Re:The World is Socialist
by MindBoozer on Monday April 29, 2013 @09:45AM
(#5626074)
It seems to me that opponents of 'Free Market' stuff their fingers into their ears and begin to hum very loudly when they are told that people can organize and contribute to a common goal without being forced to do it.
Those opponents of free markets often believe that intentions are the most important factor in achieving results. They reach the conclusion that people who sound kind and articulate will make the world better than well-incentivized, intelligent people would.
Re:The World is Socialist
by MindBoozer on Monday April 29, 2013 @03:30PM
(#5628148)
I have noticed that as well. If you say you are going to help people and make some cursory gesture towards that ends then you are lauded as some sort of selfless hero. Whether or not people are actually better off is seemingly irrelevant. Its just the act of 'wanting to help' that matters.
It's amusing that Winer thinks we'd have a problem with snow plowing, meanwhile he uses the private Internet, which is approximately a million times more complex and difficult to maintain than plowing snow. And this isn't even an optimal private Internet, as the government is currently shielding the telecom monopoly system from competition, and it still works extraordinarily well.
We can have a private Internet and Web, that took hundreds of billions worth of private investment, supports a billion users, IP telephony, streaming video, radically advanced massive scale search systems, and it can run at maximum uptime as a system, meanwhile its speeds increase by a factor of 25 to 50 fold every decade..... but the roads! Oh the roads! Such a complex system to solve. The free market could never solve the issue of roads. Oh geez.
Who plows my driveway? I pay someone to do it. The notion that the free market wouldn't solve snow plowing is pure comedy gold. It'll lead to the iPhone, but snow plowing is tricky!
Who would feed the people if the government didn't do it? Oh. Who would build the cars if the government didn't do it? Oh. Who would fly the planes and build the planes if the government didn't do it? Oh. Who would write the software behind Android or iOS if the government didn't do it? Oh. But plowing snow, yeah, that's a really complex problem to solve in a free market. Truly hilarious.