"Free Speech" in the EU
Mark Atwood
The EU seems to be unclear on the concept of this "Free Speech" thing.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/06/01/weu101.xml
Free speech, the judge told him, was not an absolute right. It
could not be used to justify certain offences, such as criticism of
the EU.
Hmm... if the right to free speech doesn't cover political speech,
what the hell is it for, then?!
For all the many current faults of the US and it's governments, the
right to criticize the government remains utterly absolute, despite
the best efforts of Democratic Party politicians [in the name of
"Campaign Finance Reform", actually targetted at gutting grass-rooted
funded political issues ads] and of University presidents to pretend
otherwise.
--
Mark Atwood | When you do things right,
m...@pobox.com | people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
http://www.pobox.com/~mra
Andy Leighton
>
> The EU seems to be unclear on the concept of this "Free Speech" thing.
>
> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/06/01/weu101.xml
>
> Free speech, the judge told him, was not an absolute right. It
> could not be used to justify certain offences, such as criticism of
> the EU.
>
> Hmm... if the right to free speech doesn't cover political speech,
> what the hell is it for, then?!
Well this is all rather old news isn't it? Connolly was sacked in 1996 or
so. Most people in the UK disagree with that particular statement, as
presented, by the judge. It should also be noted that the judge was not
talking about freedom of speech per se but just judging on whether it was
reasonable for the EU Commission to sack Connolly for publishing a work
decrying monetary policy (which was the unit in which he was employed).
> For all the many current faults of the US and it's governments, the
> right to criticize the government remains utterly absolute,
Although this wasn't true historically was it? There was a time when
to openly criticise the US govt and promote a certain other political
thought (namely Communism) had far more serious consequences.
--
Andy Leighton => an...@azaal.plus.com
"The Lord is my shepherd, but we still lost the sheep dog trials"
- Robert Rankin, _They Came And Ate Us_
Niall McAuley
news:slrnbef9e6...@azaal.plus.com...
> Well this is all rather old news isn't it?
What were you expecting, insight? This is Mark Atwood.
--
Niall [real address ends in se, not es.invalid]
Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr
>
>The EU seems to be unclear on the concept of this "Free Speech" thing.
>
>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/06/01/weu101.xml
>
> Free speech, the judge told him, was not an absolute right. It
> could not be used to justify certain offences, such as criticism of
> the EU.
>
>Hmm... if the right to free speech doesn't cover political speech,
>what the hell is it for, then?!
>
>For all the many current faults of the US and it's governments, the
>right to criticize the government remains utterly absolute, despite
>the best efforts of Democratic Party politicians [in the name of
>"Campaign Finance Reform", actually targetted at gutting grass-rooted
>funded political issues ads] and of University presidents to pretend
>otherwise.
How do you know that the campaign finance reform is targetted at gutting
grass-root funded political issues ads, and which political issues ads are
those? (I've noticed that any group with "Taxpayers For" or "Taxpayers
Against" is a front for big commercial interests.)
-- Alan
--
===============================================================================
Alan Winston --- WIN...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU
Disclaimer: I speak only for myself, not SLAC or SSRL Phone: 650/926-3056
Paper mail to: SSRL -- SLAC BIN 99, 2575 Sand Hill Rd, Menlo Park CA 94025
===============================================================================
Mark Atwood
> > [in the name of
> > "Campaign Finance Reform", actually targetted at gutting grass-rooted
> > funded political issues ads]
>
> grass-root funded political issues ads, and which political issues ads are
> those?
Because the proponent of the bill stated, on the debating floor,
*specifically*, which interest group they were looking to destroy.
The group is the NRA, the issue is the 2A, and the ads they want to
ban are the NRA ILA mailings.
Or does that make it ok to you?
Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr
>win...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU ("Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr") writes:
>> > [in the name of
>> > "Campaign Finance Reform", actually targetted at gutting grass-rooted
>> > funded political issues ads]
>>
>> How do you know that the campaign finance reform is targetted at gutting
>> grass-root funded political issues ads, and which political issues ads are
>> those?
>
>Because the proponent of the bill stated, on the debating floor,
>*specifically*, which interest group they were looking to destroy.
Which proponent? If we're talking McCain-Feingold, only one sponsor was a
Democrat (and you're tarring all Democrats and no Republicans with it). If
we're talking about something else, what are we talking about?
>
>The group is the NRA, the issue is the 2A, and the ads they want to
>ban are the NRA ILA mailings.
I don't know what the ILA mailings are, even. ("I Love Armaments?" "Iustice
Leagve of America?" "International Lorettic Alphabet?") Is this some kind of
NRA-based legislative scorecard?
>
>Or does that make it ok to you?
No, actually, it doesn't, despite my being deeply conflicted on the
implementation of the RKBA and certainly not being an NRA member. (Since I
don't have a completely coherent position I'd prefer not to be drawn into an
argument on the merits or otherwise of my incoherent position.)
I am in favor of campaign finance reform that results in picking candidates
based on something other than their acceptability to big business and requires
fewer payoffs to big business post-election, perhaps resulting in politics
that favor individuals and the environment more than they do now. (Yes, I'm
naive. If we stipulate that, perhaps I can avoid being drawn into an argument
with you, David, and Pete about how letting big business do whatever it wants
is really the best thing for everybody.)
I am not in favor of campaign finance reform that results in silencing
grass-roots (as distinct from Astroturf) citizen groups, no matter how
misguided I think those groups might be.
David Friedman
Andy Leighton <an...@azaal.plus.com> wrote:
> Although this wasn't true historically was it? There was a time when
> to openly criticise the US govt and promote a certain other political
> thought (namely Communism) had far more serious consequences.
Not, I think, serious legal consequences. There was some risk that your
employer might fire you. Of course, there was some risk that your
employer might fire you for holding the opposite position too, depending
on the employer.
And, of course, a congressional committee might try to ask you
questions. But getting locked up required you to first lie under oath,
or at least required someone to persuade a jury that you had done so.
Merely expressing unpopular opinions wasn't illegal even in the fifties.
The E.U. consists of a number of different countries with, presumably,
different positions on such issues. My impression is that Germany and
the U.K., at least, are weaker on free speech issues than the U.S. is or
has been in my lifetime. I don't know is that's true of all the other
E.U. states or not.
Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr
>In article <slrnbef9e6...@azaal.plus.com>,
> Andy Leighton <an...@azaal.plus.com> wrote:
>
>> Although this wasn't true historically was it? There was a time when
>> to openly criticise the US govt and promote a certain other political
>> thought (namely Communism) had far more serious consequences.
>
>Not, I think, serious legal consequences. There was some risk that your
>employer might fire you. Of course, there was some risk that your
>employer might fire you for holding the opposite position too, depending
>on the employer.
Although if you were involved in the entertainment business and got listed
in "Red Channels", you were pretty well screwed. Networks and movie studios
weren't showing an awful lot of courage at that point.
>
>And, of course, a congressional committee might try to ask you
>questions. But getting locked up required you to first lie under oath,
>or at least required someone to persuade a jury that you had done so.
>Merely expressing unpopular opinions wasn't illegal even in the fifties.
I'm under the strong impression that refusing to testify could get you locked
up for "contempt of Congress"; you didn't have to lie.
Dan Kimmel
"Mark Atwood" <m...@pobox.com> wrote in message
news:m3smqgb...@khem.blackfedora.com...
>
> The EU seems to be unclear on the concept of this "Free Speech" thing.
>
> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/06/01/weu101.xml
>
> Free speech, the judge told him, was not an absolute right. It
> could not be used to justify certain offences, such as criticism of
> the EU.
>
> Hmm... if the right to free speech doesn't cover political speech,
> what the hell is it for, then?!
>
> For all the many current faults of the US and it's governments, the
> right to criticize the government remains utterly absolute, despite
> the best efforts of Democratic Party politicians [in the name of
> "Campaign Finance Reform", actually targetted at gutting grass-rooted
> funded political issues ads] and of University presidents to pretend
> otherwise.
Actually the real threat to free speech in American is the Bush
Administration and its supporters claiming that ANY criticism of the
court-appointed president is tantamount to treason and aiding the enemy.
Brett Paul Dunbar
David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.com> writes
> Andy Leighton <an...@azaal.plus.com> wrote:
>
>> Although this wasn't true historically was it? There was a time when
>> to openly criticise the US govt and promote a certain other political
>> thought (namely Communism) had far more serious consequences.
>
>Not, I think, serious legal consequences. There was some risk that your
>employer might fire you. Of course, there was some risk that your
>employer might fire you for holding the opposite position too, depending
>on the employer.
Bernard Connolly was sacked in 1995 for publishing a book attacking the
EU whilst employed in a senior civil service position by the EU
commission. He claimed that being sacked for publicly attacking his
employers, in violation of specific terms in his contract, violated his
right to free speech, the courts disagreed, and rejected his claim of
unfair dismissal.
--
Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm
Brett Paul Dunbar
To email me, use reply-to address
Brian D. Fernald
101.sfo1.dsl.speakeasy.net>, dd...@daviddfriedman.com
said...
> In article <slrnbef9e6...@azaal.plus.com>,
> Andy Leighton <an...@azaal.plus.com> wrote:
>
> > Although this wasn't true historically was it? There was a time when
> > to openly criticise the US govt and promote a certain other political
> > thought (namely Communism) had far more serious consequences.
>
> Not, I think, serious legal consequences. There was some risk that your
> employer might fire you. Of course, there was some risk that your
> employer might fire you for holding the opposite position too, depending
> on the employer.
protestors during WWI, etc.
"Free Speech" has not always meant what we think it
means in America.
--
BDF.
FSOBN.
David Friedman
> >> How do you know that the campaign finance reform is targetted at gutting
> >> grass-root funded political issues ads, and which political issues ads are
> >> those?
> >
> >Because the proponent of the bill stated, on the debating floor,
> >*specifically*, which interest group they were looking to destroy.
My working assumption is that campaign finance restrictions are
targetted at protecting incumbents. An incumbent congressman starts with
an enormous advantage because of the free publicity he gets and the
opportunities to buy votes with government money. One result is that the
overwhelming majority of incumbents who run for reelection win--although
that's a bit misleading since if they are obviously not going to win
they probably won't run.
Defeating an incumbent, unless he has gotten himself involved in a
really unpopular scandal, generally requires the challenger to heavily
outspend him. Campaign finance "reform" is aimed at reducing the total
amount of money available to candidates, a result that favors incumbents.
In addition, given current court decisions permitting a candidate to
spend as much of his own money on his campaign as he wants, limits on
raising money from other people give a big advantage to wealthy
candidates. I have nothing in particular against wealthy candidates, but
restricting the competition to such drastically reduces the size of the
pool.
David Friedman
True enough. There were problems during the Civil War as well.
But I assumed, from the reference to Communism, that he was referring to
the period after WWII.
O Deus
>
> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/06/01/weu101.xml
>
> Free speech, the judge told him, was not an absolute right. It
> could not be used to justify certain offences, such as criticism of
> the EU.
>
> Hmm... if the right to free speech doesn't cover political speech,
> what the hell is it for, then?!
Free speech gives everyone the right to praise the EU. And gives
everyone who disagrees the right to remain silent.
> For all the many current faults of the US and it's governments, the
> right to criticize the government remains utterly absolute, despite
> the best efforts of Democratic Party politicians [in the name of
> "Campaign Finance Reform", actually targetted at gutting grass-rooted
> funded political issues ads] and of University presidents to pretend
> otherwise.
For the moment anyway. Until that speech becomes charachterized as
'offensive' at which point it becomes 'hate speech.' And under the
Clinton administration, the same people the press today is hailing as
courageous civil libertarians were considered anti-government
extremists.
David Dyer-Bennet
> In article <slrnbef9e6...@azaal.plus.com>,
> Andy Leighton <an...@azaal.plus.com> wrote:
>
> > Although this wasn't true historically was it? There was a time when
> > to openly criticise the US govt and promote a certain other political
> > thought (namely Communism) had far more serious consequences.
>
> Not, I think, serious legal consequences. There was some risk that your
> employer might fire you. Of course, there was some risk that your
> employer might fire you for holding the opposite position too, depending
> on the employer.
>
> And, of course, a congressional committee might try to ask you
> questions. But getting locked up required you to first lie under oath,
> or at least required someone to persuade a jury that you had done so.
> Merely expressing unpopular opinions wasn't illegal even in the fifties.
A *lot* of people had their careers and lives ruined or seriously
derailed by the actions of the US government (particularly HUAC, the
Hoover FBI, and Senator McCarthy). Whether it was done by making
something illegal, or by some other method, matters not at all to me
or to them.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, <dd...@dd-b.net>, <www.dd-b.net/dd-b/>
RKBA: <noguns-nomoney.com>
Photos: <dd-b.lighthunters.net> Snapshots: <www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/>
Dragaera mailing lists: <dragaera.info/>
Alan Braggins
>In article <ddfr-14F237.1...@dsl081-079-101.sfo1.dsl.speakeasy.net>, David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.com> writes:
>>In article <slrnbef9e6...@azaal.plus.com>,
>> Andy Leighton <an...@azaal.plus.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Although this wasn't true historically was it? There was a time when
>>> to openly criticise the US govt and promote a certain other political
>>> thought (namely Communism) had far more serious consequences.
>>
>>Not, I think, serious legal consequences. There was some risk that your
>>employer might fire you.
So when Bernard Connolly was sacked from his EU position for critizing
EU policy, that was nothing serious, and there's so real need for Mark
to get worked up?
Bjørn Vermo
"There was a time" might refer to a couple of months ago.
I find it rather chilling when what I consider to be reasonably enlightened
middle-class people tell their relatives "you must not say that in public".
There does not have to be any great real risk of repercussions for free
speech to be seen as a dangerous luxury, it only takes some fear,
uncertainty and doubt.
On the other hand, if people FEEL they can get away with voicing their
protest in technically illegal ways, they will. Just look at France.
--
Bjørn Vermo
Robert Sneddon
<ar...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes
>
>So when Bernard Connolly was sacked from his EU position for critizing
>EU policy, that was nothing serious, and there's so real need for Mark
>to get worked up?
He went public (and in a way to benefit financially from it) while
continuing to be employed by the organistaion he worked for. If he felt
so badly about what the EU was doing and how it was going about his
affairs, he might have resigned before selling his book to a publisher
after exhausting all his avenues of recourse for rectification of the
problems as he saw them.
After the book was published, how could any employer keep him on?
--
Robert Sneddon nojay (at) nojay (dot) fsnet (dot) co (dot) uk
Pete McCutchen
<dan.k...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>> For all the many current faults of the US and it's governments, the
>> right to criticize the government remains utterly absolute, despite
>> the best efforts of Democratic Party politicians [in the name of
>> "Campaign Finance Reform", actually targetted at gutting grass-rooted
>> funded political issues ads] and of University presidents to pretend
>> otherwise.
>
>Actually the real threat to free speech in American is the Bush
>Administration and its supporters claiming that ANY criticism of the
>court-appointed president is tantamount to treason and aiding the enemy.
Isn't the contention that somebody else is a traitor itself an
exercise of free speech rights? So far as I know, not even John
Ashcroft is suggesting that administration critics be jailed.
--
Pete McCutchen
Christopher L. Taylor
Let me point out that when the "President" and his spokespeople
make these statements in contexts where they are clearly
representing the government (like press conferences), then it becomes
somewhat more than an exercise of free speech rights, and somewhat
less than official government policy.
I have no doubt that these statements are being used by those in
positions of power to intimidate critics. There are many ways
the government can seek revenge against critics that fall short of
jail.
Chris Taylor
Dan Kimmel
"Christopher L. Taylor" <ch...@fcrao1NO.astro.umassSpam.edu> wrote in
message news:3EE8A0CA...@fcrao1NO.astro.umassSpam.edu...
Indeed. I'm surprised at Pete. Surely he realizes that government
officials -- acting in their official capacity -- do not have rights. They
have powers and obligations.
