Free market promotes innovation?

[Drakim]

I like Valve's Steam. It has served me well in getting me games that sometimes aren't exported all the way here to Norway, or does get exported ridiculously late and expensive.

I also like the idea of skipping the middle man and buying straight from Valve. They were the guys tolling to code my product. I would rather that a greater share of my money go to them than to a random truck driver, a store clerk, and a CEO of GameStop. Not that these guys don't work hard, but in todays age, they are very ineffective at transporting and selling me data that I could get in 20 minutes over the net. I think it's a dying business to sell digital data physically.

But here is the thing. Steam's prices has gone up lately, and I find some games there costing up to three times(!) as much as a retail box, which is transported, has an instruction manual, a physical CD with art, and so on. Clearly Valve is overstepping here, assuming I'm willing to pay that much extra.

But I can't switch. All my friends use steam, and there is no guarantee that I will be able to play with them if we buy diffrent versions of the game. The boxes never say specifically and it's hard to find on the internet, especially for a came-out-the-day-before game. If we both want to play game X on the day it comes out, we both need to buy it from Steam.

But it doesn't end there. Tons of companies have these things which makes it harder to switch away from them, locking you in. Both Sony and Nintendo have region locking on a lot of their products. Microsoft use everything in their power (fortunately failing) to ensure you simply cannot leave their side. Gaming companies try to make it harder for third parties to make gamepad controllers for their system, forcing you to buy the official expensive ones they make. The list goes on.

My point is, even in a free market system, I don't feel particularly free. Free market capitalism is easy to understand when the products peddled are cans of tomato soup, but when it comes to digitally encoded music which only works on the producers music player, the whole idea that I can vote with my money becomes fuzzy.

"But Drakim, surely you must realize that these things are part of the system. The reason you buy Steam games even when they are more expensive is because of the awesome community package that comes with it that Valve has built. Despite that their games are more expensive, you prefer them because of the benefits you get. If you would rather have a cheaper game and forgo all these benefits, then you should vote with your money for another company than Valve."

This is true in the strict sense, but, it does not escape one aspect of it all. This line of thinking clearly hurts innovation. When a big corporation can stomp out more effective, cheaper and better products with their pure market position, then that is clearly going to hurt overall innovation.

Imagine if somebody made a Steam clone that's simply better. It uses less resources while running in the background, it makes your games run more stable, it contains better chat features, has cheaper prices, better games...just everything is superior. Everybody realizes this and nobody honestly thinks that the Steam platform is better in any possible regard.

Now, it might very well be that it never catches on despite this. Because, as the first guy hops over from Steam to this new platform, he finds to his horror that he has nobody to play with online. Valve refuses to connect the network, after all, it would only hurt them. Nobody wants to jump over to the new platform in case everybody else doesn't. In the end, the new platform dies because they can't get users.

Or imagine if somebody invented a medicine, and copyrighted it's production. But a bigger company which makes a less effective medicine manages to use their market position to stomp out this new medicine, which is worthless to them because of the copyright restrictions.

Clearly, in such a scenario, the free market doesn't promote the maximum amount of innovation. After all, innovation is just a tool for success, and if another means to gain success exists, such as dedicating your engineers and designers to locking in your customers, then that will be picked instead over innovation.

These things has clearly happened in the past. Microsoft pushed their Internet Explorer to get 90% of the market, using their existing position within the OS market. Internet Explorer wasn't really that much diffrent from Netscape back those days, but people didn't care about the features. They just picked whatever was already installed. And using their market position, Microsoft made sure that was always their browser.

For a couple of years IE stood unchallenged until Firefox rose up to be noticeable and put some fire in Microsoft's asses. But as I said, this was after a couple of years. And what happened during these years? Absolutely nothing. Not a damn thing. Internet Explorer version 6 was all there was, and all there would be. There was litteraly a time period of several years were Microsoft by themselves murdered anything known as innocation within the browser market, be it in terms of speed, performance or features. Really, you could draw a graph of browser innovation and you'd see a steady rise all over the place, except one long period in the middle where it's a flat line.

And why should it be any different? Microsoft didn't have to innovate, they could lock in their market to ensure they stay number one more more effectivly. They were winning, who are we to tell them they did wrong?

So Drakim is a raging socialist?!? Not at all. I just wanted to make the point that free market capitalism isn't a failsafe path to innovation and success. It's not a flawless diamond.

[chairmankem]

The free market doesn't promote innovation. A free political system does.

Those two don't necessarily exist simultaneously in certain places.

