The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

@elodea

I didn't specifically link that article because of thinking it claimed something unusual, the mantra "Australien internet sucks because monopoly" isn't new on the internet. I guess there may be some truth to it, or not, as you lay out.

It's interesting to see an Australian say that isn't the entirely the case.

Now Germany, I think, roughly has a similar "story" of how its telephone (and then internet) networks came to be: The government build them as part of postal services. At some point they were privatized because reasons. So our Telstra is called "Deutsche Telekom". However our internet prices have massively spiraled downwards due to monopoly-controlling laws that force the Telekom to let competitors use their cables at competitive prices.
I guess you'd view this as a case of "government made the mistake to fiddle with the market and then corrected it by fiddling more, but without doing as many mistakes"?

This makes me wonder about two things:

a) the reason why the government fiddled with the market here was because it created the market. Telephone lines are part of the infrastructure of a nation. Like streets and the electric grid the state build them because that is the responsibility of the state. Do you think the infrastructure of a nation should be created by private companies in general? The problem with the infrastructure is that building streets/electric lines/telephone lines in sparsely populated areas is a problematic investment. Also you want your infrastructure to be one "thing" that fits together. You don't want multiple companies competing with each other that all put incompatible infrastructure into the ground, creating complete chaos in the process.

b) and since we don't have all that many private streets why do we even have private internet providers? Unrelated to the discussion in a way, but just a question making me wonder right now...

Typical for someone on the left (i don't mean 'leftie' please don't hurt me officer tatsu) to look past the ideas being discussed and go to the refuge of identity politics. Sorry I don't fit the narrative you have in your head. Oh that guys australian, he must have some mutating disease because he is different from what I think australians should be. Oh that guys black, why isn't he for blm? Uncle tom! Oh that person is a female, why isn't she a feminist? Internal mysogyny!

To answer your question, I 'got this way' because of people like you. Liberalism used to mean something on the left. It used to stand for reason, rationality, science, intellectual honesty, individuality, respect of others. Now adays those values can only be found on the right, especially in center right libertarianism.

And i'm not the only one waking up to the mad house that the left in Europe and America has become. It's infected Australia, and I am left very unimpressed.


When the ability to criticise ideas becomes a criminal act, you will find me in the other camp.
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act...igious-vilification-laws-20160804-gqlagu.html

Why do i love capitalism despite being 'Australian'?

That's interesting. I'd subscribe to those things you see in the right as well. I just see them more in the left spectrum than in the right. Left and right are weird words I guess and incredibly fuzzy. The right I know makes demonstrations screaming "foreigners out" and builds walls when people ask for help.

The right you seem to think of is quite different. Well I guess right libertarianism is just something I've never seen in full action, I think the one political party we have here in Germany that goes into that direction is the FDP, which isn't very successful. My very first vote ever actually went to them, but then I realized that their "the free market is better than everything" leaves behind too many losers.

A great example why division of labor and assembly-line work is a great thing. You can have those things in any economy system though. Even in a communistic planned economy. Not that I am saying that a communistic planned economy is a great thing or even works at all, but even there you can have those things.

Yup, so the libertarian position is that infrastructure like roads and power etc. should be left to private enterprise to create and own because they have profit motive. There are very little if any real world examples of this on a large scale though, so it remains as yet still a theoretical thing that follows on from the underlying ideology. Except for maybe the railroads of old.

The idea basically being that private owners care more for their property so you don't get tragedy of the commons or wastage on infrastructure that never gets used much. I wouldn't disagree with your point that a central plan to make it all fit together is a benefit of government involvement, though at the same time it doesn't necessarily mean private enterprise isn't capable of the same. Australian capital city for example was created via competing private designers and government picked one to implement.

A good example of huge infrastructure wastage from central control is China's ghost cities. Not to say that government will always make such big mistakes or that private individuals are immune from the same. It's more a matter of systematic risk - if government screws up (like with Australian NBN) the problem is on a huge scale. But if private business screws up, the loss is compartmentalised only to them.

As for rural folk, definitely agree with you about the cost problems. It sounds mean to say - but there is a cost to everything. Like, it doesn't make sense to spend $x worth resources to build something that will only benefit a small number of people vastly less than $x. It's good for the recipients, but on the flip side these are resources coming from someone else who is losing.

