Re: A New Hope For the Working Engineer

And we come full circle: Who did I steal it from?

The question you fresue to answer!

Who did I steal my computer from? Now, remember, in order for something to be stolen, it can't have been freely traded.

Which means that you're full of hot air, since there is no unfair pay-- they were happy to get paid, they agreed to it, therefore its fair.

You're really a tin pot dictator, aren't you?

You and I both know that I am the one who has been honest here... which is why I'm calm, while you are tearing your hair out.

It doesn't have to be this way.

Your claim to "honesty" just means that you have either a poor, or a very selective memory.

Got any evidence for this claim? It is a lot to read into a seven word declarative sentence.

You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Go away and try to learn what honest arguement involves.

------- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

------------------- We won't have to, you'll starve because you can't buy food without doing your job.

---------------------- Nope, they will be killed immediately by public torture and their relatives forbidden to ever mention their name.

----------------------- We don't need a warrant to will do spot checks of absolutely everywhere. You can live in a hole and eat bugs.

-------------------------- Nope, hasn't. The methods are universal, that's what confuses you. This will be a system nobody even WANTS to frustrate, you'll have far too much to lose and so much to gain by cooperating. No rent, no eviction, universal health, power, education, DSL and cable, educational TV that isn't crap, no worries, simply work a part time job in a pleasant surrounding and sign up for more work if you want to buy a consumer item. You own your home property and can modify it the way you want without ANY restrictions except public health danger. No landlords, no debt, no opression.

--------------------------- Only the rich would see it as "enslavement", and only because THEY would be forbidden to enslave others!! The rich see enslaving others as some kind of a weird "freedom". That's a LIE! Steve

---------------

-Steve

-------------- Obviously not very well. Nobody broke any windows.

--------------- He's a hack with a brainwashed high-school-level education. Steve

---------------------- Criminals, sure.

But for anyone harmless who simply works their simple part time job will have a home of their own and the chance to buy whatever they wish if they sign up for the additional work, and they can go back to minimum when they wish.

------------------------ No, you're just a liar, you have to LIE in service to your pet theory because you can't actually THINK!

-Steve

--

-Steve Walz snipped-for-privacy@armory.com ftp://ftp.armory.com/pub/user/rstevew Electronics Site!! 1000's of Files and Dirs!! With Schematics Galore!!

good.

is

arugment

cooperative.

------------------------ Stealing begins and ends WHENEVER YOU cause a man to work more hours for YOU than YOU do for HIM and try to call that a fair bargain!!!

------------------------------------- No, that's just your lie, but it's a novel spelling.

----------------------------------- Nope, that's a thieve's criteria.

A starving man is an illegal target of your trade because he has had all REAL choice removed by circumstances.

A man facing eviction for example has no ability to bargain for living quarters. These all become situations in which YOU drive the inequity intentionally, or else you merely opportune upon it, and both are criminal and must be banned and punished.

---------------------------- That's like pretending that it's all on the up-and-up when you stop hitting someone and they like it!! They are happy if they are starving to get back only a little of what you stole, but that doesn't mean that you were right to steal the REST of it!!

------------------------------ Irrelevant, lying, and disingenuous. You want to steal and not be punished, you're merely a criminal!

-Steve

I fell asleep. Remind me about what the f*ck you're buzzing on and on about.

Go away and try to learn.

It was actually a pretty deep point all by itself, if take the careful time to think about it and remember your Western Civilization courses. Transitions to sedentary groups had an almost invarient social stratification which took place, then. (Except, it appears, for the New Guinea population which also invented agriculture about 7000 years ago and never did stratify

-- still rather egalitarian, there. Perhaps they just didn't develop the gene others did.) Anyway, some people took advantage of accidental providence or sheer strategy to place themselves in better circumstances and to keep it that way. It's easy to see how evolution may encourage that as a successful phenotype. But social progress is often a matter of opposing those natural tendencies -- certainly, the development of the scientific method qualifies, in this regard.

Anyway, I hadn't been following any of these conversations except to skip over them. But this one stuck out as a gem, all by itself. Didn't even need a context.

Jon

Go away, I wasn't talking to you.

You need to learn how to construct some kind of sequential arguement, before we can get onto difficult concepts like "honest" and "dishonest".

Actual Geek can more or less manage that (though his attention span leaves something to be desired) and in this respect he leaves you trailing in the dust.

----- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

You are repeating my complaint against you back at me?

Sorry, that just shows I was right in the first place (And you're not very creative.)

