Anti-Capitalist Sentiment (with some morality)

I suppose it's easy enough to hit the highlights of loss aversion and fairness/gouging.

If you pay a clerk 9 dollars an hour and a bunch of similar businesses move into the area and pay similar clerks 7 bucks an hour it is generally seen as unfair to cut your clerk's wage to 7 dollars an hour but totally fair should he leave for you to pay a replacement 7 bucks an hour.

This works for price gouging in the rain storm-generator example of some weeks back in that the reference point is the usual price of the generator, every dollar above is seen as a gain for the gouger and a loss for the buyer. Independent observers will be more apt to recognize the pain of loss for the buyer more viscerally than the benefit of gains for the seller and roundly denounce the practice. As can be witnessed by some reactions to the price gouging scenario in this thread (or some other thread maybe, I never checked to see I was in the right one.)

Book looks good rilla. The golf example is particularly interesting although I'm not sure actually demonstrates the point the author thinks it does.

Yeah, it's not a rare event that some example he offers up seems flimsy and sounds off my skeptical alarms, and other times I sense some seemingly inappropriate analysis, but I've picked up a lot of the books he's named dropped and burned through them and he doesn't seem to be blowing smoke.

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Originally Posted by Renton

It makes no sense for an employer to pay his employees any more than wages they would agree to. It's the same thing as paying 1.50 for a 1 dollar apple at a fruit stand. The employer owes it to his clients or customers to minimize his costs, and labor is one of those costs. This works to everyones benefit as it drives down the prices of everything and helps to spur innovation.

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If the 'price of everything' is driven down, how does it benefit those at the bottom of the pay chain (since wages come down with it) any more than if they were paid a little more and commodity prices in general were proportionally higher?

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Originally Posted by pantherhound

If the 'price of everything' is driven down, how does it benefit those at the bottom of the pay chain (since wages come down with it) any more than if they were paid a little more and commodity prices in general were proportionally higher?

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The prices of produced goods generally decrease over time with free market activity. This is for a bunch of reasons, mainly because innovation, emulation, and economies of scale create conditions whereby goods are produced much more efficiently and are sold competitively.

On the other hand, the prices of labor (i.e. wages) generally increase with free market activity. This reflects the scarcity of human time. Basically there are more things for people to do in the economy than there are people with time to do those things. This is especially the case in post-industrial societies with low birth-rates. Economic growth without accompanying population growth means doing more with less with regard to labor. In industrializing countries of the third world, the prosperity instead comes in the form of a population growth explosion as families finally are beginning to have access to cheap and abundant food and basic medicine. This partly explains why every developing economy seems to go through an extended period of stagnant sweatshop wages before it breaks through to becoming a modern economy; new humans are injected into the economy more quickly than the GDP grows. But it helps to have some perspective here, the GDP growth and population growth are massive in such countries (India, Indonesia, Thailand, etc) and that's a hell of a lot better than these countries were doing before.

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Originally Posted by Renton

Basically there are more things for people to do in the economy than there are people with time to do those things. This is especially the case in post-industrial societies with low birth-rates. Economic growth without accompanying population growth means doing more with less with regard to labor.

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Huh? Populations are growing in pretty much all countries. Also, how do things like automation and the widespread switch to service-based economies mean more jobs?

I dont understand why ”wages increase with free market activity"

Isnt the reverse shown to be true repeatedly thought history? We can follow taxes on the wealthy, for example, and see that income inequality was at its highest in times of minimal regulation, and at its lowest with heavy regulation.

The other problem I see with leaving wages to the market is that there is a huge difference in bargaining power. Anyone who has ever been unemployed knows this, to the point of accepting any wage...even at the cost of getting a second job. What history tells us though, is that conditions will progressively get worse if businesses are left to their own devices, until the people resort to violence ala the French revolution, the march on wall street, and countless other examples.

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Originally Posted by pantherhound

Huh? Populations are growing in pretty much all countries.

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"First World" countries like U.S. and U.K. have positive population growth, but much smaller than poor countries, and much of it from immigration. Japan is actually depopulating. Meanwhile, developing countries like India and Indonesia are growing much more quickly. The interesting thing is that all of the population growth curves are slowing down. It's a natural consequence of the accumulation of wealth in a country.

Basically it goes like this:

1. Pre-agricultural economy: This is where we all began. Life is extreme hardship. Sustaining life is extremely labor intensive and dangerous. There's not even a concept of income or economic growth, only of basic survival. Population grows slowly if at all. (currently, some isolated tribes perhaps)

2. Agricultural economy: Eventually people discover or are shown how to cultivate land and domesticate livestock. This allows for the most basic forms of savings and trade, with the currency being food. Population begins to grow a bit more quickly, but there's little time to be devoted to anything like research or innovation. The decision to have a child is a tough cost-benefit analysis of whether the family can support another child, and whether its worth the medical risk to the mother. (currently, many African nations and rural parts of developing third world countries)

3. Industrial economy: Just enough innovation has taken place at this point that food is in a more stable abundance. Advances in basic medicine have made childbirth less risky. Where in the last stage, having children was a tough decision, now it's usually an excellent economic choice to have as many children as possible. People in industrializing countries actually have children as a form of pension program. Jobs are primarily manual labor, so the highest earning potential is when a person is young, and it diminishes as they get older. There is usually a strong culture of parental caretaking. Trade is happening on a larger scale, and this is usually the sharpest period of percentage-based GDP growth of all the stages. It's also the sharpest period of population growth. (currently, China and urban parts of India and Southeast Asia)

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Originally Posted by pantherhound

Also, how do things like automation and the widespread switch to service-based economies mean more jobs?

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4. Post-industrial economy: After a period of industrialization, capital has accumulated to a point that one worker is capable of doing the work of many of the former industrial economy workers. Sustenance and basic healthcare is a non-issue for the vast majority of people. Population begins to curb as adequate parenting becomes more about investing time and money into a few quality children instead of creating the maximum amount. Human capital, i.e. education and training, become more valuable in this context as automation reduces the demand for the low-skill primary and secondary sector jobs and as newly developing tertiary and quaternary sectors create demand for higher-skill, higher-education jobs.

To answer your question, automation doesn't kill jobs. It contracts the primary (agriculture/mining) and secondary (manufacturing) low-paying jobs into a smaller number of higher-paying jobs. In the old economy, a guy lugs boxes of stuff from point A to B one at a time and makes a low wage, since his job can be done by anyone with muscles. In the new economy, the guy needs to be trained on the forklift so he can do five times as much work in the same amount of time, for which he is compensated more. He gets a pay bump, the other 80% of box-lugger-guys are let go. Thankfully, there are new sectors of the economy developing for those people to specialize in as well. Basically as people get higher incomes, they take on more needs and desires, creating demand for entirely new goods and services that poorer people wouldn't have been able to afford, or in some cases, even conceive of. For example, in the U.S., almost everyone now has high speed internet and uses online services constantly. The provision of those services must come from new jobs.

The problem is that the transition can be jarring. An entire generation of people raised in an industrial economy finds themselves at age 30-45 laid off from their obsolescent jobs with little marketable skill do do anything else. It's unavoidable though, and in the long run there is cause for great optimism. This is all happening because our lives are getting better in general. It is great that the lower sectors of the economy become more productive for less invested human time. It's merely temporarily bad for a relatively small slice of the population.

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Originally Posted by JKDS

I dont understand why ”wages increase with free market activity"

Isnt the reverse shown to be true repeatedly thought history? We can follow taxes on the wealthy, for example, and see that income inequality was at its highest in times of minimal regulation, and at its lowest with heavy regulation.

The other problem I see with leaving wages to the market is that there is a huge difference in bargaining power. Anyone who has ever been unemployed knows this, to the point of accepting any wage...even at the cost of getting a second job. What history tells us though, is that conditions will progressively get worse if businesses are left to their own devices, until the people resort to violence ala the French revolution, the march on wall street, and countless other examples.

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Income inequality and wages are two entirely different things. Inequality doesn't tell us anything. Here's one easy example why: triple everybody's income and you have eliminated poverty but increased inequality. The media's obsession with inequality does not come at the behest of most economists.

History has shown that markets are what increase wages. This happened in every western nation, including the US, and East and Southeast Asia have been demonstrating this for the last few decades. China's growth is entirely about pro-market reforms and it has been growing mind-bogglingly fast. The western media has no idea how to cover China, and we're sorely left in the dark about exactly how rapidly its wages have risen. They've gone up so quickly that China is now losing out some industry to poorer places that are pursuing their own market reforms, like Cambodia.

Employees have a lot of bargaining power in the market too. In fact, regulations like minimum wage are one of the main things that detract that bargaining power. The intellectual and policy backing of "pro-labor" reforms like the minimum wage have always been unions with the goal to kick their competition out of the market. Irony.