[lapis]

The free market is often as much of a pipe dream as theoretical Communism. Just as much as striving to excel without proper reward goes against "human nature", it goes against human nature to not abuse one's market position to choke down more competitive parties entering the market. In the end, it's best for the consumer if a government intervenes to push through implementation standards that prevent strong parties from entangling their customers and raising the bar for them to buy products from a different manufacturer.

Maybe your argument could be nr. 7 in Pox's topic.

[Musician]

J. D. Rockefeller was only able to establish his brutal monopoly over the oil market due to collusion with the US major railroad freighters (united under a market cartel at the time). He jacked up the prices for his competitors while keeping them low for himself. I mean there are cases like this all throughout the history of capitalism.

Just in recent history, Intel was sued for colluding with manufacturers to try and cut off it's main competitor AMD from essential manufacturing resources. It was a "we'll buy from you, but you have to promise not to sell to our competitors" kind of thing.

It's not really that hard to dispel the myth of 'perfect competition' within a free market. The truth is, the bigger a corporation gets, the larger it's influence as a de facto government body becomes. It gains privileges, just through manipulation of market institutions, which allow it to make markets much less competetive than they would naturally be. And this is even before we touch on the issue of state collusion.

Anyways. Good post, enjoyable read. Expect to be attacked by a bunch of Libertarians who have little to no idea what they're talking about.

[SmilezRoyale]

At 8/9/10 06:31 AM, Drakim wrote: I like Valve's Steam. It has served me well in getting me games that sometimes aren't exported all the way here to Norway, or does get exported ridiculously late and expensive.


But here is the thing. Steam's prices has gone up lately, and I find some games there costing up to three times(!) as much as a retail box, which is transported, has an instruction manual, a physical CD with art, and so on. Clearly Valve is overstepping here, assuming I'm willing to pay that much extra.

But I can't switch. All my friends use steam

There's your problem. Game companies are aware that people who buy a game the first day or the even the first week it comes out are going to have a very high time preference and so they'll be able to get away with squeezing a great deal of money out of those people. When I use steam I am usually buying a game that is at least 5 months old already unless I think the game is going to be spectacular, in which case I'll probably get it on amazon or something. If you absolutely INSIST on getting something immediately, steam in this case is going to have significant bargaining power.

However I've never heard of not being able to play the same game with someone before simply because you did not buy it from the same person. When i want to communicate with fellow gamers I prefer to use Xfire or ventrillo.

But it doesn't end there. Tons of companies have these things which makes it harder to switch away from them, locking you in. Both Sony and Nintendo have region locking on a lot of their products. Microsoft use everything in their power (fortunately failing) to ensure you simply cannot leave their side. Gaming companies try to make it harder for third parties to make gamepad controllers for their system, forcing you to buy the official expensive ones they make. The list goes on.

My point is, even in a free market system, I don't feel particularly free. Free market capitalism is easy to understand when the products peddled are cans of tomato soup, but when it comes to digitally encoded music which only works on the producers music player, the whole idea that I can vote with my money becomes fuzzy.

It depends largely on the market and the elasticity of demand. However I think you may be exaggerating the tendency towards exclusivity. We don't often see websites, for example, that can only be accessed unless you have a particular web provider, or computer, and with certain limits (and given technological change) channel providers and channels. There is some exclusivity here and there, but there tends to primarily be overlap between the various groups. And this long run tendency makes sense, it is very difficult for a firm to sell technology that is so desirable that it is otherwise incompatible with the technology of other firms. this is why, for example, credit card companies do not sell triangular credit cards that need special credit receiving machines.

Now, it might very well be that it never catches on despite this.

But if valve is as exploitative as you say do you really think people are going to put up with that sort of thing indefinitely? By that logic something like Facebook never would have come into existence after so many people were conditioned to live under my space.

And certainly the political economy is not immune from these problems, to the contrary, it is ripe with them. A federal program, once established, is nigh impossible to repeal or replace unless you consider increased funding a manner of 'regime change'. Once the program is established the ones that manage it become staunchly defensive and attempt to justify their existence, and there is significant stigma attached to proposing alternatives. As bad as Valve is, I hope no one has called you unpatriotic for disliking the services rendered to you.

Or imagine if somebody invented a medicine, and copyrighted it's production. But a bigger company which makes a less effective medicine manages to use their market position to stomp out this new medicine, which is worthless to them because of the copyright restrictions.

I only see how this is a problem under a regime of copyright Nazism.

But like i said, i do not see a systematic tendency in markets toward complete incompatibility. And the only way i can imagine 'locking one's customers' would be successful is if a firm could generate a cult of personality around it. So for example, The Obama Corporation completely guilts its supporters from the 2008 election into tacitly accepting the administration's betrayal of it's foreign policy promises; to reduce the American empire and to end things like Gitmo and torture and what have you. In which case the people who literally and figuratively bought into Obama are now stuck without the change they wanted, but the cost of leaving the 'firm' is so great, and a switch to the republican party guarantees no positive changes, that the entire system remains in the status Quo, and as before.

