CrowEpistemologist

Vouchers/charters = government-run schools. What are you talking about?

If somebody creates--as they are, right now, all across the country--a competing charter/voucher school right next to a private school, often with many of the same families, the same curriculum, etc... then no, it's not optional. One business gets free money from the government, the other one doesn't. There's no way it can compete. Well, okay, I suppose your participation in business is entirely optional. Private schools will enjoy the right to either go out of business or merge with the State...

Exactly. And to expand my maybe-too-cryptic point above ("our house our rules"), it's simply unrealistic to imagine that any government-financed institution will remain free for very long. Voters won't put up with their money going someplace they don't like, and the politicians will come in and make a career out of it, and so forth. Private schools that start taking vouchers will be defacto government schools within a decade or sooner. Vouchers are just a way to slowly-but-surely turn private schools into government-run schools (and Charters are just a way to instantly turn private schools into a public schools). I dread the day my fellow parents greedily accept a discount on their school tuition in exchange for their long-term freedom. They will have sold their future for a trifle.

"Performance" as measured according to... what exactly? Like I said, there's real, hard, obvious data here: vouchers go to religious schools. Look it up. This doesn't come as a surprise to anybody who actually lives in the actual, "real" world where most people are... religious... Giving people choice as to what sort of school they send their children to will not change their religion and/or philosophical beliefs. If only it were so easy. Oh, and as for me, I already send my kids to private school, so I just assume not a) force my schools to get fucked up by the government when they have no choice but to take their money; and/or pay for other people's private school. So no, I don't find the whole voucher/charter thing very interesting at all...

Totally. Changing the way education is done, from the purely technical perspective, is fully supportable. Private schools can and must lead this, but they must be truly private schools, not Fascist schools where the government gives private companies money as long as they do what the government tells them to do. I've also made the case elsewhere, btw, that vouchers/charters are harmful to the cause of private schools since they can (and absolutely are right now) destroying private schools. If the charter/voucher movement had a slogan, it would be, "The First Hit is Free". Once the industry switches over to a government-financed model, it will forever be entwined with government regulation under the universal, "my house, my rules" principle...

That's not a correct characterization, no. I don't recall ever imagining "people should not be able to make choices for themselves". HOWEVER, there's a tricky distinction here at work: you have the right to choose that which you rightfully may. In other words, you don't get to "choose" to have my car, or to have the government buy you a free car, or a free private school in this case. As for the financing structure being the "root cause" of schools being in the state they are in, well, I guess we'll agree to disagree. Ayn Rand, again, talked about philosophy guiding things like this... Defacto, in the here-and-now country we live in, vouchers are about religious schools being paid for by the government. That's because of the philosophy prevailing in our culture, which needs to change in order for that to change.

Since we're talking about our own guesses as to what will happen in the future, has it occurred to anybody to look at, I don't know, evidence? Everything I've seen (too lazy to look it up right now) show charters and vouchers drastically increasing the number of government-financed religious schools. I'm not getting the connection between changing school's curriculum and whatnot and changing their financing structure. Schools aren't the way they are because the government pays for them. That has nothing to do with it...

Interesting. Ayn Rand said these things were because of philosophy. Anyhow... Sending all kids to private schools (which have a far-higher propensity to be religious schools for instance) will make things worse, not better. You want to give a bunch of anti-conceptual dumb-dumb parents the ability to think up anything they imagine sounds like "school" and send their kids there. Many of them will inevitably send their kids to far-worse than we have now, and the lack of the diversity of the ideological gene pool is likely to make things a lot worse. All the kids in Utah will go to Mormon schools. That would be worse than what we have now. Depressing, I know, but what you're talking about won't work...

The Repubs in the South (and in the WWC) are there because of religion and primitive tribalism. Insofar as the Demos made any headway against them, that would indicate that the political grip of religion is loosening. Why would the opposite be a good thing? Truck drivers and the like vote against raising the minimum wage--and thus their own wage--because they think that's what God wants, not because they are admirers of Adam Smith. Tell yourself whatever you want to make yourself feel better, but all you're seeing is some of the ebb and flow of warring tyrants, not any change that makes any difference.

Now I can't get "sagging dorsal fins" out of my head. Thanks a lot.

Yeah, okay, I should have qualified that US dollar inflation can only be a threat to savings if, and only if, you actively invest in US dollars. I guess I'm an "inflationaphone" with every financial instrument I own, be it AAPL, DZZ, GBP or USD. I watch all of these things and trade out of them if I think they will go down in value... Once you understand that US dollars are just another investment instrument then fears we commonly have about "inflation" are vastly overblown.

Why would one's net worth make any difference? The danger of inflation is to savings. Somebody living hand-to-mouth doesn't care about inflation in any case. *** "Through speaker whom, too obviously, are in no such danger...". ...which is to say that most of the inflationaphobes you hear from tell you how they know what's coming and have therefore invested in gold or real estate or bullets or whatever. If everybody were like this (and my thesis is that that they are or would be if they needed to be) then... my thesis is correct...

