Causality and Thomism · Page 2

I will have to look into it more. My source is an award winning hard SF author who claims that it does not cause gravitational effects.

If I don't believe in God, then I wind up in a moral morrass in which the argument for any individual to do anything one way rather than another is that it is in his own best interest.

Even if one were to accept this statement, I do not think the conclusions you arrive at are necessarily entailed. Without getting too deeply into it just yet, I'm sure I've read arguments that one's health (meant in the broadest possible sense) depends on behaving in moral ways for moral reasons, and that perfect personhood cannot be achieved without morality. Thus, it is in the amoral person's best interest to become moral, and once moral, the moral person continues to be moral not out of self-interest, but because it's the moral thing to do.

(That's brutally summarized, but I've got things to do, including post for Maxx.)

The most common method involves the fact that dark matter has a gravitational pull on both the light and the sources of light that we can see.

From NASA.

Is this the same NASA that thought, 'wow, this O-ring degraded nasty last time, and even nastier this time, but the shuttle is still there, so we should relax our standards, and go with the flow?'

Or the one that denied getting their global warming info data from the Climategate email scandal place in East Anglia, but actually did get it from that?

Does Dr. James Hanson work there?

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to be using NASA as an authority.

That form of logic leads to illogical conclusions, it's saying that a company or group that has been proved wrong in the past is refuted, without regard for successes.

Ex.
Large organization in practice for 50 years has had .1% fallacy in statements.
Small organization in practice for 5 months has had 5% fallacy in statements.

Based on the above logic conditions, the small organization should be trusted, as it has 120 times less statements (assuming the same rate of statements) therefore despite having a 50x higher rate of being wrong, they have been wrong less times.

Furthermore, in order to refute a citation source, you not only have to attack the source but cite a source yourself, otherwise you can't hope to have a more reliable claim. Unless you are citing yourself in which case you wish to say that your knowledge on the issue is of a higher grade than NASA's.

Also, the points you cited show budget cuts, not false data.

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to be using NASA as an authority.

Well, then, anything involving other galaxies can be completely ignored, because NASA runs the Hubble and other orbital telescopes capable of actually seeing them in detail.

Of course, if you disregard information from reputable sources because they disagree with your views, there is no point at all to having any discussion.

Incidentally, did you know that the climategate emails contain no indication of fraud whatsoever? There is a searchable database somewhere online, I went there a while back and confirmed that, and recently the British government has officially confirmed that. Apparently, the only support for claims of fraud is someone complaining about having to read through hundreds of lines of uncommented code to figure out what was being used to correct for distortions of data caused by the urban heat island effect and suchlike.

Glantri,
You're basically asking for me to revisit the matter in more depth to be fair.

Let's consider NASA then, pros and cons.

Pros:
1. Moon pass-by's and Moon landings. Major pro.
2. Hubble Space Telescope as JTM mentioned.
3. Voyager extrasolar mission.
4. Saturn Ring picture mission.
5. Venus mission.
5. Mars missions.

Cons:
1. The O-Ring disaster which I do not put down to budget cuts, but to criminal negligence.
2. The other shuttle explosion. Its interesting, I think it was Richard Feynman who calculated that the shuttle would have a 1-2% failure rate. History has borne him out.
3. Because of 1 AND 2, the Shuttle program. (And I used to live in a town where I could drive by and see the Enterprise shuttle.)
4. That Mars mission where one group used pounds and the other group used newtons, and the result was kablam into Mars.
5. Venus mission melting.
6. A general lack of space exploration. I'm of the school of thought that we would probably be further into space had NASA never existed. Free Enterprise Baby!! The government is the worst possible solution to a problem, unfortunately sometimes its the only solution.
7. The Hubble repairs. When the Hubble first went up, it was broken.
8. I think there was a Mercury disaster as well.
9. Unlike JTM, I do believe climategate was a deliberate effort and conspiracy to commit fraud for power and for megabucks. Personally, I lean toward hanging the lot of them along with Bernie Madoff because at some point grand theft felony shifts into grand theft treasury and hundreds of billions of dollars go bye-bye to no good purpose and the folks responsible should pay in blood. And since NASA tried to cover-up their use of this data, I'd be tempted to try them for fraud as well, or at least fire the ones responsible at NASA.

I'll put Apollo 13 into its own category. That it failed, bad. That they rescued it, good.

Now, Glantri, you're left with trying to balance those account books. And each person has their own narrative that explains the world in their head which influences the weight they give to various events, and the credibility they give to various sources.

I'm of the 'Mainstream science has become corruupted by gov't cheese, and by ideology, and by a disdain of experiment and an elevation of theory, and so Big Science has become part of a somewhat oppressive and illogical Establishment.' narrative. JTM sees a different narrative obviously.

I'm tempted by the notion that Science does not exist. There is only Speculation and Engineering. Tempted, but not persuaded. However, I do like Mark Twain's statement that (paraphrased)...'I love science. You get such massive returns of speculation from such trifling investments of fact.'

JTM,

How about instead we let someone else interpret the data from other galaxies?

And that is somewhat the question: Is NASA a reputable source for data on DM?

I've read some of the climategate emails. They did everything but go 'Bwahahahahaha!! They will not be allowed to stop my nefarious plan!'

Second post.

JTM,
I do not know enough about DM to make a serious judgment. I'm relying on rule of thumb and intuition. Give me a month and I'll see if I can get around to studying things more thoroughly.

One point with which I will take issue is the suggestion that free enterprise would have gotten us farther into space than NASA has.

Free enterprise only really works where there is a credible probability of significant return on investment within a short period of time. That is, an 80% probability of a ten-thousand-percent return on an investment in a hundred years is probably not a good investment, because by the time it pays I won't be here to collect, and I don't know who will be. It is unlikely that private enterprise would have taken us to the moon, and certainly not in 1969.

