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a) You're sort of sidetracking here by making a statement about public goods theory and simply declaring that the internet is one. I respect your right to your
by throwaway420 10y ago
a) You're sort of sidetracking here by making a statement about public goods theory and simply declaring that the internet is one. I respect your right to your belief, but you haven't really made a case why the internet is one here.
b) I don't want to sidetrack too much from your own sidetrack, but there's a great deal of literature on the theory of public goods, why they don't actually exist, and why government isn't needed to create or manage them. Even if you want to argue that this isn't the case, I'm not sure how the internet would definitely be one.
c) You're free to make an argument that you like things like the roads and water system. But do you really love them? Yeah, the freeway system kind of works, sure. The water system kind of works, sure. But it's not really flourishing, there's no market pricing on these things that truly eliminates waste (how many roads actually need to be built? Is overproduction of roads crowding more efficient means of travel like rail out of the market?), and innovation in these fields moves at a snails pace.
- ajmurmann 10y agoInteresting. Can you recommend anything in particular to read up on alternative ways of handling large pieces of infrastructure?
- throwaway420 10y agoA search here has some interesting articles. https://mises.org/search/site/%22public%20goods%22/library/mises-daily-articles-147 https://mises.org/search/site/%22public%20goods%22/library/m... There are also many papers on the site, but many of them are pretty dense and don't make for a good introduction.
- madgar 10y agoOh god I hope nobody ever ends up innovating with my drinking water. The last thing I need is companies racing to cut costs on fucking water.
- throwaway420 10y agoa) The government has already illustrated through Flint and other incidents that they are very capable of completely screwing water up as well. And when things go wrong, unlike in the private sector nobody seems to ever get punished in any way. b) I misspoke in one way, the government does kind of innovate in providing water. Take their decision to mass dose basically the entire country with fluoride. At best, fluoride's main benefits are for young kids about 4-10 years old in preventing child cavities. The point isn't to argue the health benefits of the substance, but to point out that they're medicating everybody without tailoring the dose to what's necessary for the individual. What's crazier than compulsory mass medication of an industrial byproduct that doesn't take into account individual dosage? c) You presumably ingest food, created by non-government sources everyday. They look to cut costs all of the time. How often do they really screw up? And when they do, they immediately have to work to fix the issue and they're punished severely on top of that.