DISQUS

It's interesting that your religions professor friend sees greed as the foundation of the market, but apparently doesn't recognize it as the foundation of state action.

Leaving aside the small matter that the "market" that failed was state capitalist to its core...

One satisfies greed in a genuinely free market by appealing to the interest of others. One satisfies greed in the political arena by the use of compulsion: using government force to prevent others from competing with your goods and services at a lower price or higher quality, prohibiting the consumer from meeting his own needs without a license, creating artificial scarcities, etc.

The religion professor might want to look up the phrase "Baptists and Bootleggers."

I hope they'll cut a deal with me on the "Davey and Goliath" hentai thing.

I don't think pharma is necessarily an exception. Most of the basic research is done in universities at taxpayer expense, and most of the initial work of developing drugs based on the research is done in small startups and then bought out by Big Pharma. The main expense of Big Pharma is testing. But most of the testing expense doesn't come from getting FDA approval for the version actually marketed. Most of it comes from securing patent lockdown on all the major therapeutic windows *not* marketed, so competitors can't develop a rival version of the drug. IOW, most of Big Pharma's so-called expense comes from gaming the patent system.

And that's not even taking into account the distorting effect of patents when it comes to "me, too" drugs (tweaking existing drugs just enough to repatent them, which is a form of low-hanging fruit artificially created by the patent system).

My immediate reaction is that it can't run afoul of the First Amendment because the Fourteenth Amendment doesn't apply the Bill of Rights to the states.

Those "autonomous" cars will result in a net loss of individual autonomy. How much will all those high-tech bells and whistles add to the price of a car? How much will the constant breakdown of all the unnecessary extra components add to the cost of owning it? How much will all of it add to the average consumer debt load? And how many extra hours will the average person have to work a month to pay it?

I never buy anything without thinking of how many hours of slavery I'm selling myself into to pay for it. Give me something that's simple, reliable, and user-friendly, designed for cheap repair, with low mainteance costs, that I can pay off as quickly as possible and then use as long as possible without depending on THE MAN for outside income to keep it running. I want something designed to perform its basic function as well as possible--period.

I work with several people who 1) buy the biggest house they can possibly make monthly payments on, with almost nothing down and a forty year mortgage; 2) spend $30,000 or more on a fancy new sportscar, and 3) then spend time surfing the web shopping for expensive electronics to spend their "discretionary income" on. Perhaps not coincidentally, they work sixty hour weeks (or more) and are utterly dependent on continued employment to avoid living in the gutter in a week. That means holding on to their job like grim death, meekly suffering any indignity from the boss, obeying his every whim, and living in dread of earning his displeasure.

My habit is to buy a used pickup in good condition for $2000 or so, drive it until it wears out (my current ride has lasted 5 years and is still fine), and replace it with another one at a similar price. I'll gladly forego playing around with the cellphone and blackberry (why would I even want to own an electronic leash, anyway?) while I'm driving, in return for being able to tell my boss to go to hell.

I think the "tacit knowledge" of Hayek and Polanyi has a lot to do with this. An innovation may involve a considerable amount of tacit, idiosyncratic knowledge on the part of the innovator, that cannot be reduced to a verbal formula. Formulating such innovations as "best practices" involves just that--reducing them to a verbal formula, so that they can be transmitted from one organization to another. But something is lost in translation.

Tacit knowledge is probably a major component of x-efficiency, as well.

It doesn't really matter all that much how little the government has seen fit--so far--to infringe our liberties. What matters is that it has gone a long way toward laying the technological, legal, and administrative groundwork for a total police/surveillance state. When the infrastructure of a police state exists, and can be put into operation by a simple stroke of the Presidential pen, then it's fair to say that our liberties are no longer rights; we hold them as a sovereign concession of grace from the government, which can revoke them at any time it sees fit.

Let's see: the erosion of the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment standards of due process by no-knock raids, civil forfeiture, and other aspects of the drug war; the militarization of local police by SWAT teams; the legal and administrative framework for martial law from Garden Plot on; the dumbed-down pro-police, pro-prosecutor popular culture inculated by dreck like "Cops" and "Nancy Grace"; the fiat power to seize assets of "terrorists" without due process, under Clinton and Bush era "counter-terror" legislation; the erosion of posse comitatus; the Padilla precedent for ad hoc suspension of habeas corpus; "know your customer" laws, ubiquitous tracking of economic activity by credit reporters, the willingness of AT&T; and other "private" actors to roll over and cooperate with the national security state; public surveillance cameras mated to face recognition technology and digital databases....

Imagine if this groundwork had already been laid when Mitchell Palmer ordered the mass arrest of Wobblies, or when Germany passed the Nuremberg laws.