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At 7/5/11 12:11 PM, SmilezRoyale wrote:

You need to learn how to be CONCISE. Haha.

I personally believe that all conscious behavior is inherently rational, but only to the perspective of the person engaged in that behavior.

Well either it's false ( i.e. people don't actually choose as much as they think ) or you're saying "people do what they do", which is pretty useless.

If you say that human nature is savage and brutish, then *do not* exempt anyone who is human from that definition.

How about some people are and some aren't?

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I have not defined what a state is, but the article by Whakahekeheke defines a state fairly well.

Also i said in this post that It would be shorter than the first one, after finishing I'll have to redact that statement.

Boundaries of the Market:

The short answer to this question is as follows: Every issue in which voluntary exchanges are seen as suboptimal to some level of coercion by the state is worthy of a separate topic.

It is my opinion that the state is unnecessary. However there are at least dozens of issues that would need to be covered to either justify this view or disprove it. Unfortunately, any ideology having a free-market bias [like mine] or a statist bias [like yours] involves a series of interlocking beliefs.

Legitimate [having a logical basis] arguments against the free market, in favor of state coercion [to one degree or another] do exist, as do ones that have an illogical basis. I will **not** mention which ones I think are legitimate and need answering and which ones are not worthy of consideration, since all of them need to be addressed at some point, nor will I attempt to 'refute' them here.

Public Goods Arguments - There are certain goods where the person who produces the good cannot normally control who receives the good. In other words, someone will produce something, and people naturally receive this good regardless of whether they paid for it or not [this is called the 'free rider problem']. The best example of this is defense. Defense of a country is inherently territorial, an army cannot defend ONLY those houses which pay the army to defend them. Therefore, no one would voluntarily produce any defense because it is not profitable, and thus the only way defense can be funded is if a central agency uses coercion to ensure that all members of a society contribute sufficiently to the defense of a given territory.

This is not a rebuttal, but note that not all public goods are produced publically, and not all goods produced public ally are public goods. First class mail delivery is a private good, the government does not HAVE to provide you with mail service.

Radio broadcasts are [or were] a public good, and were produced [or at least financed] through private means.

Public "Benefit" Arguments - Public benefit arguments are a subset of public goods arguments. In this case, the interventionists [or statists] concede that a good is private in the sense that it could be produced profitably. However, they argue that the production of a good entails certain positive externalities that are dispersed among society and is not taken into account by producers and consumers.

The best example is education. Education is a private good in the sense that producers of education can exclude non-payers if they want to. However, education involves certain non-tangiible benefits to society as a whole and society 'free rides' off of these benefits. Individuals who receive a good education can pay for the benefit, but society who benefits from educated individuals does not.

Therefore, a private good like education is will not be produced SUFFICIENTLY. And thus, coercion must again be used to fund education in excess of what it would be funded if education was left to the purely voluntary market.

Note that whether something is a public or private good can depend upon the 'rules of the game'.

Negative Externalities - This is simply the reverse of public benefit. This argument says that private production of a good involves costs placed on society that a private producer does not take into account.

The archetype example of this is pollution. Suppose you are a factory producing widgets on a river, and I am the fishing industry that operates in the lake by the river. Your widget production poisons the river and thus harms the fishing industry. Interventionists argue that because the factory producer is otherwise incapable of taking this cost into account, coercion must be applied to remedy the problem. This can come in the form of pollution taxes, or outright prohibition.

Explicit profiling of economic and political agents - This argument concludes the necessity of interventionism from a few premises.

A. Consumers of goods **produced on the market** are ignorant
B. Producers of goods are not as ignorant as consumers and are profit maximizers.
C. Producers and executors of Law are neither ignorant nor are they interested in profit maximization, [I.e. they by nature, interested in the benefit of society as a whole]
D. A+B shows that businesses are both willing *and* capable of exploiting consumers.
E. Given C, agents of the state can be entrusted to use coercion to either prevent producers from harming consumers [controlled production] , or to prevent consumers from harming themselves [controlled consumption]

QED

Circumstantial Evidence - This is when instances of businesses doing things that are known or thought of as morally reprehensible are used as proof that the state should use coercion to somehow prevent such morally reprehensible actions from occurring again.

The difference between Social and economic Freedom:

The short answer is: There is no discrete boundary between what is social and what is economic, certainly not with respect to the extent to which statists of various stripes are interested in interposing people's voluntary decision making.

All of it is always in terms of what individuals are doing with their time and their bodies, and who ultimately gets to decide what I, or you, or anyone chooses to do.

I'm not saying that social and economic are not useful categories. But many of the arguments i listed above can be used just as effectively to justify intervention in what are called social issues as much as they are used in economic issues. Here is a list of some issues commonly thought of as social.

1) Free Speech - Individuals are engaged in the production of a good; information [news, entertainment etc.] either for self gratification [artistic expression] or in persuit of a goal [earning an income, educating others, etc.] Consumers are those who receive this information.

Should the state use coercion to protect consumers from their own ignorance? Should it have the power to decide who producers what information and under what terms?

2) Drugs - Already mentioned

3) Prostitution and Pornography - Money is being exchanged for things which certain people strongly believe are harmful to society [negative externalities, public benefits]

Religion and economics are very closely related. Remember that at one time, charging interest on loans was considered a sin, and only Jews were allowed to do it. Does that mean that money and interest are 'social' and not 'economic' issues? obviously not.

Certain economic activities are explicitly prohibited by religious doctrine and thus become thought of a social issues.

4) Violent video games - Similar to free speech, see above

5) Abortion - This is tricky, if you believe a fetus is a human being, you may consider abortions a form of coercion. If you don't, then you may view abortions as simply being an exchange between a medical professional and a woman or a woman/husband.

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At 7/5/11 09:29 AM, SadisticMonkey wrote:

YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS AT ALL

The more you talk about it, the less it seems there is to know about it.

2. Austrians Build their economic theories upon axioms regarding fundamental human action.

Which implies prediction.

3. The Austrian school actually claim that prediction is not the true test of economic theories

If you can't predict, no one's interested.

Ron Paul predicted five years before the GFC that the policies pursued by the fed and fannie/freddie would lead to a housing bubble and subsequent collapse.

Why is that the only example you ever give? You've brought this one up like 20 times now even though I've shown you a bunch of non-libertarian, non-austrian guys who had made the same damn prediction as the laws were being passed.

Read a goddamn austrian economics book or something fopr goodness' sake.

Seems pretty shitty if I can refute it so easily with my limited knowledge and a little bit of common sense.
And double fishy that it's a fringe view and has been one for DECADES. Newsflash: when a field of social or natural science stagnates for decades on the fringes, it means IT'S SHIT.

Austrians believe that value is subjective, and people very often value things higher than money.

Everyone and their mom knows this and has always known this.
What we're interested in is predicting what people will pay for something.

