punk

The show is one giant "lifeboat scenario". Some degree of collectivism would be expected under the circumstances, even in an objectivist society.

If a person attained perfection, they'd have nothing to strive for. Who'd want that?

Demand is desire. Economically my ability to act on that desire is based on my other desires and the amount of money I have. If the price of a commodity falls low enough demand is exactly desire - I will take as much as I desire. In fact, for plenty of us there are things that we consume exactly at the level of desire. For instance I probably drink as much coffee as I want to, as I don't have a budget that requires I consider not drinking coffee to save money. There are plenty of things I would start consuming if the price dropped a bit. That means I have the present desire to co

Not at all. If I am in the village at the lake there is a supply of water. It is there and people can take. Nobody produced the water, but there is a supply. You can have a supply without any producer. The Earth has a supply of air, and we all breathe it, but no one made it.

The point being we aren't talking about "shortages" and "rationing" any more. We are talking about something deeper about the nature of markets, supply, and demand. Recall, my point was that "shortages" and "rationing" already occur any free market, so simply pointing out that they will occur in a nationalized system is pointless. The only reasonable definition I can think of for "shortage" is that there exists someone that wants something and can't get it. Every time I read something like this, I always substitute the following: "I dogmatically think the contrary, but I don'

In practice supply never meets demand. There are always people who want something but cannot get it. What happens in a free market is that money is introduced and prices are set so that the demand for something given the price one has to pay for it meets supply. I have plenty of demand for things I cannot afford. I'd love to have my own private jet, it just so happens I don't have enough money. Thus the supply of jets and things like fuel don't meet demand, and prices are introduced to ration jets and aviation fuel.

There is a shortage of everything that has a price. If there wasn't a shortage it wouldn't have a price. If I live in the only small village on a large fresh water lake, then there is no shortage of water (the resource is effectively infinite), so no one is going to pay anything for water and there will be no market in water. If I live in a village in the middle of a desert there is a shortage of water, and so water has a definite price, and there is a market for water. It is exactly the case that by having a price a commodity is effectively finite in amount (unlike the water in th

Shortages *do* happen in a free market. A "shortage" simply means someone not getting the health care they want. In a free market there is still a finite amount of "health care" to go around, it is distributed by how much one is willing to pay, and if you don't have enough money you don't get it (in fact even if you do have enough money you might not be able to get it if you are unlucky and all the other wealthy types have gotten to it first, say if you want an organ transplant). Stop talking like there is somehow an infinite supply of health care in a free market. There isn't an i

There is a certain dishonesty in the way the word "rationing" is tossed around in things like this. The fact is health care is already rationed. A free market is a way to ration things. Rationing is basically how you distribute a scarce resource. In a free market you distribute the scarce resource according to how much people are willing to pay (that is what all that economics of supply and demand is about). In any other system you choose a different method of rationing the resource than the amount people are willing to pay. So again health care is already rationed. To speak a

If freedom were the ultimate political value then we wouldn't have laws, or the people advocating freedom as the "ultimate political value" would all move to the jungle and live however they want to without worrying about anyone else. Anybody living in a civilized nation has sacrificed freedom for some other good. The fact is, by living in a community you have already acknowledged that benefits come from having freedom limited. The question is at what point further limitation of freedom does not come with a corresponding benefit.

I prefered the sequel - "Force 10 From Nihilism".

In normal legal parlance this is what is called a "trial". The main objection to Gitmo has been the lack of trials to determine guilt.

The number of unique positions is greatly reduced when you account for the fact if you have two positions that are the same except for having colors swapped, or simply having to rotate the whole cube, then they are really the same position. I believe Rubik himself wrote a monograph on the mathematics of the cube.

We already have it. It is called a "safety deposit box". You can get one at the post office. Take all your money, put it in the box, and lock it. A variation on this for the traditionally minded immigrant is called a "mattress".