Oh look, a goblin socialist

http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2010/12/market-cant-solve-everything-alone.html

This is a common market problem: while the action is good for the whole, the gain is so little that the people don't care, while the few negatively affected do. Here comes the necessity for rules and enforcing agencies, to stop things that are bad for lot of people just a little. If my car is emitting too much CO and NOx, no person in the county are poisoned enough to personally sue me. On the other hand not fixing my car saves me $500, so I won't. But the National Traffic Agency forces me to get my car checked every second year and takes its license plate if it has bad emissions, making me to fix it.

The perfect example is the 2008 depression: whenever a banker repacked a bunch of crap papers and insured them and repacked the insurance too and sold it to several investment funds, he made lot of money, while harming no single individual. He increased the risk of everyone by a tiny little bit. You know how that story ended, right?

Ayn Rand would be crying right now at this blatant support for socialist and government intervention in the market. That is, she would be crying if she was not dead and incapable of human emotion.

Let's get to the facts: if people can't protect themselves from 'the market' or 'externalities', it's because they're too cheap or economically weak to do so. If people get tricked by bad derivatives, it's because they were too stupid to investigate them properly. If they were smart they'd have been the ones selling them.

So there's no market problem here, just a whole lot of people who were too lazy to see what they were buying. Should we really be letting lazy, stupid people dictate the market? Well sure, if by "dictate" you mean "be lazy and stupid so we can take their money", but if you mean have regulations to protect them, no.

But let's just say we do want to think about this "greater good" that the socialists love so much. Even then, since the market efficiently distributes resources while socialism kills millions of its own subjects, we can see that a so-called imperfect market is still for the greater outcome. In other words, any regulation at all, even the slightest bit, is not just the slippery slope to socialist takeover, it is itself socialist takeover.

But what else should I expect from someone raised in the Soviet mentality?

Random idiots on the random bus

The other day I was waiting for the bus and this old lady with all these bags hobbles up next to me. I moved away a bit. She tried to talk to me but was all screechy: "DO YOU KNOW WHERE THIS BUS GOES?" I told her to look it up and not bother me. She wandered over and bothered someone else. Someone needs to learn2internet.

Eventually the bus comes, I swipe my card and get on, grab a good seat. She starts bugging the driver about where the bus goes. I yelled at her and eventually she shut up and tried to pay. Had all these crumpled bills that didn't fit. I yelled at her for that too, but she didn't go any faster. Eventually the driver traded some bills with her and then she's shaking while putting them in and I'm face-palming. I mean, wow, why are you taking the bus if you can't even use it properly?

Just to confirm it all, or if you're smart you could have predicted it beforehand, she's dressed in these dirty rags. And yea, the bags. Had these thick glasses that I swear I saw a like recycling symbol on, literal coke bottle glasses.

Ugh.

Hey city government, you want to know why people don't like taking the bus? It's because of people like this who don't know what they're doing. How about a dress code? If you're wearing terrible clothes you're clearly not going to a job, so you're worthless anyway and don't need the bus. And don't get me started on the damn kids who are taking the bus for the first time. Kick them off! It's ridiculous that a respectable person like me gets stuck on the same bus as these lowlifes, and even worse, they get to the exact same stop as me.

We should just start running our own buses, charging our own fees, and checking to not let on these scum.

The BP spill was caused by communism

In this case I am using communism to refer to communal ownership. Or more accurately, ownership by no one, but benefit taken by whoever can get it.

Why would BP let this happen? Oh, sure get all up in arms. Yes, they let it happen. Why should they not? Of course they dislike the loss of the oil. But most of the economic loss is not theirs. They will never pay the full cost. They know this and it factors into their calculations of how to spend resources.

We've seen this before with the Ford Pinto. Short version: the cost of recalling the car and fixing the problem was estimated to be more than the cost of lawsuits or whatever else would come up. Human life was indirectly given a value, in the form of how much people would whine about deaths. It sounds horrible, doesn't it?

It's merely rational economic choice for the company. Why should they spend more than they'd benefit? They are not a charity.

I'm a monster, aren't I? Oh no. I am just able to see the problem and the solution. The problem isn't corporate greed. That is merely a force; like gravity. Do we blame gravity for plane crashes? That would be stupid. No, the true problem is externalities: benefits or costs which are not incurred by the groups which are part of an economic decision.

BP will never pay the full cost of the gulf spill. Is the solution greater regulation, greater fines? No. That is just going to add more government, more taxes, and doesn't actually fix the problem and more than sticking a box on the leak would fix it (it hasn't, btw). Instead the solution is to make BP responsible for the damage to the Gulf of Mexico: the coastal areas, the fisheries, the tourism.