By "rational", I mean "predictable" given the "axioms of human behavior", which, again, I suspect austrian economists know nothing about.
And how the fuck could they, the theory is like 100 years old and was invented in a time where we knew so very little about human behavior.

Mainstream economics does, and yet they're not as good at predicting as the Austrians.

Seems to be because Austrians only make predictions about the obvious things to raise their batting average.
By the same token, I'm pretty awesome at predicting the weather, although I don't predict beyond an hour.

But are you honestly contending that the neoclassicals or Keynsianism would have predicted the precise number of people who would have paid for the album and the amount they would pay?

No, I'm saying that you can't imagine a "free market" would just fix itself magically based on offer/ demand, which is what you always rave about.
People don't know what they want and manufacturers don't know what people want. No one knows what people want sometimes. There's so many loopholes to exploit that warp the idea of a free market.

because they would have a vested interest in protecting the gulf

No, why do you think they would OWN the gulf?
I have a vested interest in protecting my apartment, but I don't own the building. In what insane world would people always just happen to own the land they use for their livelihoods?
That doesn't even make sense given geography. You can pollute an area and it'll rain acid 2000 miles away.

All acts of state suffer from the calculation problem. The price mechanism on the market allows actors to dtermine if a certain allocation of resources is efficient based on the aggregate values of soceity, whereas state action has no such feedback mechansm.

That doesn't work for all products nor is it a desirable way to allocate ressources for everything.

Seriously, sell it to some libertarians. You get money for your expansive welfare programs, we get our own little socities to experimetn with. Win-win, no?

I'm sure you can buy an island somewhere.

At 7/5/11 09:49 AM, SadisticMonkey wrote:

Except the mafia is bad only because it opeates within a legal system wherein their practices are banned

The protection racket is an age-old practice that has nothing to do with the government. In fact it's what you complain about the most regarding governments: they force you to pay them money every year or they put you in jail.

Well there's places where there's mafia / warlords that do the same exact thing.

If someone buys 'aggression insurance' from your company, for example, wherein they pay you to protect them, its obviously cheaper to put a few security guards on teh street than it is to go around paying out a bunch of claims.

And it's even cheaper to not pay claims and collect money.
A trick insurance companies have figured out a long time ago.

yeah because in an industry with MASSIVE demand, one one firm would be providing services, right.

In a given area, yes, probably. Or else you'd have a giant mess or a government run by a company owner, which is what we call a "kingdom".

Yeah I'm not responding to any more of your bullshit until you watch this. And I mean all of it.

Not this bullshit again from the economic equivalent of VenomfangX
Maybe you should tell this kid that he's an idiot because YOU study economics in college and he doesn't.

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At 7/5/11 12:37 PM, poxpower wrote:

I personally believe that all conscious behavior is inherently rational, but only to the perspective of the person engaged in that behavior.

Well either it's false ( i.e. people don't actually choose as much as they think ) or you're saying "people do what they do", which is pretty useless.

Like i said, free will does not exist. It cannot exist. But people do*act*

Acting and choosing is more a matter of being aware or conscious of doing it, and being able to provide some motivated reason for doing it. This is the difference between the decision to respond to someone on a new grounds forum and blinking.

If you say that human nature is savage and brutish, then *do not* exempt anyone who is human from that definition.

How about some people are and some aren't?

Then you are not dealing in terms of human nature, but in terms of behavior correlating [or being caused by] a category of humans

It is not illogical to say that the average human has an IQ of X, but the average Asian has an IQ of X+15

It is illogical to say that Human nature [i.e. All of Humanity] is such that the intelligence of man IQ of X, but Asians [a sub category of human] have a higher IQ.

If you want to call certain groups of people certain things and other groups of people other things, Go ahead, but do not call it human nature and do not make empirical claims without empirical evidence.

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At 7/5/11 01:25 PM, SmilezRoyale wrote:

Like i said, free will does not exist. It cannot exist. But people do*act*

That's not particularly useful to know.

Then you are not dealing in terms of human nature, but in terms of behavior correlating [or being caused by] a category of humans

Depends. You could argue that it's not in human nature to run an under 4 minute mile, but some people can still do it.

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At 7/4/11 10:34 PM, bgraybr wrote:

At 7/4/11 10:18 PM, SadisticMonkey wrote: Stop listening to Michael Moore for goodness' sake.

Never heard of him, but I'm assuming that he's some sort of evilliberalsocialistdictatorfaggot according to you.

No, he's some fat guy with a leftwing agenda who makes.....interesting....documentaries. He's sort of like the liberal version of Rush Limbaught, but, unlike Rush, Michael Moore trashes capitalism while using it to live a lavish lifestyle. He's a hypocrite, just like Al Gore is.

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At 7/5/11 04:07 PM, poxpower wrote:

Then you are not dealing in terms of human nature, but in terms of behavior correlating [or being caused by] a category of humans

Depends. You could argue that it's not in human nature to run an under 4 minute mile, but some people can still do it.

You are correct insofar as "It is not in human nature" means "Not all"

I.e. "Not all Humans can do X" is compatible with the statement "Some humans can do X"
It is not compatible with the statement "No human can do X"

To say that one category of humans is different from another is acceptable, provided it can be proven empirically.

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At 7/4/11 08:11 PM, poxpower wrote: As we know, people would demand less goods that are made by polluting companies and thus there would be no more pollution.

No, people would weigh the enjoyment they'd lose from pollution against the enjoyment those products would bring. Better yet, as anyone who's read "The Tragedy in the Commons" can tell you, given an absolute maximum tolerable level of pollution, credit for each unit of pollution could be bought by the highest bidder (the one generating the most value through their pollution).

THE GOVERNMENT IS STEALING YOUR MONEY WITH TAXES AND THAT'S MORALLY WRONG

Damn, somebody's scared about their welfare check this month.

As we know, if you name 2 options at random to solve any given problem or explain any given thing, all you need to do is bash on one of the options to validate the other!

Government market intervention can generally only go two ways from where ever it is (more or less). Options for change in government policy is hardly "random."

In a free market, there would be no government. People don't want governments. Governments just happened by magic somehow.

Governments came to be mainly through militarism. Once people started rejecting governments that ultimately just wanted to take over each other, we entered the [classical] liberal era. Of course then people decided enough intervention could fix all domestic problems that idiots bring on themselves, and we started cascading right back to the stone age.

And in the free market, there's no stealing, scamming, violence or cruelty!

Capitalism is the recognition of each person's ownership of their property, so general law enforcement would have to be kept, but that's one of the few things. Companies might even be better off if they train and equipped their own security teams (within the limits of the rights of the accused).

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At 7/5/11 09:28 PM, ohbombuh wrote: Of course then people decided enough intervention could fix all domestic problems that idiots bring on themselves, and we started cascading right back to the stone age.

Just wondering, what do you think America was like before progressive movements? Do you really think that the economy was perfectly balanced, and that businesses weren't corrupt?

