Capitalism Forever
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Posts posted by Capitalism Forever
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Unless I am missing something it seems as if a private company would far outperform a publicly traded company in the longer-term because they don't have to sacrifice long-term gains for short term gains.
If we assume that they have the same amount of capital, then probably yes. But it should be noted that going public makes it much easier to raise capital.
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Just to make the thread a bit ... well, "fair and balanced" (so if you're a fan, don't read on!) I don't particularly like them. They have a few songs that have a little merit to them (such as Let It Be, although I cannot really figure out what they want to let be--or Yesterday, whose meaning is pretty clear, but not a part of its merit), but I wouldn't go as far as to call even those "good," let alone "great." Not to mention the fact that John Lennon was a damn Communist! I'd rather listen to Abba than the Beatles if I had to choose, and I'm not a fan of those guys either...
It's interesting to observe one's own taste in music change. If this thread had been started now, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have included that "merit" part, I simply would have said that the Beatles suck, period. And I would have expressed my bewilderment at all those posts praising them to high heavens.
Well, since many of those posters are still here: What do you guys like about the Beatles? Do you think their songs are good stuff qua art in the Objectivist/Romanticist sense, or are they simply pleasant to listen to, or do you find them energizing / inspiring / enchanting / ... ?
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It's not that simple. River flood-plains make for excelent farmland (as do the slopes of volcanoes), which is why there are so many farming towns in the news whenever there are floods.
Okay, but if someone settles on a river flood-plain because it is a river flood-plain, it is quite clear that he has no right to call for government force to have a dam built in order to prevent floods, isn't it?
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Can you see what future negotiations with Japan will be like?
"I'm sorry, President Obama, but I am afraid you have to comply with our demands, otherwise our first lady will eat the sun."
Now that you mention that, does anyone know if it's OK for a vegetarian/vegan to eat celestial bodies?
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That leaves us (me) with the question of whether we are better off with or without those dams. The lives and property saved from occasional flooding is a strong argument supporting the building of dams. Is it strong enough to justify the government's coercive role, assuming the dam would have been improbable through private funding?
Of course not.
Besides, if the area was prone to flooding, there wouldn't be many people living there anyway (at least not any more...
) and as for the few who did live there, it wouldn't be difficult to convince them to agree. It would be only after and as a result of the dam being built that the area became more populous. -
I continue not to have enough time to read Zedic's rambling posts, but has anyone received a meaningful answer from him to the question of why lack of sustainability is a problem? Because until that happens, all this discussion is about how to solve a problem that has not been shown to exist.
It's a bit like someone complaining that the English language has more than a dozen different vowels and proposing that we should learn (or be forced to learn?) to speak without vowels. Until he has explained why he thinks vowels are a problem, why even begin discussing his proposal? And no, something like "Because all human languages have at least one vowel" does not convince me that vowels are my enemy!
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If anything which uses energy or resources isn't sustainable, then you freely admit, by consequence, that nothing today is sustainable.
BINGO! You've got it. But what I am still not getting is why lack of sustainability is a problem.
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An ad hoc collection of people who believe our current trends are unsustainable.
I agree that many of our current trends are unsustainable, I just don't see why that is supposed to be a problem.
I didn't read the rest of your post because I don't have the time for it. Could you provide a brief summary of your position please?
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I am an objectivist to the core and nearly worship Rand fundamentally. However I have a HUGE problem with her on this one.
On the "give all help possible" part, or the tribalism part?
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This is true.
Right, and it is one of the contradictions in the original piece. It sees group-think as a manifestation of individualism.
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He says that establishing such freedom from need, hunger etc. would not necessitate force as everybody profited from government infrastructure and other ressources.
Yeah. Capitalism does free people from hunger etc., it does not involve force, and everybody profits!
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OK, let's make this explicit: Eiuol, please define efficient.
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His fellow power-lusters aren't wasting any time in seizing the opportunity:
Kennedy’s Death Spurs Calls to Pass Health Legislation
The death of Sen. Edward Kennedy quickly became a rallying cry for Congress to pass health care overhaul legislation.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office sent an email to reporters at around 2:30 a.m. today, just hours after his death, calling for the passage of health care overhaul.
[...]
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I know as a Canadian I don't have a dog in this fight
You do. The decisions of the United States Senate affect your life no matter where you live.
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http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/TedKennedy/story?id=6692022
Sen. Ted Kennedy died shortly before midnight Tuesday at his home in Hyannis Port, Mass., at age 77.The man known as the "liberal lion of the Senate" had fought a more than year-long battle with brain cancer[.]
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That a free market is efficient isn't enough to say something is morally good. A free market being efficient can be discovered without any specific morality.
Doesn't the definition of "efficient" depend on what goal you want to achieve? Statists don't think the free market is efficient because it doesn't allow them to gain and keep what they want: political power.
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Which foundations in particular?