It occurs to me that there's a certain irony in that. Kennedy challenged the socialists to a moon race to prove that democratic capitalism was superior to dictatorial socialism, but we used methods of dictatorial socialism to achieve that goal. Of course, we also used methods of democratic capitalism to do so, so we may have proved that our socialist/capitalist blend is better than their socialist/capitalist blend. But that's a separate issue.

The moon rocks are said to be the most valuable objects on earth, but that's based primarily on the cost involved in collecting them, and the desire of scientists to study them; they don't have much materials value, as far as I am aware, and although if I am correct in recalling that they are high in titanium oxide, the oxygen is only valuable for establishing a moon colony and the titanium probably can't be delivered to earth markets economically so will only really have value if space manufacturing becomes a reality.

Experiments in zero gravity production (whether chemical or materials fabrication) are also such long-shot concerns that investment in the equipment is unlikely to give a positive return except in the very long term, and part of the problem there is that it is as likely that someone else will benefit from what I learn as that I will. The only way to avoid this is to keep the discoveries from my investment so secret that there will be duplication of effort--several investors spending millions to learn what others already know. That's a drain on the economy, capital investment going to no useful purpose.

Even with the head-and-shoulders boost NASA spending has given to all these fields, the only private interests in space that show any promise of return on investment right now is space tourism; and ultimately the reason tourists want to go to space is because astronauts have done it, and made it look relatively safe and interesting. I don't see any companies interested in asteroid mining (costs outweigh returns) or zero-gravity production (transportation of product prohibitive) or even the development of solar satellite power generation--the costs for developing the technology make the return on investment dubious.

One thing government does do well is promote basic research and application. NASA did wonderful things for us in the 60's because going to the moon gave us a thousand problems to solve to get there, and so we now have miniaturized computing circuitry (developed for space capsule computers), long-range medical telemetry (developed for monitoring astronaut health in space), and a great number of other advances that came about because the government said, "We want to put a man on the moon and bring him back to earth, what do we have to invent to accomplish that?" And researchers, focused on particular problems, came up with good answers, because there was money to be made answering those questions.

Had it been private enterprise, no one would ever have thought that there was any money to be made putting a man on the moon. In one sense they would be wrong--every computer sold, every telemetry unit used, every GSPS device, every cellular phone, every flat screen television, just about every piece of technology bought, sold, rented, or used today has some of its history in the fact that the government invested in materials science, miniaturization, communications, physiology, aerospace engineering, and more, to put a man on the moon. It's just that under a free enterprise economy, those profits go to the companies that take the technologies and run with them, and the government only benefits from the taxes collected on the stimulated economy.

You can accomplish something of the same result with military spending during a war, but most of us would rather not have the war.

--M. J. Young

I'll have to deal with in more depth later.

Yes, free enterprise wouldn't have put a man on the moon by 1969, but by the time they did, we would have mostly stayed there. Going to the Moon was the equivalent of building a pyramid, a prestige project. Free enterprise gives us something more fruitful. We should have been worried about Near Earth Orbit, not the Moon in 1969.

Many argue that the space program gave us a lot of stuff, as you did. The problem with this is ROI, Return on Investment. Sure, the gov't was not completely useless, but the same money and skill might well have created much better things.

Now, your arguement is more sophisticated than most pro-NASA folk who could be refuted by the ROI point. You argue that long-term investment is better done by the gov't. Yet, you were the one who pointed out to me when we discussed Vinge about the problem of planning for the future, and how one should focus on the present.

Another point is that perhaps Monarchies and Great Families can plan for the future, but Democracies are notoriously bad at it.

And lets add that if our leaders were a better calibre of men and women instead of the rather pathetic leadership class we currently have, I might have more confidence.

Lastly, the gov't is going to tend to favor the rich, established industries rather than the new, emerging ones that are the future. Granted, sometimes one can figure out useful infrastructure, but you also run into problems like the 'railroad barons' which used their gov't boosted power to crush the farmers.

Um, if you think that free enterprise is better than government regulations, you may want to read about the economic situation in the 1930s, then remember that:
1) the current situation is a result of deliberate evasion of regulations
2) No one has lost their money because the bank they had an account with collapsed.

Now, I agree that ineffective government regulations, especially ones created by efforts to score electoral points, tend to do poorly when they aren't just plain stupid, and combine with a refusal to raise taxes to produce a government that will stop being able to pretend it can pay bills soon enough.

Also, free enterprise would not have gone to near earth orbit, because even with NASA "failure" #3, the cost of getting people to orbit without a 10%+ chance of flaming death is a bit high, and the cost of getting things back down is also high, and then you don't exactly get paid enough.

FDR extended the Great Depression by doing things like putting a ninety percent tax on business. He would have been better off doing JFK's strategy of cutting taxes.

Booms and busts seem to be a neccessary part of any unstable system. Right now, we're having a boom year for ticks, I think, in Tennessee. (Perhaps its just my property.) Every seven or so years we do.

I do think that gov't action makes these instabilities worse.

For the current situation, I'd be more tempted to blame Barney Frank and Chris Dodd,
Democratic senators. W tried to reign in the Congress, but they weren't interested.

As for point two, we've traded George Bailey for going trillions into debt. While I certainly don't like Bailey's problem, I'm also not fond of opening the door to hyperinflation and Weimar Germany or to debt default. I suspect that we could have kept Bailey from happening, if the gov't had shown more restraint, without making the Wall Street bailouts a supposed necessity.

I'm not sure we needed to send people into NEO. But satellites, yeah. We would have ended up sending people when it was more useful to do so (although I'm pretty sure the prestige thing, at some point, would have kicked in for private businessmen as well.)

Maybe we'd have Solar Power Sats by now, and we'd be phasing out our nasty polluting coal power plants, and ramping up production of electric cars because with all the cheap electricity it made economic sense to stop using gasolene. Maybe. Hard for me to say.