The French Revolution was a disaster and wasn't about rebellion from markets and businesses.

The US is the most regulated entity in world history. By a lot. Banks are regulated about six million times more than the media or those who march on Wall Street realize. The most consistent way to keep the powerful in power and keep the powerless out of power is regulations. Besides, I think if everybody knew what many of these regulations are or who are giving them, everybody would be against them. They mostly work in the shadows and have nothing to do with who or what people vote for.

The issue of how markets create bargaining power for employees is quite counter-intuitive. If you would like we can go into how it works.

This is pretty interesting :http://www.theguardian.com/society/2...e-conservative

Given economic performance under the Tories, it looks like people voted with their wallets. Everybody talks jobs jobs jobs and then the UK government develops policies that make a uniquely robust jobs recovery.

Well that's the opposite of what that article is saying. It's saying people who will actually lose out from likely and previous policies have voted for them anyway.

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Originally Posted by rong

Well that's the opposite of what that article is saying. It's saying people who will actually lose out from likely and previous policies have voted for them anyway.

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I know. The claim is common.

It's hard to say in what ways it's true, but I think the claim that conservatives vote against their economic interests by voting conservative is not supported by what economists say.

I suspect that what's really going on is that people of all sorts regularly vote against their interests, but on the margins they vote with their wallets. That doesn't mean that everybody votes on economics, because individuals can vote for programs that are bad economically but good for them over the short run.

I think it's more a case of people not really having a clue what best for them individual or the country when it comes to any government policy, economic or otherwise, but more so economic.

The main demographic problem western european countries and places like Australia face is that while the indigenous population is reproducing at below the replacement rate, large immigration is being coupled with welfare which gives the maximum pay-out when these families have 6-7 children. I really don't get this because it sets future generations up for a very big problem as in a few decades most of europe will have a majority population of third worlders who never integrated into society. This has become a very hot topic in recent years. When this comes up in conversation people will say "yeah this is a time bomb that's going to burst at some point". The official rationale is that we need to import people to maintain a young workforce to pay for the elderly's pensions but in practice welfare has proven to be just an extra tax on society, not in the least become a substantial portion of the people who flee their country for a better life in western nations are those that have been spit out by their own society, ie criminals.

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Originally Posted by jackvance

The main demographic problem western european countries and places like Australia face is that while the indigenous population is reproducing at below the replacement rate, large immigration is being coupled with welfare which gives the maximum pay-out when these families have 6-7 children. I really don't get this because it sets future generations up for a very big problem as in a few decades most of europe will have a majority population of third worlders who never integrated into society. This has become a very hot topic in recent years. When this comes up in conversation people will say "yeah this is a time bomb that's going to burst at some point". The official rationale is that we need to import people to maintain a young workforce to pay for the elderly's pensions but in practice welfare has proven to be just an extra tax on society, not in the least become a substantial portion of the people who flee their country for a better life in western nations are those that have been spit out by their own society, ie criminals.

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Yes, the welfare state causes a lot of problems like this. If the benefits were contracted and immigration were relaxed, people would have the best of both worlds: the indigenous people would keep more of their money and generally have more and better jobs, and the immigrants would still be able to have a better life working in the primary/secondary sectors albeit with fewer perks and below currently imagined minimum wages. It would be a more income inequal society, but almost everyone would be better off. There's nothing inherently wrong with income inequality.

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Originally Posted by Renton

t would be a more income inequal society, but almost everyone would be better off. There's nothing inherently wrong with income inequality.

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That's basically how countries like UAE/Qatar do it.

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Originally Posted by jackvance

That's basically how countries like UAE/Qatar do it.

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Well.. there's also the slave labor..

If I had a slave or two if definitely feel wealthier.

Isn't Renton ok with slave labour. Not if their forced physically, but he's ok with paying them next to nothing because their desperate. I think that's an integral part of capitalism.

As it is, the welfare state necessitates harsh immigration policy. There's a strong correlation in the U.S. with the decrease in the employment of blacks and young people and the increase in immigration (illegal and otherwise). Basically the U.S. government policies cause huge incentives for immigration from Mexico:

1. Drug war is destroying Latin America, resulting in millions of would be emigrants who must seek a better life, often at great personal risk.

2. Farm subsidies, especially corn, allow the U.S. to export products so cheaply that it can be sold in Mexico for less than the local farmers can produce it. Basically we're destroying Mexico's primary sector, so where before those people were merely fucked because of gang violence, now they're fucked and unemployed. Not to mention the subsidies create more farming jobs in the U.S. than there would be in a free market, and immigrants from Mexico of course seek those jobs. They reduce the demand for labor, and thus, the price. Low-skill indigenous workers in the U.S. suffer lower wages and higher unemployment.

3. Welfare benefits create added incentive for this flow of low-skill workers into the country, and for the currently low-skill workers to remain having low skills, exacerbating every one of the above problems.

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Originally Posted by rong

Isn't Renton ok with slave labour. Not if their forced physically, but he's ok with paying them next to nothing because their desperate. I think that's an integral part of capitalism.

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It's an insult to actual slaves to refer to willing participants in commerce as slaves or even as similar to slaves. The existence of choice is a pretty black-and-white distinction.

It is not an integral part of capitalism that people be paid next to nothing. Incidentally people will be paid next to nothing when there is very low demand for their productive use of time. It's obviously an unfortunate situation to be so desperate for work that you will take almost any job at any wage, but capitalism has better answers for those people than socialism does. And in any case, it is not slavery, not even close.

I really wish all socialist intellectual types would visit an actual poor country to see what actual poverty is like. I live in Cambodia, and basically all people here want to do is to incrementally improve their lives. Often this means taking a 90 dollar a month job. In fact, if a new garment factory (a.k.a. sweatshop) opens up, people line up around the block to work there. The NGO's trying to shut down the sweatshops or boycott the products are not doing these people any favors. They're just increasing the sweatshop owners' risks and costs which lead to fewer factories being built. This leads to lower wages in a country where there are ten people vying for every job opening.

The other thing is the working conditions and child labor issues, which usually go with the "modern-day slavery" hyperbole. I guarantee if you went to any sweatshop worker in Cambodia and asked him "would you rather have safer, more comfortable working environments, or more money?", that they would say they want the money. Some families here are so poor that they might not have enough money to eat, let alone to send their children to school, so it often makes perfect sense for a 13 year old to generate income for the family. There are not easy solutions to this, but allowing people to make their own choices to improve their lives is generally going to be better than moralizing and crusading.

So we exploit the desperate and needy to make a profit. That's a major part of capitalism. If we all had enough to feed, clothe, shelter and educate our family this wouldn't be an issue.

I understand what you're saying and don't have an answer on how to do it better. But that doesn't mean the exploitation you refer to should just be considered acceptable. Just because I can't find a better way doesn't mean the current way is right. You must at least acknowledge it leaves a bad taste in your mouth that sone are so rich they have 5 Ferraris and others can't afford to feed their kids.

I don't know the answer. But I know I don't like what you described and I'd happily try an alternative.

I guess we'd get less growth. If we were in a position where we simply didn't have the resources to feed everyone then you'd have to accept that growth should be the priority. But as we already can, we could accept a slower rate of growth for the sake of better distribution.

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Originally Posted by rong

So we exploit the desperate and needy to make a profit. That's a major part of capitalism.

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What, how did you glean that message from my post?

There is no exploitation. Everyone in the system acts voluntarily and in self-interest and attempts to improve his situation. Everyone who works a job is "desperate and needy" for that job, by your definition, because they are accustomed to a lifestyle that wouldn't be possible unless they worked at that job. The difference for the ultra-poor is that the stakes are life and death for them. It isn't merely a choice between a better lifestyle and a worse one, like it is for a middle class person deciding whether to get a second job or take on overtime hours. Making it as easy as possible for the truly poor to get a job is the best thing that can be done for them. Sweatshop owners do more to alleviate poverty than all NGOs put together.

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Originally Posted by rong

If we all had enough to feed, clothe, shelter and educate our family this wouldn't be an issue.

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There is no "enough." There is only the making of the best of the situation given the circumstances. Every person at every level of income strives for a higher standard of living. There will always be more needs than there are fulfillments of those needs. If there was an infinite amount of everything, there would be no need for economics.

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Originally Posted by rong

I understand what you're saying and don't have an answer on how to do it better. But that doesn't mean the exploitation you refer to should just be considered acceptable. Just because I can't find a better way doesn't mean the current way is right. You must at least acknowledge it leaves a bad taste in your mouth that sone are so rich they have 5 Ferraris and others can't afford to feed their kids.