I see Clive has posted his answer while I was writing mine, but anyway, here are the foundations I consider to be crucial for economics:
- Man's life qua man as the standard of value
- The virtue of productivity
- The role of reason in creating wealth
- The trader principle
- Being "materialistic," i.e. concerned with life on Earth
- The idea that rational men love their work (as opposed to "disutility of labor" theories)
And, needless to say, a proper epistemology is also indispensable.
- Man's life qua man as the standard of value
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http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9...;show_article=1
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Obama administration plans to end the popular $3 billion Cash for Clunkers program on Monday, giving car shoppers a few more days to take advantage of big government incentives.[...]
"It's been a thrill to be part of the best economic news story in America," Secretary Ray LaHood said in a statement. "Now we are working toward an orderly wind down of this very popular program."
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Dealers have complained of delays in getting reimbursed and backlogs of vehicle paperwork getting processed in the program. Dealers have said they face a risk of not being reimbursed but LaHood has pledged that dealers will get paid for the incentives.
Interesting how they seem to define an economic success story: promising people to pay them, then finding excuses to delay or avoid payment. What is that, if not looting?
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I guess this thread shows how different tastes can be. Other than Elisha Cuthbert and maybe a couple others, I think pretty much all of the women mentioned so far are so-so at best.
My favorite actress is Vanessa Marcil:
I just listened to her and Gary Scott Thompson commenting an episode on the Las Vegas Season One DVD. Thompson introduces her as "the lovely, talented, beautiful...wonderful......incredible Vanessa Marcil!" Vanessa's response: "Talented, that's so sweet!" That should give you the answer to the "...and why" part!
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Another HUGE one for me is that I think it's insane to allow 18 year olds to vote.
While I don't agree with you about vehicles, I'm very much with you on voting. For the same reason that you need to be 30 to be a Senator and 35 to be President, you should be required to be of a sufficiently experienced age in order to vote--after all, voting means exercising a government function.
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I wouldn't say someone is a slob for thinking about something, so long as he does take rational action to be productive at some time before his resource run out. I see this as similar to what I said about Hank's research: He was using resources, not creating products.
I see. That would mean that someone who specializes on research is never a productive person at all, though, wouldn't it?
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Yes, you have to have the idea first; no one is questioning that, but if you do not bring it into material form -- i.e. write down the recipe or cook food based on your idea -- then you haven't created anything.
So you're saying that the first two scenarios are examples of productivity and the subsequent ones are not, right?
If it is just in your mind as an idea and you haven't acted to bring it into material form, then you have skipped a necessary step in production.There is a difference between "skipped" and "not yet gotten to it." The poet in our Thursday/Friday example was not skipping step 2, he simply had no time left for it on Thursday and therefore could only do it on Friday. The question is this: if later he reminisces on how he created the poem, would he be right to consider Thursday a very productive day of his, the day that made his poem possible, or would he be more correct to think, "I was being an unproductive slob on Thursday, doing nothing but lying under a tree and thinking, but I made up for it on Friday by writing an excellent poem" ?
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BTW, since you
regard working out at the gym as being productivethere isn't really a significant disagreement between us from my perspective. To quote again from that favorite "earlier post of mine," I consider the question of sleep to be a marginal issue. Stuff for hairsplitters to worry about, if you like.
Sustainable development
in Political Philosophy
Posted
It is a contradiction in terms. The only thing that can be sustained indefinitely is death.
First, I wouldn't take that as a definitive statement of what sustainable-development advocates are all about; they usually want the government to "help convince" people to behave in their preferred, "sustainable" ways.
Also, it doesn't give a definition of sustainable development, it just names a supposed implication of it. It's a bit like being asked what prostitution is and answering, "Prostitution involves your desires being satisfied." Yeah, maybe it does--but that does not tell you what the essence of prostitution is.
But even if we look past all that and just consider the concrete statement, it seems to be rather "context-challenged," so to speak. Why would one cut down the entire rainforest for housing? Is there such a huge demand for housing right now? Is the rainforest the most economical way to supply the housing? If the answer to either is no, then it does not pay to cut down the rainforest for housing, and everyone will know that without anyone having to mention sustainability. And if we're going to need the continued existence of the rainforest during the next several decades, it will not be cheap to cut it all down, therefore it will not be the most economical way to supply housing--again without anyone bringing up sustainable development. (All this assumes a laissez-faire society, of course. If any of this does not work because the market mechanisms are not allowed the work, the solution is to let the market mechanisms work, and again not to blabber about sustainability!)
I like to quote Ann Coulter on this one: "Don't worry about the grandkids, they'll have a planet on their own." As far as the very next generation is concerned--could you give an example of a specific resource that is threatening to run out on our kids?
If, at some point in time, a group of people happens to be stuck on a planet that cannot sustain life beyond the current generation, the proper course of action for them is to have no children. Or maybe if they do, to tell them not to expect to outlive their parents by very much. But at any rate, it would not be rational for them to starve and suffer so that there can be 2 or 3 more starving and suffering generations after them instead of just one!