He called my vision of people not being imprisoned for engaging in voluntary interactions "sickening". You want me to not call him out for having a preference of imprisoning peaceful people? You're stifling real debate, and sheltering people from the realities of the world. I have not, at least in this instance, been uncivil.
And my political commentary is confined to threads about political issues. If you are going to allow posts on HN that relate to a forcible income redistribution program like UBI, but not allow people to describe the punishment dealt to those who don't comply with the tax mandate and pay into the UBI as a form of "authoritarian violence", you're taking an ideological stance about what kinds of state violence and limitation on liberty are socially acceptable.
You want me to explain the entire body of common law? What is the point of this line of questioning? Are you trying to demonstrate that everything is subjective, and thus that justice doesn't exist in any objective sense, meaning it's okay for you to use violence against peaceful people to force them to act charitably?
>What happens when people disagree about ownership?
The same thing that happens now when people disagree with a legal ruling. What are you expecting me to offer as an alternative? Utopia? Perfect justice?
>So it's okay to ignore property rights if enforcing them would cause harm?
When did I say it's okay to ignore property rights? I said it's okay to not physically resist the legal ruling, given it will lead to civil strife, without providing the desired security of private property (given government is nearly impossible to resist by force).
>And what will this achieve? What mechanism is there for government to recognise and rectify its mistake?
I'm not talking about rectifying mistakes in specific rulings. I'm talking about rectifying mistakes in larger policy.
I'm talking about persuading society to abandon principles that legitimize robbing people of their essential human rights, like their private property and privacy rights, in the name of helping the poor, or achieving some other social objective.
I believe that most people share a common understanding of what legitimate property rights are, and share a belief that forcing someone to surrender their private property rights is wrong, and I believe that is is only the layers of ideological indoctrination that people are subjected to, and the obfuscating complexity of modern societies, that leads them to support government policy that endorses violating people's rights.
Consequently I believe explaining the injustice of said policies will lead to people dropping their support for the policies, and adopting positions that are in my opinion more just.
>As opposed to two wolves agreeing that they own the grass, and enforcing that until the sheep dies
This is not about a plot of land, that was there from before man's ascent. This is about two people engaging in a private trade, and a third party claiming ownership over a share of the movable property traded, on account of some contrived ideology that attempts to rationalize theft.
>This is different. In the past, technology has been a multiplier for the productivity of workers.
No it wasn't. One power loom with 10 operators replaced 2,000 people.
The same will be true when a cadre of intelligent robots, with one manager giving them daily instructions, replaces 5 wait staff and cooks at a restaurant.
>The confluence of robotics and AI will mean the eventual evaporation of low-skill and/or laborious jobs as they are completely replaced by automated agents.
Low-skill work is no more vulnerable to automation than high-skill work:
Ultimately, we humans universally have and will continue to have a set of skills that cannot, for legal reasons, be automated. This gives human services a unique value proposition. Moreover, human labour cannot be mass-produced like machines, so it becomes increasingly scarce, which is why wages have increased 20 fold since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution
>These people do not have a unique skill set they can apply to something else.
Yes they do have valuable skills. They have a high-level understanding of society, people's intentions and needs, and the tools and technology that enables people to accomplish tasks.
A person living in 2017 isn't some empty slate that's indistinguishable from a human living in 1950. The modern person has knowledge about automation that makes them vastly more productive in the modern context. The modern person knows how to use modern tools like smart phones with applications like internet-accessible maps, to maximise productivity, and has unique knowledge about numerous domains that is not publicly available.
With respect to the last point: most of the collective knowledge of the economy is not in the public domain, as a public resource. It is mostly diffused throughout the population, as private knowledge. It is this knowledge that makes individuals increasingly productive, and their labour increasingly valuable.
>Globalization can only happen once.
Industrialization has happened continuously for 200 years. Wages have grown enormously over this time frame.
You're being pessimistic for the sake of being pessimistic. Maybe because you're looking to rationalize your universal welfare cheque.
>An ad-hoc process controlled by an individual? Of course I'd complain.
Morally there's no difference. You just want the armed robbery to be done in a more organized and deliberative process. That doesn't change the moral quality of threatening you with violence to deprive you of your property, when you have not committed any offence to warrant such a violation of your rights.
>Actions on behalf of a democratic system are different to actions of an individual, because they have the consent of a majority of the governed.
Violating people's rights with the "consent of the majority" is just two wolves and a sheep voting on whats for dinner. The justification is just an ideological cover for violating others rights.
>How do you intend that property rights be enforced? Who decides who owns what, and what gives them the right to make that decision?
Property rights would ideally be enforced by the government, with common law, which is based on protecting people's human rights (including the right to not be robbed to provide for the poor), determining who owns what.
>Would it be acceptable for an individual who disagrees (i.e. doesn't consent) to take action on their own to reallocate property as they see fit?
