>> ^gtjwkq:
Do you think, really, that a market is less capable of defining scarcity than a politician?

When it comes to environmental concerns, the answer is absolutely yes.

The problem with not understanding politics free markets is not seeing long term consequences to a rule. Most rules businesses have the best intentions in mind and anyone can see their obvious short term benefits, but are completely blind to the disaster they usually create in the long run.

It's a lot easier to change rules down the road than it is to fix the environment once it's been polluted. To put it another way, it will be far more expensive to just let things go as they are, than to take preventive steps now.

>> ^NetRunner:
Cap and trade is the exact opposite of central planning. It just forces the market to deal with a scarcity that it currently refuses to acknowledge.
The beauty of it is that it allows for your little conservative religion to finally be useful towards solving the problem, rather than just making things worse.

It's not the opposite of central planning, it's just applying a rule so people can start caring about something YOU think they don't care about.

Do you think, really, that a market is less capable of defining scarcity than a politician?

The problem with not understanding politics is not seeing long term consequences to a rule. Most rules have the best intentions in mind and anyone can see their obvious short term benefits, but are completely blind to the disaster they usually create in the long run.

>> ^gtjwkq:
Keep the government out of it, they can't even deliver the mail profitably. Treat it like damage to private property and let the courts punish offenders.
Government => central planning => bad idea
Private citizens => best ideas are rewarded => everyone wins


Cap and trade is the exact opposite of central planning. It just forces the market to deal with a scarcity that it currently refuses to acknowledge.

The beauty of it is that it allows for your little conservative religion to finally be useful towards solving the problem, rather than just making things worse.

Your answer is a bit like saying we shouldn't have a rule that cars need to drive on one side of the road, instead we just need to provide a court to settle the damages once they happen.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'resource, allocation, scarcity, problem' to 'resource, allocation, scarcity, problem, philip glass, koyaanisqatsi' - edited by dystopianfuturetoday

>> ^NetRunner:
but do you really have regular interactions with honest-to-God socialists who argue that property is theft?

Property is theft.

Generally those of us who hold this position fall into one of two camps:

1) usafruct: the right to use, but not harm, that which is unused.
2) common holding: the right to use, but not harm, everything.

Either way the bed-shitting is not defensible on socialist grounds, as harm is clearly done.

I tend towards 1, but am not adverse to 2, if a post scarcity equilibrium can be reached.

P.S. I was born in LA, so this is relevant to your question.

>> ^Flood:
I agree that eventually we'll get to the point where it simply isn't possible for every citizen to work. I don't think that means we'd have to go to socialism though. You can accomplish the same goals that socialism would tackle by using a Negative Income Tax, without the drawback of giving complete control to the government on deciding whose work is most valuable.


Once you've developed an automated workforce you'll be looking at a planet with probably 10 billion people, 9.5 billion who will likely have no access to a job of any kind.

By that point your glorious Negative Income Tax would serve no purpose.

Doing away with money all together will be the only effective way of dealing with society at that point.

As it stands, we have the technology and resources to provide a much greater quality of life for every person on the planet, but few are willing to sacrifice the false sense of superiority they derive from their wealth. So we continue to prop up a failing economic system, maintain pointless class separations, encourage debt, propagate false scarcity and let millions suffer poverty needlessly, so that rich people can substitute the fact that they're miserable people by driving Mercedes cars and wearing Prada.

The saddest part is that those same greedy scumbags have convinced enough of the lower class shlubs, that it's your own fault if you're not as rich as they are because you're either too stupid or two lazy, and you should work harder because if you're not rich you're not worth anything. And unfortunately enough people have fallen for their bullshit that they continue to facilitate the same system that exploits them and keeps them down.

who cares? hunger, scarcity of resources, corruption, religious terrorism, anyone???