But maybe the benefit of roads to transport food and keep farmers in a standard of living they are happy with is greater than $x. Only a free market can really discover that. e.g. private road gets built for $x, farmer pays toll and passes it onto consumers where the tax reduction from not building/maintaining the roads offsets the increased food prices.

I certainly wouldn't claim to know which one it is, nor what the market might come up with in a developing country that lacks infrastructure to begin with. Maybe the result will be an agricultural belt that has all the farmers clustered together into the most efficient solution so that everything ends up costing less overall. I think for instance that there is huge money to be made in the private sewer/toilet business in india.

As for why private ISP's, the one reason off the top of my head is that if i was living in an authoritarian state i would definitely prefer to be on a private ISP that did not co-operate with the government in sharing my information. I can't remember where i read the story, but there was a case where turkey had cracked some communication app thought to be secure and bad things happened to people who were expressing anti-government criticism.

*quickly on the left/right thing. I'm definitely with you on that. libertarians are socially liberal, economically conservative. I don't have much against muslims on an individual level. It's just the ideas they hold that I don't like. The far right unfortunately mixes the individual up with the ideology.

This is good a representation of most 'discussions' involving politicians that I see.
Not discussing a topic to better their understanding, not doing it to find issues and improvements with the other person's point of view, not even arguing to be right. Just blindly calling out the other person and saying how the other person is doing bad things without giving a reason.
Same with interviews I see in the media and the political campaigns prior to the recent election. On the rare occasion I take any notice, I don't gain much knowledge on the issues because the only persuasive technique being used is attacking the opposition. Makes me sad.

@elodea Something I heard recently was that the milk industry here in Australia could die out due to overseas imports being cheaper and farmers being forced to sell to retailers at very low prices. I don't know anything about this except for hearing some family members discussing how the Government needs to do something about it, and even if it is not entirely true I'm sure there are many examples of similar things from other industries. I don't really see how people in that kind of industry could adapt to something else in a free market system without losing a lot.


I feel like all the talk about the morals of Islamic beliefs and ideas are a bit off topic. I presume the only reason it came up has something to do with terrorism and speaking about the ideas of the religion of a whole does not seem relevant when we only care about a ridiculously small percentage of them who kill people and cause problems. Their beliefs / scripture may support what the terrorist groups are doing but the fact that most Muslims are not actively seeking out to kill everyone says to me that it is not a problem with their beliefs, just a problem with crazy people.

Edit: please don't get me started on the NBN

Yep, protectionism comes up a lot when talking about free markets and the same concerns are voiced each time - cheaper imports will destroy domestic production and this is bad. It's a very compelling argument because it's partly true, but it isn't bad in the way that you might be led to think about it. There are several parts to protectionism that need to be addressed. Brace yourself, entirely too wordy post incoming

Wealth and utility
Lower cost for an identical product is good. It means I can buy more for the same amount of money/work and society benefits from the extra wealth. Either they buy more milk or have more money to spend on other things.

However, it doesn't mean people always buy the cheapest thing because sometimes lower cost comes with lower quality whether real or perceived. People freely choose to buy what is in their best interest given the resources they have to spend. Some people buy more expensive milk that they perceive has higher quality, while others think it is in their best interest to buy the cheapest milk. A free market allows both these people to do what maximises their happiness in life without needing a government to treat them like children and tell them what they can or can't do.

See this article on how people are forgoing buying the cheaper milk in order to support Australian farmers. http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-12/private-vs-branded-milk/7723408

They do so because they derive more subjective happiness or utility from consuming Australian milk than the money they might save from buying the cheaper stuff. Nothing wrong with individuals exercising their decision making power to choose what they feel is best for them. As long as they find supporting Australian farmers more beneficial to their lives, a market will always exist to serve them e.g. Australian branded milk. In any country you will be hard pressed to find locally produced consumer goods like milk that have been completely driven out of the domestic market because of cheap imports.

You know that made in australia sticker that you sometimes find on products? That's only there because businesses realise it has a real monetary value - people sometimes do have preferences towards australian products.

Or if it's a matter of overseas milk producers abusing their cows or employees in order to get that cheaper milk. Well, same thing is seen in the caged vs free range egg market. Free range is making a comeback because people are willing to pay that extra money knowing the chickens weren't abused.