Heather Jones
>
> In article <slrnbef9e6...@azaal.plus.com>,
> Andy Leighton <an...@azaal.plus.com> wrote:
>
> > Although this wasn't true historically was it? There was a time when
> > to openly criticise the US govt and promote a certain other political
> > thought (namely Communism) had far more serious consequences.
>
> Not, I think, serious legal consequences. There was some risk that your
> employer might fire you. Of course, there was some risk that your
> employer might fire you for holding the opposite position too, depending
> on the employer.
You might want to talk to some real live people who suffered from
those "not ... serious legal consequences". It's dangerous to
disbelieve in things that actually happened historically.
Heather
--
*****
Heather Rose Jones
hrj...@socrates.berkeley.edu
*****
Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr
More care with the attributions, please; none of my words survived in this
post.
Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr
Was Ari Fleischer's "watch what you say" an exercise of free speech rights
in his public position as White House press secretary?
Avram Grumer
ar...@chiark.greenend.org.uk (Alan Braggins) wrote:
Didn't someone here say that Connolly had signed a contract specifying,
as a condition of his employment, that he not criticize EU policy (at
least not in that context)? One might argue that such contracts should
be illegal, but I think that makes it a more complicated issue than just
being fired for saying something without the contract being involved.
--
Avram Grumer | av...@grumer.org | http://www.PigsAndFishes.org
Millions for defense, not a penny for the House of Saud.
Matt Austern
> Actually the real threat to free speech in American is the Bush
> Administration and its supporters claiming that ANY criticism of the
> court-appointed president is tantamount to treason and aiding the enemy.
That's *a* threat to free speech. There are others. At the moment,
the threats to free speech in the US that worry me the most tend to
deal with intellectual property law. This generally involves civil
cases, not criminal cases, but I don't think that's terribly
important. Corporations are getting an awful lot of tools that let
them prevent people from saying inconvenient things.
At a meta-level, the biggest threat to free speech in the US is our
national delusion that we have a legal guarantee of unrestricted free
speech. This delusion means that when we do have restrictions on
speech (and we do have those restrictions, like every other country;
some of our restrictions are even for good reasons), we try to avoid
seeing them. It's hard to talk about something when you pretend it
doesn't exist.
Brett Paul Dunbar
<av...@grumer.org> writes
The EU has an official website at <http://europa.eu.int/>, form which
court documents can be found fairly easily.
To look at the European Court of First Instance in Staff Cases'
judgements and opinions in the case of Connolly v. Commission: view the
search form
<http://curia.eu.int/jurisp/cgi-bin/formfonct.pl?lang=en&nomusuel=Connoll
y+v+Commission> then click on submit. Unfortunately these are only
available in French.
To look at the European Court of Justice's judgements and opinions in
the case of Connolly v. Commission: view the search form
<http://curia.eu.int/jurisp/cgi-bin/form.pl?lang=en&nomusuel=Connolly+v+C
ommission> then click on submit. These appeals to the highest EU court
are available in English.
Pete McCutchen
>
>The EU seems to be unclear on the concept of this "Free Speech" thing.
>
>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/06/01/weu101.xml
>
> Free speech, the judge told him, was not an absolute right. It
> could not be used to justify certain offences, such as criticism of
> the EU.
>
>Hmm... if the right to free speech doesn't cover political speech,
>what the hell is it for, then?!
The actual outcome of the case seems right, even under US First
Amendment law. If Treasury Secretary Snow announced tomorrow that the
tax cut on dividends was irresponsible, Bush would be within his
rights to sack him. Now, in the US, lower level functionaries do have
a First Amendment right to publicly criticize the government. But
senior officials in a policymaking role do not. As I recall the facts
of the case, this guy was in such a senior position.
Not that there aren't reasons to be concerned about the EU, other than
this case. It now seems fairly clear that continental elites seek to
govern the EU by means of something not unlike the old Soviet
Politburo. It won't be a real representative democracy, and I
seriously doubt that it will brook much opposition. In the upcoming
years, the differences between US and EU will only widen. Not that I
expect the EU to be able to compete economically with the US.
I just wish that the UK and Ireland would junk the whole idea and join
in an Anglospheric alliance with the US.
>
>For all the many current faults of the US and it's governments, the
>right to criticize the government remains utterly absolute, despite
>the best efforts of Democratic Party politicians [in the name of
>"Campaign Finance Reform", actually targetted at gutting grass-rooted
>funded political issues ads] and of University presidents to pretend
>otherwise.
That's because many of the Donks are what Stephen den Beste calls
Transnational Progressives. They want us to be like Europe.
--
Pete McCutchen
Mark Atwood
>
> That's because many of the Donks are what Stephen den Beste calls
> Transnational Progressives. They want us to be like Europe.
Many of the Donks want us to be like Europe of the 21st C, while a
vocal section of the Phants want us to be like Europe of the 12th.
Sigh.
Keith F. Lynch
> Actually the real threat to free speech in American is the Bush
> Administration and its supporters claiming that ANY criticism of
> the court-appointed president is tantamount to treason and aiding
> the enemy.
Please don't cry "wolf". There are plenty of real threats. But
it's still perfectly legal to criticize Bush. Otherwise, half the
people in this newsgroup, including me, would be in jail.
--
Keith F. Lynch - k...@keithlynch.net - http://keithlynch.net/
I always welcome replies to my e-mail, postings, and web pages, but
unsolicited bulk e-mail (spam) is not acceptable. Please do not send me
HTML, "rich text," or attachments, as all such email is discarded unread.
Pete McCutchen
("Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr") wrote:
>I am in favor of campaign finance reform that results in picking candidates
>based on something other than their acceptability to big business and requires
>fewer payoffs to big business post-election, perhaps resulting in politics
>that favor individuals and the environment more than they do now. (Yes, I'm
>naive. If we stipulate that, perhaps I can avoid being drawn into an argument
>with you, David, and Pete about how letting big business do whatever it wants
>is really the best thing for everybody.)
The odd thing is that I'm not really a huge fan of "big business" per
se. (I suspect that Mark and David would agree, though of course I
cannot speak for either.) In fact, I think that "big business" can be
downright obnoxious. Where we disagree, I think, is on an empirical
issue. Or maybe two empirical issues. While Big Business might be
dangerous, I think that the Big State is far more dangerous.
And I think that the Big State actually makes businesses bigger, and
more likely to be abusive. The Interstate Commerce Commission is a
paradigmatic example. Originally intended to curb alleged monopolies,
it ended up enforcing them. Why, just recently, I came across an
article in Forbes' online edition which talked about the abuse of
eminent domain by big business.
http://www.forbes.com/home/2003/06/11/cz_ic_0611beltway.html Who's
fighting that? Not the supposed liberals -- they *like* a powerful
state that can take property and redistribute it. It's a libertarian
public interest law firm that's fighting this particular abuse. I
think that adopting libertarian rules would make businesses smaller on
average, not larger.
And that, by the way, is another reason why no "campaign finance
reform" can ever succeed. When you have this massive powerful state,
people will seek out ways of bending it to their own purposes. And I
can assure you that lobbyists are still working full time, campaign
finance reform or no.
>
>I am not in favor of campaign finance reform that results in silencing
>grass-roots (as distinct from Astroturf) citizen groups, no matter how
>misguided I think those groups might be.
Well then you should oppose McCain Feingold, because it makes no such
distinction. Genuine grassroots groups are treated exactly the same
as "Astroturf" groups -- banned from engaging in political speech
prior to an election. If the First Amendment means anything, surely
it means that people who like candidate A or think candidate B is a
fink can get together and express their views.
Nor, by the way, do I think it's possible to write legislation which
distinguishes between "grass-roots" groups and "Astroturf" groups.
--
Pete McCutchen
Pete McCutchen
<bfer...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>In article <ddfr-14F237.17463011062003@dsl081-079-
>101.sfo1.dsl.speakeasy.net>, dd...@daviddfriedman.com
>said...
>> In article <slrnbef9e6...@azaal.plus.com>,
>> Andy Leighton <an...@azaal.plus.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Although this wasn't true historically was it? There was a time when
>> > to openly criticise the US govt and promote a certain other political
>> > thought (namely Communism) had far more serious consequences.
>>
>> Not, I think, serious legal consequences. There was some risk that your
>> employer might fire you. Of course, there was some risk that your
>> employer might fire you for holding the opposite position too, depending
>> on the employer.
>
>The Alien and Sedition Acts, imprisonment of war
>protestors during WWI, etc.
The Alien and Sedition Acts were a major campaign issue, and were one
of the reasons the Federalists lost the White House. They caused
major backlash. Imprisonment of war protestors during WWI, under the
reign of that scion of the Progressive Era, Woodrow Wilson, was indeed
unfortunate. But the dissents in the Supreme Court's decisions in
those cases ultimately became the law of the land.
>
>"Free Speech" has not always meant what we think it
>means in America.
True 'nuff. But communists usually won their challenges to various
attempts to infringe their free speech rights, even in the fifties.
--
Pete McCutchen
Pete McCutchen
("Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr") wrote:
>In article <grvdevo3i7sevcqsj...@4ax.com>, Pete McCutchen <p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> writes:
>>On Thu, 12 Jun 2003 01:36:36 GMT, "Dan Kimmel"
>><dan.k...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>>
>>>> For all the many current faults of the US and it's governments, the
>>>> right to criticize the government remains utterly absolute, despite
>>>> the best efforts of Democratic Party politicians [in the name of
>>>> "Campaign Finance Reform", actually targetted at gutting grass-rooted
>>>> funded political issues ads] and of University presidents to pretend
>>>> otherwise.
>>>
>>>Actually the real threat to free speech in American is the Bush
>>>Administration and its supporters claiming that ANY criticism of the
>>>court-appointed president is tantamount to treason and aiding the enemy.
>>
>>Isn't the contention that somebody else is a traitor itself an
>>exercise of free speech rights? So far as I know, not even John
>>Ashcroft is suggesting that administration critics be jailed.
>
>Was Ari Fleischer's "watch what you say" an exercise of free speech rights
>in his public position as White House press secretary?
Of course.
--
Pete McCutchen
Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr
>On Wed, 11 Jun 2003 23:36:20 GMT, win...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU
>("Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr") wrote:
>
>>I am in favor of campaign finance reform that results in picking candidates
>>based on something other than their acceptability to big business and requires
>>fewer payoffs to big business post-election, perhaps resulting in politics
>>that favor individuals and the environment more than they do now. (Yes, I'm
>>naive. If we stipulate that, perhaps I can avoid being drawn into an argument
>>with you, David, and Pete about how letting big business do whatever it wants
>>is really the best thing for everybody.)
>
>The odd thing is that I'm not really a huge fan of "big business" per
>se. (I suspect that Mark and David would agree, though of course I
>cannot speak for either.) In fact, I think that "big business" can be
>downright obnoxious. Where we disagree, I think, is on an empirical
>issue. Or maybe two empirical issues. While Big Business might be
>dangerous, I think that the Big State is far more dangerous.
I think there are some definite problems with the big state, but that there are
some things that it's beneficial to have a biggish state for, and that those
things are worth having. So I want to see a robust state _and_ a robust set
of watchdogs, including the ACLU, public interest lawyers, the courts, feisty
newspapers, etc, all of them holding each other accountable all the time.
>
>And I think that the Big State actually makes businesses bigger, and
>more likely to be abusive. The Interstate Commerce Commission is a
>paradigmatic example. Originally intended to curb alleged monopolies,
>it ended up enforcing them. Why, just recently, I came across an
>article in Forbes' online edition which talked about the abuse of
>eminent domain by big business.
>http://www.forbes.com/home/2003/06/11/cz_ic_0611beltway.html Who's
>fighting that? Not the supposed liberals -- they *like* a powerful
>state that can take property and redistribute it. It's a libertarian
>public interest law firm that's fighting this particular abuse. I
>think that adopting libertarian rules would make businesses smaller on
>average, not larger.
What would you consider to be libertarian rules, for these purposes?
>
>And that, by the way, is another reason why no "campaign finance
>reform" can ever succeed. When you have this massive powerful state,
>people will seek out ways of bending it to their own purposes. And I
>can assure you that lobbyists are still working full time, campaign
>finance reform or no.
I think it's possible that campaign finance reform can curb some egregious
abuses, but it's not going to get rid of the lobbying system. And of course
there are lobbyists for things I approve of as well as lobbyists for things I
disapprove of.
>
>>
>>I am not in favor of campaign finance reform that results in silencing
>>grass-roots (as distinct from Astroturf) citizen groups, no matter how
>>misguided I think those groups might be.
>
>Well then you should oppose McCain Feingold, because it makes no such
>distinction. Genuine grassroots groups are treated exactly the same
>as "Astroturf" groups -- banned from engaging in political speech
>prior to an election. If the First Amendment means anything, surely
>it means that people who like candidate A or think candidate B is a
>fink can get together and express their views.
Yeah, but the First Amendment wasn't written considering corporations to be
persons with rights. That came along considerably later, and I don't think
it;'s a good idea.
>
>Nor, by the way, do I think it's possible to write legislation which
>distinguishes between "grass-roots" groups and "Astroturf" groups.
That I can't argue. If the multi-watchdog system I propose above were working,
then the papers would be reporting where the money for each issue-advocacy ad
was really coming from. But legislation (like computer programs) can't make
that judgment itself.
David Friedman
Pete McCutchen <p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> The odd thing is that I'm not really a huge fan of "big business" per
> se. (I suspect that Mark and David would agree, though of course I
> cannot speak for either.)
Certainly I would agree.
And I would also agree with the more general point--that strong
government on average increases, rather than decreasing, the ability of
big business to do bad things.
David Friedman
> I think there are some definite problems with the big state, but that there
> are
> some things that it's beneficial to have a biggish state for, and that those
> things are worth having. So I want to see a robust state _and_ a robust set
> of watchdogs, including the ACLU, public interest lawyers, the courts, feisty
> newspapers, etc, all of them holding each other accountable all the time.
I think a lot of it comes down to your view of two different sets of
mechanisms for making it in the interest of other people to act as we
would like them to. At a very simplified level, they are:
1. Political. Governments have to do good things or they will be voted
out of office.
2. Market. Firms have to do good things or customers won't buy their
products.
Both methods work imperfectly. But in my view, on both empirical and
theoretical grounds, the former method usually works much less well than
the latter. Putting it in the language of my field, market failure
exists in the private market but is endemic in the political market.
The argument "We need a powerful government to make up for the
imperfections of the market" assumes, at some level, the opposite--that
we can do a better job of making it in the interest of political actors
to act as we would like, in particular to prevent rather than promoting
various undesirable things that people do on the private market, than we
can of making it in the interest of actors on the private market to act
as we would like.
I think the argument for government becomes plausible only when you are
considering things where we have strong reason to expect, not merely
that the private market will work imperfectly, but that it will entirely
or almost entirely fail to work. A public good such as national defense,
or precautions against contagious diseases, can plausibly be argued to
meet that standard. But most of the government activities that are
justified on public good/market failure grounds can't--they are things
that we can expect to get from the private market, even if not in
optimal quantity or quality.
> Yeah, but the First Amendment wasn't written considering corporations to be
> persons with rights. That came along considerably later, and I don't think
> it;'s a good idea.
I'm not sure that affects anything. If I have a right to free speech and
freedom of organization, then I have a right to exercise my free speech
by paying to put on ads that someone else creates--and to form
organizations for that purpose. I have the right to get together with
lots of other people and hire executives to use our money to make stuff
and sell it--and support ads for politicians whose policies we think
benefit us.