And why should it be any different? Microsoft didn't have to innovate, they could lock in their market to ensure they stay number one more more effectively. They were winning, who are we to tell them they did wrong?

I have to admit I don't know much about internet browsers prior to around 2006, you're probably a lot older than I am.

So Drakim is a raging socialist?!?

Do not expect positive change with respect to most anything to be ideal under a regime of Markets. But do not expect the imperfections faced by markets to be any better by utilizing the far more centralized and thus detached political means. After all, considering first the population of informed voters, the population of ignorant voters, and then the general population of like minded gamers, what do you expect is the chance that political action on your part will ensure that positive political action is taken if a bunch of like minded gamers came togeather to fund some sort of campaign, which would obviously involve a much larger national population and also involve a much wider variety of issues which would also need to be handled by the political institution.

It's important to take the romance that is sometimes ascribed to the free market, but it is far more important to take the romance that is even more irrationally ascribed to political solutions.

[Musician]

At 8/9/10 04:48 PM, SmilezRoyale wrote: We don't often see websites, for example, that can only be accessed unless you have a particular web provider, or computer, and with certain limits (and given technological change) channel providers and channels.

No, but we do see video games tailored to certain hardware specs. Many games cannot be properly run on both ATI and Nvidia graphics cards. We do see exclusivity for many software products towards certain operating systems. Linux and OSX lag far behind MS Windows in this regard (one of the main reasons the OS is able to fix it's price so high).

What do you even mean to prove by using websites and browsers as an example? First of all, it's not true. For many years when netscape was having wars with browsers like IE, the different browsers would provide 'exclusive' html tags that could be used to program websites accessed in their respective browsers. The result was a ruthlessly inefficient code system where in most cases programmers would actually have to create TWO versions of a website just to make the website accessible to users of both browsers. We're still recovering from that little debacle.

You note that we don't often see websites catered to a specific browser these days. Well yeah, what motivation would the browsers have these days to force exclusivity? There's no profit in browsers anymore. They're all free. That's a terrible example to invoke. If you want to try and prove wrong the notion that exclusivity is a widespread issue in a capitalist free market, you'll need to look at for profit industries.

Like the GE agricultural industry. If I were you I would totally point out how Monsanto totally does notgenetically engineer it's seeds to be only grow if you use Monsanto fertilizers and Monsanto pesticides (also, I would note how this has totally not bankrupted thousands of farmers in India). Or you might make mention of how Blockbuster totally did not cut deals with Warner Bros, Sony Pictures, and 20th century Fox for exclusivity on new releases for a month after launch, in an attempt to drive it's competitors out of business. Or you could talk about how the cell phone industry is certainlynotcompletely dependent on the idea of exclusivity (you definitely don't have to subscrite to at&t to get an iphone, you definitely don'thave to be a customer of verizon to get a droid. no sir).

Oh wait, that entire last paragraph was a lie and all those things really do happen. Whoopsie!

[Camarohusky]

I whole heartedly believe that a Free Market IS the best system to promote and foster innovation we have. The incentive to succeed is extremely high. If you do well you get money and prosperity for you and those around, whether it be just your family or in other cases your community as a whole.

However, it also has an EXTREMELY high vulnerability to corruption and the stifling of ideas by those who have already made it. The tendencies of man make this system highly flawed. The way people defend their station, whether it be at the top or in 10th is harmful to society as a whole and to innovation. We humans are more prone to defending our station by destroying those who threaten us rather then by trying to improve ourselves. Were we humans prone to the innovation mode it might help.

The clear winner and loser in a free market can also be harmful to society. Those who are pure losers become a dead weight upon innovation. They are not as porductive as possible because the fact that they have lost so much hurts morale and takes away their incentive to work. Those at the top needed the lower levels to work to supply the infrastructure and services that are vital, and often taken for granted, in order for the innovative to properly innovate.

In the end I think a leashed free market is the best. One that supports innovation, but keeps the successful from stifling others' innovation and while keeping the lower classes more productive through incentives for them to work.

[SmilezRoyale]

At 8/9/10 11:01 PM, Musician wrote:

At 8/9/10 04:48 PM, SmilezRoyale wrote: We don't often see websites, for example, that can only be accessed unless you have a particular web provider, or computer, and with certain limits (and given technological change) channel providers and channels.

