I think this is a pretty great video explaining who's really to blame for this one.
12-07-2014 05:19 AM
#1
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Guy selling loosies in NYC killed by police, caught on video, no indictment
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12-07-2014 08:57 AM
#2
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Very good and thorough over-view of the situation. I want to broaden his eyes a bit more when he talks about the current manifestation of how the government enforces these laws. | |
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12-07-2014 09:14 AM
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And yeah, the root of the problem is the power to kill and who should have it. Brute strength is the ultimate form of strength and sequestering it into a gov't which answers to the people seems to me the best shot we have. Our half-distributed (right to bear arms) half-centralized set up right now is only one of a myriad of bad choices. | |
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12-07-2014 09:38 AM
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People answer to themselves / each other more than the government answers to the people. If the store owner got fed up with the guy selling loosies in front of his store and took matters into his own hands, and things escalated in exactly the same way and resulted in Garner's death, the legal system would do a pretty decent job of determining liability or lack thereof in that case. But in this case the state police is heavily insulated from any liability. | |
12-07-2014 10:22 AM
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Yeah, we're seeing eye to eye on this one. | |
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12-07-2014 10:22 AM
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My anarchist friends would say yes, I personally am not such an idealist. But I think you can really reduce the negative effects of government by increasing property rights. I think the store owner should own the sidewalk in front of the store, and I think he has the right to call security to escort Garner from the store premises. I think the road in front of the store should have a owner as well, and I think that owner should have the right to call security to escort Garner from the road premises. I think you see where this is going. | |
12-07-2014 10:22 AM
#7
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I tried to clean up my post because it was getting messy. | |
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12-07-2014 10:27 AM
#8
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12-07-2014 10:30 AM
#9
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Well like i said, in such a case the government would exist to enforce law, there just wouldn't be as many laws and there wouldn't be as much public space. | |
12-07-2014 10:32 AM
#10
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I like this too. And it reminds me of America circa the 1790s. | |
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12-07-2014 10:49 AM
#11
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Also, Renton, just because I have your attention. | |
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12-07-2014 11:24 AM
#12
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I hate this argument because there's no counter to it. It's status quo bias. A free society is virtually unimaginable because nothing like one has ever existed. So I think people who hypothesize how one would work should be commended for having the imagination. | |
12-07-2014 11:25 AM
#13
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Last edited by a500lbgorilla; 12-07-2014 at 11:28 AM. | |
12-07-2014 01:19 PM
#14
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Too bad people have already blown their rioting load on some punkass who tried to take a cop's gun away from him to likely murder him just for being asked to stop walking in the fucking road. | |
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12-07-2014 01:56 PM
#15
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12-07-2014 01:58 PM
#16
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Seriously though, this was an incredibly well constructed argument. I'll check out his other stuff. | |
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12-11-2014 10:23 AM
#17
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12-11-2014 10:30 AM
#18
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Nah, dog. Investigate. | |
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12-12-2014 07:22 AM
#19
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There are tiny pockets of economic freedom and vast amounts of tyranny being demonstrated in current reality, and we can isolate these cases to understand the broader picture. In Thomas Sowell's excellent Basic Economics, its no accident that one of the first things he discusses are rent controlled apartments. It's one of the starkest examples of a price control that demonstrably does great harm to society. He then moves on to discuss all the other types of price controls that have been ubiquitous throughout human history and it turns out they all do very similar harm. The thesis of the book is that all price controls cause net harm to society. And it turns out that nearly everything the government does is in some way or another a price control. | |
Last edited by Renton; 12-12-2014 at 07:27 AM. | |
12-12-2014 04:33 PM
#20
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First, thanks for the name drop. I just snatched up a copy of Basic Economics from amazon. | |
Last edited by a500lbgorilla; 12-12-2014 at 06:36 PM. | |
12-12-2014 04:34 PM
#21
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PS wufwugy, this is why I ignore your parrallels to my thinking being "God of the Gaps", it's more akin to "Gap of the Gaps". | |
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12-12-2014 06:49 PM
#22
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12-12-2014 07:08 PM
#23
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Rilla, the state was born of the need for security in early civilization. Not too many disagree with that. However that doesn't mean that modern society has the same need |
12-12-2014 07:10 PM
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Renton, I'm pretty sure I am fully anti-statist. I see no reason to believe that the monopoly on violence is not exactly that. Since true monopolies go against everything we know about what creates prosperity, by logical extension, the state is fundamentally bad. In order to determine the state is valuable, we would need reason to believe there is an inherent value to the monopoly on violence that there isnt to other monopolies |
