I very much doubt the whole leaving left/right biases out is even possible. I don't think it's a good idea. In order to prevent all threads mentioning it going off topic, I started this thread. Whenever someone posts about this topic, respond to it here, and limit the argument to this thread.

First off, the government is not responsible for their actions. If a business doesn't work efficiently, the workers suffer. There's no such feedback for the government. In effect, what they are doing is charity. We've all seen how inefficient charities can be.

There has been talk here about replacing getting rid of intellectual property rights and replacing it with something open-source. I admit that IP rights are too restrictive. I was told this by the CEO of Parallax, a small business. That being said, completely getting rid of them would be a bad idea. Take the pharmacutical industry, for example. A quick google got this. It mentions early on that it costs about $800 million to develop a new drug. Who would pay for that? There is a big difference between working on an open source project without being payed and paying for the opportunity to work on one. Even if there is enough money and manpower donated, this still runs into the charity problem. Who decides how much research is put into what kind of drugs?

A thread has appeared talking about rationing healthcare. I see no reason this should be treated differently than anything else. It is unequally distributed, and people are paying significantly higher rates for slightly better healthcare. The same can be said about houses, or cars, or TVs, or anything else. If you want to change the distribution, do it with everything and just use a progressive tax.

EmbraceUnity wrote:I think both Daniel's and my claims are verifiable, as long as they are ultimately based on utilitarian grounds. Granted, it is quite hard to quantify anything in utilitarian terms, and one can come to many repugnant conclusions, but I am assuming those aren't dealbreakers for you, or you wouldn't be here.

My own worldview has been explained in the greatest depth here and here. If there is anything which isn't verifiable about any of this, I would very much like to know.

As for Daniel's views, libertarianism is rather easy to refute on utilitarian grounds. Most happiness scholars have actually concluded that social democracies rank higher than more laissez-faire economies as far as happiness goes. The most prominent libertarian argument against the consensus within Happiness Studies was a piece by Will Wilkinson which condemned any attempts at quantifying happiness (though, in a colbert-esque manner, tried to simultaneously argue that America is quantifiably happier).

Assuming you have a good way measuring happiness. I have pointed out the problem with that here. In addition, it fails to account for growth. What cost is a little less happiness now if it gives a 1% benefit for the rest of civilization?

Though I think setting aside the consensus of happiness research, it is just blindingly obvious that volatile boom and bust cycles and atomized dog-eat-dog mentality causes all sorts of mental problems, unhappiness being the most widespread among them.

I don't believe that there's a consensus on the boom and bust cycles being from the economy (rather than from government intervention). The dog-eat-dog mentality mainly just applies to entrepreneurs. The average person just has to worry about finding a good job and finding what they need for cheap. In any case, something being obvious doesn't make it true.

More verifiably, we must also factor in that because of the "hedonic treadmill" people naturally gravitate towards a natural equilibrium happiness set point, and that people tend to judge their own happiness and success in a relativistic fashion. Thus, it is Hedonistic Imperative type stuff which is actually necessary to maximize happiness, and the way to prove which mode of production is superior is to rate how likely it is at achieving the aims of the Hedonistic Imperative.

Considering that the market only can provide the profit motive, it cannot account for other goals or for externalities. Luckily, new communications technologies allow for different modes of production which allow for other motivations, can account for externalities, and can simultaneously be cheaper and more efficient.

Externalities aren't that big a problem. They can be countered by appropriate taxation/subsidies. I haven't looked at any numbers, but I suspect that externalities pale in comparison to the current wrongly given taxes and subsidies. Also, I doubt externalities would cause nearly as much error as being disconnected from your goal.

How can the market achieve the aims of the Hedonistic Imperative, when there are currently no incentive structures to support the rights of animals, and strong incentives to create artificial scarcities. Not to mention perverse incentives along the lines of the Military-Industrial Complex which actually make war and disease profitable. True, there are incentives to at least treat animals just well enough to continue to produce quality products, but what about the even more urgent case of Wild Animals.

Making war and disease profitable is only a problem if they can actually start war and cause disease.

