y_feldblum

I'd like to know what that 'vital element' is.... I lament people who make products based on the gullibility of buyers and not for the product itself. Everything you're railing against. People making products that the buyers will buy, instead of preaching to them to buy other things that you the enlightened central planner know are better for them. I think I was quite clear that 'the cost of information' could only cost the consumer if... You were very clear and very wrong. The "cost of information" I was describing is the price the consumer must pay to research and gain knowledge, because information is not free. This is not necessarily money paid, but can also be time invested looking through catalogs or leisure forfeited or staying longer at the store to browse or asking the storekeeper what he doesn't currently have in stock. The cost of information is the price paid every time you learn about another product on the market, no matter whether it was fed to you on a billboard or you looked through a catalog. I do lament that ignorant and uninformed people seem to be quite happy being as such That is uncapitalistic. People are rational, right? (Objectivists, nod your heads....) That's the fundamental tenet of Capitalism. If they choose to stay ignorant, that means getting educated is too expensive or not worth the risk. but I never said that had anything about THEM being capitalist or un-the-same No, because lamenting them is being anti-capitalistic. Here, I am assuming you don't simply have a personal preference for an educated populace, but a fundamental problem with an uneducated one (the education discussed being all from your perspective). What are your views of what 'real' Capitalist business practices? Anything people want to do, as long as laws are objectively defined, government is and is only in existence to quash initiation of force or the threat of such, and people deal with each other as traders not looters, with persuasion not force. Other than that, anything goes, and (a touch of Objectivist morality here) please everyone use your minds and your capabilities of reason to your personal benefit. What do you think an example of an 'un-capitalistic' business is One that is unregulated. I can read this or that later, but it would be nice to see your arguments here on the board. And this is totally unrelated to examples of Capitalistic business practices, having more to do with having a basic understanding of the economics fundamentals and jargon. The point is, you need an economics book, or if you like the free stuff an economics website. I have no idea how to write up a chapter on the fundamentals right now; but since many such are already written, the ball is in your court. Go for the free stuff, or visit Amazon; my personal recommendation is ... and you've heard it already.

Mind + reason and property are logically connected. They are two sides of an equation, separated only by time. There is no one without the other. No property means no mind and reason; no mind and reason means no distinguishing characteristics from animals, aside from walking erect. There is no claim that is not exclusive claim - or, exclusive claim is the only kind of claim there is, by definition; otherwise claim would be a stealing-from-each-other race. BTW, Wonder, when you ask a one-word question on statements with more than one part, you're going to have to rephrase your question or everybody else is going to be confused.

Again, and I can't stress it more, I agree with you on capitalism! You don't, because you describe as un-capitalistic a vital element of it. << Evidently, the cost of access to information is too high. People would prefer to purchase A without knowing about B because A is suitable and the expected benefit of researching all the Bs outweighs the cost. >> I totally agree with the second sentence and totally disagree with the first. You can't; they say the same thing. It's my style. No, no definition yet ... worth ... I know what my own profit margins are.... Here, you're talking nonsense. Read a bit: learn the fundamental concepts and jargon. Where did I ever say 'at no charge'? You are lamenting as un-capitalistic that people don't know everything, and that the lack of infinitely complete information on the part of all is a cause of a market sector. I lament as uncapitalistic your lament.

