Hugo

Then your definition of government is wrong. Government is an organisation that exerts a monopoly over the services of law and justice within a geographical area. Since private courts and arbitrators do not exercise a monopoly over their services within a geographical area they cannot be called or compared to government. Not at all. These institutions only presuppose that a contract should be binding, and that concept exists quite independently of "government law", as the medieval Law Merchant or the Somali Xeer illustrate quite neatly. If you default on bills and loans, Equifax will make your life a misery as a penalty without any "residual or delegated government enforcement authority" whatsoever. All they will do is advise people not to deal with you, which depends on no authority or enforcement of any kind except that which people will willingly give (i.e. nothing to do with government).

Where did I say otherwise?

It's been a while since we've locked horns, Blackdog, what do you say? Not true. You even contradict yourself by stating that it "works" and then admit that the only way it was kept going was through tax increases! The social security program almost collapsed in 1983, and was "saved" by the Greenspan Commission (funnily enough). He saved it with a series of tax hikes to pays for its increasing costs, which proves absolutely nothing about its viability since you can keep virtually anything going as long as you throw enough money at it, and such money is easy to come by when it is coerced out of people. Since Reagan's presidency, all cuts to income taxes have been more than offset by increases in social security taxes. Social security will face another huge problem in 2018, when claims upon it will start to exceed the taxes going into it. The administration does have a large amount of claims on the Federal government, however, the feds don't have any cash reserves to honour these claims because they already spent the Social Security "surplus" (one of the reasons for the reform in 1983 was as an exercise in creative accounting to reduce the defecit on paper) and so, in 2018, expect that either taxes will go up, the defecit will balloon, or the age of retirement will be raised to 70 or 75. President Bush has proposed to partially privatize the system, however, the funds he proposes to use for private investment will come almost entirely from funds allocated to fulfilling pension obligations. This means that the government will have to tax or borrow trillions of dollars before this scheme actually starts to cause any reduction in required social security spending. What the proposal therefore amounts to is an expansion of government rather than any real kind of privatization. It also creates a massive potential for pork-barrelling since government will have to approve the stocks that are purchased, and I think it probable that the likes of Halliburton will mysteriously appear high on that list. Social Security is basically a big Ponzi scheme. It purports to be almost like a private savings institution, when the fact is that it is nothing more than a wealth redistribution scheme. The idea is that you pay in, your money gets saved and then given back to you in old age. What actually happens is that you pay in and your money is given directly to retirees, and when you retire, the government will take money from other young people to give to you. The difference is that Ponzi did not have the coercive power of the state to back up his deceit. The other big lie is that it is somehow a welfare scheme. A person who earns $52,000 per year will pay 7.65% of their income to social security, but a person who earns $500,000 a year will only give 0.78%. This is hardly taxing the rich to help the poor! Hong Kong only acquired a state retirement funding scheme three years ago, and that didn't stop the residents there from enjoying one of the highest standards of living in the world. Their life expectancy is higher than in the USA. The social security scheme revolves around a very condescending leftist idea: that people, left to their own devices, are too stupid to plan for their own retirement and must be forced into saving for it. Given the resourcefulness and talent shown by so many in avoiding government interference this is patently untrue. That was a statement truly worthy of Maplesyrup. The right does not want to destroy it because it is an unbridled success, the right wants to destroy it because they see it as a failure and because they believe there are superior alternatives.

Then should the government not nationalize and control the food industry? Farming has a big impact on the environment, and food is just as important for life as water. But what you are saying is that government is the only possible way to resolve disputes. Do private courts not really exist, then? Private arbitrators are a figment of the collective imagination? Contracts are just a fiction?

Well, actually the reason for that type of attack is the government! Terrorism is overwhelmingly conducted as a response to a governmental policy. I'm not aware of any terrorists proclaiming a strategy against individuals or business entities, are you? Government agencies and armies may protect individuals, but as far as I see it their primary purpose is to protect the existence of the state. The army and other agencies have been used many times to protect the state against its own citizens (for example, Kent State, Waco, or most notably, the Civil War), and the FBI and police forces spend a good deal of time enforcing the various monopolies enjoyed by the state. Evidently it isn't working, and perhaps because the state is not interested in doing anything to fix this. They have already signed the US healthcare industry over to a monopolised cartel (the AMA). The medical industry is already massively regulated, but a lot of those regulations are aimed at preserving monopoly rather than protecting consumers. But what precautions can you take? These are deaths that occur because a doctor prescribed or a nurse administered the wrong drug, for instance. How does one take "various precautions" against this kind of malpractice?

