Morosoph's Journal -Data Base
2005.06.05 23:13

Let's take a close look at his JEs here first, I will quote all his writings so here they are;

# Arrow's Theorem on Voting 2003.09.06 1:15 [ #44870 ]

Arrow's Theorem came up in a recent discussion where I commented on the virtues of Single Transferable Vote. It seems to me that the axiom of the Independence of Irrelevent Alternatives is in fact too strong: to me it makes a difference as to the degree of intent where I rank different candidates in an election, and what the degree of separation is. If I rank candidates fifteenth and twentieth, I probably want my vote to have at least as much influence in differentiating the two than if they were fifteenth and sixteenth, but not less. The candidates between the two do matter, particularly if one of them drains my "residual vote", and this axiom is used throughout the proof. This bothers me, because this theorem is a real show-stopper for those who'd want to reform the electoral system, and the way people are, if you can't show that a new system is perfect, they settle for an inferior state of affairs which is the status quo. My question is this: is there a better alternate axiom or set of axioms that can reasonably distinguish voting systems, so that we can meaningfuly say that one is in some way superior to another?
Since writing the above, I discovered ElectionMethods.org, which is worth a look. At present, I favour Condorcet, then Single Transferable Vote (here's why). Anyone have any better ideas?
As this Journal entry's been archived, anyone who wants to comment will need to post here, on the unofficial Bruno forum.

#Problem of Law 2003.09.11 21:37 [ #45468 ]

A constant theme of Slashdot is what's going on through the courts, but the more we see coming through, the more we see just how crude the law is. Adrian Lamo seems to be clearly deserving of sympathy, but with the law comes, it seems, a crude association of a bad deed with punishment which is sometimes (as with this case) misapplied, or applied in an attempt to mirror The Laws of Physics, without realising that doing more harm cannot correct harm. Why is it that so many apparently intelligent people do not decompose "justice" into its constituent parts? Punishment always comes after the act: that is, it is applied too late to do any good. This kind of Essentialist thinking is far too prevelent; we need to be more sceptical! Whilst I understand that punishment is meant to deter, people do not act as if they're going to get caught. One's values and simple mutual exchange keep the rest of us out of trouble; what is the cost in side-effects of deterence? An act can be done towards a higher end than that envisaged when framing the law controlling it. That the act is less likely to be engaged in when it is optimal with respect to one's values is a cost, although perhaps not sufficient to countermand the law in itself. I am no longer an anarchist, as I used to be, but it amazes me how much people worship the law, without realising what a messy compromise it all is.

#Efficiency in Economics 2003.09.28 22:17 [ #47402 ]

There seems to be a bug in conventional economics: our measure of efficiency.
It must be obvious that $100 is worth more to someone with $1000 than to someone with $100,000. So here's an idea: Rather than totting up total income/wealth, we could (to a first approximation) take logs first, so that 10% of one's income means the same to one person as another.
Why logs? If one's time is worth $20 per hour, then something worth $2 is worth to us six minutes of one's time. If one were instead earning $60 per hour, something worth $6 is worth six minutes of our time, so everything scales: we've measured equal propensity to want to do stuff. It is precisely this that we're wanting to optimise when we're considering efficiency.
Any thoughts, criticisms, comments, improvements?

#Freedom 2003.10.15 5:50 [ #49085 ]

