Pragmatarian Discussion Thread

[Soldati Senza Confini]

So, you're saying that we just want to make the market look bad, and this works anywhere else?

The incentive to make the market look bad and/or democracy look good only exists when the two things are being directly compared.

That is not necessarily true. Because your poll does not compare them at all.

Your poll is simply a shoddy poll stuck on it and then labeling it an "experiment", we have established this is not an experiment.

[Xerographica]

It would generally be against our self interest to do so. Someone wrote a book where they argued that self-interest was in the best interests of all of society.

So he didn't mention anything about value signals regulating the supply?

The only communication you've argued form Hayek is in the form of price signalling, but your system kills this.

Pragmatarianism doesn't kill price signals. What pragmatarianism actually does is create value signals where there aren't any.

I'm going to ask you again, why should you be able to walk into Wal-Mart, pick up a TV, walk out of the store, and not pay for it because "you didn't value it" or "TVs are already overfunded"?

I'm not a pragma-socialist, but you're certainly welcome to predict that it won't be the natural consequence of pragmatarianism.

[The Two Jerseys]

Xero, my seat on the lifeboat is underfunded.

Why don't you want me to fund it more?

[Galloism]

It would generally be against our self interest to do so. Someone wrote a book where they argued that self-interest was in the best interests of all of society.

So he didn't mention anything about value signals regulating the supply?

I'm saying self-interest would suggest we wouldn't do so, at least not accurately.

Which makes sense, because that's how the whole private sector economy works.

The only communication you've argued form Hayek is in the form of price signalling, but your system kills this.

Pragmatarianism doesn't kill price signals. What pragmatarianism actually does is create value signals where there aren't any.

But it doesn't allow price signalling. Admit your system doesn't have price signalling, the very thing that Hayek said works.

I'm going to ask you again, why should you be able to walk into Wal-Mart, pick up a TV, walk out of the store, and not pay for it because "you didn't value it" or "TVs are already overfunded"?

I'm not a pragma-socialist, but you're certainly welcome to predict that it won't be the natural consequence of pragmatarianism.

I'm asking why you should be permitted to use the roads, and then refuse to pay for them. Why should you be allowed to be a free rider? It's just as bad as you being permitted to walk into Wal-Mart, pick up a TV, and leave without paying for it. We call the latter shoplifting. We call the former pragmatarianism.

Pragmatarianism = legal public sector shoplifting.

[Xerographica]

So he didn't mention anything about value signals regulating the supply?

I'm saying self-interest would suggest we wouldn't do so, at least not accurately.

Which makes sense, because that's how the whole private sector economy works.

Market economies work because they are better than command economies at revealing people's valuations. Would you agree?

Pragmatarianism doesn't kill price signals. What pragmatarianism actually does is create value signals where there aren't any.

But it doesn't allow price signalling. Admit your system doesn't have price signalling, the very thing that Hayek said works.

Sure, if we implemented pragmatarianism in the public sector then there wouldn't be any prices. But as far as I know, you've never argued that there should be prices on all the goods supplied by the government. Have you? What about the non-profit sector? Have you ever argued that the goods supplied by the non-profit sector should be regulated by prices rather than by DV?

The status quo isn't economically coherent. You're always going to tie your brain in knots trying to defend it.

I'm not a pragma-socialist, but you're certainly welcome to predict that it won't be the natural consequence of pragmatarianism.

I'm asking why you should be permitted to use the roads, and then refuse to pay for them. Why should you be allowed to be a free rider? It's just as bad as you being permitted to walk into Wal-Mart, pick up a TV, and leave without paying for it. We call the latter shoplifting. We call the former pragmatarianism.

Pragmatarianism = legal public sector shoplifting.

Free-riding, as defined by Samuelson, is when a person's value signal is less than their valuation...

1954: The Nobel economist Paul Samuelson critiques Hayek's essay by pointing out that, because of the free-rider problem, the market fails to optimally supply public goods...