I'm also not sure you are correct about the history, although that is a
more complicated issue. The idea of the corporation as a legal person
predates the American revolution. Two relevant quotes:
"When they [the individuals composing a corporation] are consolidated
and united into a corporation, they and their successors are then
considered as one person in law . . . for all the individual members
that have existed from the foundation to the present time, or that shall
every hereafter exist, are but one person in law ú a person that never
dies: in like manner as the river Thames is still the same river, though
the parts which compose it are changing every instant." (Blackstone)
"A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and
existing only in the contemplation of the law. Being the mere creature
of the law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its
creation confers on it, either expressly or as incidental to its very
existence. These are such as are supposed best calculated to effect the
object for which it was created. Among the most important are
immortality, and, if the expression be allowed, individuality;
properties by which a perpetual succession of many persons are
considered the same, and may act as a single individual."
(Chief Justice John Marshall)
David Friedman
"Christopher L. Taylor" <ch...@fcrao1NO.astro.umassSpam.edu> wrote:
> There are many ways
> the government can seek revenge against critics that fall short of
> jail.
And most of them are not violations of free speech.
Consider, as the most obvious case, critics in Congress. If they are
Republicans, the President, as head of the Republican party, can try to
minimize the support they get from their party next time they run. If
they are Democrats, the President can try particularly hard to defeat
them--raise money for their opponents, say--the next time they run. All
of that is perfectly ordinary political behavior.
David Friedman
ar...@chiark.greenend.org.uk (Alan Braggins) wrote:
If I understand that case correctly, it wasn't a violation of free
speech--but I'm going only by what has been posted here.
Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr
>In article <00A214B0...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU>,
> win...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU ("Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr")
> wrote:
>
>> I think there are some definite problems with the big state, but that there
>> are
>> some things that it's beneficial to have a biggish state for, and that those
>> things are worth having. So I want to see a robust state _and_ a robust set
>> of watchdogs, including the ACLU, public interest lawyers, the courts, feisty
>> newspapers, etc, all of them holding each other accountable all the time.
>
>I think a lot of it comes down to your view of two different sets of
>mechanisms for making it in the interest of other people to act as we
>would like them to. At a very simplified level, they are:
>
>1. Political. Governments have to do good things or they will be voted
>out of office.
In the presence of an informed, empowered, electorate who are in fact allowed
to vote and to have their votes counted. (Clearly, this mechanism is broken
under effective dictators; it's also broken if the electorate doesn't care,
it's broken if the electorate can't get good information, it's broken if
people who should be allowed to vote are purged from the rolls or scared away
from the polls, and it's broken if unauditable voting machines facilitate
fraud.)
Further, in situations where TV ads make a big difference in voter turnout and
decisions, and TV ads cost big money, the people who must agree that the
government has done good things are the big campaign contributors; they may
have a different opinion about the goodness of those things than a majority of
a well-informed electorate would.
>
>2. Market. Firms have to do good things or customers won't buy their
>products.
But when has this been true? Firms, admittedly, have to have products
customers want or need; is that the same thing as "doing good things"?
Because a lot of successful firms do _terrible_ things. (Microsoft leaps
to mind, but other corporations pollute, overgraze, overfish, treat employees
as disposable. And yet they have large revenues.)
So for this mechanism to work, consumers must be well-informed, care,
and have real alternatives to purchasing the products of ill-behaved
firms. (A lot of people have no real alternative to Windows, mostly because
of network externalities.)
In many cases, in an unregulated market, there are no real alternatives to
those purchases.
>
>Both methods work imperfectly. But in my view, on both empirical and
>theoretical grounds, the former method usually works much less well than
>the latter. Putting it in the language of my field, market failure
>exists in the private market but is endemic in the political market.
>
>The argument "We need a powerful government to make up for the
>imperfections of the market" assumes, at some level, the opposite--that
>we can do a better job of making it in the interest of political actors
>to act as we would like, in particular to prevent rather than promoting
>various undesirable things that people do on the private market, than we
>can of making it in the interest of actors on the private market to act
>as we would like.
I feel that with an adequate degree of watching the watchdogs - which does
presuppose that the media haven't been captured by the party in power -
we can make government act in important ways in the way a majority of the
population would like it to.
>
>I think the argument for government becomes plausible only when you are
>considering things where we have strong reason to expect, not merely
>that the private market will work imperfectly, but that it will entirely
>or almost entirely fail to work. A public good such as national defense,
>or precautions against contagious diseases, can plausibly be argued to
>meet that standard. But most of the government activities that are
>justified on public good/market failure grounds can't--they are things
>that we can expect to get from the private market, even if not in
>optimal quantity or quality.
In what private market can we purchase equal rights for groups hitherto
discriminated against? In what private market can we purchase believable
and consistent food inspection? In what private market can we purchase stock
exchange regulation and bank examiners? (And maybe it's possible to imagine
private ways of doing that, but private enterprise had plenty of opportunity
to figure out how to provide those goods and neglected to do so until
government took it on.)
Business was doing a fair amount of stuff around 1900 that I would prefer it
didn't go back to doing, and the reason it stopped was government regulation,
sometimes spurred on by public outrage. I think trust-busting was a good
thing. I think the Pure Food and Drug Act was a good thing. I think the SEC was
a good idea and pretty much eliminated stock-watering (although there are all
kinds of other behavior that can screw the stockholders too). I think meat
inspection, poultry inspection, and restaurant preparation are good things.
>
>> Yeah, but the First Amendment wasn't written considering corporations to be
>> persons with rights. That came along considerably later, and I don't think
>> it;'s a good idea.
>
>I'm not sure that affects anything. If I have a right to free speech and
>freedom of organization, then I have a right to exercise my free speech
>by paying to put on ads that someone else creates--and to form
>organizations for that purpose. I have the right to get together with
>lots of other people and hire executives to use our money to make stuff
>and sell it--and support ads for politicians whose policies we think
>benefit us.
I don't think your argument ("I am an individual and have rights and therefore
I can get together with like-minded people and hire someone to make and place
ads for us" addresses the case I'm talking about, where, eg, Nike tries to
assert that lying in advertisements about what it pays its Indonesian employees
is an exercise of its free speech rights.)
>
>I'm also not sure you are correct about the history, although that is a
>more complicated issue. The idea of the corporation as a legal person
>predates the American revolution. Two relevant quotes:
>
>"When they [the individuals composing a corporation] are consolidated
>and united into a corporation, they and their successors are then
>considered as one person in law . . . for all the individual members
>that have existed from the foundation to the present time, or that shall
>every hereafter exist, are but one person in law ú a person that never
>dies: in like manner as the river Thames is still the same river, though
>the parts which compose it are changing every instant." (Blackstone)
>
>"A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and
>existing only in the contemplation of the law. Being the mere creature
>of the law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its
>creation confers on it, either expressly or as incidental to its very
>existence. These are such as are supposed best calculated to effect the
>object for which it was created. Among the most important are
>immortality, and, if the expression be allowed, individuality;
>properties by which a perpetual succession of many persons are
>considered the same, and may act as a single individual."
> (Chief Justice John Marshall)
I think you're missing my point. From exactly what Marshall says, unless the
corporation is _chartered_ to have first amendment rights (which is not
explicitly in corporate charters of Marshall's period, at least), it doesn't
have them. Blackstone doesn't address my point either; I'm not arguing
"corporation as a person", I'm arguing that "corporation as a person with a
full set of the rights of a natural person" isn't what the founders had in
mind.
(By me, all the speech of a corporation is commercial speech, which can be
regulated without throwing away the First Amendment.)
Niall McAuley
news:00A214D8...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU...
> In article <ddfr-D9ED35.0...@dsl081-079-101.sfo1.dsl.speakeasy.net>, David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.com> writes:
> >1. Political. Governments have to do good things or they will be voted
> >out of office.
> In the presence of an informed, empowered, electorate who are in fact allowed
> to vote and to have their votes counted. (Clearly, this mechanism is broken
> under effective dictators; it's also broken if the electorate doesn't care,
> it's broken if the electorate can't get good information, it's broken if
> people who should be allowed to vote are purged from the rolls or scared away
> from the polls, and it's broken if unauditable voting machines facilitate
> fraud.)
I think one of those is wrong: it's not broken if the electorate doesn't care.
If only one person in three cares to vote, it's because the other two think
things will be OK regardless of the outcome.
High voluntary turnouts tend to be in places where people are really pissed
off; Northern Ireland always gets a high turnout, for example.
--
Niall [real address ends in se, not es.invalid]
Nancy Lebovitz
Niall McAuley <Niall....@eei.ericsson.es.invalid> wrote:
>""Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr"" <win...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU> wrote in message
>news:00A214D8...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU...
>> In article <ddfr-D9ED35.0...@dsl081-079-101.sfo1.dsl.speakeasy.net>, David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.com> writes:
>> >1. Political. Governments have to do good things or they will be voted
>> >out of office.
>
>> In the presence of an informed, empowered, electorate who are in fact allowed
>> to vote and to have their votes counted. (Clearly, this mechanism is broken
>> under effective dictators; it's also broken if the electorate doesn't care,
>> it's broken if the electorate can't get good information, it's broken if
>> people who should be allowed to vote are purged from the rolls or scared away
>> from the polls, and it's broken if unauditable voting machines facilitate
>> fraud.)
>
>I think one of those is wrong: it's not broken if the electorate doesn't care.
>If only one person in three cares to vote, it's because the other two think
>things will be OK regardless of the outcome.
It might be because people think things will be ok, or because they don't
think their votes will make a discernable difference.
I've wondered about what it would take to make politics interesting--paying
attention to political information is promoted as a public duty. Ads are
essential--and ads are a sign of information that people wouldn't seek out
on their own. Once upon a time, people went to political speeches as a form
of entertainment. Admittedly, our entertainments are flashier now, but
speech-making has also declined, and I wonder if anything could be done about
that.
--
Nancy Lebovitz na...@netaxs.com www.nancybuttons.com
Now, with bumper stickers
Using your turn signal is not "giving information to the enemy"
Andrew M Wood
> > So when Bernard Connolly was sacked from his EU position for critizing
> > EU policy, that was nothing serious, and there's so real need for Mark
> > to get worked up?
>
> If I understand that case correctly, it wasn't a violation of free
> speech--but I'm going only by what has been posted here.
According to the way it was presented in the press, the ruling by the
European Court of Justice went well beyond merely upholding dismissal
for breach of contract.
See, for example:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/03/07/weuc07.xml
although I haven't read the actual ruling to see if the Telegraphs's
account is fair. The Telegraph's got a bit of a reputation for
exaggerating stories about the EU.
Andy.
Alan Braggins
>Niall McAuley <Niall....@eei.ericsson.es.invalid> wrote:
>>""Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr"" <win...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU> wrote in message
>>
>>> to vote and to have their votes counted. (Clearly, this mechanism is broken
>>> under effective dictators; it's also broken if the electorate doesn't care,
>>> it's broken if the electorate can't get good information, it's broken if
>>> people who should be allowed to vote are purged from the rolls or scared away
>>> from the polls, and it's broken if unauditable voting machines facilitate
>>> fraud.)
>>
>>I think one of those is wrong: it's not broken if the electorate doesn't care.
>>If only one person in three cares to vote, it's because the other two think
>>things will be OK regardless of the outcome.
>
>It might be because people think things will be ok, or because they don't
>think their votes will make a discernable difference.
If they are mistaken about that, they aren't informed. If they are right
because no-one who will make a real difference is allowed to stand, there
is an effective one party state if not an actual dictatorship. If they
are right because they have such different views on what is wrong that
no one candidate can persuade a significant proportion they could do better,
the people getting in at the moment are probably doing something reasonably
close to the best possible in a difficult situation.
Vicki Rosenzweig
14:13:51 GMT:
Not quite. He's stating--successfully--that anyone the Justice
Department labels as a terrorist should be jailed, without access to
a lawyer, for an indefinite period. If they can do it to Jose Padilla,
they can do it to you and me.
--
Vicki Rosenzweig | v...@redbird.org
r.a.sf.f faq at http://www.redbird.org/rassef-faq.html
Kristopher
>
> Well then you should oppose McCain Feingold, because it makes
> no such distinction. Genuine grassroots groups are treated
> exactly the same as "Astroturf" groups -- banned from engaging
> in political speech prior to an election. If the First
> Amendment means anything, surely it means that people who like
> candidate A or think candidate B is a fink can get together
> and express their views.
<snip>
Are those groups banned from buying ads, holding rallies, writing
letters to media outlets, etc, etc, etc, or simply restricted in
their ability to give money to the candidates and parties? If
it's only the latter, then their free speech is not infringed upon.
Money is not speech.
--
Kristopher
The question is not "What," or "How," but rather "-Why-?"
Brian D. Fernald
@newshog.newsread.com>, na...@unix1.netaxs.com said...
Christopher Lasch, in his _Revolt of the Elites_, made
the point that political participation is directly
related to the amount of emotional investment in the
political issues that frame political participation.
The 'yellow' political journal, for example, that has a
distinct political point of view, gathers more
involvement in the issues of the day, then a coldly
rational panel argument.
The rise of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, O'Reilly, etc.,
are pretty indicative of this. If you dispense with
the 'fair and balanced' treatment of the facts, in
order to speak to the assumptions and conclusions of
the voter, you will have power. If you don't, you
won't.
Galbraith made similiar points in his _The Anatomy of
Power_.
Duties, are a different point altogether. A duty, for
many people, is something that they have to do,
regardless of their wishes. If voting is a duty, and
the majority of the population just wants to live their
lives, then why not reject the idea of duty and do what
you want to do? I suspect that generally, the notion
of duty is lost in modern America, but whether that is
a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen.
As, for the "Once upon a time, people went to political
speeches as a form of entertainment", are you sure that
they don't do that now? Crossfire looks an awlfull lot
like a series of speeches to me, and people watch it
for reasons not just related to its information
content. So, the old forms of political discourse may
no longer exist, but that does not mean that new ones
have not arisen to replace them.
--
BDF.
FSOBN.
Brian D. Fernald
@news.panix.com>, v...@redbird.org said...
of political contributions to a Lebanese political
party, you can be charged as providing aid and comfort
to a terrorist organization.
If political contributions are a form of free speech,
then such a policy is a restraint of free speech.
--
BDF.
FSOBN.
Christopher L. Taylor
Or the Department of Homeland Security can try to arrest them on behalf
of the Texas Republicans....
Chris Taylor
David Dyer-Bennet
> I'm also not sure you are correct about the history, although that is a
> more complicated issue. The idea of the corporation as a legal person
> predates the American revolution. Two relevant quotes:
>
> "When they [the individuals composing a corporation] are consolidated
> and united into a corporation, they and their successors are then
> considered as one person in law . . . for all the individual members
> that have existed from the foundation to the present time, or that shall
> every hereafter exist, are but one person in law ú a person that never
> dies: in like manner as the river Thames is still the same river, though
> the parts which compose it are changing every instant." (Blackstone)
>
> "A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and
> existing only in the contemplation of the law. Being the mere creature
> of the law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its
> creation confers on it, either expressly or as incidental to its very
> existence. These are such as are supposed best calculated to effect the
> object for which it was created. Among the most important are
> immortality, and, if the expression be allowed, individuality;
> properties by which a perpetual succession of many persons are
> considered the same, and may act as a single individual."
> (Chief Justice John Marshall)
I'm pretty darned sure the Marshall quote does not predate the
American revolution, and hence is irrelevant to supporting your
claim. What's the date on the Blackstone quote?
--
David Dyer-Bennet, <dd...@dd-b.net>, <www.dd-b.net/dd-b/>
RKBA: <noguns-nomoney.com>
Photos: <dd-b.lighthunters.net> Snapshots: <www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/>
Dragaera mailing lists: <dragaera.info/>
David Bilek
>> Department labels as a terrorist should be jailed, without access to
>> a lawyer, for an indefinite period. If they can do it to Jose Padilla,
>> they can do it to you and me.
>>
>Also, if you were to send monetary support in the form
>of political contributions to a Lebanese political
>party, you can be charged as providing aid and comfort
>to a terrorist organization.
>
>If political contributions are a form of free speech,
>then such a policy is a restraint of free speech.
Uh, are you arguing that Hezbollah is primarily a "political party"?
-David
Avram Grumer
[other questions snipped]
> [...] In what private market can we purchase believable
> and consistent food inspection? [...]