Freedom is not democracy, and freedom is not capitalism.
Freedom is, to a first approximation, to act unrestrained.
Society requires that we recognise trade-offs between individuals, but the means by which we achieve those trade-offs is not freedom.
As means to freedom, we focus far too much upon our interaction with others, when in fact most of our interaction is with ourselves. Discipline can bring us freedom, and certainly those who have disciplined their minds to engage in mathematics can attest to the freedom that that brings.
Capacity to develop is strongly linked to freedom. When our natural tendencies are stymied, development cannot occur. Justice on the human level, as well as the legal level, usually has costs that apply to all parties. "An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind" said Ghandi; restraint can cripple equally.
So how can discipline create freedom, yet restraint cripple? The latter blocks a motion in progress, whereas the former instills a building block. Enforced discipline might have a cost, then a benefit, of course.
Freedom is not democracy. Those who call democracy freedom and fight for it are selling themselves short. Majority rule is often called "the tyranny of the majority" for a reason. This is not a matter of agreement or disagreement with the majority, but is rather a confusion between instantaneous power (=freedom) and delayed and averaged power that binds us all.
Freedom is not choice, but the capacity to make choices, thus freedom is not capitalism, as a contract might be a freer state of affairs than a corresponding law, but it is not freedom. To walk in the woods is freedom, property law is not. To pay for a walk in the woods is less free than to walk costlessly.
Why do people shy from real freedom and blunten it immediately with "with responsibility"? Certainly there's your freedom and other people's, but hidden in "with responsibility" comes a will to control and maybe be controlled by an adjudicator of responsibility; often the speaker. This speaker in truth doesn't want real responsibility for their actions: to accept their effect and to "own" that effect. They want to abdicate thought and judgement.

# Goodness 2003.10.23 5:39 [ #49867 ]

I posted the first iteration of this Journal entry here
I've long been a foe of "enlightened self-interest". I don't seek to dissuade anyone from it; in fact I'd be glad if I could consistently reach that standard myself (I'm far too indulgent), but I think that we (meaning some of us) can do better than that.
For a start, we can train out emotion through thought experiment. As an example: what if the best way to one's long-term self-interest were to change how you felt about exploiting the poor or trading with them? Many people support ideologies that turn out to either be centred around keeping themselves in work when their jobs are under threat from abroad, or else denying others fair trade with an excessively anti-interventionary wage policy.
To make what I mean more obvious, consider this: the poor generally want minimum wages: they accept the trade of being slightly less likely to find work as against a wage that is a fair bit better. Free marketeers might consider this cartelisation, once they can accept that wage payments to the poorest workers extract economic rent (and therefore demand is not especially susceptable to change in market price), yet a moment's empathy would lead one to reallise that in a sense this form of cartelisation is more efficient in the sense that it is a better use of resources for the population's well-being.
If one looks to one's own well-being, and does not challenge one's own preconceptions, it is much easier to be blissfully happy, even allowing for political activity to help others! Deeper thinking leads one to realise that general well-being is to some extent at one's own expense, and that there are few simple answers. This is itself upsetting. Is it really better not to think, and live an easier life?

#Civil Disobedience 2003.11.18 2:12 [ #52411 ]

Thoreau was there first, but people seem to have forgotten the option of civil disobedience in our cowardly modern times.
The worst of it is that we believe that to obey is moral. Is there no way to hold our society to account? No hope of finding a higher principle? No hope of thinking for ourselves? To always trust the averaging process of democracy or of the marketplace (I don't want "libertarians" to feel that they're being let off the hook) is to substitute language and a one-dimensional measure of value (respectively) for experience. To quote from this post (link inserted):
Freedom is not open to contract, and once we are too strongly oppressed, we must remember that. Contract is a means by which we get on. It is a voluntary trade, a voluntary restraint. When our rights are shat upon from a great height, this is not a voluntary trade: it is oppression.
Fair use rights might appear to be the right to rip off an artist; in reality they are a recognition in law that freedom of action trumps property rights. Naturally, they're limited in society, for we do want to protect artists' income streams, but we do not prescribe the death penalty for all misdemeanours, for we believe in graded punishment that "fits the crime", ie. we do not want to deter actions too much.
What do we want to do, then? We want to allow people to break the law if they have sufficient cause. And this is a classic case. Our fair use rights are particularly important, for they link to free speech. This includes the right to quote others our of their chosen context. Without this, political dissent within a free society is not possible. What then is political as apposed to commercial? There is no easy way to deduce that. It has to be left up to the speaker. And sometimes the speaker has to brave prison or other disincentives in order to uphold their rights, and (more importantly) the rights of those who are in a similar position. Civil disobedience is a social act, not an antisocial one. Civil disobedience restores sanity and respect into the minds of the rulers, and reminds them that they are meant to serve us, not rule us.But civil disobedience is larger than our fair use rights. Our modern cowardice will render our wars, our battles against Nazis, Fascists, communists, and terrorists pointless. Contrary to cyranoVR's quiz, we must not confound a nation's interests with freedom, or even its members' freedom, for collections of people have emergent properties that have nothing to do with the people's own interests.