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The rich people are not the problem. In a free market, people are rich because they made a lot of money for a lot of people. Many of the people with five ferraris made that money by pulling thousands out of poverty in the third world. Income inequality is only a problem when the wealth concentrates as a result of political power. Heavily taxing the rich punishes the risk taking behavior that leads to economic growth, because the taxes do not take into account the unseen people that went bankrupt from their ideas instead of getting rich from them. Heavily taxing corporations is an even bigger disaster because is a direct drain on the resources that would be otherwise used in expansion or investment into risky new projects that spur innovation and job creation.

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Originally Posted by rong

I guess we'd get less growth. If we were in a position where we simply didn't have the resources to feed everyone then you'd have to accept that growth should be the priority. But as we already can, we could accept a slower rate of growth for the sake of better distribution.

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If we distributed all of the resources to feed everyone, they would just multiply and produce more needy people. Incentives affect behavior. The most distributive countries are the ones with the highest unemployment and national debt. Economic freedom and the growth that results is the only consistently demonstrated cure for world poverty.

Yeah there's an issue with people not taking responsibility for themselves and their families and breeding themselves into poverty. That also leaves those that have with guilt. The only way to remove that is to provide the minimum requirements to survive free to everyone and then let them move from there on their own.

But that's a little too left wing for even my tastes.

I guess we could neuter everyone at birth and only allow people to breed once they can demonstrate an ability to provide for their offspring. I think that idea may prove unpopular though.

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Originally Posted by rong

I guess we could neuter everyone at birth and only allow people to breed once they can demonstrate an ability to provide for their offspring. I think that idea may prove unpopular though.

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That would violate some of the basic human rights laid out in UN's charter. Short of a revolution, not gonna happen.

Well we could add minimum child care standards to it making not being able to feed your child a crime.

The powers that be are completely leftist though. You'd be violating the reigning dogma which states that if anyone's at fault for people being hungry, it's the west for not helping them enough.

Unless Elon Musk succeeds in making us an interplanetary species real soon, something gotta give though. We're ravaging and overpopulating the planet pretty badly.

"After what will henceforth be known as the Great Outage of 2018, the internet and the global media are finally back online after one year of shutdown. By universal decree the events that transpired shall never be investigated but we are pleased to announce that the world population is now back down to a comfortable 800 million. Please proceed with your lives as normal. Jobs are now voluntary, if you do not wish to work, funds are made available and please register for your personal AI drone to take care of you. If you have not yet received your DNA regulating chip implant, you have 3 weeks time to comply. All hail your Corporate Overlords."

This reminds me of something that always bugs me in debate with left-wing people.

One of the things that sucks so much about the state is that many of its tyrannies are necessary in light of its other tyrannies. It's the doctor that prescribes you one drug where the side effects are worse than the cure, then needs to give you more drugs to counter those side effects which contraindicate with the first drug, and on and on.

When you have a situation where wealth concentrates due to political influence (crony capitalism), it makes sense to have wealth distribution to the poor. When you have a system that gives money to the poor, it makes sense to make immigration difficult. When you have free government healthcare, it makes sense to meddle in people's business to make sure they don't do risky things with their own bodies. When you have a high minimum wage, it makes sense to give everyone free post-secondary education since there otherwise will be no jobs for them. When you give everyone free college, it makes sense to control who goes into what field so you don't waste billions of dollars on people who will be in the same predicament as having no education at all. It also makes sense to control the content in public universities when taxpayers are footing such a massive bill.

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Originally Posted by jackvance

We're ravaging and overpopulating the planet pretty badly.

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I don't agree. I think overpopulation is only a problem in local areas. Pollution is necessarily a big problem but a higher population might have a counter-intuitive effect on pollution. I believe the more human minds that are born, the more chances there are for great people who will have ideas about how to solve our big problems. Also, the more population there is, the more incentive there will be to have an agricultural revolution. We have ways of producing food and energy in sustainable ways, there just isn't yet enough economic pressure for those ways to compete with the dirty methods.

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Originally Posted by Renton

When you have a situation where wealth concentrates due to political influence (crony capitalism), it makes sense to have wealth distribution to the poor. When you have a system that gives money to the poor, it makes sense to make immigration difficult. When you have free government healthcare, it makes sense to meddle in people's business to make sure they don't do risky things with their own bodies. When you have a high minimum wage, it makes sense to give everyone free post-secondary education since there otherwise will be no jobs for them. When you give everyone free college, it makes sense to control who goes into what field so you don't waste billions of dollars on people who will be in the same predicament as having no education at all. It also makes sense to control the content in public universities when taxpayers are footing such a massive bill.

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Fantastic way of putting it.

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Originally Posted by Renton

This reminds me of something that always bugs me in debate with left-wing people.

One of the things that sucks so much about the state is that many of its tyrannies are necessary in light of its other tyrannies. It's the doctor that prescribes you one drug where the side effects are worse than the cure, then needs to give you more drugs to counter those side effects which contraindicate with the first drug, and on and on.

When you have a situation where wealth concentrates due to political influence (crony capitalism), it makes sense to have wealth distribution to the poor. When you have a system that gives money to the poor, it makes sense to make immigration difficult. When you have free government healthcare, it makes sense to meddle in people's business to make sure they don't do risky things with their own bodies. When you have a high minimum wage, it makes sense to give everyone free post-secondary education since there otherwise will be no jobs for them. When you give everyone free college, it makes sense to control who goes into what field so you don't waste billions of dollars on people who will be in the same predicament as having no education at all. It also makes sense to control the content in public universities when taxpayers are footing such a massive bill.

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i have to say this all makes a hell of a lot of sense and is a perspective i've failed to appreciate or even access in my own private ruminations on these kind of topics. i'm confused as to the the context though. why do these points you mention bug you about debating with left-wing people?

ps interesting thread. keep discussing shit you impassioned internet strangers

edit: pps, except you wufuwgy, you just keep quoting renton. or otherwise perhaps dig up some of your material on the woes of the state and the godliness of the economy from other completely unrelated threads and quote that in the unlikely event that you make a divergent point or express something as efficiently.

ppps juuuust kiddin' brah ;)

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Originally Posted by Renton

This reminds me of something that always bugs me in debate with left-wing people.

One of the things that sucks so much about the state is that many of its tyrannies are necessary in light of its other tyrannies. It's the doctor that prescribes you one drug where the side effects are worse than the cure, then needs to give you more drugs to counter those side effects which contraindicate with the first drug, and on and on.

When you have a situation where wealth concentrates due to political influence (crony capitalism), it makes sense to have wealth distribution to the poor. When you have a system that gives money to the poor, it makes sense to make immigration difficult. When you have free government healthcare, it makes sense to meddle in people's business to make sure they don't do risky things with their own bodies. When you have a high minimum wage, it makes sense to give everyone free post-secondary education since there otherwise will be no jobs for them. When you give everyone free college, it makes sense to control who goes into what field so you don't waste billions of dollars on people who will be in the same predicament as having no education at all. It also makes sense to control the content in public universities when taxpayers are footing such a massive bill.

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I agree with pretty much everything you say, the problems of regulation are obvious. My point is, and has been all along, that I find it hard to be convinced that the alternative you propose can work any better as long as its whole premise is based on rational choice theory, which I find flawed. Voting, for example, is a market activity, and people are disastrous with their choices. People act rationally in the economic sense as much as they only do +EV choices in poker.

https://msu.edu/course/aec/810/bond-rat.htm

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Originally Posted by rpm

i have to say this all makes a hell of a lot of sense and is a perspective i've failed to appreciate or even access in my own private ruminations on these kind of topics. i'm confused as to the the context though. why do these points you mention bug you about debating with left-wing people?

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Sorry I lost my train of thought with that post. I bugs me because it makes it difficult to argue against what socialists want. They're not totally incorrect, if you argue in the mindset of "well the governments already doing this shitty thing, so we have to do that shitty thing." Basically the more entrenched the state is, the more alluring socialism becomes.

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Originally Posted by CoccoBill

I agree with pretty much everything you say, the problems of regulation are obvious. My point is, and has been all along, that I find it hard to be convinced that the alternative you propose can work any better as long as its whole premise is based on rational choice theory, which I find flawed. Voting, for example, is a market activity, and people are disastrous with their choices. People act rationally in the economic sense as much as they only do +EV choices in poker.

https://msu.edu/course/aec/810/bond-rat.htm

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I think maybe yours (and rilla's) problem is that you're not interpreting rational choice theory correctly. Or maybe I'm not. My view of capitalism is that when people make their own decisions they are doing so based on subjective value. I don't believe anyone has a right to apply value judgments to the decisions of others as long as those decisions aren't hurting anyone. And how can you assess the correctness of another's choice without being aware of their value system which is entirely different from yours?

