Dear Jim,
frankly speaking, I think the petition to make "gasoline price gouging a federal crime" (http://pol.moveon.org/stoppricegouging/) is stupid and dangerous. If political stupidity was a climate gas, our planet would have been incinerated quite some time ago...
Here just some arguments against:
- Price gouging happens when someone has a monopoly on a needed good or service and thus can dictate the price to consumers. The only organization having a forced monopoly on certain goods and services currently is the state (and state licensed monopolies). The government thus is the only group that can (and systematically does) engage in price gouging on a massive scale! It can do so because it has the monopoly on coercion, which it uses generously- not only abroad, but also at home. To suggest that the government as the price gouger #1 should make price gauging a crime (i.e. use its own monopoly instruments of coercion to bring it under its own price gauging monopoly) is absurd and will not only legalize and increase price gouging but als makes it enforcible by power of gun!
- the market, as long as there is no forced intervention by governments, is the most sensitive, because ultimately consumer driven, mechanism to dynamically balance demand and supply. Oil prices translate into gas prices by consumer demand and supply factors. Government interventions like a war in Iraq, increased taxation at the pump or forced biofuel additives (which in addition to market factors are seasonably highly price sensitive) are by far the biggest factors of price increases at the pump.
- Price fluctuation in a market free of forced intervention is a very useful and efficient mechanism to adapt to whatever influences the consumers and producers are experiencing. This could be scarcity, climate, new ideas and values, technical innovations, hopes and fears, political stability, natural disasters, different habits and preferences etc... The less this adaptation process is interfered with, the more intelligent and timely it can work. Attempts of price gouging by free market participants so far have all failed in the long run, because they encourage competition like nothing else does!
- Even apparently reasonable arguments for government intervention in markets based on alleged "market failures" do not increase the adaptive potential of society, but in fact decrease it, because it lowers what could be called the emerging intelligence (sometimes also called "collective intelligence", but this term obscures the fact that it is an emerging whole and not a tangible entity) of society: government intervention is not the AGGREGATION of the intelligence expressed by the emerging results of the many voluntary decisions of all market participants, but the SUBSTITUTION of this distributed intelligence for the limited intelligence of a small group of politicians (with often different agendas in mind). To demand or even assist in the substitution of distributed intelligence for the limited intelligence of a small group holding the monopoly of coercion (= power), is like proposing that the chickens be protected by the fox, because he represents their collective intelligence...
- who could be interested in such a stupid proposal? Certainly not the chickens! All such proposals originate from groups of power seeking individuals, who either want to get coercive powers in their own hands or who want to benefit from such powers. Their personal business plans are more than often sustainable jobs in NGOs that seek government subsidies or donations from companies and the public. Most of these NGOs are either modern protection rackets claiming to protect the environment or the poor, or they promise undeliverable goods like social justice and other qualitative values, which they try to quantify. Of course they cannot deliver either, because qualitative values cannot by quantified in principle, so they get into the eternal power game of raising fears and exploiting hopes. Just look at their slogans and demands and you will find this consistent pattern, both with governments and with groups striving for governmental powers...
If you want to stop price gouging, make it a crime to intervene by coercive means in the lives of people including free markets. Make power gouging a crime! You might have your jails full of politicians, but you also have ended wars and taxes!
Cheers,
AdLib
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Definition of Insanity
Dear Ben and Albert,
when people define insanity (mostly in political discussions) they attribute their favorite definition to either one of you, presumably to evoke some higher authority on the subject. This definition, hardly contested by anyone, reads:
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.”
I personally doubt that either of you is the author of this rather dumb definition. Because it assumes several unlikely events:
1) Sameness of things. In a dynamic universe, no same things can exist. Everything is different and changing all the time. Nothing remains as it was. There just are no same things. This makes our universe principally complex and uncertain.
2) Linear causality: Doing the same thing is plainly impossible as well. Not only does the context of an action change, but so does the actor and thus the action itself. We can at most declare similarities and assume that similar things under similar conditions will produce similar results. But these are essentially speculations. We just cannot know.