#International Minimum Wage 2004.01.16 2:18 [ #58452 ]

This article was posted in its first incarnation here.
The world would be better off with a minimum wage adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity.
Racking the wage up for the sake of equality should not be an aim here. Establishing a minimum, avoiding a contest to the bottom is enough. Poverty is the major problem facing the world, not "inequality".
"Equality" will ruin us all, for the concept has such emotional appeal as to short-circuit thinking. If we say that minimum wages should be a percentage of the average wage, say, then governments will have to refuse investments that enrich the rich too much, even if they help to eliminate poverty. This is not sane.
The market will eventually seek greater equality across nations. Initially, money seeking the world's poorest means that in rich countries, the divide gets worse (the poor get competition from people who are still poorer), and the same also holds for poor countries (consider the new factory owners), yet global inequality goes down: the world's poorest get richer, and poor nations get to be richer, too. There is a means to greater global equality even though it gets worse in each nation.
Why a minimum wage, then? Simple. The market at the low end is not very suseptable to price if all prices move together. You'd still consume almost as much bread at almost twice the price, yet a lot more flows to poor families and to poor nations. Even if six families find an income where seven did before, their country is more able to provide education and the other necessities of life: in short, they get out of poverty faster.
The most obvious argument against a minimum wage is short-termist and is blind. Immediate slightly greater employment will not solve poverty, and will leave people roughly as they are in the next generation. A minimum wage would create a greater expectation of (aggregated) income, thus greater investment in any case, so that employment might even go up.

#Real Family Values 2004.02.24 9:42 [ #62978 ]

Never underestimate the value of a good liberal upbringing. If you really want your children to grow up as individuals who will contribute to society, you will never do it by destroying their confidence, and making them conform. Instead, we need to accept risk, and encourage moral individualism.
The people who will shape our society will be those who have the confidence and will to do so. Your children will learn your values: count on it. Children copy, as does everyone else. You can teach the confidence of those values, or fear of non-conformism.
You do need to stand up to your children, but example, not discipline is what will transform them most.
Maybe I've stated that a bit too boldly. Feel free to comment for or against!

#Justice requires good-faith prosecution 2004.03.12 21:25 [ #65008 ]

Go now to orthogonal's journal (which is what led me to writing this journal entry), and then, for something lighter, to jondiii's.Malicious prosecution by the authorities is a major political problem. This kind of event should ring alarm bells, and should really require a review process to monitor it. You cannot rely upon juries to do the right thing; they trust that the prosecution is giving their version of events, and are not just saying whatever they need to say to secure a conviction.
When the government is doing this kind of thing, can we really trust that it's not distorting science to its ends?
Prosecution in bad faith undermines the integrity and authority of government, and usurps the feedback loop that allows us to improve government based upon the data that we have. Bad faith prosecution is in fact a deeply subversive act.
Update: I ought to give the link to Dr. Thomas Lehman's account of Dr. Butler's trial that orthogonal gives in his journal. Justice is more important than perfect politeness.

#Gay Marriage 2004.03.19 0:35 [ #65585 ]

