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No, the question is, in a sufficiently complex system, can or should you boil everything down to sentence-sized absolutes? I'm positing that if you do that, yo

by jbooth 17y ago

No, the question is, in a sufficiently complex system, can or should you boil everything down to sentence-sized absolutes? I'm positing that if you do that, you're going to be wrong. Unregulated markets are the right way to go for 95% of goods and services, like toilet paper, peanut butter and roadside diners. But not for 100%. You agree with this, unless you're in favor of disbanding the military and hiring personal bodyguards, selling off the highway system to toll roads, allowing your neighbor to build a coal-fired power plant within 6 inches of your property and opposing net neutrality because the market will work things out. Don't turn your brain off just because it's comfortable -- examine situations with a fresh mind. Follow the incentives -- market failure is a real phenomenon.

anamax 17y ago
> No, the question is, in a sufficiently complex system, can or should you boil everything down to sentence-sized absolutes? That's a question, but it isn't particularly relevant as no one claimed that everything can be boiled down to sentence-sized absolutes. > You agree with this, unless Not so fast. The military isn't an example of a regulated market. Net neutrality is an interesting example for you to bring up. Last-mile bandwidth providers have a govt-granted monopoly. Ford doesn't tell me what I can do with trucks that I buy from it. > Don't turn your brain off just because it's comfortable -- examine situations with a fresh mind. Follow the incentives -- market failure is a real phenomenon. Patronize much? The existence of a problem does not imply that the existence of a solution with desirable properties. To be more specific - the existence of market failure does not imply the existence of solutions to said failure that are better than said failure. If you want to argue for regulation, you need more than "market failure". You need to show that regulation costs less. Since your examples of the need for regulation have been caused by regulation.... Note that the success of regulation in one area tells us nothing about whether regulation will succeed in another. And then there's the small problem that we don't have ideal regulators, we have US regulators. Surely their record is relevant....

by jbooth 17y ago

anamax 17y ago

> No, the question is, in a sufficiently complex system, can or should you boil everything down to sentence-sized absolutes? That's a question, but it isn't particularly relevant as no one claimed that everything can be boiled down to sentence-sized absolutes. > You agree with this, unless Not so fast. The military isn't an example of a regulated market. Net neutrality is an interesting example for you to bring up. Last-mile bandwidth providers have a govt-granted monopoly. Ford doesn't tell me what I can do with trucks that I buy from it. > Don't turn your brain off just because it's comfortable -- examine situations with a fresh mind. Follow the incentives -- market failure is a real phenomenon. Patronize much? The existence of a problem does not imply that the existence of a solution with desirable properties. To be more specific - the existence of market failure does not imply the existence of solutions to said failure that are better than said failure. If you want to argue for regulation, you need more than "market failure". You need to show that regulation costs less. Since your examples of the need for regulation have been caused by regulation.... Note that the success of regulation in one area tells us nothing about whether regulation will succeed in another. And then there's the small problem that we don't have ideal regulators, we have US regulators. Surely their record is relevant....