There are virtually no incentives to treat wild animals with any respect whatsoever. They are seen by the market either as pests or game, but never as intrinsically valuable beings, and incentive structures will always override a minority of activists and ethical consumers... thus, the market must be out-competed and made irrelevant to the largest extent possible by Open Source methods in order to abolish suffering from all sentient life.

There is no incentive in any form of government. It would seem necessary for the government to step in in this case, but this is the exception, not the rule.

A few things on the worldview you mentioned:
You seem to imply that the rich and powerful making themselves richer and more powerful is a bad thing. They can only do so by selling or leasing their services or capital. They create more than what they keep.

You imply that it's possible to not have scarcity. This doesn't mean there's less than we need. It just means we'd like to have more. I don't know about you, but if I had virtually limitless resources, I'd start building cooler and cooler megastructures until my resources stop seeming so limitless. Even if you're content with what you have, I'd make it so there's scarcity. If we agree on limits, I'd be willing to stay within them, but the creation of these limits would be the acknowledgement of scarcity.

Also, I'd like to point out that public goods commonly don't need to be public. I already suggested the privatization of rivers. You could sell populations of fish and let the new owner decide how many fish can be spared. Anything we can prevent someone from taking doesn't have to be a public good. If we privatize all public goods, and tax for the occasional major externality, greed can't possibly cause any harm.

Responding to statements already in this thread:

How can the market achieve the aims of the Hedonistic Imperative, when there are currently no incentive structures to support the rights of animals, and strong incentives to create artificial scarcities. Not to mention perverse incentives along the lines of the Military-Industrial Complex which actually make war and disease profitable. True, there are incentives to at least treat animals just well enough to continue to produce quality products, but what about the even more urgent case of Wild Animals.

What we currently have is not really the market at work. Much of the "supporting the rights of animals" is done by private groups (Humane Society, etc.), while the government causes much of the suffering experienced by animals. Speaking for the US, the government is the largest purchaser of factory farms' "products" and therefore keeps the huge, immoral companies like Smithfield in business. The government "regulates" places like Smithfield (with Smithfield probably writing those regulations!), issuing puny EPA fines (0.03% of one year's profits, I believe) for the extensive damage the company caused, and then closing the case and not investigating them further. That is not a free market, but a government specifically colluding to give one huge corporation advantages over any others in the market. And that is what we have now, corporatism.

I'm reading Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, and these horrific experiments paid for with tax dollars with no purpose at all would not be tolerated in any company's budget, but United States taxpayers have paid billions for what I consider to be atrocities to be committed by scientists (Singer's ex.: maternal deprivation studies on chimps and various kinds of monkeys-- once one type of monkey or ape set the precedent of getting grant money for a scientist to do these tests, other scientists applied for funding to see how other species would react, with no point to it at all other than continuing grants for their labs). I won't even get started on the various military experiments.

How are wild animals more urgent than, say, factory farming?

There are virtually no incentives to treat wild animals with any respect whatsoever. They are seen by the market either as pests or game, but never as intrinsically valuable beings, and incentive structures will always override a minority of activists and ethical consumers... thus, the market must be out-competed and made irrelevant to the largest extent possible by Open Source methods in order to abolish suffering from all sentient life.

Agree that there is no incentive with government, either, and I would contend that part of "the market" does have an incentive to respect wild animals: nonprofit organizations are an essential component of the free market. The Humane Society, the Nature Conservancy, and other groups have done much more on behalf of wild animals than the US or state governments have.

I completely agree about Smithfield. I think it is atrocious that rampant corporatism is allowed to persist.

The Humane Society is not really part of the "free market," it is part of civil society. The "Third Sector," neither public nor private. It doesn't abide by the aims of agents in a marketplace, namely profit maximization, but rather pursues mutually determined goals... just as Open Source does. My argument is we need to find ways for civil society to fill the niche of production which the market currently fills... and find ways for it to provide governance as well. Open Source Everything!

there is no incentive with government, either

Democratic governments are tools of special interests, and the incentive structures are basically determined by who the system enables to gain influence and wealth. Thus, the goals are not static, unlike the marketplace. The market may want to project an ethical face if the consumers demand it, but that would merely be following demand signals in service of profit maximization. The goals have not changed, but this is not the case with nation-states.