First draft Here.I've not said much about gay marriage thus far, because it's hard to have a decent argument with someone who agrees with you, but below is my reponse to On Lawn's journal entry. I'm picking up on this argument because I feel that the sense of property infringement is at the heart of the conservative argument.
What should be understood in this debate is that homosexuals have the right to marry, what they are seeking after is the right to same-sex marriage. And in order to get it they need the intellectual property rights to marriage so they can re-define it in their image. Like flamboyant little Marxists, they only want to steal it from their neighbor so they can give it to everyone. But instead they wish to alter it and enforce their forgery on everyone else. Am I being just a little to strong in my language here? Yes. --prove me wrong. IPR is completely inappropriate a concept for marriage. Marriage is primarily a bond between two people, and secondarily a contract with society. We are not all of one flesh, as Marxists and conservatives alike would have it, but are rather a collection of individuals. Society is emergent.Your [quoted] argument is mean, and [itself] suffers from zero-sum Marxist thinking. If two other people marry, your marriage remains intact, they have not stolen from you any more than two others engaging in a trade that you do not approve of debases work that you contract to independently.
To make myself clearer, consider a time when it is legal to keep slaves. Any contract that a slave forms is invalid, for they literally do not possess themselves to form a contract: they have no rights to give. If we say that slaves cannot agree to contractual work because it would steal from non-slaves, you are simply asserting that slavery is right.
Even if IPR were an appropriate concept, if we look at copyright and patent laws, we see that these rights are not absolute. Rather, they are a calculated trade-off between various parties interests. If we look again to the analogy of slavery, we can see that we have decided that there are things that cannot be traded, and marriage is about identity; how we consider property is conditioned by such things as marriage. It is not one person, but two who own property. Property might be in one or the other's name, but when it comes to divorce, it becomes clear that this is simply a legal nicety.
As a society, we have already decided on the principle that people can marry, and this is on the basis that marriage is a blending of identities. To exclude some couples who love each other (ie. blend identities) from marriage on the basis on IPR is a serious case of defeating a higher principle (who one is) with a lower one.
Update: On Lawn and I have written a lot in On Lawn's JE; if you're interested in this topic, you'd be well-advised to go there!

#The Nature of Justice 2004.07.30 8:48 [ #78876 ]

Original draft:
I believe that Justice, and therefore "social justice" is a product of the human mind.
"Justice" is an excuse that we have for revenge, and therefore requires standards, created by humans, against which we calculate harm. This is also why the concept of Karma is (would be) flawed: we think of it as a divine standard, but, if it exists, it can only ultimately be the mood of a time.
I stive for leniency, and for punishment only as required to establish some minimum sense of order. Punishment is frequently ineffective; how do we justify our will to punish? We seek solace in other's common will to punish, and a desire for order through fear, thus punishment is a manifestation of our will to conformity, the state within each of us. A manifestation of the collective over the individual.
"Justice" is the beginning of both socialism and fascism. Believing in absolute standards, we are quick to believe that our own standards are absolute. In "justice", we hide our will to power together with our resentment.
Justice is a poisonous concept, distracting us from higher concepts such as freedom, causing us to judge one another daily for being too rich, or otherwise unworthy. It creates irrational faith in the efficacy of punishment, so that we lock people up for longer and longer periods for lesser and lesser crimes. We ignore one of the messages that we give when we punish, particularly when we kill: that killing is justified when the cause is great enough; is it really a suprise that the death penalty is ineffective?
Social Justice is the beginning of meanness. Difference is less tolerated. Success is not tolerated. By seeing "inequality" rather than poverty as our enemy, we enact irrational social policy. We destroy wealth to level people down. Again, faith in justice can make us insist that our policies will not do this; how can something that is morally right do harm? Thus we persist, willfully blinding ourselves, in our idiocy.

#Reply to The Angry Economist 2004.08.08 17:10 [ #79657 ]