No, but we do see video games tailored to certain hardware specs. Many games cannot be properly run on both ATI and Nvidia graphics cards. We do see exclusivity for many software products towards certain operating systems. Linux and OSX lag far behind MS Windows in this regard (one of the main reasons the OS is able to fix it's price so high).

What do you even mean to prove by using websites and browsers as an example? First of all, it's not true. For many years when netscape was having wars with browsers like IE, the different browsers would provide 'exclusive' html tags that could be used to program websites accessed in their respective browsers. The result was a ruthlessly inefficient code system where in most cases programmers would actually have to create TWO versions of a website just to make the website accessible to users of both browsers. We're still recovering from that little debacle.

I never said these SORT of things would never be attempted. I just said that given enough time compatibility will become the norm. For example, there MAY have been triangular credit cards back when credit cards and more specifically swipe machines were first coming into existence. Back in the early days of railroads each rail road company would have it's own rail length, which would be a problem for rail cars trying to go from one road to another. It wasn't long before the companies realized they were better of sharing traffic with one another and agreed upon a standard rail length.

You note that we don't often see websites catered to a specific browser these days. Well yeah, what motivation would the browsers have these days to force exclusivity? There's no profit in browsers anymore. They're all free. That's a terrible example to invoke. If you want to try and prove wrong the notion that exclusivity is a widespread issue in a capitalist free market, you'll need to look at for profit industries.

Like the GE agricultural industry. If I were you I would totally point out how Monsanto totally does notgenetically engineer it's seeds to be only grow if you use Monsanto fertilizers and Monsanto pesticides (also, I would note how this has totally not bankrupted thousands of farmers in India). Or you might make mention of how Blockbuster totally did not cut deals with Warner Bros, Sony Pictures, and 20th century Fox for exclusivity on new releases for a month after launch, in an attempt to drive it's competitors out of business. Or you could talk about how the cell phone industry is certainlynotcompletely dependent on the idea of exclusivity (you definitely don't have to subscrite to at&t to get an iphone, you definitely don'thave to be a customer of verizon to get a droid. no sir).

First, Monsanto profits mainly from it's power to patent it's individual seeds. Your favorite agency in the world is in charge of "whacking" farmers that attempt to duplicate the seeds Monsanto has produced. But even then, Monsanto's decisions are not without obvious and inevitable consequences.

http://www.automatedtrader.net/real-time -dow-jones/2438/monsanto039s-fiscal-3q-p rofit-drops-45-on-roundup-woes

And notice that the drop is not some random and completely detached occurence from the topic at hand.

"Last month, Monsanto cut its full-year forecast as it said it would cut the variety of products at its Roundup weed-killer business and slash prices close to those of generic competitors amid surging supplies of the herbicide. It plans to shift resources toward selling genetically modified seeds, but will need to persuade farmers to buy the more expensive new offerings as commodity prices are on the decline."

People simply do not want to buy their expensive (And patented) seeds and herbicides, even if they are superior, which means it is being forced to either make their expensive product more desirable, or cut the price of them to match the lesser quality albeit cheaper generic brands.

As for the iPhone, I am not surprised. Under a regime of patents you shouldn't expect that it's going to be easy for anyone except a giant corporation with an army of lawyers to be able to offer a product similar enough to the iphone and either slightly better or significantly cheaper. Although even without patents one would not be surprised if apple enjoyed a monopoly of one or two years simply because the product itself is considered so 'revolutionary' by the people who see fit to buy it. And those people who did buy the iPhone might not be terribly thrilled to hear that Apple's resources are going to have to be diverted towards funding an anti-trust lawsuit for having a 'monopoly' on their new product rather than simply working on making another, improved, version of the iPhone.

As for Block Buster, the issue itself seems quaint, because as far as i can tell by the time Blockbuster got it's "monopoly", it and it's contemporary companies were all going bankrupt because they were already being outperformed by other competitors.

So yeah, free human interaction wins out in the end. The process itself is far from perfect and notions of 'perfect competition' should be discarded as a nirvana fallacy, but it strikes me as far more inefficient and time consuming to engage in frivolous anti trust suits or nationalize businesses or make ease of entry into business even more cumbersome by 'regulating' them.

[Musician]

At 8/10/10 10:34 AM, SmilezRoyale wrote: I never said these SORT of things would never be attempted. I just said that given enough time compatibility will become the norm.

Given enough time we're all dead, so it's a moot point. If a company goes out of business or a certain practice falls out of use AFTER a tremendous amount of damage has been done, I wouldn't consider it to be a 'triumph' of the capitalist free market. If your whole argument here is that 'well sure, uncompetitive market practices may be bankrupting the lower and middle class right now, BUT don't worry because 4 or 5 years down the line i'm sure the market will naturally fix it' then you should know, that just ain't flying.