But, and this is the point sensed by Wicksell but perhaps not fully appreciated by Lindahl, now it is in the selfish interest of each person to give false signals, to pretend to have less interest in a given collective consumption activity than he really has, etc. -   Paul Samuelson, The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure

Samuelson's basic assumption was that the optimal supply of all goods is entirely dependent on honest signals. For example, it’s possible to benefit from Linux without having to pay for it. Let's say that your true valuation of this operating system is $40 bucks. If you only donate $20 dollars to it, you still can fully benefit from it, but you can take the $20 bucks that you saved and use it to buy a nice steak. The amount you spent on Linux would be a false/dishonest signal because it would be less than your true valuation of the software. Your false signal on its own isn't so much of a problem... after all... you only cheated Linux out of $20 bucks. But when everybody else does more or less the same thing, then it’s a big problem. If everybody's contribution to Linux is less than their true valuation of it, then naturally its quality is going to be a lot lower than everybody truly wants it to be. Plus, there are going to be far fewer freely available operating systems than everybody truly wants.

The only reason that consumers have the incentive to be dishonest about their true valuation of Linux (a public good) is because they have the option to spend their money on steak (a private good) instead. If this option was eliminated, then so too would be the incentive to be dishonest.

[Galloism]

I'm saying self-interest would suggest we wouldn't do so, at least not accurately.

Which makes sense, because that's how the whole private sector economy works.

Market economies work because they are better than command economies at revealing people's valuations. Would you agree?

Given market economies don't reveal people's true valuations, no.

Neither one reveals true valuations very well, because true valuations are hard.

But it doesn't allow price signalling. Admit your system doesn't have price signalling, the very thing that Hayek said works.

Sure, if we implemented pragmatarianism in the public sector then there wouldn't be any prices.

Therefore, the price signal communication that Hayek theorized would not exist in your system. Y/N?

But as far as I know, you've never argued that there should be prices on all the goods supplied by the government. Have you?

Technically, some sectors do, where practical. For instance, the fuel tax is a good approximation of road usage. Heavier vehicles require more fuel and also cause more wear and tear on the road. Aviation fuel tax is roughly correlated with how much one uses the airspace system. Heavy motor vehicle use tax recognizes that the super heavy vehicles cause more damage, and therefore are taxed more. Social security tax has a tax/benefit metric where the more you pay in the more you get back.

All of these have certain "price" elements to them for their usage.

Of course, as you will recall, you were against that.

What about the non-profit sector? Have you ever argued that the goods supplied by the non-profit sector should be regulated by prices rather than by DV?

It's not regulated by DV now, so I'm not arguing it should change at all from the current system.

The status quo isn't economically coherent. You're always going to tie your brain in knots trying to defend it.

It's only economically incoherent if you cannot recognize that different goods do not behave the same way. It's only economically coherent if you are the type of person who would yell "all vehicles are designed to pass through fluids, so only a train, a plane, or a boat, can be the most economically efficient no matter WHAT the task! Our current transportation system isn't engineeringly coherent! You're going to tie your brain in knots trying to defend it!"

Which is functionally stupid.

I'm asking why you should be permitted to use the roads, and then refuse to pay for them. Why should you be allowed to be a free rider? It's just as bad as you being permitted to walk into Wal-Mart, pick up a TV, and leave without paying for it. We call the latter shoplifting. We call the former pragmatarianism.

Pragmatarianism = legal public sector shoplifting.

Free-riding, as defined by Samuelson, is when a person's value signal is less than their valuation...

Weird, that passage doesn't seem to indicate he called that free riding. Perhaps you cited the wrong source? It doesn't mention free riding at all. It mentions how perfectly rational market action when it comes to private goods fails hard when it comes to public goods. That's not the same as the free rider problem.

A free rider problem would be if you could come, take a TV off Wal-Mart's shelf, and there was no way they could stop you or make you pay for it. Or, applied to public goods, that you are driving on the road and don't have to pay for it.

Samuelson doesn't appear to mention the free rider problem in this paper at all.

Do I need to explain what the free rider problem is again? You seem to have forgotten the last discussion where we explained it to you. It's not "paying less than your valuation". That's called a consumer surplus. It's "not paying anything at all while you expect someone else will provide it for you". That's a free rider problem.