Russell Nelson writes in his column: The Angry Economist that The Minimum Wage really does destroy jobs, but he seems to be misconstruing the minimum wage argument, which isn't that the minimum wage has no effect on jobs, but that the effect is less than you would imagine.Russell approaches the argument with a naive supply-and-demand response, and asserts "This isn't Economics 101, it's Economics 001." Yet in doing so, he's ignoring the core of the more subtle point about the functioning of a monopsony. Essentially, since as an employer, your competitors are also facing higher wages costs, almost all of you can afford to pay the higher rate. Yes, this means that prices go up, but this is indeed equivalent to (roughly) a sales tax, with minimal overhead costs, as Brad DeLong points out.
Certainly supply and demand curves aren't going away, but your classic supply and demand curve is a steep one, as a result of severe competition. The minimum wage, by cartelising the workforce eliminates this competition, resulting in a much more gentle supply and demand curve, the result of which is that you can do a lot of redistribution of wealth for a small cost in employment. The psychological trick employed here is to imply that the severe rigours of the market also apply to the labour market, when in fact, taken in aggegate, the market is far less rigourous: a classical economist's intuition is honed by considering the supply and demand curves experience by a single firm in a competitive market for a particular good.
Tyler Cowen is playing the same trick, in effect, by claiming that employers will cut costs elsewhere, "Gordon notes that the government can make an employer raise nominal money wages, but can't stop him from turning off the air conditioner." This is in fact emotion masquerading as logical argument. An employer is going to want value for money; they wouldn't indiscriminately adjust costs to the "correct rate", for they are going to want an efficient and motivated workforce. Quite possibly, the reverse effect could occur: the workforce costs that much more, so it's more important to keep them efficient, so that you turn the air conditioning on sooner.
The flaw here appears to be the result of imagining that there is a "correct rate", but in truth, the rate is emergent from supply and demand; it is not divinely discovered by an invisible hand doling out "true justice". Employers will spend more or less on the workplace in accordance to how this effects their profits, not (just) their overheads. An investment that paid off beforehand is still likely to pay off. There is little existing slack in the system before the pay rise, since the "extras" not prescribed by law are susceptable to competition, and therefore, if they could be trimmed to save costs, would have been trimmed already.
Update: The Angry Economist has posted a "rebuttal".
My terse response is that it would be moral to have as full an employment as possible if there were no fallback. As there are benefits paid to the unemployed, it's simply not the case that we're sending people into severe poverty if they don't get a job, so the best policy is not maximal employment at all costs.
I expect that he would be opposed to "artificial" job creation, even if it could work, so I think that this is fake emotion. Maybe I'm wrong.

#How to fix the NHS 2004.09.07 21:07 [ #82873 ]

