It was already apparent that you weren't comprehending my posts, so you not reading them will save time for us both.

That's one data point. Here are 433 more.

I see that my diagnosis of economic illiteracy was apt. Productivity can't be increased by fiat, and technology is (alongside capital formation) indeed the major factor in increasing productivity.

There's no mystery here to anyone who understands economic history. Wages in proto-industrial capitalism were near subsistence because productivity (as determined by proto-industrial technology, capital stock, and education) was near subsistence. People who could barely feed themselves working in proto-industrial factories had just left farms where the could barely feed themselves -- and indeed, chose not to return to the farms because the factories were better.

"Taking away their means of life" is pretty vague. Quite a few employees at match.com just got laid off, partly because me and my colleagues working on Yahoo Personals are doing a better job than they. Did I "take away their means of life"? No, what I did was offer a better product, and customers voluntarily chose to do business with me instead of them. That's OK, they can now go do something else, and the net result is that consumers have a better online dating experience. This is ultimately win-win, not zero-sum. This is why captialism will always win, even if people like you don't understand it.

Correct.

Most water use (here in California) is agricultural. The right way to regulate it is through markets.

No, because I can argue that corporations are subject to corrective forces that socialist collectives aren't.

Firms in a free market are dedicated to maximizing individual customer satisfaction while minimizing the use of resources. Socialist collectives are dedicated to subjecting minorities to the armed coercive tyranny of the majority.

False. I received a Bright's newsletter that assumed without argument that Brights shouldn't welcome Kerry's defeat by Bush when it asked "how it is the American people would vote as they did".

My Nov 17 posting gives sufficient detail to provide an existence proof that one cannot assume without argument that Brights shouldn't welcome Kerry's defeat. You can of course reasonably assert that my Nov 17 posting didn't immediately convert you to libertarianism. But you can't reasonably assert that I didn't correctly diagnose a tendentious assumption in the Brights newsletter. Indeed, Paul Geisert seemed to admit as much to me when he thanked me for my "cogent and clear exposition of [my] position", said he would "keep it in mind", and noted that other atheist Bush supporters had spoken up as well.

That's pretty funny. Did you not read my initial post in this thread? I wrote:

I'll put my credentials as a humanist and metaphysical naturalist up against anybody's. Anybody's.

Thank you.

I agree it is indeed healthy for humanism if humanists explicitly register their ideological baggage. Much as one might wish otherwise, humanism doesn't come with a conveniently comprehensive political platform, and the issues that humanism does speak clearly to aren't guaranteed to always be the most important ones in any given election.

I don't know what you mean by "beneficial to Brights for Brights' sake". In spite of your assertions above, perhaps you do not believe that I could make a case that, on the humanist values of the Brights, the damage to economic liberty under Kerry would outweight the damage to individual liberty under Bush. If so, then as I said, you're either ignorant or close-minded.

When one uses the subjunctive construction "I would argue", one is explicitly pointing out that an argument exists but is not being presented. This is in direct contrast to the (not-so-)Bright anti-Bush posturing I was complaining about when I wrote

The election was between Bush and a Democrat, not Bush and some unspecified ideal. My original point was that there are reasonable grounds for a Bright to be glad that Bush won over the leading alternative. PyotrZ's point that Bush isn't perfect does not rebut my point.

Any economist can guarantee you that if the minimum wage law were repealed, nickel-per-day sweatshops would not return. The reason is that, even in a completely laissez-faire economy, compensation is determined by productivity.

My straw man diagnosis stands unrefuted. If you want to know my positions, see the platform of my recent campaign for Congress.

If that happens, it will be because we don't use markets to regulate water use.

Fraud and coercion are the primary regulations to which corporations are subject.

His anti-collectivist argument against corporate capitalism works even better against its leading alternative (socialism). Since the state collective has the power to coerce and corporations don't, it's easy to argue that the latter will exhibit more corruption than the former.

"All" is your straw man. PyotrZ said that he's worried about collectives misbehaving. I simply pointed out that statist/socialist collectives are empirically more dangerous than corporate collectives. You offered not a shred of data in rebuttal.

Your sample is skewed, because you exclude all dispassionate people who are neither dangerous or violent. Most crimes of (non-political) violence are indeed the result of human passion, and I'll gladly cede you anyone in our audience who doesn't agree with this empirical claim.

I don't know what "slow outflow" is, but your assumption about "economical oppression" is of course the fundamental mistake of leftism: to assume that declining to conduct a transaction can be aggression. Does a supermodel commit "sexual oppression" against me when she declines to have sex with me?

It seems we are in violent agreement. You apparently didn't read the posting of mine immediately after the one you quote.