Businessmen tend to not care about prestige unless the prestige means marketing boosts that sell more of their product. No CEO is going to say "I want to do this, knowing it's likely to lose money but hey, it'll be cool".

Also, what's stopping the privatized sector from inventing the things you mentioned? Why would we assume that the same private companies that haven't made the breakthroughs you're talking about would have if it weren't for NASA?

I'm not talking about the immediate effects of the new deal (Although 90% tax on buisness sounds suspiciously made up), I'm talking about the bit where we didn't have any bank runs this time around at least partially because the FDIC exists and thus reduces panics related to the risk of banks collapsing.

It is true that booms and busts are natural for any unstable system. I do not like the idea of the world economy being unstable.

For the current situation, I'd be more tempted to blame Barney Frank and Chris Dodd,

I'm interested in why you think that senators are more to blame than the bankers who decided that it was a good idea to issue loans without checking if the receivers actually had any money, let along enough, and that nothing could go wrong with giving out loans to people known to be unlikely to pay them back so long as the interest rates were beyond the means of said people.

W tried to reign in the Congress, but they weren't interested.

Admittedly presidents tend to lack control over congress.

The wall street bailouts are not quite so expensive over even the relatively short term as they are made out to be, mostly because the government is requiring the banks to pay it back.

We totally need to send people into NEO, mostly to fix satellites.

The ultimate problem, though, is that satellites didn't have any immediately obvious ways to generate income that could actually pay for the satellite. The early US ones were actually spy satellites, and it was hardly obvious that GPS would be economically useful back when the government decided to make it for missile guidance. Nowadays, the economic utility of being able to send large amounts of data via satellite and then charge people for it is quite clear, but no one had predicted it.

JTM,
I suspect we'd be better off without something like the FDIC over the last six decades. And much of the time when gov't comes in and says 'we have to fix this problem!', they were the ones who created the problem in the first place. But I mentioned this with George Bailey (bank runs). It seems to me we've traded institutional risk for systemic risk to use bigger words than I'm totally comfortable with. We reduce the risk to the banks individually, and increase the risk to the whole society. And then people come along, and say 'hey, we've haven't botched yet, let's try to do something even more crazy.'

I think you can't make the world economy stable.

Because the bankers were threatened and rewarded by the congressman to do those bad behaviors.

And after the banks paid it back, the gov't took the money, and used it pay down the debt and to send rebates back to the people, right? No, you mean they took it and spent it on other stuff? Whodathunkit? :)

At first, for some time, the laser was a solution in search of a problem. It happens. But then some bright guy comes along with an idea, and finds a use for it. And Arthur C. Clarke had predicted the weather satellite, I think.

Your 'ultimate' is basically arguing that people cannot gather together enough money to do something Really Big without the government being the organizer. I disagree. Also, I suspect that many things that seem like that might not have been the best answer. Are we truly better off with Eisenhower's interstate (yes) as compared to what might have happened elsewise (bullet trains coast to coast) (maybe we're not better off). Sometimes gov't solves problems, but by doing so, it forecloses what would probably be a better solution.

It is true that in order to get back to free enterprise, we probably need to go step by step. Large steps, but still steps.

We reduce the risk to the banks individually, and increase the risk to the whole society.

You seem to be misunderstanding the precise problem. The problem is not so much that banks can collapse but that when a bank collapses, the people who didn't withdraw their savings no longer have savings. Even that isn't the entire problem, though. The thing is, when people realize that they're at risk of losing their savings, they'll go and withdraw money from other banks, which then collapse. The FDIC is responsible mainly for having enough money (taxed directly from banks) that people will feel that they aren't at risk of losing money if a bank collapses, and so won't cause bank collapses.

I think you can't make the world economy stable.

I disagree. Each new banking panic tends to be caused by something different from the previous one, and generally something that is obviously an insanely risky or stupid plan. However, blocking such things only occurs after each crisis arises, not before it is too late to do anything.

Because the bankers were threatened and rewarded by the congressman to do those bad behaviors.

More importantly, they were threatened and rewarded by their stockholders, and there was no one to make sure that the risks they were taking were acceptable. Businesses have to take some risks, but they have a tendency to take extremely large ones on the flawed assumption that X is different from the last thing that everyone thought would go up forever. The responsible parties for this particular crash at each business got fired, but the basic drive to ignore risks in favor of shiny profit growth rates still exists, and there is still no body that will actually tell banks to cut it out before the crash.

Not that the post-crash situation has been exactly well-handled in reducing the tendency of businesses to take risks, although the bit with AIG where the government decided that contracts unpopular with the public are best ignored or resolved through indirect death threats may have an effect. Seriously, they threatened to release details such as where the executives who had already received death threats lived in order to resolve that. The bonuses might have been excessive, but they were the result of binding contracts.

And after the banks paid it back, the gov't took the money, and used it pay down the debt and to send rebates back to the people, right? No, you mean they took it and spent it on other stuff? Whodathunkit?

They'd totally have spent that money on other stuff anyway. It's not collected just to sit around. The point is that they basically spent money on rescuing banks and then got to spend said money again. That is pretty rare, in general.

At first, for some time, the laser was a solution in search of a problem. It happens. But then some bright guy comes along with an idea, and finds a use for it.

The advantage of projects like NASA is that they find things like miniaturized circuitry before people find other things that they need said circuitry for, such as computers that fit in your pocket and can transmit voice to people.

Your 'ultimate' is basically arguing that people cannot gather together enough money to do something Really Big without the government being the organizer. I disagree.

Oh, people totally can do large-scale projects without the government being the organizer. But when they're competing with other groups to make a profit and they see an opportunity to spend a ton of money to give someone in the future, possibly at another one of those groups, a chance to gain an advantage, they're not likely to take it.

