That may be. Not to devalue the lives or importance of keeping children safe, but even if it's hundreds more, statistically, it's still a very, very small figure, especially when contrasted with injuries and deaths from auto accidents, disease, etc.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm certainly not disagreeing with you. Whether or not the improved safety is due to being left unattended less or not... I don't know if we can know that for sure.

Kidnapping as we general think of it (a stranger taking a child with nefarious intent) is exceptionally rare. In the United States, there are some 100 incidents per year. I don't mean to contradict anything you've said; I think you're right on the money. Just thought I'd throw a number out there. The thing that I don't understand is how do we get that it's all right to hold the parents responsible for someone else's actions? It's not like they deliberately had their children walk home in an area that they thought would result in injury or death to either child. If someone kidnaps, murders, rapes, etc, shouldn't that fall on the individual her perpetrated such crimes? Having laws on the book to to criminalize hypothetical scenarios doesn't seem helpful at all. (To be clear, I think there is a stark difference between allowing children to walk home, vs intentionally putting children in harm's way so that something likely will happen to them.)

An outcome that does not yield your personal preference of goodness or morality is not proof of the market not working. Rather, this sort of thing conveys that people just don't care.

I am very aware of this argument, but it is wrong. Gold's viability and value as a currency comes earlier in the market process. There is a sort of paradox when transitioning to a non-commodity money; Ludwig von Mises thought it impossible. Like you said, one way to overcome the paradox is by force of government, and it's been assumed for quite a while that without the force of government, such a money would never come to be... well... money. The argument for this is compelling, but we know it to be wrong simply by looking at Bitcoin. Bitcoin had absolutely no worth, and as such, was completely arbitrary in exchange, yet someone thought it cool enough to try and eventually it stated to hold its own exchange value.

Lastly, *nothing* has intrinsic value: if you simply mean to say that a good has other use cases besides money, that is fine. But the use cases it has are precisely because we have assigned it such. Gold isn't "naturally" worth anything. It is only worth something because we have found uses for it.

You are right in that Arden is wrong. Obviously there are commodities that can be collected to back a currency. My other comment was just to point out that gold is not a hill worth dying on and it's unfortunate that sound money people get so hung up on it.

Physical currencies generally have more disadvantages to advantages when compared to virtual ones. There really is no reason, economically, for a currency to be backed by a commodity. There are, however, very real problems that are introduced by inflationary policies and the use of fiat currency. The biggest hurdle for virtual currencies to overcome is to get off the ground in the first place and to be assigned a value by society. (Remember, there is no such thing as "intrinsic" value: a thing only has a value if people assign value to it. Commodities like gold have other uses besides currency, which make them easier and more likely to bootstrap as into a state of money, but that does not mean a virtual currency can never come about as money. Bitcoin has proven that notion wrong.)

Maternity leave is all ready factored into the studies. Clearly, his statement is false.

I don't doubt that's the case. But it's not discrimination: it's hedging against risk; namely, the risk of spending resources on training someone and having them bail shortly thereafter. Regulations like mandatory maternity leave only serve to exacerbate the problem.

I have made no such claim that the market is flawless. But if you understand value theory (value is not a price, but is subjective; value ends up indirectly determining price), then you will know that the market is the *only* way to come to a sensible price. It is the only way by which we can calculate how scarce resources should be used amongst their alternative uses, in what quantity, etc. It may seem nonsensical to you, but if for some reason, all of the western world values a steaming pile of shit, shit will become a scarce resource and have a price associated with it. Just because I don't want shit doesn't mean other people don't and that its price should be lower than, say, a pound of rice. It may turn out that the desire for shit was misplaced sometime in the future, it is abandoned, but that doesn't prove anything at all.

Oh, how so? It outlines the same things that have been echo'ed here, that there women make decisions that negatively affect their earning power. That's not to say that those decisions are poor decisions--only an individual can decide if such a sacrifice is worthwhile. As for linking to a book, apologies. I only did a very brief search; it's a political topic and most of the results are political in nature, not scientific.

You are drawing conclusions from something that was not said. It may well be that the author is sexist and meant it in a sexist way, but I see no reason why we should assume it to be a sexist statement.

Sigh, arbitrary arguments over wage rates. The only way to find out what someone should be paid is by letting the market show us. There's no other way to aggregate the necessary information.

That varies depending on what data you look at. The link I provided above accounted for all of 4%. The other thing to remember is that there could be other factors that we just haven't thought of yet--that remaining 4-7% could very well make perfect sense, as has the other 17%. The point is that it's a very small deviation--small enough that any efforts to "correct" it, should it even need correcting, would almost surely hurt everyone involved more than help them. As I stated above (maybe in a different message), the market does not reward discrimination. That doesn't mean that it won't exist, only that a firm places itself at a competitive disadvantage if it discriminates[1].

[1] Actually that's really only true when society detests the discrimination in question. It could certainly be plausible that if a society detests brown-eyed people working in factories (for whatever silly reason), any company who attempts to hire a brown-eyed person to a factory job would be boycotted to the point where hiring that person would be a net loss, even though otherwise his hiring practices may be at a competitive advantage over the competition. Suffice it to say, I don't think society detests women being paid on par with men, given it is an apples to apples comparison, so I don't think this analysis applies.

Ultimately I think he communicated the same thing that you did, but in fewer words. He didn't say "women who act like men are paid more," just that when the behaviors are the same, which would include career choice, child rearing decisions, etc., the pay is the same. There is *nothing* sexist about that statement.

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I rarely read signatures, but I did read yours.