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As I said, all three of those things will have resources devoted to them simultaneously at any given time. There isn't an order of importance or priority that's etched in stone. Each of those...

I don't think it's appropriate to cite for-profit universities as examples of market failures for the same reason that you shouldn't cite health insurance companies as such. These industries are...

In all likelihood, all of the above. A properly run business will devote resources to increasing cost effectiveness and development, to marketing and to improving the product, in a ratio of...

No, but you're asking the wrong question. Our generation is certainly exposed to more edifying stimuli per unit time. The average 30 year old today knows FAR more than the average 30 year old of...

Also, re: the price-jacker, public pressure is causing him to lower the price. I think people really underestimate the power of public outcry and reputation harm in markets. They are often able to...

All we need is a politics that is friendly toward capitalism. All problems of racism and corruption aside, the U.S. from 1800-1900 and to a lesser extent 1900-1960 embodied this. Compared with most...

Problems of human frailty are exacerbated by concentrating power. In capitalism, a selfish asshole does selfish things with his own property. In politics, the same selfish asshole does the same...

The part you're missing is that the price is not a objective quantity. The same product can be made by different means and for different costs. You don't seem to have a problem with the free market...

Government adds a couple of important wrinkles to this situation:

1) Intellectual property laws make it far too easily to monopolize. It's an open debate among free-marketeers of how IP should...

A universal basic income no strings attached is actually a hell of a lot better than a conventional welfare state in a lot of ways. Of course, only if it supplants the welfare state, and doesn't add...

Countries with high minimum wages tend to be rich countries. Those countries are rich for a complicated lot of reasons that have little to do with minimum wage laws. In a way, they have the...

You're kind of appealing to tradition though. It's certainly a reasonable assumption that things are the way things are because they needed to be that way at one point in time, but it's also quite...

Overfishing is solely caused by the ocean being a common good. They aren't owned by anyone so it's a gigantic tragedy of the commons. The only ways to mitigate that problem are a) allow private...

Sorry I badly misquoted the medicare budget, counting it with other mandatory spending to make up about 2/3. This includes Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, welfare, student loans, and interest...

MMM I'm pretty sure the point of wuf's post wasn't to compare theft to welfare in the sense of them both being morally wrong. It was to suggest that someone receiving free shit from the system can...

Actually welfare, food stamps, and unemployment make up a pretty small part of the budget. Medicare is what we should really be talking about, it's something like 2/3 of the federal budget and...

Points taken. I'm dealing with some very stupid people in twoplustwo politics and it is possible that my frustration is seeping from that to my posts in this thread. It is not intentional.

To be...

The theory backs up my case more strongly than the data. There haven't really been any post-industrial states that haven't robbed their citizenry blind. There is plenty of data to correlate the...

Let's just say that I am highly confident that the unemployment rate and median income would be dramatically improved if the state wasn't squandering so much of our resources. I don't know the exact...

The problem with your (MMM) anecdote about benefiting from the welfare state is that it presupposes an identical universe except with you not having the unemployment benefits. In a world where the...

Fewer is correct when the thing is countable, and less is correct when it isn't countable. For example, you can have less rice, less gasoline, less water, but you can only have fewer kilograms of...

The libertarian community is pretty split on IP laws, there's a lot of good debate to be found on youtube about it. The only consensus seems to be that they suck and are counter productive as they...

I'm totally cool with this, my fear (and the reason I started this thread) is that many/most of the regulations are borne out of blatant economic fallacies, and not science and evidence.

Many laws are unjust and involuntary. Was slavery voluntary for black people? It isn't as if they subject every tax law to an annual popular vote to see if they should remain with us. Political...

I believe 6 trillion dollars is an unbelievable amount of money to take out of only 300 million people's pockets. I brought up the point that its low compared to western euro nations only to show...