It's my opinion that 9/11 is being used both as a distraction and an excuse for abuse of power. It's not purely about such a huge tragedy. Each year, between 90,000 and 140,000 Americans die due to medical or pharmaceutical negligence or malpractice. At the high end of that scale, that's the equivalent of a 9/11 almost every week. But what action is being taken about this? Is it anything like the kind of action that has been taken in response to 9/11? I also think that the federal government has used 9/11 as an excuse to concentrate even more power in its own hands. This process has been going on since Lincoln trampled states' rights and made the USA far more Washington-centric. FDR also made big steps in this direction and GWB is too, with the Patriot Act. With every war the USA fights and "national crisis" it suffers, the government gets larger and the feds get more powerful.

While eminent domain is in effect? Don't be silly! Are you telling me that you think the only possible way to resolve such incidents is through state intervention or state ownership?

NAFTA goes against every word of what I have just said. For government treaties and agreements to override individual decisions made over private property is a massive violation of property rights and, once again, brings us back to slavery. Then would the people downstream of you not have the right to be recompensed for their loss? Why can that not be done on an individual rather than a national basis?

Firstly, nothing can belong to everyone. Everyone will never reach a consensus on the useage of something, and with publicly owned goods this means that some of the "owners" won't have the right to dispose of their supposed property as they see fit, which means that they do not own it at all in any meaningful sense of the word. The problem we then get is that the minority who don't get to decide the disposal of a good still have to contribute to its procurement, which amounts to forced labour or slavery. I'd suggest that water belongs to the owner of the land from which it is procured. He can decide if he will sell it and to whom, and if government prevents him from doing so then once again he is prevented from owning his property and is rendered a slave. As to whether or not we sell to Americans, who cares? They're human beings, the same as we are, and an individual's standing does not, in my eyes, change according to which latitude they live at. Judging Americans as a group is no better than judging Jews, blacks or women as a group. The manner in which water is produced is neither here nor there. Of course supply is limited, everything is limited, and this is why we have economics. We don't produce sunlight either, would there be something wrong with building solar plants and selling the energy to Americans?

Corporations see taxes as operating costs and if those costs are too high, will take away money from other areas including salaries. This is why corporate tax hikes cause unemployment increases. They have less money for payrolls. I know that it appears to work the way you think it does if you divide money up into various neat chunks, but those divisions are purely subjective. That's why it's a word game. It's like when you make your home budget and allocate money for groceries and money for the mortgage. The "mortgage money" is really no different from the "grocery money", you just call it different. If the government takes greater taxes from your "mortgage money", then you necessarily will have less to spend on groceries, so effectively they have taxed both your mortage and your grocery money even though, on paper, taxes are only levied on mortgages and ostensibly do not affect grocery spending. And if they only took extra taxes from your mortgage after you had bought your groceries, well, you still would not be able to spend the same amount on groceries! You would just have to adjust your grocery budget before your mortgage was paid rather than afterward. Therefore, when you spend money on groceries and pay sales tax, you have been double-taxed, even though on paper and according to you, you have not. These two sentences contradict each other. You see government as being a possible solution to this problem, because if you didn't, you'd be calling for private healthcare. You only want to change the implementation of the solution, not the provider of it.

I think that Mulroney, along with his friend Reagan, probably recognised that any semi-successful democracy requires that its citizens have a fundamental distrust of government. Mulroney's idea on visible taxes works so long as this distrust is present, however, in Canada that is not the case now. Most people think of government as a solution, not a problem, and most would probably accept higher taxes for a good cause, like more healthcare or police spending. Where the citizens distrust their government, the only tax increase that the government is likely to get away with is the hidden one. Although VAT factored into prices is hardly invisible, it's certainly less obvious. Separate sales taxes remind you of your tax burden every time you're at the cash register. True. I forget who it's attributed to, but democracy works until the electorate realises that they can vote themselves largesse from the public coffers. It generally doesn't take too long. American liberal democracy only lived eighty-odd years.