Meh.... Poker example is good. They value money but make stupid decisions. Between ignorance, distraction and stupidity people can't be expected to get that many big decisions right. And those decisions effect other people. Do you think it's ok for people to have kids living on poverty simple because their parents are idiots? I don't.

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Originally Posted by CoccoBill

I agree with pretty much everything you say, the problems of regulation are obvious. My point is, and has been all along, that I find it hard to be convinced that the alternative you propose can work any better as long as its whole premise is based on rational choice theory, which I find flawed. Voting, for example, is a market activity, and people are disastrous with their choices. People act rationally in the economic sense as much as they only do +EV choices in poker.

https://msu.edu/course/aec/810/bond-rat.htm

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Rational choice theory is flawed. I'm not sure to what degree economists use it, but they spend a lot of time not using it. Rationality is intro-econ stuff. Irrationality is what they cover after they establish rationality. It's similar to how the physical sciences establish some things early in the education that are wrong with the purpose of giving a base to understand the more complex material and why the intro-models aren't perfect.

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Originally Posted by rong

Meh.... Poker example is good. They value money but make stupid decisions. Between ignorance, distraction and stupidity people can't be expected to get that many big decisions right. And those decisions effect other people. Do you think it's ok for people to have kids living on poverty simple because their parents are idiots? I don't.

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Poker example is not good, because economics isn't a zero sum game, and because there isn't a unanimously agreed-upon scoring system for decisions. And yes, of course, I believe it is okay for stupid poor people to have children if they want. What I don't believe is that those people should be supported by the state and given warped incentives for child-rearing by the state.

There's just no way to unequivocally state that someone's choice is bad. There are smart people who smoke cigarettes. It's obviously a life -EV decision for them to do, but life is fucking stressful and if that eases the tension a little and allows them to live more productive and enjoyable lives, then they are making a fine decision to smoke. But the state shouldn't take care of their lung cancer treatment after they chain smoke for thirty years. And insurance companies should jack up their premiums out the ass.

I may totally be wrong, actually it wouldn't even surprise me much if I had something about the concept totally backwards. Still, what I meant with my criticism of it is that it assumes that people make the decisions that are best for them, to maximize their personal utility. If all humans were vulcans with godly intellect and complete information related to their decisions (that is, enough information and understanding to be able to not only weigh in all the factors, but also identify all false and deceitful information given to them) then yes, I'm sure free markets would work perfectly and all superficial regulation would only be a hindrance. This is hardly the case though, people have very incomplete and often misleading information available to them, limited capabilities to assess the data and a poor understanding of the effects of their choices. It's not (only) about the correctness of their values, but people regularly act against their values, either through ignorance or deceit.

Let's say we live in Renton's utopia. I come up with tobacco and in a couple years I got a few million people hooked. We're still a couple decades from learning about the long term health consequences. What's your move?

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Originally Posted by CoccoBill

I may totally be wrong, actually it wouldn't even surprise me much if I had something about the concept totally backwards. Still, what I meant with my criticism of it is that it assumes that people make the decisions that are best for them, to maximize their personal utility. If all humans were vulcans with godly intellect and complete information related to their decisions (that is, enough information and understanding to be able to not only weigh in all the factors, but also identify all false and deceitful information given to them) then yes, I'm sure free markets would work perfectly and all superficial regulation would only be a hindrance. This is hardly the case though, people have very incomplete and often misleading information available to them, limited capabilities to assess the data and a poor understanding of the effects of their choices. It's not (only) about the correctness of their values, but people regularly act against their values, either through ignorance or deceit.

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I think you're using the traditional definition of rationality, and not the one used by rational choice theory, which is more of a subjective rationality. Either way, it is not vital to functioning capitalism that people make max-utility choices. Capitalism applies economic pressure to everyone in the system to TREND toward higher utility choices, and it does so much better than laws do.

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Originally Posted by CoccoBill

I may totally be wrong, actually it wouldn't even surprise me much if I had something about the concept totally backwards. Still, what I meant with my criticism of it is that it assumes that people make the decisions that are best for them, to maximize their personal utility. If all humans were vulcans with godly intellect and complete information related to their decisions (that is, enough information and understanding to be able to not only weigh in all the factors, but also identify all false and deceitful information given to them)

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This is how it is. Economists try to understand this.

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then yes, I'm sure free markets would work perfectly and all superficial regulation would only be a hindrance. This is hardly the case though, people have very incomplete and often misleading information available to them, limited capabilities to assess the data and a poor understanding of the effects of their choices. It's not (only) about the correctness of their values, but people regularly act against their values, either through ignorance or deceit.

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Keep in mind that regulation are every bit as much a facet of rationality/irrationality and economics as markets are. If you claim people act irrationally in markets, you also need to claim they act irrationally with regulations. Really, the underlying reason markets work is because they don't solidify irrational behavior like regulations do.


Outside of that, rationality has a ton of applicability that isn't seen from the lay. For example, financial markets react about as rationally as possible to behavior of central banks. None of this stuff makes sense on the individual level, and it's more related to the wisdom of the crowds type of thing.

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Originally Posted by CoccoBill

Let's say we live in Renton's utopia. I come up with tobacco and in a couple years I got a few million people hooked. We're still a couple decades from learning about the long term health consequences. What's your move?

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I don't see any issues with this example yet. Does it have a part 2?

Is it your point that people shouldn't be allowed to engage in risky behavior, even where the risks are entirely unknown?

People have been putting cell phones next to their heads for a period of time not-long-enough to definitively study the cancer risks of microwave radiation. Should all cell phones be banned?

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Originally Posted by CoccoBill

Let's say we live in Renton's utopia. I come up with tobacco and in a couple years I got a few million people hooked. We're still a couple decades from learning about the long term health consequences. What's your move?

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My move as a policy director is to allow people as much freedom as possible to counter. The inventive and constructive capacity of free people is far greater than that of central command. The people would be free to conduct their own research, campaign against tobacco, invent alternatives, etc. This is basically what happened to tobacco in the first place. It became so vilified that the masses accepted mass bans on consumption in overreaching ways. The sad part of is that the bans were wholly unnecessary since tobacco was already being pushed out of most places by choice. All the bans did was reaffirm central legal authority on nuances of peoples' lives, and further the idea that the true owner of all things is the government.

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Originally Posted by Renton

I don't see any issues with this example yet. Does it have a part 2?

Is it your point that people shouldn't be allowed to engage in risky behavior, even where the risks are entirely unknown?

People have been putting cell phones next to their heads for a period of time not-long-enough to definitively study the cancer risks of microwave radiation. Should all cell phones be banned?

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So to put it another way, you see no issue with me marketing tobacco as a harmless habit that makes you look cool?

I'm in no way endorsing regulations for the consumers, I'm endorsing regulations for the producers. I've got a feeling in your utopia there would be no way to know cigarettes are harmful, and (without the judicial branch, I assume?) no way to sue them even if you did find out.

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Originally Posted by wufwugy

My move as a policy director is to allow people as much freedom as possible to counter. The inventive and constructive capacity of free people is far greater than that of central command. The people would be free to conduct their own research, campaign against tobacco, invent alternatives, etc. This is basically what happened to tobacco in the first place. It became so vilified that the masses accepted mass bans on consumption in overreaching ways. The sad part of is that the bans were wholly unnecessary since tobacco was already being pushed out of most places by choice. All the bans did was reaffirm central legal authority on nuances of peoples' lives, and further the idea that the true owner of all things is the government.

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There are no policies nor policy directors, are there? I on the other hand, as a tobacco tycoon, possess pretty deep pockets to stymie most attempts to campaign against me. I put out my own research and buy off competition.

What happened to tobacco was a class action suit in the 50s after 2 doctors from the UK Medical Research Council, a government agency, published a study about the link between smoking and cancer. It only took 12 years from that for the first health warnings to appear on cigarette packages, and the tobacco companies to acknowledge their products may not in fact be completely harmless.

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Originally Posted by CoccoBill

So to put it another way, you see no issue with me marketing tobacco as a harmless habit that makes you look cool?

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I have a huge problem with it. Almost everybody has a huge problem with it.

But what I have an even bigger problem with is getting government involved in it because government has an incredible track record of making these things far worse. It doesn't solve the actual problem as well as it creates the unintended consequences like what Renton laid out earlier.

There are plenty of ways people acting freely solve these sorts of problems. Governments, well, kinda never solve them. The data and theory both bear this out. The data against government solving problems is overwhelming. The theory is solid. Everybody agrees with the theory too. It's just that once people start thinking in terms of macro, they start providing one exception for that theory: government. We think it's absolutely ridiculous for government to tell us who we're allowed to be friends with, but we love government telling us who are allowed to be our doctors. The theory for why it is wrong for government to choose peoples' friends is exactly the same when applied to choosing doctors, but society at large has rejected this reality.

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Originally Posted by wufwugy

There are plenty of ways people acting freely solve these sorts of problems.

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Such as?

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Originally Posted by CoccoBill

There are no policies nor policy directors, are there? I on the other hand, as a tobacco tycoon, possess pretty deep pockets to stymie most attempts to campaign against me. I put out my own research and buy off competition.

What happened to tobacco was a class action suit in the 50s after 2 doctors from the UK Medical Research Council, a government agency, published a study about the link between smoking and cancer. It only took 12 years from that for the first health warnings to appear on cigarette packages, and the tobacco companies to acknowledge their products may not in fact be completely harmless.

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Good news: you've gone bankrupt. No more need to worry now.

The fundamental difference between private entities and governments are that private entities live and die based on choice of the consumers; whereas governments live and die based on mandatory taxes. This is why private entities go out of business all the time and have very little funds to oppress, and it's also why governments never go out of "business" and have overwhelming funds to oppress anybody.

The cost-benefit analyses governments perform are almost non-existent. The closest governments get to them are politicians trying to keep their jobs and security forces keeping the taxes uninterrupted. If the Kochs acted like governments, we would laugh ourselves into convulsions at how quickly they lost all their capital.


It should be noted that if a private entity were granted a legal and violence monopoly, it would become a government. What we're really talking about here is if it's better to have entities that can't force you to do stuff or entities that can.

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Originally Posted by CoccoBill

Such as?

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By competing against them. The more avenues people are allowed to freely compete, the greater variety and ultimately greater the solution will be. Against tobacco marketing specifically, all sorts of entities from wealthy individuals/groups or non-profit organizations functioning on smaller donations from like-minded folk can conduct research and campaigns against tobacco. Isn't this what happened to Dr. Oz?

On the business side, when people are free to create whatever products and services for whatever cost they can muster, we find that alternative and superior products and services develop. Maybe vaping is an example, but really you can even go so far as to say that wheat grass juice and the neo-hippie businesses are examples. I'm not well-versed on tobacco specifically, but I suspect if we were to delve into the regulations governments impose (most or all of which are well-meaning), we would find ample reason to believe that competition against Big Tobacco is stymied. An example I understand better is ISPs, which I've posted on several times here already. The short is that Comcast and Time Warner have such high market share with worse service than might be desired because of government policies. Examples are zoning and unions.

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Originally Posted by wufwugy

Good news: you've gone bankrupt. No more need to worry now.

The fundamental difference between private entities and governments are that private entities live and die based on choice of the consumers; whereas governments live and die based on mandatory taxes. This is why private entities go out of business all the time and have very little funds to oppress, and it's also why governments never go out of "business" and have overwhelming funds to oppress anybody.

The cost-benefit analyses governments perform are almost non-existent. The closest governments get to them are politicians trying to keep their jobs and security forces keeping the taxes uninterrupted. If the Kochs acted like governments, we would laugh ourselves into convulsions at how quickly they lost all their capital.


It should be noted that if a private entity were granted a legal and violence monopoly, it would become a government. What we're really talking about here is if it's better to have entities that can't force you to do stuff or entities that can.

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Call me a skeptic, but I haven't seen many tobacco companies go out of business, even with harsh government regulations. So I think I'll just go about my business selling Hello Kitty vanilla-bonbon flavored healtharettes to (private) preschoolers. Actually I might start a couple preschools myself to put my excess liquid assets to good use, free cigs for the first semester for all 3-year contracts!

On a more serious note, governments need popular vote to keep their business running, a government that does not allow this is a flawed one.

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Originally Posted by CoccoBill

Call me a skeptic, but I haven't seen many tobacco companies go out of business, even with harsh government regulations.

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Because they haven't done what you suggested. Additionally, the "harsh" government regulations are nothing of the sort. The regulations have created a zero competition space. Big Tobacco would be powerless relative to where it is now if the barriers to competition created by regulations were not so incredibly high.

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So I think I'll just go about my business selling Hello Kitty vanilla-bonbon flavored healtharettes to (private) preschoolers. Actually I might start a couple preschools myself to put my excess liquid assets to good use, free cigs for the first semester for all 3-year contracts!

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This not working aside, what you're suggesting is that an unaccountable entity should do this instead of accountable entities.

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On a more serious note, governments need popular vote to keep their business running, a government that does not allow this is a flawed one.

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The amount of accountability this engenders is a tiny fraction relative to the accountability the market engenders.

You can vote once biyearly or you can vote lots of times every day. You can vote for something extremely vague or you can vote for specific clear things.

By now, we're back in circles. This topic is hardly even debatable. People adore extolling the virtues of freedom for every aspect of their lives except the ones they've been hammered into believing otherwise.

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Originally Posted by wufwugy

By competing against them. The more avenues people are allowed to freely compete, the greater variety and ultimately greater the solution will be. Against tobacco marketing specifically, all sorts of entities from wealthy individuals/groups or non-profit organizations functioning on smaller donations from like-minded folk can conduct research and campaigns against tobacco. Isn't this what happened to Dr. Oz?

On the business side, when people are free to create whatever products and services for whatever cost they can muster, we find that alternative and superior products and services develop. Maybe vaping is an example, but really you can even go so far as to say that wheat grass juice and the neo-hippie businesses are examples. I'm not well-versed on tobacco specifically, but I suspect if we were to delve into the regulations governments impose (most or all of which are well-meaning), we would find ample reason to believe that competition against Big Tobacco is stymied. An example I understand better is ISPs, which I've posted on several times here already. The short is that Comcast and Time Warner have such high market share with worse service than might be desired because of government policies. Examples are zoning and unions.

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So now we have competing tobacco companies sharing the profits, with even more assets to enforce our market presence. We might as well start price-fixing to ensure continuing profits, and pretty soon we can afford our own army. Your move?

The study on Dr Oz's claims was conducted by U of Alberta (a public uni) and it resulted in a senate hearing and FTC complaints. I wouldn't chalk that up as a win for free enterprise. In fact, I would argue that Oz more presents a clear case for regulation and oversight.

Vaping, I think, is a great example for what you're saying about healthier products brought about by competition (and yes, the tobacco/pharma lobbies and government regulations are doing their darnest to kill it). My argument is that it took 60 years, and I see no reason to believe it would have taken less in a regulation-free environment, I would argue it would take longer, perhaps indefinitely. How many people died unnecessarily within that time, as opposed to efficient regulation from day 1? And no, I don't know what that efficient regulation would be, but I'm not a policy nor a subject matter expert, I'd leave it to those. I also can see regulation being able to push innovation. If there's a clear market for a product but it doesn't pass health regulations, one obvious alternative is to develop a healthier product.

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Originally Posted by wufwugy

Because they haven't done what you suggested. Additionally, the "harsh" government regulations are nothing of the sort. The regulations have created a zero competition space. Big Tobacco would be powerless relative to where it is now if the barriers to competition created by regulations were not so incredibly high.

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They haven't done what? Marketed tobacco as healthy? Put out their own research belittling the health issues and bought out competition?

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Originally Posted by wufwugy

This not working aside, what you're suggesting is that an unaccountable entity should do this instead of accountable entities.

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This would carry a lot more weight with some non-anecdotal evidence.

I don't see my tobacco cartel being in any practical sense accountable to anyone.

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Originally Posted by wufwugy

The amount of accountability this engenders is a tiny fraction relative to the accountability the market engenders.

You can vote once biyearly or you can vote lots of times every day. You can vote for something extremely vague or you can vote for specific clear things.

By now, we're back in circles. This topic is hardly even debatable. People adore extolling the virtues of freedom for every aspect of their lives except the ones they've been hammered into believing otherwise.

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Yes, we are, and that's largely because you're not so much arguing against the theory of a government but against the current state of affairs in the US using cherry picked examples and anecdotes. Any alternative system will look awesome if that's the benchmark.

We may once again just have to agree to disagree.

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Originally Posted by CoccoBill

So now we have competing tobacco companies sharing the profits, with even more assets to enforce our market presence. We might as well start price-fixing to ensure continuing profits, and pretty soon we can afford our own army. Your move?

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Bankruptcy came years before this.

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The study on Dr Oz's claims was conducted by U of Alberta (a public uni) and it resulted in a senate hearing and FTC complaints. I wouldn't chalk that up as a win for free enterprise. In fact, I would argue that Oz more presents a clear case for regulation and oversight.

