pareto efficiency is pointless to consider because many different points can be Pareto efficient) Saying "but i don't think we're spending our money well" is not an argument against government its an argument against management. Just as Enron is not an argument against business its an argument against corruption.
Korea's infrastrcuture costs are probably a tiny fraction of the US's. I don't know how South Korea's population is spread out, but there is probably 1 huge city where almost everyone lives. It would be very inexpensive to build internet infrastructure for that city.
Edit - From Wikipedia
South Korea = 100K Square Kilometers. Population = 50 million.
United States = 9,820K Square Kilometers. Population = 300 Million.
So US has 10 times the area and 6 times the population. If I had to provide top-quality internet access, I'd rather do it for Korea. It's smaller, it's denser and Koreans love their internet more than anybody.
It won't do it because monopoly pricing is welfare inefficient.
Prices are lower in Korea, bandwidth is higher, even when comparing locations that are just as dense.
Japan, another example of better internet than the US, also enjoys a high population density. But it isn't just South Korea and Japan; broadband penetration - and even more so, broadband quality - is relatively stagnant in the US while every other country in the world that isn't too busy starving is booming terrifically. This is partly due to the newer technology they are deploying to catch up with our older technology, and partly to do with the relative ease of doubling a 5% broadband penetration to doubling 20%, but our power-mad ISP monopolies and the congress-critters in their pockets certainly aren't helping.
Libertarians would rightly note that the original fault lies with the government intervention in these markets, but many problems in the last two decades have been the result of the absence of continued intervention. For some reason this bunch of cockbites whose name starts with an "L" have been yelling that the best way to treat local monopolies propped up by taxpayer spending is not to regulate or make demands of them, but to go "hands off" and let the market do its thing. Except there is no market, because we created local monopolies with tax dollar investment. Capital-G Government is never going to be entirely decoupled from ISP service... nor should it be, given the infrastructure interest that any sane State ought to have in its information systems.
Retarded oversimplifications such as "leave Comcast alone and let their customers switch to DSL if they want to" are the source of the "glibertarian" stereotype: the guy who knows just enough about an issue to deliver a glib three-word solution ("The Free Market") to a complex and problematic situation that is woefully under-served by such child-like naiveté.
Prices are lower for users.
All the resources the government uses inorder to make that happen are still costs, they just don't appear on your bill. And all of the lost efficiency is also kept off the books.
If Americans wanted faster internet, they could pay for it. But there aren't enough of you who want faster internet. You guys probably mostly scream for cheaper internet. Does anyone here really want 100X faster internet? I don't lag in Star Craft... I know I wouldn't pay much more for 100X internet.
As long as I can stream youtube, I'm happy. I think most users feel that way.
Well in my defense, I did try to not-talk about broadband, and I said it was something I wasn't familiar with.
But thank you for the limed part. If there's already been a bunch of government intervention, you no longer have a good libertarian approach. If the government spends a trillion dollars to keep you from being bankrupt, then yea I guess they can lay down a few rules. Because just giving tax payers money away for nothing is really really dumb.
This is where I disagree. It is possible to generally hew to the tenets of whatever flavor of libertarianism you prefer without embracing them all whole heartedly or joining the Libertarian party. This then leads to strategic voting concerns whereby relatively moderate libertarians will align with one of the two major political parties. Maybe in a different electoral system you would get a more true picture, but I don't think you can given our current system.
I mean, by a similiar token, you cannot say that the Green party represents all environmentalists.
While I admit I'm not freshly familiar with the platform issues of the Green Party, I think I can safely say that their core values don't explicitly and purposefully fly in the face of environmentalism and communal economics.
I can't say a similar thing about the Libertarian Party.
Well part of the problem of contemporary right wing economics in the US is the complete failure to grasp exactly what the government does with all their tax dollars, part of the problem with right wing energy policy is the lack of understanding of externalities. These two make sweet love and produce glorious bad policy.
Any money not paid by BP to fix the oil spilled (and I seriously doubt they'll foot 100% of the bill) is an invisible externality of oil that will be paid for with tax dollars, just as one example.
The govt of the U.S. did not intervene to create monopolies in the first place. It built the infrastructure then sold it. (or paid people to build it). That does not create monopolies as much as any act of building infrastructure creates monopolies.