Thus, the statement that democratic governments have no incentive to take care of animals is relatively meaningless... unless you are proposing a system which forces respect for animal suffering. What you are really saying in this case is that the majority of people who wield special interest power have little to no concern for animals.... though if we are to be honest with ourselves, we should probably admit that most people in general lack empathy for animals... but I'm not sure if that can be blamed on the government.

How are wild animals more urgent than, say, factory farming?

Wild animal suffering is a far more urgent case than domestic animal suffering, as David Pearce, Alan Dawrst, and others have shown. The number of creatures which suffer in the wild is astronomical. We cannot say for certain to what degree different creatures suffer, but what should give us pause is the sheer quantity of animals in the wild who are suffering from the cruel fate of natural selection. The source of the suffering is irrelevant, and the fact that we didn't cause the suffering of wild animals doesn't exempt us from the moral obligation to stop it.

I will quote Pearce at length on this topic:

Yet even if we have global veganism, surely there will still be terrible cruelty in Nature? Wildlife documentaries give us a very Bambified view of the living world: it doesn't make good TV spending half an hour showing a non-human animal dying of thirst or hunger, or slowly being asphyxiated and eaten alive by a predator. And surely there has to be a food chain? Nature is cruel; but predators will always be essential on pain of a population explosion and Malthusian catastrophe?

Not so. If we want to, we can use depot contraception, redesign the global ecosystem, and rewrite the vertebrate genome to get rid of suffering in the rest of the natural world too. For non-human animals don't need liberating; they need looking after. We have a duty of care, just as we do to human babies and toddlers, to the old, and the mentally handicapped. This prospect might sound remote; but habitat-destruction means that effectively all that will be left of Nature later this century is our wildlife parks. Just as we don't feed terrified live rodents to snakes in zoos - we recognize that's barbaric - will we really continue to permit cruelties in our terrestrial wildlife parks because they are "natural"?

The last frontier on Planet Earth is the ocean. Intuitively, this might seem to entail too complicated a task. But the exponential growth of computer power and nanorobotic technologies means that we can in theory comprehensively re-engineer the marine ecosystem too. Currently such re-engineering is still impossible; in a few decades, it will be computationally feasible but challenging; eventually, it will be technically trivial. So the question is: will we actually do it? Should we do it - or alternatively should we conserve the Darwinian status quo?

http://www.abolitionist.com/

This is a response to this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=175

There's no barrier between libertarianism and open standards or open collaboration.

I never said there was.

Great! I apologize for thinking you did.

Precisely, except there are a lot of corporatist public policies and tyrannical "intellectual property" laws which stifle open innovation, and Open Source is only succeeding despite this... imagine what could be achieved when we knock down these barriers.

Since we seemed to be discussing libertarianism in the other thread, libertarianism is pretty much opposed to corporatism (what we have now). Many people assume it's the same thing for some reason, but no libertarian would really be happy with what we have now at all. Libertarianism is generally for fewer laws and less restriction when possible, so that would go along with loosening IP laws.

Just because I argue that the profit motive runs counter to the Hedonistic Imperative, which is deductively true, doesn't mean I support any statist policies to achieve this. I argued explicitly for open source models.

I think both open source and profit motives can achieve the technologies which would be needed for the Hedonistic Imperative. There's no reason they can't co-exist, and in fact, I think they'd have to. Many open source projects (like GNURadio) are funded by philanthropists, and philanthropists often initially get money through some kind of profit-based incentive system.

EmbraceUnity wrote:
The Humane Society is not really part of the "free market," it is part of civil society. The "Third Sector," neither public nor private. It doesn't abide by the aims of agents in a marketplace, namely profit maximization, but rather pursues mutually determined goals... just as Open Source does. My argument is we need to find ways for civil society to fill the niche of production which the market currently fills... and find ways for it to provide governance as well. Open Source Everything!

I guess we'll agree to disagree on that aspect, since I think the Humane Society is definitely part of the free market. The free market is simply private enterprise, not just making profits. (The Humane Society does make a tidy profit from its fundraising, btw, anyway.)