Ever gone food shopping with someone who keeps kosher?
--
Avram Grumer | av...@grumer.org | http://www.PigsAndFishes.org
Millions for defense, not a penny for the House of Saud.
Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr
>""Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr"" <win...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU> wrote in message
>news:00A214D8...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU...
>> >1. Political. Governments have to do good things or they will be voted
>> >out of office.
>
>> In the presence of an informed, empowered, electorate who are in fact allowed
>> to vote and to have their votes counted. (Clearly, this mechanism is broken
>> under effective dictators; it's also broken if the electorate doesn't care,
>> it's broken if the electorate can't get good information, it's broken if
>> people who should be allowed to vote are purged from the rolls or scared away
>> from the polls, and it's broken if unauditable voting machines facilitate
>> fraud.)
>
>If only one person in three cares to vote, it's because the other two think
>things will be OK regardless of the outcome.
If the electorate doesn't care enough to notice whether the government is doing
good things or not, then they can't make their voting (or turnout) decisions
based on that, at which point the principle above is broken.
(That's distinct from making a choice that it's all fine and they don't need to
vote, but may be the same thing as "all politicians suck and there's no point
in making a distinction between them.")
Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr
>In article <00A214D8...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU>,
>
>> [...] In what private market can we purchase believable
>> and consistent food inspection? [...]
>
>Ever gone food shopping with someone who keeps kosher?
Ah, support for the Bush principle of giving essential functions to faith-based
organizations.
Rob Hansen
<p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> It now seems fairly clear that continental elites seek to
>govern the EU by means of something not unlike the old Soviet
>Politburo. It won't be a real representative democracy, and I
>seriously doubt that it will brook much opposition. In the upcoming
>years, the differences between US and EU will only widen. Not that I
>expect the EU to be able to compete economically with the US.
>
>I just wish that the UK and Ireland would junk the whole idea and join
>in an Anglospheric alliance with the US.
I've been in favour of something along those lines for quite some time
myself. In the 1973 referendum I voted yes to joining the then Common
Market because in the set-up as then constituted it made sense to me.
I would not vote yes to joining the current set-up.
--
Rob Hansen
=============================================
Home Page: http://www.fiawol.demon.co.uk/rob/
David Friedman
David Dyer-Bennet <dd...@dd-b.net> wrote:
> David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.com> writes:
>
> > I'm also not sure you are correct about the history, although that is a
> > more complicated issue. The idea of the corporation as a legal person
> > predates the American revolution. Two relevant quotes:
> >
> > "When they [the individuals composing a corporation] are consolidated
> > and united into a corporation, they and their successors are then
> > considered as one person in law . . . for all the individual members
> > that have existed from the foundation to the present time, or that shall
> > every hereafter exist, are but one person in law ? a person that never
> > dies: in like manner as the river Thames is still the same river, though
> > the parts which compose it are changing every instant." (Blackstone)
> >
> > "A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and
> > existing only in the contemplation of the law. Being the mere creature
> > of the law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its
> > creation confers on it, either expressly or as incidental to its very
> > existence. These are such as are supposed best calculated to effect the
> > object for which it was created. Among the most important are
> > immortality, and, if the expression be allowed, individuality;
> > properties by which a perpetual succession of many persons are
> > considered the same, and may act as a single individual."
> > (Chief Justice John Marshall)
>
> I'm pretty darned sure the Marshall quote does not predate the
> American revolution, and hence is irrelevant to supporting your
> claim. What's the date on the Blackstone quote?
The Marshall quote does not predate the American Revolution, but it
represents the view of the subject held at the beginning of the history
of U.S. jurisprudence.
I believe the final edition of Blackstone's Commentaries was published
in 1770. He died in 1780.
David Friedman
> >I think a lot of it comes down to your view of two different sets of
> >mechanisms for making it in the interest of other people to act as we
> >would like them to. At a very simplified level, they are:
> >
> >1. Political. Governments have to do good things or they will be voted
> >out of office.
> In the presence of an informed, empowered, electorate who are in fact
> allowed
> to vote and to have their votes counted. (Clearly, this mechanism is broken
> under effective dictators; it's also broken if the electorate doesn't care,
> it's broken if the electorate can't get good information, it's broken if
> people who should be allowed to vote are purged from the rolls or scared away
> from the polls, and it's broken if unauditable voting machines facilitate
> fraud.)
But it is broken, more fundamentally, for any large population
democracy where the government is doing very much. In such a situation,
having anything close to an informed opinion on what the government is
doing requires a lot of effort, and the individual knows that if he goes
to all the effort, the chance of his vote influencing the outcome is
very close to zero. So almost nobody does.
We then get the phenomenon that economists describe as rational
ignorance--not having information because it costs more than it is worth
to you. When we discuss the question in class--I'm teaching a good
private university, and essentially all of my students are old enough to
vote--I routinely ask how many of the students know the name of their
congressional representative. A minority raise their hands.
> Further, in situations where TV ads make a big difference in voter turnout
> and
> decisions, and TV ads cost big money, the people who must agree that the
> government has done good things are the big campaign contributors; they may
> have a different opinion about the goodness of those things than a majority
> of a well-informed electorate would.
More fundamentally, every interest group that wishes to influence the
government faces an internal public good problem. If the steel industry
gets a protective tariff, steel firms will benefit, whether or not they
contribute to the lobbying effort. If the tariff fails to be passed,
consumers will be better off, whether or not they contributed to the
lobbying effort to block it.
One of the things we known about public good problems is that smaller
and better organized groups do a better job of producing public goods
for the group. Hence, predictably, concentrated interest groups are more
successful in getting government to do what they want. That isn't an
aberration--it's the logical implication of the institutions.
> >2. Market. Firms have to do good things or customers won't buy their
> >products.
>
> But when has this been true? Firms, admittedly, have to have products
> customers want or need; is that the same thing as "doing good things"?
> Because a lot of successful firms do _terrible_ things. (Microsoft leaps
> to mind, but other corporations pollute, overgraze, overfish, treat employees
> as disposable. And yet they have large revenues.)
I'm not claiming that either method works perfectly--only that the
latter works better. The good things that firms have to do through this
mechanism all amount to providing what their customers want to buy--and
buying inputs, including labor, at terms that the sellers prefer to
other alternatives. The mechanism doesn't control pollution and
overfishing, because in both cases the resource in question isn't
private property--and there may be no workable way of changing that,
depending on the particular example.
Overgrazing, on the other hand, is a consequence of having land either
not property or mismanaged government property.
> So for this mechanism to work, consumers must be well-informed, care,
> and have real alternatives to purchasing the products of ill-behaved
> firms. (A lot of people have no real alternative to Windows, mostly because
> of network externalities.)
Consumers qua consumers have a much stronger incentive to be well
informed than consumers qua voters. If I decide Mac OS is better than
Windows, I end up with Mac OS. If I decide Bush is better than Gore (or
vice versa), I change the probability of getting him by under one part
in a million. I'm not suggesting that consumers make firms do good
things in any more general sense through the market mechanism.
How important network externalities are is still an open question. You
might want to read the Liebowitz and Margolis book (the title has
"Microsoft" in it but I don't remember it exactly); they've been the
most active critics of network externalities.
I am puzzled by Microsoft's success, but some parts of that success
aren't explained by network externalities, owning the OS, and the like,
which leaves me suspecting that my requirements for software may be
significantly different from those of much of the market.
> In many cases, in an unregulated market, there are no real alternatives to
> those purchases.
Compared to the availability of alternatives to what government
controls? The worst case market scenario--a natural monopoly, which is
pretty rare--is still better than the normal situation with government.
People complain about Microsoft unfairly giving away Explorer. But the
government taxes me to pay for a monopoly school system, and then tells
me that I am free to send my child to another school--if it can compete
against a competitor with a nine thousand dollar per pupil per year
subsidy. And in the case of the postal system, they go farther--for a
private firm to deliver the equivalent of first class mail is illegal.
> I feel that with an adequate degree of watching the watchdogs - which does
> presuppose that the media haven't been captured by the party in power -
> we can make government act in important ways in the way a majority of the
> population would like it to.
We could solve our power problems pretty easily--go 100% hydro--if we
could only persuade rivers to run uphill on command. The problems you
are observing aren't accidents--they are inherent in large population
democracies with governments that do a substantial amount.
> >I think the argument for government becomes plausible only when you are
> >considering things where we have strong reason to expect, not merely
> >that the private market will work imperfectly, but that it will entirely
> >or almost entirely fail to work. A public good such as national defense,
> >or precautions against contagious diseases, can plausibly be argued to
> >meet that standard. But most of the government activities that are
> >justified on public good/market failure grounds can't--they are things
> >that we can expect to get from the private market, even if not in
> >optimal quantity or quality.
>
> In what private market can we purchase equal rights for groups hitherto
> discriminated against? In what private market can we purchase believable
> and consistent food inspection? In what private market can we purchase stock
> exchange regulation and bank examiners? (And maybe it's possible to imagine
> private ways of doing that, but private enterprise had plenty of opportunity
> to figure out how to provide those goods and neglected to do so until
> government took it on.)
So far as I know, there is zero evidence that losses due to security
fraud, or any other measure of the riskiness of the market, declined
when the SEC was created. Stigler has an old piece trying to look for
some, and failing.
There are lots of private firms providing the equivalent of bank
examiners, food inspection, and the like for a wide variety of goods.
Private markets don't prevent private discrimination, although they tend
to make it costly. More generally, the private system takes as given
individual preferences. Do you prefer a system where, when you make a
choice, a third party gets to veto it if he thinks your reasons for
making it aren't convincing?
On the other hand, big government makes ethnic and racial hostility much
more likely, because it creates a game where winning is heavily
dependent on coalition formation, and a game where lots of people are
fighting over who will get the same bundle of stuff.
> Business was doing a fair amount of stuff around 1900 that I would prefer it
> didn't go back to doing, and the reason it stopped was government regulation,
> sometimes spurred on by public outrage. I think trust-busting was a good
> thing. I think the Pure Food and Drug Act was a good thing. I think the SEC
> was
> a good idea and pretty much eliminated stock-watering (although there are all
> kinds of other behavior that can screw the stockholders too). I think meat
> inspection, poultry inspection, and restaurant preparation are good things.
Doubtless you do. We went through a long discussion of the FDA here,
which I'm not inclined to revivie, beyond pointing out that it imposes
large hidden costs which must be balanced against visible benefits.
Peltzman's old piece on the effect of the Kefauver amendments found that
they cut the rate of introduction of new medical drugs in half, with no
measurable effect on average quality.
How do you feel about the large scale creation of monopoly that was
included in that movement--for example the creation of the ICC to
enforce railroad cartels, then to protect the railroads from the
competition of barges, then to protect them from the competition of
trucks?
How about the war on drugs--which is another facet of the same
"government gets to decide what is good for you" approach? I don't get
to say "I am in favor of the market because it works for A, B, and C,
and the market I propose won't have D and E." You don't, on the same
basis, get to argue "I am in favor of government deciding for you what
you are allowed to consume when I agree with its decision, and in the
regulatory system I am proposing it only decides in those cases."
> I don't think your argument ("I am an individual and have rights and
> therefore
> I can get together with like-minded people and hire someone to make and place
> ads for us" addresses the case I'm talking about, where, eg, Nike tries to
> assert that lying in advertisements about what it pays its Indonesian
> employees
> is an exercise of its free speech rights.)
Is it if an individual employer does the same thing? If not, why isn't
it an exercise of the free speech rights of whomever Nike hires as their
spokesman?
...
> I think you're missing my point. From exactly what Marshall says, unless the
> corporation is _chartered_ to have first amendment rights (which is not
> explicitly in corporate charters of Marshall's period, at least), it doesn't
> have them. Blackstone doesn't address my point either; I'm not arguing
> "corporation as a person", I'm arguing that "corporation as a person with a
> full set of the rights of a natural person" isn't what the founders had in
> mind.
Then I mistook your point.
> (By me, all the speech of a corporation is commercial speech, which can be
> regulated without throwing away the First Amendment.)
And there I disagree. I gather the Court has been gradually coming
around to my view from yours. I don't see a difference in kind between
trying to persuade people of the political views that I want them to
have and trying to persuade them to the views of my product that I want
them to have. Either can be done honestly or dishonestly, and both are
done by people both ways.
David Friedman
na...@unix1.netaxs.com (Nancy Lebovitz) wrote:
> I've wondered about what it would take to make politics interesting--paying
> attention to political information is promoted as a public duty. Ads are
> essential--and ads are a sign of information that people wouldn't seek out
> on their own. Once upon a time, people went to political speeches as a form
> of entertainment. Admittedly, our entertainments are flashier now, but
> speech-making has also declined, and I wonder if anything could be done about
> that.
The problem is that if you are going to speeches as a form of
entertainment, you don't care much about whether what they say is true,
only whether it is entertaining.
Consider, for a familiar example, the newspapers. While they make some
effort to avoid saying things that aren't true, their major objective is
to tell a good story. Contrast that to Consumer Reports. People buy CR,
at least in part, to make decisions--and if the information is wrong the
car they buy ends up breaking down. They read the paper to be
entertained.
Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr
>In article <00A214D8...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU>,
> win...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU ("Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr")
> wrote:
>
>> >I think a lot of it comes down to your view of two different sets of
>> >mechanisms for making it in the interest of other people to act as we
>> >would like them to. At a very simplified level, they are:
>> >
>> >1. Political. Governments have to do good things or they will be voted
>> >out of office.
>
>> In the presence of an informed, empowered, electorate who are in fact
>> allowed
>> to vote and to have their votes counted. (Clearly, this mechanism is broken
>> under effective dictators; it's also broken if the electorate doesn't care,
>> it's broken if the electorate can't get good information, it's broken if
>> people who should be allowed to vote are purged from the rolls or scared away
>> from the polls, and it's broken if unauditable voting machines facilitate
>> fraud.)
>
>democracy where the government is doing very much. In such a situation,
>having anything close to an informed opinion on what the government is
>doing requires a lot of effort, and the individual knows that if he goes
>to all the effort, the chance of his vote influencing the outcome is
>very close to zero. So almost nobody does.
Which is why I want a robust set of non-governmental watchdogs, some of which
we have now - the ACLU is fairly effective, despite being widely despised - and
some of which we only have in spurts. Enough of that, and it's easier to tell
whether you think the government is doing good things.
>
>We then get the phenomenon that economists describe as rational
>ignorance--not having information because it costs more than it is worth
>to you. When we discuss the question in class--I'm teaching a good
>private university, and essentially all of my students are old enough to
>vote--I routinely ask how many of the students know the name of their
>congressional representative. A minority raise their hands.
Which, if the ignorance is in fact rational, suggests that the value to them of
knowing their Representative's name is very low indeed, since it's easily
discovered. On the other hand, could they be apathetic slags?
>
>> Further, in situations where TV ads make a big difference in voter turnout
>> and
>> decisions, and TV ads cost big money, the people who must agree that the
>> government has done good things are the big campaign contributors; they may
>> have a different opinion about the goodness of those things than a majority
>> of a well-informed electorate would.
>
>More fundamentally, every interest group that wishes to influence the
>government faces an internal public good problem. If the steel industry
>gets a protective tariff, steel firms will benefit, whether or not they
>contribute to the lobbying effort. If the tariff fails to be passed,
>consumers will be better off, whether or not they contributed to the
>lobbying effort to block it.
>
>One of the things we known about public good problems is that smaller
>and better organized groups do a better job of producing public goods
>for the group. Hence, predictably, concentrated interest groups are more
>successful in getting government to do what they want. That isn't an
>aberration--it's the logical implication of the institutions.
This is interesting. But it seems to me that in many cases if you abolished
the government function, then the firms wouldn't even have to lobby to do what
they wanted - they could just do it.
>
>> >2. Market. Firms have to do good things or customers won't buy their
>> >products.