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One small aspect of something that was touched by government. We have so much government these days that you can't walk into a room without government crouching in the crannies. Just be sure to not look at that one tree and call it the forest. The campaign against Oz was vastly private. If government had been a significant enough party on this, all other parties would have either been supported or prohibited by mandates. We would have seen no change and no progress.

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Vaping, I think, is a great example for what you're saying about healthier products brought about by competition (and yes, the tobacco/pharma lobbies and government regulations are doing their darnest to kill it).

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The only possible way they could is government backing.

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My argument is that it took 60 years, and I see no reason to believe it would have taken less in a regulation-free environment, I would argue it would take longer, perhaps indefinitely.

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So we have the ultra heavily regulated environment tobacco has operated in, and you say less regulation would make it worse?

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How many people died unnecessarily within that time, as opposed to efficient regulation from day 1?

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We don't have anywhere close to an idea of what efficient regulation is from day 1. The drug war is an amazing example for what happens when we believe we have "efficient regulation from day 1".

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And no, I don't know what that efficient regulation would be, but I'm not a policy nor a subject matter expert, I'd leave it to those.

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The vast majority of these subject matter experts oppose government intervention into these sorts of things. The government typically doesn't hire experts to regulate for this reason. Voters love regulation. Experts are in the minority, denouncing them.

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I also can see regulation being able to push innovation. If there's a clear market for a product but it doesn't pass health regulations, one obvious alternative is to develop a healthier product.

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The effect is the opposite because innovation is marginal. These sorts of regulations have been integral in reducing market activity. The regulators are trying to do "the right thing" by regulating for better things, but they're not engaging in economically sound methods to get those better things. Which is why regulations to improve systems by reducing choice always make them worse.

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Originally Posted by CoccoBill

They haven't done what? Marketed tobacco as healthy? Put out their own research belittling the health issues and bought out competition?

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You said they would use their deep pockets to stymie competition. The answer to that is a resounding "lolnope". Private entities don't have remotely close to the finances or legitimacy it takes to stymie competition. Governments have vastly greater finances and power, and they can't even fully stymie lots of things.

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This would carry a lot more weight with some non-anecdotal evidence.

I don't see my tobacco cartel being in any practical sense accountable to anyone.

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Market actors are accountable to other market actors and consumers. The only examples of cartels like you describe are when government backs them. Every example you can find where government does not much intervene in markets is highly competitive and develops nothing close to centralized control.

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Yes, we are, and that's largely because you're not so much arguing against the theory of a government but against the current state of affairs in the US using cherry picked examples and anecdotes. Any alternative system will look awesome if that's the benchmark.

We may once again just have to agree to disagree.

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We've been over this. It has nothing to do with US government. I dislike your government far more than mine. My anti-government position is entirely because of my pro-economics position.

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Originally Posted by CoccoBill

So to put it another way, you see no issue with me marketing tobacco as a harmless habit that makes you look cool?

I'm in no way endorsing regulations for the consumers, I'm endorsing regulations for the producers. I've got a feeling in your utopia there would be no way to know cigarettes are harmful, and (without the judicial branch, I assume?) no way to sue them even if you did find out.

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Please stop saying utopia. I just want the government to do fewer things, I'm not asking for the world here.

Obviously in a free society it would become apparent that cigarettes cause health harm. Do you think all scientific and medical research is done by states? Obviously even in a pure anarcho-capitalist experiment there would still be laws, law enforcement, suing, contracts, etc. There is great economic value in all of these things. There will also always be non-profit organizations that advocate for causes. In fact, with people making twice as much money (from not having to pay taxes), I suspect a lot more money would flow to such causes than now.

As long as no fraud is being committed, I have no issue with any marketing strategies for tobacco.

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Originally Posted by Renton

Obviously in a free society it would become apparent that cigarettes cause health harm.

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Absolutely beyond 110% not the case. The average joe is no better than chance at telling between an expert and an expert fake. If you can flood the conversation with more expert fakes than there are experts, you can robustly direct the conversation away from the truth. Profitable cig companies would have an interest in controlling the conversation, truth-jockeys without a profit motive would have no chance to compete.

edit: Maybe wealthy sensible people and nonprofits could become a loud voice in the conversation, but without a central violent authority to straight up silence the wrong the side, they'll always have an appreciable level of rhetorical pull.

It seems to me that fraud is pretty close to unavoidable. It's an arm of both telling lies and desiring more, which sound like normal aspects of people.

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Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla

Absolutely beyond 110% not the case. The average joe is no better than chance at telling between an expert and an expert fake. If you can flood the conversation with more expert fakes than there are experts, you can robustly direct the conversation away from the truth. Profitable cig companies would have an interest in controlling the conversation, truth-jockeys without a profit motive would have no chance to compete.

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There would be tons of profit in competing against them. It's like how we have a vast health food industry for reasons unrelated to government involvement. Plus non-profit would have a lot of legroom to work as well. Most information that travels through communities are not based on profit.

The last thing "Big Whatever" wants is the government to let the market handle it.

But the Health food industry is just another face of the same monster that wants people smoking more cigs. It's not interested in the truth of the health of their food, only in the perception and profit of it. So they don't care if their food isn't even healthy at all, so long as people believe it is.

Remember, the cig giants said that they wouldn't sell a deadly product to their customers because they profit from them. And it seems like there is a belief that that would be the case in a totally free market. Yet they did. Because they had a mildly deadly product that people were sweeping up and they were going to ride that profit tsunami as far as it would go, damn the (non-profit-motive) consequences. And pointing out that their mildly deadly product was mildly deadly was a threat to that cash wave, while insisting it was perfectly healthy was just sweeping it further inland.

And even if they did figure out that it was unhealthy, the only for-profit arms of society that would care are insurance companies*. But so long as people would purchase profitable plans, they don't care how healthy they're being, only how profitable. So even the sober-eyed insurance companies wouldn't try to mount a robust campaign for public health. And the for-profit Tobacco companies would continue to invent greater ways to dig into the same old gold mine and fight to remove this hard-won knowledge of the health-consequences of cigarettes from the public domain and instead put forward something like, "Oh no, that's just how people get old and die. Don't worry about it! Let one of our smooth, rich cigarettes carry those cares away..."

*Maybe also whatever companies run hospitals, but once again, so long as those patients are profitable, who cares what keeps them coming in? Hell, maybe we can make a fine buck by breaking more people with this super profitable lung cancer...

As bad as what some companies try to do is, legally allowing it is integral to eliminating the problem. We already kinda established this, which is part of why you went in the direction of claiming economics is a false field in the first place.

Outside of that, the irony of the pro-government argument is that it claims that less accountability is more accountable than more accountability. The pro-statist says "I hate that these entities have various levels of power therefore I want one entity to have all the power because I believe that one entity will agree with my desires". It's quite the head scratcher.

I always thought I was cynical about people, but rilla and coccobill make me look like an optimist.

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Absolutely beyond 110% not the case. The average joe is no better than chance at telling between an expert and an expert fake. If you can flood the conversation with more expert fakes than there are experts, you can robustly direct the conversation away from the truth. Profitable cig companies would have an interest in controlling the conversation, truth-jockeys without a profit motive would have no chance to compete.

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Do you really believe that corporations are this powerful and that individuals are this weak? You don't think the evidence would pile up pretty quickly that smokers are a hundred times more at risk for a hundred different medical conditions? Why do you think that the cig companies would have infinite power to control the conversation, given how unbelievably expensive that would end up being? Yes, they're going to market their product and down-play the risks, and they'll spend as much as necessary to maximize their image without cutting too much into their profits, but there will be limits to what they are capable of.

http://www.bath.ac.uk/research/news/...-eu-directive/

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Originally Posted by wufwugy

As bad as what some companies try to do is, legally allowing it is integral to eliminating the problem. We already kinda established this, which is part of why you went in the direction of claiming economics is a false field in the first place.

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I must have missed that memo. Wouldn't it logically follow, that those practices would be less of a problem in areas with less or no regulation? It would probably be trivial to demonstrate this if it were the case.

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Originally Posted by wufwugy

Outside of that, the irony of the pro-government argument is that it claims that less accountability is more accountable than more accountability. The pro-statist says "I hate that these entities have various levels of power therefore I want one entity to have all the power because I believe that one entity will agree with my desires". It's quite the head scratcher.

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It's all about who controls said entities. On a theoretical level, is it a single party that has their livelihood depending on their ability to sell their product, vs. a community of consumers subject to the health effects of those products. I would argue the former has far greater motivation to hide facts and silence conversation.