How do we make them responsible without more government? The free market of course! Remove the communism, the free use of the water, the ability to cause damage without incurring any cost: Privatize the water.

Sell the gulf to BP and other companies. This would settle a huge portion of the government debt, while also reducing government burden, thereby killing two birds with one stone and poisoning their food supply. In this metaphor the birds are bad government (redundant).

They could then lease the fisheries and beaches and whatever else. That profit stream would give a strong incentive to keep the water clean, much stronger than government bureaucrats looking over their shoulders.

If it happens that they still don't care, then it only means that the non-oil revenues were insufficient. It means that they were not viable as a sustained source of economic benefit.

The crisis of the commons is most easily fixed by privatizing the commons.

Socialist Salt

You might have heard that the FDA is moving towards regulating salt. That means Obama is taking over the salt and soup industries just as he did with healthcare.

It's a scheme to boost the retail salt business. Obama is in the pocket of Big Salt. He's removing the freedom of soup-makers to buy cheap salt in bulk, instead forcing consumers to buy expensive salt in small cardboard containers with those metal lid things.

Regulated salt means higher prices and less choice. Also food will taste bad. You know where else food tasted bad? Communist Russia.

Think about where we are headed.

The Pinko-tailed Inn

You may or may not be aware of a gnomish blogger named Larisa. She runs the aptly-named Pink Pigtail Inn. She's a nice, motherly sort of blogger. Or should we say paternalistic? Perhaps.

I suspect she's actually a Communist. Soviet-style, authoritarian, world-domination-obsessed, murderous Communist. Let's paint the picture.

She hates capitalism.

She insists on leadership which tells everyone what to do exactly when. One might think this means the efficient capitalism of Henry Ford, if she didn't hate capitalism.

Then there's the double-talk that the Soviets used to love.
Time to Make Our Own Cataclysm
The week before: Peace! Please!

She gets lonely. Sounds like a real anti-individualist. There are plenty of friends at the collective farm!

A post including the title: "The curse of choice." Really, the curse? Do you need the Party to tell you what to do all the time?

Blogging about your guild may put you in trouble. Can you say censorship?

This is all surface-level. Let's go deeper. She's friends with another gnome who runs a blog called "Armaggedon's coming!" Sounds a bit like the revolution, doesn't it, COMRADE!?

One might expect gnomes to gno better. Aha, a pun. Get it? Soviets don't. They always say "In Soviet Russia, pun gets you," which I assume is some sort of threat.

Gnomes had their capitol blown up by the infighting of their leaders and foreign invasion. Nuclear Armageddon. Hm... where have we heard that before?

I rest my case.

Dog is to Wolf as Socialist is to Human

What are dogs? They are the lazy beggars of the world. They were once wolves, intelligent and capable of cooperation, but not collectivist. Then the lazy ones, the social ones, started following the humans. They accepted a submissive position in return for handouts. And then they were bred for greater submissiveness, greater social behavior.

The result is that the proud wolf is now the lowly, mindless dog.

And the wolf? The capitalist of the animal world? It is hunted to extinction.

God is a Socialist

Gods are the ultimate form of government. They can do more than imprison or kill; they can take your very soul, burn it for all eternity, and then after that, kill it. Yes, they can do something after an eternity. They're gods.

They can demand taxes: sacrifices. They tell us how to act. They give no privacy and make it clear that we have none from them.

Which brings me to my point: evolution.

There is a certain sort of blind, unthinking idiot who believes in the literal word of Genesis the same way he believes in the unregulated and unrestricted free market. They do not know why either of them are true (or not). They only believe because they've been told to. Those who disagree are called socialists and godless. I'm all for attacking socialism, but only by those who know why. These people take it as a matter of faith that the free market is better.

Blind idiots.

Anyone who believes in the free market and creationism is a fool. An unthinking fool.

What is evolution? It is a word which attempts to encapsulate a process of success or failure of combinations of genes and environments. This is an unregulated process. There are no bailouts, no free lunches, no minimum wage. Species rise and fall only as they are able to adapt to their environments.

Evolution is the free market of genetics.

Logically that makes creationism or intelligent design the socialism of genetics. That makes God a socialist and all who teach creationism (sorry, teach 'the controversy') cosmic communists.

Reagan spoke of godless Communists, but he never bothered to see the God Communist.

My grandmother isn't dead yet

Clearly I overestimated the speed at which our socialist government would take over healthcare.

Hitler, I mean Obama, stole our time

You might have noticed that recently you lost an hour of your time. A bit less than 5% of your day. I imagine you grumbled about it and then went about your day sleep deprived.