To quote Heraclites: "You cannot step into the same river twice." But as Heinz von Foerster once remarked, you cannot even step into the same river once, because there is no same river. In a universe in flux, prediction is always speculation. Although we individually rely heavily (like all species) on such speculations by assuming that events of the past will happen again in the future, this is never certain. Prediction, whether by oracle or clearvoyence of computer models remains speculation.
So my definition of insanity would go like this:
"Insanity is to first believe that we can do the same things again (and again), and second to expect the same outcome."
Yours,
AdLib
when people define insanity (mostly in political discussions) they attribute their favorite definition to either one of you, presumably to evoke some higher authority on the subject. This definition, hardly contested by anyone, reads:
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.”
I personally doubt that either of you is the author of this rather dumb definition. Because it assumes several unlikely events:
1) Sameness of things. In a dynamic universe, no same things can exist. Everything is different and changing all the time. Nothing remains as it was. There just are no same things. This makes our universe principally complex and uncertain.
2) Linear causality: Doing the same thing is plainly impossible as well. Not only does the context of an action change, but so does the actor and thus the action itself. We can at most declare similarities and assume that similar things under similar conditions will produce similar results. But these are essentially speculations. We just cannot know.
To quote Heraclites: "You cannot step into the same river twice." But as Heinz von Foerster once remarked, you cannot even step into the same river once, because there is no same river. In a universe in flux, prediction is always speculation. Although we individually rely heavily (like all species) on such speculations by assuming that events of the past will happen again in the future, this is never certain. Prediction, whether by oracle or clearvoyence of computer models remains speculation.
So my definition of insanity would go like this:
"Insanity is to first believe that we can do the same things again (and again), and second to expect the same outcome."
Yours,
AdLib
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Dear Reader,
Blogging is one of the new freedoms of the internet: the freedom to independently publish your own opinions. Of course you and I have countless opinions on countless subjects, so why bother? I decided to publish a blog related to the one issue that is becoming more and more important in our lives: freedom.
In order to make it more focussed I decided to write this blog in the form of letters, adressed to a particular person (which I do not personally know, in most cases). I will take up issues from the news or from my daily experience, and hope to be able to add a new and different, often critical and even contrarian angle to it. Seeing things and events from different perspectives to me is an important value in itself. When everyone thinks the same, no one thinks at all (or at best, only one does). This marks the end of freedom, because freedom is based on the recognition that we are all different and unique, and thus have each different and unique experiences, perspectives, histories and viewpoints. Even as a group, we act best when each can use his or her individual intelligence as independently as possible, because our personal experience and knowledge is unique and cannot be generalized or mapped into a computer model...
I consider freedom an endangered species, ironically because nearly everything that is done politically and individually today is done in the very name of freedom. Many of our self styled "freedom fighters" at the same time attack liberal ideas as the most dangerous modern evil. In such a time of semantic confusion, freedom is in danger of getting crushed between good intentions and the quest for political power to realize them. My blog is just one individual's resistance against this trend. It is meant to provoke and inspire. What we need is a global con-spiracy of freedom!
In order to make it more focussed I decided to write this blog in the form of letters, adressed to a particular person (which I do not personally know, in most cases). I will take up issues from the news or from my daily experience, and hope to be able to add a new and different, often critical and even contrarian angle to it. Seeing things and events from different perspectives to me is an important value in itself. When everyone thinks the same, no one thinks at all (or at best, only one does). This marks the end of freedom, because freedom is based on the recognition that we are all different and unique, and thus have each different and unique experiences, perspectives, histories and viewpoints. Even as a group, we act best when each can use his or her individual intelligence as independently as possible, because our personal experience and knowledge is unique and cannot be generalized or mapped into a computer model...
I consider freedom an endangered species, ironically because nearly everything that is done politically and individually today is done in the very name of freedom. Many of our self styled "freedom fighters" at the same time attack liberal ideas as the most dangerous modern evil. In such a time of semantic confusion, freedom is in danger of getting crushed between good intentions and the quest for political power to realize them. My blog is just one individual's resistance against this trend. It is meant to provoke and inspire. What we need is a global con-spiracy of freedom!
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