I don't know, because there are many factors to consider. If the judgment is unjust, but resisting it with force leads to far more violence against the innocent, then it could wrong to resist in such a manner. The best course of action in my opinion is to strongly argue for what one believes is justice as long as the freedom of speech exists.
>Yes, I'd prefer people be thrown in prison for refusing to feed the starving, rather than them starving to death.
So I guess you won't complain when some self-righteous modern-day Robin Hood engages in armed robbery against you to feed children in an orphanage in Africa. And if you resist? Well, the consequences fall on you. Who are you to deny others who are in need your income.
That actions that are unconscionable by any normal moral standard suddenly become socially acceptable to endorse when done through the political process shows how detached political ideology has become from humanity/morality. The political ideology you endorse is sociopathic and narcissistic to the extreme.
>Why should I bother, if you're just going to change the way I was using a word and then tell me I'm sheeple?
It doesn't really matter how you define it. What matters is that they have not improved much from the position they were at when they adopted social democracy, and the reason is because their rate of economic growth has stagnated.
The way to measure the success of a policy is to see how much a country has improved from the position it was at when it adopted the policy relative to other countries.
>And since you like statistics so much, population growth,
Gee why would anyone base their views on large-scale phenomena on statistical evidence!? Why don't I just base my ideas on what's culturally popular and which notions give me warming feelings!?
>If the population stagnates, then of course you expect growth to stagnate.
You're taking an amateur approach to this, in missing all sorts of facts to arrive at your predetermined conclusion. The fact is that per capita GDP growth has slowed, not just GDP growth. Moreover, wage growth has slowed, and wages are a per-capita measure.
>Likewise this crazy expectation that human lifespans just linearly expand with improved circumstances
There's no indication that it's a "crazy expectation". The point I was making is that there is no evidence that social democracy has actually made anything better in the countries where it has been adopted. The trends in place before the adoption of social democracy were superior to the trends that came into effect after its adoption. So there is no objective evidence to support your ideological inclinations.
>but what would you expect when you're citing data from a source whose raison d'etre is specifically promoting the free market?
There's absolutely no evidence that the source's raison d'etre is to promote the free market. It's entirely possible that they want to further public welfare, and have concluded, based on empirical evidence, that the free market is the best way to do that.
>But I will leave you with this: economic growth isn't everything. That's the point of quality-of-life measures. People have a high quality of life in Sweden. Whereas China has recently had a rapidly-growing economy, and life sucks there.
More bullshit logic indicative of an amateur approach to economics and society.
China is still extremely poor relative to the West. But people in China are FAR better off now than they were 30 years ago, and that's primarily down to the massive economic development the country has experienced. Wages growing by a factor of 4-5X is hugely important to quality of life.
There are other factors at play in an economy besides automation, like forcible income redistribution. That the rich are benefiting from automation while the rest are not could be due to one of these extraneous factors.
>and how much thanks to the fall of colonialism over the past century.
It has to do with massive economic growth, and economic growth is really just a measure of automation. The wage growth accelerated after the fall of Communism, as market institutions gained strength.
I'll just quote my own comment from further up the comment chain:
"Computers and horses don't have property rights or the means to exercise them. All of this automation is augmenting humans because we do. We've gone from 122 million people owning smartphones in 2007 to 2.5 billion people owning them at the beginning of 2017 for example."
The last sentence is particularly relevant to your point.
They don't have "vibrant economies". They have strong economies, that long ago stopped being "vibrant" (by vibrant, I mean fast-developing).
Europe and Canada have seen stagnant wage and economic growth since adopting social democracy. What are you basing your claim that these policies are working on? I strongly advise you to stop assuming that what you're told by the media and echo chambers on the internet is correct, and actually do research on these issues, by looking at statistics.
Social democracy has not worked in Scandinavia. The author of Scandinavian Unexceptionalism explains how it has harmed Sweden:
"From 1870 until 1970, Sweden was a free market success story. Sweden had the highest growth rate in the industrialized world. .. [After taxes were raised in the late 60s and 70s] Sweden stagnated":
Sweden was the 3rd wealthiest country in the world in 1968. After it created a massive welfare state in the 1970s and 80s, its growth stagnated, and by 1991, it was 17th highest income country in the world.
• Scandinavia is often cited as having high life expectancy and good health outcomes in areas such as infant mortality. Again, this predates the expansion of the welfare state. In 1960, Norway had the highest life expectancy in the OECD, followed by Sweden, Iceland and Denmark in third, fourth and fifth positions. By 2005, the gap in life expectancy between Scandinavian countries and both the UK and the US had shrunk considerably. Iceland, with a moderately sized welfare sector, has over time outpaced the four major Scandinavian countries in terms of life expectancy and infant mortality.
• Scandinavia’s more equal societies also developed well before the welfare states expanded. Income inequality reduced dramatically during the last three decades of the 19th century and during the first half of the 20th century. Indeed, most of the shift towards greater equality happened before the introduction of a large public sector and high taxes.