Your system encourages free riding. Why do you get to pick up a TV off the shelf and walk out of the store without paying for it? Why Xero? Why do you want to encourage this type of behavior?

[Xerographica]

Samuelson doesn't appear to mention the free rider problem in this paper at all.

Do I need to explain what the free rider problem is again? You seem to have forgotten the last discussion where we explained it to you. It's not "paying less than your valuation". That's called a consumer surplus. It's "not paying anything at all while you expect someone else will provide it for you". That's a free rider problem.

Here's the quote again...

But, and this is the point sensed by Wicksell but perhaps not fully appreciated by Lindahl, now it is in the selfish interest of each person to give false signals, to pretend to have less interest in a given collective consumption activity than he really has, etc. -   Paul Samuelson, The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure

He's saying that it's a problem that people have an incentive to pretend to be less interested in a public good than they truly are. Do you agree?

[Galloism]

Samuelson doesn't appear to mention the free rider problem in this paper at all.

Do I need to explain what the free rider problem is again? You seem to have forgotten the last discussion where we explained it to you. It's not "paying less than your valuation". That's called a consumer surplus. It's "not paying anything at all while you expect someone else will provide it for you". That's a free rider problem.

Here's the quote again...

But, and this is the point sensed by Wicksell but perhaps not fully appreciated by Lindahl, now it is in the selfish interest of each person to give false signals, to pretend to have less interest in a given collective consumption activity than he really has, etc. -   Paul Samuelson, The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure

He's saying that it's a problem that people have an incentive to pretend to be less interested in a public good than they truly are. Do you agree?

Yes, that is a problem. It's a problem with a free market solution, and it's a problem in your "pragmatarianism" solution.

[Xerographica]

Here's the quote again...


He's saying that it's a problem that people have an incentive to pretend to be less interested in a public good than they truly are. Do you agree?

Yes, that is a problem. It's a problem with a free market solution, and it's a problem in your "pragmatarianism" solution.

What's the free market solution to people paying less than their true valuations?

[Xerographica]

Here's my reply to Russ Roberts' story I Can’t Hear You...

It’s not market failure. Today in the Atlantic I read a story a story by Franklin Foer…

What is God? It is only a subject that has inspired some of the finest writing in the history of Western civilization — and yet the first two pages of Google results for the question are comprised almost entirely of Sweet’N Low evangelical proselytizing to the unconverted. (The first link the Google algorithm served me was from the Texas ministry, Life, Hope & Truth.) The Google search for God gets nowhere near Augustine, Maimonides, Spinoza, Luther, Russell, or Dawkins. Billy Graham is the closest that Google can manage to an important theologian or philosopher. For all its power and influence, it seems that Google can’t really be bothered to care about the quality of knowledge it dispenses. It is our primary portal to the world, but has no opinion about what it offers, even when that knowledge it offers is aggressively, offensively vapid. — Franklin Foer, The Death of the Public Square

Foer is criticizing how webpages are ranked. From his perspective, Google incorrectly ranks pages about Gods. He goes on to say…

The old, enfeebled institutions of the public sphere have grown dependent on the big technology companies for financial survival. And with this dependence, the values of big tech have become the values of the public sphere. Big tech has made a fetish of efficiency, of data, of the wisdom of the market. These are the underlying principles that explain why Google returns such terrible responses to the God query. Google is merely giving us what’s popular, what’s most clicked upon, not what’s worthy. You can hurl every insult at the old public sphere, but it never exhibited such frank indifference to the content it disseminated. — Franklin Foer, The Death of the Public Square

The wisdom of the market? Google is not a market… it is a democracy. Each link that I created to Foer’s story is a vote. The more people that vote for his story, the higher its ranking on Google. The relative importance of his story is determined by cheap signals.

At the grocery store you don’t simply vote for your favorite products. If you actually want them, then you have to pull out your wallet and pay for them. Markets are all about costly signals. In a market, the supply is regulated by the costly signals of consumers.