Sometimes gov't solves problems, but by doing so, it forecloses what would probably be a better solution.

That's true of free market too. Once you have something that works reasonably, there really is not much motivation to do something that might solve the problem better but will definitely cost money. The internet's mess of commercially laid cables with terrible security on the basic infastructure could almost certainly be rebuilt to be better, but it would certainly cost a very large amount of money.

It is true that in order to get back to free enterprise, we probably need to go step by step. Large steps, but still steps.

Returning to the days of Standard Oil and suchlike seems to be a rather bad idea, although it is happening in telecommunications to a disturbing extent. The thing with a free market is that eventually one company "wins" and that ends poorly.

The FDIC reduces the risk of bank collapse, and then Barney Frank says lets do something crazy because we can. I think we'd probably be better off without FDIC, but as gov't programs go, its not bad. I support my thought because I think humans would come up with a solution to the bank run problem on their own without gov't that would naturally be better. Its possible I'm wrong.

Human nature does not change. It can be trained, and institutions can have learned wisdom, but this only goes so far. Basically people have to relearn the same lessons over and over again, if things go well.

That is one of the primary modern functions of gov't.: To disconnect consequences from actions, especially for the politically connected. Its hard to learn how to balance risk and reward when you have a congresscritter on speeddial, or when the congresscritter is manipulating the environment in unsound ways.

Fear stockholders, or fear the guys who can arrest you, humiliate you on national TV, take over your company....

But now the gov't is that much further in debt. As one guy put it...the gov't learned it could spend trillions instead of billions.

The free market is vastly better at finding new things.

I already touched on this with Vinge and with Democracy vs. Monarchy and Great Families.

With the Internet, is it really better to redo it? For the Net perhaps, but what about how that money could be used to solve other problems? Sort of a sidenote, I've heard that a system has to be 10x better than the previous system to convince people to go to the bother of shifting over.

There are two ways to get a monopoly. One is with the gov't backing up a company by force. This is bad. The other is that a particular company is so good, so brilliant, so cheap that no one can compete with them. This is good. The first situation is by far the more common one. The second situation is very rare.

I'm handling monopolies first, then covering the others in chronological order

In the united states, it actually tends to be a company being somehow better than other companies for long enough to control most of the market. They tend to then get government muscle to back them up by bribery, mob-style threats, or tampering with elections. That only goes so far, because the government is ultimately elected, and eventually voters will get sufficiently sick of it to force the government to take action. However, even if they don't do that, monopolies are inherently bad. Basically, once there is no competition, there is no reason to not raise prices until people decide they'd rather not buy the product than pay the price. Competition lowers prices because, all else being equal, people will pay the lowest price. However, in a monopoly, the price the company sets is the lowest price, even if it is twice what is used to be. Even without government opposition, it's hard to compete with a monopoly. That's why the government makes a point of restricting them in most fields. Government action is why we have more than one gas company.

Eh, I doubt that the bank run problem is actually solvable without the government or making a bank monopoly that then charges something absurd on loans because it can. The thing is, it is flatly impossible for a bank to both issue loans and have enough cash on hand that it can have everyone withdraw cash at once. The FDIC, and by necessity any similar program, is pretty much an effort to appear to be able to cover withdrawals so that it never has to be done.

True. That is what rules are for. The problem is, current rules are static denials on specific bad ideas, not flexible controls that can be altered to limit new types of deals designed to get around said static rules. The SEC can't just impose new limits on a new type of trading, and that is a problem. Until congress decides they can score easy political points, any entirely new type of trading is pretty much unregulated.

You are correct that congress isolates connected people from bad consequences to an extent, but what has largely happened is that congress has stopped ordinary people from going entirely bankrupt. The bailouts have gotten well-connected people fired and fined or sometimes life imprisioned.

Stockholders can totally take your company. That's kind of what being publicly traded means.

Um, no, the government got to spend money twice. It's no more in debt than if the bank bailout hadn't happened at all. It's the rest of the package that actually cost money that isn't coming back.

If, and only if, trying to find new things is economically sound for the finder. Paying for expensive experiments with some rock that does funny things to film doesn't exactly sound like the best idea, but that's where all things atomic came from.

But the government can do things that are not immediately profitable, like NASA. Sending a man to the moon is obviously not worth the money in itself, which is why the free market would not have done so, and not developed the equipment to do so until it found another reason. That would have taken more time.

See, that's kind of my point. The net as it exists could certainly be built better, but unless you have the Shadowrun crash and most of the infrastructure literally catches fire, it'll cost too much money and be too much hassle. The net, in it's current state, didn't entirely arise from ARPANET, just a large fraction of the communication protocols. The actual wiring is part of why it's so hard to track down the source of viruses, and the servers the broadband companies set up are themselves vulnerable to a virus. China is only able to censor the internet because the internet in China is built a bit differently, with only three fiberoptic cables exiting Chinese borders. It also means they can stop viruses from Russian and USA cyberwarfare more easily than the reverse. That's something the free market made that hedged out potentially better alternatives. They may not have actually been better, but we'll never know now.

Well, my last sentence isn't entirely true. CERN is apparently making plans to restructure the internet by creating a high-bandwidth intercontinental fiber-optic "backbone" as an outgrowth of a plan to store data from the LHC. I'm dubious that it will actually lead to large-scale Software As A Service, but it will make things faster.

An active government favors the rich, or as Calvin Coolidge said 'Nine out of ten people who come into my office want something they shouldn't have.' Yes, rich guys game the system, and many of them believe not in Free Enterprise but in the Divine Right of Business to Make a Profit, but that means the ideal is to limit government, not to expand government. The expansion of government is what created the opportunity for the large company to game the system by buying congressmen.

Edit: This is a reply to the monopoly point, and a general point. The market, like a democratic republic, ain't perfect, its just better than almost every other set-up over the long haul.