I guess where you got hung up is this: I never denied that inflation of a particular currency possible or even probable. I am only saying that it doesn't have the power to hurt anybody anymore. I'm saying that there's no longer a reason to care about currency inflation. Yes, this in turn might make the probability of a particular currency's inflation smaller since governments only hurt themselves in this scenario, but that's a secondary point.

Exactly. Insofar as one refuses to understand how finances work--yet still wishes to enjoy the benefits of them--they evade.

Interesting. I guess in that context Ayn Rand meant the word "money" (and note she didn't use the word currency) to mean "stored value". She then seems to list gold as an example of how one's store of value could be held. Ayn Rand was certainly not a financial expert. To whit, she said: "To fulfill this requirement, money has to be some material commodity which is imperishable, rare, homogeneous, easily stored, not subject to wide fluctuations of value, and always in demand among those you trade with." To a financial expert, she might as well have said that money needs to be ground up Unicorn testicles. There's absolutely no (single) substance or derivative of a substance that meets all those criteria nor will there ever be--the last two characteristics are logically in opposition to one another. This is interesting though. The reality of persistent wealth storage is that is requires at least some level of diligence by somebody. Is the faith in gold trying to be a denial of that fact?

I'm not sure where she said that, but it would have been a pretty dumb thing to say. Currency is just an investment like any other. But no, I don't think Ayn Rand would tell people to shun all other investments but US dollars. I'm pretty sure she had no opinion on the matter. Oh, and "savings" and "investment" are the same thing, technically speaking. It's true that laymen don't often understand this, and they don't know how a bank works, etc. but there is no difference.

Um, US dollars, at various times, have been a good investment. Other times not. There is absolutely no investment instrument, by definition, that only goes up in real value and not down. That said, I don't see why a thing's ability to be an investment (successful or otherwise) is a prerequisite of being "money". I've always defined Money to be, "a liquid form or trade that is widely accepted within a given market context". Maybe there are other definitions but I've never used the term that way.

Here you go: http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=26189 The tl;dr for that thread is that inflation is rapidly becoming meaningless as technology, globalization, and the instant proliferation of information come together. Nobody keeps their savings in physical cash, and anybody can easily trade into whatever investment instrument they want, and thus not expose themselves to US dollars, and thus there's no real reason to care about inflation anymore. This phenomenon makes it rather pointless and thus politically untenable for a government to inflate its currency. It's a complicated point, but it has rather broad implications...

I think we're saying the same things, in a round-about way. And yes, the live point here is not the economics, but rather the politics. A fiat currency can be manipulated by a government (although I've argued that this characteristic has almost completely been eliminated in advanced countries in the last ~20 years). A fully commodity-based currency presumably cannot as easily. These are two perfectly valid tools, and perfectly valid concepts. Perhaps Spiral was reacting to the fact that most people don't have the faintest clue how global commerce and financing work--they go to the store and buy stuff, and everything behind it is black magic. That's not a floating abstraction either, but merely an abstraction based on simpler precepts that are nonetheless present and true.

People can--and do--value something for its (albeit recursive) ability to be widely traded. People value US dollars because... lots people value US dollars.

Your definition is too narrow. Money is a liquid form of trade that is valuable to the parties within the given trade. Cigarettes are "money" in prison, gold gloops might be "money" in some online game, etc. etc....

Kids in my area using trading cards as money. They are just pieces of paper, but they are valuable nonetheless. Other kids (and grown-ups) are using online game things and online game "money" (gold pieces or whatever) as money. The point is that anything that a given marketplace (which can be as small as a brother and a sister) finds valuable can be used as a liquid trading mechanism. This is an outstanding exercise in Epistemology, by the way. While I'm usually weary of "explain it to a 5 year old" explanations of subjects that cannot be explained to any human lacking an enormous context ("explain the Arab/Israeli conflict to a 5 year old"), very basic mechanisms like this work great. This makes you think of the origins of the notion of "currency" and "money" from its basic roots in physical usefulness, not as a floating abstraction, based on politics for instance.

Fiat currencies exist in reality. For instance, there's the US Dollar. It exists. You may not like it, but it exists. It is not a Floating Abstraction. Floating Abstractions are an epidemic among Objectivist, but that's another thread entirely...

Actually, that innovation is exactly my point. We are on the way to innovating our way to virtually eliminating labor (as defined as something somebody does that somebody else desires). I'm pretty sure the human race works a lot less than it used to, no?

Got it, so you don't define "unemployed" as, "not being employed". How silly of me. That said, I still don't get it: if somebody does not desire to work, and they correspondingly do not desire to buy things, then surely that desire would have a direct effect on aggregate demand, no? Put it another way, if technology gets to the point where we only need work for a few years of our life to buy ourselves a replicator, a permanent place to live, a computer, Internet connection, Roomba 2042, etc... then what? In such a society there's going to be vastly less demand for human labor, right? (And to be sure, I think a backward-looking example is probably available...).