But then, if you had an argument in support of socialism (say, one that doesn't involve pretending that walmart doesn't exist, or that capitalism is failing in ways it isn't) you'd present it (we'd hope.)

Until you do, you have nothing.

On the contrary, here living in a land that is far from the workers "paradise" you advocate, I am not starving. On the other hand, when we've had starvation in the last 100 years, it was always when people were trying to create the system you describe.

Funny how starvation is so closely correlated with socialism. Could it be a coincidence? Or have you got a better explanation>?

Yes, and after you kill everyone with ability, what will you do then? Stalin did this and millions starved. There's that starvation again.

Ah, the totalitarian petty dictator comes out!

You must have some mighty insecurities to drive you to such a level of psychosis!

Yes, that's always the cumon with you guys. But as you admitted below-- there is no freedom in that society-- if you disagree, if you think different, you will be hunted down and killed.

So, as you clearly indicate, you are offering slavery with allegedly nice perks--- and you don't even have a way to show how there won't be mass starvation as has happened in the past when people sold the very same snake oil you're selling.

You're a psychopath-- you have repeatedly called for mass death, and advocated the starvation, or execution of millions.

I've got news for you Steve, when you come to try and kill me, you will be the one who dies.

No freedom, no intellectualism allowed, nothing but oppression, and death, is your proposal.

Ah yes, if we only did what you told us, under penalty of death to do- we'd truely be free!

Doing what we want is slavery, you say! Ha!

You're definately a psychotic. Just like all socialists... you're just aren't hiding it very well.

Getting back on the point.

Bill, you have failed to show how there's an information problem in capitalism, and you haven't even tried to explain why we need to solve it.

Finally, you would then need to explain how a centralized economy would be able to do a better job than a distributed one... given that distributed economies are successful because decisions get made at the place where the people with the most understanding of the situation can make the decision.

Every centrally planned economy in the history of the world has failed, or been far less successful than less centrally planned economies of similar conditions.

Just look at what's happened in India in the last 20 years since they gave up central planning and curtailed government interference-- they have doubled the incomes, on average, of a billion people.

They've done more in 20 years to defeat poverty-- using capitalism-- than all the socialist systems ever tried.

Frankly, capitalism is the cure for poverty, and it works every time.

Krugman has been hoping for a return of depression economics for decades. Any problem faced by the economy at large will be faced by the regulators of the economy. There is hubris in pretending that you know what the market is supposed to be doing, and Krugman just can't shake that control fetish. Let the decentralized decisions of market participants act on the information they have and regulate to the least extent possible, and you might avoid a catastrophic unintended consequence of regulations that affect all market participants.

It works surprisingly well because people make continual adjustments every second of every day. Check the price of ten million Harry Potter books the day after they are bought and compare it to the price of a

The price, at least theoretically, contains all of the information you might be interested in, doesn't it?

That is a murky issue. I don't know that I'd hold up India as an example of notably less government interference than most other developing countries, it only has less government interference than it used to have. Its reduction in regulation allowed it to grow at all, which was not the case before. To compare across countries would be a much larger task.

Japan, for example, flung open the export doors right out of the gate. A good portion of their growth had to do with the extent to which they adopted market friendly policies. We will never know exactly, of course. Krugman would argue one way and P.T. Bauer would argue the other looking at the same cases.

It doesn't work poorly. It only works poorly if you discount charitable giving from poverty alleviation, and if you discount that the amount of goods available for redistribution is greater.

More productive? I would have to see those figures. You are telling me that countries with near infinite unemployment benefits, mandatory 30 hour work weeks, mandatory breaks during the day for all laborers, regulations that prevent anyone from firing incompetent labor, and extremely high debt to GDP ratios have more productive labor forces?

Will Hutton's "The World We're In"

Lots of books paint pictures about the U.S. Not all pictures are accurate. Europe has been waiting for us to grow up and become civilized socialists with no respect for individual liberty for a long time. We just as a culture have different ideas about what constitutes progress. A state where everyone can wait in line for an asprin with equal ability has some virtues, but so does a state where some people can get brain surgery.

Go read your Keynes. The decentralised decisions of the market participants is what makes pure free market economies unstable, and Krugman identifies the "decentralised decisions" of the currency speculators and the hedge funds as major contributors to the Asian crashes of the late 1990's (which is what he was actually writing about).

This is arrant "perfect free market" propaganda. Go read Keynes.

