ribuck

I can resolve this paradox rigorously, although I don't know whether I'm using game theory. Suppose there are 100 people. Each individual who pollutes will gain $10. If no-one pollutes, there is a net gain to their society of $2000. One person runs a DRO, and offers $19 to each of the other 99 people provided that (a) they stop polluting, and (b) the DRO receives the $2000 net gain, but © the agreement is void unless all 99 people sign up. This doesn't work, because some of the people think "The DRO will never get all 99 people to sign up, so I won't bother". As a result, only 95 people sign up and the net gain isn't realised. So the following year, the DRO guy tries something more sophisticated. Like a true entrepreneur, he decides to risk some of his own money. He says to the other 99 people: "I will pay you $11. It's yours to keep, with no strings attached, if you (a) stop polluting, and (b) agree that my DRO receives the $2000 net gain if everyone stops polluting. In addition, I will pay you a further $5 if everyone signs up." This succeeds. If every polluter can gain $10 by polluting or $11 by not polluting, of course they will each agree individually to not pollute. Because everyone prefers $11 to $10, everyone signs up and stops polluting. The DRO guy receives the $2000 net gain. From that, he takes $11 for himself per person (to reimburse himself for the money that he risked by paying everyone $11 up-front with no strings attached), then he pays everyone the extra $5 bonus because everyone signed up, and the remaining $400 is his profit. We can then consider a society with two DROs who are competing to get people to stop polluting. Naturally they will cut their profit margin, in order to persuade as many people as possible to sign with them. So maybe only $100 of the non-pollution "windfall" will go to the winning DRO as profit. But now, each DRO will have signed up some of the people. Obviously it is now in the economic interest of both DROs to combine their lists, win the $2000 net gain, and split it between them. This whole apparent paradox is resolved so much more neatly and so much more profitably than the statist solution, where the government bans everyone from polluting, except for those who lobby hard enough and donate enough money to it, and except for some of its own government departments who continue to pollute.

No, I used the term "purchasing power" to mean what could be bought, i.e. after adjusting for inflation. For the same reason, I referred people to the inflation-adjusted line on the gold price graph. Those are indeed very long cycles, but to my eye the overall trend looks upwards. In Jeremy Siegel's book Stocks for the Long Run, he tabulates the real returns (i.e. after discounting for inflation) of stocks, gold and bonds from 1871 to 2001. The average annual real return for stocks was 6.8%, but for gold was actually slightly negative at minus 0.1%. This agrees with the convention wisdom: that gold is a great store of value, and a great hedge against financial instability, but is not a productive investment in the long run.

So ... how do you (personally) do this in practice? Did you ever catch a bus or train? In most places, public transport receives money that was taken from taxpayers. Did you ever receive interest on your bank account? Even if your bank didn't receive a direct bailout, it certainly benefited financially from "fiscal interventions". Did you ever use a road that was maintained using money taken from taxpayers? Like you, I choose to lead by example, and here's how I do it. I keep a very rough tally on what I've received from the government and what I've had taken by the government. Because I've never accepted any handout, I'm way on the losing side of that transaction. But even so, I have received indirect benefits that required money being taken from people by the state. So I pledge that I will return to any person, upon request, that portion of my benefit that was taken from them. It's largely a symbolic gesture, because I've benefited by less than a penny per taxpayer, but even symbolic gestures can be important. Regarding the original poster, I would never call someone immoral for accepting something that was given to them. If that thing was taken immorally, then the immorality is with the person who did the taking, not with the honest person who received it. Of course, as an honest person, they would acknowledge the wrong that was done.

In the long run, cash loses purchasing power. In the long run, gold and silver maintain purchasing power. In the long run, stocks greatly increase their purchasing power. If you're investing long term (at least a couple of decades), it makes no sense to buy precious metals. The price of precious metals is quite volatile. It tends to skyrocket when there is financial instability, and plummet when stability returns. In the short term it can make sense to hold precious metals, provided you buy them before the instability hits, and sell them before stability returns. Before buying gold, take a look at the following chart: Historical gold price in USD and inflation adjusted gold price in USD Pay attention only to the red (inflation-adjusted) line. See how there are many times when it would have been a really bad time to buy gold? The really good times to buy gold were prior to 1973, and from 1997 to 2006. If you buy now, you are helping someone else realise the gains their gold made between 2002 and now. If you think that financial instability is going to get even worse than it is now, it could still make sense to buy gold, provided you sell before stability improves. If the western economies crash badly, gold could still do well. But the reason I won't invest in gold at this time is that if western economies crash badly, private ownership or use of gold might be prohibited or heavily taxed.

You can accept the money you're offered without guilt, provided you acknowledge the wrong that was done when the state took that money from others.

I used to do this when I was a teenager and worked in a shop for a while. However, nothing interesting came out of it. The function of small talk is to work out whether there is common ground between two people, and where that common ground lies. Then you can advance to meaningful conversation. Unfortunately, for most people, small talk seems to be something they see as worthwhile in its own right, and they cannot move beyond it.

If a good government is so great, why can it only achieve its goals by using force? Is it still a good government for those against whom it is using (the threat of) violence?

Along these lines, there's a website fuelprotest.com where you enter how much you paid to fill your car, and it creates a mock receipt itemising all the taxes you paid. For example, my car took £55 of unleaded petrol. Of that, the gas station got £1.91, the oil company got £21.82, and the taxman got £31.27 (more than half). Of the £31.27 tax, £22.10 was fuel duty, £4.75 was value added tax (VAT) on the price of the fuel, and £4.42 was value added tax on the fuel duty. A tax on a tax!