Respond whenever you want .... Capitalism as it was meant to be is a social system where every person is free from the initiation of force or the threat of such. In essence, that means people are free from you. Where I was headed with my previous post is: A. Letting the mass market know about your product is as much a good as the product itself. Knowledge isn't free: people need to pay simply to find out what's on the market. The cost of purchasing an item is the price of the good itself plus the information that you learned about it. B. Running a business is no simple endeavor. It's not "Wow, new law of physics! I think I'll build flying cars and sell them now for millions!" It is, "okay, I need to find competent people who've experience in cars, flying, and most importantly starting businesses. I need to raise capital and attract investors. I need to find and buy, rent, or lease some land and build a factory, buy the heavy machinery, and hire a workforce, all before I sell the first unit. Then, I have to figure out how to let people know about my product: tv, magazines, billboards. Wow, this is risky." A similar process affects already established businesses. That is not free! What you are paying for in a good is the competence of the manufacturing plus the competence of the business system. for sure everything has its value. I'd call that 'worth' - but then one could ask how to measure it - which brings up a good point because the question 'what is a dollar' should be asked more often You need to read an economics tract, and again I'd recommend Sowell's Basic Economics as a lifelong reference. Everything you're asking about is very well defined. Now what would you call a system where thoughtless consumption is a norm, where a lack of choice is blindly accepted? Evidently, the cost of access to information is too high. People would prefer to purchase A without knowing about B because A is suitable and the expected benefit of researching all the Bs outweighs the cost. the worth of you and what you do or make for others is Capitalism That includes covering the cost of access to information - advertisement. I'm not so sure that selling something for more than it's worth is Do you know anything about the supply curve and the demand curve? Or, getting more technical, what is marginal cost and marginal value? These are the fundamental concepts in economics, and they define what "worth" is. From what I see here, you have no solid definition of your own. Earning because of someone else's weakness, laziness or stupidity isn't. Making and profiting from an enviroment of stupidity is even worse. This is the worst part of your post. Who is to provide the masses with information about all possible products at no charge? - Blank out!

J.M.S., you are in need of an answer, because otherwise I can see you completely rejecting Capitalism. Information has both value and price. Business systems have both value and price. Quality has both value and price. Quality: Meaning, you can't make a superb-quality finished good and expect it to be the idol of Capitalism. It is not. Information: How are you going to let people know you make it and are selling it? Business Systems: What if you can't fill orders fast enough, or you're in a slump and have overstocked inventory, how do you make or store? All these questions need answers. Microsoft, McDonald's, any wildly successful company must answer all of these questions well; it's not only about how good it is, it has loads to do with does the customer know? and does the customer get it when he wants it?. Capitalism requires a person to use his mind. It's all very well to think, how can I perfect this new product idea? - but you are evading (the word raises a red flag here!) all of the other issues involved.

I think that argument was, nonexclusive claim negates property-rights and man-qua-man. I don't assume we automatically "own" the things we create, because we can simply not and start living like squirrels or something. To be a person as distinguished from all other kinds of things out there, however, demands the recognition of exclusive claim to mind + reason = . You have exclusive claim to mind + reason; it is yourself, your mode of existence (assuming for the moment that being human is a good thing). Thus, you have exclusive claim to mind + reason = .

I did say precisely what you're questioning in my second-previous post. I will repeat and elaborate. Most of what I say is rehashed straight from AR. There is a distinction in the mode of survival between all other kinds of animals (and certainly all life) and man. Bacteria and plants are aware of their environment and are cued to adapt, in order to survive, by virtue of individual, disconnected sensations. Animals are of a higher order, in that their awareness, ability to adapt, and survival hinge on perceptions, integrations of multiple sensations. Still a higher order of animal consciousness involves cognition - the abstraction of perceptions. Yet, they all survive based on their natural instincts: hunt or be hunted, eat or be eaten. People can choose to be different, they have that capability. People have minds capable of reason, an order of consciousness above abstractions - and they can choose to use reason as their mode of survival, or resort to the instinctual survival of the lesser species. The rational person is man qua man; the person who rejects reason is a brute animal. Man qua does not exist without such a thing as "property rights". In a person's mode of survival as man, mind is the beginning, reason is the middle, and property is the end; mind the input, reason the process, property the result. Note that as of here, property is simply the end result. Only where a person has exclusive use of his property, ie the result of mind and reason, does survival as man exist - because if others had a claim on anything a person produces equal or greater than is own claim, ie public property, the value of the thing is instantly negated; the end being nothing means the middle and the beginning are nothing. Air is virtually non-property and its (economically, marginal) value is virtually zero; this is because anybody has a claim on anybody else's airspace. Mind and reason regarding air are nothing. Mind and reason regarding anything which anybody else could take at will come to nothing. On the other hand, people here have exclusive use to their cars and such property, and so mind and reason are paramount here. The "right to property", according to Objectivism and this chain of reasoning, is man's nature; the concept of exclusive use is the necessary condition that elevates man from among the animals to the level of mind and reason. Without the concept, man would cease to be man and would be more like apes. People could perfectly well survive without property rights - as plants or perhaps mice do; but they cannot survive as men without property rights, because property rights is the difference between them and the rest of the animal kingdom. The argument here is: observe distinction; identify distinction. EDITED by RadCap for name-calling/smears

Or, philosophically, that is the very nature of things, their very identity. Philosophy cannot tell a person any more facts about the universe than what he could discover by observation.