At 7/5/11 05:59 PM, AbstractPathologist wrote: No, he's some fat guy with a leftwing agenda who makes.....interesting....documentaries. He's sort of like the liberal version of Rush Limbaught, but, unlike Rush, Michael Moore trashes capitalism while using it to live a lavish lifestyle. He's a hypocrite, just like Al Gore is.

Okay, but I don't really see why I should care or why he had to be brought up.

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At 7/5/11 11:32 PM, bgraybr wrote: Just wondering, what do you think America was like before progressive movements? Do you really think that the economy was perfectly balanced, and that businesses weren't corrupt?

I think they were what the technology allowed at the time. They were concerned with profits; that's business. Abusing their customers' trust (or whatever you're accusing them of) would make them lose profits and create an opportunity to push them out of the market. After the progressive movement, we got into Prohibition, which led to a black market of booze (which was far more often involved in toxic additives than its free predecessor) and a rise in gang activity, which in more influential cases led to governmental corruption.

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At 7/6/11 12:01 AM, ohbombuh wrote:

At 7/5/11 11:32 PM, bgraybr wrote: Just wondering, what do you think America was like before progressive movements? Do you really think that the economy was perfectly balanced, and that businesses weren't corrupt?

I think they were what the technology allowed at the time. They were concerned with profits; that's business. Abusing their customers' trust (or whatever you're accusing them of) would make them lose profits and create an opportunity to push them out of the market.

So what's your answer to the question? - Do you think the economy was perfectly balanced before progressive movements? Do you really think that the economy was perfectly balanced, and that businesses weren't corrupt?

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At 7/5/11 01:20 PM, poxpower wrote: The more you talk about it, the less it seems there is to know about it.

I have bearely talked about it at all. In fact, you're teh one who brought it up. It has little relevance to the thread so far.

Anyway, there's plenty to know. Have a read of this, its my favourite book.

Which implies prediction.

No, it's more about being able to interpretthe world, explain phenomena and presribe policy.

If you can't predict, no one's interested.

Austrians contend that prediction of human affairs by any school is not realistically possible, because there are an infinite number of variables to be considered and very few of the mcan be controlled and replicated thye way they can be in the natural sciences. If predictions can't be made, they can't be made.
If you want to contend they can be made, cool, but the Sutrians aren't saying its only them who can't amke predictions.

Why is that the only example you ever give?

It's big and obvious, given your short attention span and dislike of reading things.

Anyway, there is heaps. The mainstream concensus was that there was going to be massive deflation after the GFC, while the Austrians warned of infaltion and were ridiculed for it.
Fast forward a year or two now inlfation is here and even the mainstream think it will get worse.

You've brought this one up like 20 times now even though I've shown you a bunch of non-libertarian, non-austrian guys who had made the same damn prediction as the laws were being passed.

The point is that this wsa very different from the concensus among mainstream economists. inclusing the federal reserve chairman, who has a phd in economics from MIT and wrote the most used economics textbook of modern times (principles of macroeconomics).
And the more mainstream of the economists who did predict the collapse did it closer to the collapse based their views on the data, not economic theories.

Seems pretty shitty if I can refute it so easily with my limited knowledge and a little bit of common sense.

You haven't refuted shit mate. And 'very limited' is being wuite genrous. You know none of the main principles.

And double fishy that it's a fringe view and has been one for DECADES. Newsflash: when a field of social or natural science stagnates for decades on the fringes, it means IT'S SHIT.

I EXPLAINED THIS IN MY LAST POST.

Everyone and their mom knows this and has always known this.

annnnnd once again you demonstrate your compelkte ignorance of the history of economic thought. Until the Austrian economist carl menger and a few others cam along, the prevailing view was called the labour theory of value, a theory of objective value.

By "rational", I mean "predictable" given the "axioms of human behavior", which, again, I suspect austrian economists know nothing about.

One of the most important austrian texts is literally called "Human Action" and its over a thousands pages long. SO yeah, they've thought about it a littel bit.

And how the fuck could they, the theory is like 100 years old and was invented in a time where we knew so very little about human behavior.

The main Austrian text, the one I linked above, was written in 1962.

I'm getting really tired of explaining all this crap to you bit by bit. Either read up (and not your biased mainstream crap) on it or stop talking about it,

Seems to be because Austrians only make predictions about the obvious things to raise their batting average.

Most of thier predictions concern the effects of certain policies, and there's literally hundreds and hundreds of these.

By the same token, I'm pretty awesome at predicting the weather, although I don't predict beyond an hour.

Mises predicted in 1920 that socialism, the government control of the economy, necessarily can't work, and that the soviet union would lead to economic stagnation and contraction.
This is of course what happened, with millions of people starving to death and leadingmiserable lives because of how poorly the economy was operated.

Meanwhile, Paul Samuelson, one of the most important Keynsian economists of the twentieth century, said as late as the nineteen seventies that the people of sivet russia would overtake the standard of living and per capita income by 1990.
The soviet union was dissolved in 1991, with a total of 62 million deaths.

No, I'm saying that you can't imagine a "free market" would just fix itself magically based on offer/ demand, which is what you always rave about.
People don't know what they want and manufacturers don't know what people want. No one knows what people want sometimes. There's so many loopholes to exploit that warp the idea of a free market.

Look, the Austrian View of economics is extremely complex and deatailed. The 1500 page book I linked you to was just principles.

You can't just make these broad statements and expect me to explain how the an entrire economic system would supposedly work.

Make a specific argument, or I'm not going to bother.

No, why do you think they would OWN the gulf?

Because a homsteading-principle is likely to be te foundation of property ownership on a toal market, given that its in most people's best interest ( and hence legal agencies have an incentive to enforce such a system of ownership)

I have a vested interest in protecting my apartment, but I don't own the building.

well duh someone else built that apartment and it is the source of their livelihood. You just get the government to pay for you to stay tehre. It's not at all analogous to wroking on a piece of land like in the gulf.

Either way, things would be better in the current statist systme if the government would privatise the environemnt. The reason the tragedy of the commons isn;t a problem in terms of 'farmers feeding on all the grass' until the pastures were baron isn't because the government set regulations on how much each cow could eat, its because of private property and the conservations incentivises is causes.

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That doesn't even make sense given geography. You can pollute an area and it'll rain acid 2000 miles away.

Watch this (half way through is the enviro stuff).

Either way, if you think profit-driven firms won't come up with a mechanism for protecting their firms, why in god's name would you expect a bunch of politicans with no real incentive to stop this from being competent?

That doesn't work for all products nor is it a desirable way to allocate ressources for everything.

w'sup vague emaningless assertion

The protection racket is an age-old practice that has nothing to do with the government.

Yeah, it's proof of an ineffective system where income isn't linked with performance.

In fact it's what you complain about the most regarding governments: they force you to pay them money every year or they put you in jail.

So mafias are abd therefore we need an infinitely bigger, more invasive mafia?LOL

And it's even cheaper to not pay claims and collect money.