The reason that there is little or no decent debate on the structure and future of the NHS is that it is a sacred cow in British politics, and this is especially true within the Labour Party. The Liberal Democrats have been going soggy, so it is especially heartening to read some serious liberal thinking instead of the soft-left "social liberalism" that we have been getting.We need to clear our minds from the fog, and learn to challenge established prejudice if we actually want to achieve the type of society that we wish, rather than simply indulging our emotions.
David Laws: The NHS is suffering a terminal illness
Could we not have a more meaningful and adult debate about how to build a health system fit for the 21st century?
03 September 2004
Any constituency MP in Britain will see, on a regular local basis, the individual successes of the National Health Service and the affection in which it is held by so many people. The NHS provides a first-class emergency treatment service, is staffed by hard working and often deeply dedicated staff, and has made a real impact for the better on many people's lives.
But any constituency MP in Britain is also acutely aware of the weaknesses and failings of the NHS - huge numbers of people waiting unacceptably long for operations and diagnostic tests; bed shortages; cancelled operations; over-stretched staff; the collapse of NHS dentistry; buildings that often date back to before the Second World War; micro-management from Whitehall; poor standards of customer care and frequent problems with standards of cleanliness in hospitals.
Two or three years ago, Gordon Brown promised a national debate on the NHS. He published the Wanless report which documented in stark terms the extent of the problems in Britain's health services, compared with other developed countries - shorter life expectancy, high infant mortality rates and poor cancer survival rates. Wanless argued that Britain's health system had delivered some of the worst health outcomes in the developing world. But, bizarrely, it claimed that the NHS was the best model of healthcare funding and delivery on offer! So, the great debate over UK health services was over before it had even begun.
In fairness to the Chancellor, many of the problems of the NHS have been caused by low levels of investment over a long period of years. But many others are not simply a consequence of poor levels of funding. The NHS is one of the biggest employers in the world, running a bureaucratically driven system which is driven by central diktat from Westminster and Whitehall.
The NHS is a system that fails to allow for the disciplines of choice, diversity and competition which can help to ratchet up standards. Most of my elderly constituents, given appointments for vital diagnostic tests and consultations which may be months or years in the future, have no alternative to the NHS if they need faster treatment. The only option for the wealthier minority is to buy treatment in the private sector - which usually means seeing privately in a week the same consultant who could not be seen for six months or a year on the NHS.
The NHS suffers from two other obvious problems - political instability and funding uncertainty. Because the NHS is run from Westminster and Whitehall, it is subject to sharp policy changes, and targets that meet political imperatives and not local needs.
New Labour's supposed conversion to a "localist" agenda is unconvincing and skin deep. As the Liberal Democrats have consistently argued, Labour's idea of "localism" is extending to a minority of local hospitals or schools limited powers to implement policies which have already been set in Whitehall.
In addition, this is a system that relies on the Government of the day funding the NHS generously out of general taxation. The Government can rightly boast a good record on funding the NHS for the few years from 1999/2000 - but these levels of funding have been the exception rather than the rule for the whole history of the NHS, which strongly suggests that we cannot rely on future governments funding the NHS in the manner of recent years.
But what other alternatives are on offer? The Tories used to favour subsidised private health insurance, and they are now peddling their "patient passport", which is a payment to help people to opt out into the private sector - if they can pay the balance of costs themselves. This attempt to provide an escape route from poor-quality state provision for an affluent minority, while leaving the NHS fundamentally unreformed, has convinced few commentators and even fewer voters.
So are there any other alternatives to the state monopoly which fails so many citizens and the private opt-out which will never be an option for so many people on lower incomes?
Liberal Democrat policy advocates a portion of income tax being earmarked only for the NHS as an "NHS contribution", to allow people to understand how much of their tax is used to fund the NHS, and to help to build the case for higher funding to cover higher future health costs and the implications of an ageing population.
We have also advocated a genuine decentralisation of the NHS, with a presumption that local NHS professionals know better than the man in the ministry - reversing the existing Government assumptions.
Finally, we have advocated introducing more choice and diversity into the NHS, with new providers and greater choice. In an essay published yesterday (in The Orange Book; Reclaiming Liberalism), I have explored whether our policy could be developed further in the future to offer even greater choice and diversity.
To some people, this may seem radical, even dangerous. The public's views about the NHS are, to a certain degree, contradictory - people simultaneously express strong support for the NHS and its values, but seem sceptical as to whether existing Government policies and extra money will deliver success.
Meanwhile, in many continental European countries (often regarded as dangerously left-wing by commentators in this country), a totally different model of health care provision does exist, which does offer citizens greater choice and variety. The model is usually described as representing a "social insurance" approach, where the state funds all health care out of progressive taxation but people can choose between different providers.
In many of these European countries, waiting lists are regarded as an absurd British eccentricity, and the fixation with having only one state provider is regarded as absurdly out of date. The social insurance systems are identified with greater choice and competition for patients, better funding and health outcomes.
This is surely a model which we in the UK could be learning from. Could we not have a more meaningful and adult debate about how to build a health system fit for the 21st century, on the basis of the very principles which underpinned the foundation of the NHS? For example, why not switch from a monopoly NHS system to a National Health Insurance Scheme - with the NHS remaining in place, but as only one of the options available to all citizens?
Why not raise an NHIS contribution from every citizen from their incomes, and on the basis of ability to pay? Why not allow the private and voluntary sector to offer their own schemes to citizens, provided that they are open to all citizens without payment of any top-up, and delivering care which is free at the point of need?
It is time for a liberal vision of the NHS's future, building on existing Liberal Democrat policies, but offering a genuine alternative to the Government's centralised monopoly purchaser vision. When so many other countries in the world have health systems which deliver so much better results, why are we so scared in this country of considering how we can marry our national commitment to health care for all of the population to a system with real choice and better quality?
The writer is the Liberal Democrat MP for Yeovil

#FSF to Acquire Defensive Patents 2004.11.30 23:49 [ #91631 ]