I'm not sure, I've only recently begun to think about it after reading "against intellectual property" sparked the idea. So far I can think of four:

scarcity of resources (conflict over property rights -- mentioned in the book)
human emotion: fear, hate (irrational conflict -- you mentioned this one)
ideological intolerance (conflict of opinion)
categorization of reality (conflict at the intersection of groups)

I would say peace is my greatest ideal, so that is what I strive for. Insofar as I can contemplate it, equality seems to be at odds with removing the sources of conflict I can imagine.

In reply to this comment by NetRunner:
I think the major source of conflict starts with a mix of fear, and a lack of understanding. I think a lot of wars/conflicts going on now are hereditary memes -- lies told to children by their parents about the "enemy" or a group of people who they're told should be viewed as less than human in some way or another.

I'm not sure I could make a generic prioritization of peace or equality, especially since I think they can and should go hand in hand.

If we're talking about Israelis and Palestinians, I think the only possible goal is peace, not equality, so I prioritize that. If we're talking about the rights of African Americans or gays, I prioritize equality, even if it means starting (another) civil war.

How about you? What do you think the main source of conflict is? Which would you choose, peace or equality?

In reply to this comment by imstellar28:
I know you value equality and peace. Given that conflict prevents peace, what do you view as major sources of conflict in the world, and why? If given the choice between improving equality and improving peace, which do you prefer?

They tell us we must learn to live with less, and teach our children that their lives will be less full and prosperous than ours have been; that the America of the coming years will be a place where — because of our past excesses — it will be impossible to dream and make those dreams come true. I don't believe that. And, I don't believe you do either. I cannot and will not stand by and see this great country destroy itself. Our leaders attempt to blame their failures on circumstances beyond their control, on false estimates by unknown, unidentifiable experts who rewrite modern history in an attempt to convince us our high standard of living, the result of thrift and hard work, is somehow selfish extravagance which we must renounce as we join in sharing scarcity. I don't agree that our nation must resign itself to inevitable decline, yielding its proud position to other hands. I am totally unwilling to see this country fail in its obligation to itself and to the other free peoples of the world.

--Ronald Reagan

So the rest of the world will forever depend on US innovation because they aren't smart enough to design software, CPU's and anti-terrorism advise? What I mean by service economy is retail, restaurants, and other middleman businesses. When Asian countries send us products we give them dollars ("paper") the value of those dollars depend on the scarcity of dollars. We will monetize our debt because China won't lend in the long term because it's totally out of control now. If you had a printing press in your house and you gave me a million dollars for a truck load of TV's that I produced, then a year later the government comes to you with 1 trillion in bonds to be turned into dollars, I'm going to be pretty pissed that my earlier money isn't worth shit anymore because you're diluting it every time somebody comes to you for money. I'd be more reluctant to sell you anything I produced unless you pay me in something that can't be easily diluted.

Brilliant. Favourite answers so far:

"Bring a famous person back from the dead - George Washington. He'd be fuckin pissed at what we've done to his nation".
"Most off the wall member - I'd say Choggie, but he doesn't have a wall to be off of, so kronosposeidon will have to do".
"Left or right handed - right handed, but ambidextrous when I pleasure myself".
"Siftbrew, it’ll help generate revenue for the site, and everyone can claim they made that last comment while under the influence".
"Have the opposite gender deal with something you have to - Masturbation, that is.. MY masturbation".
"Sex or food - Food. I made that choice a long time ago".
"Have the opposite gender deal with something you have to - Scarcity of awesome sex toys".

Hehe

I could go for some light peer bonding activity. Going to post before I read.

Favourites

1) Season - Autumn.
2) Place in the world - My home. I don't really see the point of anywhere else.
3) Children's book - I'm going to count the whole silver age X-Men as one book and make that my answer.
4) TV Series - The Crystal Maze
5) Word - Appendices.
6) Film - The Fifth Element
7) Curse - Making something up on the spot is always the most satisfying.
Creature - Man.
9) Past time - Past time or pastime? The Victorian era, when people knew how to dress / playing board games.
10)Person - Myself. Everyone should be just like me.

