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>>This is something we're going to have to get way better at.. ...government created markets. The goal should be to eliminate government created markets not ge

by syshum 9y ago

>>This is something we're going to have to get way better at.. ...government created markets. The goal should be to eliminate government created markets not get "better" at creating them... > You need (or at least, they opted for) a centralised core: That is the problem they opted for the centralized management, one does not need it for EBT, they choose it because they wanted control over how and where the money was spent which means they needed a contractor they controlled. >We also can't expect competition or market forces to fix problems with the central core, at least unless that competition can be designed in. In this case it comes down to data ownership. Like so many other things in modern society in the US we have a warped sense of ownership where a company that collects information about you owns that information, you do not own your own information. Until we change that these types of issues will continue to arise As the article stated commercial banks attempted to shut down services like MINT for people until a law was passed requiring the banks to allow users to access their own data with 3rd party services like Mint. This type of legal requirement should be expanded to all personal information

adrianN 9y ago
There will always be government created markets. Who else should pay for infrastructure for example? Do you want to privatize all of that?
- syshum 9y ago
  >>There will always be government created markets. Maybe, maybe not, but that was not my point. The Goal should be to eliminate as many of those as possible. >Who else should pay for infrastructure for example? Depends on what infrastruture you are speaking of, Roads are often an example but you do understand there are private roads, probably more than you think. "But who will build the roads" is a tired dead horse in libertarian circles, that problem has been solved countless times >Do you want to privatize all of that? Again that depends on what you mean by "Privatize", I believe goods and services are best when the consumers that consume them directly pay for them. My goal would be to have the payment for goods and services as close to the consumption of those goods and services as possible. The more people and organizations you put between a consumer and vendor the more quality suffers, and prices raise.
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    There's many small private roads, but all the major ones you drive on every day to get to and from your work once you're away from your suburb? Those are public, and unlike the ones that are in your cul-de-sac, they're used by many many people, not just the people who live on the same street.
    - syshum 9y ago
      So it is your belief there are no major roads that are private? and there is no way to fund major roads in a private user fee way?
    - tssva 9y ago
      > There's many small private roads, but all the major ones you drive on every day to get to and from your work once you're away from your suburb? Those are public, and unlike the ones that are in your cul-de-sac, they're used by many many people, not just the people who live on the same street. Does a 12.5 mile long 6 lane divided highway count as a major road? Because I drive on a privately owned one everyday to and from work.
      - vertex-four 9y ago
        Cool. I assume that's a toll road. Now let's say every single separate road you travel on was owned by a separate company - how would you pay your tolls? In cash, every 30 seconds? Would you have to install a tracking device on your car that any road owner can tap into? Who'd control access to such a thing? How would you ensure that they don't display monopoly-like behaviour, like the identity verification/credit check/etc companies of today? Could the road owner outside your work or your home jack up the prices to make it prohibitively expensive to take your car there? How'd you prevent that? How would you ensure that somebody didn't buy up all the major roads into or out of a city and make it prohibitively expensive for poor people to access the city? How would you ensure that somebody didn't sit on their monopoly on the route to or from wherever you need to go, and refuse to perform repairs? The whole thing could, potentially, work for the countryside, where land is cheap and plentiful and if you don't mind wasting economic production on duplicating and triplicating and quadrupling routes just to make your fantasy work out, it might work. Except wait... America's got a privatised industry which theoretically competes with road travel already and has many of the same restrictions - the freight rail industry - and when's the last railway that got built? Apparently it's prohibitively expensive to buy the land.
jaggederest 9y ago
> The goal should be to eliminate government created markets not get "better" at creating them... So we're all going to individually contract with "General Jim's Defense Systems" or "Admiral Bob’s Global Security" ala Snow Crash? The parent is discussing natural monopsonies, where there's no reason for a given territory to have more than one purchaser, such as national security space launches and social security distribution systems.
- syshum 9y ago
  But we do already have more than one Company for "National Security Space launches" (ULA and SpaceX) with more attempting to become contractors. We have seen directly in that market what competition will do, massively lower costs. ULA is somewhere on the order for 5x more expensive than SpaceX, and SpaceX had to sue to get the privilege of bidding on the contracts for the Defense Dept which previously did No-Bid contracts to ULA So your own example debunks your comment Further I never stated we could eliminate ALL government markets, but that should be the GOAL, national defense is likely one that can not be eliminated however it is also an example of the extreme waste and over reach these markets create where now the government has programs that even the military says they do not want because they are Jobs programs not for actual defense.
  - leereeves 9y ago
    I think you might be mixing up monopolies (only one seller) and monopsonies (only one buyer).
    - dalbasal 9y ago
      Yes, at least that is what I meant by monopsony. There are multiple competing firms, but they all sell primarily to the state. The legal cases syshum mentions resolved in changing the rules of this artificial, state-run market. ..making them better. I don't know where "no-bid" plays into the story, but elon musk testified for fixed-bid as an alternative to cost-plus pricing/bidding.
dalbasal 9y ago
re: "The goal should be to eliminate government created markets" Having been on hn for a while, I was sort of writing to this response when I commented. So... my friend^, I don't know. I really don't. I am sympathetic to all sorts of minarchist ideas and minarchist ideals. I also have my own ideas off beat ideas about was of improving some of these. In many cases that I alluded to above, trying to minimize government power would be an approach worth trying. However, I just don't see us living in a near future where the quality of artificial^^ markets is not very important. Some of these are a lot worse than others, and we should fix it. ^I mean this. Lets not forget we're friends, disagreements don't negate this. ^^re-reading, I realized that I should have said "artificial" rather than government created. There are many ways to catch mice, and it's worth varying more than just the colour of the cat.
- madhadron 9y ago
  > e-reading, I realized that I should have said "artificial" rather than government created. There are many ways to catch mice, and it's worth varying more than just the colour of the cat. All markets are artificial. You can't have any kind of market without some enforcement of the rules that make it a market. Otherwise it degenerates into a free market, which, despite its name, is not a market.
  - kazagistar 9y ago
    All markets are artificial because enforcement of property allocations is an artificial, market creating action. But none of this is relevant to the point of the GP, which is that a realistic policy decision involves making existing artificial markets incremental better in the short term.

