Ok, say you own a bus company, and you pay people to drive your busses, and you also ride your own busses. You're sitting quietly at the back of the bus reading a book when the driver rear-ends the car in front of the bus. Are you personally responsible? Your company? The driver?

For that matter, reduce it down to an even simpler scenario: you have a paid chauffeur. You own the car and you pay a guy to drive it so you can sit in the back and relax. When your chauffeur drives your car into someone else's, who is responsible?

What if instead of you personally paying the chauffeur, you hired a chauffeur company to send some guy of their choosing to drive you around, in your car still. When their driver causes a wreck, who is responsible?

Now imagine your chauffeur is instead a robot. Do you own or rent that robot? Does that make a difference in responsibility?

And because he's a robot doing only one mechanical function, he doesn't even need a body, so he's just a program in your car's computer. Does own/rent even make a difference there since there's no question that the physical car belongs to you and the "intellectual property" of the program doesn't?

Let's do one better than that:

You have a standard set of rights and responsibilities. They can be conditional (e.g. if X then you must Y, unless X you may not Y, etc).

Nobody can change anybody else's rights or responsibilities, in any way, including by mutual agreement. You cannot sign away your rights or responsibilities. You can only change which conditions in fact obtain, and consequently which conditional rights and responsibilities may or may not apply to you.

In other words, fuck contracts in general.

You think Software Development is bad for this? At least the equipment is inexpensive and the material accessible.

In aviation, you'll pay > $60,0000 of your own money to get your ATPL all to start on a wage of $25,000.

What about medical school or law school? That's pretty expensive and comes out of your pocket.

Many serious professions require you to spend money on your training. It just comes with the territory.

You insensitive clod.

The reason locals don't take the jobs is *because* they don't need it. They are in high enough demand that they can get better-paying jobs elsewhere. The businesses don't like the employees having the leverage like that for once, so they want to bring in more cheap labor to fix that problem and bring down the overall cost of labor, so that the locals *can't* pass up the low-paying jobs because then they'd be passing up all jobs since there's always more low-paid immigrants to do it at that price if the locals won't.

Consider whatever you do for a living. You can command a certain wage for that job, that is to say you can expect to get paid a certain amount, and that amount is set by how low you could possibly afford to go (your costs of your labor), how much employers could possibly afford to pay you (the value of your labor), how many jobs of that kind are open (how in demand your kind of labor is), and how many other people could do that job (how much supply for that kind of labor there is). Consider a scenario where the number of jobs and the number of qualified workers are well-matched: there aren't unfilled jobs, any employer can always find a worker if they're willing to pay them well. But the employers of course want to pay less for the same value of labor if they can. So if they could suddenly bring in a bunch of new workers who for whatever reason can or will accept a much lower pay than you and others in your field (lowering costs and increasing supply), then they will hire all of those people instead of the locals like you, unless locals like you are willing to accept those lower prices too (because if you don't, you'll be passed up for someone who will). They didn't have a shortage of workers, they had a shortage of workers-willing-to-accept-lower-prices. Bringing in more workers willing to accept lower prices forces all of the workers to accept those lower prices by creating an excess of workers and forcing workers to choose between lower pay or unemployment.

Just because a business can't fill a job for a specific price doesn't mean it can't fill it for any price. Maybe they think that price is not worth the value of the work, but if those people are passing up those jobs for higher-paying ones elsewhere, then clearly someone thinks it is worth it, and the other businesses are either just cheapskates who don't want to pay more, or are doing something wrong that they can't get the full value out of their employees' labor, in which case they deserve to fail to those other (higher-paying) businesses that can.

The question is whether those qualified citizens are willing to accept wages as low as the companies want to offer.

Ad the answer is no, so the companies would much rather bring in immigrants over whom they have far more leverage and who will accept lower wages... consequently lowering the average wage for those positions that local citizens are applying for.

The companies offer positions requiring high qualifications and low pay; those who are qualified won't accept the pay, so they cry there's "no qualified applicants" and demand more visas to bring in immigrants willing to accept a lower price.

I actually agree with both of you. The Open SSL guys gave out their work for free for anybody to use. Anybody should be free to do that without repercussions. Code is a kind of literature and thus should be protected by free speech laws.

However, if you pay peanuts (or nothing at all) then likewise you shouldn't expect anything other than monkeys. The real fault here is big business using unverified (in the sense of correctness!) source for security critical components of their system.