12-12-2014 07:43 PM
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Wufwugy, the problem with taking an ambiguous stance toward the state is that almost every supposed good that it does dovetails with an evil. I think the most reasonable of leftists would agree that a 1200% tax on cigarettes is a bad law, but they think the welfare state is super necessary and a universal good to society. But if you're going to divorce citizens from the health-deteriorating consequences of their actions, it becomes necessary to promote healthy actions through taxation. And to back up those taxes by deadly force. The state is not a buffet where you can pan around and pick the courses that are appealing to you while eschewing the less appetizing ones. It's more like family dinner with an abusive dad who beats you if you don't eat your green beans. | |
12-12-2014 07:52 PM
#26
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I'm not sure I understand your point |
12-12-2014 08:07 PM
#27
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12-12-2014 08:33 PM
#28
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Hey so who's in the middle of this pseudo-intellectual circlejerk? | |
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12-12-2014 09:04 PM
#29
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I'm saying the whole state package has to come with evil. It's easy to understand that a police state is evil and less easy to understand that a welfare state is evil. Leftists make the fatal (literally) mistake of favoring one while being critical of the other. They're inextricably linked, and failing to understand that disqualifies one from participating in useful political-economic discussion. That is the primary reason why liberals are so much worse than republicans. Both parties believe deeply evil shit, but at least republican ideology is founded in an honest perspective of the world. Kind of ironic since they're also the party of anti-intellectual Christians. | |
Last edited by Renton; 12-12-2014 at 09:07 PM. | |
12-23-2014 11:37 AM
#30
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12-23-2014 08:58 PM
#31
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Read this yesterday. |
12-23-2014 09:02 PM
#32
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12-23-2014 09:03 PM
#33
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12-23-2014 09:07 PM
#34
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The author has strawmanned Paretto efficiency. It does not claim what she says it does. |
12-23-2014 09:07 PM
#35
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And there are places where Pareto optimal solutions do happen, where perfect information does occur, like telecom companies bidding on frequency ranges, but the author is still right. | |
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12-23-2014 09:07 PM
#36
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12-23-2014 09:09 PM
#37
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What I'm really getting at is if you can show me he's wrong, I want to know. If you want to brush it away with argumentative tricks, then Author is Right. | |
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12-23-2014 09:12 PM
#38
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I'm not trained in econ and the PhDs I read haven't covered this rant. There are a few people with apparent credibility discussing it here |
12-23-2014 09:17 PM
#39
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12-23-2014 09:30 PM
#40
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What concerns? She's not raising any concerns. She has no credibility and has not demonstrated any reason to give her any. |
12-23-2014 09:37 PM
#41
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Argumentative tricks it is, I see. | |
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12-23-2014 09:46 PM
#42
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Sumner's most recent post is pretty relevant to that view, actually |
12-23-2014 09:53 PM
#43
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Physicists and Economists don't see eye to eye. When you're trained in one, you don't understand the other well enough to compare. But as I've been roughly trained in physics, there's a secure beauty in the things you know and understand. You can always check yourself against reality if ever you're worried. There's always a sanity check. Even when it returns an insane answer, you can be sane in accepting it. | |
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12-23-2014 10:03 PM
#44
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Hold physics to the same standard as everybody holds economics, and we'll start talking about how bad physicists are at understanding/predicting earthquakes. We'll also find the tons of factors with utmost levels of certainty that nobody talks about |
12-23-2014 10:06 PM
#45
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Doesn't it strike you as odd that people who have absolutely no business having an opinion on economics are the crowd that claims its lack of veracity? If we did this with physics, we'd get laughed out of the building. Yet for some reason it's super popular to not understand economics yet deride it |
12-23-2014 10:08 PM
#46
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12-23-2014 10:09 PM
#47
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12-23-2014 10:11 PM
#48
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12-23-2014 10:13 PM
#49
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12-23-2014 10:13 PM
#50
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This just got lame. | |
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12-23-2014 11:33 PM
#51
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Economics is on the same plane, it's just not treated by most not in the profession as such. |
12-23-2014 11:49 PM
#52
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Their robustness is proportional to complexity, or at least basically so. Economics has super robust math at its base. The issues come when trying to develop social theories, which is a far more difficult task than going to the moon. There is a stark difference between something like flying and something like predicting weather. Nobody calls bullshit on physicists because of how bad they are predicting weather, yet many call bullshit on economists because of how bad they are at predicting capital changes. |
12-31-2014 05:37 PM
#53
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12-31-2014 06:50 PM
#54
