"it is still much lower than what it would be in an unregulated environment."
Counterfactual. The article you link to is laughable on the face of it. "A new study for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University" carries about the same intellectual heft as "A new study for the Eat More Beef Center at Hamburger University."
You seem the sort of person able to recognize others' ideologies while incorrectly assuming your own beliefs are rational and well-founded. Are you generally tolerant of or convinced by counterfactuals when they don't support your ideology?
"Labor Freedom" is perhaps the most galling. One might think it would cover the right of laborers to organize and collectively bargain. Or the right to have safe working conditions, sick days, severance pay, access to childcare and healthcare.
In fact, it's the exact opposite. A perfectly free workforce in Heritage Foundation's verbiage would be one with no worker protections or individual rights of any kind and a 100% labor participation rate - to them, quite literally, "labor freedom" is slavery.
Maybe France does have to many workers' rights to compete with other countries, who knows. Heritage's numbers aren't granular enough for me (or you) to assess that. But re-defining the meanings of basic words so one can accuse people who disagree with you of "hating freedom" is pathetic. Please try to find some other way to make your case that's befitting educated adults discussing a serious issue.
"Labor freedom" is the freedom to contractually define what the employee does in exchange for money from the employer.
If you have laws that define "8 hours max" (or "10$ per hour" minimum), then poor (or uneducated people, respectively) might struggle to make ends meet (or find a job, respectively).
Another example is "6 months minimum contract" which results in "never employ people if you just have work for 3 months" to employers.
Do you see the common pattern?
Freedom in general is defined (at least at this site) as contractual freedom, i.e., the absence of state-defined contract clauses set via law. Your definition of freedom is "employee rights" (which can be considered a kind of freedom, but to the detriment of employer freedom).
If you maximize employee freedom, you automatically minimize employer freedom and that will take a heavy toll on employment in general.
Point of clarification: Pai was appointed to the 5 person FCC commission by Obama. He was named chairman by Trump. FWIW, the previous chairman, Tom Wheeler (ostensibly a Democrat), probably would've dismantled net neutrality if Obama hadn't come out strongly in favor of it.
I find it incredibly frustrating that people clearly see the need for referees in sports, but not in business. Nobody's saying that the NFL or the NBA would have better competition if there were no refs.
What your proposing is more like a league which will solidify the rules as they currently exist. An example of this is banning innovations like Aluminum bats.
The court system isn't suited for this anymore. It was a different time in 1776 when corporations were not allowed to live in perpetuity, amassing as much of the valuable resources as they can, handing it off to ancestors upon the owners death (sounds a bit like monarchism, IMO).
"What your proposing is more like a league which will solidify the rules as they currently exist."
According to Thomas Jefferson, this is exactly what Constitution and laws are for.
Thomas Jefferson:
"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."
"The world" during the high days of the VOC was only 8% of the population today so it's kind of difficult to honestly compare, IMHO.
But more importantly, the VOC "perished under corruption" not because it was dragged to court :) It's not really fair to say that "the system" dealt with it when it obviously just succumbed over time under the inevitability of impermanence.
The Dutch east India company had standing armies and war ships. To say that modern companies are more powerfully merely because of population growth is a bit of a stretch.
How they came to an end is irrelevant to whether courts are effective referees unless you believe the only fair thing is to destroy large companies.
Thomas Jefferson had more direct opinions on corporations, having tried (and failed) to add an 11th amendment limiting their power. For example:
"I hope we shall take warning from the example [of England] and crush in it’s birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and to bid defiance to the laws of their country."
What's the point of content-free, incoherent, misspelled comments like this one? There's nothing even remotely like what you're describing in the actual article.
"The government hardly ever creates wealth. They can create the conditions for wealth creation by getting the heck out of the way."
Yes, we're aware that's how it works in shitty novels about trains from the 1950's.
Here in the real world, every single technological innovation in the iPhone was created by the US Government, or with the assistance of US government-funded basic research. This book breaks the whole thing down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entrepreneurial_State
Google Maps is a particularly terrible example. It wouldn't exist without GPS, a technology invented by the US government.
Hong Kong's government puts billions of dollars a year into technology research. That's not a good example, either. Furthermore, HK has lower income inequality than Nigeria, Rwanda, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar, Burundi, The Gambia, Swaziland, Botswana, CAR, Sierra Leone and Namibia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq... . So your statement "everybody else has just about the same as everybody else" in sub-Saharan Africa is total bullshit.
Japan and Scandinavia have relatively low rates of income inequality (especially compared to sub-Saharan Africa). Are you saying those countries are less innovative than Namibia (highest income inequality in the world)?
Finally, the idea that the sole difference between "Sub Saharan Africa" (a region that encapsulates over a billion people and over 40 countries which you regard as a monolith) and Hong Kong is due to "government policies" is childishly ignorant. Africa is not a country.
As for the government never creating wealth, most innovations that came out of government basic research came out of the DoD/partially NASA. Although mostly the DoD. Are you advocating for more defense funding, and then I'd be all behind you.
As for your income inequality chart, it shows exactly what I'm talking about. One of the highest "equality" ratings of the Gini coefficient is the Netherlands, where the Jante law holds sway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante
As I said, those are countries who seem like they're stagnating. Do you really want countries with low outcome equality vs. equality of opportunitity vs countries who actually let you excel and keep the fruits of your labour and skill? Outcome inequality is not a bad thing.
Also note that in your gini chart, most of the countries which are awful have no statistics. Are they equal or just a blank slate that you can project your own feelings on?