You mean gained efficiency actually. In the case of a monopoly the govt does not have to do but regulate. They can do so by regulating prices lower and so getting more people on at the same coverage, regulating quality higher(which is really the same thing as regulating prices lower really), or some combination of the two.
The company still is making profit, just not as much, and more gains go back into society.
To get a better grasp of how this work, it might be valuable for you to read a bit about minimum wages under monopsony conditions(which is exactly what we're discussing except a price floor rather than cap due to demand control rather than supply control), which, while not an "uncontentious" topic, certainly has plenty of documentation. Or something on the basic argument for the removal(or limitations) of copyright law. Relaxing copyright law does the same thing as regulating monopolies in this instance, except in repeated instances you don't have problems with new content creation(since we aren't dealing with newly created goods and since we're still allowing some monopoly profits but not all)
E.G. lets steal a picture from wikipedia
Monopoly prices
If we have a price cap between Pm and Pc then Marginal Revenue is flat on the level of the price cap until it hits the demand curve (at which point it reverts to its original position.
Such by setting a price cap between Pm and Pc (or increasing quality via regulation) we can reduce deadweight loss without any costs but enforcement.
Monopolies are occasionally the most efficient solution to a problem, but they can't be controlled by the market; they require regulation. Deregulating telecoms was a dumb move, and it was a dumb move made by politicians, not the Invisible Hand, because the Invisible Hand has limitations to its reach, as the obvious and necessary role of government in the creation of the internet should show. I was not being complimentary when I acknowledged that the libertarians are right to blame government intervention; the truly deleterious intervention came when their ideals guided the shift from public to private control of internet infrastructure. We wouldn't have the monopolies without the government, but the monopolies wouldn't be a problem without the libertarians.
Its written by a "more crazy than less crazy" libertarian, but kinda exemplifies the libertarianism I wish was the "opposition". Its not perfect(it certainly could use a bit of a editing in the language department), but there are a lot of little lines that i liked. Such as "Trade exists without government, but markets do not"
"From a libertarian point of view, it would be inconsistent to advocate legalizing marijuana and banning trans fats."
Actually, the two issues are different.
Marijuana
The only reasons to ban marijuana are:
1) Because it impedes the mind, and therefore choice, and choice is a necessary capacity, and necessary assumption, in the libertarian model. This is a technical concept, not a practical one.
2) Because you can expose others to risk due to impaired judgement, largely while driving a vehicle. This concept is both technical and practical.
Justifying the application of force must be both technical (epistemically rational) and practical (materially implementable). Epistemic applications alone are infinite and open to error. (ie: laws should be enforceable not specious.)
Trans fats
Foods are a voluntary health issue, not an externalized risk issue or capacity issue. The libertarian concept of freedom allows people to harm themselves. However, since it is not possible to make a rational choice over the content of goods , regulating labeling is not a question of freedom but a question of limiting fraud or accidental harm in a market.
Libertarianism's Failures
Classical liberalism is an outgrowth of conservatism. Libertarianism is an outgrowth of Classical Liberalism. Rothbardian anarchism is an outgrowth of libertarianism. The only articulated philosophy is the Rothbardian. But Rothbard succeeded by avoiding the problem of creating markets, and advocating a religion of property under the auspices of natural law. Hoppe improved this line of thinking by developing private institutions that provided public goods. But these methods are flawed because they start with non-violence and trade, rather than the human capacity for violence and fraud, and the necessity of building and creating markets. In that sense, while anarchists have made innovations ( monarchic inter-temporal incentives, private insurance institutions ) they have failed to provide an answer for advances in abstract forms of property, and as such are providing solutions that are regressive as did Marx.
A market is a joint stock company that was invested in by the fraternal order of soldiers who then collected fees for their service in creating that market. Market administrators determine the citeria for merchants and products to compete in the arena of the market, and provide registration for product types as needed to reflect advances in product technology. Merchants enter the market by registering products such that they meet the market criteria so that the shareholders experience an appreciation in value. The common people gain access to the market by respecting property, which is a material forgone opportunity cost. Everyone pays, and everyone profits from market participation.