That's just word games. Corporate taxes are levied against corporate incomes and necessarily reduce the amount of money available for everything else, including salaries, and then those salaries are taxed again, and then again in sales taxes. So the same given quantity of money has actually been triple taxed by the time an employee actually gets the goods and services he wants. Let it not be said that I made the perfect an enemy of the good. Look at it this way. If the governments of the world became laissez-faire and abolished migration controls, the only difference between that and a state of "true" anarcho-capitalism would be the inability to choose different law without changing geographical location. This would basically cause an increase in opportunity cost and time-lag for changing law provider compared to a nongeocentric legal system. Well, once again this is a difference between political and economic expediency. There are so many good examples of why economics and politics don't mix and this is just another. Actually, sales taxes in the UK are at 17.5%, the Czech Republic 19%, while Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Hungary all levy at 25%. In fact, EU Directive 2001/4/EC states that the absolute minimum tax rate levied by a member state will be 15%.

Well, there's many ways for government to get money. It can rely on voluntary contributions (yeah, right), it can tax, it can borrow in the form of bonds (which is future taxation), or it can spend inflated currency (which is a future taxation of uncertain rate of interest and maturity date). Taxation is almost certainly the easiest to foresee the consequences of, but is politically unpopular because the current ruling party can't hide what they are doing. Only they will get blamed for tax hikes. Borrowing and inflation are politically more expedient because chances are some future party or at least a future government will get blamed when the bill comes. This is rather like the NDP government in Ontario: they spent all the money, the Conservatives were left with the bill, and the Conservatives got blamed for a lot of the consequences. Now the cycle is repeating itself for the Liberals, as Dalton McGuinty is finding out that the financial situation is bleaker than it appeared before election day, and yet he is blamed for the tax hikes and service cuts that are essentially coming as a result of Conservative (and, ultimately, NDP) policy. Borrowing from bonds can also be economically expedient since in the future, when they come due, we will be richer. Since the industrial revolution each generation has been richer than the last and so long as government interventionism does not completely destroy economic growth this trend will continue. Therefore, borrowing from greater future riches makes more sense than taxing from lesser present riches. A good idea. Furthermore, the tax system should be simplified since right now, it is so convoluted that Revenue Canada could probably find a way to level tax-evasion charges at most Canadian citizens, although most probably had no intention of committing a crime. Remember that they could only imprison Al Capone on tax-evasion charges. It's not really a good idea to have a legal/taxation system that makes criminals out of a sizeable portion of the populace. Yup. Corporate taxes are double taxation: tax the corporate earnings, and then tax the incomes of employees which are paid out of those earnings. The problem with double and triple taxation is that it makes it easier to hide massive taxes. If all the taxes paid in Canada were rolled into income tax alone, people would be up in arms. As it is, most of it is hidden. We'll see. That which is economically wise is often politically suicidal. Because fuel taxes do not tax according to road useage but fuel useage. The two do not coincide since vehicles consume fuel at different rates per mile. This idea that CPP and EI must be kept separate stems from a big lie: that CPP and EI are saving schemes. They are not, they are wealth redistribution schemes. Once that is established it doesn't really matter how the wealth is taken. If CPP/EI were a savings scheme, your contributions would go into a personal account which you would later draw out of. The way it actually works is that CPP/EI is pooled and doled out to those who ask for it not later, but now, which makes it a simple wealth-redistribution scheme. Brian Mulroney was quite wise when he required that sales taxes be added to prices. His reasoning was that a tax hike is much harder to hide when the tax is figured separately. With gas, the taxes are figured into the pump price for you, and most people as a result do not realise how extortionate the gas taxes are. Having said that, it's my opinion that sales taxes need to be abolished. Quite apart from their economy-slowing effects, they are regressive and hurt the poor far more than the rich.