> Do you really want countries with low outcome equality vs. equality of opportunitity
This is a commonly given argument, but does not apply to the US -- it's nowhere near a country of equal opportunity. I'd be more open to the argument if you'd include items like no inheritance and no private schooling, to really give a more equal footing -- but I'm guessing these are not up for discussion. Thus, a certain amount of outcome equalizing is absolutely necessary.
Incorrect. One of the highest drives of most human peopls is to make sure that their efforts will benefit their offspring.
Once you take that away, whether through inheritance tax or forbidding of public schooling or even presence of more books in the household, what incentive are you giving them to produce? Do not equalize outcome.
I think we agree then that equal opportunity isn't realistic, and perhaps even shouldn't be attempted. Thus, please avoid making this kind of simple argument of opportunity vs. outcome, as that's not at all what is being suggested.
Some of the nastiest bullying I've observed (and experienced) in my life has been from smart people towards even smarter people that they resented. I'm getting more than a whiff of that here.
I don't know if this girl is a Mozart, but there sure are a lot of angry Salieris in these parts.
Why frame the issue in this way, except to make yourself feel better about being complicit in denying your fellow citizens access to basic healthcare?
The alternative explanation is that you genuinely believe all issues requiring healthcare are the result of "poor lifestyle decisions", which is plainly ludicrous.
I think you should give some serious consideration as to why your brain forces you to frame the problem in this way. I suspect it's because at some level you do feel morally culpable for whether your neighbor lives or dies, but that inevitably leads to a position where some social programs are morally just, and a belief in orthodox anti-statism is more important to you.
The only way to square that circle is to frame all healthcare issues as "poor lifestyle decisions" and social programs as "like slavery". Much easier to feel better about a child dying because they can't get access to basic healthcare if you can just hand-wave it away as "poor lifestyle decisions."
Your attitude is sickening to me. Why not just go full-on black hat and say "fuck the sick" instead of pretending all healthcare is due to "poor lifestyle decisions"? At least that would be intellectually honest, and no less evil.
A huge fraction of health care expenses is due to lifestyle choices. Most diabetes (diet and obesity), most cancer (smoking), many knee/hip replacements (obesity), most hypertension (diet, obesity, sedentary lifestyle), not to mention alcoholism and drug addicition which at least starts with lifestyle choices.
People make the best choices they can with the information available to them.
Malcolm Gladwell recently had a podcast about how McDonalds ruined their French fries when they got bullied into changing their fryer oil from stable saturated fats to unstable polyunsaturated oil: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/19-mcdonalds-broke-my...
I don't think The American Heart Association's propaganda campaign against stable cooking fats helps individuals make good choices for themselves.
If not dying every time I jumped resulted in a new human being born, I might agree, but the death rate of births is a net negative. :P
Joking aside, that's an interesting comparison but a bit difficult to really put side by side in a way that's fair. Skydivers jump on average around 90 times a year, which is why they die about 1 in 1,600 per year. Mothers only give birth once per year and on average less than 2 times per life in the US.
A average skydiver's chance of dying in after 20 years is 1 in 80. The average mother's change of dying from birth after 20 years is 1 in 2,000.
That’s a seriously interesting point. Maternal death rate is 280 micromorts. Infant death (neonatal + perinatal) is about 1% in modern countries (10,000 micromorts), for a net of -989,700 micromorts, or +0.99 lives (not counting multiple births, etc).
Lack of gold standard is not sufficient for inflation - you also need reckless monetary/fiscal government policies (abundant in the US, taking full advantage of the dollar being the reserve currency)
I was not trying to prove causation. There appears to be correlation, but obviously other factors (like government spending) are at play
"If you show probability work like Hillary having lower election odds, then this is new definition of hate speech."
I get that the guy is angry. I would be too if I got locked out of my accounts, but this is a ludicrous accusation -- the new definition of hate speech?
"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity." The idea that google is waging war on this guy because of election predictions he made 12 months ago is absurd on the face of it.
Our society has been completely taken over by Hofstadter's [paranoid style](https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am...). Everything is taken as evidence of some vast conspiracy of fascists or communists. (A couple weeks ago there was an article posted here alleging that google was suppressing anti-communist websites.)
Replace "freemasons" or "international bankers" with "social justice warriors" and we're right back in the 1950's again.
I think you're right and I hope you're right. However, their system seems exceedingly sensitive to a certain political narrative.
I've heard about both antifa and alt right bearing most of the auto trips, but many incidental opinions such as this are getting caught up in their dragnet. That's not a good thing.
I would be inclined to believe it wasn't something very deliberate if it was only one or a few services getting shut down, but everything is fully removed. Even his [blog](https://statisticalideas.blogspot.com) has a "this has been removed" header.
That being said, I wouldn't be surprised if there's more to this story than what's come out so far. I think it's worth following.
There's no such thing as a partial account removal. It's like your LDAP or AD account: you disable it and all services stop working, without having to worry about how each of them does access control on the front end as well as the back end. The latter can be the tricky and non obvious part.
Jordan Peterson, a psychology professor, also got locked out of his account. He also happens to have incorrect views. Have any other professors been locked out of their account?
Counterfactual. The article you link to is laughable on the face of it. "A new study for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University" carries about the same intellectual heft as "A new study for the Eat More Beef Center at Hamburger University."
You seem the sort of person able to recognize others' ideologies while incorrectly assuming your own beliefs are rational and well-founded. Are you generally tolerant of or convinced by counterfactuals when they don't support your ideology?