Wake the fuck up. Coffee won't help you. Not even the retards at the Tea Party can help you.

Open your eyes as SEE.

Reparations are finally here. Of course we knew a black president would be eager to do it. But we're all so careful watching budgets that he couldn't simply get the market value of 40 acres and a mule, add in inflation, and then hand that out to black people. We watch the welfare budget carefully.

So he did something even worse. He took an hour from every single American. Even old people who need every last second. He hates your grandmother, after all. Where did the time go?

Reparations. He gave that time to black people to make up for the time lost to slavery.

It is the ultimate in socialism. Take the wealth and spread it. Or in this case time, which is money.

Gearscore is like Communism

It's such a great idea to better coordinate and organize everything for perfect efficiency and happiness. As long as it isn't abused by people with god complexes and excessive paranoia.

What I'm trying to say is, if you use gearscore, you're a communist.

Theft vs. Welfare: Efficiency

A few months back I suggested that welfare be replaced with theft. Actually an Anglican bishop suggested it. But I liked the idea. It got me thinking: how efficient are these two systems as methods of delivering undeserved wealth to the poor?

Welfare has the noticeable disadvantage of bureaucracy. This stems from silly ideas like having different brackets of welfare depending on perceived necessity and so there are food stamps, housing, subsidies, all manner of complicated structures. It's clearly more expensive than a flat benefits system of giving nothing at all. Okay that's obvious, but whatever benefits are handed out, the rating system makes it more expensive.

Theft doesn't have this problem. It's individually-driven and free of government bureaucracy. That means low cost to run it.

There are problems with this free-market solution.

Presumably the poor have similar consumer demands as the employed. If they were significantly different, in a rational way, they would be in the cheaper direction and so they'd be comparatively less poor; but clearly that isn't the case. Maybe poor people like more expensive goods; and this has actually been proven if you look up studies on conspicuous consumption and income levels. Basically poor people try to be flashy to stand out. But this isn't applicable since those are poor people with money trying to stand out from their welfare peers. They are not the target demographic here.

If the poor want similar products as normal consumers, this would seem to create a perfect situation: they will steal what is most readily resupplied due to the high demand and quick supply movement. This also means they steal those items which are presumably profitable enough that the losses can be offset. I doubt it would work out this well. Instead stores would attempt to minimize theft by not carrying those items which are most easily or commonly stolen, creating a sort of counter-market force; with demand causing reduced supply. This also means they'd carry less of what consumers want, ruining business and consumer satisfaction, driving them to less desirable products and therefore to less mutually profitable exchanges.

In effect, welfare can be considered a government program to negate the harm that the poor would otherwise cause to the free market. While the taxation is bad, creating an active counter-market force is possibly much worse. In this regard, taxation and welfare may be the less damaging than theft and therefore more efficient.

There is another problem though: The rise in theft will inevitably lead to a rise in demand for policing. That means another cost. Even worse, this means direct conflict between the poor and society, leading to violence which is the worst possible condition for an functioning economy.

It appears that welfare is a more efficient system than giving nothing at all.

GDKP: free market spending with Marxist labor

I've developed a theoretical love for GDKP recently. In short form, this is a raid in which items are bid on and the pot is split up at the end. The specifics vary, but in general the result is you walk out with loot or a lot of gold.

They're a sort of free-market raid. You are rewarded based on how much you're willing to invest. Or spend. Those who have a lot of gold have earned a great deal of purchasing power through their wise investments outside the raid.

It creates an interesting exchange in that the loot effectively starts out collectively owned. That means of course that no one owns it or can use it except at the permission of the dictator/loot master. Then comes the free market in which capitalists assert property rights. Whoever values the item most and can back up his greed gets the item.

This is actually a rather socialist system if you think about it some more.

Whose loot is it?
When the loot drops, everyone owns it. Then the capitalists bid and the gold goes to those who did not bid. The effective result is that the capitalists are conducting an exchange only with those who did not bid. The poor effectively have control over the item. This exposes the great lie of socialism: equality. It's not equality, it's giving the poor, the non-investors control over what was claimed to be collectively owned.

Oh sure, argue that the capitalists already had partial ownership. They merely had to buy out the ownership of the others. Fine. But who is thinking this way? I doubt anyone. If this was the case, then prices would be 4% (25-man) to 10% (10-man) lower, to reflect not needing to but out their own share. But no, people bid as if they don't have any initial shares at all; meaning that this collective system is encouraging people to overpay by a non-trivial amount. It is actively interfering with the free hand of the market.