To be honest, I feel rather absurd having to explain the difference between democracy and markets to you. Yet, in your story you didn’t point out the painfully obvious fact that Google, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and all the other social media sites are not markets. You didn’t explain the difference between costly signals and cheap signals. You didn’t explain the difference between markets and not-markets. But elsewhere you sure have explained the difference between market economies and command economies.

You offer quite a few solutions to the internet’s primary problem, the first of which is humility. Ok, sure, I might be wrong. But am wrong that Youtube isn’t a market? I hope you agree that videos are ranked by cheap signals (views/votes) rather than by costly signals. Then it’s just a matter of determining whether I’m wrong that…

1. democracies and markets rank content differently
2. markets are better than democracies at ranking content

My hypothesis is that voting elevates trash while spending elevates treasure. Is my hypothesis wrong? The beauty of my hypothesis is that it is testable. For example, you can have people vote and/or donate for their favorite interviews that you have conducted. Then we can all compare the two rankings. We can decide whether a crowd of voters or a crowd of donors is wiser.

Humility is good, but science is better. All the different ranking systems can be, and should be, tested and compared.

Here are some examples of using donations to rank things and here is my most recent attempt to compare voting and donating. In that thread I shared this economic timeline and my analysis of it.

[Galloism]

Yes, that is a problem. It's a problem with a free market solution, and it's a problem in your "pragmatarianism" solution.

What's the free market solution to people paying less than their true valuations?

We don't try to solve it with private goods, because with private goods, it's a good thing instead of a bad thing. It's a strong functional component of the Invisible Hand as theorized by Adam Smith - everyone wants to get the most for the least they can pay.

It's why the market does pretty well with private goods, but horribly with public goods. Same function, but horribly different results.

I don't see why this is so hard for you to understand.

[Dogmeat]

Here's my reply to Russ Roberts' story I Can’t Hear You...

It’s not market failure. Today in the Atlantic I read a story a story by Franklin Foer…

What is God? It is only a subject that has inspired some of the finest writing in the history of Western civilization — and yet the first two pages of Google results for the question are comprised almost entirely of Sweet’N Low evangelical proselytizing to the unconverted. (The first link the Google algorithm served me was from the Texas ministry, Life, Hope & Truth.) The Google search for God gets nowhere near Augustine, Maimonides, Spinoza, Luther, Russell, or Dawkins. Billy Graham is the closest that Google can manage to an important theologian or philosopher. For all its power and influence, it seems that Google can’t really be bothered to care about the quality of knowledge it dispenses. It is our primary portal to the world, but has no opinion about what it offers, even when that knowledge it offers is aggressively, offensively vapid. — Franklin Foer, The Death of the Public Square

Foer is criticizing how webpages are ranked. From his perspective, Google incorrectly ranks pages about Gods. He goes on to say…

The old, enfeebled institutions of the public sphere have grown dependent on the big technology companies for financial survival. And with this dependence, the values of big tech have become the values of the public sphere. Big tech has made a fetish of efficiency, of data, of the wisdom of the market. These are the underlying principles that explain why Google returns such terrible responses to the God query. Google is merely giving us what’s popular, what’s most clicked upon, not what’s worthy. You can hurl every insult at the old public sphere, but it never exhibited such frank indifference to the content it disseminated. — Franklin Foer, The Death of the Public Square

The wisdom of the market? Google is not a market… it is a democracy. Each link that I created to Foer’s story is a vote. The more people that vote for his story, the higher its ranking on Google. The relative importance of his story is determined by cheap signals.

At the grocery store you don’t simply vote for your favorite products. If you actually want them, then you have to pull out your wallet and pay for them. Markets are all about costly signals. In a market, the supply is regulated by the costly signals of consumers.

To be honest, I feel rather absurd having to explain the difference between democracy and markets to you. Yet, in your story you didn’t point out the painfully obvious fact that Google, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and all the other social media sites are not markets. You didn’t explain the difference between costly signals and cheap signals. You didn’t explain the difference between markets and not-markets. But elsewhere you sure have explained the difference between market economies and command economies.