Competition and innovation
If cheaper import milk turns out to be of lower quality e.g. watered down or there is bad stuff being put into it to make it cheaper, this information naturally changes the utility people perceive in buying that milk and they will shift towards more expensive Australian milk because of perceived quality.

If however it is because overseas producers have found innovative ways of making cheaper milk whether because of better types of machinery or animal husbandry, then Australian farmers will also eventually catch onto these efficient production methods as they seek to compete. As a result society benefits. The price of a television used to be astronomical but now adays they are pretty much affordable for everyone.

Let's ask what will happen if we for example subsidise milk production through government out of genuine concern so that they can compete with lower prices. Well, they will never become competitive as there will be no incentive to either lower costs or increase quality. When subsidies end up being lifted, all that time spent in comfort will have built up and will whiplash them even harder than if they had dealt with the problem to begin with at the start. We see this time and time again in subsidised and protected industries all across the world such as US car manufacturing. All paid by the everyday taxpayer who may not even drink milk.

If tariffs or quotas are imposed, the same cost is borne to milk consumers to the benefit of non-milk consumers, only this time it is a hidden transfer of wealth in terms of the lost opportunity to buy cheaper milk.

Domestic and foreign production
Take a snapshot of today. Some of the goods you consume are produced overseas while some are produced domestically. Who gets to choose where those products get produced and how much get produced(or become available for consumption)?

Is it a good idea for government to dictate "product A must be produced here and product B must be produced overseas because I think so". That is communist central planning (not as a negative connotation but a statement of fact). Yes, the size of the Australian milking will decrease and farmers may end up switching to other industries like perhaps beef, though I really don't know how they will transition. That's the beauty of a free market because it empowers the farmers themselves who know best, not me, and certainly not government.

Trade balance
One of the hinges by which global trade operate is via floating currency exchanges. Say it is cheap to import milk from Europe. That means I have to go to a currency exchange and sell AUD to buy Euro in order to pay my suppliers. This creates currency pressure which pushes the Euro to become more expensive against the AUD up until the point at which the compensation to European milk producers is comensurate to the compensation paid to Australian milk producers. Dynamic exchange rates act to balance out arbitrage trading that results from different costs in different countries.

Risk management
Risk and profit go hand in hand. Wherever there is potential profit, there is always a risk of it not going to plan. It is not the job of the government or everyday taxpayer to act as insurers of business decisions. There are insurance markets specifically out there for people who want to lower their risk e.g. business insurance or futures contracts. Businesses gain and lose money all the time for any number of reasons and they are always learning experiences. You cannot and should not force people to buy the products you produce.

Trade wars
Let's assume that the aim of these imports is malevolent and they want to destroy the australian milking industry. Or maybe if instead of selling the milk for $1 that they said "hey Australia I hate you so much I want to give you free gifts no strings attached".

Well, what are they going to do when they run out of money to subsidise the losses from selling all their milk for so cheap? Australia will thank them for their generosity and go right back to starting up milk production again while they sit in poverty having exhausted their wealth giving us essentially free stuff. We're better off if we accept their offer regardless of how that low price is achieved or for what reason.

Emotional policy making
Tariffs, quotas and other such measures to control imports and exports have always struck me as entirely born of stupidity. When a country declares war on another, the first order of business is to blockade their enemy to prevent them from importing or exporting e.g. trade sanctions against Russia. Yet in peacetime people somehow think it sensible to self inflict on ourselves that which we do to our enemies in war. Truly puzzling.

That milk example is an interesting one. Here in Germany we have a huge amount of drama because we have apparently simply too many farmers that produce milk. So the complaint isn't "too many cheap imports", but "we are too many farmers who have too many cows".
This causes the market to push down the price so much that the single farmer has a hard time to stay around. So they demand the government "do something" to the point where the throw away huge amounts of milk on the streets as a matter of protest.

I think I am not that much against a free market, as I in this case think they're out of their mind for demanding government money or extra laws like "a farmer may only produce so and so much milk to limit production and that will increase the price". If there is substantially too much production than we don't need as much milk production. Simple as that.

I think you're making this look a bit too easy though. The whole problem with market protection is that you can't just "start up production on some product again because we're not getting any of it anymore". Once you have imported a product for many years you become dependent on whoever it is who produces that product for you. Dependencies can be a bad thing or can be a good thing, as you're less likely to declare war on whoever you are depending on. They would stop trading with you after all.

But in terms of what it means for your economy it isn't all that good. You said it yourself, if you import too much your currency goes down the drain. That hurts your economy and your people. If Australia buys so much milk from Germany that the price of the € rises massively you become basically poor compared to me. Now Australia won't get that problem as you guys have a lot of interesting stuff to offer so we buy things for AU$ back. But if it isn't just milk but basically half your industry that dies out because ours out competes it you get issues that you can't quickly fix.
This is especially bad for countries that are poor to begin with. There is a lot of poverty created in nations that fall behind like that and a global free market has no interest in fixing that.

I just can't seem to completely agree that a completely free market is such a good idea. It's probably the most efficient economic system, but not the best one as it doesn't care for the well being of its people at all.
I am not advocating all that much government interventions, often I think there are too many (my stance on the financial crisis of 2008 was "let those banks crash and may the world burn for it, hopefully they will learn from that"), but none interventions at all seems like a bad idea.

We charge those who are careless with their vehicle and cause a death, with manslaughter. Well, not Hillary, if she's negligent, we nominate her for presidency, but EVERYONE ELSE is charged with manslaughter, whether they did it intentionally or "negligently". Hillary is one of the elite where the "lack of intent" works as an argument.

Firearms work as intended, as self defense. If they didn't work, whatever country you come from, would have absolutely 0 owned by it's government (I don't know or care where you're from, your government owns guns for it's intended purpose).

Firearms, for instance, stopped that vehicular mass murder in the Nice incident, which I am so insensitive for referencing. Guns kill someone, liberals invoke the lost souls of the damned for their gun control agenda before the corpses are even cold... vehicles kill someone within the same week liberals claim it can't be done, and it's insensitive to say the liberals are wrong because "think of the victims".

If you claim to think of the victims when invoking gun-control agenda, then I claim to think of the victim when referencing Nice as evidence for my side of the story. You can't shout "racist" and then go "taco bowling", you're just doing all the hostile stuff you accuse your opponents of doing, yourself, while being aggressive to the point of assault, towards those opponents...

Honestly, I don't know why I feed the trolls. I like the direction Colin and company had this thread headed. Please continue, methinks it's time to unfollow this forum thread.

I'm not sure whether i should be happy you all proved my point, or whether i should cry for being right.

the dig difference here of course being we're against both and you're advocating one of the two.

either you're ignoring this on purpose or ....you're ignoring this on purpose that's the only possible alternative.


by now what you're saying is 100% emotion 0% fact just as I had predicted.

Hillary should be charged with manslaughter if I get you right? or there's just a bunch of words missing in your sentence.

i don´t care bout hillary clinton if she killed someone with are car accidently then i have no problem with her being charged if it can be proved

the goverment in other words lawinforcement and military for extreme cases by trained personnal ... why should civilians such as me and you own it? why would i need a gun?
because something "might" happen?

stopped by what person? police? military? or some random doods? i think it´s save save to say that it ain´t some random dood ...

i don´t even understand what you want to prove with this .. .. again manslauter by car does not make manslauter by gun any better ..


also troll? ... realy? is that the best argument you can bring up to someone with a opposing opinion? ..

"the goverment in other words lawinforcement and military for extreme cases by trained personnal ... why should civilians such as me and you own it? why would i need a freedom of speech?"

"the goverment in other words lawinforcement and military for extreme cases by trained personnal ... why should civilians such as me and you own it? why would i need food?"

"the goverment in other words lawinforcement and military for extreme cases by trained personnal ... why should civilians such as me and you own it? why would i need a say in who leads me?"

The same reason we aren't swallowing those, the fact that we are PART of society and not just SUBORDINATE to society, is the same reason why we have capitalism instead of communism, instead of dictatorship, instead of fascism, instead of theocracy, we have a government of the people, by the people, for the people, with freedoms guaranteed to everyone equally, the government not above the individual just because they are "rich and powerful". The president's daughter gets caught underage smoking pot, I personally want marijuana prohibition repealed, and everyone seems to support it, but to shrug off any wrongdoing by the president's daughter, but continue to hand out decade-long prison sentences to the filthy plebeian lower-class for possession of marijuana, is highly hypocritical."

"Only the government, can be caught doing drugs, taking bribes, and massing firearms, every poor filthy plebeian needs to check their privilege before the government revokes their privilege to continue breathing."

Yeah, no.

Elodea can I subscribe to your newsletter? You're an absolute saint. I gave up doing serious sustained political discussion on internet forums years ago

this doesn´t answer scrap of my question ..

free speech, food, marjuana, the ability to vote who to lead a state are not what can wound or kill a person directly ..

from when it starts to 1:07

Thank you for making me waste several hours of my life.

oh it's a pleasure.

noone should live their life without D & A in it.

Neither can collecting rain water (illegal in the States) or fishing (requires same amount of licensing and fees as a vehicle in the States).

You tell me why our government is better than us, but we can't have even the simplest of rights and freedoms, and I'll answer your question. You come off just like the government, by the way, elitist, belittling those around you like they are inferior, they are "too stupid to even comprehend or answer your questions, so their words do not matter and their freedoms do not matter, they best learn their place and do as they are told".

Out of all the things we can ban, we can make people live in internment camps chained to an issued job, which is exactly what communism and totalinarianism does, but we are not North Korea, we have the right to own automobiles and knives, we have the right to own firearms as another tool, a tool which is capable of wounding someone but not if used properly, and the PROPER way to use it is not to shoot innocent people with it.

If you use it to shoot or rob people, then you are using it as illegally as you'd use a knife, nailgun, or pipe bomb. If you are arguing the only "right way to use a gun is to use it to shoot someone in the face", then YOU are the problem, and I wouldn't trust YOU with a knife personally. I don't know anyone with a gun who thinks the proper way to use it is to shoot as many faces with it as possible.

This is actually not illegal in the states. Not when you're actually collecting rainwater in stead of building artificial lakes.

This isn't looking at it this from a business financial/accounting point of view - money already takes into account time. When inflation is positive, I prefer 1 dollar today than 1 dollar a year from now, so when i make an action, I take into account all future inflows and outflows discounted to a present day value.

Option A
If i keep my factory running, I incur an operating loss as well as an opportunity cost of keeping my assets from being invested in something more profitable. Let alone the moral issue of covering those losses with money stolen from the pockets of wholly unrelated individuals in society who don't get compensated for doing so.

Option B
If i close my factory down temporarily, my loss is by definition less than Option A because I am only incurring the opportunity cost of keeping my capital assets tied up. Factories modulate their capacity usage all the time in line with market movements. Producing at a loss makes absolutely no sense, therefore you reduce production, supply decreases, and thus price increases until it is once again profitable.

Option C
If i sell my factory and land, it will be sold for the highest price say $x at which that land and capital equipment can be otherwise productively utilised by some other activity. This price incorporates all available information I have about the risk of milk prices coming back up and me losing out on them. $x is by definition greater than the NPV of either Option A or B because otherwise I wouldn't voluntarily sell. The buyer on the other hand believes they can produce more profit discounted for time (NPV) than the price I am selling at - maybe it might be building a car manufacturing plant.

Some of the increased wealth derived from this more efficient organisation of land and capital is then used to trade for overseas milk to make up for any excess local demand for milk. Everyone becomes richer. It's very hard to make it understandable without graphs, but basically the gist is that prices already incorporate basically all known information.


Imagine if everyone thought like you suggested and protected markets. Picture the same scenario above happening with a large global oversupply of milk where producers are making a loss (cost of inputs > marketable value). When everyone subsidises and protects their milk industry, they will be doing so for eternity because no-one wants to bite the bullet by decreasing their production of milk. Instead, oversupply never gets corrected and everyone continues literally destroying their wealth waiting for someone else to cut production.

If you doubt the ability of private individuals to re-establish and expand productive capacities, I'd again point you to the free market miracle of post ww2 Germany under Ludwig Erhard where in just 10-15 years they transformed from a war torn, firebombed, and devastated military goods focused industry into one of the envies of the western world. Britain who won the war on the other hand continued on with a policy of heavy regulation as if it was still at war, protected its industries and was quickly beset with abysmal growth and skyrocketing inflation. Germany started from very little and quickly overtook them.

Lastly, I'll also add that corporate welfare by now is widely agreed on both sides to be horrible and immoral. The left hates it because they see it as reverse robin hood, and the right hates it because it represents big government interfering in markets. The only people who like corporate welfare are the only people who benefit - the crony capitalists.