And in a system wher firms aren't shielded from competition through state regulations (see: america's health insurance system wher you can't sell insurance across state lines) then you would quickly go out of business because of the reputation you would get.

In a given area, yes, probably. Or else you'd have a giant mess or a government run by a company owner, which is what we call a "kingdom".

So you're syaing firms aren't attracted to profitable industries? ????

Not this bullshit again from the economic equivalent of VenomfangX

YEah I'm not going to respond to your "this guy isn't a mainstram economist therefore he is wrong" ad homenim attacks.

You know nothing about the economic sceinces. They are nothing like the natural sciences.

The economic profession has been "progressing" for years and the government has been pursuing economist influenced policy more than ever, ...and the economy is in an abolsutely dreadful state. And the best idea the 'experts' have to fix things is to print a bunch a money, and all this has done is created massive inflation and little else.

Eocnomics is not matter of ceoncrete evidence like evolution or physics. It is highly abstract, and professional economists have all kinds of political incentives to be pro-government.

Maybe you should tell this kid that he's an idiot because YOU study economics in college and he doesn't.

He is more knowledgable about economics, Austrian, mainstream or otherwise, than myself and all economic grad students I've ever had the displeasure of meeting.

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At 7/6/11 08:42 AM, SadisticMonkey wrote:

I'm getting really tired of explaining all this crap to you bit by bit. Either read up (and not your biased mainstream crap) on it or stop talking about it,

Done : D

It's not at all analogous to wroking on a piece of land like in the gulf.

Why not? You can work land like you can build a house. If I deforest an area to prepare it for agriculture, why can't I rent it to someone else so he works on it and gives me X% ?

Why would I suddenly lose property of that land if someone settles on it like a bandit in the night when I'm not looking????

You think it's horrible for a country to lay claim to vast areas they don't populate but you make no argument as to why you wouldn't let a company or an individual do the exact same thing. Land is valuable and people will inevitably create ways to own and exchange it in a free market.

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At 7/6/11 08:42 AM, SadisticMonkey wrote: I have bearely talked about it at all. In fact, you're teh one who brought it up. It has little relevance to the thread so far.
Anyway, there's plenty to know. Have a read of this, its my favourite book.

No you were definitely the first one to mention it and you have spent quite a few posts talking about it.

No, it's more about being able to interpret the world, explain phenomena and presribe policy.

Which leads to prediction. Any school of thought is meant to interpret the world and explain phenomena so that patterns can be established and predictions can be made.

Austrians contend that prediction of human affairs by any school is not realistically possible, because there are an infinite number of variables to be considered and very few of the mcan be controlled and replicated thye way they can be in the natural sciences. If predictions can't be made, they can't be made.
If you want to contend they can be made, cool, but the Sutrians aren't saying its only them who can't amke predictions.

Have the Austrians ever heard of history? Study history for any period of time and the same mistakes and behaviors begin to show up quite frequently making it pretty easy to predict what's coming next. Follow a few empires from beginning to end and you've practically got a farmers almanac of human behavior.

It's big and obvious, given your short attention span and dislike of reading things.
Anyway, there is heaps. The mainstream concensus was that there was going to be massive deflation after the GFC, while the Austrians warned of infaltion and were ridiculed for it.
Fast forward a year or two now inlfation is here and even the mainstream think it will get worse.

So the Austrians don't make predictions, and yet they did make a prediction? I'm confused, do Austrians not make predictions or do they because in this same post you put "Austrians contend that prediction of human affairs by any school is not realistically possible..." and yet according to you Austrians made a prediction about economic inflation.

The point is that this wsa very different from the concensus among mainstream economists. inclusing the federal reserve chairman, who has a phd in economics from MIT and wrote the most used economics textbook of modern times (principles of macroeconomics).
And the more mainstream of the economists who did predict the collapse did it closer to the collapse based their views on the data, not economic theories.

A good economist is a lot like a crappy weatherman, they get their predictions wrong until the day before it happens when the average person knows what's coming weeks before it does. And that last sentence sounds a lot like you're bashing mainstream economists for using facts and empirical data to make prediction as opposed to the "theories" Austrians used to make a prediction despite the fact that, according to you, Austrians don't make predictions. Where exactly did they get these theories for the predictions they don't make? Why should anyone believe the predictions of a people who claim that predicting the future is impossible?

One of the most important austrian texts is literally called "Human Action" and its over a thousands pages long. SO yeah, they've thought about it a littel bit.

Once again you're defending the Austrian's skill in the field of economics by countering claims you've previously made. A people hellbent on not making predictions because human behavior is too complex to predict has an entire book about human behavior. It seems like everything you say you turn around and say the complete opposite. "Austrians contend that prediction of human affairs by any school is not realistically possible, because there are an infinite number of variables to be considered and very few of the mcan be controlled and replicated thye way they can be in the natural sciences."

Most of thier predictions concern the effects of certain policies, and there's literally hundreds and hundreds of these.

Most mainstream economists can't afford to only make predictions about specific policies because they have to weight the pros and cons of thousands of potential policies in conjunction with those policies that already exist in order to come up with a best case worst case scenario for each so that the people in charge are able to better decide which path to take.

Mises predicted in 1920 that socialism, the government control of the economy, necessarily can't work, and that the soviet union would lead to economic stagnation and contraction.
This is of course what happened, with millions of people starving to death and leadingmiserable lives because of how poorly the economy was operated.
Meanwhile, Paul Samuelson, one of the most important Keynsian economists of the twentieth century, said as late as the nineteen seventies that the people of sivet russia would overtake the standard of living and per capita income by 1990.
The soviet union was dissolved in 1991, with a total of 62 million deaths.

Socialism in Soviet Russia failed because of the Cold War. Without that the economy never would have been stressed to and beyond its limits and Soviet Russia could still be standing strong today. In 1990 they were still one of the strongest nations in the world that utilized totalitarian control to prevent anyone outside the nation from knowing just how bad things really were. In 1920 Mises merely made a guess based on the theory whereas Paul Samuelson was forced to use history and evidence to determine the most probable course for the future.

Because a homsteading-principle is likely to be te foundation of property ownership on a toal market, given that its in most people's best interest ( and hence legal agencies have an incentive to enforce such a system of ownership)

Legal agencies wouldn't exist without a government to provide laws. And just because you have the most to lose from something bad happening to an area doesn't automatically mean you own it. The person with the most money is the person with the power in a free market and the person with the power decides what belongs to who. Big companies that make money off of an area would be the ones who owned it which in the case of the Gulf means oil companies that could make a lot of money by drilling for oil (or in some cases spilling the oil and then driving up the prices) would be the owners of the Gulf and by extension the areas surrounding the Gulf.

well duh someone else built that apartment and it is the source of their livelihood. You just get the government to pay for you to stay tehre. It's not at all analogous to wroking on a piece of land like in the gulf.