I have written a couple of letters to the FSF on the subject of the possible acquisition of defensive patents for the purpose of deterring patent claims against free software. To the last one, I received this reply: On Fri, 2004-11-19 at 14:28 -0500, Tim Wesson via RT wrote:
>>>> Hi Dave,>>>> Sorry to come back to you after such a long gap, but I've noticed how>> some larger companies (Red Hat, IBM, Sun?) have a /defensive patent/>> portfolio, and it occurred to me that were the FSF to seek patents on>> code donated to them, with the intention to use them only defensively,>> wouldn't that improve matters for free software?
We are interested in obtaining patents for defensive use. I'm presentlytalking to our patent lawyer about the details of this process. If youhave a patentable idea, please let me know (I don't need any detailsright now) and I'll try to get the ball rolling a bit faster.
---Dave TurnerGPL Compliance EngineerSupport my work: http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=novalis&p=FSF This has to be a good thing. Previously, there was the risk of "divide and rule": free software developers could not afford to stand up to large companies with a sizeable patent portfolio; instead they had to rely upon being below their radar, and the company's desire for goodwill from developers. This cannot be relied upon, as strategies other than seeking goodwill are commonplace. Witness SCO, for a start.Personally, I have not yet developed any patentable ideas (although this might help give them an impetuous), but I would ask any free-software developers reading this to consider what patentable ideas that they may have, and to consider donating them to the FSF.

#Free Markets do not require Self-Interest 2005.03.03 7:08 [ #99823 ]

The fallacy is this: that economic efficiency requires self-interested action.This diary entry grows out of this post of mine.
It is motivated by repeated critiques of (for example) the GNU GPL or proponents of strong copyright law where it is perceived that a side-effect of reducing the ability to horde is synonymous with reducing output. Such a perspective only makes sense to the extent that creativity is conditioned by a restricted definition of reward.
What if reward can involve benefit to others? This concept seems natural to us when we consider such things as benefit to our families, or when we seek political advantage for a chosen cause, but not always so natural when we're considering trade, worker relations, or supply and demand. What if I demand not just the lowest price, but an adequate wage for specified workers in the form of "fair trade"?
"Fair trade" produce doesn't typically have massive market share, this is true, but then we do not have very much information to base our purchasing decisions upon. Also, some people don't think of it as a consumer choice as much as a political statement, the implicit politics being left wing, a collection of folks that they might or might not wish to be associated with.
In what sense, then, can a "fair trade" purchase be efficient? The answer to that becomes clearer when we realise that efficiency itself is a relativistic concept. Efficiency only make sense when we decide for ourselves what constitutes "progress" and "cost", so that the ratio can be known. "Fair trade" then involves a concept of progress that includes the end workers' well-being. Clearly that can be sustained whilst reducing the end price through mechanisation, better mechanisms of delivery, and such like. Thus buying "fair trade" produce still drives the market to find superior allocations of resources.
What then about the new development of "copyleft" licenses, such as Creative Commons "share-alike" licenses or indeed the GNU GPL? Here we see creation by people who value that others make use of their works, and others yet in turn. This act in itself must undermine the perspective of those who believe that an incentive to create is synonymous with keeping things to oneself. Thus the fact that the GPL is in use undermines the central justification used by those who oppose it on intellectual property grounds!
For those who haven't read it yet, you really should read Coase's Penguin!

#Property is a Positive Right 2005.03.12 20:55 [ #100704 ]

What do I mean when I say "property is a positive right"?I do not mean that "property is a positively a right", although property is an important part of the concept of freedom, rather I mean property is a right in the same way that health care is a right, as opposed to say the right to bear arms.
A negative freedom is where others refrain from harming you, in particular the state. An example is freedom from false imprisonment.
A positive freedom is one where one is guaranteed something by an outside entity, usually the state. An example of this is freedom from poverty.
Property certainly appears at first to be a negative right because it appears to be very natural, especially to those that are used to it. It is indeed likely that civilisation would be impossible without it. However, property is not nearly as simple as being a simple, universal right. Coase's Theorem lies at the root of why land is property, and air is not, for example. The key here is the concept of transaction cost.
There is a defence of property as natural in the theory of natural law, but proponents of natural law are far more subtle than simply proposing property rights as absolute; rather such a defence is about the natural equilibrium of common law over time. Those who would hold property to be a negative right would have to lean on natural law theory, implicitly defining property to be a natural extension of the owner. The trouble with such a theory is that it isn't nearly as strong as the proponents would wish it to be.
Given the problem with defining what property is, and the implicit definition required of property being an extension of oneself, I posit that this kind of reasoning is post-rationalisation used by those who want a minimal government, and divide the concept of rights conveniently into positive and negative rights for the purpose of achieving the kind of government that they wish. This is an entirely reasonable thing to do: seeking consistency by searching for underlying principles is what makes a course of action moral rather than merely arbitrary.
However, property is awkward, and ever-shifting. The evolution of patent law and copyright show this to be precisely the case, and it appears that a better thesis than that of natural law, or concerns of efficiency concerning what is and isn't considered to be property is simply that the powerful get their way. Luckily, however, the multitude of firms in existence means that power is to some extent decentralised, but property certainly appears to exist with the blessing of the state, and this would still be the case even if property law enforcement were in some way more 'just' (this term will mean different things to different readers). In short, property is a positive right.