First, Monsanto profits mainly from it's power to patent it's individual seeds. Your favorite agency in the world is in charge of "whacking" farmers that attempt to duplicate the seeds Monsanto has produced.

My favorite agency in the world? As if a patent office wouldn't exist in your utopian anCap paradise? That's hilarious, not only would protections for intellectual property exist (huge demand for them from giant corporations), they would probably be even further reaching and more brutally enforced than they are by today's state.

[SmilezRoyale]

At 8/10/10 01:47 PM, Musician wrote:

Given enough time we're all dead,

I said that the high seed prices were maintained by patents, you can lay blame upon the your precious 'government' for having enforced the patents. It was the fact that other competitors weren't legally prohibited from selling their seeds that this problem was dealt with at all.

If you want to spend millions of dollars on anti-trust lawsuits which may or may not be successful and which may take several years.

My favorite agency in the world?

No corporation would be so stupid as to pay out of it's own pocket to go city to city hiring expensive hit-men to make sure that people aren't buying products that are similar to the ones they sell, plus the cost of isolation.

But this issue is besides the point. You do not have to abolish the state, per say, to abolish patents. And the fact remains that if the state is, at present, solely in the business of creating a system of patents and enforcing them, they are responsible for the consequences of those patents.

[Musician]

At 8/10/10 06:29 PM, SmilezRoyale wrote: I said that the high seed prices were maintained by patents, you can lay blame upon the your precious 'government' for having enforced the patents

I could also lay the blame on the government for establishing a legal basis for corporations as a legal entity all together. But I won't, because it's a moot point. Patents would exist in the system you propose. Corporate personhood would exist in the system you propose. Monsanto's price fixing practices and their resulting bloodshed is the a direct result of the corrupting influence inherent within the profit motive. Which would exist with or without the state.

No corporation would be so stupid as to pay out of it's own pocket to go city to city hiring expensive hit-men to make sure that people aren't buying products that are similar to the ones they sell, plus the cost of isolation.

Strawman. They wouldn't need to hire hitmen, they'd just hire the local judicial system to rule in their favor. They'd put 'market governments' in their pockets through use of subsidies, and their inclusive financial pressures.

the fact remains that if the state is, at present, solely in the business of creating a system of patents and enforcing them, they are responsible for the consequences of those patents.

At who's leisure? Big capital. Placing the blame solely on the state is naive, when it's clear that the state is driven by big business.

[thedo12]

This is one thing that has always bothered me about anarcho-capitalism , it seems to me the state is merely another type of emergent corporation and when capitalist's refer to private markets there simply referring to corporations below the state level .

[SmilezRoyale]

At 8/10/10 07:32 PM, Musician wrote:

At 8/10/10 06:29 PM, SmilezRoyale wrote: I said that the high seed prices were maintained by patents, you can lay blame upon the your precious 'government' for having enforced the patents

I could also lay the blame on the government for establishing a legal basis for corporations as a legal entity all together. But I won't, because it's a moot point. Patents would exist in the system you propose. Corporate personhood would exist in the system you propose. Monsanto's price fixing practices and their resulting bloodshed is the a direct result of the corrupting influence inherent within the profit motive. Which would exist with or without the state.

If by the profit motive you mean greed, then yes. But blaming social problems on greed is as irresponsible as blaming architectural problems on gravity. changing the architecture will enable a structure to withstand even with the existence of gravity, but you cannot construct anything that will reduce gravity.

Conversely, corporation's corrupting influence on the state is not a problem if there is no intersubjective consensus that "The state has a right to exempt individuals from the rules it creates regarding issues of fraudulent behavior." And with respect to the abolition of 'the corporation' it is not inconceivable that the state could rewrite laws that simply make the executives or certain individuals of a business have greater degrees of liability than they do now.

Of course you can make a strong case that the state is not incentivized to do anything that would work to the detriment of the corporation, and thus this sort of change is impossible. But that is no more a case against free markets than it is a case for statism in general, since it still leaves us with no tools to handle the corruption of the corporation under a system of states.

So when i say that the problem of patents falls on the state I am really saying that the problem lies in the inter-subjective consensus that 'The state has the right to compel individuals to fund state agencies that enforce the state's dictates that a single institution recognized by the state is given a monopoly on the production of a particular kind of good' I.e. a patent. Obviously this consensus needs to be broken by society at large.

If a private agency can convince a population that it 'owns' a geographic area it has not bought or touched, for whatever reason, and that it has a claim to the labor of everyone in that area, it isn't a private agency, it is a state.