Your argument assumes that the sole goal of production is production itself, otherwise the elimination of jobs would not be a concern at all. Is this what you are saying - that the only goal of an economy is to produce things? Demonstrate that, please. I have cited the works of four very intelligent and highly qualified minds who disagree with you, so evidently this is not a priori fact at all and you must prove it. I am 99% certain you did not even read them. You refuse to read anything that challenges your prejudices. Need I point out again that I not only read but actually critiqued everything you gave me? This was what you said before I even brought it up: Why would you make a contention and then accuse me of distraction when I reply to it? That makes absolutely no sense. If you feel it is a distraction, don't make the point! If you disagree, quote me bringing up the history of these ideas before you said that. Purchasing power is increased. How can lower prices mean decreased purchasing power? This is completely and utterly illogical. And yet you can neither quantify nor identify these problems. No, the truth of it makes it so. Wal-Mart does not force anybody to subsidize another, that is solely performed by government. If government were to stop, Wal-Mart would not be able to take over. No, it also has to do with excessive inflation and deficit spending, with the failure to fix currencies to the gold standard at market rates, with excessive regulation and interventionism and so forth. Make no mistake, though, there is not one cause of the Depression which cannot be traced back to government intervention. What attempts? Give an example. You do not understand how trade works. The iron law of trade is that it pays a cost to receive a greater benefit. The cost is concentrated in a few, the benefit is diffused throughout the economy. Globalisation is always about the benefit of the many at the expense of the few and cannot be any other way. Adam Smith had some important contributions but also made some crucial mistakes, such as his theory of value. Don't take what he says to heart too much. He's a classical economist. Why don't you answer August? More to the point, why don't you answer me? Have you read my links yet? If not, why not?

Good attempt at distraction, but I notice that you still refuse to read the articles I linked to. Why are you so afraid of new ideas? Answer the question and stop flailing around with irrelevancies. Debating Marx or Cicero would indeed be largely irrelevant, but it was you who originally brought up the question of the age and pedigree of the ideas we are discussing, not I. What is lost, then, and how much is it worth? I see a lot of whining about traffic congestion or urban sprawl, but it is incredibly vague and nobody has tried to put any kind of economic cost on it, let alone bothered to find out how much can be attributed to Wal-Mart. As regards the "social costs", as I am saying for the third time now, this problem is created by government externalizing a market factor. The solution is less government intervention, not more! If government stopped externalizing labour costs for Wal-Mart, the wages would go up, entirely due to the market. This is what happens when you get government to defeat market outcomes, but you won't learn this lesson. You can read the report here. It is written by Martin Baily, a Senior Fellow at the Institute for International Economics and a Senior Advisor to the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), and Diana Farrell, Director, MGI. You can read the same thing from Bruce Bartlett, Senior Fellow at the National Institute of Policy Analysis, former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the U.S. Treasury Department, former Senior Policy Analyst in the Office of Policy Development at the White House, former Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C, former Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress. His article is here. You can read the same thing again from Daniel Drezner, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, right here. Do you have a refutation of any of these articles? Did you know that the USA is a net recipient of outsourcing? Far more jobs are outsourced to the USA than are outsourced from the USA. If outsourcing was outlawed, far more jobs would be lost than gained. Trade and job protectionism is a beggar-thy-neighbour game and, as the Great Depression illustrated so neatly, it's a game that everybody must lose. Protective tarriffs in that era slashed international trade to a fraction of what it had been before and did massive damage to the economies of all participants. We already took that into account by having Wal-Mart render 150 people (the employees and owners of the businesses that lost sales to Wal-Mart) unemployed. Talking of net sales, this will increase, not decrease, since Wal-Mart has lowered prices and raised real income thus causing demand to increase. It's a real pity that you don't put as much effort into your arguments as you do into your insults.