Which one?

11) Dog or cat - Cat, if they didn't have those brain parasites.
12) Sweet or savoury - Savoury unless I run out of sweet. Everything, and as much as possible.
13) Cereal or Toast - Toast.
14) Tan or pale - Pale.
15) Shoes or barefoot - Barefoot.
16) Desktop or laptop - Desktop.
17) Drive or walk - I'd rather have whatever it is I'm driving or walking to delivered.
18) Drama or comedy - Comedy.
19) Sex or food - Food. I made that choice a long time ago.
20) Futurama or Simpsons - Simpsons.

The Sift

21) Your fave personal submission - ...didn't get any votes.
22) A great comment on one of your vids - * promote
23) Most off the wall member - Obviously choggie.
24) Favourite user name - I would have to check every name to answer this question.
25) Your most used channel - eia
26) Personal dumbass moment - I've never made a mistake in my life.
27) Best avatar - dotdude's examples of his own artwork, and anything from that star wars thread.
28) Partner in crime - Don't have one.
29) Do people offline know of your sift problem - To some extent.
30) Idea for the site - Bring back the new member queue.

About you

31) Where do you live - SE Britain.
32) Smoker/non-smoker - Occasional cigar/pipe smoker.
33) Left or right handed - Right.
34) Hair colour - Brown.
35) Relationship status - Leper.
36) How tall - Don't know, 6' 4"-ish.
37) Children - are too expensive.
38) Ever had an operation - Nope.
39) Best feature - Glorious human mind.
40) Use four words to describe yourself - Better person than you.

If you could...what, who, when etc

41) Bring a famous person back from the dead - Tolkien. I'd like to see what he made of those films.
42) Give 50 grand to any charity - Amnesty International.
43) Send someone on a one way ticket to the moon - Sarah Palin.
44) Relive a moment in your life - Any time when I was hitting somebody.
45) Have a superpower - Wolverine's healing factor, in continuities where it makes him immortal.
46) Find out one thing you've always wanted to know - The future of the human race.
47) Have the opposite gender deal with something you have to - Scarcity of awesome sex toys.
48) Be president for one hour - Have the last president executed.
49) Delete a period in history - Anything people are proud of today without having actually participated in the accomplishment.
50) Achieve one thing - Bomb something.

>> ^xxovercastxx:
I have a more radical suggestion: Increase the value of the vote. Think of votes as currency. We're suffering from inflation here. We've got an unlimited supply of votes to spend on anything and everything. From the voters' perspective, there's little to no reason not to vote something up.
Cap the total number of votes each sifter has per day. Suddenly those votes have value and voters will want to use them more selectively. I suspect that under such a system, downvote would be obsolete.
I realize this would be a radical change to the way the Sift works, but think about it. How radical the change is could be controlled by how many votes-per-day are allowed. Something ridiculously low, like 5, would cause people to be really stingy with those votes and would be a drastic change. Something ridiculously high, like 500, would have little to no impact at all.


I've been thinking something along the lines of this too, though mostly in a sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek way.

What we need is false scarcity! Let's make it so "votes" work like money. Posting a video is free, and each vote your video receives goes into your "bank". You can vote for a video as many times as you like, each one subtracted from your bank, but you can't vote for your own videos.

You can downvote videos, but it'd still count as an "upvote" in the recipient's bank, it'd just lower the vote count for "quality" purposes. You can downvote as many times as you like, though it may ultimately be counterproductive.

There is no such thing as pqueues, promotes, begs (they're socialist anyways) and the front page is Top Sifts, not Hot/New.

That way free market principles will surely allow choice to bring us the highest quality videos possible.

Then we just change the site to "LibertarianSift", and siftbot's name to randroid, and we're good to go.

Getting back to seriousness though, I do think we should look into increasing vote count and queue time both, and shifting the default front page to newness instead of hotness. I think the hot = frontpage is exacerbating some of the problems people are complaining about (i.e. too much sensational, not enough sublime).

