ancap

I don't have a copy of today's NYT so I'll leave it to someone else to perform the exercise. But it's besides the point. You're asking the wrong question. Again speaking generally, when the media criticizes the "incompetence & evils of governments" it is in effort to elevate or promote some other government party, or to promote their alternative program or policy, not to fundamentally alter the system of government itself. When they criticize a member of the ruling class it frequently is part of a coordinated PR campaign organized by another member of the ruling class.

Anyone part of the media who veers too off course the path of allowable opinion is quickly reigned in or let go.

That's not surprising as the media, speaking generally, is a class which aligns itself closely with the ruling class and is incentivized to maintain the status quo.

>You need the other things to move away from the necessity of government regulation

I guess this is the crux of the matter. You are suggesting that transparency must pre-exist a free market, I am suggesting that a free market pre-exists transparency, and when necessary transparency will be demanded by the consumers.

The criteria you specify for transparency is subjective and I don't agree that all of those criteria are strictly necessary. Specifically, I don't agree that knowledge of "provenance, relative supply and transport/marketing cost" is required of a buyer at all in a free market, though they may personally have an interest in those things. I would venture that most consumers know and care very little about those things.

>If you don't have that, a free market can't work well.

>which is why it's fundamental for a free market

What's important is the principle of subjective value--that the buyer and the seller value what they are getting more than what they are giving up--and that can happen without the various criteria of transparency you outline. Certainly there are cases where market actors will demand some of those (and many cases they will not), but I wouldn't state it's a foundational requirement the market must be built upon.

Transparency can be subjective. For example, a person sells 100 shares of ACME stock to a savvy buyer. A short time later the stock triples in value, and the seller sues the buyer because they were not "completely transparent" about their knowledge that the stock would rise.

Of course, in all of this I am not talking about deliberate fraud which would be strictly forbidden in a free market.

Non sequitur and a red herring.

>To believe otherwise is to believe that a person does not have personal agency, and that a person is not in charge of themselves.

Non sequitur. Someone owning data about you has nothing to do with denying someone's "personal agency". Quite the opposite. I would suggest someone recording the actions you make is a testament to the principle of personal agency. You can own yourself and your choices all day long, but you don't control the consequences of those actions. Furthermore, if you're saying someone cannot record things that they observe, you are denying them their personal agency. (As an aside, I find your appeal to "personal agency" curious given your previous assertion that people are irrational, implying the foolishness of such a principle).

>But in the real world, that's simply not true. And in the real world

In the real world there are a myriad of legal jurisdictions, with a myriad of laws whose principles and motives often are contradictory. I am not arguing from the perspective of the status quo. Individuals can also demonstrate cognitive dissonance.

Please answer the following questions:

1) If I observe you walking down the street and I see you wearing a pair of Adidas athletic shoes, and I make a mental note to myself "s73v3r_ wears Adidas athletic shoes", do you own my thought?

1a) If yes to #1 how do you justify owning a stranger's thoughts?

2) If I write down the thought in my notepad, do you own the entry in my notepad?

2a) If yes to #2 how do you justify owning an entry in a stranger's notepad who expended their labor creating?

If you answered no to #1 and yes to #2 then you have a contradiction you need to account for (data is data whether it is in memory or persisted). If you answered no to #1 and no to #2 then you have established the principle that you do not own data about you. If you answered yes to #1 and yes to #2 then it would be good for you to at least be explicit so those who are following the argument understand your premise.

I suppose you have your own definition for "perfectly rational" that you're standing by, and that's fine. But I fail to see the point. How is that relevant to this thread?

I originally posted that people wouldn't use these web services if they didn't receive some benefit from it, and you've done nothing more than present red herrings.

I can write down in my notepad right now:

  s73v3r_ - thumb sucker

I'm not sure what perfect information has to do with anything. It's impossible that perfect information could ever exist.

While you've presented a compelling counter-argument, I'm still not convinced.

>And when did I agree to Equifax's terms?

You didn't need to because they never stored "your data".

Of course. No one would be using them if they weren't better off from using them.

If labor were much cheaper, I personally might be willing to hire a maid, a gardener, a masseuse, a cook, etc. Similarly a retail business might hire more cashiers, or have more staff on the floor to answer customers questions and help them find things. A gas station might provide a full service experience for their customers. You could do this analysis for virtually any type of business and given cheaper labor they would hire more people.

Why is this so? Because the demand for labor, like goods, is infinite.

>Business owners exploit the basic human need for food and shelter to underpay low-skill workers.

You could equally (and wrongly) say that workers exploit businesses basic need for labor. It's economic nonsense.

Wages are set by the market through supply and demand

To summarize, a "savings glut", they claim, is what happens when wealthy people do not spend their money, causing an increase in bank deposits, causing a drop in interest rates, causing the central bank to have less leverage in managing the economy. While in a sans-central bank economy interest rates may work that way, the world's economies are managed by central banks who, more or less, determine what the interest rates will be. That is to say, current record-low interest rates have very little to do with savings from the wealthy, and are mostly tied to the tens of trillions of dollars injected into the economy in recent years by the central banks.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w13953.pdf

http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1246.pdf

The last one they muddy the waters quite a big where they talk about a "net decoupling" and "gross decoupling". The first they use the same deflator and the second they use a different deflator. Using different deflators for wages and productivity means you're comparing apples to oranges.

Economists Donald Boudreaux and Liya Plagashvili discuss the topic in greater detail in this WSG op-ed https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-boudreaux-and-liya-palag...

1) They do not include fringe benefits in their calculation of wages 2) They use one inflation measure to adjust for cost changes in productivity over time and a different inflation measure to adjust for cost changes in wages over time.

Doing a quick search over their methodology [1], to their credit, I believe EPI avoids mistake #1, but it appears they make mistake #2.

Studies which include the complete value of benefits in their calculation of wages and use the same method to deflate both wages and productivity show that there is no "wage decoupling" from productivity.

[1] http://www.epi.org/data/methodology/