Even better! A total of $2.8bn saved over the whole retail industry. Alright, then let's assume Wal-Mart employs 100 people at $9 per hour, rendered 150 $12-per-hour workers permanently unemployed, and that one-quarter of the community saves $200 per year by shopping at Wal-Mart, i.e. the average yearly saving is $50 per person. Net gain to the town: $700,000 per year. And that's being very generous to you. This study reports that the average household saves about $524 per year on groceries alone by shopping at Wal-Mart, which, assuming an average 3-person household, makes our annual net gain over $6.9m for the town if they only bought groceries at Wal-Mart! Government gets to steal less money? My heart bleeds. And for every $1 the USA outsources, it gets a $1.14 return, on average. Not much else needs to be said, the empirical evidence demolishes your argument. You are indeed arguing against technological progress. Wal-Mart has found a method - a technology - of offering the same goods and services using less labour, much like James Watt, or James Hargreaves, or Henry Ford did. Like the weavers who attacked Hargreaves, you want to see that progress done away with. As August said, you would want to preserve the jobs of the fire-keepers. As to preserving employment, let me ask you: if you won $20 million in a lottery tomorrow, would you still work? Because if the answer is "no" (and I guarantee it would be, from almost everybody) you have said that labour is not an end in itself, but just a means to another end, be that wealth, material comfort, happiness, whatever. However, you have made labour an end unto itself. That's wrong. Labour is a cost you incur while striving for a given end, and if you can achieve the end without incurring that cost, that is better and not worse as you claim. Now, as to replacement work. When consumers save money they will spend it elsewhere, often creating entirely new industries. Who could have foreseen the modern multi-billion-dollar IT industry forty years ago? Again, your argument assumes that consumers will take their saved dollars and burn them, removing them from the economy. But they don't. I shop at Wal-Mart, and I find a use for all my money, so evidently what I save at Wal-Mart is going somewhere! How can free trade be piracy? Do you see Wal-Mart employees with eyepatches and parrots robbing shoppers at gunpoint? The government is "Blackbeard and his like", Eureka. Modern government is the biggest organized crime racket in history. Its robberies and thefts are on an unimaginable scale. Ralph Goodale has just proposed to steal $196 billion from Canadians this budget year. That's over $6,500 per Canadian citizen. Plus the provincial taxes. Yes, it does. Look at the picture a decade ago, and a decade before that, and so on. Each time, government is bigger, there are more regulations, more taxes, more interventionism. Even the American experiment in minimalist government failed, proving Jefferson's warning that it is the rule for goverment to grow and liberty to shrink. Why is equal better? If it is better, why don't we lobotomize every intelligent person until their IQs fall to the level of the most stupid person in our society? My economic ideas date back to the 19th Century (although they are still being revised to this day), although their roots trace back to Cicero and Aristotle. Your ideas are also as old as the hills, being traceable back through Marx all the way to Plato. So let's not start arguing about whose ideas are older. My point was that my ideas are clearly new to you, and you are afraid of reading about them, even though I have taken your ideas by the horns!

If Wal-Mart is able to cut labour costs by $2.8bn, then that is $2.8bn saved! Labour is not valuable in and of itself, it is actually a negative factor whose reduction is a marked factor in human material progress. It is an incurred cost, an inefficiency, and as we have seen with things like the steam engine, the automobile, and the spinning jenny, less labour creates greater wealth because a given product can be produced at less cost than before. To argue against this is to argue against all technological progress, since if preserving labour is the actual goal we should outlaw cars, trucks, trains and even horses in favour of sherpas. Is that what you advocate? I didn't think so. This $2.8bn saving in labour costs is actually a benefit to Southern California. It represents $2.8bn that was previously being used inefficiently (since it was evidently not essential to the production of a given product of a given standard, it must have been inefficient) and which can now be re-allocated to more efficient production of other goods. Economics to study the allocation of finite resources, including labour. The best allocation of these resources is hardly to waste them in unproductive activity. If consumers save money at Wal-Mart, do you think they spend it elsewhere, or perhaps invest it? The proposed argument assumes that they would take their saved dollar bills and burn them all. I already explained this one. "Social costs" have been made an externality for Wal-Mart by the government. The solution here is for government to stop making this an externality, returning the problem to the market where it belongs. The socialist solution to this problem is to heap more problems on top of it by arguing for increased government intervention and increased externalities. For example, state hobbling of Wal-Mart will cause price rises, which will probably create a demand for price fixing. These create even more problems, and the only logical conclusion to this process is a completely centrally planned economy. I think you do, since you have not even named these fallacies, let alone defined them. What part of my argument are you disputing? If I've left some factors out of my calculation, by all means, insert them and let's run the figures again! If my figures are wrong, correct me! If my math is wrong, correct me! But you do none of this, of course. Don't bother trying to put words into my mouth. I said that all socialists advocate violence, and these particular socialists are no different. And you have stopped before you even started. I don't think you read a single one of the articles I referred you to. I did you the courtesy of reading and even critiquing yours since I am always interested in hearing new ideas. Believe me, if I was not, you would not be arguing with me today. Why are you so afraid to hear new ideas, Eureka?

