IntenseDebate

14 years ago @ Armed and Dangerous - Irrational Expectations · 0 replies · +1 points

>The fairness doctrine was designed to prevent the same thing from happening to the average American\'s daily diet of political opinion and analysis

Hardy-har-har. That was the best joke I\'ve heard all day. Doubtless unintentional, however.

14 years ago @ Armed and Dangerous - Irrational Expectations · 1 reply · +1 points

>Your argument is no different than asking why you darned Americans are always conflating gun rights and libertarianism, or free speech and libertarianism. They are \"conflated\" because they are subcategories of libertarianism, not random beliefs glued together unnaturally.

Correct. The failure of non-Americans to understand this is their problem, not ours.

14 years ago @ Armed and Dangerous - Irrational Expectations · 0 replies · +1 points

>I didn\'t detect any hint of \'hey, the market failed this time\' in your essay, in light of current economic events, I would like to ask: what in your view would actually constitute a market failure?

Of course the market failed this time! My intent wasn\'t to deny that, only to argue that in this case (as usual) political fixes guarantee political failures worse in both magnitude and persistence than the market failure they are aimed at correcting.

14 years ago @ Armed and Dangerous - Irrational Expectations · 13 replies · +1 points

>Like much otherwise clear-sighted U.S. commentary, this essay suffers from being underpinned by the \'infallible market\' hypothesis endemic to that country. This hypothesis possesses an irrefutability rivaled only by religious convictions. The market is held to unerringly seek efficiency, where efficiency is defined as whatever the market produces.

Nice going, that\'s two completely wrong assumptions in two sentences. They screw up the rest of your diatribe.

No economist, U.S. or not, believe markets are infallible, just less fallible than any other form of resource allocation. This is actually provable under very general assumptions; see D. D. Friedman\'s <cite>Price Theory</cite>. Furthermore, \"efficiency\" is not defined circularly, op. cit.

14 years ago @ Armed and Dangerous - I may have to disable ... · 0 replies · +1 points

I have sent a gripe to the IntenseDebate maintainers. If they can't tell me how to prevent comments from being chunked into pages, I'm going to disable the plugin.

14 years ago @ Armed and Dangerous - I may have to disable ... · 1 reply · +1 points

>if this plugin is responsible for your Comments becoming restricted to page-by-page subsets of posts (\"click Next [o see next subset]\"), please: PLEASE get rid of it.

It is, and I hate this misfeature too. If I can\'t figure out a way to disable it, I may very well drop the plugin.

14 years ago @ Armed and Dangerous - Irrational Expectations · 0 replies · +1 points

>I'm sure Eric has heard this line of reasoning before but someone has to start the discussion.

I agree with your analysis, actually, so no argument here.

14 years ago @ Armed and Dangerous - Irrational Expectations · 2 replies · +1 points

>what license would you choose for the linux kernel?

Try asking that in the right thread, please; I want to stick to rational-expectations economics and its discontents here.

14 years ago @ Armed and Dangerous - The Economic Case Agai... · 0 replies · +1 points

>Intellectual property is a misnomer. Please show me some living being that is solely responsible for the shaping of their intellect?

Stupid argument. Someone else built my house; this doesn\'t make it any less my property.

14 years ago @ Armed and Dangerous - The Economic Case Agai... · 1 reply · +1 points

>Let's zoom in: could one kind of licencing be more efficient for one kind of software, and another kind more efficient for another kind of software?

In fact, my own analysis ten years back suggests that some software - such as games -- has the economics of a perishable packaged good. That is, short shelf life, no support requirements, no interoperability issues because it doesn't talk to anything else. Open source licensing doesn't make a huge amount of sense for these products.

I'm fully aware of these special cases. I don't think they invalidate the general analysis at all.

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