No corporation would be so stupid as to pay out of it's own pocket to go city to city hiring expensive hit-men to make sure that people aren't buying products that are similar to the ones they sell, plus the cost of isolation.

Strawman. They wouldn't need to hire hitmen, they'd just hire the local judicial system to rule in their favor. They'd put 'market governments' in their pockets through use of subsidies, and their inclusive financial pressures.

I get the feeling you aren't thinking this through. When one speaks of the free market you are only talking in terms of agencies that operate within the constraints of the intersubjective consensus that society places on them. Because most people have a very odd view of 'the united states federal government' They tend to treat this agency, similar to the church, in a manner different from all others, and pay taxes to the state in a manner that private agencies simply could not.

The intersubjective consensus holds that states can run massive and virtually unpayable debts on the credit of people who did not voluntarily agree to the debt and can levy taxes on people within an arbitrary geographic area

A private agency has to collect it's revenue person by person on a voluntary basis, it cannot appeal to patriotism or religiosity and it cannot simply write on a piece of paper that it 'owns' half of a continent that it has never touched and that it 'owns' a third of the labor of everyone living in the area that it claimed. So when i say it is not profitable for a private agency to wage war of the kind you describe I am assuming that a private agency is private and not a state.

and obviously bribes aren't going to work either. It is possible to bribe a politician 50,000 dollars to vote to go to war on another country that will cost the government 500 billion dollars, and benefit the corporation 100 million dollars, because the politician doesn't pay for the war himself and the corporation doesn't pay for it either, it's paid for by the taxpayer that doesn't think twice about paying his or her taxes.

And so The argument that a private company (A) could bribe another private company (B), say, 50,000 dollars to wage a war that will cost, say, 500 billion dollars, and benefit the private company (A) 100 million dollars is even more absurd than saying that the private company could profit by spending 500 billion on a war that will get it 100 million dollars. That you do not see this line of logic suggests you, number one, do not understand fundamental differences between state and private agencies, and number two, do not understand what stateless actually entails.

At who's leisure? Big capital. Placing the blame solely on the state is naive, when it's clear that the state is driven by big business.

businesses do not have free will, they will attempt to earn money in the way that is easiest for them. They compete not because they want to but because they have to.

But it isn't any different for agents of the state. Politicians succumb to lobbying because they are systematically incentive's to do it, and i have made a thread on this issue which explains why the tendency is for the state to be driven by 'big business' although i would refine that to economic interests in general.

[riemannSum]

At 8/9/10 06:38 AM, chairmankem wrote: The free market doesn't promote innovation. A free political system does.

Those two don't necessarily exist simultaneously in certain places.

A free market obviously promotes innovation - I come up with a good new idea - I make a ton of money. Simple as that.

[Camarohusky]

At 8/11/10 12:06 AM, riemannSum wrote: A free market obviously promotes innovation - I come up with a good new idea - I make a ton of money. Simple as that.

There's a lot more to it.

You have to find a buyer, you have to make sure otehrs aren't out there paying people to NOT buy your stuff. This sort of shady shit DOES happen in the current already quite regulated business environment. The general idea is correct, but like Adam Smith's first theory, it assumes people are perfect. In reality we're a species of greedy irrational boobs, who are more willnig to hurt our species in order to benefit ourselves.

[poxpower]

At 8/10/10 10:34 AM, SmilezRoyale wrote:

I just said that given enough time compatibility will become the norm.

This is what annoys me the most with your whole line of thinking because your answer to every problem is "give it time and it will fix itself".

And your counter to every ounce of social progress is "well given time, it would have happened on its own".

How much time?

Oh between like 10 and 10 000 years or so. Yeah.

[SmilezRoyale]

At 8/11/10 02:28 AM, poxpower wrote:

At 8/10/10 10:34 AM, SmilezRoyale wrote:

I just said that given enough time compatibility will become the norm.

This is what annoys me the most with your whole line of thinking because your answer to every problem is "give it time and it will fix itself".

And your counter to every ounce of social progress is "well given time, it would have happened on its own".

How much time?

Oh between like 10 and 10 000 years or so. Yeah.

It's as speculative as saying "Let the congress handle it."

And I CAN say without much speculation that if the solution even occurs [which itself is a speculatio in of itself] is a non solution, or a cure worse than the disease, it will become a permanent feature of the political system. That is to say, bad laws never get repealed. I've given the reasons why I don't expect political solutions to yield net positive results.

[Musician]

At 8/11/10 12:02 AM, SmilezRoyale wrote: If by the profit motive you mean greed, then yes. But blaming social problems on greed is as irresponsible as blaming architectural problems on gravity. changing the architecture will enable a structure to withstand even with the existence of gravity, but you cannot construct anything that will reduce gravity.