Companies generally own the land where their people work. While some fishermen might be able to make enough money to live on it would be large fishing companies that own numerous boats and have many people working for them that would make the most money off of fishing areas and therefore would have ownership of those areas.

Either way, things would be better in the current statist systme if the government would privatise the environemnt. The reason the tragedy of the commons isn;t a problem in terms of 'farmers feeding on all the grass' until the pastures were baron isn't because the government set regulations on how much each cow could eat, its because of private property and the conservations incentivises is causes.

Companies have no reason to care about the environment, they can make more money by spending less on the environmental regulations of the government and simply dumping their waste and using the cheapest possible method (which is often the most polluting method) to manufacture goods. Right now massive containment areas are being built for nuclear waste to protect the environment, do you really think anyone would be spending that much money if they didn't have to? Nuclear power plants could secretly dump their waste without worrying about the government fines.

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At 7/6/11 12:55 AM, Camarohusky wrote: Do you really think that the economy was perfectly balanced, and that businesses weren't corrupt?

I don't think that there can be such a thing as a "perfectly balanced" economy. At best, economic flows may be in stasis, but that by no means makes them perfect or balanced. People who get money often (but not always) do stupid things with it and lose a significant amount; that's fairness and accountability, not some unnatural/unbalanced concept.

As for business corruption, you may want to expand on how you define that. As I said, business is about long-term profitability, generally with willing exchanges through customers. I would call a business concerned with anything else corrupt, and doubtless there were some, but the free market would be increasingly likely to eliminate them as the time of their presence went on. When we got into businesses being deemed too big or important to fail, we got into real corruption.

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At 7/6/11 10:39 PM, ohbombuh wrote: I don't think that there can be such a thing as a "perfectly balanced" economy. At best, economic flows may be in stasis, but that by no means makes them perfect or balanced. People who get money often (but not always) do stupid things with it and lose a significant amount; that's fairness and accountability, not some unnatural/unbalanced concept.

On a micro level that might be true, but I'm pretty sure the question was meant for the macro scale.

As for business corruption, you may want to expand on how you define that. As I said, business is about long-term profitability, generally with willing exchanges through customers.

When I think of business corruption, I think of profitability derived from exploitation of the customers and/or employees. Now people's standards can vary widely, but there is no way anybody can legitimately say how employees were treated in the 1800s was disgusting. Also, it;s juyst naive to say that the monopolistic practices that squashed competitionbenefitted the customers, through quality or price. The food conditions are a pretty good example of corrupt business. The idiom that what customers don't know won't hurt them is the ideal of corrupt business. I do understand that profit is and should be the primary goal of a business entity, however, businesses have the same responsibilities to the community as regular citizens do.

When we got into businesses being deemed too big or important to fail, we got into real corruption.

Actually, it was bad business practices (encouraged by loosened regulations) that lead to companies like AIG being so intertwined in the conomy with money that didn't exist that lead to the idea of "too big too fail." When close to 1 trillion dollars is on the brink of vanishing, a company has become so big that if it did the the entire US economy would fail with it.

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At 7/6/11 10:58 PM, Camarohusky wrote:

When I think of business corruption, I think of profitability derived from exploitation of the customers and/or employees. Now people's standards can vary widely, but there is no way anybody can legitimately say how employees were treated in the 1800s was disgusting. Also, it;s juyst naive to say that the monopolistic practices that squashed competitionbenefitted the customers, through quality or price. The food conditions are a pretty good example of corrupt business. The idiom that what customers don't know won't hurt them is the ideal of corrupt business. I do understand that profit is and should be the primary goal of a business entity, however, businesses have the same responsibilities to the community as regular citizens do.

A. Consumers of goods **produced on the market** are ignorant
B. Producers of goods are not as ignorant as consumers and are profit maximizers.
C. Producers and executors of Law are neither ignorant nor are they interested in profit maximization, [I.e. they by nature, interested in the benefit of society as a whole] <- This is sometimes never explicitly stated but is implicitly understood as true
D. A+B shows that businesses are both willing *and* capable of exploiting consumers.
E. Given C, agents of the state can be entrusted to use coercion to either prevent producers from harming consumers [controlled production] , or to prevent consumers from harming themselves [controlled consumption]

QED

I just wanted to point out that I made the argument before you did, IMHO he should be responding to me :P

_______________________________

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At 7/6/11 10:58 PM, Camarohusky wrote:

At 7/6/11 10:39 PM, ohbombuh wrote: I don't think that there can be such a thing as a "perfectly balanced" economy. At best, economic flows may be in stasis, but that by no means makes them perfect or balanced. People who get money often (but not always) do stupid things with it and lose a significant amount; that's fairness and accountability, not some unnatural/unbalanced concept.

On a micro level that might be true, but I'm pretty sure the question was meant for the macro scale.

Macroeconomics is nothing more than the sum of instances of microeconomics. Besides, my starting points still address the whole of the economy.

When I think of business corruption, I think of profitability derived from exploitation of the customers and/or employees.

Exploitation of employees? Hello, Karl Jr. If they could get a better deal elsewhere, they were free to take it. If not, that was the best deal they could get and that isn't the fault of the business's policies.

Now people's standards can vary widely, but there is no way anybody can legitimately say how employees were treated in the 1800s was disgusting.

OK, but I thought you were trying to prove somehow that early 1900s businesses were the bad guys, not that their predecessors were really amazing.

Also, it;s juyst naive to say that the monopolistic practices that squashed competition benefited the customers, through quality or price.

If one company is predominant in a market and raises its prices or cuts quality, other people could, for example, take out a loan to start a new business and offer better/cheaper products, either driving the original out of business or making it rethink its policies.

The food conditions are a pretty good example of corrupt business. The idiom that what customers don't know won't hurt them is the ideal of corrupt business. I do understand that profit is and should be the primary goal of a business entity, however, businesses have the same responsibilities to the community as regular citizens do.

If someone sold food that left customers dissatisfied or sick more than what was unavoidable, there would again be an opportunity for someone else to undercut them with better products, especially if the difference was significant enough to be proven.

Actually, it was bad business practices (encouraged by loosened regulations) that lead to companies like AIG being so intertwined in the conomy with money that didn't exist that lead to the idea of "too big too fail." When close to 1 trillion dollars is on the brink of vanishing, a company has become so big that if it did the the entire US economy would fail with it.

Wrong. Speculation on the housing market was their fault. The money they expected didn't come, so it couldn't possibly vanish. They guaranteed what they didn't have, and that fact couldn't be fixed. They should've had to face the debt they racked up by making faulty assumptions, but the government wouldn't let that pass. Without the bailout, we'd still have all the same goods available as we did beforehand, but we'd have one less moronic organization.

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At 7/6/11 11:36 PM, ohbombuh wrote: Macroeconomics is nothing more than the sum of instances of microeconomics. Besides, my starting points still address the whole of the economy.

Not neccesarily. The rationality of a person doesn't make people as a whiole rational. In this case, the lower people losing money, doesn't equate always to the larger schemes.