by syshum 9y ago

adrianN 9y ago

There will always be government created markets. Who else should pay for infrastructure for example? Do you want to privatize all of that?

syshum 9y ago
>>There will always be government created markets. Maybe, maybe not, but that was not my point. The Goal should be to eliminate as many of those as possible. >Who else should pay for infrastructure for example? Depends on what infrastruture you are speaking of, Roads are often an example but you do understand there are private roads, probably more than you think. "But who will build the roads" is a tired dead horse in libertarian circles, that problem has been solved countless times >Do you want to privatize all of that? Again that depends on what you mean by "Privatize", I believe goods and services are best when the consumers that consume them directly pay for them. My goal would be to have the payment for goods and services as close to the consumption of those goods and services as possible. The more people and organizations you put between a consumer and vendor the more quality suffers, and prices raise.
- vertex-four 9y ago
  There's many small private roads, but all the major ones you drive on every day to get to and from your work once you're away from your suburb? Those are public, and unlike the ones that are in your cul-de-sac, they're used by many many people, not just the people who live on the same street.
  - syshum 9y ago
    So it is your belief there are no major roads that are private? and there is no way to fund major roads in a private user fee way?
  - tssva 9y ago
    > There's many small private roads, but all the major ones you drive on every day to get to and from your work once you're away from your suburb? Those are public, and unlike the ones that are in your cul-de-sac, they're used by many many people, not just the people who live on the same street. Does a 12.5 mile long 6 lane divided highway count as a major road? Because I drive on a privately owned one everyday to and from work.
    - vertex-four 9y ago
      Cool. I assume that's a toll road. Now let's say every single separate road you travel on was owned by a separate company - how would you pay your tolls? In cash, every 30 seconds? Would you have to install a tracking device on your car that any road owner can tap into? Who'd control access to such a thing? How would you ensure that they don't display monopoly-like behaviour, like the identity verification/credit check/etc companies of today? Could the road owner outside your work or your home jack up the prices to make it prohibitively expensive to take your car there? How'd you prevent that? How would you ensure that somebody didn't buy up all the major roads into or out of a city and make it prohibitively expensive for poor people to access the city? How would you ensure that somebody didn't sit on their monopoly on the route to or from wherever you need to go, and refuse to perform repairs? The whole thing could, potentially, work for the countryside, where land is cheap and plentiful and if you don't mind wasting economic production on duplicating and triplicating and quadrupling routes just to make your fantasy work out, it might work. Except wait... America's got a privatised industry which theoretically competes with road travel already and has many of the same restrictions - the freight rail industry - and when's the last railway that got built? Apparently it's prohibitively expensive to buy the land.