If regulation is needed anywhere, it is there. People who develop safety and security critical stuff should be certified and businesses with a turn over $x million dollars should be required to use software developed only by the approved organisations.

There is nothing in this definition that prevents an open source implementation. In fact, there's an argument to say that any such verified implementation must be open source precisely so it can be inspected. But it is quite a lot of work and people need to be paid to do that work. You can't expect to get this level of quality assurance for free.

The members of congress are also partial to the current electoral method, seeing as they're usually members of the major parties too. I wasn't only talking about presidential elections but congressional ones as well. Nobody currently in congress would support election reform as it would undermine their own political careers; we'd still need to first somehow get enough people into congress who would support it. Though I agree, the first step to that is getting the people to want it.

Agreed but the only people who might ever do that would be 3rd party politicians trying to secure more opportunities for them to get elected in the future. So to secure a world where 3rd parties are viable options, we first need to get enough 3rd parties to win that they can institute electoral reform.

I'm glad to hear someone else pointing this out too. :-)

A secondary benefit to this strategy is that if enough people follow it, if everyone in swing states started voting their true choices instead of buying into the two-party horse-race, because their votes didn't matter anyway, then their votes would start to matter. E.g. if we assume there's a lot of Californians who prefer Democrats over Republicans but would really prefer Greens, and they all start voting that way because their votes don't make a difference since the Democrat is a shoe-in anyway, then the Democrats would be weakened and the Greens would become a viable party and now suddenly it really matters who you vote for. You might (as a left-leaning voter) say that would actually be a bad outcome because then the Republicans might win California, but if the right side of the spectrum was doing the same thing meanwhile (e.g. if a lot of Californians who prefer Republicans over Democrats would really prefer Libertarians over either, and started voting Libertarian cause it's not like the Republican was going to win anyway), you could get an actual contested election with multiple viable options and a third party could possibly win the state.

I really wish the various third parties would get together and run a series of ad campaigns in election season targeting would-be third-party voters in swings states telling them "[Liberals/conservatives] of [state], [shoe-in candidate] is in all probably going to win [state] no matter who you vote for. So why waste your vote on [them/their major-party opponent] if that's not who you'd really prefer? Why not vote for [short list of prominent third-party candidates aligned with target audience] instead? They're even more [liberal/conservative] than [shoe-in candidate / their major-party opponent], and a vote for them will bring attention to the issues you really care about like [issues the major parties are neglecting]. Vote third party this election and make your vote count!"

Wish I had mod points.

Someone with a lot of wealth owning stock doesn't impose a constant expense on anyone with little wealth. Who owns what stock has no effect on how much it costs me to live; what businesses exist and competition between them and so on does, but someone is going to own each of them at the end of the day and opening that ownership up to a broader variety of people doesn't make any difference (other than the overall positive economic benefits of investing money with those best capable to use it and diversified risk and all of those things that stock enables).

Stock is also an investment that's immediately available to anyone who has any kind of savings income to set aside, unlike something like renting income properties which requires you to already have either huge savings or a huge income just to get into that game (to buy the extra housing) and then gets easier from there. So stock exhibits none of the iniquities that I'm concerned about. It's a form of investment that everyone can participate in.

In fact people with lower incomes benefit the most (proportional to their invested amount) from stock investment, if we assume that their lower incomes are indicative of an inability to generate a return on capital through their own activity. By instead trading that capital to someone better capable of generating a return on it, in exchange for a portion of their business, everyone including the lower-income investor benefits more than if they had just hung onto that capital and not invested it. Whereas someone more capable than average of generating a great return on capital through their own actions, who would likely have a higher income already because of that productivity, is better off hanging onto that capital and putting it to good use, rather than investing it into other people's less-productive ventures.

Also, I never said anyone shouldn't be able to borrow money. Interest-free loans are possible, and if useful will still exist in a world without interest. I imagine a roundabout form of such (payment plans) would be extremely common in an interest-free world: expensive items can be bought on different terms (payment due dates) for different prices, where you're charged a higher price for longer terms (more delayed payment). A pair of such transactions is how temporary use of expensive things could still be possible without technically renting them: the "rental" company would technically be a buyer and seller of used [whatever]s, selling on longer terms for higher prices and buying on shorter (immediate) terms for lower prices, and the "renter" would technically be buying something on long terms at a high price and then selling it back on short (immediate) terms at a lower price well before he's finished paying it off, thus canceling the remainder of his debt toward the purchase.