The Problem Of A False History
The history of economic thought is the history of demonizing monarchs for the purpose of transferring control of the market from it's military founders, to the vendors - the middle classes. This demonization is nothing but falsehood. As it turns out, kings were kinder to their populations than are republican and democratic governments. But because of this demonization, the causal origin of civilization, of cities, of markets, of prosperity, and of western culture itself, is obscured by the rhetoric of demonizing the nobility who created this culture under which we prosper.
Despite it's variety of logical strengths, libertarian philosophy contains a number of errors, the most influential of which is in confusing the role of government as necessarily social in nature or necessarily defensive in nature, or a tool of class exploitation, versus the historical and causal origin of government as a protector and regulator of markets.
Markets are the primary social institution of post tribal man. Governments have no reason for existence outside of Markets. Government IS a market function, because the purpose of government is determining the rules of the market which funds the government. Trade exists without government, but markets do not. Advanced markets for the trading of abstracts do not.
All forms of property beyond portable personal property (several property) require registration, and rules for exchange in the market. The primary difference between trade and market is anonymity whereby the market operator places some guarantee on the products offered so that the market's shareholders can create a competitive advantage against other markets, and to reduce the cost of conflict administration within the market.
The difference in cultures is simply in the definition of ownership of different forms of property that they permit in their markets, and the terms by which they permit products entry. And these differences are material: the more granular the property the more liquidity and velocity it produces, and the greater the division of knowledge and labor that is possible.
This culture of Market-Making is one of the three causal differences for western civilization versus the central and eastern models. (The other two differences being military tactics that required enfranchisement - leading to debate, reason an science, and IQ distribution mixed with resource and transport availability.).
Libertarians confuse fear of abuses by the government with the necessity of constraining the government to the maintenance of the rules of the market, and the value in those rules as a means of increasing the productivity of the market and their yield from that market.
Conservatives lack the ability to articulate their concepts in other than moral terms. Libertarians do significantly better. But both systems of thought are lacking in an understanding of what they argue for.
Libertarians, despite being a minority selling a minority philosophy, seek to create a nation governed by a 'religion of property' in order to exit the influence of government when in fact, government is responsible for making the market, and libertarians should lobby for additional rules to limit the state. Not limiting it to social activities of dubious non-market nature, but to it's role in regulating the market and evolutionary increases in defining the ever expanding set of objects and options we refer to as property, and which we frequently trade, so that we, as a people, maintain a competitive advantage against other markets.
The problems with the anarchic movement are substantive in that they do not account for market-enhancing asymmetries, versus market-harming asymmetries. In other words, they are advocating the 'buyer beware' ethic of the Bazaar, rather than the 'seller responsibility' that is required of participants in the Market. This is not an advantage to the shareholders (citizens).
The problem with our institutions is that they do not separate redistributive efforts from market efforts. Libertarians (of which I am a member of the group of theorists) would be better served by abandoning our rhetoric of monarchic criticism, and instead develop a language and metaphysics such that we can provide an institutional response to an increasingly complex world in which we must register, trade and police a market of increasingly vast and complex products and services, so that we may maintain our competitive advantage over the rest of the world.
And abandon luddite religions of all sorts. That includes all forms of the church of government.
Instead, a rational epistemology can be applied if we simply look at the material problem of building and maintaining markets in an increasing division of knowledge and labor, where most of our inventions are abstractions that like large numbers, are beyond the ability of our perceptions. That is the one and only important function of government, after territorial defense and the policing of trade routes.
And the implementation of the application of rationalism, is in separating our institutions such that redistribution is held by one house, and market regulation by another. Further, our separation of banking, including the currency, credit and interest (which has replaced our code of laws as our primary means of maintaining social order) is insufficient for the current state of our division of knowledge and labor.
That is Post-Rothbardian libertarianism. And it is the only rational alternative to encroaching socialism.
Libertarianism was hijacked by Rothbard simply because Hayek, Parsons, Popper and Mises failed. And both Rothbard and Hoppe created extraordinary epistemological and institutional value with their research program. But they have failed, as did the libertarians, and the classical liberals, and the conservatives before them, to create a system of institutions capable of providing an alternative to the anti-market anti-civilization sentiments and philosophy of socialism by failing to articulate the causal purpose of government as market maker, and to create institutions that expand and evolve along with the objects that we exchange in that market.