>> ^jwray:
The point is that gold has insufficient actual USES to fall back on as a basis for its high value.

It doesn't have to be useful for consumption, it is useful as money. Do you understand what money is and why it's an important good in a modern economy. Do you understand that people can demand and want something for this purpose rather than to consume it or play with it? Do you understand that that's exactly what happened with gold when people were left to their own devices?

>> ^jwray:
The price of gold is subject to the volatile whims of the people, and has fluctuated a great deal over the last 100 years.

The value of the dollar relative to other currencies has fallen 70% in the last ten years, and 300% relative to gold. That's not volatile? See, your mistake is you're looking at the value relationship in the wrong way. You see the dollar maintaining its value and everything else flailing wildly against it. Instead, the dollar and people's confidence in it is what's flailing wildly. Look at a chart comparing gold to oil (both priced in dollars) the last thirty years - almost completely flat. If gold was money, gas prices would have gone nowhere.

http://www.kitco.com/ind/saville/may022006.html

Also interesting to note from this chart is what the price for both was in ~1971. Guess what happened in 1971 that caused the chart to start moving up for thirty years? Nixon scratched the bretton woods semi-gold standard, removing the last link of the dollar to gold. A nation that built its country on gold and became the reserve currency of the world on gold, inflated heavily in the 60s to finance pointless activities like Vietnam, The War on Poverty, the Great Society. It got to a point where gold reserves were far less than the debt owed to foreigners by 1971, the equivalent of an fractional reserve bank run. Those foreigners began calling in the debt, and rather than stop inflating and cutting a deal, Nixon got on a podium and broke the contract because it wasn't in "our best interest." Just like that. It later became permanent. Full fiat. Now there was NOTHING backing the dollar but confidence in its scarcity which is controlled by government.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRzr1QU6K1o

We currently lie about inflation and pay foreigners back in devalued dollars, probably more devalued than the interest return on those bonds, but the CPI hides it with hedonics adjustment, substitution, and geometric weighting added during the Clinton years. The bond market is the last major bubble in the U.S. economy.

But since we libertarians understand human behavior and the nature of government, it meant inevitable hyperinflationary collapse. Because like every other fiat currency in history, it will be debased by its spendthrift government and the citizens will stand by and let it happen because they are exactly like you: ignorant of economics and eternally trustful of government. That's why our forefathers tried to illegalize fiat in the constitution after they saw the continental dollar hyperinflated.

http://www.safehaven.com/article-9534.htm

>> ^jwray:
Platinum, Iridium, and Silver would work just as well as gold. But if a great depression comes I would rather have a stockpile of wheat than a stockpile of gold.

How long is that wheat going to last before spoiling? Where are you going to store it? How are you going to carry it around and pay people with it? What if someone already has enough wheat and they want berries, and the guy who has berries doesn't want wheat either, he wants leather? You're reducing yourself to barter. You can't run a modern economy that way.

>> ^jwray:
Under the current federal reserve system, if they set interest rates properly and avoid excess printing, inflation can be kept below 2%. Theoretically, if the fiat money system is done properly, it can be more stable in value than a gold-backed currency.

Welcome to today's powerful neo-Keynesian economic circles. Centralized control curriculums, a sexy interventionist theory financed by the benefactors of inflation, overrides history, human behavior, and all rational skepticism. The benevolent dictator argument, in its truest form. The fallacy that because its possible to have a benevolent dictator more efficient than any system that divides powers and makes it impossible for one man to destroy a country, that we should institute that system. No different than the Federal Reserve, in my opinion. They are THE ROOT CAUSE of most of our problems today. Right down to health care costs, another victim of inflation and HMO legislation, which the socialists are again trying to blame the free market on to build up more socialism. It all comes back to what system preserves wealth, and this ain't it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYZM58dulPE

>> ^jwray:
The Euro is doing just fine with an inflation rate of 1.8%.