Alright, I got your first link working (use the "http" button in future). Let's go through it: And why should they? It is up to the consumers to ensure those things, not the retailers. If the consumers genuinely want those goods they will pay more for them, and the fact that they don't means that they don't truly value them more than the price upon them. Therefore, what these people mean to do is to force people do what they don't want to. Do you see what I mean about socialists being all of the same stripe, now? 371 pre-built retail stores where a competitor could move in and avoid the multi-million-dollar cost of building their own store? Yes, shame on Wal-Mart, giving their competition an advantage. As to creating "traffic problems", I think traffic was worse when all stores were downtown. Wal-Mart locates stores outside inner cities where traffic is worst. And urban sprawl is almost three hundred years old now, I don't think it's Wal-Mart's fault since it began before Sam Walton's great-great-grandparents were born. They assume that bigger is worse. They need to demonstrate it since it is not a priori fact. Wal-Mart lowers prices? How evil! We must have higher prices so that everybody can be poorer! Rubbish. Wal-Mart leads to lower prices, as the article even admits in the above quote. Unless they believe that people will hoard their saved money under the mattress, this means that the saved opportunity costs from shopping at Wal-Mart can be spent in other areas, thus creating new jobs. Did they take this into account? I don't think so! It seems to me that they probably have never heard of Frederic Bastiat, let alone read his fallacy of the broken window, which refutes this entire argument. Basically, they assume zero opportunity costs, which is never, ever the case. This amount of economic ignorance is simply staggering. Let's assume that these people are correct, and each Wal-Mart job costs 1.5 other jobs. We'll take our town of 50,000 people, and say that Wal-Mart employs 50 of them, which means that 75 of them are now unemployed. Let's assume that those 75 people earned $12 per hour. So far the cost to the town is $360,000 per year in these lost wages. Now let's assume, again, that a person can save $200 per by shopping at Wal-Mart. This means that the town saves $10,000,000 per year. Net economic gain to the town: $9,640,000 per annum. For Wal-Mart to produce a net economic loss means that Wal-Mart must offer potential annual savings of less than $7.20 per year! It doesn't seem likely to me that people would change their shopping habits for such a piddling amount, which almost certainly wouldn't cover the cost of gas used getting to Wal-Mart's out-of-town location. Same thing again. They pretend that opportunity costs don't exist. They also think that people who take jobs at Wal-Mart must be idiots and need to be saved from themselves, without examining the demographic and qualifications of these employees. You can also look at this as $2.8bn (at least) which southern California consumers can spend in other industries which they previously could not. Big deal. As long as it controls less than 100% that doesn't mean anything, and the only people who control 100% of anything are government. I don't see these people complaining about the government. Why are they so self-contradictory? And why is this Wal-Mart's fault? The government steals from people and gives it to Wal-Mart, and Wal-Mart is to blame for this? By this logic, the purchaser of a stolen television set should go to jail for the crime! Perhaps if the government were not being so generous with other people's money Wal-Mart would be "forced" to pay more. As it is, they feel no need to, and the workers feel no need to demand more, because the government is forcing taxpayers to take up the slack. We could have a Five Year Plan! No, wait - a Cultural Revolution! What about a Purge? A Crystallnacht? A Final Solution? You have to love socialists and their "crusades." Good stuff. Then tell people about it and let them decide. But if they decide against you, don't try and use violence to make them comply anyway!

No, you want to use violence against Wal-Mart. You think that unions, who use violence as policy, are a good idea, and you want to force Wal-Mart to, for instance, pay higher wages under threat of violence against property (fines) and violence against the person (imprisonment). You only differ in extent, not in principle, from other great socialists such as Stalin and Hitler. You were linking to a URL parameter error? Answer my other questions before you try to get back on your high horse.