And that is your solution membership in any Church: the articulated causality of the market and it's institutions and the purpose of government by the technique which we call 'reason'.
RE: Time to pick a fight
Absolutely. And to abandon the dictum of non violence as a religious principle and embrace violence as a necessary virtue, and a requisite for making and maintaining a market.
Response to this blog post: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/05/do_you_belong_t.html
Written by this guy: http://www.capitalismv3.com/
That kind of labeling destroys the entire purpose of a label. Under that method everything is government intervention.
Rather the government was intervening and then stopped. Stopping the intervention is not "some other intervention"
Consider these possibilities for your actions:
Your set of actions consist in three subsets.
1) Things you cannot do (because you are prohibited)
2) Things you cannot do (because you are unable)
3) Things that you can do.
This should contain all of the possible things that you might ever do. Since there are only things you can do or cannot do, and only things that you cannot do because you're prohibited or because you're unable.
With no government(or violence at all) there are only two states. Since we just defined away the possibility of prevention then only 2 and 3 can exist.
Such, if we add govt we can only change two things we can make things that we cannot do because we're unable into things that we can do by adding means. And we can make things that we can do into things that we cannot do by adding prevention.
moving from 1 to 3 is only possible when intervention is relaxed. When government is lessened.
Fake Edit: Yes we are excepting the possibility of other entities preventing said action and govt stopping that prevention. But that is not relevant to the discussion on cable companies and could reasonably be considered a move from 2 to 3.
Real edit: within that framework the govts job would be to maximize the things that you can do by limiting the things that you can do that cause others to not be able to do things and vise-versa. A problem with govt intervention would be when the limitation from 3 to 1 does not cause at least a greater move from 2 to 3. Going the other way could not be a problem with govt intervention.
This of course is a pretty simple model, but i hope it gets the point across when trying to define what is and what isn't govt intervention.
omfG yes
I am not the most clear writer, but it should have at least been apparent that I was not trying to re-label deregulation as intervention of the sort which a libertarian would oppose; that would be ridiculous, and precisely counter to the point of my post. The point being that the problem with ISPs in America is the market-warping monopolies initially born of government intervention, and this is a problem in the first place because the bunch of idiots who are the subject of this thread thought that the market would be a better way to handle these institutions. They were wrong.
In a hypothetical libertarian fairyland where DARPANET was developed in an AT&T lab, we would still be dealing with a bunch of shitty monopolies, I'm sure. But that doesn't change the historical fact that the shitty monopolies we're dealing with now have their roots in public enterprise, and their failures can be clearly connected to public decisions. But this doesn't vindicate the libertarian opinion that government ruins everything; precisely the opposite: the way the government ruined this thing is by listening to the libs and passing infrastructure into the invisible hands of "the market."
No, or at least not necessarily. For instance, Anarchy, State, and Utopia doesn't argue that because it's the state of nature not to have government interference therefore government interference is bad. The badness of government interference is much closer to a primitive data point than it is to something derived--it generally has to do with the supreme value of freedom. In fact, Anarchy, State, and Utopia spends most of its time trying to figure out ways to have and to justify a sometimes coercive state given the general premise about the value of freedom. The point is most definitely not to get back to the state of nature.
I've always looked at libertarianism as something that is coming from the vaguely right direction, and having all of its fundamental ideas adjusted by reality as it hits it.
The non-existence of perfect information, infinitely large market, rational agents etc all suggest that there is a lot of room for a government that will help make the market more "ideal", but most libertarians are opposed to this out of principles that seem based on assumptions that just aren't true.
I don't think that one need necessarily have "the state of nature" or something akin to it in mind to be committing a naturalistic fallacy. One can be preferring something for its own sake without a conscious preference for nature, and be committing a naturalistic fallacy. That is, "nature" doesn't have to be in mind for a naturalistic fallacy to be made.
I don't think most people who commit the naturalistic fallacy have a desire to get back to a state of nature, I think the naturalistic fallacy is more focused on specific goods or services and is not generally applied constantly across the myriad sets of things that a person is inclined to care about.
The naturalistic fallacy doesn't actually have anything to do with nature. It's simply the mistake of assuming that something happening means that it is good. For an example, look at Nash on Canadian health care.