Measured by whom, and for how long? We could have said the same thing years ago. Will hyperinflation occur under you or your children or your grandchildren? Who knows, right? All you know is it's happened before in Europe, now it's just more centralized so all countries will be affected when it happens. Congrats.

Do you understand why we're fucked now? Why it's hopeless, why I bury my head every time someone calls Ron Paul a kook. You are just one of 200 million people I have to convince in this country, and it took me five hours with you and I probably still didn't make a dent.

In fact, here's the hilarious trickery of Keynesian economics. China holds over 1 trillion U.S. dollars in their reserves. That's right, we borrow from them, they're the largest creditor nation and we're the largest debtor (we actually used to be the largest creditor, that's how far we've fallen). But the reason they do it: they falsely believe that Americans consuming their products is driving their economy. In the beginning, this was true because they did have a legitimately weak currency relative to ours. But now things are different. They're INTENTIONALLY debasing their money to keep trying to grow this way even though they don't need to: currency appreciation would allow them to consume their own products without us. So they are intentionally devaluing their currency by inflating and buying up our bonds, on a grand scale, essentially paying Americans to consume their exports even though they can only afford them because of these payments. Insanity! If they ever figured this out, the bond bubble will pop. Even the ECB is not hiking rates when they should be. The world has been fooled into thinking that the American consumer is responsible for all their growth and is fearful of letting it collapse. Consumption over production, putting the cart before the horse, the mainstay of Keynesian thinking.

>> ^jwray:
Gold is the oldest fiat currency.

Technically, a gold standard is not fiat, only symbolically. Fiat is generally defined as anything which is forced for use as money. In "declaring" gold as money, governments were merely adopting what people were already using. You see, gold won in the free market as a common means of exchange. Not paper. Of all things on earth, it is especially suited for this task. It is rare, easily divisible, indestructible, has few industrial uses, and requires no upkeep. Since it has to be mined from the earth, a natural limit is placed on government. They are restricted to asking (taxing) its citizens when they want to finance something! They can't just print new money will-nilly, lie about how much they're doing it with flawed CPI measurements, and make its citizens pay higher prices! Imagine that! And our highest rates of real growth were in the late 19th century, a period of no slavery, no income tax, no central bank, and gold-based money. It hasn't been matched since.

>> ^jwray
Its value is an arbitrary function of how much faith people have in it as a currency. Its price is being propped up by that faith alone.

That is the case for ALL things. Value is entirely subjective and depends on the human situation surrounding it, and the scarcity of that good relative to others. If you're alone on a mountain and you're starving, a cow is worth a hell of a lot more than gold or paper. If you're in a massive society where barter is inefficient and you need a common means of exchange and placeholder for wealth, gold fills that role nicely. If your government has done this to your money so that it's worth less than firewood, all faith in it will be lost relative to actual goods, including gold, which CAN'T EVER be made as common as dirt. The possibility doesn't EXIST:

http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/c/ca/Inflation-1923.jpg

>> ^jwray
As an industrial material, the demand for gold is very low compared to the amount available.


Which is exactly why this particular precious metal made such a good monetary asset. Why would you want your money to have volatility from the supply and demand of complex industry products?

>> ^jwray
By the way, imposing the gold standard would shrink the money supply so dramatically as to cause deflation, and then deflation would cause loan defaults, and loan defaults would cascade to another great depression.


Nobody said it would be easy. Remember, depressions can be inflationary, too. Once that happens, people are in bad shape any way looking for a way out. I was afraid you were going to argue that there was a quantitative limit, which there isn't. In a move to monetize gold, it's demand and price will rise substantially to meet those figures, and the people who convert early will be better off than those converting last. But it can be done, particularly in a scenario when the paper money is made worthless anyway. Look at Zimbabwe. In their present situation, if every citizen immediately converted their money to gold, and used gold thenceforth, their long-term situation would improve dramatically as their money could no longer be debased.