This is far beyond greed. It's just mindless consumerism, facilitated by a system that promotes and rewards mindless consumerism. Consumerism is not a 'law' of human nature, it's something that we're psychologically adapted to by our culture. So no, I don't blame the flaws of global capitalism on human nature, I blame them on a system that advocates ever expanding consumption regardless of human costs that are incurred as a result.

So to tie into your analogy, free market capitalism is akin to a building constructed not to withstand gravity, but to aid gravity in the building's distruction. It is a system that is designed to fail. And that would explain why it fails often.

So when i say that the problem of patents falls on the state I am really saying that the problem lies in the inter-subjective consensus...

In your society there can be no consensus against the will of the corporations. How could there be? The masses have no feasible means by which they can educate themselves of the flaws within the corporatist system. Advertisement based media, along with other pressures from the corporate world, ensure that free media is practically non-existant.

I get the feeling you aren't thinking this through.

I get a feeling you're not thinking this through. Most US taxes come from the rich anyways. It's not a matter of 'stealing' money via taxation, it's a matter of stiffling competition and making markets uncompetetive. Lets make a hypothetical situation here that takes place in AnCap society:

Lets say the US becomes an Anarcho-Capitalist society. The federal government is overthrown, local governments are privatized, in some places new voluntary governments spring up, etc etc. The first thing the corporations are going to do is start lobbying the new voluntary governments. It's actually really easy. They'd just subsidize governments that support their interests. Through these subsidies, the governments would be able to slash costs and drive out competition. Then, once subsidies became a neccesity to maintain a government while charging the standard market rate, corporations would start using their investments within the local governments to put pressure on them to act in favor of corporate interests.

Would there be subsidies? probably not. But there would be changes in policies. court injunctions would be launched at labor strikes. exclusive property rights would be passed on to priveledged corporations. Safety regulations would be targeted at small business, while keeping their distance from big business. Basically, the end result would be tyranny on a scale never before seen.

businesses do not have free will, they will attempt to earn money in the way that is easiest for them

Right, and the easiest way is always force. And there will always be a vessel for that force. Even in Anarcho-Capitalism, even in Minarchism. The removal of the state from a system that advocates heirarchies by it's very nature is an impossible, utopian, and naive pursuit. The true solution lies in correcting the fundamental flaw of the system: the profit motive. Remove that, and you'll have resolved the bulk of the world's problems.

[poxpower]

At 8/11/10 01:32 PM, SmilezRoyale wrote: That is to say, bad laws never get repealed.

Uh, yes they do.
Why would you say something that's such an obvious lie???

[SmilezRoyale]

At 8/11/10 04:28 PM, poxpower wrote:

At 8/11/10 01:32 PM, SmilezRoyale wrote: That is to say, bad laws never get repealed.

When a government agency is created, if it fails in it's function, the congress will likely increase it's budget or increase it's power.

It was wrong of me to say that bad laws never get repealed, but federal agencies, once created, seldom disappear.

[poxpower]

At 8/11/10 05:49 PM, SmilezRoyale wrote: but federal agencies, once created, seldom disappear.

They're hard to get rid of, I'll give you that.

[chairmankem]

At 8/11/10 12:06 AM, riemannSum wrote: A free market obviously promotes innovation - I come up with a good new idea - I make a ton of money. Simple as that.

Depends on what you mean by innovation. It could mean 'come up with creative new ways to collectively scam customers.'

[SadisticMonkey]

The hilarious thing is that in a state run economy, video games remotely resembling the ones we enjoy today would never have existed in the first place for this to ever be a "problem".

[RubberTrucky]

At 8/12/10 08:01 AM, SadisticMonkey wrote: The hilarious thing is that in a state run economy, video games remotely resembling the ones we enjoy today would never have existed in the first place for this to ever be a "problem".

Cause today the state has nothing to do with economy?

The problem with extreme free market is that it depends that people will always use common sense to stop abuse and all the rest. But if people were capable of doing that, communism wouldn't be a problem either, cause the people won't let the government fuck things up that badly.

[SmilezRoyale]

At 8/12/10 08:34 AM, RubberTrucky wrote:

At 8/12/10 08:01 AM, SadisticMonkey wrote: The hilarious thing is that in a state run economy, video games remotely resembling the ones we enjoy today would never have existed in the first place for this to ever be a "problem".

Cause today the state has nothing to do with economy?

The problem with extreme free market is that it depends that people will always use common sense to stop abuse and all the rest. But if people were capable of doing that, communism wouldn't be a problem either, cause the people won't let the government fuck things up that badly.