The market may want to project an ethical face if the consumers demand it, but that would merely be following demand signals in service of profit maximization. The goals have not changed, but this is not the case with nation-states.

If I'm wrong, please correct me, but I've pretty much noticed that the goals of governments are to keep the current government in power. If the people care about animals, the government will, too (or make it appear that way). If people don't care about animals, the government won't.

.... though if we are to be honest with ourselves, we should probably admit that most people in general lack empathy for animals... but I'm not sure if that can be blamed on the government.

And that is why governments don't seem to have much respect for them, for the most part. People don't.

Interesting about the wild animals vs. factory farms, thanks!

brightmidnight wrote:

Just because I argue that the profit motive runs counter to the Hedonistic Imperative, which is deductively true, doesn't mean I support any statist policies to achieve this. I argued explicitly for open source models.

I think both open source and profit motives can achieve the technologies which would be needed for the Hedonistic Imperative. There's no reason they can't co-exist, and in fact, I think they'd have to. Many open source projects (like GNURadio) are funded by philanthropists, and philanthropists often initially get money through some kind of profit-based incentive system.

They can and should coexist, but that doesn't mean we must remain neutral on which mode of production we would ultimately like to see become predominant. Not all sectors of industry can be opened up right now, because the frameworks are not in place for their products to be treated like computer bits (endlessly copiable, instantly transferrable, etc). Not even all information was able to be treated this way, at least until the Web 2.0 software began emerging.

Now atoms are starting to become more like computer bits. With the advent of cheap, open source 3D Printers, CNC torch tables, the multimachine, we are beginning to see the day when atoms can be treated more like bits, and forget global supply chains, if you want something you download it on the internet and print it out with your 3D printer.

Of course, this isn't even mentioning nanotechnology, which is actually advancing quite rapidly.

brightmidnight wrote:I guess we'll agree to disagree on that aspect, since I think the Humane Society is definitely part of the free market. The free market is simply private enterprise, not just making profits. (The Humane Society does make a tidy profit from its fundraising, btw, anyway.)

Are you sure you understand what profit is? The Humane Society is registered as a not-for-profit, and thus they are legally required to not seek profit. Profit is the surplus value added to the capital and labor one began with. Profit is only possible under conditions of scarcity. If no scarcity exists, there is incentive to create artificial scarcities at the expense of everyone else (see: corporatism, patents, etc)

It isn't that libertarians believe in corporatism, but rather that they believe in a system which inevitably reverts to coporatism even under the most vigilant eyes.

You used "libertarians" and "the most vigilant eyes" in the same sentence.

Looking at coporatism on wikipedia, it looks like it means having corporations/unions/etc. control the government. Libertarians believe in giving little power to the government. If they don't have power, people can't do much by influencing it.

I personally believe in using the free market. It can't be used for non-rivalrous goods. Information is a non-rivalrous good as long as the government doesn't keep people from copying it. As such, the government should protect intellectual property. Perhaps I mislabeled myself as a libertarian.

Thus, the statement that democratic governments have no incentive to take care of animals is relatively meaningless... unless you are proposing a system which forces respect for animal suffering. What you are really saying in this case is that the majority of people who wield special interest power have little to no concern for animals.... though if we are to be honest with ourselves, we should probably admit that most people in general lack empathy for animals... but I'm not sure if that can be blamed on the government.

I was saying that whoever wields power has no incentive to help animals in any form of government. As such, it can't be used as an argument against libertarianism, or any other form of government.

The Humane Society is not really part of the "free market," it is part of civil society. The "Third Sector," neither public nor private. It doesn't abide by the aims of agents in a marketplace, namely profit maximization, but rather pursues mutually determined goals... just as Open Source does. My argument is we need to find ways for civil society to fill the niche of production which the market currently fills... and find ways for it to provide governance as well. Open Source Everything!

The aims of agents in a marketplace isn't profit maximization. That just tends to help them accomplish what their aims are. Many people want to prevent animal suffering. They "buy" this from the humane society by donating to them. The same goes for open source projects, though in that case it's donating time instead of money, and people also like spending the time doing it. The people who work at the humane society may be doing it for the money, because they want to help the cause, or some combination thereof.