Wonder, AR does indeed define property, but I forget her definition and someone else will please quote it. But for the purpose here, you will note that I did slip in a definition - the solution to the equation mind x reason = ? Ownership is simply the relationship between a person and his property. How we know it exists is the same way we know that mind and reason and their product exist.

The answer from QM is - a kind of bounded randomness. Certain things exist not as infinitely precise, but as multiples of the fundamental unit or as probability spreads (which are actually different ways of describing the same thing). In any event, individual microscopic motions are weighted-random (causally related to reality), and macroscopic motion is the total of such, usually very close to the expected total. The universe is not deterministic - QM squashed that conception.

I didn't really understand the Socratic argument myself ... but perhaps because it both assumes and affirms that which it tries to negate, and moreover is circular and thus invalid. Wasn't that formidable in hindsight, was it?

Since you're here, permit me to give you Ayn Rand's simple answer and my perhaps Objectivist observations (me having read not terribly much as yet of the available literature): AR - Rights (life, liberty, property) are a necessary condition of human existence - of the existence of man qua man. Premise - An animals mode of existence is instinctual; constrasted with man's mode of existence, which is fully dependent on his mind and on objective reason. Premise - A person's mind and process of reason are his own. Then - The result being the person's own means man can survive as man, ie, fully dependent on mind and reason; The result being nobody's, being nothing, being non, means man can survive only as an animal, ie, instinctually, and the concept man ceases to exist. Property is a celebration of man; non-property is a negation of man.

At this point I would like to recommend Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics as a bit of light reading and, coincidentally, as containing the answer to RE SG's question. Unfortunatly, since I am away from my copy of the book, and as such am having a bit of difficulty consulting it just now, I'll leave this post as book recommendation slash holy grail slash mandatory reading for all.

MB, I too must ask why you reject out of hand this specific physical mechanism (neuro-circuitry, for free choice). Falafel, I too must ask why you ask philosophers, out of the blue, what they know of neuroscience that a cognition-programmer doesn't know. To my knowledge, Objectivism does not specifically deal with the anterior neo-cortex.

For the benefit of RC, I'll make my presence felt in the theoretical physics topics some more. That was me making a big deal of RC's shouting, and I still wish he'd stop. It's quite a pain reading his posts because for me as well caps signify significantly raised volume. RC, do you include the nature of existence (including such things as geometry, or laws of physics) in your definition of universe? Kind of like (for those of you up on computers) how XML documents are supposed to be self-describing, ie their nature being a part of their contents?

GC, I don't think the ideal world would be full of professional (fully studied) Objectivists. It would simply be full of people who believe in life, rights, and freedom - meaning, were altruism/collectivism/mysticism not the primary philosophies taught all over the world and instead people began to uphold virtue, the world would be a whole lot better. America circa 1800 - 1900 was nearly such a place. Leave philosophy to the ivory tower - to the academy, the few necessary politicians, the journalists, the concerned citizens, the think tanks. Rand's Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, New Intellectual and Virtue of Selfishness, as well as Sowell's Basic Economics and for an historical perspective a copy of the nation's founding documents, is nearly the complete education of a life/rights/freedom society in my opinion. Also, if RC and DAC were running, I'd vote for DAC. On the issues frontier, there wouldn't be an issue of environmental regulation except as far as how fast it should be undone - "yesterday" as compared to "before it was signed into law". The actual campaign would be entirely a personality/connections contest. To an Objectivist, government should have no powers whatsoever beyond police, justice, and defense. There are absolutely zero issues, and as Rand said, government should be a tiny robot, with no personality and no desire to help, simply going about its delegated duty of protecting the citizens from physical force and the threat of it. You are right that there are at least some people annoyed by the insults, the lack of respect, the lack of explanation, and the lack of consideration for new knowledge on the part of some radical capitalist (or is it red cap / red beret?) mods. And an attempt to ban you would result in a 75% drop in discussion here, bad for the pr.