Exploitation of employees? Hello, Karl Jr. If they could get a better deal elsewhere, they were free to take it. If not, that was the best deal they could get and that isn't the fault of the business's policies.

But when the norm is to make employees work 90 hour weeks for less pay than it takes to live, there is no better place. Ultra-free market folks always throw this type of argument around as if it works, but it just doesn't. When those with the power have such a starnglehold upon that power, and are using it with greed, the free market principles no longer work. True free market principles assume that the parties have equal, or at least comparable power. In the world of 100% free business, that is not even close to the case.

OK, but I thought you were trying to prove somehow that early 1900s businesses were the bad guys, not that their predecessors were really amazing.

Wait, what?

If one company is predominant in a market and raises its prices or cuts quality, other people could, for example, take out a loan to start a new business and offer better/cheaper products, either driving the original out of business or making it rethink its policies.

Really? Are the free market folks so naive to how monopolies really work? Let's school you on the REAL world. Let's say, Shell, Chevron and Exxon are actually owned by the same company. Joe Blow takes out a $1 million dollar loan to put his gas station in, hoping to relieve the people of the prices. He put gas at $3.50 a gallon (.10 above the buying price), when the trifecta had theirs at $3.70. What does the monopoly do? They use profits from their 50 other markets to drop the price down to $3.30, selling at a loss. They cause all of the customers to ignore Joe, and he cannot pay off his loan and goes bye bye. When he finally leaves Gas goes back up to $3.70. Sure, tehre was a short term benefit, but in the long run, not only has the price gouging remained the same, a possible competitior has been run out of business, thus sending a tough message to any other would be enterpenuer. THAT is how a monopoly works. You can't just grassroots beat a monopoly. If that were the case, WalMart would have been squashed a decade ago, and WalMart isn't even close to a monopoly.

If someone sold food that left customers dissatisfied or sick more than what was unavoidable, there would again be an opportunity for someone else to undercut them with better products, especially if the difference was significant enough to be proven.

If the customers didn't know that it was the sausage with dead rats and rat poisoned bread loafs in it, that was making people sick, they wouldn't stop eating it. Also, entrepenuers aren't made of money. Starting a factory is not cheap. It's not like I can snap my fingers and have a fully functioning Camaro's sausage refinery, and it will happen. It will take tons of capital and time. Not to mention quality products (and even just safe products) can be expensive to make, and therefore expensive to sell.

Wrong. Speculation on the housing market was their fault. The money they expected didn't come, so it couldn't possibly vanish. They guaranteed what they didn't have, and that fact couldn't be fixed. They should've had to face the debt they racked up by making faulty assumptions, but the government wouldn't let that pass. Without the bailout, we'd still have all the same goods available as we did beforehand, but we'd have one less moronic organization.

You really don't know what AIG actually does do you? They don't speculate on home. They sell stock insurance. They sold insurance to people who DIDN'T own stock. If my memory serves me they sold somewhere between tem to twenty times the value of ALL of GM's stock in insurance. Now GM was a stock behemoth. I'd venture to say they had a float of over a billion dollars. That means AIG stood to lose 10+ BILLION dollars because they got cocky and sold stuff they didn't have.

Now I definitely know you don't know what "Too Big To Fail" actually means. I used to think like you. I used to think, well let the fuckers fail, they deserve it. However, you know what happens when AIG fails? Average Joes who have invested in the people who are tied to people who are tied to AIG will lose their money. Imagine what happened with Madoff, but instead just a paltry few hunred million, more like a sizeable few hundred billion, if not a trillion dollars.

It's counterintuitive. I know. Why must I feel the full brunt of my failure, when the big guys don't? Well, when I fail, only me, and my family are hurt. When the Big Boys fail EVERY SINGLE PERSON who has a tie (and that is damn near everyone) to their funds loses out.

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At 7/7/11 12:24 AM, Camarohusky wrote: Not neccesarily. The rationality of a person doesn't make people as a whiole rational. In this case, the lower people losing money, doesn't equate always to the larger schemes.

I don't know anybody who would honestly that even most people are rational. However, the least rational people are generally better at eliminating themselves from the nature's flow.

Exploitation of employees? Hello, Karl Jr. If they could get a better deal elsewhere, they were free to take it. If not, that was the best deal they could get and that isn't the fault of the business's policies.

But when the norm is to make employees work 90 hour weeks for less pay than it takes to live, there is no better place.

They're usually able to do that because a group of some line of work (most often unskilled labor) has grown too big to continue without some of them starving off. Ever read The Grapes of Wrath? It pretty well demonstrates that with hundreds of thousands of competitors packing into a small area, you'd better have some edge in productivity or lower consumption needs. (In that book it was largely the farmers' fault for having like six kids per family on land they couldn't pay the bills for.)

Ultra-free market folks always throw this type of argument around as if it works, but it just doesn't. When those with the power have such a starnglehold upon that power, and are using it with greed, the free market principles no longer work. True free market principles assume that the parties have equal, or at least comparable power. In the world of 100% free business, that is not even close to the case.

No, people don't have equal resources, planning abilities, etc. They can get some resources to weigh in against what older companies have earned, but they'll only overcome that if the incumbent business has really turned around.

OK, but I thought you were trying to prove somehow that early 1900s businesses were the bad guys, not that their predecessors were really amazing.

Wait, what?

You were talking about 1800s business conditions not being disgusting. I didn't really see how it fit into the conversation.

If one company is predominant in a market and raises its prices or cuts quality, other people could, for example, take out a loan to start a new business and offer better/cheaper products, either driving the original out of business or making it rethink its policies.

Let's say, Shell, Chevron and Exxon are actually owned by the same company.

I love these meager and highly probable assumptions.

Joe Blow takes out a $1 million dollar loan to put his gas station in, hoping to relieve the people of the prices. He put gas at $3.50 a gallon (.10 above the buying price), when the trifecta had theirs at $3.70. What does the monopoly do? They use profits from their 50 other markets to drop the price down to $3.30, selling at a loss. They cause all of the customers to ignore Joe, and he cannot pay off his loan and goes bye bye. When he finally leaves Gas goes back up to $3.70. Sure, tehre was a short term benefit, but in the long run, not only has the price gouging remained the same, a possible competitior has been run out of business, thus sending a tough message to any other would be enterpenuer. THAT is how a monopoly works. You can't just grassroots beat a monopoly. If that were the case, WalMart would have been squashed a decade ago, and WalMart isn't even close to a monopoly.

They only have that much money in the first place because they earned it earlier on by offering customers the best deal (or at least, what the customers saw as the best deal) they could get. The longer they do that and the tighter they keep the price margin in that startup time, the more room they have to clear out competitors. Thus, if they've been watching their backs on pricing for five decades, by all means they can take a little long-term benefit from that. If they really abused, OPEC might be able to undercut them for direct profits without them as middlemen. As for Joe Blow, his goal should start out being profits through a sustainable business. If that need is filled, without a huge price gap to wedge himself into, he can't rely on that. If he really wanted to make payments easier for people, he himself would start selling at a loss, which is a bad business tactic. Besides, how can we say for sure the companies wouldn't want to avoid selling at a loss to squash someone else in the future? They might buckle down a little more. If I recall correctly, gas has gone over 4 bucks a gallon, so why is it below that now?