Pure anything tends to work out poorly. Just for instance, in a truly unregulated market, hiring someone to shoot a competitor is generally the cheapest option. Now, you don't quite seem to be an anarchist, but I decided to go for a deliberate extreme. The thing is, given the way a market with no anti-monopoly regulations works, you will eventually get a monopoly and it will then be a very bad thing for decades until technological innovation and arrogance destroys it. If you're lucky and it doesn't become the defacto government by owning every industry, which is admittedly likely to be rare. But the thing with monopolies is that once one arises in an industry, it will stay pretty much at least until the face of that industry is changed through entirely new innovations and the company decides the innovation is not worth co-opting or crushing.

many of them believe not in Free Enterprise but in the Divine Right of Business to Make a Profit

It is in fact the duty of a CEO to turn a profit and give shareholders a return on investment. That's what being a publicly held corporation means.

Note on conversation protocol: Even if I just read the post you are answering, it is not the case that I will remember everything in that post in the order it was written. Statements simply that you agree, or disagree, or are going to consider, or not going to address "that" should please contain some fragment of whatever "that" is. It is not even likely that I will look back to see what was next in the previous post if you don't; it's only that I'd like to follow the conversation and cannot do so if you don't state whatever it is you are answering when you reply.

Thanks.

--M. J. Young

I am a social conservative which entails a strong bit of libertarianism.

I disagree with you on how a market with no anti-monopoly regulation works.

You seem to be saying business will cheat, and the response is to have the government cheat as well instead of having the gov't enforce the rules against cheating. It is the duty to make a profit, but there are limits on the morally acceptable methods. Bribing congresscritters to chain your enemies with regulations is not acceptable.

I disagree with you on how a market with no anti-monopoly regulation works.

Standard Oil: Actually happened. They got 90% of everything related to oil, then were eventually broken up by the anti-trust act and the supreme court. They did that by out competing everyone for a while then exploiting their massive reserves of wealth to force competitors out of business.

See also: Microsoft. They got their dominant market position because they made the best PC operating system. Xerox didn't even bother patenting the concept of a GUI, much less selling PCs on a large scale, and despite what Apple supporters claim, the Mac is not dominant because it went through a period of being really terrible for technical work. However, they've since been pretty bad about attempting to control everything related to software, using their control of the operating system market to try forcing their way into new markets with inferior products.

You seem to be saying business will cheat, and the response is to have the government cheat as well instead of having the gov't enforce the rules against cheating.

How do you get that statement from anything I've said?

It is the duty to make a profit, but there are limits on the morally acceptable methods.

Naturally, but what is under serious contention is restricting risk-taking that threatens to cause large booms and busts. I used what is circumstantially hyperbole to make a point. People do actually think that all laws and regulations should be removed and the free market will sort everything out, but you don't seem to be one of them.

Bribing congresscritters to chain your enemies with regulations is not acceptable.

Indeed, the tendency to do that or trying to avoid regulations that restrict the company for the good of consumers and competition is destructive. That doesn't mean that all regulations are bad. Indeed, it looks like Obama will finally manage to push something through congress giving the SEC the ability to set regulations by itself. It may not even go as badly as the healthcare bill, and will end up actually accomplishing what supporters of the plan wanted in the first place.

I like a lot of my Republican brethren am against the minimum wage laws. It is an illegitamate interference into the market. It is cheating. However unlike many of my Republican brethren, I don't favor doing it away with it first chance I get. The way I see it is...there's a poker table, and everyone at the table is cheating, including the poor guy making minimum wage. Captains of industry and professionals and middle management and unions and entrepreneurs and farmers and the poor schmuck. So, get everyone else to stop cheating first, probably starting with the richest group you can practically force to submit to justice, and then work your way through the groups of people until twenty years later you finally rescind the minimum wage law.

I come to you and say that 'too much gov't power is the cause of monopolies' and you partially agree with me (adding mob warfare and such). But instead of reducing the source of the problem, you want to add more gov't power.

Now on this topic, I am aware that I could be justly charged with being a starry-eyed idealist whose wonderful principles have little place in a corrupt world. Everyones for free enterprise until its them who need a gov't helping hand. But as Calvin Coolidge said 'nine out of ten people who come into my office want something they shouldn't have'.

MJ: This is a reply to the question about cheating, and my defending monopolies that arise from skill instead of gov't action.

As to Standard Oil, I highy doubt they managed to get there through superior talent and superior hustle. Just because someone gamed the system does not make the system invalid.

As to Microsoft: I'm not competent to judge that first sentence, but I am aware that there are probably at least a million people out there who would spit in your face for saying such an insult to their favorite computer. One guy, Michael Malone, said that Microsoft won because Apple was piggish, and tried to control all the software development to their profit. There is a saying on Wall Street something like this...Bears charge, bulls run, but pigs get slaughtered. It sounded to me like the free market working well.

As to regulations...not all are bad. However, as I said earlier...gov't is the worst solution to a problem, unfortunately sometimes its the only solution. Or as Calvin Coolidge said paraphrased....without law and culture, your Wall Street is worth just as much as a corner lot in Babylon with the sand blowing over the ruins. The job of government is to be a fair and impartial referee. Its not to say 'well, these guys really tried hard, so we'll give them an extra point. Or this team has a handicapped guy so we'll give him two points.'

Second Post

I saw this comment on Instapundit by the very smart Mickey Kaus. MK is one of a few Dems that I respect.

It’s a stark illustration of the inequities of capitalism that organized labor can only afford to buy one political party, but Wall Street can buy both of them.”

I'm beginning to think that there is so much misinterpretation of my statements occuring that attempts at continuing this conversation are pointles. I will try anyhow.

I'm thinking you have a different definition of the word cheating than me.