In that case, the conclusions reached from your arguments will only be applicable to yourself, since others have a different sum of experiences. If your personal experience includes noticing that the scientific method makes it possible to know which theories have predictive power, then your method becomes more useful. Exactly /emoticons/emotion-1.gif So which is it? My use of the word "but" is probably the source of the confusion. I didn't mean "but, alternatively". I meant "but, additionally". I've removed the word "but" from the quoted copy above, to see if that makes my intended meaning more clear. Moncaloono says that he argues from the sum of his experience of reality. I commented that this will be more productive if his experience of reality includes the experience that "the scientific method is useful". Moncaloono agreed. So I think he interpreted my post as I had intended it.

For sure. In our case, it was the boxes of cereal on the breakfast table that led them to discover the joy of words. They had learned to recognise and understand most of those words long before they had any interest in reading systematically. I've heard it said (and can easily believe it) that the strongest motivating factor for a child is not being shown words or having stories read to them from books (stories told from memory engage the child better than stories read from books). What motivates a child to learn to read is to see people around them gaining enjoyment from reading.

In that case, the conclusions reached from your arguments will only be applicable to yourself, since others have a different sum of experiences. But if your personal experience includes noticing that the scientific method makes it possible to know which theories have predictive power, then your method becomes more useful.

It's easier for a child to learn to read once their brain is a little more mature. If you teach them before they are ready, it can be stressful for them, and hard work for you. In the first few years of life the child has no shortage of things to learn about the world around them. Teaching reading just displaces something else. At the age of 3, I reckon a child learns more by digging holes in the garden and chasing pigeons. At some point, they are ready for more abstract processes such as reading, and you'll be in no doubt that they have a voracious thirst to learn to read. That's when reading skills are gained the most easily.

That's what I would expect from a thread with a catchy title but no substantive content (other than a link to a video). You will always get a greater response if you summarise the content of the video in the original post.

Children don't have any difficulty learning to read, once their brains are sufficiently developed to master it. This usually happens between ages 4 and 7, depending on the child. If you try to teach your child to read before they are read for it, it will be a hard unfruitful process whichever method you use. But if you wait until they are ready, the child will see others reading and will have a voracious interest to be able to do that too. With that motivation, they won't find it difficult to learn. For this reason, Steiner schools don't teach reading until age seven. Within a year or two, their students are reading Harry Potter, having condensed the tedious stage of "Run, Spot, Run" and "Three Little Pigs" from years down to months, making it a more enjoyable process for the children and adults alike.

There's no link. The meteor and the asteroid came from different directions.

If they were really supporters of Ron Paul, you'd think they'd be very keen to let him have the domain name that he seeks (ronpaul.com).

Marc, I have a hunch that if I asked the aggressor in your example, he would reply to me that hitting person B satisfied his need to perceive himself as "top dog", and stealing B's wallet satisfied his need for money. It would be great if we could reason with person A and help him find a better way to meet his needs, but I have a feeling it would work better for person B to guard his wallet better and keep an eye out for people about to hit him over the head.

It's a very clear explanation, thanks Marc. But I don't adopt that view for two reasons. First, I'm not aware of hard evidence that we do all have a need for peace (including the aggressor in your example). Second, the strength of a need cannot be measured, so it doesn't seem productive to talk about maximising the meeting of needs when we can't look at two outcomes and discover which one meets everyone's needs to the greatest degree. But I agree with the ideas behind what you're saying, particularly the notion that once people label someone as morally "bad" they are likely to commit unnecessary and unjustified violence. Personally I only consider actions to be morally good or bad, not people. And I'm a pacifist anyway.

I'm a donor. But it makes no sense for you to care about that. The merits or otherwise of an argument don't depend on donations.

How can you tell? As far as I know, only automated monthly donors get badges.

Good analysis, Annabelle! It also highlights how large PayPal's fees are (and they're even higher for donations from other countries). Those who use Bitcoin will avoid these fees. And Bitcoin takes care of aggregating the small donations without further paperwork. Stef could just make one outgoing transaction per month for the full value of his bitcoin donation address, without needing to process each individual incoming transaction. This would even make it efficient to donate the equivalent of 50 cents every time one watches a video of his or listens to a podcast.

Of course, Ayn Rand received Social Security and Medicare payments. There is, incidentally, a school of thought which says that everyone should accept as many things from the state as possible, because everything they draw from the state will weaken the state.

I learned about FDR at a Bitcoin forum. Someone posted a list of videos about liberty, and one of them was by Stef. How did you find FDR? Hey, here's an idea that might help you find your California friend again one day. You could set up a web page saying that you'd like to make contact again. Make sure the web page has all the things you know about her: middle name, friends and family names, places she has lived, places you two went together, etc. One day she might put her name plus some of those words into a search engine, and she'll see a search result with a page heading that says "Hey it's Juan! I'd love it if you called me...". Some people even have a Google Alert set up so that they get an email whenever a new web page appears with their name on it.

I don't see it that way, for me that's a choice you make, whether to bring in morality into it or not. Hmm. I think you might be saying that the moral aspect is not embedded in the aggression itself (i.e. in the initiation of violence), but arises out of the human context of that aggression. For sure I agree with that. For example, a volcanic eruption is violent but there is no moral aspect to it. However, in this discussion we are referring to things like the use of aggression to collect taxes to pay for food stamps. Within the implied scope of this discussion, I think there's always a moral aspect to aggression. Perhaps I have misunderstood you and you mean something else. In that case, I would find it helpful if you could give an example of the type of aggression you have in mind, where it is a choice whether or not to bring morality into it.

Sorry, I don't follow. The question to which I was responding was "why condemn anyone, even someone who uses aggression?". There's always a moral aspect to aggression.