You offer quite a few solutions to the internet’s primary problem, the first of which is humility. Ok, sure, I might be wrong. But am wrong that Youtube isn’t a market? I hope you agree that videos are ranked by cheap signals (views/votes) rather than by costly signals. Then it’s just a matter of determining whether I’m wrong that…

1. democracies and markets rank content differently
2. markets are better than democracies at ranking content

My hypothesis is that voting elevates trash while spending elevates treasure. Is my hypothesis wrong? The beauty of my hypothesis is that it is testable. For example, you can have people vote and/or donate for their favorite interviews that you have conducted. Then we can all compare the two rankings. We can decide whether a crowd of voters or a crowd of donors is wiser.

Humility is good, but science is better. All the different ranking systems can be, and should be, tested and compared.

Here are some examples of using donations to rank things and here is my most recent attempt to compare voting and donating. In that thread I shared this economic timeline and my analysis of it.

It's interesting how you give us replies to things we never mentioned or asked for, but when we ask you simple, direct questions - about an email correspondence, for instance - you're suddenly very silent.

[Xerographica]

Here's my reply to Russ Roberts' story I Can’t Hear You...

It’s not market failure. Today in the Atlantic I read a story a story by Franklin Foer…


Foer is criticizing how webpages are ranked. From his perspective, Google incorrectly ranks pages about Gods. He goes on to say…


The wisdom of the market? Google is not a market… it is a democracy. Each link that I created to Foer’s story is a vote. The more people that vote for his story, the higher its ranking on Google. The relative importance of his story is determined by cheap signals.

At the grocery store you don’t simply vote for your favorite products. If you actually want them, then you have to pull out your wallet and pay for them. Markets are all about costly signals. In a market, the supply is regulated by the costly signals of consumers.

To be honest, I feel rather absurd having to explain the difference between democracy and markets to you. Yet, in your story you didn’t point out the painfully obvious fact that Google, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and all the other social media sites are not markets. You didn’t explain the difference between costly signals and cheap signals. You didn’t explain the difference between markets and not-markets. But elsewhere you sure have explained the difference between market economies and command economies.

You offer quite a few solutions to the internet’s primary problem, the first of which is humility. Ok, sure, I might be wrong. But am wrong that Youtube isn’t a market? I hope you agree that videos are ranked by cheap signals (views/votes) rather than by costly signals. Then it’s just a matter of determining whether I’m wrong that…

1. democracies and markets rank content differently
2. markets are better than democracies at ranking content

My hypothesis is that voting elevates trash while spending elevates treasure. Is my hypothesis wrong? The beauty of my hypothesis is that it is testable. For example, you can have people vote and/or donate for their favorite interviews that you have conducted. Then we can all compare the two rankings. We can decide whether a crowd of voters or a crowd of donors is wiser.

Humility is good, but science is better. All the different ranking systems can be, and should be, tested and compared.

Here are some examples of using donations to rank things and here is my most recent attempt to compare voting and donating. In that thread I shared this economic timeline and my analysis of it.

It's interesting how you give us replies to things we never mentioned or asked for, but when we ask you simple, direct questions - about an email correspondence, for instance - you're suddenly very silent.

Which email correspondence are you talking about?

[Xerographica]

What's the free market solution to people paying less than their true valuations?

We don't try to solve it with private goods, because with private goods, it's a good thing instead of a bad thing. It's a strong functional component of the Invisible Hand as theorized by Adam Smith - everyone wants to get the most for the least they can pay.

It's why the market does pretty well with private goods, but horribly with public goods. Same function, but horribly different results.

I don't see why this is so hard for you to understand.

We weren't talking about private goods, we were talking about public goods. You agreed with Samuelson that it's a problem when the amount of money that people voluntary pay for public goods is less than their true valuation of them. You said that this problem has a free-market solution. Except, when I asked you what the solution was, you started talking about private goods.

[Dogmeat]

It's interesting how you give us replies to things we never mentioned or asked for, but when we ask you simple, direct questions - about an email correspondence, for instance - you're suddenly very silent.

Which email correspondence are you talking about?

It was a while ago, I can't remember exactly. I'm pretty sure it was before he died, but after e-mail was invented.

Well surely you remember how old you are. What year was it (approximately) and who was your ISP at the time?