No, it is a fact. All socialists advocate the use of violence to further their ends, as do you, wonderfully illustrated by your statement that I need to be "reducated" [sic]. If you deny it, say so. But you don't deny it, you just complain about it. Which figures are you disputing? Or do you accept my figures but find fault with my math? Oh, I'm sure it did, like global cooling got so much press attention thirty years ago. It's not hard to find an audience for a popular idea, and right now socialism is quite popular. But "common knowledge" is neither here nor there, I very rarely accept anything just because it is "common knowledge." If it is indeed knowledge it should withstand a little scrutiny. This link is broken. I searched through the February and January archives and found nothing. Fix your links, I'm not doing your legwork for you. Oh, and "tyranny of the marketplace"? Nice contradiction in terms. Almost as good as "democratic socialism." Most of this is just complaints that Wal-Mart has not always done what the government told it to and moaning about the free choices other people make. These people are just more despots in disguise, since they want to dictate to others what they have to do rather than letting them choose. It's hard to actually single out any real substantiated claims because the internal links are broken. They don't work with Mozilla or Firefox, and if you need Internet Explorer to view that page, well, that's pretty ironic from a self-proclaimed monopoly buster! Perhaps you'll find me a quote I can look at, if you can actually navigate their site. If your sources can't even put together a functioning website, what does that say? If you want to read something rational about Wal-Mart, I suggest you try this. You won't, of course, because your mind is closed. Isn't it annoying having your own insults thrown back at you? Maybe you'll be a bit more mature in future.

Thou sayest! I just asked you what you thought you could gain from replacing voluntarism with institutionalized violence. That you would take it as "character assassination" shows that you don't truly believe what you say since when it is spelled out to you, you find it overwhelmingly negative. By whom? No, to enrich all. I already went over this in my mathematical demonstration, which you have not even attempted to refute at any point. As I showed you, if Wal-Mart pays an average of $2 per hour less than the competition and employs 50 people in a town of 50,000, Wal-Mart would have to offer savings of less than $4 per year to its shoppers in order to produce a net wealth-reducing effect - yet this is precisely the effect you are arguing, without any evidence or logic! Illustrate why this is something we should lament, please.

What has Wal-Mart escaped - your little Communist "Speak Bitterness" Denunciation Meeting? I don't see what Wal-Mart has done wrong. All they have done has been consented to by the people it was done to. I'm sure the people who were fired did not want to be fired, however, I don't think anybody believes in jobs-for-life anymore and one has to accept that an employment contract can be terminated by either party. If these employees had deserted Wal-Mart to work for a company with better pay, would you be so outraged? You still have shown no evidence that Wal-Mart is or ever could become the only employer and, quite frankly, such an idea is highly preposterous anyway. The only thing I could even conceive of as being categorically wrong is the initiation of violence or the threat of it, and the only ones guilty of this are the people you support. This means the labour unions, who commit violence against property as a matter of policy (a sit-in strike, for instance) and even against people on occasion (attacking 'scabs'), and the government, who have committed violence as policy since their very inception and continue to commit massive violence against virtually every citizen every day that passes. And this returns us to the question I had previously asked you, which you never answered: why would you want to replace nonviolence with violence, peace with war, co-operation with oppression? All socialists are of the same stripe. Lenin wrote that he would always use violence and terror as tools, and so will you. The only thing Wal-Mart might have escaped here is being subjected to socialist terrorism, and we should all be so lucky.

This is not a problem and never has been. What you are observing is that in a free market, the consumer reigns supreme (as opposed to a planned economy, where producers do). In Wal-Mart's relationship vis-a-vis its suppliers, Wal-Mart is the consumer. A consumer can refuse to buy at any price, and the supplier can either choose to lower the price hoping that the consumer will find new value and buy again, or try and find another consumer who will pay the higher price. It would be more correct to say that no company that coerces sales can gauge the value its consumers place on its products. If you are not using any product it means that you, as an individual, do not find that product to be of greater value than the asking price. Let's say I buy a plasma TV for $3000, and you don't. All this means is that I find a plasma TV to be worth more to me than $3000, but you would find that other products which that money will buy are worth more than the plasma TV. When somebody is not paying for a good, they will demand it so long as it is something more than worthless to them. This is all you are seeing here with current "feedback". It's worthless for discerning what people actually value, all it tells you is that people value healthcare more than nothing (duh). Oh yes, socialism would be a far better system if men were angels. They are not, however. Human beings are fallible creatures, and a system that utilises their fallibility is better than one that pretends they are perfect. Your examples are faulty in that they assume a static economy, when it is not static at all. As we can already see, public healthcare causes the cost of healthcare to spiral upward. This means that over time, it becomes less and less affordable. The tax burden in Canada is now borne mostly by the poor anyway since the rich don't really have a lot more to be fleeced out of. Over time, as the tax burden becomes ever heavier and real incomes drop, increasingly fewer people will be able to afford healthcare (to wit, they will pay the taxes for their healthcare but have increasingly less left over to live on). Your talk of virtue and refrain from greed makes me laugh, quite frankly. It's easy to be generous with somebody else's money. What you are advocating is massive theft and violence, so it amuses me that a morally bankrupt individual like you would lecture anybody on morality. Perhaps you too can take the tax-definition challenge. Define taxation in a way that does not also describe high-minded theft, if you can.