>>
>> But when has this been true? Firms, admittedly, have to have products
>> customers want or need; is that the same thing as "doing good things"?
>> Because a lot of successful firms do _terrible_ things. (Microsoft leaps
>> to mind, but other corporations pollute, overgraze, overfish, treat employees
>> as disposable. And yet they have large revenues.)
>
>I'm not claiming that either method works perfectly--only that the
>latter works better. The good things that firms have to do through this
>mechanism all amount to providing what their customers want to buy--and
>buying inputs, including labor, at terms that the sellers prefer to
>other alternatives. The mechanism doesn't control pollution and
>overfishing, because in both cases the resource in question isn't
>private property--and there may be no workable way of changing that,
>depending on the particular example.
>
>Overgrazing, on the other hand, is a consequence of having land either
>not property or mismanaged government property.
>
>> So for this mechanism to work, consumers must be well-informed, care,
>> and have real alternatives to purchasing the products of ill-behaved
>> firms. (A lot of people have no real alternative to Windows, mostly because
>> of network externalities.)
>
>Consumers qua consumers have a much stronger incentive to be well
>informed than consumers qua voters. If I decide Mac OS is better than
>Windows, I end up with Mac OS.
Unless you need your home computer to interoperate with your work or school
computers, or you can only afford a low-end machine (which usually means
non-Mac), or your local friends-with-computers-who-can-help-you-out are all
PC users.
It's not, for many people, an unconstrained choice of what's better, or even
of what you like more.
>If I decide Bush is better than Gore (or
>vice versa), I change the probability of getting him by under one part
>in a million. I'm not suggesting that consumers make firms do good
>things in any more general sense through the market mechanism.
>
>How important network externalities are is still an open question. You
>might want to read the Liebowitz and Margolis book (the title has
>"Microsoft" in it but I don't remember it exactly); they've been the
>most active critics of network externalities.
>
>I am puzzled by Microsoft's success, but some parts of that success
>aren't explained by network externalities, owning the OS, and the like,
>which leaves me suspecting that my requirements for software may be
>significantly different from those of much of the market.
There's early access, stomping on competitors, pre-sale of vaporware, using the
apps to sell the OS, making manufacturers pay them for licenses even on
machines sold with other OSes - stuff they couldn't get away with if they
weren't basically the desktop standard, but they've leveraged that by a whole
bunch of anti-competitive means.
>
>> In many cases, in an unregulated market, there are no real alternatives to
>> those purchases.
>
>Compared to the availability of alternatives to what government
>controls? The worst case market scenario--a natural monopoly, which is
>pretty rare--is still better than the normal situation with government.
>
Which seems like a religious statement to me, but I take it to be your
position.
>People complain about Microsoft unfairly giving away Explorer. But the
>government taxes me to pay for a monopoly school system, and then tells
>me that I am free to send my child to another school--if it can compete
>against a competitor with a nine thousand dollar per pupil per year
>subsidy. And in the case of the postal system, they go farther--for a
>private firm to deliver the equivalent of first class mail is illegal.
I don't really complain about their giving away Explorer. But a pretty
analogous case is the "Microsoft Tax", where PC manufacturers, in order to get
rights to distribute the machines with Windows preloaded, had to agree to pay
for licenses for every machine they sold, whether or not it actually had
Windows on it. They were free to load DR-DOS on their machines if it could
compete against a competitor whose cost was hidden in the price of the bundled
system, so DR-DOS appeared higher-priced.
>
>> I feel that with an adequate degree of watching the watchdogs - which does
>> presuppose that the media haven't been captured by the party in power -
>> we can make government act in important ways in the way a majority of the
>> population would like it to.
>
>We could solve our power problems pretty easily--go 100% hydro--if we
>could only persuade rivers to run uphill on command. The problems you
>are observing aren't accidents--they are inherent in large population
>democracies with governments that do a substantial amount.
>So far as I know, there is zero evidence that losses due to security
>fraud, or any other measure of the riskiness of the market, declined
>when the SEC was created. Stigler has an old piece trying to look for
>some, and failing.
So we don't hear about people like Jim Fisk going down to the basement and
printing another 100,000 shares when they need some pocket money any more. Has
this behavior stopped? If so, why has it stopped? IF it hasn't stopped, why
don't we hear about it?
>
>There are lots of private firms providing the equivalent of bank
>examiners, food inspection, and the like for a wide variety of goods.
We've recently seen the collapse of auditing systems at Enron, among other
places. Is that what happens with private sector regulation?
(Supposedly the new SEC rules which prevent the audit division from dealing
with people the consulting division deal with will keep that from happening
again. But that's the government.)
[I'll admit here that I haven't heard about any major Underwriter's Labs
scandals. Does anybody know who pays for UL testing - is that the manufacturer
or an insurance company consortium?]
>
>
>On the other hand, big government makes ethnic and racial hostility much
>more likely, because it creates a game where winning is heavily
>dependent on coalition formation, and a game where lots of people are
>fighting over who will get the same bundle of stuff.
Although you can get a damn good supply of ethnic and racial hostility without
big government. I think people who perceive themselves primarily as members of
groups, and people who perceive others that way, will be happy to discriminate
on a group basis. Look at anti-Irish-immigrant prejudice in the period I'm
talking about. Plenty of hostility even before the Irish got hold of the NYC
government.
>
>> Business was doing a fair amount of stuff around 1900 that I would prefer it
>> didn't go back to doing, and the reason it stopped was government regulation,
>> sometimes spurred on by public outrage. I think trust-busting was a good
>> thing. I think the Pure Food and Drug Act was a good thing. I think the SEC
>> was
>> a good idea and pretty much eliminated stock-watering (although there are all
>> kinds of other behavior that can screw the stockholders too). I think meat
>> inspection, poultry inspection, and restaurant preparation are good things.
>
>Doubtless you do. We went through a long discussion of the FDA here,
>which I'm not inclined to revivie, beyond pointing out that it imposes
>large hidden costs which must be balanced against visible benefits.
>Peltzman's old piece on the effect of the Kefauver amendments found that
>they cut the rate of introduction of new medical drugs in half, with no
>measurable effect on average quality.
I sure hoped that by saying "The Pure Food and Drug Act" and using "around
1900" I was sidestepping the argument about the Kefauver amendments, etc.
>
>How do you feel about the large scale creation of monopoly that was
>included in that movement--for example the creation of the ICC to
>enforce railroad cartels, then to protect the railroads from the
>competition of barges, then to protect them from the competition of
>trucks?
I think the railroads in the US have always battened on the government teat,
even when government wasn't that big. (1850s isn't an acme of Big Government,
is it?) The conditions under which railroads were built - and the man who
founded the university I work for now got filthy rich - were amazingly corrupt,
and it hasn't gotten a whole hell of a lot better.
>
>How about the war on drugs--which is another facet of the same
>"government gets to decide what is good for you" approach? I don't get
>to say "I am in favor of the market because it works for A, B, and C,
>and the market I propose won't have D and E." You don't, on the same
>basis, get to argue "I am in favor of government deciding for you what
>you are allowed to consume when I agree with its decision, and in the
>regulatory system I am proposing it only decides in those cases."
>
The War on Some Drugs also sucks.
If I'm following your argument, you bring this up as an example of the kind of
evil that big government does because of inherent flaws in the organization. I
am unclear on exactly which small well-organized lobby groups have put and kept
the WOSD in place through multiple administrations. (Your railroad example
works well to support this argument; I don't offhand see how the war on drugs
supports this argument.)
If you just want to list bad things government has done, I can start listing
bad things businesses have done, and we'll both be here until the bar closes.
>> I don't think your argument ("I am an individual and have rights and
>> therefore
>> I can get together with like-minded people and hire someone to make and place
>> ads for us" addresses the case I'm talking about, where, eg, Nike tries to
>> assert that lying in advertisements about what it pays its Indonesian
>> employees
>> is an exercise of its free speech rights.)
>
>Is it if an individual employer does the same thing? If not, why isn't
>it an exercise of the free speech rights of whomever Nike hires as their
>spokesman?
By "employer" do you mean employee? That change might help me parse this
question.
Do you think there should be any regulation of commercial claims? Any
requirement of truth (or not outright lies) in advertising?
>
>> (By me, all the speech of a corporation is commercial speech, which can be
>> regulated without throwing away the First Amendment.)
>
>And there I disagree. I gather the Court has been gradually coming
>around to my view from yours. I don't see a difference in kind between
>trying to persuade people of the political views that I want them to
>have and trying to persuade them to the views of my product that I want
>them to have. Either can be done honestly or dishonestly, and both are
>done by people both ways.
I note your disagreement.
David Friedman
> >But it is broken, more fundamentally, for any large population
> >democracy where the government is doing very much. In such a situation,
> >having anything close to an informed opinion on what the government is
> >doing requires a lot of effort, and the individual knows that if he goes
> >to all the effort, the chance of his vote influencing the outcome is
> >very close to zero. So almost nobody does.
>
> Which is why I want a robust set of non-governmental watchdogs, some of which
> we have now - the ACLU is fairly effective, despite being widely despised -
> and
> some of which we only have in spurts. Enough of that, and it's easier to
> tell
> whether you think the government is doing good things.
Except that every interest group that's sufficiently well organized will
subsidize its own set of "non-governmental watchdogs"--in many cases in
the honest belief that its interest is congruent with the general
interest. The voter then faces the same problem as before, this time in
the form of deciding whose claims to believe.
> >We then get the phenomenon that economists describe as rational
> >ignorance--not having information because it costs more than it is worth
> >to you. When we discuss the question in class--I'm teaching a good
> >private university, and essentially all of my students are old enough to
> >vote--I routinely ask how many of the students know the name of their
> >congressional representative. A minority raise their hands.
> Which, if the ignorance is in fact rational, suggests that the value to them
> of
> knowing their Representative's name is very low indeed, since it's easily
> discovered. On the other hand, could they be apathetic slags?
The value to them of knowing their Representative's name is very
low--even if they care a great deal about what the government does.
Because a single vote has a very low probability of determining the
outcome of an election, and a single vote is all the individual voter
has to cast.
...
> >More fundamentally, every interest group that wishes to influence the
> >government faces an internal public good problem. If the steel industry
> >gets a protective tariff, steel firms will benefit, whether or not they
> >contribute to the lobbying effort. If the tariff fails to be passed,
> >consumers will be better off, whether or not they contributed to the
> >lobbying effort to block it.
> >
> >One of the things we known about public good problems is that smaller
> >and better organized groups do a better job of producing public goods
> >for the group. Hence, predictably, concentrated interest groups are more
> >successful in getting government to do what they want. That isn't an
> >aberration--it's the logical implication of the institutions.
>
> This is interesting. But it seems to me that in many cases if you abolished
> the government function, then the firms wouldn't even have to lobby to do
> what
> they wanted - they could just do it.
The airlines couldn't have maintained a cartel for forty plus years
without the CAB (and its predecessor organization). The railroads
couldn't do it without the ICC--they tried and, with one exception in
the southeast, failed. The steel industry can't get tariffs without
government help.
...
> >Consumers qua consumers have a much stronger incentive to be well
> >informed than consumers qua voters. If I decide Mac OS is better than
> >Windows, I end up with Mac OS.
>
> Unless you need your home computer to interoperate with your work or school
> computers, or you can only afford a low-end machine (which usually means
> non-Mac), or your local friends-with-computers-who-can-help-you-out are all
> PC users.
In which case you don't decide that Mac, for you, is better than
Windows--because it isn't. My point was that your decision determines
the outcome, hence you have an incentive to be well informed.
> It's not, for many people, an unconstrained choice of what's better, or even
> of what you like more.
I don't know what "unconstrained choice of what's better" means in a
context like that. One feature of an OS is what software exists for it.
Another is how expensive the machines that run it are. You could argue
that my decision to go to a MacDonalds instead of an all you can eat
Sushi restaurant isn't "unconstrained," given that the latter costs much
more--but then, the latter really does cost much more to run.
You make the choice. Your choice determines which computer you get.
Obviously that choice takes into account all sorts of features of the
alternatives, not all of which come down to "which way of designing the
OS do I think works better."
...
> >I am puzzled by Microsoft's success, but some parts of that success
> >aren't explained by network externalities, owning the OS, and the like,
> >which leaves me suspecting that my requirements for software may be
> >significantly different from those of much of the market.
>
> There's early access, stomping on competitors, pre-sale of vaporware, using
> the
> apps to sell the OS, making manufacturers pay them for licenses even on
> machines sold with other OSes - stuff they couldn't get away with if they
> weren't basically the desktop standard, but they've leveraged that by a whole
> bunch of anti-competitive means.
But none of that explains why Word and Excel first came to dominate the
Mac platform, where they had no such advantages--the "pre-sale of
vaporware," as best I recall, was done by one of their competitors, and
another one of their competitors owned the OS. I used alternatives to
Word on the Mac for many years thereafter, thus demonstrating my
preferences--but lots of other people made the opposite choice.
A runner wins a race that lots of people expected him to lose. The
explanation is that it had been raining and he's particularly good
dealing with a wet track. He wins another race. The explanation is that
the runner who should have beaten him was home sick. He wins another
race. The explanation is ... .
Each explanation, by itself, may be plausible. But at some point you
ought to start questioning your confidence that he isn't a very good
runner.
> >> In many cases, in an unregulated market, there are no real alternatives to
> >> those purchases.
> >Compared to the availability of alternatives to what government
> >controls? The worst case market scenario--a natural monopoly, which is
> >pretty rare--is still better than the normal situation with government.
> Which seems like a religious statement to me, but I take it to be your
> position.
On the contrary. It's a simple statement of fact. I'm not saying "it's
better in all respects." I'm saying "it's better in the particular
respect you pointed at--availability of alternatives."
Government services are paid for by taxes, which means that, in most
cases, you don't have the option of deciding whether the combination of
the service and its costs is worth having. Even with a monopoly private
provider, you at least have the option of not paying and not getting the
product. Most of the time you have more options.
> >People complain about Microsoft unfairly giving away Explorer. But the
> >government taxes me to pay for a monopoly school system, and then tells
> >me that I am free to send my child to another school--if it can compete
> >against a competitor with a nine thousand dollar per pupil per year
> >subsidy. And in the case of the postal system, they go farther--for a
> >private firm to deliver the equivalent of first class mail is illegal.
> I don't really complain about their giving away Explorer. But a pretty
> analogous case is the "Microsoft Tax", where PC manufacturers, in order to
> get
> rights to distribute the machines with Windows preloaded, had to agree to pay
> for licenses for every machine they sold, whether or not it actually had
> Windows on it. They were free to load DR-DOS on their machines if it could
> compete against a competitor whose cost was hidden in the price of the
> bundled
> system, so DR-DOS appeared higher-priced.
But manufacturers were also free not to sell machines with Windows--to
specialize in Dr Dos or Linux or whatever. Given how many small
manufacturers there were, that was a real option--and if lots of
consumers had preferred the alternatives, some of the small
manufactuerers doing it would have become large manufacturers.
I don't have the option of telling the government "I agree that my kids
will never use the public schools, now give me back the amount of money
you would have spent on them if they had, or, alternatively, the
corresponding share of my taxes."
A true Microsoft tax would have been a situation in which everyone had
to pay Microsoft for Windows, whether or not he wanted to run it. That's
how taxes work.
...
> >So far as I know, there is zero evidence that losses due to security
> >fraud, or any other measure of the riskiness of the market, declined
> >when the SEC was created. Stigler has an old piece trying to look for
> >some, and failing.
>
> So we don't hear about people like Jim Fisk going down to the basement and
> printing another 100,000 shares when they need some pocket money any more.
> Has
> this behavior stopped? If so, why has it stopped? IF it hasn't stopped, why
> don't we hear about it?
We do occasionally here about fraud of one sort or another. The practice
of issuing shares when you need more money hasn't stopped--although I
don't think it's fraudulent.
> >There are lots of private firms providing the equivalent of bank
> >examiners, food inspection, and the like for a wide variety of goods.
