Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care

Not necessarily. Several highly lucrative drugs came from bio research conducted in the rainforest. The pharmaceutical industry is far more profitable than the logging industry. Of course, it takes a significant foresight to do research in the rain forest, rather than cut it down for timber.

> Another major example of markets encouraging overharvesting is when the harvesting occurs on land/water that no one owns (or can reasonably own). Then, the harvesters have no regard for the replenishment of the resource; they just want to make money.

This is true if you follow the first capture rule of ownership for resources located in public domain (not owned by anyone in particular due to their nature). However, an alternative would be to argue that all resources in public domain actually belong to everyone, rather than no one. So, if you were to capture a whale in the ocean, you would actually be violating the rights of every other person on the planet to that whale. Thus, you would be obliged to compensate everyone on the planet for the fair market value (minus the cost of capture) of that whale. This means, the best you could do is brake even on your whaling activity. All of the sudden, it's no longer such an attractive economic activity.

> Sure, a state's governing may not please everyone - but if everyone is within walking and living distance, the society would be more able to resolve its differences, or come to a compromise. Thanks to this quality, I think smaller states could function with requiring more than the majority in parliament to pass legislation: e.g. 66% or 75%. Either way, at worst, you can move to a nearby state that aligns more with your beliefs. In this way, "governing" would become a market for ideas that work.

I was actually just writing how much I agree with you, and how in the past I thought that the states in US should have a lot more power, and the Federal government should have a lot less. But than I remembered the state I grew up in, IL, and how incredibly, unflinchingly, and stunningly corrupt that state, and more specifically, the city of Chicago is. Given that example, I wonder if small governments can really avoid being corrupt. That's of course not to say that large governments aren't crazy corrupt as well.

The way I see it, Education (at any level) is a process of self transformation. You cannot really purchase Education, you just pay for the opportunity to be part of that process. In this sense, your self at the time of admission is the raw material, your actualized self at the time of graduation is the final product, while the body of students can be considered the total inventory of product in process.

Second, every process of self actualization is Hard with capital H. It requires lots of work, and can be stressful (or even painful) at times. There are no shortcuts. It requires diligence to push through all that work, and perseverance in times when you feel like crap because it seems that you are never going to make it. Professors are guides and mentors, but ultimately you educate yourself. And because of this, no outcomes can be guaranteed.

Traditionally, Universities were modeled after medieval guilds. Professors, as guild masters before them, accepted candidates and teach them the art of the guild. They did not do so because they were not nice guys, but for a profit motive (Universities nowadays directly in the fees they charge, Guilds in the past indirectly through apprentices' free labor).

If the apprentice/student persevered for a fixed number of years, they received the social recognition of being competent in the art of the guild. In the Guild, apprentices became journey-man which gave them the right to practice their art in the territory controlled by the Guild and to receive a salary for it. In University, the undergraduate is considered a knowledgeable person in their major and (though we like to pretend that higher education is not job training) eligible for jobs that require specialized qualifications. In neither case does this imply that the student is now considered equals with the teacher.

For the undergraduate/journeyman to be considered equals with their professor/master, they have to pursue more self directed, advanced education for an undefined number of years. In both cases, the candidate must present a proof of competence in the art beyond what is expected from mere practitioners: For the journeyman it's called "master piece", for the graduate student "PhD thesis". This proof is presented to a group of masters including but not limited to your mentor, and they measure, debate and maybe approve it. If that last is the case, you are considered now to be a peer of them.

None of this fact seem to be common knowledge among undergraduate students, and Universities make no effort to disabuse them of their ignorance. Instead, they are now following a service industry model where every customer receives a standardized, repeatable service, and customer satisfaction is paramount. Until the day that we invent machines such as those in the first "Matrix" movie - where specific information and skills can be downloaded to your brain by direct manipulation of your neuronal patterns using electromagnetic impulses inside your skull - this model will only mess up with the older model of apprentice/master transfer of knowledge through the hard but proven self actualization process.

Reddit always seemed divided to me, lots of leftists and lots of libertarians. Maybe the Paulians were noisier and more visible. HN seems a bit more libertarian to me, maybe because people here have higher incomes.

That research was probably conducted in rainforests protected as a national park, right? At least, I highly doubt that the pharmaceutical companies actually acquired the land before conducting research, or that they would bother buying entire rainforests (to protect the ecosystem) if there wasn't a state to protect them.

An anarcho-capitalist may suggest that the pharmaceutical companies could create a fund with other people who care about preserving the rainforests, to acquire and protect the rainforests. But then, that fund would have to raise as much money as the potential profit to be made by cutting it all down - which is terribly perverted, I think. Still, such a fund would unlikely be universal enough to protect all rainforests and other important ecological centers. The point stands that whatever land a logging company acquires, it will want to destroy.

Logging is far too prevalent as it is - with all the regulation and restrictions imposed on it by modern states. I'm not sure how the argument could be made that logging would be less prevalent if there weren't any states to stop it.

> an alternative would be to argue that all resources in public domain actually belong to everyone, rather than no one

This is a nice idea in theory (and is semi-applicable in anarcho-communism too), but it can't realistically be determined what to share (e.g. these bison were on my property), how to enforce it (e.g. knowing who's harvesting what), or how to handle it (e.g. how to allocate compensation for killing a whale).

I'm not sure why we have to go through these economic gymnastics just to avoid the concept of having an association of democratic governments banning whaling or deforesting. What's so wrong with that?

> the state I grew up in, IL, and how incredibly, unflinchingly, and stunningly corrupt that state, and more specifically, the city of Chicago is

I have connections to Chicago, and can relate :-)

In my ideal world, Chicago would be broken up into governments even smaller than the City of Chicago today, which spans about 15km x 40km it seems.

I think many city councils are "optimized" for administration, and not for representation. If each of these small states were completely autonomous, and had to legislate their entire body of law, the citizens would care more, and they would develop more representative and accountable voting systems and institutions, due to the extent of the government's responsibilities.

Also, to make the point again, if a certain state is known to be corrupt, and does nothing to address it, it will probably lose business and residents to nearby states that aren't. Similarly, neighboring states would have an interest in supporting one another, and would try to discourage corruption (e.g. avoiding companies that bribe officials elsewhere).

The key point for smaller states, in my opinion, is that their constituents care. I feel like people are more apathetic in larger states, because they have less power individually, and their responsibility to keep their government accountable is further absolved. When you get people to care, and give them power collectively, everything else follows.

> The key point for smaller states, in my opinion, is that their constituents care. I feel like people are more apathetic in larger states, because they have less power individually, and their responsibility to keep their government accountable is further absolved. When you get people to care, and give them power collectively, everything else follows.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7925738