I said that the monopoly forms first, then gets power. The exception is not really present in the united states, moreso in other countries.

re: standard oil: oh, they did do it best, at first. Then they made illegal deals with the railroad companies to prevent new competition from emerging and vastly undersold them locally if they managed it anyhow.

Microsoft won largely because, well, macs spent a while being really terrible. Then microsoft became a near-monopoly and began abusing that. That is the problem with a company getting to be a monopoly: There is no longer really a free market and that company can do whatever it wants. No matter why they got there, it is bad.

Actually, the job of the government is to make things better for people. A monopoly is bad because the resulting company has unlimited power, and they are going to abuse it, because they didn't get to the top via a crippling fear of money and success. Things that keep monopolies from forming, even unfair things, are good.

Its not so much misinterpretation as you and I don't agree. I say monopolies formed by skill are good. You say monopolies are always bad. I say the biggest cause of monopolies forming is gov't power being abused and so we should cut back gov't power. You say we need to add gov't power. I say gov't is supposed to be a referee. You say gov't is supposed to be a shepherd. I say being a shepherd is paternalistic and likely to result in tyranny. You probably say not so. I say we need to work harder on keeping the powerful from gaming the system. You say we need to just keep them from being powerful which then makes bueraucrats powerful.

You say monopolies are power, and power gets abused. And yet you're perfectly willing to give the government more power and more power which is not bound by the laws of the market and the fickleness of consumers. To dodge the dread possibility that IBM might send you adds every day in the mail, you're willing to give IRS agents tanks. Hyperbole sure, but why do you trust the government more than a big corporation? I don't trust either.

As to Microsoft, again, I'll trust Michael Malone's word over yours. I was very impressed with the book of his I read on computers. And I've started another one of his on the founders of HP, and it seems pretty good too. And even if you're right, so? Microsoft won because they were better. Is this some tragedy?

And no, a monopoly formed by skill does not have unlimited power. Its very very limited in power. When you bought that hamburger from McDonald's despite knowing it was bad for you, you did it because Ronald the Clown stuck a gun in your face, right? No, you CHOSE to do so. That's the difference between Wal-Mart and the IRS. If Wal-Mart wants your money, it sends adds to your house to plead on bended knee for you to come visit. If the IRS wants your cash, they send men in blue suits with guns to your house to shoot your dog, and to tell you to pay up or go to jail.

The problem is not that I misunderstand you. Men are not angels in business or the government. Unbinding the SEC from the dictates of law to let it roam at the whim of bueraucrats is a VERY bad idea. Power tends to corrupt, absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. A French king said 'Rex Lex', but we say for very good reason 'Lex Rex'. Give a bueraucrat the power to invent new laws, and you create a lot of new bueraucrats who get given Maseratis as Christmas gifts by grateful Fortune 500 CEOs.

Or as CS Lewis said...the tyranny of the bully and the greedy is to be preferred to the tyranny of the well-meaning. For the hatred of the bully may be sated for a moment, and the cupidity of the greedy may sleep, but the well-meaning will oppress and their conscience will be well pleased with them.

The Constitution is not a 'living document'. It is founded on a very rational distrust of ALL people, both in government and out of government. It is a binding contract between the People and the People and the People and the Government. It is a device built of negative rights, as in 'the gov't can't do this, or that.' The Founders had no faith in government, or in newspapers, or in business, or in the mob, or in themselves. And justly so, because humans delude themselves so easily.

Second post...

A few years back I was discussing on-line with a Finnish guy world politics. He was smart, thoughtful, educated, and generally a nice guy. But he said insane things. I knew he was not insane from reading him, but he kept saying insane things. I gave up talking to him after a while, almost, and then I read a post by an extraoridinarily bright man named Stephen Den Beste which explained the worldview of my Finnish friend. Suddenly his ideas made sense. I still did not agree, but I could now understand his logic.

He had been saying that America was the greatest threat in the world. Since I knew America was the greatest blessing in the world that made no sense. He claimed America was worse than Saddam's Iraq where they ran people through wood chippers, feet first if you really aggravated them.

But, he saw nationalism as the greatest threat to the world, and America was not only the strongest, but it was the most nationalistic nation in the world. Thus America=Very Bad made perfect sense.

I suspect we're having a similar problem.

You're obviously at least center-left if not more so, and I'm a moderate conservative with strong libertarian tendencies.

So the question becomes what are the key differing elements of the worldview of the Left and the Right?

The Left tends to believe in human nature that is perfectible or at least highly plastic. Evil institutions keep humanity back from improving.

The Right tends to believe in a relatively static human nature, and that tragedy with no ultimate solution in this life is the fate of humanity. The result is that at some point, you can't improve things because any 'improvement' would just make other things worse.

The Left tends to believe people are basically good. The Right believes in original sin.

The Left tends to believe in an elite class of smart, wise people guiding society for its own good. The Right tends to be much more populist.

The Left tends to see the Right as at best stupid, and often evil. Thus any measures are justified by the horror facing them. The Right tends to see the left as well-meaning but naive, or tyrannical. While the Right is coming to take a harsher view of the Left, they still don't go as far as the Left and so they tend to be more restrained in what measures are appropriate to deal with the Left.

The Left is more so than the Right a collection of separate interest groups. Will Rogers said he belonged to a disorganized party and that he was a Democrat. The Right is more closely bound by ideas, and one key idea is "Let us alone".

The Left's netroots have more influence over the Dems than the Right's base. These are too some extent equivalent groups. This makes the Dems more hostage to the hard left than the Reps are hostage to the hard right.

The Left tends to trust those in their tribe when in power. The Right tends more toward the sign I've seen in a number of stores "In God we trust, all others pay cash".

I am probably leftist, and of your characterizations of "the Left," at least the first three do not apply to, at least, me. And I disagree with the fifth (that the left is somehow made up of "more" interest groups than the right), but that's so incredibly difficult to back up with evidence (because it's such a nebulous claim) that I won't bother pushing it.