If you want a more equal society, you need a more free market. It is regulatory prohibitions (anti-free-market policy) on economic activity that are contributing to growing income disparity:
"Make elites compete: Why the 1% earn so much and what to do about it":
>The US with their pathological fear of their own government is not what I'd use as a particularly characteristic example of social democracy.
By every broad-based objective measure, the scale of forcible income redistribution has massively increased in relative and absolute terms in the US. The raw statistics show that the US has by every objective measure moved drastically in the direction of social democracy over the last 40 years. The same applies to every other major Western economy.
>1. Property rights is the reason that technology is augmenting humans 2. Unified global culture is the reason that technology is augmenting humans 3. Having a genetic legacy is evidence my "premise is not necessarily true"
>You are definitely moving the goal posts by #1 and #2.
That's not moving the goalposts. Please read up on what "moving the goalposts" means because what I'm doing is not that. You're being incredibly intolerant to my arguments, to the point of making wildly false accusations about them to avoid actually addressing the points made.
I thought the link between #1 and #2 was obvious to you, but I guess I need to spell it out. Neanderthals never got access to the technology of humans, because they were not part of their culture. All humans alive today can access all classes of technology from around the world, because we share the same global culture, and moroever, can fully utilize said technology to augment our own abilities, because we have property rights and thus can come to own technological devices. An additional point, which I alluded to, is that the market is driving costs down and thus making technology more widely available over time, which is a very positive trend.
It's only "moving the goalposts" when you ignore the fact that #1 and #2 were responses to different arguments made.
>1. Why Neanderthals were augmented despite not having property rights (#1, above)
You're moving the goalposts! The crux of the debate was not about why technology augmented humans in the distant past. My point was that in the modern age, due to people having property rights, technology is augmenting them. And that wasn't even my central point. My central point is that technology augments humans, and because of this, we don't face a threat of being made obsolete by machines. Are you seriously this oblivious to your own rank hypocrisy?
>2. What my premise has to do with genetic legacy. From what I gather, you assume that as long as the people alive today share genetic material with other species, either alive or dead, my premise is inaccurate. Why?
Because genetic success is one very widely used metric of success. It's the determinant of all biological life afterall. Why wouldn't it be a measure of success?
>3. What your premise actually is. Are you talking about genetically legacy, or something else? Is all that you are saying is that those alive tomorrow will at least share some DNA from those already dead? Not much of a shocker, is it?
Yes I'm talking about genetic legacy, and yes, the success of any human being would be a success for all human beings by this metric. How is that unclear? How is challenging the premise of your argument moving the goalposts?
The proliferation of smartphones doesn't lead to everyone getting "propaganda from a central server". A smartphone is a personal computing device that enables far more peer-to-peer communication and interactive engagement with the world than the previous mass-media paradigm of the pre-internet age (where a small number of broadcast networks, newspapers and radio stations controlled the minds of the vast majority of the population through passive one-way communication).
I agree that the loss of privacy is a huge concern, but like I said, there are positive trends as well that you are simply hand-waving away.
>But, again, as you stated previously, not horses?
Horses as well!
> Seriously, you are moving the goalposts all over the place.
I directly addressed your argument and then I also made an additional argument that your premise is not necessarily true. That's not defined as moving the goalposts.
Private knowledge is the most valuable economic resource that individuals have, and I believe this will become increasingly true as more narrow human functions become economically automated. To the extent that a small number of corporations and governments have access to it, while they maintain control over their own secrets, power will concentrate into the hands of a small percentage of the population.
Privacy is hard though. Individual market incentives do not lead to enough privacy-protecting technology being produced.
>We are about to face a few individuals with technology will hold massive power over everyone else.
There are plenty of counterindications to that. For instance, many forms of technology are becoming increasingly widely adopted, at a rapid pace. I gave the adoption of smartphones as one example.
>Why not include mice, they have 97.5% of our genes, as being successful? Why not all mammals? Oh, except horses, of course, because you said in a previous comment we are different from them.
I would say the success of human beings is by some metrics a success for mice, mammals etc as well..
Neanderthals faced a different species of humans whose culture they were not capable of integrating into. Humanity right now forms one unified global culture through which ideas and technology freely flow. The rising tide of technology is lifting all boats (massive wage growth globally).
Moreover, it's not clear that your premise is accurate. Neanderthals constitute 3 percent of Eurasian human genes, meaning that their genes were evolutionarily successful (3% * 6 billion > 100% * 100,000), and this is ignoring the success of their close kin, with whom they already shared >99% genes.
People being able to exercise their right to freely contract and control their own private property is sickening?
You'd prefer people being thrown in prison for refusing to surrender their private property rights, or for engaging in a voluntary economic interaction that some other party created a prohibition against?
Please help me understand your preference for authoritarian violence against peaceful people.
The US isn't the world. The US has many traits that are peculiar to it, and not universal to economies that are becoming increasingly automated. The world has seen more wage growth over the last 20 years than any other period in history: