On 27-Jun-06, at 10:02 PM, Devdas Bhagat wrote:
For very dubious values of "well"!
Care to show me better working mass transit in India which scales
up to
those levels?
India is a socialist, collectivist country. Even the Bombay mass
transit system
was not set up by the socialist state, but by the Brits.
Also, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbai_suburban_railway,
particularly:
Yearly more than 3,500 people die on the Mumbai suburban railway track
due to overcrowding during peak hours. This is believed to be the
highest
number of fatalities per year on any urban or suburban railway system.
And:
overcrowding has grown to be a compelling problem (4,700 passengers are
packed into a 9-car rake during peak hours, as against the rated
carrying
capacity of 1,700). This has resulted in what is known as Super-
Dense Crush
Load of 14 to 16 standing passengers per square metre of floor space.
A private company motivated by profit can and will solve the
"problem" of
increased demand with increased supply. (A private company doesn't
actually
consider this a problem, of course!) The state is most often
incompetent to meet
increasing demand, even when it will result in higher profits to the
state!
Care to show me alternative, working transport systems which were not
substantially funded/owned by the government and which have not
been set
up with cheap funds and labour looted from an empire?
James Hill built the first transcontinental railroad in the US, with
no government
help and no "funds and labour looted from" anyone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_hill
There are over 30 private train companies in Switzerland. All provide
levels
of service that the Mumbai metropolitan railway can never even dream of
achieving as long as it stays under state control and coercively resists
competition.
Or if you want to argue for pure market forces, what would happen if
copyright was abolished? How much literature would come into
existence,
and then get to the public?
Copyright is entirely compatible with capitalism.
If not enough people are convinced, maybe more convincing is
necessary?
Or maybe economic intervention? Or something else which drives up the
costs to the polluter instead of everyone else?
As I said before, if there's a real threat to anyone's health or
safety, polluters can
be dealt with in the same manner as any other violators of individual
rights.
However, the benefit to society is when
mass transit is used, in terms of roadspace used, pollution and time
savings for large numbers of commuters). However, this total gain
results in a net loss of convinience to every individual private
transport user.
Most people in Switzerland use rail transport for distances over 100KM,
voluntarily. Nobody forces them to do this. With economies of scale,
cost savings of mass transit can be passed on to consumers, and they
will choose mass transit voluntarily for the lower costs.
Besides it isn't at all clear that mass transit offers all that many
advantages
to society, beyond the sum of the advantages it offers individuals.
Arguments
based on resource limitations are blind in their denial of the
ability of new
technology to unlock previously inaccessible resource pools, like oil
shale.
Who determines these things are "necessary"? By what authority?
Popular
opinion? But you just said these things were also "unpopular"? :-)
Reasonable judgement, which considers social costs, as opposed to
purely
individual costs?
This doesn't answer my question at all. If there is a disagreement
over an issue,
how do you decide whose judgement is more "reasonable"? In a democracy
unbounded by the primacy of individual rights, the answer is
basically: "might
makes right". If you accept that tenet, you should have no problem
with slavery,
murder, genocide, etc.
Capitalism doesn't only subsume "profit driven industry", but also
ANY
voluntary association of human beings, including charities, co-
operatives,
non-profit organizations, and philanthropic organizations. As long as
there's no coercion involved, any of these entities is free, under
Any form of government intervention is coercion (the threat is losing
money and/or freedom).
Yes. So? The sorts of organizations I mention above do not need to
resort to
coercion to effect social change.
And your point is? Fine wines are more profitable per bottle than
beer.
In a capitalist society, however, both are produced in sufficient
quantities
to meet any arbitrary level of demand. Just because Viagra is
produced
does not mean cures for malaria will not be. Competition in the
market
means a diversity of interests and approaches towards every problem.
However, if the market is essentially demanding an ever increasing
growth in profits, then your argument does not hold good.
As I pointed our before, capitalism allows for the existence of all
sorts of
voluntary-based organizations, including not-for-profits, charities,
etc. So
this insistence on painting capitalism narrowly in terms of "greedy
profit
seeking" alone is just wrestling with straw men.
than a commercial one. Would you have invested in going to the
moon 40
years ago?
Can you prove that this actually happened? Can you point out any
valuable R&D that justified the purported expense? Or was it
precisely a
"posturing and overly expensive venture of dubious worth", as I
described NASA projects above?
http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html
My question was specifically about the purported moon mission (which
I am not
convinced even ever happened). What was the RoI for the moon mission?
As for the rest of that list, I guess it must have been critical to
spend billions of looted
dollars to come up with a "Visual News Reader" for Windows, enriched
baby food,
ribbed swimsuits, better golf balls and tennis shoes, etc.
Just the kinds of things the market is too risk-averse to take a risk
on, eh? My golf ball
isn't going far enough! The government MUST DO SOMETHING!
If you notice, it was hobbyists who pushed flight to its limits. Not
corporations.
As I've pointed out many times, private individuals, non-profits, and
so on are just
as much a part of capitalist society as are companies. A free market
doesn't
restrict the activities of such entities, unlike a tyranny or
collectivist state, which
restricts the economic activities of individual hobbyists just as
much as of
companies.
Besides, hobbyists depend almost exclusively on products provided to
them
by - no points for guessing - private companies in the market. If
these are repressed,
the hobbyist is left high and dry too.
Space is slightly more expensive, not too many
multi-millionaires who want to play around with technology.
There are plenty. Most communications satellites currently in space are
privately owned. The first communications satellite was privately owned.
And how much of NASAs problems stem from the fact that its
administrators are trying to run it like a for-profit corporation?
Why would they, when they have billions of dollars of free cash
(which they never
had to earn) to squander? They can _play_ at being like a private
company, but
they never can be like one, because a private company doesn't have
access to
blood money, unlike NASA.
#!