In the absence of the Titanic sinking, the arrangement of the deck chairs was indeed the worst thing about the voyage.

I stated them above. Re-read until comprehension occurs.

You still don't comprehend. My point is that economic and personal freedoms are orthogonal. The Bright principles (of humanism and metaphysical naturalism) indeed favor personal freedom, but they in fact are neutral on the issue of economic freedom(*) It is indeed probably true that most Brights happen to oppose economic freedom, but that doesn't change the truth-value of the previous sentence.

(*) I would argue that the science of economics implies that humanists should favor economic freedom, but reasonable -- though usually economically uninformed -- people can differ.

Our children and grandchildren owe $53 trillion in debt and unfunded liabilities, and the vast majority of it is due to Democrat entitlement programs: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-1...ebt-cover_x.htm

It's economically illiterate to pretend these things would return if we repealed the minimum wage. Compensation is ultimately determined by productivity, and minimum wage laws don't control productivity. See the graph at http://marketliberal.org/Lesson.html#Productivity.

Straw man. Nobody said anything about "unregulated capitalism".

Straw man. Antitrust enforcement is good, and was not on my list.

"Public safety and order" is pretty vague. My notion of "public safety and order" doesn't include the federal government requiring low-flow toilets and shower heads (cf. the 1992 Energy Policy and Conservation Act).

Straw man. I never said corporations should be exempt from laws against fraud and coercion.

The corruptness of collectives is precisely why socialism always has failed and always will. See http://humanknowledge.net/Thoughts.html#CiviliansKilled for the bodycount.

Corporations are generally not subject to human passions, and so it is humans and not corporations that are responsible for nearly all crimes of violence. Corporations are governed by rational self-interest at least as much as humans are, and so when the nanny state says jump they ask "how high?"

Look, you can argue for socialism all you want, and I can shoot down every argument you offer. Whether or not I choose to do so doesn't change my original point: there are reasonable grounds for a Bright to be glad that Bush won instead of Kerry. To assume without argument that there aren't is narrow-minded and bigoted -- and not very Bright.

Brian Holtz
2004 Libertarian candidate for Congress, CA-14 (Silicon Valley)
http://marketliberal.org

j-rel: I voted for the Libertarian candidate, but here is why I welcomed Kerry's defeat: Democrats are far better at restricting our economic freedoms than Republicans are at restricting our personal freedoms. I ultimately care more about personal freedoms than economic freedoms -- I just happen to think that our personal freedoms in America are more secure than our economic ones, and in the long run are only getting more so.

If you look at the last 40 years instead of just the last 4, the trend is obvious and undeniable. It's just not tenable to say that we've reached an inflection point and now the default course is a complete reversal of the last half-century's progress regarding racism, civil rights, divorce rights, sexual freedom, reproductive freedom, gay rights, criminal procedure, free expression, gambling, and even society's attitude towards substance use. It's just historically illiterate to say the sky is falling and we are in -- or even headed toward -- a police state.

By contrast, the last seventy years have seen an enormous erosion of our economic freedoms: minimum wage, maximum hours, plant closure notice, family leave, "equal pay for equal work", numeric goals in minority hiring, union exemptions from antitrust, growth controls, urban planning, rent control, monumental intergenerational inequity through a socialized retirement pyramid scheme, massive regulation of healthcare, socialized health insurance, farm subsidies, federalization of education, environmental regulations based on bureaucratic rules instead of market incentives, etc. etc.

The trend is clear. The major threat to liberty in twenty-first century America will not be from right-wingers legislating morality or invoking foreign enemies. It will be from left-wingers invoking economic inequality, and from neophobes invoking fear of the changes that progress inevitably requires.

Right-wingers will inevitably fail because Americans are fundamentally decent. Left-wingers will ultimately fail because the verdict of history, and the prosperity all around us, demonstrates that they are obviously wrong. But neophobes will be an indefinite threat, because they can always claim that the End Is Near, and no track record of failed doomsaying can shake their conviction that this time they're right.

You may not agree with my libertarian perspective on economic freedoms, but you can't pretend that your contrary perspective isn't betrayed when Brights-Net asks "how it is the American people would vote as they did". Being a Bright is supposed to just mean being a philosophical naturalist, and it's a mistake to assume that a philosophical naturalist would automatically support Kerry over Bush.

I'm a hardcore atheist. My writings against Christianity and in defense of naturalism have been published on The Secular Web at infidels.org. Yet I say there are reasonable grounds for a Bright to be glad that Bush defeated Kerry. (I voted for neither, and in fact was the Libertarian candidate for Congress here in Silicon Valley.) To pretend that no such grounds exist is to exhibit some combination of ignorance and close-mindedness. Take your pick.