Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

:)

If you don’t want someone to know your email address, why do you give it to them?

If you are looking for someone to get angry at, pal, I suggest you get a mirror, because the only one “violating” your privacy is yourself.

Violated your pseudonym how?!?

It can’t be anything else because that’s the only thing I have ever done with your email address. I certainly haven’t emailed you, or given it to anybody. I haven’t broken any confidence because:

I I haven’t said anything about you that you haven’t said publicly on this forum.

II You haven’t given me any confidences to protect, except for your email address which, again, I haven’t given out to anyone.

Why do you feel unsafe? Has someone been threatening you?

However, you have violated my trust and I therefore deem it unsafe to continue participation here. Goodbye to all, and best wishes.

Chepe, what are you talking about?

Oh, tarran, tarran, tarran, tarran. How’s that for one-upsmanship? ;-)

I’m sorry I don’t have the time to respond to your lengthy post in equal detail. You have taken the time to explain your thinking with thoroughness and civility, and you deserve a commensurate response, but I have a busy day ahead of me, so I must perforce be less complete.

Your arguments in the matter of private versus public crime prevention suffer from several weaknesses. In the first place, you rely heavily upon group economic sanctions to enforce fair play in the marketplace. I remind you that such mechanisms are already in use and still fail to prevent economic crimes. Consumer Reports has been publishing for decades, but criminal prosecutions for fraud have not withered.

A second weakness in your argument is its reliance on civil suits. I have noticed other libertarians relying on civil litigation to replace criminal law. This is a bad idea for four reasons:

1. It makes it easier for the rich (who can afford expensive lawyers) to perpetrate crimes against the poor (who cannot). This is unjust.

2. Civil litigation is slow. A typical criminal case is resolved in about a year; a civil case takes maybe twice that.

3. Civil litigation is expensive. Even when both sides can afford it, taking a case to trial usually costs more than $100K.

4. But most important, civil litigation in the absence of controlling law substitutes the majority opinion of a jury for the majority opinion of all society. How can you possibly be better off relying on the majority opinion of a small group than a big group? How do you know you won’t happen to come up with some oddballs on the jury? If your daughter were raped, and two of the jurors were fundamentalist Christians who held that girls who dress provocatively deserve to be raped, and another three jurors were guys who’ve been turned down too often and regard all women as teases — well, I think you can see where this goes.

Civil litigation is no substitute for criminal law. The history of law shows a clear trend: societies start off with private justice and a rough-and-ready kind of tort law adjudicated by senior leaders; they find that this approach is too time-consuming and fails to command the respect of the losers (who often resort to violence); they attempt to ameliorate the problem by defining the most clear-cut types of crime and handling them according to an established procedure; as they build experience, they add to the body of criminal law, thereby codifying the best practices that have emerged from the case-by-case tort litigation; and eventually they have a large body of criminal law. What you are suggesting is a reversal of this process to the level last seen several thousand years ago.

You express a belief common to libertarians: that all social policies must be based on objectively provable arguments. The problem here is that values are fundamentally subjective. There is no objective basis for even the most elementary social rule. For example, there is no objective way to prove that murder is wrong or should be forbidden. The only basis for our strictures against murder is common social consent — majority rule. Libertarians seem to hate the notion of majority rule, but there is simply no way to determine social values without somebody, somewhere laying down rules, and I prefer the majority to any small group.

Lastly, I couldn’t let this one get by:

Every society eventually falls. The more peaceful anarchic ones tend to survive about 300 years.

Actually, it’s the other way around. The longest-surviving polity was the Byzantine Empire, which lasted for just over a thousand years — and was neither peaceful nor anarchic. Another record-setter was, believe it or not, the Mongol empire founded by Ghengis Khan. A tiny fragment of it lingered in the region east of the Caspian Sea until 1921. Mongols weren’t very peaceful or anarchic, either. By contrast, the more anarchic societies survived only as long as their more organized neighbors didn’t bother to molest them. Among these are the Tuareg of North Africa, the Inuit of North America, the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, and the Bushmen of southern Africa. Yes, it’s possible to have an anarchic society that endures — so long as you live in a hostile environment that nobody else wants to live in and you keep your population density way down.

I must go now. I have enjoyed my time here and I must say, the discussions here have been more civil, informative, and reasoned than I usually find elsewhere on the web. However, you have violated my trust and I therefore deem it unsafe to continue participation here. Goodbye to all, and best wishes.

Your notion of security, and that of Molinari, is good for dealing with violent crime. It is utterly useless against other forms of crime. How do you hire a security firm to protect you against fraud?

Uhmmm, you don’t. That’s what consumer protection organizations are for. For example Consumer Union tests products and publishes reports on how shoddy they are. Hell, they used to do drug testing back before there was an FDA. People who depend on repeat custom for their livelihood will work to preserve their reputation, and in the end the only way to do that is to produce a good product. Sooner or later the reputation of a shoddy businessman takes a dive.

If somebody sells you a used car and you find that they misrepresented it, do you direct your hired goons go and break his legs?

In the absence of fraud statutes, fraud prevention can happen in one of two ways. The owner of the market, for example E-Bay or Elance would require people selling goods via their market to put up bonds or agree to other anti-fraud guarantees. Alternately, if two people are doing business, you could put in an arbitration clause into a contract as standard boilerplate.

Of course, in the end should you be defrauded, you would not have the option of breaking legs. The most you could do is to attempt to sue to recover damages. If he won’t cooperate, you publish your accusations against him. If he ends to commit fraud alot, eventually he will have trouble finding people willing to do business with him and will be forced to either take up a life of autarky or to clean up his act.

And in fact, how does your security firm handle violent crimes after the fact? Your daughter comes home weeping; she was raped. So what does your security firm do? Lynch the guy she thinks might have raped him? And what if HIS security firm wants to protect him? Does your security firm have a war with his security firm? This is craziness!!!

Again, you, or your daughter sues her attacker. If he refuses to cooperate in reimbursing her for the injury he caused you publish his name far and wide, and that will make it harder for him to find a victim next time. Contrast this with the present system, wherein a bunch of guys kidnaps the rapist, locks him up in a cage, and forces your daughter to pay a portion of his maintenance.

AS to competing security firms, I suspect since wars between security firms would be very costly to their bottom lines, they would tend to negotiate agreements.

You know, hundreds of very intelligent people have been researching this stuff for well over a century now. They have actually analyzed all of the objections you are throwing out.Here’s a nice little library on the subject.

I know you hate being given lots of reading, but, frankly, this is a complicated subject.

Now, back to the actual topic at hand:

But over the long run, a society without a strong scientific foundation will find itself economically depressed. Right now you and I are enjoying the fruits of government research from many years ago. Our parents sacrificed their immediate well-being for our own well-being — and the ROI of their sacrifice is enormous. Sure, we could all have a gay old time if we didn’t invest in the future — but we wouldn’t have a future.

Except as the writers of the paper pointed out, there is no correlation between GDP growth and funding for basic research. The time-lag they are finding is effectively infinite.

Read pages 19-24 again. They explain the incentives that promote basic research in the private sector.

Again, you are emotionally, and without evidence, that someone has to force people to invest in things that will improve their lives. This is poppycock. What you are doing is substituting what you think people should invest in in place of the investments they would actually desire to make. sure, if you get away with it, you are better off, but by necessity, you have left them worse off since you have prevented them from investing in the stuff that they want the most.

At this point, I ask yo to do a thought experiment. Let us assume that the United States suffers some sort of disaster that wrecks the economy – for example a bacterium that gobbles up all petroleum products such as plastics and oil etc. Overnight, the U.S. economy is thrown back to a level of productivity similar to that of the early 19th century, let us say we need 7 people farming to feed every 10 people again. At this point, would you increase, maintain or decrease the funding for the NSF?

I think most people would say that the funding should be decreased since now people have to devote more of their labor to subsistence and the previous levels of investment are no longer a good idea. So the NSF budget would be slashed, and scientists would go back to working the fields or whatever. Yet as time progressed, the economy would continue to grow and people would invent new productivity multipliers and, who knows, within a century or so, things could be back to 20th century levels of wealth creation.

The point being is that there is some level of investment that you think is a good idea. That level changes depending on changing circumstances. I too have some level of investment that also fluctuates, but is probably different from yours. Extend this over millions of people, and you have millions of different levels of interest in funding basic research. So, Mr Noyon, which of these millions of people is right? What makes you so special that you should be permitted to override their desires with your own? ;)

You made quite a leap in the end when you flipped from talking about utilitarianism to strong government. The two have nothing in common. My point remains unaddressed: societies that give higher priority to ideology than pragmatism fail in the real, practical world. They may die nobly, but die they will.

Chepe sweetie,

Every society eventually falls. The more peaceful anarchic ones tend to survive about 300 years. Compare that with the U.S. which is wracked by war every generation, and suffers massive dislocations such as the Great depression every 50 years or so.

Utilitarianism, as you are arguing for it, is what you get when a persons life or property can be seized based on a perceived benefit to the majority. Let us ignore the fact that what really occurs in such situations is that some elite is making that decision based on their personal judgment. To act, they need a mechanism to actually carry out their thefts. I could, for example, conclude that you should be forced to write a computer game for the benefit of society, but without some mechanism to put my idea into practice, my idea would just be an unfulfilled wish. Thus, a society that is premised upon utilitarian lines must have lots of aggressive violence. Now, the only way one can have lots of aggressive violence, and not have chaos and wholesale death and destruction is in the presence of a strong government. Thus, the ideal utilitarian society is one that has a strong central government.

Furthermore, it is literally impossible to make utilitarian calculations. For example, let us say that I propose to seize your company for the good of society and hand it over to a person whom I judge to be more able at managing it. Obviously this hurts you. How much? Are you 15 Hendrics less happy? Is that offset by me being 6 Hendrics happier and the person who I give the job to being 12 Hendrics happier?

Of course, you could argue that one should look at GDP or some other such measurement. Except that these measurements are quite ridiculous. Take GDP for example. All goods and services produced in an economy are multiplied by some conversion factor to arrive at a dollar figure. How are these conversion prices arrived at? I may judge gold to be a wonderful thing and worth 100 bushels of apples. You on the other hand think that 1 oz of gold is worth half a bushel of apples since you hate gold and really like apples. Whose conversion factor should we use?

Utilitarian calculations are literally impossible. And thus, utilitarianism really boils down to people in group A pushing people in Group B around and laying claim to B members’ labor. In other words, utilitarianism, in practice boils down to oligarchy. Oligarchies tend to be fine and dandy for the oligarchs and a chore for everyone else. Needless to say, oligarchies are not in any ways guarantors of prosperity.

In the end, you are behaving somewhat like a North Korean peasant who thanks “Dear Leader” whenever anything good happens regardless of whether the Dear Leader was involved or not.

You neglected to account for the many other factors that have contributed to the growth in “material well-being” such as the increase in annual labor hours per household, the decrease in transportation costs (paved the way for cheap imports), and god knows what else. You also didn’t account for what the free market would have accomplished in the absence of government funding.

Eliminate all of the ancillary variables, subtract the total cost (including interest) from the total benefit and then we’ll talk about whether “it’s obvious that the benefit exceeds the [cost].”

in terms of material well-being, we’re much better off today than they were in the Fifties.

Ok. Come see me when you get to the “causation” part.