Arguments premised on human 'perfection' however you care to define it, make life compatible with all systems. Economics is premised on individuals persuing separate interests regardless of their moral implications.

Statism is premised on a knowledgeable voting populace or benevolent oligarchs, or both.

[SadisticMonkey]

At 8/12/10 08:34 AM, RubberTrucky wrote: Cause today the state has nothing to do with economy?

perhaps I should have been more clear, but I broadly meant privately owned means of production. The only real alternative is state-owned means of production i.e. a centrally planned economy.

Sure, we don't have an actual free market, but this only hurts your argument, because taxes, regulations etc stunt production and investment, making innovation that much harder

My point was is that if we had a centrally planned economy, these games would never have existed in the first place, much less the technology with which to play them. The original post is obviously silly because:

-It ignores the fact that the games themselves are an innovation, and is thus complaining about a lack of innovation on an innovation (on an innovation) and so on. And innovation isn't really what he means, he just wants an alternative to steam and is thus merely complaining about insufficient competition.
-If we were to have a state-planned economy, they wouldn't make video games anyway so he's not really saying this should be different in a certain way, but is merely just pointlessly complaining, because there's no real alternative.

The problem with extreme free market is that it depends that people will always use common sense to stop abuse and all the rest.

Well a free market really just means lassiez faire, and so I don't see how a system of no state intervention is subject to gradation i.e. the market is either free or not free, so this "extreme free market" is just silly.

Anyway, why wouldn't people respond to abuse?

At least on a free market, people actually have the ability to fight against abuse. On a free market with no barriers to entry erected by the state, there would be more competition and so for firms abuse would be that much harder to get away with. People's actions will actually reflect their values, as they aren't forced to trade with firms they don't really want to (but "need" to) because of a lack of alternatives.

With state abuse, people are completely powerless.

"Hmm, those republican guys seem really corrupt and they like to abuse their state power to help their banking buddies out. Also they appear to be war fetishists who are also helping out their oil/defence/weapons buddies out too. Luckily we have democracy though! I'm going to vote for change and support Obama! Oh, what a bummer...he turned out to be no different :( "

But if people were capable of doing that, communism wouldn't be a problem either, cause the people won't let the government fuck things up that badly.

That's..really quite foolish.

Firstly, communist governments tend to be huge and powerful. We can't regulate our comparatively weaker states, so what makes you think that people under communist rule could have even the slightest hope of regulating the behaviour of government? And no, democracy doesn't work.

Secondly, states like the Soviet Union failed not because people "let the government fuck things up", but because that it was inherently doomed to fail.

In the absence of a price system the state had no way of accurately determining how much of everything to produce, and so what really should have been the most prosperous society in history turned out to be an abject failure. The only reason that it survived so long was because the planners were able to roughly base things on America's economy and scale production down to match their difference in population.

"Human nature" is to blame for the failure of communism in so much as the planners in a communist state were not omniscient.

[chairmankem]

At 8/12/10 09:57 PM, SadisticMonkey wrote: "Human nature" is to blame for the failure of communism in so much as the planners in a communist state were not omniscient.

That really shouldn't be that much of a problem unless you're just making completely random guesses every year. If it really boiled down to that it could be solved by taking more detailed and accurate censuses.

[SadisticMonkey]

At 8/12/10 04:05 AM, chairmankem wrote: Depends on what you mean by innovation. It could mean 'come up with creative new ways to collectively scam customers.'

1. Compare the rise of capitalism with global standards of living and life expectancy. Oops..

2. It is simply astonishing to me how socialists will heavily criticise VOLUNTARY INTERACTION in capitalism, and yet seemingly have no problem with COERCIVE state controls.

[SadisticMonkey]

At 8/13/10 08:05 PM, chairmankem wrote: That really shouldn't be that much of a problem unless you're just making completely random guesses every year. If it really boiled down to that it could be solved by taking more detailed and accurate censuses.

HAHAHA so basically in 70 years in the soviet union, nobody thought of this?

"Oh this is a disaster; there is far too many shoes being produced and an entirely insufficient number of undershirts being produced. Oh goodness, however will we be able to work out how much of everything to producer!"

"maybe we could be more thorough in our censuses?"

"BRILLIANT! You've saved our glorious nation!"

Lol no, its absurd.
The value of things can only be discovered through exchange.

[yurgenburgen]

At 8/9/10 06:31 AM, Drakim wrote: For a couple of years IE stood unchallenged until Firefox rose up to be noticeable and put some fire in Microsoft's asses.

Mozilla was popular long before they came up with their Firefox variation. Anyone who wasn't a retard used Mozilla instead of IE.