> We've recently seen the collapse of auditing systems at Enron, among other
> places. Is that what happens with private sector regulation?
Some bad things will indeed happen even with the best set of
institutions I can come up with. You will notice that Enron et. al.
happened quite a long time after the SEC was set up with lots of rules
supposedly designed to force corporations to provide investors with
accurate information on their financial status.
...
> >On the other hand, big government makes ethnic and racial hostility much
> >more likely, because it creates a game where winning is heavily
> >dependent on coalition formation, and a game where lots of people are
> >fighting over who will get the same bundle of stuff.
>
> Although you can get a damn good supply of ethnic and racial hostility
> without
> big government. I think people who perceive themselves primarily as members
> of
> groups, and people who perceive others that way, will be happy to
> discriminate
> on a group basis. Look at anti-Irish-immigrant prejudice in the period I'm
> talking about. Plenty of hostility even before the Irish got hold of the NYC
> government.
Sure. But in the political context, being prejudiced, and getting other
people to be prejudiced, is in your selfish interest. In the market
context, it frequently means being poorer--refusing to employ members of
the wrong ethnic group even if you can get better workers at lower cost
by doing so. Refusing to go to the Jewish doctor even though you
strongly suspect he is more likely to save your life.
...
> >How about the war on drugs--which is another facet of the same
> >"government gets to decide what is good for you" approach? I don't get
> >to say "I am in favor of the market because it works for A, B, and C,
> >and the market I propose won't have D and E." You don't, on the same
> >basis, get to argue "I am in favor of government deciding for you what
> >you are allowed to consume when I agree with its decision, and in the
> >regulatory system I am proposing it only decides in those cases."
> >
>
> The War on Some Drugs also sucks.
>
> If I'm following your argument, you bring this up as an example of the kind
> of
> evil that big government does because of inherent flaws in the organization.
> I
> am unclear on exactly which small well-organized lobby groups have put and
> kept
> the WOSD in place through multiple administrations. (Your railroad example
> works well to support this argument; I don't offhand see how the war on drugs
> supports this argument.)
I'm making more than one argument:
Argument 1: On the whole, leaving people free to choose what they buy,
who they work for, employ, etc. produces better results. Sometimes they
will make mistakes--but less often than other people with the power to
make the decision for them.
One form of rejection of that argument is paternalism, of which the FDA
and the War on Drugs are both examples.
Argument 2: In particular, governments tend to greatly overweight costs
and benefits to concentrated interests relative to dispersed interests.
In the case of the War On Drugs, I think you can argue that the
enforcement industry, in particular law enforcement agencies, are a
concentrated interest group that helps explain it. But that probably
isn't the full story.
...
> >> I don't think your argument ("I am an individual and have rights and
> >> therefore
> >> I can get together with like-minded people and hire someone to make and
> >> place
> >> ads for us" addresses the case I'm talking about, where, eg, Nike tries to
> >> assert that lying in advertisements about what it pays its Indonesian
> >> employees
> >> is an exercise of its free speech rights.)
> >
> >Is it if an individual employer does the same thing? If not, why isn't
> >it an exercise of the free speech rights of whomever Nike hires as their
> >spokesman?
> By "employer" do you mean employee? That change might help me parse this
> question.
No. I was starting with the (hypothetical) case where Nike was a sole
proprietorship and then going on to the case where it was a joint stock
corporation hiring a spokesman. I should have been clearer.
> Do you think there should be any regulation of commercial claims? Any
> requirement of truth (or not outright lies) in advertising?
I think a customer has a legitimate claim if the seller says he is
selling X and delivers Y. But I don't think that statements in general
automatically come with enforceable guarantees. To have such a system
you need a third party deciding which statements are true and punishing
those it thinks made false statements, and that seems to me a cure more
dangerous than the disease--which is the basic argument for free speech.
Mishalak
>>2. Market. Firms have to do good things or customers won't buy their
>>products.
>
> But when has this been true? Firms, admittedly, have to have products
> customers want or need; is that the same thing as "doing good things"?
> Because a lot of successful firms do _terrible_ things. (Microsoft leaps
> to mind, but other corporations pollute, overgraze, overfish, treat employees
> as disposable. And yet they have large revenues.)
I'm going to jump in with my favorite example, McWane Inc. A privately
held corporation that makes huge profits while ignoring safety and basic
human decency. It has been reported that there is almost not a person
in their workforce who is not visibly maimed in some way.
"Over the past seven years, McWane Inc. has amassed more safety
violations than their six major competitors combined. In that same
period, nine McWane workers have been killed and at least 4,600 have
been injured on the job." -Frontline
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/workplace/mcwane/two.html
They continued to operate just they way they always did because by being
unashamed practitioners of the big lie and taking advantage of the fact
that they could just pay the some fines and that was cheaper than
correcting the problems. Contrary to what the advocates of big business
would have us believe the law is toothless in the face of companies
unwilling to comply.
"Since OSHA was established 32 years ago, there have been more than
200,000 workplace-related deaths. In all that time there have been only
11 short jail sentences handed out." -Frontline
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/workplace/etc/script.html
After a combined Frontline and NY Times expose about the company there
has been some improvement, but it remains to be seen if after the hype
dies down they'll just go back their old practices.
And the mere fact that this Dickensian sort of evil corporation could
still exist in America in the 21st Century makes me wonder if it isn't
just the tip of the iceberg. They might be the worst, but are they the
only company that behaves so? Somehow I doubt it. Just like Enron was
just the first the be exposed I suspect there are quite a few more
companies like McWane lurking about.
Mishalak
Nancy Lebovitz
David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.com> wrote:
>In article <00A21565...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU>,
> win...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU ("Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr")
> wrote:
>> >So far as I know, there is zero evidence that losses due to security
>> >fraud, or any other measure of the riskiness of the market, declined
>> >when the SEC was created. Stigler has an old piece trying to look for
>> >some, and failing.
>>
>> So we don't hear about people like Jim Fisk going down to the basement and
>> printing another 100,000 shares when they need some pocket money any more.
>> Has
>> this behavior stopped? If so, why has it stopped? IF it hasn't stopped, why
>> don't we hear about it?
>
>We do occasionally here about fraud of one sort or another. The practice
>of issuing shares when you need more money hasn't stopped--although I
>don't think it's fraudulent.
I'm currently reading _Pipe Dreams_--at least part of what happened with
Enron is that they convinced the SEC to let them use completely non-standard
accounting methods (counting expected revenue as current). It's at least
possible that Enron got away with more for longer because too many people
trusted that the government was keeping an eye on things.
Pete McCutchen
Lebovitz) wrote:
>>We do occasionally here about fraud of one sort or another. The practice
>>of issuing shares when you need more money hasn't stopped--although I
>>don't think it's fraudulent.
>
>I'm currently reading _Pipe Dreams_--at least part of what happened with
>Enron is that they convinced the SEC to let them use completely non-standard
>accounting methods (counting expected revenue as current).
See here's the problem. I'm not an accountant, but it's my
understanding that accounts receivable can indeed be booked as
revenue. A reserve is then taken against the possibility that the
account won't be paid. Theoretically, doing so gives a better picture
of the true financial state of the company. Enron argued that these
long-term contracts weren't that different from accounts receivable,
and so should in fact be reflected on the balance sheet. They
actually had a good argument for that position.
The problem is that Enron valued these long-term contracts in a
totally screwy way, one that tended to exaggerate their value.
Greatly exaggerate. And in many cases, they weren't valuing the
contracts based upon actual traded markets, but based on circular
"trades" they were making apparently for the purpose of generating
"revenue."
Somebody should've noticed that Enron's "revenue" kept rising, while
their cash flowed stayed pretty much the same. In fact, a reporter at
Fortune Magazine named Bethany McLean did notice, and she wrote an
article called "Is Enron Overpriced?" In retrospect, the question
answers itself. I am personally grateful to her, because I was
contemplating the purchase of Enron stock at the time, and I chose to
refrain largely on the strength of her article.
I sent her a fan letter a while ago, and I've pre-ordered her book,
_The Smartest Guys in the Room_. I figure that an author who
personally saved me money deserves as much.
> It's at least
>possible that Enron got away with more for longer because too many people
>trusted that the government was keeping an eye on things.
Yup. Note also that it was the market, not the SEC, that ended up
catching Enron.
--
Pete McCutchen
Pete McCutchen
wrote:
>I'm going to jump in with my favorite example, McWane Inc. A privately
>held corporation that makes huge profits while ignoring safety and basic
Do we really know the profits are huge? I mean, they're privately
held, so they don't have to report their financials. For all we know,
they're just limping along. (OK, that may be wishful thinking on my
part.)
>human decency. It has been reported that there is almost not a person
>in their workforce who is not visibly maimed in some way.
First of all, I saw the Frontline report and read the New York Times
article, and, while there may well be some exaggeration going on, I
was as sickened as anybody. I *hate* companies like this.
But I don't think that companies like this are typical, and there are
atypical companies in the other direction, as well. My favorite
example is Alcoa under Paul O'Neill. He may not have been a great
Secretary of the Treasury, but he was an outstanding CEO. One of the
things that he realized was that, in order to make more money, they
were going to have to become more efficient, and in order to become
more efficient, they were going to have to get the workers on their
side. His way of doing that was to emphasize safety as the first
priority. Yes, everybody makes those noises, but he actually followed
through. He even fired otherwise capable managers who didn't buy into
his safety campaign. The end result was that Alcoa -- a company whose
workers interact with molten metal -- had one of the lowest injury
rates of any company in America. Lower, in fact, than at the
Department of the Treasury, when O'Neill took over.
Is Alcoa typical? No, of course not. But I do think it's important
to recognize that there are outliers in both directions. I suspect
that most companies lie somewhere between McWane and Alcoa.
We certainly agree that McWane -- and other companies that follow
similar strategies -- are bad. Where we disagree, I think, is on the
correct strategy for getting rid of the McWanes of the world. We have
OSHA and its state equivalents, and we incur all the costs that such a
regime implies, and yet we still have McWane.
Workers aren't stupid. Given better alternatives, how many people
would choose to work at McWane? According to the Frontline report,
nobody who has any better choices works there. In fact, they're now
using prisoners on work release. Companies compete for workers, and a
company like McWane can be forced by competition to either improve or
go out of business.
So here's my strategy: cut the size of the federal government in half.
(Over time, of course.) Eliminate huge swaths of federal regulations.
Cut taxes accordingly, _and_ pay off the national debt. Don't sell
Yosemite to Disney, as the true libertarians would have us do, but
*do* sell the land run by the Bureau of Land Management to the highest
bidder. In the resulting economic boom, companies like McWane won't
have a chance to hire workers.
--
Pete McCutchen
Pete McCutchen
wrote:
>Pete McCutchen wrote:
>>
>> Well then you should oppose McCain Feingold, because it makes
>> no such distinction. Genuine grassroots groups are treated
>> exactly the same as "Astroturf" groups -- banned from engaging
>> in political speech prior to an election. If the First
>> Amendment means anything, surely it means that people who like
>> candidate A or think candidate B is a fink can get together
>> and express their views.
>
><snip>
>
>Are those groups banned from buying ads, holding rallies, writing
>letters to media outlets, etc, etc, etc, or simply restricted in
>their ability to give money to the candidates and parties? If
McCain Feingold restricts their ability to buy TV, radio, newspaper,
magazine, and internet advertisements which mention particular
candidates during a certain period prior to the election.
>it's only the latter, then their free speech is not infringed upon.
>
>Money is not speech.
No, it's not. But restrictions on the amount of money that can be
spent on speech are restrictions of speech. Or do you think Congress
could, say, restrict how much money _The New York Times_ can spend on
newsprint?
--
Pete McCutchen
Pete McCutchen
wrote:
>>Isn't the contention that somebody else is a traitor itself an
>>exercise of free speech rights? So far as I know, not even John
>>Ashcroft is suggesting that administration critics be jailed.
>
>Not quite. He's stating--successfully--that anyone the Justice
>Department labels as a terrorist should be jailed, without access to
>a lawyer, for an indefinite period. If they can do it to Jose Padilla,
>they can do it to you and me.
I think the Justice Department is wrong about Padilla. Complain about
that; don't make silly claims about how free speech is dead in the US.
In fact, complaints about Bush are frequent and vitriolic.
--
Pete McCutchen
Pete McCutchen
>Pete McCutchen <p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> writes:
>>
>> That's because many of the Donks are what Stephen den Beste calls
>> Transnational Progressives. They want us to be like Europe.
>
>Many of the Donks want us to be like Europe of the 21st C, while a
>vocal section of the Phants want us to be like Europe of the 12th.
>
>Sigh.
There is that. Though I think it's a question of risk. Social
conservatives make a lot of noise, but the last hotel I stayed in had
a wide selection of pornographic movies. The risk of actually
becoming like Europe of the 12th century is pretty minimal. The risk
of Fabian socialism is much more significant.
If the donks were consistent on civil liberties they might have some
redeeming virtues, but they're not even good on that, any more. Look
at Biden and his idiotic "Rave Act."
--
Pete McCutchen
Aaron Denney
> Workers aren't stupid. Given better alternatives, how many people
> would choose to work at McWane? According to the Frontline report,
> nobody who has any better choices works there. In fact, they're now
> using prisoners on work release. Companies compete for workers, and a
> company like McWane can be forced by competition to either improve or
> go out of business.
...
> In the resulting economic boom, companies like McWane won't
> have a chance to hire workers.
How much choice do the prison-workers have?
--
Aaron Denney
-><-
David Dyer-Bennet
> In article <00A21565...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU>,
> win...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU ("Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr")
> wrote:
> > >We then get the phenomenon that economists describe as rational
> > >ignorance--not having information because it costs more than it is worth
> > >to you. When we discuss the question in class--I'm teaching a good
> > >private university, and essentially all of my students are old enough to
> > >vote--I routinely ask how many of the students know the name of their
> > >congressional representative. A minority raise their hands.
>
> > Which, if the ignorance is in fact rational, suggests that the value to them
> > of
> > knowing their Representative's name is very low indeed, since it's easily
> > discovered. On the other hand, could they be apathetic slags?
>
> The value to them of knowing their Representative's name is very
> low--even if they care a great deal about what the government does.
> Because a single vote has a very low probability of determining the
> outcome of an election, and a single vote is all the individual voter
> has to cast.
They can vote in elections without knowing the name of their
representative -- by voting on party lines, for example. They may
also simply not have remembered the name, even if they voted for
them (or against them).
I do not currently remember the name of my state representative,
although I've sent her several letters and talked to her on the phone
once this year. I do happen to remember the name of my state senator
-- even though she's solidly opposed to the issue I was active on this
year, and I might well not vote for her (if there were somebody
*better* run against her).
I don't currently remember the name of my federal representative at
all, even though I have voted in every federal election in ages.
David Dyer-Bennet
The amount of money people can contribute to political candidates is
already limited, and has been for years, hasn't it? Isn't there a
$1000 cap for an important type of contribution?
Pete McCutchen
I'd also legalize drugs and get rid of other victimless crimes. I
don't object if prisoners are required to raise food for their own
sustenance or some such, nor do I object to *voluntary* work release
programs. But I'd require that they be voluntary.
--
Pete McCutchen
Pete McCutchen
wrote:
>> No, it's not. But restrictions on the amount of money that can be
>> spent on speech are restrictions of speech. Or do you think Congress
>> could, say, restrict how much money _The New York Times_ can spend on
>> newsprint?
>
>The amount of money people can contribute to political candidates is
>already limited, and has been for years, hasn't it? Isn't there a
>$1000 cap for an important type of contribution?
That is indeed correct. And I believe that the dissents in the
Supreme Court cases which upheld those limitations were correct, and
that the limitation on individual contributions is unconstitutional.
--
Pete McCutchen
David G. Bell
<recjevohe8r207kcf...@4ax.com>
p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net "Pete McCutchen" wrote:
If they can so blatantly ignore the US Constitution in that matter, why
should anyone think that any other element of the US Constitution gives
any protection?
