251–260 of 278 posts
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1. Air rights needn't be tied to land. A proportional share could be automatically inherited by each citizen upon birth. 2. Existing water rights in the US have as much to do with free markets as they did in the USSR.
How do you enforce these air rights when they've been violated by a polluter?
At my computer science university (private university with HQ based in France) in downtown San Francisco, teachers were paid between 100$ and 300$ / hr, which I find decent. 100$ was mostly for teachers with not much experience, mostly students that graduated last year and were helping out as teachers.
This article is about adjunct instructors, who are not paid per hour -- they are paid a fixed amount per course. Average pay is $3000 per course [1]. Teaching four courses in a semester is a full-time job; this gives $24,000 per year, usually without benefits. Institutions tend to limit the number of courses assigned to each adjunct in order to avoid the adjunct being classified as a full-time employee. [1] http://ch…
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40 hours of work per week!? Eight hours a day, five days a week, for every class?
Yes. I have to prep 2 3 hour lectures per week. Each lecture easily takes 8 hours to prep. 6 assignments--have to make them up, set up automated tests, get things set up in source code control, and help students when things come back wrong if they can't figure it out. A midterm and a final--have to make it up and correct it. Add in office hours as well as replying to students via email and I'm easily at 40 hours per…
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Research, Sports, executive salaries. There are a lot of costs besides teacher's salaries.
I thought research was funded through grants and sports was self funding?
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>Regarding markets: they are only the sum of the people that constitute them. No, they're the sum of the constitutive people, minus all the parts that don't deal with property, trade, contracts, and debt, plus distortions added by institutional arrangements.
I'd say if there is a distortion or limiting arrangement, it's not a free market, and thus its participants behave differently, because they can't freely take their decisions. If people take their decisions freely, quite often money is not the top priority, but more traditional - and human - values may be.
Then the term "free market" is an oxymoron. By conjuring a market, which deals with money, property, and profit therein, you have already made it unfree.
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>HN really IS the reddit of a few years ago... I would say the same damn thing regarding the knee-jerk right-wing proprietarianism, except that rich Bay Area techies have had a tendency towards the less-well-considered forms of "wannabe ubermensch" libertarianism for a long time now. If you pointed out that leftists cluster on Reddit you wouldn't even be correct , as Reddit was pretty unambiguously rooting for Ron Pa…
I was talking about the tone, which sounded like a personal attack to me. HN used to have a more civil conversational tone. 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.
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I was talking about the tone, which sounded like a personal attack to me. HN used to have a more civil conversational tone. 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.
The tone was, I admit it, meant to be harsh. The reason for that is precisely because the high-income techno-libertarians feel entitled to be blithe about it. There's something irritatingly privileged about ideologies with lots of money behind them, that by some wondrous magic they are allowed to utter assertions where others (with less money them) are required to set out extensive proofs, and the most unpopular (who…
Please don't. Being harsh is not a good way to argue against blithe nonsense. It's a way to corrode the discourse and ruin the community [1]. If you're patient and reasonable, there's at least a small chance that you'll evoke that quality in others. If you're harsh, the chance of provoking the same and worse is high.
1. That particular comment was actually relatively mild. This is a personal appeal to drop the harsh tone on HN in general.
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> Your retort may be that the logging company has to acquire the rainforest first - yes, but logging is probably the most profitable activity for a rainforest, so logging companies will tend to acquire such land. I feel sick typing this... 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…
> Several highly lucrative drugs came from bio research conducted in the rainforest. 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-c…
I see several possible problems with this approach. I had similar thoughts in the years past, an I was wondering what your opinions were as to the following issues:
1. Inconsistent laws in a small geographical area. As a real world example, take a look at the car window tint law in the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago. In Illinois you can have up to 60% tint on your windows, while in Chicago, the local rule is that you can only have up to 30% tint. Don't quote me on those figures, last I looked into it was 10 years ago. But the point is, you can live outside Chicago, have a perfectly legal 50% tint, and than, as soon as you drive into Chicago, your car is all of the sudden in violation of one of the local laws. And they do ticket you for it. In your proposed system you would have all kinds of inconsistent laws. This is a problem for automotive laws, food safety, building codes, etc. The only solution I see would be for all of the small governments to gather together and agree on some standard set of laws that they will all implement. But than you are more or less back to square one.
2. Large infrastructure projects. Large projects require a lot of capital and a lot of cooperation from people in a large geographical area. Things like highway construction, rails, bridges, aqueducts, pipelines, all of those would require cooperation of dozens, if not hundreds of individual governments in your system. And you would always have holdouts, townships that would demand an extra something for their cooperation.
3. Research projects. Currently the united states government sponsors significant amount of research. If we were to switch to the township system, than that research would not be sponsored any more. Alternatively, maybe a bunch of townships could unite in a consortium to pay for research. But then you run into problems with division of profits from that research. Say 6 out of 10 townships paid for the research which resulted in development of a cancer cure. Would they then be able to deny the benefits of that cure to the other 4 townships?
There are a bunch of examples that I can think of in addition to this. In the past after thinking about this idea, the Jefferson Township model of government, I decided that I could not think of a way to make it work. However, a State system might work. A state system would largely eliminate the Federal Government and programs like the Social Security, ACA, Medicare, and all of the other social programs. It would also eliminate the Federal Income tax. The Federal Government would be responsible for national defense (military), borders, interstate transportation, and the interstate laws and treaties. The interstate laws would be a set of laws that 3/4 of the states would agree on. Things like food labeling, minimal vehicle safety requirements, etc.
To pay for the Federal Government each state would pay a yearly membership fee based on the number of people in that state and the GDP of the state, or some other kind of matrix. It would be up to each state to organize their own Social Security, health program, and other social programs. Each state would also be free to decide how to govern it self, would have the power to collect income tax, etc. The main key to the system would be free travel. This means that no person could be prevented from leaving one state or moving to another. This would allow each state to experiment with all kinds of government models, and would allow people to vote with their feet.
Any way, my idea is as unlikely to ever come true as the Jefersonian system.
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The problem with that is that eventually you run out of other people's money. See: Europe
Reducing the Eurozone crisis to "taxes" is a non-argument. Especially considering that Scandinavia is doing pretty well, and the local tax rate, speaking from personal experience, is one of the highest in the world.
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Reducing the Eurozone crisis to "taxes" is a non-argument. Especially considering that Scandinavia is doing pretty well, and the local tax rate, speaking from personal experience, is one of the highest in the world.
Not sure which country you're talking about exactly, but don't countries in Scandinavia benefit from large resources of oil and natural gaz in the North Sea? That sure eases welfare.
Or to take examples in a different way: Spain and Ireland's issues were mostly caused by a housing bubble.