If someone sold food that left customers dissatisfied or sick more than what was unavoidable, there would again be an opportunity for someone else to undercut them with better products, especially if the difference was significant enough to be proven.

If the customers didn't know that it was the sausage with dead rats and rat poisoned bread loafs in it, that was making people sick, they wouldn't stop eating it.

Howdy Pa, we got some deep fried KFC tonight and little Davey got sick. What do you think did it? Aw, he just got a cold, that's all. But Pa, colds don't make people blow chunks!

Also, entrepenuers aren't made of money. Starting a factory is not cheap. It's not like I can snap my fingers and have a fully functioning Camaro's sausage refinery, and it will happen. It will take tons of capital and time. Not to mention quality products (and even just safe products) can be expensive to make, and therefore expensive to sell.

Yeah, that's why it's hard to enter a market unless the people in it are really doing a shitty job. Also, not all new competitors are bottom-up. Huge companies from an entirely separate market field could take their savings and open up shop in a new kind of business.

Now I definitely know you don't know what "Too Big To Fail" actually means. I used to think like you. I used to think, well let the fuckers fail, they deserve it. However, you know what happens when AIG fails? Average Joes who have invested in the people who are tied to people who are tied to AIG will lose their money. Imagine what happened with Madoff, but instead just a paltry few hunred million, more like a sizeable few hundred billion, if not a trillion dollars.

The money wasn't there. The government printed currency to take its place. The AIG guys should've been bankrupted and then sold to organ harvesters for every cent they were worth, but instead everybody who WASN'T involved in their mess had their money depleted of value so that they could stick around.

It's counterintuitive. I know. Why must I feel the full brunt of my failure, when the big guys don't? Well, when I fail, only me, and my family are hurt. When the Big Boys fail EVERY SINGLE PERSON who has a tie (and that is damn near everyone) to their funds loses out.

Make no mistake, their failure would not eliminate money, it would only remove the lie of money they didn't really have. Maybe some people who were planning to retire on that would seem to lose money, but basically every currency user removed from the incident was robbed to pay for them.

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At 7/6/11 09:44 AM, poxpower wrote: Why not? You can work land like you can build a house.

You didn't build your apartments (?)

Why would I suddenly lose property of that land if someone settles on it like a bandit in the night when I'm not looking????

That of course is a dreadful system of ownership and there is no reason to suspect that it would emerge in a stateless soceity.

In the, stateless american west, ownership was based on homesteading (working on land). I don't know the specific but it was something such that if you work on a piece of unowned land for six months, the land is officially recognised as being under your ownership. During the six months, you do not have the right to sell the land or other benefits involved with onwership, but you can legally prevent others from using that land. If you desert your land (does not inclue renting it out) for more than three months the land becomes unowned.

I'm not saying that a future stateless society would have this exact system, and indeed many communities may have radically different systems of ownership depending on the aggrgate values of its citizens, but given that this is generally what best benefits most people, something remotely resembling will likely becoem the norm, though the exact details is osmething for the market to sort out.

You think it's horrible for a country to lay claim to vast areas they don't populate but you make no argument as to why you wouldn't let a company or an individual do the exact same thing.

Because it would be extremely unprofitable to personally enforce ownership over millions of acrs of land?

Land is valuable and people will inevitably create ways to own and exchange it in a free market.

Yeah..?

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At 7/6/11 10:44 AM, djack wrote: No you were definitely the first one to mention it and you have spent quite a few posts talking about it.

Nope, I mentioned the definition of rational, and that's it. Pox launched some huge tirade on a the whole school. I mentioned one definition.

Which leads to prediction. Any school of thought is meant to interpret the world and explain phenomena so that patterns can be established and predictions can be made.

Austrians contend that in in the world of human affairs which involve conscience actors, the number of variables is infinite and so it is impossible to make predictions with anywhere near the precision of the natural sciences.

Have the Austrians ever heard of history? Study history for any period of time and the same mistakes and behaviors begin to show up quite frequently making it pretty easy to predict what's coming next. Follow a few empires from beginning to end and you've practically got a farmers almanac of human behavior.

These are very broad, general predictions. Murray Rothbard and Thomas E. Woods have written quite prolifically about history.

When I say prediction I mean "Raising interest rates by %X will cause an inrease in employment of %X over a period of X months".

So the Austrians don't make predictions, and yet they did make a prediction?

They contend that given the nature of human action, prediction is not a reasonable test of the validity of economic theory.

I'm confused, do Austrians not make predictions or do they because in this same post you put "Austrians contend that prediction of human affairs by any school is not realistically possible..." and yet according to you Austrians made a prediction about economic inflation.

They didn't say: "We have a theory, and if inflation happens the theory is vindicated".

And like I said above, they don't use sophisticated economic modelling like mainstream economists do, who believe specific, accurate QUANTITATIVE predictions can be made (but are wrong).

A good economist is a lot like a crappy weatherman, they get their predictions wrong until the day before it happens when the average person knows what's coming weeks before it does.

Yeah try FIVE YEARS IN ADVANCE, and the vast majority of mainstream economists calling them cooks the whole time.

And that last sentence sounds a lot like you're bashing mainstream economists for using facts and empirical data to make prediction

Hilariously, this is an example of the 'weatherman' thing you just said. These economists cried disaster once the sky began to darken, so to speak.

There's nothing wrong per se about using empirical data in economics per se, it's just that it's not very useful in discovering valid economic theories.

Where exactly did they get these theories for the predictions they don't make? Why should anyone believe the predictions of a people who claim that predicting the future is impossible?

http://mises.org/books/ufofes/ch4~6.aspx

Once again you're defending the Austrian's skill in the field of economics by countering claims you've previously made. A people hellbent on not making predictions because human behavior is too complex to predict has an entire book about human behavior.

learn the difference between explain and predict

It seems like everything you say you turn around and say the complete opposite. "Austrians contend that prediction of human affairs by any school is not realistically possible, because there are an infinite number of variables to be considered and very few of the mcan be controlled and replicated thye way they can be in the natural sciences."

Okay, I should have clarified, I was talking about specific, quantitative predictions.
Austrians make broad, qualitative preidctions, and not in order to test the validity of their theorems.

And if you want to say "Oh well if yu're being all broad and general, of course you're going to get stuff right".

Ben Bernanke, one of the world's leading economists, said mere months before the crash that he didn't consider it at all a possibility.

Joseph Stiglitz, an economic nobel laureate, co-authored a paper explicitly stating that Freddie and Fannie effectively had a risk of defaulting on their debt of effectively zero.