So you believe in orginal sin, or a similar concept? Interesting.

The obvious question then becomes, if I'm wrong, and I'm doubtful of that, then what are the differences in worldview that lead to choosing different narratives?

Not in original sin, but rather that people are basically people. Saying "people are basically good" is kind of like "our goal is for every child to be above average." People are people, and any simple characterization will be inaccurate.

The obvious question then becomes, if I'm wrong, and I'm doubtful of that, then what are the differences in worldview that lead to choosing different narratives?

I'm not sure. I would say "I'll get back to you," but I doubt I will.

Mostly, I wanted to register that I don't believe in an elite class of anyone doing anything, that I don't believe in human nature changing at any rate faster than macroevolution (i.e., not at any rate fast enough to matter to civilization as we know it), and that you don't have to have a naive view of people to be (for example) a Democrat. I didn't intend to interfere with your discussion with James any further than that.

I'm going to relate an anecdote concerning the Microsoft monopoly, because although probably all the facts are common knowledge they really do get overlooked.

The original web browser was created by Netscape; they designed software that would allow you to move from one universal resource locator to another by using hyperlinks, and which would support both text and images on the same screen. They continued to improve their product, and to market and sell it.

Microsoft developed its Internet Explorer. It then incorporated it into its Windows Graphic User Interface (before it was an operating system), integrating it rather thoroughly (the same program that browsed the web also managed files on the computer itself), and packaged it such that any computer that had Windows, which was nearly ever computer not made by Apple, also had Internet Explorer at no "extra" cost. That is, you couldn't get the computer cheaper if you didn't want Internet Explorer unless you didn't want Windows at all, and since GEOS and other graphic user interfaces had been driven from the market by a combination of unfair competition (Microsoft had the contract to design the DOS operating system, and it would upgrade that in ways compatible with its own software upgrades but not with the old systems others were using, so they always had to play catch-up) and lawsuits (despite the fact that it had stolen the GUI concept from Apple who had stolen it from Xerox, anyone else was sued who attempted to use things like pull-down menus or separate frames for separate programs), you either worked in DOS (which Microsoft owned anyway) or used Windows. That means that most people wouldn't pay the extra money to buy a web browser, even a better web browser, because they had an adequate one, and Netscape was struggling.

Enter America Online (AOL). Microsoft is making inroads into the world of the Web, and the old model of Compuserve, Quantum Link, and Prodigy which had been America Online's strength was failing. It had its own AOL browser built into its software so that its subscribers could access the Internet, but everyone on the Internet complained about how poor it was. So AOL bought Netscape, with lots of big talk about how it was going to continue Netscape's vision and incorporate the Netscape Browser into the AOL product.

Within a year, AOL and MS had brokered a deal: AOL would use the Internet Explorer browser, and Microsoft would include the AOL software as part of all its computer software systems. The single strongest competitor against Microsoft's browser was dead.

Of course, I doubt most of us use IE. Safari, Firefox, Opera, and others are out there, and most "serious" Internet users at least claim these are superior to Microsoft's work. I don't use Internet Explorer for the simple fact that I hate that they killed Netscape, which was always the better browser.

Eric, I'm afraid that you're so far to the right that you aren't really a very good judge of where the center is. You make me feel like I'm on the left wing--and I won't vote for anyone from a party that does not at least say they're working to criminalize abortion. I think even my wife thinks me too right-wing for sense, and she's been an anti-abortion advocate active in establishing crisis pregnancy care who also won't vote for a member of a party that supports abortion. But then, most people believe that they're close to the middle, and most of those who don't either really are on the edges or believe that the middle packed up and left them behind.

Unregulated free market economy usually results in abuses. The biggest abuse is the abuse the labor pool. One of the most overlooked problems with advancing technology is it means that production easily outstrips demand, and every employer can make more product with fewer workers, so there are more unemployed workers; and because there are so many unemployed workers who would be happy to make even half what those who are working are making, there is nothing to prevent the employers from firing their entire staff and hiring a new batch at half the wage of the old.

Having graduated from college only to find that the minimum wage was the most I could expect, I have a great deal of sympathy for the minimum wage. I know that my employers would have paid me less if it were legal. When I was in college, it was almost a joke at the nursing home at which my wife was an aid that when the minimum wage rose the management would have interviews with all of the aids on staff and with great ceremony give them individually merit raises to the new minimum wage a week or two before it went into effect so they could pretend that these workers were getting merit raises they were forced to give them anyway. I couldn't live on what we made when we both made minimum wage. I don't know where we would have been without that law.

--M. J. Young

What's unfair about making something that only uses your specs? If Craftsmen decides to start selling nuts and bolts and wrenches based on the Lilliputian Inch rather than the English Inch, I have no beef with them. Its their product, they can make it how they like provided its not actively dangerous, and they are not lying about what they are sellling.

As to the judges making incorrect copyright decisions about GUI's, you're the lawyer here. I suspect that the rich man having an advantage in court over the poor man is one of those things we can't get past. Shall we blame the judge for not smacking them with frivolous lawsuit charges or blame Microsoft for being a bully, or blame the weak for letting themselves be obviously rooked out of their due?

And I use IE, but then despite being a SF writer, I'm actually fairly technophobic in my ordinary life.

Last political affiliation test I took put me as economically conservative and socially moderate. Keep in mind MJ, roughly 40% of Americans self-id as conservatives, roughly 20% as liberal. And yes, you point out that a lot of 'c' don't necessarily favor 'c', but that goes the other way too. Blacks tend to be socially conservative, but they vote D at 90%. One example of this is Prop 8 and Obama in California. Prop 8 won, so did Obama.