He'd lose some money in such a the deal and the "rental" company would profit from it, but the "renter" could technically avoid that by selling back to someone else for a better deal... if he was willing to accept the inconvenience of finding such a buyer, which most people wanting to use something temporarily wouldn't be, so the profit to be made "renting" things out in such a way would be driven down the the value of the convenience such a "rental" company provides. Meanwhile people who don't want something temporarily, who want something permanently and just can't afford the huge barriers to entry into ownership, can start "renting" and just keep it up until eventually it's theirs and they can stop, and if they do eventually decide they don't want it (they're moving house, for example), take the time to find a buyer who will take it off their hands for a price and terms that doesn't leave them losing on the deal.

The tricks that Muslim (and Middle Ages Catholic) countries use(d) to get around the prohibition on interest usually involve(d) a rental contract as part of the complex financial instrument used, so those would not be technically possible under my proposal. That was one of the problems with such earlier opposition to interest: it didn't recognize it as just one (major) instance of the broader phenomenon of rent which is the source of the trouble. (Another problem is that they actually banned it as in you would be punished if you tried to enter into such an arrangement, whereas I only advocate not legally protecting such contracts, which makes them unsuitable for widespread economic use [as what good is an unenforceable contract], by having the state do less rather than more, maintaining compatibility with libertarian principles [in the broad, not-US-centric sense]).

I haven't said anything against investments. Investments are great. You can buy goods and commodities when and where they're cheap and sell them when and where they're expensive. You can buy equity in promising business ventures (stock), taking part in all their risks and rewards, and profiting if they do. There are all kinds of investments that don't involve rent and interest.

In fact a hopeful side-effect of the effects I intend to achieve by eliminating rent and interest would be that lower-income people would have more money to save and invest, especially in stock, which means that more resources are in the hands of the people who can get the most return from their use, growing the whole economy (to the benefit of higher-income people too, who have more resources invest in them to put to productive use), and further increasing the mobility of the lower classes by better allowing them to participate in that growing economy.

Ok thanks, I understand what you're talking about now, but I still don't see how anything I've suggested impacts it. I'm not at all talking about a command economy, I'm talking about fixing the bug in market economies that makes people think command economies might be necessary. A way to have a free market (which is really the thing you're talking about that allocates resources well) without capitalism (which is not the same thing as a free market, and I'd argue actually makes markets less free and less efficient by allowing some parties in an advantageous position to merely extract value from the market without contributing anything to it).

Also, re "in America, pretty near everyone has more than they need": everyone needs a place to live, and though it's apparently nigh-impossible to find statistics on how many people own houses (vs how many houses are occupied by people who own them), personal income statistics compared to housing cost statistics strongly suggest that most people in America don't have a place to live of their own -- and are subsequently forced to borrow a place to live, for a fee, from others who have more living-space than they personally need, many of them for their entire lives, generation after generation.

That's actually the origin of my concern with this problem: if I didn't have to pay housing rent, I could afford to work a whole lot less, and would probably just freelance working for myself to supply for my own meager needs. I work a lot more than I have to to make a lot more money than I actually need to pay for the things I consume in a comfortable lifestyle, because I have to pay a lot of money every month forever in order to not be homeless, and I need to make a whole damn lot more money than that to escape from that effectively infinite debt, because the finite debt I'd need to replace it with is still so oppressive, partly because of factors that effect interest rates but also because the cost of housing itself is so damn high, because it's in high demand because an extra house is a free money machine (when rent is possible) and that's a really desirable thing to have if you can afford it. Get rid of rent and there's no reason to own housing you're not living in, and all the housing currently being rented out would have to be sold to the only people still interested in it, namely everyone who was stuck renting before; and it'd have to be sold on terms they could afford, or else no sale and no profit for anyone.

That's what I think is the insight Marx missed. Yes, people are beholden to their employers, but that's only half the problem. They're beholden to their employers because they need money from them to pay their landlords and creditors and other capitalists on the expense side of their cash flow. Fix that end of the problem and suddenly the employers have much less leverage (because the employees can more easily walk away from the job and not have their entire lives fall apart as soon as next month's rent is due), and most of the workplace problems Marx laments go away.