Most mainstream economists can't afford to only make predictions about specific policies because they have to weight the pros and cons of thousands of potential policies in conjunction with those policies that already exist in order to come up with a best case worst case scenario for each so that the people in charge are able to better decide which path to take.

And the past few years (or decades, or century) have shown how disastorously bad they are at doing this.

Socialism in Soviet Russia failed because of the Cold War.

No, it failed because it's impossible to centrally plan an entire economy.

The fact that you don't understand this demonstrates your total ignorance of sound economic theory.
Please, please read this.

Without that the economy never would have been stressed to and beyond its limits and Soviet Russia could still be standing strong today.

America was the most prosporous society in history during the same time period in which millions of russians were living in poverty. That's just you trying to make excuses.

In 1990 they were still one of the strongest nations in the world

Only because tehy were a massive nation that dedicated a disproportionately large amount of their resoruces to their military.
America was also one of the most powerful, and yet people didn't have to wait in line every time they wanted to buy vegetables or undershirts.

; In 1920 Mises merely made a guess based on the theory

"merely made a guess", yeah you're an idiot who has no idea what they're talking about.

He wrote an entire book on the subject with extremely complex and sophisticated reasoning, not "a guess."

whereas Paul Samuelson was forced to use history and evidence to determine the most probable course for the future.

The fact that he thought a centrally planned economy could ever have worked in the first place and that these statistics could possibly be correct is proof alone that he is incapable of sound economic reasoning.

Legal agencies wouldn't exist without a government to provide laws.

This is empirically false, and there's no reason to believe this a priori either.

And just because you have the most to lose from something bad happening to an area doesn't automatically mean you own it. The person with the most money is the person with the power in a free market and the person with the power decides what belongs to who.

Yeah except that these businesses could make it impossible for anyone to use the gulf without massive headaches.

Big companies that make money off of an area would be the ones who owned it which in the case of the Gulf means oil companies that could make a lot of money by drilling for oil (or in some cases spilling the oil and then driving up the prices) would be the owners of the Gulf and by extension the areas surrounding the Gulf.

You think that the oil spill was profitable for BP?

hahahahahahahahahahaa

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At 7/4/11 10:14 PM, Musician wrote: Here's an interesting link I came across the other day. Noam Chomsky argues that most of the United State's technological innovation has come about as a result of publicly funded research, and not private innovation. It's a very interesting argument, and worth a watch. He rips into libertarians a lot. It's pretty entertaining.

Nicola Tesla
Thomas Edison
Write Brothers
The SpaceX program
Benjamin Franklin
Ford
Leonardo DeVinchie
Motorola

There are more, but I'm done for now.

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At 7/8/11 08:50 PM, Wolfman11111 wrote: Nicola Tesla

Not American

Thomas Edison

Too long ago.

Write Brothers

WriGHT brothers were also too long ago, before the governmetn championed science.

The SpaceX program

Is this something new, or just an idiot and a bad typo?

Benjamin Franklin

Again, way long ago.

Ford

Again, way long ago.

Leonardo DeVinchie

DAVINCI was not American

Motorola

You sure about that? How much of their R&D was NOT based off of research at their local university?

The vast majority of all research in the US from electronics, to medicine, to biotech, to psychology, to pointless academia is publicly funded.

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At 7/9/11 12:34 AM, Camarohusky wrote:

Write Brothers

WriGHT brothers were also too long ago, before the governmetn championed science.

Um dude, the Smithsonian Institute, which is government funded, was competing with the wright brothers to design the airplane, but couldn't.

Lol can you imagine if they had designed it but the wright brothers couldn't? lol you would never hear the end of it.

The vast majority of all research in the US from electronics, to medicine, to biotech, to psychology, to pointless academia is publicly funded.

Cool, but this doesn't prove very much unless we could examine the outcomes of never taxing this money and letting the businesses keep it.

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At 7/9/11 12:39 AM, SadisticMonkey wrote: Cool, but this doesn't prove very much unless we could examine the outcomes of never taxing this money and letting the businesses keep it.

Is it possible that businesses would have advanced us further and quicker than the government? Yes. It is possible. However, it is not likely.

Business competition, which favors the dollar, is not as potent as national competition, which in many cases promotes innovation for the pure ego of it.

I trust competing egos much more than I trust those who seek out money as their only goal. I can guarantee that many times innovation actually causes businesses to lose profits, see pretty much anything to do with cars in the US.

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At 7/9/11 12:51 AM, Camarohusky wrote: Business competition, which favors the dollar,

satisfying the demands of the market

I trust competing egos much more than I trust those who seek out money as their only goal. I can guarantee that many times innovation actually causes businesses to lose profits,

Yeah this is dumb. These "competiting egos" have wasted literally trillions in desgining and building all kinds of military equipment which has not improved anyone's lives or increased living standards.

Private innovation seeks to satisfy consumer demands, which necessarily means at least attempting to
improve people's standard of living (for selfish reasons, obviously), whereas "public" innovation does not, but is absed on the fickle whims of whoever happens to be in charge at the time.

see pretty much anything to do with cars in the US.

Um car innovation has been driven(lol) almost exclusively by the private sector (?)

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At 7/9/11 02:16 AM, SadisticMonkey wrote:
Um car innovation has been driven(lol) almost exclusively by the private sector (?)

Actually, you can draw a more direct line of causation to the EPA than to any private sector item.

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At 7/9/11 02:16 AM, SadisticMonkey wrote:

At 7/9/11 12:51 AM, Camarohusky wrote: Business competition, which favors the dollar,

satisfying the demands of the market

I trust competing egos much more than I trust those who seek out money as their only goal. I can guarantee that many times innovation actually causes businesses to lose profits,

Yeah this is dumb. These "competiting egos" have wasted literally trillions in desgining and building all kinds of military equipment which has not improved anyone's lives or increased living standards.

This is just plain wrong, have you ever heard of GPS or the internet? Both of which were first developed for military use and then became available to the general public over time. Everything from jet engines to velcro are the result of those competing egos.

Private innovation seeks to satisfy consumer demands, which necessarily means at least attempting to
improve people's standard of living (for selfish reasons, obviously), whereas "public" innovation does not, but is absed on the fickle whims of whoever happens to be in charge at the time.

Private innovation only seeks to maximize profit. There is very little improvement in peoples' standard of living as companies only need to produce the same product for less money in order to maximize profit whereas public innovation requires continuous technological development to remain competitive in the global system.

see pretty much anything to do with cars in the US.

Um car innovation has been driven(lol) almost exclusively by the private sector (?)

Um, no it hasn't. Originally yes but that only got people into the 1990s and since then the only real innovation has been installing extra features like sync so that they can charge a lot more for what is essentially the same vehicle. Major innovations like the electric engine and solar powered vehicles have been the result of government funded programs. So for the past 20 years there have been almost no private innovations in the vehicle industry and numerous major public innovations.