If everyone was always nice, communism would be infallible.

If oxygen were privatised, then a lot of oxygen billing agent job positions would suddenly be filled.

The right for people to breathe air freely would not be trumped by the right for oxygen billing agents to keep being paid.

Newayz, the immoral act here is greed.

This so much.

1) Google is as good as selling photographs with its news aggregation;

2) 99% of all photography may be shit, but "pros" don't deserve any special treatment.

On the other hand, I don't care much about intellectual property. I have one possible solution: an agreement to opt in or opt out of the intellectual property system. If a company opts in, it is required to pay royalties for all the IP it uses, with no exceptions or other get-out clauses. Anyone who is not in the system is free to use others' IP as they wish, BUT ALSO has no protection over their own IP.

Is that a suicide note?

No, because most "privacy-concerned" people already understand that "economic freedom" just means the freedom for people to gain unlimited power, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Since AFAICT no individual has broken the law here - at worst they've broken an employment contract - "punishment" of an individual would have to be extra-legal.

Ofc we're going by the assumption that humans really do think "oh that guy's being punished for X so I should avoid X" rather than "that guy's being punished for X so I should be more sneaky when I do X", which - if the existence of crime is anything to go by - is how people actually think.

That was a rubbish analogy.

No, I indicated that it makes no sense to punish the government, then went on to describe that e.g. firing someone isn't punishing them. But, in general, punishing an employee doesn't make them work harder.

Anyway, I wouldn't work for any private firm which paid bonuses or cut pay according to performance in a particular role. I will do the best in any role I am given, and expect all my colleagues to do the same. If one of us genuine can't do the job, we shouldn't be in that position. I have never worked for the government.

FWIW, your sentence read:

That's about expectations, not punishment.

Ah, kids of Slashdot. Governments have been sanctioning extra-judicial killings since the first man in a seat of power had a grudge against another. There is nothing new about this. "Police brutality" is almost a set phrase, although the white, middle-class men on Slashdot are less likely to be a victim of it. I am the law, etc. Assassinating 4 people in a country of 300 million is entirely unacceptable, but it still isn't going around killing everyone.

"Because it is morally wrong"

Your moral compass sounds awful and you should replace it.

"Once the government has the ability, that ability extends"

Slippery slope fallacy. The government has the ability to execute, but it doesn't execute everyone.

"It would be better to unionize"

Agreed.

Yeah in the US the poor simply can't afford stuff.

Each regime deals with scarcity in a different way.

Since politicians get to choose what belongs to whom in the first place (via the legislative process which defines property), I do believe we're going to find ourselves a circular argument!

Yup. I find it interesting that we've gone from "communist!" to "terrorist!" and back round to "socialist!" quite quickly.

Yeah, that makes things worse.

But the trouble is that the free market allows companies to get so big that so many people rely on them that there would be a lot of suffering if the company collapsed.

It therefore seems necessary to not allow anything to get too big to fail.

Because "citizenship" is patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, and "social responsibility" is orthogonal to a country founded on the ostensible principle of rational selfishness. :P