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That would be funny if most first year physics students didn't understand economics on a much deeper level than most economic students. |
12-31-2014 07:15 PM
#55
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I'm not sure how much I would disagree with that. Physics is much more difficult subject matter (as far as what is taught and what is expected of the students). Most who go into physics are generally competent in a variety of other fields, at least as far as intro is concerned. But lots of econ students are those whose skills are at a general arts level and econ would be a challenge to them |
12-31-2014 08:10 PM
#56
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Wuf I get the joke, it's a joke which presides in most fields, especially those where you can take an authority pose on any subject. |
12-31-2014 08:18 PM
#57
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That's true. The economist I read the most claims one of the biggest problems in the field is bad messaging. Also that macro shouldn't even be taught until graduate level because of how counterintuitive it is |
01-01-2015 02:48 PM
#58
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Alright. | |
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01-01-2015 03:33 PM
#59
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The point: It is very difficult to mock up an economy and run trial. | |
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01-01-2015 03:52 PM
#60
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Do you have examples of behavioral economics doing this? |
01-01-2015 03:57 PM
#61
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Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. | |
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01-01-2015 04:13 PM
#62
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I still haven't gotten past the first ten pages of A Renegade History of the United States. Unlikely I'll read any new non-fiction any time soon |
01-01-2015 05:37 PM
#63
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Rilla I think your problem is that you believe that basic economic principles do not work (or at least, aren't always beneficial to society) because of the lack of perfect information when people transact. But there's nothing to say that every participant in trade need be rational or have perfect information for economic benefit to occur. Sowell's definition of economics (which he ripped from others no doubt) is the study of scarce resources which have alternative uses. Information is a scarce resource that has alternative uses, one of the scarcest and most useful resources there is. Free trade between individuals does a pretty good job of efficiently distributing scarce resources in an economy, and one of the ways it does this is by propagating information about those resources to others within the economy. When someone in an economic transaction gets "duped" out of some of his resources due to a lack of knowledge, those resources are displaced to people who have a clearer view of the true value of the resource, and society benefits greatly from this. | |
Last edited by Renton; 01-01-2015 at 06:13 PM. | |
01-02-2015 11:07 AM
#64
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No Renton. My problem is that I understand the scientific method and won't settle for anything less. Economists want to understand the economy, can't apply the principles, and so need to take on faith they're getting it right. | |
Last edited by a500lbgorilla; 01-02-2015 at 11:10 AM. | |
01-02-2015 01:07 PM
#65
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"An economic model is a simplified description of reality, designed to yield hypotheses about economic behavior that can be tested. An important feature of an economic model is that it is necessarily subjective in design because there are no objective measures of economic outcomes. Different economists will make different judgments about what is needed to explain their interpretations of reality." | |
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01-02-2015 02:27 PM
#66
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Scientific method and objectivism are relevant in economics. You're comparing two different things. In physics, it's EASY to conduct experiments. In economics, it's really really really really really hard. |
01-02-2015 02:57 PM
#67
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If you say so, wuf. | |
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01-02-2015 03:17 PM
#68
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Several economists are currently running an experiment on a theory that normalizes nominal economies |
01-02-2015 03:23 PM
#69
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Talk about it. | |
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01-02-2015 03:47 PM
#70
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The theory is about a nominal GDP futures market. ipredict is the main vehicle for the experiment, but I think there are multiple markets. Here's Sumner's first post on it. IIRC Gabe Newell is the chief donor |
01-02-2015 04:07 PM
#71
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It sounds cool. Have a lot of people gamble on guessing the future instead of a couple academics doing it. | |
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01-02-2015 04:14 PM
#72
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Voluntary trade benefits both sides because otherwise the trade wouldn't occur. The proof that it benefits both sides is the fact that the value of anything is individually subjective. There is no such thing as objective value. Every resource has a different worth in the hands of different owners. If I distribute a bunch of bouncy rubber balls of different colors to a kindergarten class, and then allow them to trade with one another, trade will almost certainly occur and everyone who trades will increase his/her value. More people will be able to have a preferred color than if I had prohibited trade to occur. | |
Last edited by Renton; 01-02-2015 at 04:16 PM. | |
01-02-2015 04:23 PM
#73
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You've never made a trade you regretted? | |
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01-02-2015 04:24 PM
#74
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Sorry guys, but I'm officially bowing out. You can have your social sciences. I'm not buying it. | |
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01-02-2015 04:45 PM
#75
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Economics doesn't deny this. Economics tries to explain how this -- and everything else -- relates to a system of production and trade |