[Xerographica]

Which email correspondence are you talking about?

Well surely you remember how old you are. What year was it (approximately) and who was your ISP at the time?

Heh, my email correspondence with Murray Rothbard? I guess it wasn't obvious that I was joking. Rothbard died before I even knew that he existed. The first time that I even heard of anarcho-capitalism was in 2010.

[Dogmeat]

Heh, my email correspondence with Murray Rothbard? I guess it wasn't obvious that I was joking. Rothbard died before I even knew that he existed. The first time that I even heard of anarcho-capitalism was in 2010.

This:

Have you gotten any relevant experts to actually make a solid agreement with your position?

Yeah, I e-mailed Murray Rothbard and he replied...

One of the most absurd procedures based on a constancy assumption has been the attempt to arrive at a consumer’s preference scale . . . Through quizzing him by questionnaires. In vacuo, a few consumers are questioned at length on which abstract bundle of hypothetical commodities they would prefer to another abstract bundle, etc. Not only does this suffer from the constancy error, no assurance can be attached to the mere questioning of people. Not only will a person’s valuations differ when talking about them than when he is actually choosing, but there is also no guarantee that he is telling the truth.

Is not a joke.

It's a lie. You lied.

[The Two Jerseys]

Here's my reply to Russ Roberts' story I Can’t Hear You...

It’s not market failure. Today in the Atlantic I read a story a story by Franklin Foer…


Foer is criticizing how webpages are ranked. From his perspective, Google incorrectly ranks pages about Gods. He goes on to say…


The wisdom of the market? Google is not a market… it is a democracy. Each link that I created to Foer’s story is a vote. The more people that vote for his story, the higher its ranking on Google. The relative importance of his story is determined by cheap signals.

At the grocery store you don’t simply vote for your favorite products. If you actually want them, then you have to pull out your wallet and pay for them. Markets are all about costly signals. In a market, the supply is regulated by the costly signals of consumers.

To be honest, I feel rather absurd having to explain the difference between democracy and markets to you. Yet, in your story you didn’t point out the painfully obvious fact that Google, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and all the other social media sites are not markets. You didn’t explain the difference between costly signals and cheap signals. You didn’t explain the difference between markets and not-markets. But elsewhere you sure have explained the difference between market economies and command economies.

You offer quite a few solutions to the internet’s primary problem, the first of which is humility. Ok, sure, I might be wrong. But am wrong that Youtube isn’t a market? I hope you agree that videos are ranked by cheap signals (views/votes) rather than by costly signals. Then it’s just a matter of determining whether I’m wrong that…

1. democracies and markets rank content differently
2. markets are better than democracies at ranking content

My hypothesis is that voting elevates trash while spending elevates treasure. Is my hypothesis wrong? The beauty of my hypothesis is that it is testable. For example, you can have people vote and/or donate for their favorite interviews that you have conducted. Then we can all compare the two rankings. We can decide whether a crowd of voters or a crowd of donors is wiser.

Humility is good, but science is better. All the different ranking systems can be, and should be, tested and compared.

Here are some examples of using donations to rank things and here is my most recent attempt to compare voting and donating. In that thread I shared this economic timeline and my analysis of it.

It's interesting how you give us replies to things we never mentioned or asked for, but when we ask you simple, direct questions - about an email correspondence, for instance - you're suddenly very silent.

I've been waiting almost a week for an explanation of why I should use the system that's supposed to reveal our true valuations to not reveal my true valuation...

[Galloism]

We don't try to solve it with private goods, because with private goods, it's a good thing instead of a bad thing. It's a strong functional component of the Invisible Hand as theorized by Adam Smith - everyone wants to get the most for the least they can pay.

It's why the market does pretty well with private goods, but horribly with public goods. Same function, but horribly different results.

I don't see why this is so hard for you to understand.

We weren't talking about private goods, we were talking about public goods. You agreed with Samuelson that it's a problem when the amount of money that people voluntary pay for public goods is less than their true valuation of them. You said that this problem has a free-market solution. Except, when I asked you what the solution was, you started talking about private goods.