--
David G. Bell -- SF Fan, Filker, and Punslinger.
"History shows that the Singularity started when Tim Berners-Lee
was bitten by a radioactive spider."
Pete McCutchen
("David G. Bell") wrote:
>On Saturday, in article
> <recjevohe8r207kcf...@4ax.com>
> p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net "Pete McCutchen" wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 13 Jun 2003 11:21:30 -0400, Vicki Rosenzweig <v...@redbird.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>> >>Isn't the contention that somebody else is a traitor itself an
>> >>exercise of free speech rights? So far as I know, not even John
>> >>Ashcroft is suggesting that administration critics be jailed.
>> >
>> >Not quite. He's stating--successfully--that anyone the Justice
>> >Department labels as a terrorist should be jailed, without access to
>> >a lawyer, for an indefinite period. If they can do it to Jose Padilla,
>> >they can do it to you and me.
>>
>> I think the Justice Department is wrong about Padilla. Complain about
>> that; don't make silly claims about how free speech is dead in the US.
>> In fact, complaints about Bush are frequent and vitriolic.
>
>If they can so blatantly ignore the US Constitution in that matter, why
>should anyone think that any other element of the US Constitution gives
>any protection?
Now that's a good argument. But it's not the argument that Dan made.
--
Pete McCutchen
David Friedman
David Dyer-Bennet <dd...@dd-b.net> wrote:
> > The value to them of knowing their Representative's name is very
> > low--even if they care a great deal about what the government does.
> > Because a single vote has a very low probability of determining the
> > outcome of an election, and a single vote is all the individual voter
> > has to cast.
>
> They can vote in elections without knowing the name of their
> representative -- by voting on party lines, for example. They may
> also simply not have remembered the name, even if they voted for
> them (or against them).
Could be.
My point was that in order for what I think of as the civics class model
of democracy--the government does the right things because politicians
are voted out of office if it doesn't--to work, voters need quite a lot
of information about what politicians are doing and what they should be
doing. Obtaining reliable information isn't costless. The fact that one
of the simplest pieces of useful information--the name of your
representative, needed to keep track of how he votes, since in the U.S.
politicians don't consistently follow a party line--wasn't known to a
majority of my students is evidence that voters aren't obtaining
information in anything like the required amount.
Nancy Lebovitz
Pete McCutchen <p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>On Sat, 14 Jun 2003 09:05:28 GMT, na...@unix1.netaxs.com (Nancy
>Lebovitz) wrote:
>
>>>We do occasionally here about fraud of one sort or another. The practice
>>>of issuing shares when you need more money hasn't stopped--although I
>>>don't think it's fraudulent.
>>
>>I'm currently reading _Pipe Dreams_--at least part of what happened with
>>Enron is that they convinced the SEC to let them use completely non-standard
>>accounting methods (counting expected revenue as current).
>
>See here's the problem. I'm not an accountant, but it's my
>understanding that accounts receivable can indeed be booked as
>revenue. A reserve is then taken against the possibility that the
>account won't be paid. Theoretically, doing so gives a better picture
>of the true financial state of the company. Enron argued that these
>long-term contracts weren't that different from accounts receivable,
>and so should in fact be reflected on the balance sheet. They
>actually had a good argument for that position.
>The problem is that Enron valued these long-term contracts in a
>totally screwy way, one that tended to exaggerate their value.
>Greatly exaggerate. And in many cases, they weren't valuing the
>contracts based upon actual traded markets, but based on circular
>"trades" they were making apparently for the purpose of generating
>"revenue."
Part of what happened was that top executives got bonuses based
on the value of what they were in charge of--this gave them a
strong incentive to manipulate the apparant value.
Incentive's an interesting thing--I'm not sure what's least likely
to have disasterous side effects. Perhaps executives should get
stock paid out year by year after they've left. This would at least
discourage them from leaving time bombs.
>Somebody should've noticed that Enron's "revenue" kept rising, while
>their cash flowed stayed pretty much the same. In fact, a reporter at
>Fortune Magazine named Bethany McLean did notice, and she wrote an
>article called "Is Enron Overpriced?" In retrospect, the question
>answers itself. I am personally grateful to her, because I was
>contemplating the purchase of Enron stock at the time, and I chose to
>refrain largely on the strength of her article.
Afaik, she wasn't the only one, but there weren't many who noticed
there was something fishy.
From an NPR interview (possibly with the author of _Pipe Dreams_):
if a company keeps telling experts in the field that their business
structure is too hard to explain and/or understand, don't trust that
business.
>I sent her a fan letter a while ago, and I've pre-ordered her book,
>_The Smartest Guys in the Room_. I figure that an author who
>personally saved me money deserves as much.
Sounds interesting.
>> It's at least
>>possible that Enron got away with more for longer because too many people
>>trusted that the government was keeping an eye on things.
>Yup. Note also that it was the market, not the SEC, that ended up
>catching Enron.
Interesting point.
Michalak
> On Sat, 14 Jun 2003 01:41:01 -0600, Mishalak <cher...@mishalak.com>
> wrote:
>
> >I'm going to jump in with my favorite example, McWane Inc. A privately
> >held corporation that makes huge profits while ignoring safety and basic
>
> Do we really know the profits are huge? I mean, they're privately
> held, so they don't have to report their financials. For all we know,
> they're just limping along. (OK, that may be wishful thinking on my
> part.)
"According to one knowledgeable person, the company's annual revenues
approach $2 billion, an estimate that does not include the family's
banking and real estate interests." -NYTimes
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/09/national/09PIPE.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5070&en=8c138353f3abf780&ex=1055736000
> >human decency. It has been reported that there is almost not a person
> >in their workforce who is not visibly maimed in some way.
>
> First of all, I saw the Frontline report and read the New York Times
> article, and, while there may well be some exaggeration going on, I
> was as sickened as anybody. I *hate* companies like this.
>
> But I don't think that companies like this are typical, and there are
> atypical companies in the other direction, as well.
I think it is atypical, but not terribly rare. If the company I
worked for were in an inherently dangerous industry they would have a
safety record more like McWane's. They have little if any regard for
us and are constantly cutting the workforce while demanding the same
output. In the two years I have worked for them the size of my
department has been cut by 2/3 and our total output has increased 25%.
My pay in the same period has gone down by 5% due to hourly cutbacks.
And now I have to work weekends as well. We have to work harder and
faster while getting less money.
> Workers aren't stupid. Given better alternatives, how many people
> would choose to work at McWane? According to the Frontline report,
> nobody who has any better choices works there. In fact, they're now
> using prisoners on work release. Companies compete for workers, and a
> company like McWane can be forced by competition to either improve or
> go out of business.
McWane was still able to fill its workforce and amass its horrendous
work history despite the fact that the seven-year period investigated
being during what may have been the tightest labor market in US
history. Many experts think it was as close to total employment as is
possible. Color me skeptical that market forces will get companies
like McWane to change. (And more skeptical that deregulation will
result in an economic boom.)
How would I fix it? I have no easy answers and I don't even know if
my ideas would work. But I am positive that deregulation would make
the problem worse, not better.
I don't want more regulation I want more effective regulation. First
off that means simplifying the regulations and making them outcome
based. It shouldn't matter what the letter of the law says, the proof
is in how safe the worker actually are. There should be suggestions
for how companies could make their work safer without specifying
exactly what must be done since I think that the companies may be
frequently come up with better solutions than the ones suggested by
the government.
Secondly I think that part of it should be making fines for wrong
doing scaled to the size of the company's revenue/assets so
organizations like OSHA are no longer monstrously threatening to small
businesses and helpless when faced with large ones. In addition I
think making officers of the company personally liable for making or
carrying out illegal actions would be helpful as would making rewards
available for truthful whistle blowing resulting in successful
prosecution. And since the government is often the creature of these
large companies I would make it possible for workers to sue for
ownership of the company if there is a pattern of uncorrected abuse of
their rights.
Lastly I think that sometimes the only solution would be a sort of
corporate death penalty. If the abuses are bad enough I think the
government ought to ban officers from working in management positions
at any corporation and the assets of the company should be seized and
sold off. I do think this should be rare and only imposed or
threatened when there is a history of multiple deaths or multiple
cases of workers unable to work after preventable workplace injury.
One of the big things I don't have an idea of how to solve is how to
prevent companies from cooping (is that the right word?) the
regulators or the regulators having their budgets slashed until they
cannot do their job.
Mishalak
Aaron Denney
> One of the big things I don't have an idea of how to solve is how to
> prevent companies from cooping (is that the right word?) the
> regulators or the regulators having their budgets slashed until they
> cannot do their job.
First of all, RASFF gold star.
Second, I believe the word you're looking for is "coopt" (or perhaps
"co-opt" or even "coöpt").
Aaron Denney
> prevent companies from cooping (is that the right word?) the
> regulators or the regulators having their budgets slashed until they
> cannot do their job.
First of all, RASFF gold star.
David Friedman
na...@unix1.netaxs.com (Nancy Lebovitz) wrote:
> >Yup. Note also that it was the market, not the SEC, that ended up
> >catching Enron.
>
> Interesting point.
Clear evidence that the insider trading laws aren't strong enough.
The first of the modern cases where the FTC tried to expand the
definition of insider trading was one in which an investment advisor
heard a rumor that a major company was juggling its books (pre-Enron--I
don't remember the name of the company). He reported it to the FTC,
which ignored it. So he reported it to his customers, some of whom acted
on it. It turned out that the company had indeed been juggling its books.
So the FTC had him indicted for insider trading.
My source is Fischel's book, which is not unbiased but, so far as I
know, is accurate.
Brian D. Fernald
dbi...@attbi.com said...
> Brian D. Fernald <bfer...@mindspring.com> wrote:
> >In article <duqjevkvkc1e37415fh4pl9jfl82kii0t2
> >@news.panix.com>, v...@redbird.org said...
> >>
> >> Not quite. He's stating--successfully--that anyone the Justice
> >> Department labels as a terrorist should be jailed, without access to
> >> a lawyer, for an indefinite period. If they can do it to Jose Padilla,
> >> they can do it to you and me.
> >>
> >of political contributions to a Lebanese political
> >party, you can be charged as providing aid and comfort
> >to a terrorist organization.
> >
> >If political contributions are a form of free speech,
> >then such a policy is a restraint of free speech.
>
> Uh, are you arguing that Hezbollah is primarily a "political party"?
They are a major player in the democratic government of the country,
and have the most effective social welfare apparatus within the
country.
Hezbollah is a bit different from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and what not.
--
BDF.
FSOBN.
Mark Atwood
>
> If the donks were consistent on civil liberties they might have some
> redeeming virtues, but they're not even good on that, any more. Look
> at Biden and his idiotic "Rave Act."
Doubly idiotic. I *love* raves, even tho I've never taken E and
never will.
The assorted Dance Electronica genres are not like Deadhead music, you
don't *have* to be stoned to like it.
--
Mark Atwood | When you do things right,
m...@pobox.com | people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
http://www.pobox.com/~mra
Michalak
> On 12 Jun 2003 20:00:45 -0700, Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> wrote:
> >Many of the Donks want us to be like Europe of the 21st C, while a
> >vocal section of the Phants want us to be like Europe of the 12th.
> >
> >Sigh.
>
> There is that. Though I think it's a question of risk. Social
> conservatives make a lot of noise, but the last hotel I stayed in had
> a wide selection of pornographic movies. The risk of actually
> becoming like Europe of the 12th century is pretty minimal. The risk
> of Fabian socialism is much more significant.
What about the dominant faction of the Phants who want us to be like
Europe in the Victorian age? Crony capitalism, at least lip service
to prudish social values, and mostly winking at the private actions of
the 12th century faction against undesirables like abortion providers,
gays, and atheists.
Mishalak
"Horrors, we could be like Europe in the 21st century!"
"You mean with a government that leaves most power to the states?
Dread."
Nancy Lebovitz
David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.com> wrote:
>In article <OIMGa.1686$Ry3.1...@monger.newsread.com>,
> na...@unix1.netaxs.com (Nancy Lebovitz) wrote:
>
>> >Yup. Note also that it was the market, not the SEC, that ended up
>> >catching Enron.
>>
>> Interesting point.
>
>Clear evidence that the insider trading laws aren't strong enough.
This is sarcasm?
>
>The first of the modern cases where the FTC tried to expand the
>definition of insider trading was one in which an investment advisor
>heard a rumor that a major company was juggling its books (pre-Enron--I
>don't remember the name of the company). He reported it to the FTC,
>which ignored it. So he reported it to his customers, some of whom acted
>on it. It turned out that the company had indeed been juggling its books.
>
>So the FTC had him indicted for insider trading.
There was a WSJ editorial making the argument that insider trading
can have a stabilizing effect, but iirc, they didn't cite any specific
cases.
>My source is Fischel's book, which is not unbiased but, so far as I
>know, is accurate.
--
Lis Carey
news:ddfr-D9ED35.0...@dsl081-079-101.sfo1.dsl.speakeasy.net:
> In article <00A214B0...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU>,
> win...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU ("Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg
> Mgr") wrote:
>
>> I think there are some definite problems with the big state, but that
>> there are
>> some things that it's beneficial to have a biggish state for, and
>> that those things are worth having. So I want to see a robust state
>> _and_ a robust set of watchdogs, including the ACLU, public interest
>> lawyers, the courts, feisty newspapers, etc, all of them holding each
>> other accountable all the time.
>
> I think a lot of it comes down to your view of two different sets of
> mechanisms for making it in the interest of other people to act as we
> would like them to. At a very simplified level, they are:
>
> 1. Political. Governments have to do good things or they will be voted
> out of office.
>
> 2. Market. Firms have to do good things or customers won't buy their
> products.
>
> Both methods work imperfectly. But in my view, on both empirical and
> theoretical grounds, the former method usually works much less well
> than the latter. Putting it in the language of my field, market
> failure exists in the private market but is endemic in the political
> market.
>
> The argument "We need a powerful government to make up for the
> imperfections of the market" assumes, at some level, the
> opposite--that we can do a better job of making it in the interest of
> political actors to act as we would like, in particular to prevent
> rather than promoting various undesirable things that people do on the
> private market, than we can of making it in the interest of actors on
> the private market to act as we would like.
>
> I think the argument for government becomes plausible only when you
> are considering things where we have strong reason to expect, not
> merely that the private market will work imperfectly, but that it will
> entirely or almost entirely fail to work. A public good such as
> national defense, or precautions against contagious diseases, can
> plausibly be argued to meet that standard. But most of the government
> activities that are justified on public good/market failure grounds
> can't--they are things that we can expect to get from the private
> market, even if not in optimal quantity or quality.
You're missing the real position of most people somewhere vaguely near my
political stance:
3. We need both strong markets and strong governments, because they both
have benefits and they both have weaknesses and flaws. Each needs the other
in order to both sustain it and control its excesses.
The Soviet Union had no free market, virtually no market at all. Was this
good or bad for the long-term health of the Soviet government?
Russia entered its post-communist era with _no laws_ governing free-market
commercial interactions. Was this good or bad for the Russian economy in
the immediate post-communist years? Is it madness or good sense that the
Rule of Law project is sending American lawyers, judges, and legislators to
Russia, and bringing Russian lawyers, judges, and legislators to the US, so
that the Russians can learn our system? (Other countries may well be
involved, too, but this is the piece of it that I'm aware of.)
Somalia acheived a state of complete anarchy a few years ago. How has this
been working out for them, in terms of public safety, public health,
economic vitality?
<snip>
--
Lis Carey
http://www.nesfa.org/reviews/Carey/index.html
Lis Carey
news:bccbr6$t3g$1...@newstree.wise.edt.ericsson.se:
> ""Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr""
> <win...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU> wrote in message
> news:00A214D8...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU...
>> In article
>> <ddfr-D9ED35.0...@dsl081-079-101.sfo1.dsl.speakeasy.net>,
>> David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.com> writes:
>> >1. Political. Governments have to do good things or they will be
>> >voted out of office.