#The GNU GPL is Efficient 2005.03.19 20:06 [ #101357 ]

If you code under the GNU GPL, you're doing the economy more good than if you use a BSD-style license.How can this be? After all, surely it's a question of circumstance, after all, sometimes you need to use others' code which might mandate the GPL or other license, whereas other times it depends upon business strategy [eg.] or other factors, and this is true, but I am arguing about the economy at large rather than one's own interests (which would vary according to one's values), and at some point, I'm taking averages, for there's bounds to be unforseen "butterfly effects" that could prove me wrong when dealing with specifics ;-)
A clue for how this can be is given in my use of the DNA symbol for this article: the efficiency comes from reuse and mixing of code, in particular in the induced speciation between proprietry and free software, as each class of software is viral, promoting the persistence of that class.
So what happens when "non-viral" free software is produced? Here, both free and proprietry derivatives result, but free software has not gained over proprietry software in aggregate. Why does this matter? Resources have gone into the production of free software, and yet the species of free software has gained no advantage from this. This means that the free-software development model is not promoting itself with the production of free software (in this case), and thus will not be selected for over proprietry software, even if it is a more efficient mode of production. This diseconomy is clear, for effort has gone unrewarded when considering free software in aggregate, although this is not the case when proprietry software is produced.
Perhaps the solution is to consider BSD-style licenses semi-free for the purposes of economically rational behaviour. It could perhaps be deduced that the government should produce software under BSD-style licenses without GPL-incompatable clauses (favouring neither mode of production) unless is has reasons to believe that there are flaws in the market to correct, such as the value (in general) of the availability of source code as a teaching aid.

#Reality is Singular 2005.03.21 20:38 [ #101493 ]

Of late there has been an explosion of Journal articles and other postings where some posters have been referring to "different realities" or "different truths", especially when dealing with such things as evolution. This is bullshit. Being wrong is one thing, but "different truths" is the ultimate cop-out."Reality is Singular" is the title that I gave to this post, but really physical (as opposed to moral) relativism is pretty self-evidently rubbish. What's probably worse, though is the so-called Consensus theory of truth, whereby Newton and Copernicus where insane upon discovery of their respecitive theories, and presumably became sane through convincing others of the results of their own investigations.
When arguing on issues such as Creationism, the consensus theory is worse than being wrong, for the criteria for acceptance shift. If truth is a matter of consensus, then arguments about how dreadful it would be if something were false gain weight. Creationism perhaps should be believed, then, because Christianity induces social cohesion. Punishment works, because it justifies a simple moral outlook, when someone looking at the evidence would see that punishment is only moderately effective, and indeed its effectiveness is highly variable, depending upon context. "Left-wing" criticisms of Richard Dawkins' theories, without appealing to religion tend to have a nod to this, together with ad hominem attacks upon the motives of genetic theorists who's work he's built upon. Such a world soon becomes intellectually claustrophobic as one's thoughts have to be self-policed for political correctness.
To embrace theories of "consensus reality" is to give up upon civilisation, and indeed that there is anything beyond politics. Far from overcoming social division, it entrenches warring tribes, for there is no way that evidence can shift an argument one way or the other. All is politics, and truth is replaced with a simple Marxian political dialectic, where palatability overwhelms reality. Society suffers too, as those who speak their minds are hounded out of their jobs. Consider the repercussions of Lawrence Summers's speech.