I didn't say there was a free market solution to people paying less than what they value. I said it's a "problem" (more specifically a "thing that is", because it's only a problem in certain contexts) both with a free market solution and a pragmatarian solution when it comes to the public goods problem.

Reminder:

Yes, that is a problem. It's a problem with a free market solution, and it's a problem in your "pragmatarianism" solution.

What's the free market solution to people paying less than their true valuations?

A free market solution to the "public good problem" would be something like anarcho-capitalism, where we rely on the market to provide public goods. This "solution" fails for many reasons that you are no doubt aware. Namely, it involves the free rider problem with people paying nothing for public goods (because they aren't forced), but can't be excluded from them (because public goods don't work that way). The free market solution to the public good problem fails. The pragmatarian solution to the public good problem fails for similar reasons.

[Xerographica]

Heh, my email correspondence with Murray Rothbard? I guess it wasn't obvious that I was joking. Rothbard died before I even knew that he existed. The first time that I even heard of anarcho-capitalism was in 2010.

This:

Yeah, I e-mailed Murray Rothbard and he replied...

Is not a joke.

It's a lie. You lied.

Yes, I lied, but in my defense I thought that it was obvious that I was lying. It seemed like at least a couple other people realized that I was joking around...

Wait, which Murray Rothbard?

Because Murray Rothbard the economist died in 1995, so unless you can speak to the dead I sincerely doubt that's the Murray Rothbard you're talking about.

Seldon resurrected him!

ALL PRAISE TO SELDON!!!!

[Dogmeat]

This:

Is not a joke.

It's a lie. You lied.

Yes, I lied, but in my defense I thought that it was obvious that I was lying. It seemed like at least a couple other people realized that I was joking around...

Seldon resurrected him!

ALL PRAISE TO SELDON!!!!

No, that last one is just mocking you. The other one is - accurately, it turns out - accusing you of lying.

[Xerographica]

We weren't talking about private goods, we were talking about public goods. You agreed with Samuelson that it's a problem when the amount of money that people voluntary pay for public goods is less than their true valuation of them. You said that this problem has a free-market solution. Except, when I asked you what the solution was, you started talking about private goods.

I didn't say there was a free market solution to people paying less than what they value. I said it's a "problem" (more specifically a "thing that is", because it's only a problem in certain contexts) both with a free market solution and a pragmatarian solution when it comes to the public goods problem.

X = the amount of money that people voluntarily pay for a public good (ie Linux)
Y = their true valuation of the public good

Samuelson said that it's a problem when X < Y. Do you agree with him that this is a problem?

[Xerographica]

Yes, I lied, but in my defense I thought that it was obvious that I was lying. It seemed like at least a couple other people realized that I was joking around...

No, that last one is just mocking you. The other one is - accurately, it turns out - accusing you of lying.

I'm not denying that I lied. Sometimes I lie. Do you ever lie? Does the amount of money that you donated for capracracy accurately reflect your true valuation of it?

[Galloism]

I didn't say there was a free market solution to people paying less than what they value. I said it's a "problem" (more specifically a "thing that is", because it's only a problem in certain contexts) both with a free market solution and a pragmatarian solution when it comes to the public goods problem.

X = the amount of money that people voluntarily pay for a public good (ie Linux)
Y = their true valuation of the public good

Samuelson said that it's a problem when X < Y. Do you agree with him that this is a problem?

It's not per se a problem. It however causes a problem in the context of public goods (namely, that they become undersupplied as a result).

This doesn't happen with private goods (much), as the Invisible Hand will correct that faulty distribution if it starts to happen (per Adam Smith). That's why we don't try to solve it in the private market.

[Xerographica]

X = the amount of money that people voluntarily pay for a public good (ie Linux)
Y = their true valuation of the public good

Samuelson said that it's a problem when X < Y. Do you agree with him that this is a problem?

It's not per se a problem. It however causes a problem in the context of public goods (namely, that they become undersupplied as a result).

You agree that it's a problem when public goods are undersupplied. You agree that X < Y results in public goods being undersupplied. But you disagree that X < Y is a problem?