jaggederest 9y ago

> The goal should be to eliminate government created markets not get "better" at creating them... So we're all going to individually contract with "General Jim's Defense Systems" or "Admiral Bob’s Global Security" ala Snow Crash? The parent is discussing natural monopsonies, where there's no reason for a given territory to have more than one purchaser, such as national security space launches and social security distribution systems.

syshum 9y ago
But we do already have more than one Company for "National Security Space launches" (ULA and SpaceX) with more attempting to become contractors. We have seen directly in that market what competition will do, massively lower costs. ULA is somewhere on the order for 5x more expensive than SpaceX, and SpaceX had to sue to get the privilege of bidding on the contracts for the Defense Dept which previously did No-Bid contracts to ULA So your own example debunks your comment Further I never stated we could eliminate ALL government markets, but that should be the GOAL, national defense is likely one that can not be eliminated however it is also an example of the extreme waste and over reach these markets create where now the government has programs that even the military says they do not want because they are Jobs programs not for actual defense.
- leereeves 9y ago
  I think you might be mixing up monopolies (only one seller) and monopsonies (only one buyer).
  - dalbasal 9y ago
    Yes, at least that is what I meant by monopsony. There are multiple competing firms, but they all sell primarily to the state. The legal cases syshum mentions resolved in changing the rules of this artificial, state-run market. ..making them better. I don't know where "no-bid" plays into the story, but elon musk testified for fixed-bid as an alternative to cost-plus pricing/bidding.

dalbasal 9y ago

re: "The goal should be to eliminate government created markets" Having been on hn for a while, I was sort of writing to this response when I commented. So... my friend^, I don't know. I really don't. I am sympathetic to all sorts of minarchist ideas and minarchist ideals. I also have my own ideas off beat ideas about was of improving some of these. In many cases that I alluded to above, trying to minimize government power would be an approach worth trying. However, I just don't see us living in a near future where the quality of artificial^^ markets is not very important. Some of these are a lot worse than others, and we should fix it. ^I mean this. Lets not forget we're friends, disagreements don't negate this. ^^re-reading, I realized that I should have said "artificial" rather than government created. There are many ways to catch mice, and it's worth varying more than just the colour of the cat.

madhadron 9y ago
> e-reading, I realized that I should have said "artificial" rather than government created. There are many ways to catch mice, and it's worth varying more than just the colour of the cat. All markets are artificial. You can't have any kind of market without some enforcement of the rules that make it a market. Otherwise it degenerates into a free market, which, despite its name, is not a market.
- kazagistar 9y ago
  All markets are artificial because enforcement of property allocations is an artificial, market creating action. But none of this is relevant to the point of the GP, which is that a realistic policy decision involves making existing artificial markets incremental better in the short term.