As an alternative, maybe the loot is controlled by no one. But in that case, why does the bidder need to pay for anything more than the time it takes the master looter to send the item over? Obviously this could trigger a bidding war, but the expecting starting price would be much lower, creating different value perceptions, and driving down the end price as well. Clearly socialism is driving much more than 10% deflection from the market price.

Marxist labor
"From each according to his ability".
That's Marx for you. And that's the raid. Unless someone is blatantly holding back the raid, they are carried along. I won't be an idiot and assume that they are leeches, at least not yet. They do enough. That's fine. But when the payment comes, the bottom DPS and the top DPS have the same share of the loot to buy out. Everyone works, but some pay better attention or are more skilled, and yet where is their advantage? I have never heard of a loot master declaring "if you're 10% below the average DPS, you must pay 10% more to compensate", or the reverse. High achievers are not rewarded within the raid. There does remain the gold component, but there is only a very tangential link between that gold and raid success; that link of course being their market activities raising all boats and enabling the raid to have consumables and gems and crafted gear. But that's a tenuous link and hardly comparable to the difference between a high and low DPS.

Told you so
My blog description says there's socialism everywhere. This is true. This is a perfect example: a supposedly free-market exchange in which reward matches contribution, but in the most significant way: skill and contribution within the raid, there is no link. I really am quite surprised at the ingenuity of it; the lazy leeches have convinced the investors that it's a free market which rewards them, while instead it rewards most those who invest nothing except a bit of unskilled labor.

Only Socialists don't run back after wipes

If we look at the greatest overall benefit, it is best for the tank and DPS to go afk to troll the forums, look at porn, get food, etc; while the healer runs back and rezes them. While this will increase the overall instance time, much of that time is 'free' in the sense that 80% of the group can do something else. So the only real burden is on the healer. There is a net gain.

What do we have here? We have a managed group (economy) driven by some higher net benefit. Every person is given the role to which they are 'best suited', told to carry it out, and ask for nothing more than that which is given to them by the group. We also have an ordinarily hard-working healer (capitalist?) who is critical to the success of the group (society), but often ignored and blamed for problems being shackled, enslaved, for the benefit of others. They receive no benefit, only burden, all for some 'greater good'.

"rez plz" Should be met only with "go fuck yourself you lazy socialist" and a kick from the group.

Who gives a shit about trees?

I'm sick of greedy idiots pretending that environmentalism is about hippies having sex with trees and not wanting to lose their partners. Maybe it was. But now it's about the planet we live on not getting poisoned so we can't live on it. I know, it's a difficult concept to understand, that actions have consequences and that there's more to personal responsibility than a balance sheet.

I can see how people failed to learn that. Just about anyone in the Western world can see how much capitalism has worked. It has made us rich, and rich, and yielded amazing technology, and made us very rich. Every day we are taught by our experiences that capitalism works.

But, for years capitalism has operated in a fantasy world in which actions had no consequences. Pollution and other neighborhood effects were ignored, the costs passed on to others. Or so they thought. Sick populations spend money on other industries such as healthcare or funerals, not on consuming products that keep factories running and the average worker employed. The short-sighted were destroying their own markets.

To compensate they went overseas to get cheaper labor. This only made things worse as they were under even looser environmental standards and deprived their consumers of even more income. Is it any wonder the American economy is having problems?

Any attempt to adjust cost distributions, to make producers pay for all of what they produce, is decried as socialism or anti-market. There is no market, no effective market at least, if costs are not accurate. All the people crying about free markets and government control and taxes are themselves creating the most anti-market subsidy ever: the passing of all pollution costs on to those who potentially have nothing at all to do with the production, consumption, or distribution of the products producing the pollution. How's that for market manipulation?

So who gives a fuck about trees? I do, because those trees are what keep us from all dying. Maybe there's a free market solution. Maybe we could get people to add up the full cost of a product and see that the one that costs less money is not always the one that is cheaper, and by this they'd switch to 'green' products, the truly cheaper ones. But that's not likely as long as short-sighted, greedy sociopaths misrepresent environmentalism and discourage any education or responsibility.

I wish our children could travel through time so they could come back to now and take revenge on those who are responsible for killing them.

Communism saved capitalism

If not for the Communist revolution in Russia and the resulting rise of it as a foreign idea, Communist ideas may have taken root in America and the Western world. A revolution may not have happened, but the gradual corrupting influence of 'reform' would have taken its toll. At the heart of such reform is the rejection of individual action and accountability, the loss of freedom which is the herald of Communism. Thanks to the flawed revolution in Russia, the world had a clear look at the bottom of the slippery slope and took strong measures to protect capitalism.

Revolution hurt reform and everyone ended up off better because of it, except the Communists.