About all of this the one thing that most puzzles me is that you're both saying a regulation free alternative has never been attempted and if only we tried it, miracles would happen. I've said this before and I'll say it again: regulations aren't the initial state. Humankind has roamed about doing its thing most of its existence without corporate regulation. Regulation and governments came along when people noticed the regulation-free environment wasn't working. Tobacco came to an un-tobacco-regulated market. It had been used by native indians long before Columbus and the first significant piece of regulation towards it came in the 1960s. That's a shitload of time to experiment with no regulation, and what we can observe is, I think, exactly what we would see in any unregulated field, since there were de facto no regulations regarding tobacco before that. The first piece of regulation on some stone tablets was put up to stop some motherfuckers ruining it for everyone else.

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Originally Posted by Renton

As long as no fraud is being committed, I have no issue with any marketing strategies for tobacco.

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Who defines "fraud"?

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Originally Posted by CoccoBill

Who defines "fraud"?

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People do. Definitions come from human culture, not from Webster, and certainly not from states. Conventional court systems define law in fairly undemocratic ways, as high court judges are often appointed, not elected. Free market courts (since we're apparently still on the anarcho-capitalist experiment) would not be able to arbitrarily define law, because people would be free to choose courts that have a best reputation for fairness. For me, while fraud contains a gray area, I would only be in favor of a law against the most blatant fraud, since it is the least subject to interpretation. Soft misrepresentation shouldn't be a crime. Having a supermodel smoking a cigarette in your commercial shouldn't be a crime. Deliberately stating to your customer your tobacco product definitely has no health risk should be a crime.

Again though, I'm just here to criticize what governments are currently doing. If they started to do merely less, I would consider that an accomplishment. I suspect the role for government, if it has a role, will be solidified through conversations like these over the next millennium.

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Originally Posted by Renton

I always thought I was cynical about people, but rilla and coccobill make me look like an optimist.



Do you really believe that corporations are this powerful and that individuals are this weak? You don't think the evidence would pile up pretty quickly that smokers are a hundred times more at risk for a hundred different medical conditions? Why do you think that the cig companies would have infinite power to control the conversation, given how unbelievably expensive that would end up being? Yes, they're going to market their product and down-play the risks, and they'll spend as much as necessary to maximize their image without cutting too much into their profits, but there will be limits to what they are capable of.

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This isn't hypothetical, this is history. The evidence for global warming has always been huge*, it's only now reaching a point where the majority of people accept it. Another example is lead in gasoline.

Cig companies would control the conversation because they did. Oil companies would control the conversation because they did. It's not hard. Like I said before, people are no better than chance at telling between an expert and an expert fake.

edit *Even when TIME was talking about Scientists fearing a new ice age, the evidence for global warming was strong and was represented in the majority of peer reviewed publications of the time.

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Originally Posted by Renton

I always thought I was cynical about people, but rilla and coccobill make me look like an optimist.



Do you really believe that corporations are this powerful and that individuals are this weak?[1] You don't think the evidence would pile up pretty quickly that smokers are a hundred times more at risk for a hundred different medical conditions?[2] Why do you think that the cig companies would have infinite power to control the conversation, given how unbelievably expensive that would end up being?[3] Yes, they're going to market their product and down-play the risks, and they'll spend as much as necessary to maximize their image without cutting too much into their profits, but there will be limits to what they are capable of.[4]

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Alright, I'm going to go through these one at a time.

[1] Yes. I remember when I watched a video about how we didn't land on the Moon followed by a documentary on the manned missions. After the first video, I really did spend some time thinking it was possible that it had been faked. I consider myself smart enough to survive in this world but even I have mental weak spots that can be exploited - everyone does. If there are two sides in an unregulated debate and one side is fighting to protect its profit engine and the other is fighting to communicate the truth, the profit engine team can play to, at worst, a draw. It takes a lot of effort and checking to get to the right answer, people have better things to do and they will always use short cuts and heuristics to make their decision. Like two chessmasters will run to a draw, if both sides of the debate relentlessly try to hit on these heuristics, the audience will be split. Unfortunately, the truth-jockeys will likely believe too deeply in their actual methods for getting the right answer and try to convey to the people why their answer is the best answer based on all of the information and they'll come across with data-collection methods and error bars and their message will not strike with the average joe. Hell, it wouldn't strike with me.

[2] Where would this evidence pile up? Will it be as obvious as the Sun orbiting the Earth?*

edit: *Be careful, because you know the answer, it's hard to imagine anyone not getting there. But when the answer is one of many alternatives, it won't be so easy to tell the right from the wrongs. Remember that monty hall problem with three doors and you get to switch your pick or stay after the host opens the one booby prize door? Well, hindsight is opening all of those possible alternative explanation booby prize doors in your imagination, so you think it'll be a simple yes or no question and yes will have all these now known reasons to go with.

[3] Because they've found a rare thing in this world, an engine for profit. Grow the plants, make the cigs, sell to the consumer, repeat and grow. It's not easy taking money from this world and if you can do it, you best protect it. I suspect they'll protect it.

[4] They will actively try to muddle the conversation, deny the risks, promote the benefits, obscure the truth, everything. It would be foolish not to.

I'm not sure what argument you're trying to make here. Obviously corporations are going to act in a way that maximizes their profits. I'm just saying I'd rather they didn't have the power to use the state to further their interests.

Also what is with this anti-profit stuff? Tobacco companies employ people and provide a product that people are happy to buy. People are generally very aware of the risks of inhaling tar and radioactive metals. They would be aware of this regardless of state regulations because science doesn't need permission from the state to exist. You are deeply cynical about people.

What's with you seeing anti-profit stuff? Profits are good and bad. You focus on the good, I remind you of the bad and now I'm anti-profit. Careful, those heuristics are showing.

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Originally Posted by Renton

People are generally very aware of the risks of inhaling tar and radioactive metals. They would be aware of this regardless of state regulations because science doesn't need permission from the state to exist. You are deeply cynical about people.

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This is wrong. Not black and white wrong because of how you word it, but wrong. Science is aimless and needs to be fed. Some science can be fed by the profit motive - computers and electronics are an amazing example of this, chemistry is another, thermodynamics another still. But global warming absolutely is not. The link between carcinogens and cancer another. The discovery of DNA another still... Discoveries fed by the state... subatomic particles and nuclear energy another, hell, thermodynamics and aerodynamics probably belong on the fed by the state side of things as they were both enormously driven by the state.

PS States are good and bad. You focus on the bad, I remind you of the good, don't go calling me pro-statist now.

Not every action taken by human beings in a stateless world need be for profit. Plenty of money would flow into research by voluntary means. Plenty of rich people are interested in science, and would fund scientific work. Non-profit organizations would exist much as they do now. Truthfully, when people would be able to keep more of what they make, they would have a lot more money and time to commit to any cause they believe in.

Your posts during the past few days come off as very anti-profit. There's a lot of "take" language like you believe its all a zero sum game or something. What qualifies as a good profit to you?

I don't believe there is a such thing as a good or bad profit. Profits just are. They're all useful in that they provide signals for more or fewer things to be supplied in a given market. They're always the result of mutual benefit in any case where the commerce was voluntary and the external costs accounted for.

'Take' is more emotive than it is explanatory. Lots of more measured words can fit in there. I believe money is tied to work, and the net amount of work in the world is very likely growing thanks to passing on of techniques and knowledge.

And I don't play good or bad, there just is. Profits just are. The consequences of them are, as well.

But I still stand by take, people don't just give you money in this world and they will very frequently try to take it from you.

And while all actions don't need profit motives, dominant actions will.

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Originally Posted by Renton

I don't believe there is a such thing as a good or bad profit. Profits just are. They're all useful in that they provide signals for more or fewer things to be supplied in a given market.

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Hey, we agree on this.

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They're always the result of mutual benefit in any case where the commerce was voluntary and the external costs accounted for.

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I believe this is wrong. It is a consequent of rational actors. If everybody maximizes their utility, when two people agree to trade, they must both be profiting. I don't think that's true.

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Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla

I believe this is wrong. It is a consequent of rational actors. If everybody maximizes their utility, when two people agree to trade, they must both be profiting. I don't think that's true.

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Please elaborate.

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Originally Posted by Renton

Please elaborate.

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Gladly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8I-uZ2iml_s

I wish there was a Dr. Oz livestream to hammer home my point about people being no better than chance at telling between experts and expert fakes.

You don't think it's true that two people maximizing their utility can mutually profit through trade, or you don't think it's true that people are maximizing utility?

If the former, then that's just wrong. If the latter, I think your problem is that you are trying to objectify value. Is your basic premise that since sometimes people spend money on QVC instead of donating it to high-energy physics research that free-market capitalism is unoptimal?

Utility is nonsense. It does nothing to help you understand and actively hurts you by masking the things you don't understand.

And I do believe that people can profit from trade. I do not believe that people must always profit from every trade. That there can be trades that benefit only one side, but that will still happen frequently because of the nature of people.