It's quite simple, Eureka. The price mechanism is a back-and-forth. Goods are offered at a price initially determined by the supplier, and the level of consumption at that price signals back to him the value that consumers place on his product. With that knowledge he can adjust his price, and consumers will adjust their consumption. If prices go up, less people will judge the product of greater value than its price, so consumption drops, and vice versa. Of course, equilibrium is never reached because the economy is not static but in constant flux and change, so this is why prices change. The difference with public industry is that the feedback from consumers in the form of consumption keyed to price does not happen. This is of crucial importance in understanding why public enterprise is innately inefficient compared to free markets. Consumers cannot signify their interpretation of the price and the value of the good back to the supplier because the amount they consume is not set by them, but by the supplier! Take healthcare. In a free market you consume healthcare services according to the amount and quality you actually use, but when healthcare is provided publicly you consume healthcare at the tax rate levelled upon you regardless of how much or how little you use the services that you actually buy. Therefore, neither the consumption nor the useage of healthcare services has anything to do with the value placed upon them by consumers. That being the case, the providers of healthcare don't have any real way of knowing what value consumers place upon the services, what kinds of service they demand and so on. They can gather statistics on healthcare use, conduct surveys and so forth, but the problem with this kind of data is that it can only show you what happened, not what is happening or what will happen, so as a tool for computing future production they are all but useless.

Public industries do not have a price mechanism because their prices are coerced and not derived from trade. Therefore they lack the primary means of economic information relay. The price mechanism functions in exactly the same way for all goods and services, whether it is bananas, cars or healthcare. After all, just because you say it doesn't make it so. I have gone to lengths to find examples and conduct demonstrations for you, and your rebuttal amounts to, "No it isn't." Why isn't it? Until you can explain yourself you will get nowhere. Healthcare is produced from a variety of goods and services, just like a television set (various labourers work to produce it, various transistors, circuits, pieces of plastic and glass are used). You are telling me that goods and services can only become accessible to all with state intervention, and you are telling me that goods and services will always increase astronomically in price over time. Both of these statements I have already refuted with an example that you have not offered any argument over despite the fact that this is the third time I have asked you to. Your only other recourse is to deny the obvious, that healthcare is a service. This is true only inasmuch as technology will decrease the price of an item relative to its quality, i.e. if the quality of an item increases, the price may also increase but it will not keep pace with the increase in quality, otherwise such an increase would not be implemented since consumers would judge it better to buy the older product. So you say that toilet paper is more expensive than discarded newspaper, therefore, the price of toilet paper has increased? By the same argument, modern cars are more expensive than walking, therefore, the cost of cars has increased over time. House prices increase as a quantum of the increase in their value. If my house accumulates in price it is because people have judged it to be even more valuable than it was when I bought it. On the aggregate, the price of housing has decreased over time, not increased. The problem with the application of this idea to healthcare is that it is impossible to ascertain what value people actually put on healthcare and its advancements because there is no price mechanism when it is provided by the state. To put it another way, demand increases as price decreases. The price of healthcare has been artificially reduced to zero, therefore, people will demand healthcare for as long as they feel that healthcare is not of negative value for them. It is highly probable that a lot of healthcare development is malinvestment and of overall negative value, however, so long as the price mechanism is removed from healthcare this will not be corrected. Yes, you have. You said that Wal-Mart deliberately prices its products below cost to eliminate competition. Then you said that price was a factor of cost. However, if price can be changed while cost remains a constant as your first statement suggests, your second statement cannot be true. Conversely, if price cannot be changed while cost remains constant as you later opined, then Wal-Mart could not possibly change their prices when cost remains unchanged. Let me illustrate. Let P (price) = C (cost)*2. If C is $2, then P must be $4. But if I could make P = $1 while C remains $2, then the equation is wrong and P is not a function of C at all. No, you said: How can a price "depart" or be removed from the price mechanism? How can an outcome be divorced from the procedure that creates it? Can children be conceived without parents?