>
>> In the presence of an informed, empowered, electorate who are in fact
>> allowed to vote and to have their votes counted. (Clearly, this
>> mechanism is broken under effective dictators; it's also broken if
>> the electorate doesn't care, it's broken if the electorate can't get
>> good information, it's broken if people who should be allowed to vote
>> are purged from the rolls or scared away from the polls, and it's
>> broken if unauditable voting machines facilitate fraud.)
>
> I think one of those is wrong: it's not broken if the electorate
> doesn't care. If only one person in three cares to vote, it's because
> the other two think things will be OK regardless of the outcome.
Or the other two think that, no matter how they vote, it's not going to
help. When people think their vote doesn't count, or won't be counted,
they're rather less inclined to go to the trouble of making a choice and
going to the polls.
> High voluntary turnouts tend to be in places where people are really
> pissed off; Northern Ireland always gets a high turnout, for example.
The former communist countries had very high turnouts in the first few
elections after communism, from sheer euphoria at actually having choices.
Every election, we get reports of how much higher turnouts are in European
countries that _aren't_ in deep crisis.
Some level of apathy towards elections can be a sign that people are
generally satisfied with how things are going, but too much is bad, and
high turnouts can be signs of democratic health as well as indicators of
major problems.
Lis Carey
> On Thu, 12 Jun 2003 19:07:40 GMT, win...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU
> ("Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr") wrote:
>
>>In article <grvdevo3i7sevcqsj...@4ax.com>, Pete
>>McCutchen <p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> writes:
>>>On Thu, 12 Jun 2003 01:36:36 GMT, "Dan Kimmel"
>>><dan.k...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>>> For all the many current faults of the US and it's governments,
>>>>> the right to criticize the government remains utterly absolute,
>>>>> despite the best efforts of Democratic Party politicians [in the
>>>>> name of "Campaign Finance Reform", actually targetted at gutting
>>>>> grass-rooted funded political issues ads] and of University
>>>>> presidents to pretend otherwise.
>>>>
>>>>Actually the real threat to free speech in American is the Bush
>>>>Administration and its supporters claiming that ANY criticism of the
>>>>court-appointed president is tantamount to treason and aiding the
>>>>enemy.
>>>
>>>Isn't the contention that somebody else is a traitor itself an
>>>exercise of free speech rights? So far as I know, not even John
>>>Ashcroft is suggesting that administration critics be jailed.
>>
>>Was Ari Fleischer's "watch what you say" an exercise of free speech
>>rights in his public position as White House press secretary?
>
> Of course.
It's perfectly okay with you if an administration spokesperson attempts to
intimidate the political opposition into swallowing their criticism of
administration policies?
Is this principle applicable generally, regardless of the parties and the
policies involved?
Mark Atwood
>
> Somalia acheived a state of complete anarchy a few years ago. How has this
> been working out for them, in terms of public safety, public health,
> economic vitality?
Correction, Somalia has transitioned over to clan law, which was the
traditional way of doing adjudication in that part of the world before
Europeans moved in and set up the assorted local war leaders up as
"leaders" slash puppets.
David Friedman
na...@unix1.netaxs.com (Nancy Lebovitz) wrote:
> In article <ddfr-61DB85.1...@dsl081-079-101.sfo1.dsl.speakeasy.net>,
> David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.com> wrote:
> >In article <OIMGa.1686$Ry3.1...@monger.newsread.com>,
> > na...@unix1.netaxs.com (Nancy Lebovitz) wrote:
> >
> >> >Yup. Note also that it was the market, not the SEC, that ended up
> >> >catching Enron.
> >>
> >> Interesting point.
> >
> >Clear evidence that the insider trading laws aren't strong enough.
>
> This is sarcasm?
Yes.
One effect of insider trading laws is to reduce market discipline in
cases like Enron. Once insiders realize things are eventually going to
collapse, it's in their interest to start unloading their stock or even
selling short--which brings down the stock price, which signals
outsiders that something is wrong. Insider trading laws discourage that.
They discourage it even more when they are expanded to cover people who
aren't insiders but have some inside information.
David Friedman
Lis Carey <lisc...@attbi.com> wrote:
> You're missing the real position of most people somewhere vaguely near my
> political stance:
> 3. We need both strong markets and strong governments, because they both
> have benefits and they both have weaknesses and flaws. Each needs the other
> in order to both sustain it and control its excesses.
But this assumes that strong governments work--i.e. that they do
"control the excesses" of the market.
Consider the issue of monopoly. Despite all the sound and fury,
government in the U.S. in the 20th century did far more to promote
monopoly than to reduce it. It cartellized the transport industry. It
reduced the size of the market by restrictions on trade. It provided the
mechanisms by which professions restricted entry.
It also ignores the fact that "strong markets and strong governments" is
in some degree logically inconsistent--because if I am free to make a
decision for myself (strong market) then the government is not able to
make the decision for me (weak government).
> The Soviet Union had no free market, virtually no market at all. Was this
> good or bad for the long-term health of the Soviet government?
It had a fairly extensive black market, which was surely good for the
long term health of the Soviet people. Whether good for the government
I'm not sure.
> Russia entered its post-communist era with _no laws_ governing free-market
> commercial interactions.
It entered its post-communist era with large parts of the economy still
belonging to the government. Russia adopted democracy and then tried to
feel its way to capitalism. China is doing it the other way around--its
capitalism is still very incomplete, but well ahead of its democracy. An
interesting experiment.
> Was this good or bad for the Russian economy in
> the immediate post-communist years? Is it madness or good sense that the
> Rule of Law project is sending American lawyers, judges, and legislators to
> Russia, and bringing Russian lawyers, judges, and legislators to the US, so
> that the Russians can learn our system?
Interesting question, and I'm not sure of the answer. I would be more
confident if they were learning the legal system under which we got from
where they are to where we are.
> Somalia acheived a state of complete anarchy a few years ago. How has this
> been working out for them, in terms of public safety, public health,
> economic vitality?
As far as I can tell, pretty well by African standards. I believe the
latest issue of _Liberty_ had an article on it, although I haven't read
it yet.
Dan Kimmel
"Pete McCutchen" <p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
news:9oujevk0a9o5umig4...@4ax.com...
My argument is that John Ashcroft, acting in his official capacity as
Attorney General, has no "rights." He has powers and duties and,
supposedly, restrictions on those. The idea that a government official
should attempt to suppress free speech through intimidation becoming an act
of free speech itself is just plain ludicrous.
Pete McCutchen
<dd...@daviddfriedman.com> wrote:
>> Somalia acheived a state of complete anarchy a few years ago. How has this
>> been working out for them, in terms of public safety, public health,
>> economic vitality?
>
>As far as I can tell, pretty well by African standards. I believe the
>latest issue of _Liberty_ had an article on it, although I haven't read
>it yet.
This is what is known as "grading on a curve."
--
Pete McCutchen
Mark Atwood
> >
> >As far as I can tell, pretty well by African standards. I believe the
> >latest issue of _Liberty_ had an article on it, although I haven't read
> >it yet.
>
> This is what is known as "grading on a curve."
Even so, entrenched and operating clan law, while it allows little
local warlordism, the warlordism wont scale up to a city, let alone
the whole landscape. This is a massive massive improvement.
Clan law strikes me as a legal system that, while it is next to
impossible to use the law to "do good" aka do progressive social
engineering on a grand scale, even for some little thing, it is
similarly difficult to use the law itself to do ill.
There is something to be said for that.
Nancy Lebovitz
Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> wrote:
>Lis Carey <lisc...@attbi.com> writes:
>>
>> Somalia acheived a state of complete anarchy a few years ago. How has this
>> been working out for them, in terms of public safety, public health,
>> economic vitality?
>
>Correction, Somalia has transitioned over to clan law, which was the
>traditional way of doing adjudication in that part of the world before
>Europeans moved in and set up the assorted local war leaders up as
>"leaders" slash puppets.
I posted a summary of that article from the April issue of _Liberty_
(http://www.google.com/groups?q=somalia+author:lebovitz&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&newwindow=1&selm=XEGCa.627%24x35.435459%40newshog.newsread.com&rnum=1). It's
quite interesting, but I haven't seen any confirmation from other sources.
Have you?
Nancy Lebovitz
Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> wrote:
>Pete McCutchen <p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> writes:
>>
>> If the donks were consistent on civil liberties they might have some
>> redeeming virtues, but they're not even good on that, any more. Look
>> at Biden and his idiotic "Rave Act."
>
>Doubly idiotic. I *love* raves, even tho I've never taken E and
>never will.
>
>The assorted Dance Electronica genres are not like Deadhead music, you
>don't *have* to be stoned to like it.
Is there a difference between Deadhead music and Grateful Dead music?
Mark Atwood
>
> Is there a difference between Deadhead music and Grateful Dead music?
It's the Grateful Dead, and all the "in the footsteps of" bands, the
best know of which is Phish.
Alan Winston - SSRL Admin Cmptg Mgr
>In article <m3y903g...@khem.blackfedora.com>,
>Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> wrote:
>>Pete McCutchen <p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> writes:
>>>
>>> If the donks were consistent on civil liberties they might have some
>>> redeeming virtues, but they're not even good on that, any more. Look
>>> at Biden and his idiotic "Rave Act."
>>
>>Doubly idiotic. I *love* raves, even tho I've never taken E and
>>never will.
>>
>>The assorted Dance Electronica genres are not like Deadhead music, you
>>don't *have* to be stoned to like it.
>
>Is there a difference between Deadhead music and Grateful Dead music?
I don't know whether Mark makes this distinction, but I can see a couple
of reasonable ways to make a distinction.
1) The Other Ones, Phish, and perhaps other outfits could be said to be saying
Deadhead music - the kind of music that appeals to Deadheads - without
necessarily playing Grateful Dead music.
2) Within the GD ouevre, there are songs and there are jams, and the jams
are more stereotypically of interest to Deadheads. ("Grateful Dead fans" buy
Grateful Dead albums; "Deadheads" collect unofficial concert recordings.)
--Alan (awaiting correction from doug, among others)
--
===============================================================================
Alan Winston --- WIN...@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU
Disclaimer: I speak only for myself, not SLAC or SSRL Phone: 650/926-3056
Paper mail to: SSRL -- SLAC BIN 99, 2575 Sand Hill Rd, Menlo Park CA 94025
===============================================================================
Avram Grumer
<ddfr-4DFB84.1...@dsl081-079-101.sfo1.dsl.speakeasy.net>,
David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.com> wrote:
> In article <Xns939B5531FD965...@216.148.227.77>,
> Lis Carey <lisc...@attbi.com> wrote:
>
> > You're missing the real position of most people somewhere vaguely
> > near my political stance:
>
> > 3. We need both strong markets and strong governments, because they
> > both have benefits and they both have weaknesses and flaws. Each
> > needs the other in order to both sustain it and control its
> > excesses.
>
> But this assumes that strong governments work--i.e. that they do
> "control the excesses" of the market. Consider the issue of monopoly.
> Despite all the sound and fury, government in the U.S. in the 20th
> century did far more to promote monopoly than to reduce it. It
> cartellized the transport industry. It reduced the size of the market
> by restrictions on trade. It provided the mechanisms by which
> professions restricted entry.
>
> It also ignores the fact that "strong markets and strong governments"
> is in some degree logically inconsistent--because if I am free to
> make a decision for myself (strong market) then the government is not
> able to make the decision for me (weak government).
What's going on here is that Lis has used some vague and undefined
terminology "strong markets" and "strong governments", and thereby
allowed you to project your own meanings onto her words. I see a lot of
this sort of thing.
What I, personally, think of when I hear the phrase "strong market" is
that a wide variety of goods and services are available for my purchase,
especially on terms that allow me to switch providers easily.
What I, personally, think of when I hear the phrase "strong govermnet"
is that my tax dollars will buy me safety from the enemies of my nation,
protection of my rights, and certain kinds of help and services that
the market might not be up to providing.
I don't see that either of these necessarily interferes with the other.
I expect that you probably agree with me, up until that "certain kinds
of help and services" part.
--
Avram Grumer | av...@grumer.org | http://www.PigsAndFishes.org
Millions for defense, not a penny for the House of Saud.
Kevin J. Maroney
<dd...@daviddfriedman.com> wrote:
>One effect of insider trading laws is to reduce market discipline in
>cases like Enron. Once insiders realize things are eventually going to
>collapse, it's in their interest to start unloading their stock or even
>selling short--which brings down the stock price, which signals
>outsiders that something is wrong. Insider trading laws discourage that.
>They discourage it even more when they are expanded to cover people who
>aren't insiders but have some inside information.
When insiders sell out their shares and short-sell the company based
on privileged information, insiders get rewarded for being inside a
failing company by siphoning money away from people who are outside of
it. Preventing that siphoning is the whole point of prohibiting
insider trading. The small benefit you describe is, to my mind, vastly
outweighed by the negative consequences of allowing insiders to dump
their shares on people who don't have access to that private
information.
--
Kevin J. Maroney | k...@panix.com
Games are my entire waking life.
David Friedman
Avram Grumer <av...@grumer.org> wrote:
> What I, personally, think of when I hear the phrase "strong market" is
> that a wide variety of goods and services are available for my purchase,
> especially on terms that allow me to switch providers easily.
>
> What I, personally, think of when I hear the phrase "strong govermnet"
> is that my tax dollars will buy me safety from the enemies of my nation,
> protection of my rights, and certain kinds of help and services that
> the market might not be up to providing.
>
> I don't see that either of these necessarily interferes with the other.
> I expect that you probably agree with me, up until that "certain kinds
> of help and services" part.
I think my disagreement comes at least partly from the observation that,
once it is accepted that the government is to do a wide variety of
things justified as making up for failures of the market, it turns out
that at least some of those thing reduce the variety of goods and
wervices available foryour purchase, and make the terms on which you
purchase them less attractive.
In addition, of course, to the extent that the government, which is a
monopoly provider, is producing services that the market would otherwise
produce--schooling is the obvious example--you are much less able to
switch providers than if the market was providing them.
And, finally and most radically, I think that the same sorts of
arguments that suggest that the government does a bad job of producing
food or cars also suggest that it does a bad job of defining and
protecting rights.
Avram Grumer
<ddfr-19062A.1...@dsl081-079-101.sfo1.dsl.speakeasy.net>,
David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.com> wrote:
> In article <avram-53A648....@reader1.panix.com>,
> Avram Grumer <av...@grumer.org> wrote:
>
> > What I, personally, think of when I hear the phrase "strong market"
> > is that a wide variety of goods and services are available for my
> > purchase, especially on terms that allow me to switch providers
> > easily.
> >
> > What I, personally, think of when I hear the phrase "strong
> > govermnet" is that my tax dollars will buy me safety from the
> > enemies of my nation, protection of my rights, and certain kinds
> > of help and services that the market might not be up to providing.
> >
> > I don't see that either of these necessarily interferes with the
> > other. I expect that you probably agree with me, up until that
> > "certain kinds of help and services" part.
>
> I think my disagreement comes at least partly from the observation
> that, once it is accepted that the government is to do a wide variety
> of things justified as making up for failures of the market, it turns
> out that at least some of those thing reduce the variety of goods and
> wervices available foryour purchase, and make the terms on which you
> purchase them less attractive.
>
> In addition, of course, to the extent that the government, which is a
> monopoly provider, is producing services that the market would
> otherwise produce--schooling is the obvious example--you are much
> less able to switch providers than if the market was providing them.
What percentage of American children attended school before the
government started providing it? What percentage attend private schools
now?
What percentage of the population attended college prior to the
establishment of the state universiety system? Prior to the GI Bill?
What percentage attends now?
> And, finally and most radically, I think that the same sorts of
> arguments that suggest that the government does a bad job of producing
> food or cars also suggest that it does a bad job of defining and
> protecting rights.
I can't even think of a way to measure this one.