And the QVC example, all I see is a channel that hits every single sales-trick in the book and manages to sell overpriced crap to people who won't use it for profit year over year.

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Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla

Utility is nonsense. It does nothing to help you understand and actively hurts you by masking the things you don't understand.

And I do believe that people can profit from trade. I do not believe that people must always profit from every trade. That there can be trades that benefit only one side, but that will still happen frequently because of the nature of people.

And the QVC example, all I see is a channel that hits every single sales-trick in the book and manages to sell overpriced crap to people who won't use it for profit year over year.

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From the point of view of subjective value, all voluntary trade has mutual benefit. There's really no better way of ascribing value to anything than by assuming that if someone traded X for Y, they valued Y more than X and vice versa for the other guy. Sure, an omniscient observer can have a clearer picture of whether the trade was one sided, but unless you start arbitrarily ascribing value to things, it's hard to definitively state that any trade was one-sided.

It's funny, I feel warm and fuzzy when I see QVC. I see it as the result of a society that has become so extravagantly wealthy that most people have the disposable income to buy a 80th Annual Mickey Mouse Commemorative Toast Butterer, mostly thanks to a capitalistic economy. I see all of the lucky people who are escaping from a thousand-generation-long subsistence farming lifestyle to get paid 5 times as much to make dumb crap for white people to waste money on. This is wealth redistribution I can get behind.

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Originally Posted by Renton

From the point of view of subjective value, all voluntary trade has mutual benefit. There's really no better way of ascribing value to anything than by assuming that if someone traded X for Y, they valued Y more than X and vice versa for the other guy. Sure, an omniscient observer can have a clearer picture of whether the trade was one sided, but unless you start arbitrarily ascribing value to things, it's hard to definitively state that any trade was one-sided.

It's funny, I feel warm and fuzzy when I see QVC. I see it as the result of a society that has become so extravagantly wealthy that most people have the disposable income to buy a 80th Annual Mickey Mouse Commemorative Toast Butterer, mostly thanks to a capitalistic economy. I see all of the lucky people who are escaping from a thousand-generation-long subsistence farming lifestyle to get paid 5 times as much to make dumb crap for white people to waste money on. This is wealth redistribution I can get behind.

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Subjective value is the same nonsense. 'No better' doesn't mean 'right'* and it certainly doesn't mean you have any sense of what the world would look like without states (which I don't think is even possible).

And while all of this awesome stuff is thanks to capitalism, it's also thanks to historic knowledge, science, fossil fuels, new worlds, and political strife, and other stuff I'm not yet aware of.

But as to it being hard to state that any trade is definitively one sided, there was a bidding war between two channels for some show. Both sides got caught up in the emotion of the event and the winner eventually ended up MASSIVELY overpaying for the product and it was roundly seen as a bust by all observers (except, of course, the producers of the show). I read the example in Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahnmann. Maybe I'll dig it up later.

edit: *There was a time where there was no better explanation of the stars movement through the sky than the Earth was the center of it all. And when they noticed that some stars seemed to move backwards for a period before moving in congress with the rest of the stars, instead of invalidating the no-better theory, they simply added epicycles to it to account for the anomolies. These stars were planets and these epicycles masked their misunderstanding further, they didn't help explain anything. I see the same mistake being made with utility.

Profits are always a positive, they feed the economy. It's how those profits are created that's the problem, that can definitely be bad or good. Something not being zero sum does not mean one person's profits are never someone else's losses, just that it's not the case always. Likewise as a response to the earlier comment about the poker analogy, it's irrelevant whether poker is zero sum or not, that just changes the outcomes of people's choices, not their motivations or ability to detect the correct choice.

Re: non-profit organizations in free markets, sure, they would probably exist just the same as they do now, perhaps a bit less since now even not for profit activities make economic sense taxation-wise. I'm not saying thats a net good thing, but its nevertheless an incentive that might lessen non-profit activity in a deregulated environment.

Anyway, if we ignore nonprofits since they are more or less fringe cases in both scenarios, we're left with either a completely profit-driven model, or one with both profit-driven and publicly funded activities. I personally can only see one of these models producing vital basic research, which has no foreseeable profit expectations, only huge expenses.

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Originally Posted by CoccoBill

http://www.bath.ac.uk/research/news/...-eu-directive/

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This does not support your position. This is entirely about lobbying government for special treatment. This is something that doesn't happens to near this extent without regulatory monopolies.

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It's all about who controls said entities.

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No. It is about the revenue streams of those entities. One is consumer choice, the other is mandates. These create entirely different effects.

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About all of this the one thing that most puzzles me is that you're both saying a regulation free alternative has never been attempted and if only we tried it, miracles would happen.

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I am not. I am bringing the claims of the field of economics to you. It has been overwhelmingly demonstrated that market reforms that expand choice are responsible for prosperity growth all across the world in every variable society. This is not me talking, this is the field of economics talking.



It appears I'm basically done with this. I recommend engaging material by actual economists. They say much different things than the general public believe.

I feel as if I've acquitted myself poorly in this page of the thread. Just putting that out there. I'm kind of stressed out and it's hurting my ability to debate this topic.

Shit, sorry. I'm a vampire for knowledge and you (two) have pushed into the world of economics and let me follow. I've been excitable and fighty for no constructive reason recently. At least it's Saturday... I assume they still have Saturdays where-ever the fuck you are.

edit PS guys argue about economics on the internet and end up talking about their feelings, thanks feminism!

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Originally Posted by wufwugy

This does not support your position. This is entirely about lobbying government for special treatment. This is something that doesn't happens to near this extent without regulatory monopolies.

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I believe it does. It demonstrates the enormous amounts they have available to support their case, and that theyre willing and able to do it. In part having a centralized target for policy lobbying makes attacking easier, but at the same time there's regulation in place to limit them. While the effect is arguably greter in a regulated model, it's naive to think they'd be powerless in a deregulated environment.

I also had some other things written here but the internet ate it and now am drunked.

CoccoBill, where do you live?

The country that got robbed their place in the quarter finals by refs against the czechs.

...crossreferencing...

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Originally Posted by CoccoBill

I believe it does. It demonstrates the enormous amounts they have available to support their case, and that theyre willing and able to do it. In part having a centralized target for policy lobbying makes attacking easier, but at the same time there's regulation in place to limit them. While the effect is arguably greter in a regulated model, it's naive to think they'd be powerless in a deregulated environment.

I also had some other things written here but the internet ate it and now am drunked.

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That "enormous amount" is fractional compared to what it would take without a legal monopoly to guarantee special treatment. The "centralized target making it easier to lobby" gives them several magnitudes (yes, magnitudes) more capacity to distort outcomes, and "the regulation to limit them" is not that big of a negative for them and is in lots of ways a positive.

I did not say that markets make them powerless, but that they make them powerless to achieve what you think they can. Every concern every person has about companies that are big and rich distorting outcomes is created by special treatment and market distortions created by the legitimized taxing monopolies. The left-wing view has it completely backwards. Economists are not afraid of greedy individuals, they're afraid of overreaching tax monopolies. The pursuit of self-interest is a necessary driver of competition and a thriving society. Legitimized tax monopolies stymie this by legitimizing specific interests.

Milton Friedman is your friend. He is considered the best economics communicator in history. Start here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3N2sNnGwa4

Finland. I think you just asked me this like 5 years ago, sheesh.

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Originally Posted by CoccoBill

Finland. I think you just asked me this like 5 years ago, sheesh.

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...crossreferencing...

Oh, South Africa!

I knew I knew it. You seem like a South African.

These were recently posted on Scott Sumner's blog so I can easily find them again. http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=29278

Main street of an economic free trade zone experiment in China in 1981:

http://www.themoneyillusion.com/wp-c...6.21.04-PM.png

Same place, 2013:

http://www.themoneyillusion.com/wp-c....21.24-PM1.png



The result is basically magic. There is no regulatory regime that can produce a fraction of this level of success. In fact, this success only happened because of market reforms stripping away regulations that were holding the region in poverty.

Perhaps people like governmental regulations because they're "rules" and rules are good. But they just don't work in systems so complex that they're governed by macroeconomic forces. Rules adopted by individuals, communities, and companies by choice are fantastic, but rules adopted by governments are the greatest unforced error of our time. Generations far in the future will be baffled by the amount of misery we caused by our stoicism to the state.

I love this. While we're showing cards, A Modern History of Hong Kong showed me that HK enjoyed two basic periods of perfect political lassie-fair free market growth and they fucking boomed in both periods, but it also showed that eventually the Japanese will come and rape your women and then decades later the Chinese will insist upon total control. And even the boom periods were built upon British stability and a British Justice System that was and is and will ever be the envy of the world.