Another example is some comedian went out and asked people if they were for Obama's Vice President, Sarah Palin, and he got a number of 'yes''.

Lastly, there have been studies that show conservatives are more knowledgeable about politics than liberals.

As for you feeling on the Left, I'd possibly call you a moderate Democrat except for this one issue.

And I've voted twice for Phil Bredesen, Democrat Gov of TN. I've voted and will probably again vote for Lincoln Davis, D Senator. If Bredesen, who had been a contender, had gotten the Presidential Nomination from the Dems, I would have been hard-pressed. I like Bredesen a LOT better than McCain (who I said I'd vote for Hillary Clinton before voting for him), but I like Sarah Palin better than Bredesen. It is really too bad that the Dems did not put up Bredesen who is a lot smarter and a lot tougher than Obama. Bredesen would have gotten two terms and gone down as one of the more popular presidents.

I am on the Right, but not that far out here.

One thing you need to keep in mind is the difference between the ideal and the practical. When I speak of getting rid of the minimum wage, I speak of the ideal.

Do you understand my poker table analogy? Everyone's competing, everyone's cheating. If everyone stops cheating, you, the poor guy, won't need to either.

The greatest cause of abuses in the market is the government. The gov't causes a problem, it gets bad, the gov't blames the companies, and proposes yet another gov't expansion to fix the problem.

Do you understand my poker table analogy? Everyone's competing, everyone's cheating. If everyone stops cheating, you, the poor guy, won't need to either.

This, though, sets up a tragedy of the commons (Malthus) scenario. It is always to my advantage individually to cheat, as long as there are no consequences to being caught cheating. It is thus always to everyone's advantage to cheat.

Somewhere I read an article that said it was not the fault of the executives of financial institutions that they led their companies into practices that were bound to bring about the economic disaster of 2008. The government in allowing those practices left open a profitable path to exploit, and anyone who could see the potential profit would have exploited it as surely as they did.

Somewhere in this you objected to the power of banks to create money; but that's not a power the government gives them--it's a power that government limits that is inherent to the concept of being a bank.

You are a bank. In essence, what you do is offer to protect the money of those willing to trust you with it. Thus instead of me trying to find some place to keep my retirement fund that is safer than the clay pots hidden under my bed, I give it to you with your promise that you will return it to me when I need it. So what's in it for you? You get to use my money to make money. How do you do that? You lend it to someone else. Of course, you have to have enough money on hand that if I want my money back now, you can give it to me; but as long as you are giving the same service to several people and there's no reason to expect them all to demand their money at once, you probably can play with at least half and possibly up to ninety percent of the money. So what do you do with it? You invest it in businesses who promise to pay you back with interest. In doing so, you have created money: I have "my money" which I know that you have, and the business also has money which it borrowed from you, so there is now at least twice as much money around as there was. In fact, if I'm spending a large amount of money, it's likely that instead of getting my money from you and giving it in cash to the other person, I'll give that person a piece of paper authorizing him to get my money from you--and if you're as good at being a bank as I think, you'll probably persuade him to let you keep what is now his money safe for him, and you never had to show the money to anyone. So the banking business is about creating money. Government's involvement is about controlling how freely banks can create it.

It's to everyone's advantage to cheat; it is to everyone's advantage that no one else cheat. Thus as you indicate I don't have to cheat if no one else is cheating--but it is still to my advantage to do so. The only way, then, to ensure that no one cheats is to impose negative consequences on cheating. However, the only way to do that is to define the rules clearly enough that everyone knows what is permitted and what is cheating.

So if you put yourself forward as being a bank, and I trust you with my money, and you spend it all frivolously, what recourse do I have? Is that fair, or is it cheating? If it is cheating, how do I ensure that you, and not I, suffer the consequences?--because there are consequences in that my money is gone and you cannot return it to me. I should not have trusted you with my money, but I did, and it's too late to change that. In one sense you did not steal it from me--I gave it to you freely, and you lost it. You promised I could have it back when I wanted, but that's life sometimes.

Laissez-faire free market economics means ultimately that the recourse society has against you is we don't trust you in the future, and nobody gives you any more money because your reputation is ruined; it probably also means that nobody gives money to a lot of other banks, because of what you did. Market forces drive you out of the banking business, but drive a lot of other people out of the banking business, too. It also means that all of us who were duped into trusting you have learned our lesson, and will not trust anyone with whatever money we manage to save in the future--but we've lost a great deal of money we will never replace, and it may be that the consequences to us will be severe.

I, at least, perceive the task of government as enforcing fair play. That means, however, that someone has to define fair play, and this, too, falls to government. At least we can argue that in our society government is at some level responsive to us; but then, the democratic process is another system in which it is to everyone's advantage to cheat and to use any achieved advantage advantageously, so again we need rules to govern the process of making the rules.

It's fine to say that if everyone stopped cheating no one would have to cheat, but ultimately there would always be an incentive to cheat, and thus there must be an imposed disincentive, and cheating has to be defined.

--M. J. Young

As I said, it can be fairly argued that I'm a starry-eyed idealist.

And you're right, we need some sort of disincentive for cheating. Its an interesting question.

Corporation X bribes Congresscritter Y to A)Give them a hundred million dollars. B)Lay down heavy regulations which since X has a dozen lawyers on retainer, it can fairly easily comply with, but that the new up and coming Entrepreneur W cannot. This keeps W from threatening X four years down the line.

News Reporter Z discovers this, and informs the people. Now what disincentive kicks in to penalize Corporation X and keep Corporation A and B from following X's evil example?

Edit: In the Bible, theft that is not motivated by starvation is punished at seven times the repayment. So tell Corporation X to repay 700 million dollars to be spread out among the people who punished them by some sort of formula. Maybe the government gets half, the initial whistleblower gets 5%, and the taxes of the people in the area served by Corporation X get reduced by a certain amount that year.