RC, no dissent ... except what is your conception of river ownership?

I would answer, government should recognize that just as one has property rights in his section of the river enough to dump his toxic wastes in, others have property rights in their sections enough that others should not damage their property by letting toxic waste flow in without their consent. So yes, the moral system would be objective laws protecting the rights of one from violations of another.

DAC, that's just it: even with the perfect experiment, a particle's characteristics can never be precisely determined. Even if nothing bumps into anything, etc etc. In fact, what it means is precise position coupled with precise momentum do not exist at once. "A is A" purists should be passing out here. GC, you are right to question AS's claim against physicists re universal expansion. However, whenever you've got a lot of mass-energy in a singularity, whether it is a black hole or the big bang precursor, causality breaks down. Ie, it happens today and it is observable.

I am curious as to what the Objectivist opinion is with regard to the uncertainty principle of QM, and the expanding universe of astrophysics (the same one which Einstein evaded - denied outright in favor of eternality - and later regretted doing so). Do these phenomena and laws exist and apply to reality, or are physicists' philosophic principles simply flawed? Some here need reminding that the ancient Greeks used logic to derive the structure of the universe; as we know, they were dead wrong in nearly every respect.

GC, RC is correct in asserting that if the moral basis of an action is evil, the intentions matter not at all. We are not playing the "ends justify means" game of life, or at least a couple rational individuals are trying not to against a tide of the irrational. The "noble" socialist goal of giving free healthcare to all is predicated on a negation of individual rights and is hence, no matter intention, evil. Further, it is completely fair to say the regulatory approach is based on whims: that is what any gang rule is. When one gang makes the rules because it has the biggest gang or the loudest voice or the noblest posture, until another gang rises and displaces it and makes new rules, it's rule of the whim, not of fact. No process of government control can be made rational: the Mouches of the country can try all they want, but in the end they have the power only to destroy, not produce. Specifically here, the reason is that enviro regulation is based completely on who has the government's ear. One year the greens have, say, Clinton, and he's all out crusading for "safe levels" of pollutant emissions. Four years later, it's Bush, and suddenly the definition of "safe levels" changes drastically when the factory owners steal the prez's ear. What you need is a system of objective laws predicated on a moral philosophy; the law shouldn't depend on who is the president at any given time. Objectivism gives such a possible system: property rights.

GC, the regulatory approach is based on whims, since nobody has rights. "Some action needs to be taken to protect some people from what I consider bad things" - who is to take said action? Government. How? Initiation of force. Who is to pay for it? Firstly the taxpayers, and secondly anybody with a different opinion of what things are bad and a gang too small to influence government policy. On what moral code? Not a rationalist one.

Under GC's scheme ... and as I see it ... There is the environmentalism which seeks to preserve nature as though humans didn't exist: anti-man. Then there is the environmentalism which is concerned with its own future access to currently legally unowned resources: selfish. Under the second category, there is the environmentalism which seeks government controls: negates others, thugocratic. Then there is the virtually nonexistent environmentalism which seeks government nonintervention and the re-establishment of property rights: Objectivism-sanctioned.

I have made essentially two points. 1. It is a fact of reality that no ether exists; it is demonstrable from perception and derivable from everything else we know about how the universe works. 2. You evade this fact of reality by invoking the rules of logic. There are three possibile resolutions. 1. This fact of reality is incorrect, and in time we will perceive or derive ether. 2. The rules of logic are incorrect, and a new framework must be created. 3. You have not correctly applied the rules of logic in disputing the fact of reality. I lean toward 3. What is your opinion on the matter?

The environmentalist challenge is based on the premise of no-ownership, where anybody can do what he wants so long as he has a suitably large and powerful gang to back him up - government, legislation, and controls. The objectivist response must be, public property is an abomination. The best solution is for the body of citizens - with the power vested in government - to auction off all such property.