No. Because the price reflects the pressures of the moment. If the price of 747's goes through the floor, Boeing still has about a year's production stacked up in the factory in various states of completion. Harry Potter books can be reprinted and distributed a lot more quickly.

The metal markets are unstable for the same sort of reason - is the price of a metal creeps up, the owners of various more or less marginal mines are persuaded to invest the money to pump out the mine-shafts again and get the machinery running so they can extract the relevant mineral, all of which takes time. When they finally start shipping ore, the market is suddenly over-supplied, and the price crashes.

Why do you think that it was "the reduction in regulation that allowed it to grow at all"?

Japan is almost as good as the U.S.A. at using non-tariff barriers to trade to protect the domestic market while exporting furiously. I don't know exactly what you meant to say with "flung open the export doors right out of the gate" but they certainly protected their domestic market, and they still do.

In the U.S.A. the poor are getting poorer. Poverty is not being cured, but made worse. Capitalism is *not* working as a cure for poverty in the U.S.A.

Get hold of Will Hutton's book and track down the academic studies that he references.

I've received unemployment benefit in the Netherlands. It wasn't generous.

Until the end of May I was working a 40-hour week, which is perfectly normal. Some unions have negotiated 37 hour weeks. Mandatory thirty hour weeks sound like the stuff of right-wing propaganda.

Half an hour for lunch? And you don't get paid for it.

They don't prevent you from firing incompetents, you just have to go through a multi-stage procedure, and document each stage, and that only if you managed to miss the incompetence in the first six months of employment.

Yep. Some of them do. Read the book. Chase up the references. Wash out some of that propaganda that seems to fouling up your world-view.

This book has a twelve and a half page list of references cited, and fourteen and a half pages of specific citations. Will Hutton knows the published literature.

Why do you think that European socialist have no respect for individual liberty? Certain capitalist excesses are illegal, but in most respects the Europeans are less picky than the U.S. about behaviour that doesn't create immediate problems for other people. The Netherlands is famously liberal about soft drugs and same sex relationships - to name two areas where the U.S. has a number of fatuous and unenforceable laws which demonstrate a singular lack of respect for individual liberty.

If you've got money, you can buy exactly the same level of health care in (Western) Europe as you can in the U.S. If you haven't got money, you may have to wait a bit for your brain surgery (for non-emergency operations), but it will be performed every bit as well. Averaged over the population as a whole, (Western)European health care performs better than the U.S. system, which fails the poor quite badly - and in the sense of not catching up with infectious diseases as well as it might, it also fails to protect the rich as well as more comprehensive systems do.

------- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Which complaint? The main point that I was making above was that your claim that Steve was "tearing his hair out" was not supported by any evidence.

I'm actually quite creative, but there isn't a lot to be said about relentlessly superficial fatuities - even Steve doesn't find you worth serious abuse.

Free market capitalism is failing to provide a stable business environment, it doesn't provide full employment, and it doesn't seem to be compatible with the sustainable exploitation of natural resources.

Keynesian constrained-market capitalism did seem to keep the instabilites of of the market under control, and did seem to be able to get a lot closer to full employment. You probably think that Keynes was a socialist - he wasn't, and voted with the liberals in the House of Lords when he was made a lord.

The slightly socialist-tinged economies of western Europe aren't as Keynesian as they ought to - the introduction of the euro gave the bankers a lot too much power - but they do reasonably well. The lip-service to socialism provides a mechanism for getting sustainability via the market, by charging extra for the depletion of a finite resoure, but it doesn't actually seem to be happening yet.

My basic arguement was that some - as yet unspecified - system which had access to all the information we collect about the things we buy and sell should be able to do better than the current system which is controlled by just the aggregated cash prices on the days when things are bought and sold.

I imagine that such a system would have to rely on distributed control, rather than the central planning which used to be so popular with socialist administrations, but I'm not doctriniare.

Since I'm not arguing in support of socialism, you don't seem to understand what the arguement is about. The "nothing" here seems to be your failure to be able think outside the "capitalist versus socialist" box.

------ Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I've read Keynes. While it may come as a shock to many in your neck of the woods, there are numerous perfectly respectable economists with Nobel bona fides since Keynes who would tend to disagree. As a matter of fact, Keynes, Galbraith, and their cheerleader Krugman are the minority view holders these days.

I wonder what they would have to say about the state of Japan's economy, which is the most Keynesian in existence. Protectionism leads to inefficient companies that can't compete. Comparative advantage works. Public spending projects result most often not in fantastic growth, but in boondoggles that flush hard earned money down the toilet.

Keynes was incorrect about the benevolent effects of interference. Go read any of the monetarists, or any public choice economist, or any of the Austrians to see why.

This is less true than it used to be, as most production facilities use 'just in time' tactics to minimize the amount of warehousing they have to do. The question isn't whether the price as it currently exists isn't distorted by inefficiencies, the question is whether the price becomes more or less distorted when some self interested political body tells everyone what the price 'should' be. To address the problems you raise here, we should be focusing on a reduction of interference with pricing signals and let technology and the self interest of companies work to improve each of their contributions to the price of a good.

I'm surprised that companies haven't figured this out yet. I would think that this would only occur when the price of metal shoots up rather than when it creeps. What you are calling instability is the market working to meet demand. It just isn't happening as quickly as you would like for it to. Again I ask, why on earth would you prefer for a bureaucrat to tell everyone what the price of metal should be?

The central planning approach produced 0 growth. A few decades ago, markets were liberalized to some small extent and growth occurred. Coincidence, maybe?

Japan is much, much better at protecting inefficient domestic businesses than is the US. Of course, the more people who do this, the less effective it is, even in the short run. Over the long run, you have a bunch of crippled, uncompetitive companies.

I mean that the Japanese dedication to exporting their way to growth worked, but their dedication to domestic protectionism didn't.

On what basis are you arguing that the poor are getting poorer?

Interesting. I met a guy in Canada from where I thought was the Netherlands, though it might have been a Scandanavian country based on your comments, whose friend was an engineer. He had decided to stop working and fish. All he had to do was show up at an office every so often, and he got benefits in proportion to what he had formerly earned.

He hadn't held a job in 5 years and had no intention of doing so in the future.

Talk to your pals in Italy.

Talk you your pals in Germany, France, and Italy.

News from Italy and France is that they had labor riots when companies wanted to fire unproductive employees and the laws were going to be changed to allow them to do so.

Propaganda comes in all flavors. The left flavor is no more accurate.

No disagreement about the drugs and sex, but those are not artifacts of socialism or capitalism. A system which claims half of one's productive life for 'the public good' has no respect for individual liberty. It has no respect for who earned the money, it has no respect for the decisions which might otherwise be made. Confiscation of earned wealth is confiscation of the portion of one's life it took to earn that wealth.

Odd. We didn't really have a SARS outbreak here, yet Canada did. How many poor people can't go to the hospital here in the US? I'd just like to be sure how badly the US system fails. Don't confuse uninsured with not treated.

That Nobel prize was a scandal. The economists involved aren't respectable. They work with an unrealistic theory which doesn't predict worth a damn, but has the singular advantageof producing the sort of predictions and advice that the short-sighted rich want to hear. The Republican party loves them, and they gets loads of support. They aren't economists, merely flatterers.

Hutton is another of these voices in the wilderness. I first started reading his stuff when he had a weekly column in the Guardian newspaper in the U.K. in the later 1980's. One of his habits was second-guessing U.K. treasury decisions - when they did anything he'd explain why, what they intended to achieve, and predict what they would actually achieve. Six months later he'd write an "I told you so" paragraph.

Because the U.K. Treasury was full of "respectable" economists at that time, hand-picked for ideological purity by Margaret Thatcher herself, this was to some extent shooting sitting ducks, but it made the point about the predictive power of monetarist economics.

So why aren't they printing money to spend their way out of the deflationary spiral? Because the central bank isn't anythihg like Keynesian enough ...

So why is Dubbya protecting your inefficient steel producers?

in fantastic growth, but in boondoggles that flush hard earned money down the

So why is Dubbya spending so disporportionately much on defence?

The monetarists tell the story that the rich want to hear. Put them in charge of an economy - as Thatcher did in the U.K. and watch your GDP per head fall behind that of comparable economies with less ideologically blinkered policies.

The problem with manufacturing goods is not just price, but also volume. The rule of thumb is that if you can increse the volume by a factor of ten, you can halve the price. Tooling up to do this takes time and demands investment.

Keynes wasn't in the least interested in telling the market what the price ought to be. He was interested in manipulating the expectations of the people who were in the process of making their minds up about making this sort of investment, and his preferred method involved using the central banks to manipulate the money supply.

Monetarists postulate a perfect market, so they don't believe in investor expectations, and find this sort of manipulation heretical. This suites the central bankers down to the ground - they can keep on behaving as if they were running a bank,rather than an economy. Both groups effectively stick their heads in the sand.

They have, but eventually the potential profits get too tempting, and away we go again. Commoditiy markets are horribly cyclic.

No. With better information, it should be possible for the producers to make realistic predictions of demand, and negotiate where the extra capacity should come from and when it should come on line. This is - in principle - agreement in restrain of trade, and not permissible in the current free market environment, which clearly needs to be made more flexible.

Quite possibly. Technology has changed a lot over the past few decades.

It may look like that to you, but sitting in the U.K. and exporting to both in the 1980's there wasn't a lot to choose between the two.

Not necessarily. Within-country competition ought to weed out the cripples. The volumes aren't as high as you'd get selling successfully into the world market, but large domestic markets, as in the U.S. and Japan, mean that the extra volume of exports doesn't give you any dramatic economies of scale.

Since this sort of protectionism was exactly what was used by the U.S.A. to protect and develop its own industries in the nineteenth century, you would seem to be argueing that the U.S. is afflicted with a bunch of crippled, uncompetitive companies - over and above the steel mills that Dubbya protected from the predatory Europeans earlier in his administration.

In what way?

It is a fairly well known fact. The specific line "the poorest 30 or 40 million have been slipping back" was lifted directly from Paul Krugman's "The Return of Depression Economics". Scientific American has published similar results in recent years. Will Hutton quotes Paul Krugmans 1994 book "Peddling Prosperity" when he mentions a similar figure.

In the Netherlands, if you are less than 57 you have to apply for a least one job per week to maintain your unemployment benefit.

Then he wouldn't be on unemployment benefit in the Netherlands, where it only runs for a limited time, but social security, which isn't generous and not related to your previous income. If he cycled to his fishing spots, and ate the fish he caught, he might get by, but he wouldn't have any drinking money.

Belesconi is probably the most right-wing of the European goverment heads, and owns most of the TV stations. He churns out as much anti-union propaganda as any American media magnate.

The French unions are certainly good at making outrageous demands at the start of their annual negotiations, but thirty hour working weeks are fantasy. The German rules are very like the Dutch - if they were different we'd have a flood of German firms starting in the Netherlands (I live within 8km of the border, and Nijmegen fills up with German shoppers every Saturday afternoon, because the German shops close at midday.)

My guess is that more scrupulous reporters would have talked about the law being changed to make it easier to fire unproductive employees - which doesn't usually mean incompetents, but rather what the English call "redundant workers", which is to say competent peple that the company doesn't think it can make money on at the moment. I got made redundant by Cambridge Instruments in the U.K. in November 1991 and collected $15,000 from the company in redundancy money.

You can understand why a company would want the law changed to make this easiier and cheaper, and why the employees would not.

Well, the "leftist propaganda" I'm giving you does seem to be pretty accurate, if not particularly leftist.

This doesn't follow. Tax levels represent choices about services to the citizen being publicly funded through tax, or privately funded through the usual market mechanisms. The choice of the U.K. conservative administration to "privatise" the railways may look like "respect for individual liberty" to you, but gave the travellers no more choice than they had had before, and in fact degraded the service actually offered by the railways down to U.S. levels of incompetence and inefficiency.

Claiming that a particular level of taxation represents "respect for individual liberty" and that another, slightly higher level doesn't, is ideological clap-trap.

More ideolological clap-trap. You are confusing technical issues of funding with ideological principles. Even you aren't going to privatise defense, which leaves you just slightly pregnant when it comes to the question of hiw you are going to fund it.

You didn't earn that wealth on a desert island. You relied on the roads that are maintained by the state (from your taxes), and the legal system paid for by the state (from your taxes), and the education system maintained by the state (from your taxes).

You want to keep all that you earn? Fine. Go off an earn it someplace where you don't rely on community supplied goods and services. And buy your own army to keep the local protection racket from ripping you off in exactly the same way as the government "rips you off" at home.

To get SARS in the first place you had to fly to China or Hong Kong. How often do poverty-stricken Americans and Canadians choose this as their vacation destination?

If you want to know how badly the U.S. health system fails, do a google search on "drug-resistant TB".

puts New York city (30.1%)third , behind Nepal (48%)and just just behind Gujarat state in India (33.8%) and well ahead of Bolivia (15.3%) for levels of drug-resistance in TB patients. The "best medical system in the world" performing at third world levels because it treats the poor as badly as third world systems do. A false economy.

------- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen