Ah, but the risk of making an area the size of a small state uninhabitable for decades without incurring significant health risks is unique to nuclear.
In that the risk is unplanned. Hydroelectric has similar risk, but it's planned.
That is not agility, the market is merely fickle and panicky.
In other words, agility. You can be too responsive though that is less of a problem than you claim.
how are you going to buy them?
With other goods of value. Keep in mind the original poster was speaking of using gold and silver as money. How many people buy euros with their euros?
The historical evidence shows that Austerity causes demand contraction and often demand spiral, it has never in global history solved a budget crisis.
That's like claiming emergency rooms are responsible for vehicular deaths just because so many people die there. No one goes through a crash bout of austerity because they're doing well just as no one goes to an emergency room unless they have substantial problems.
The Euro eliminated currency barriers to unequal trade relationships which substantially hurt the Greece economy.
In other words, Greece fucked around for a couple of decades rather than deal with the above problem. Now they're paying the consequences.
The time to implement austerity and similar measures would have been two decades ago. It's not like the "unequal trade relationship" showed up yesterday.
And austerity does work. The Scandinavian countries successfully practice austerity right now. When you control spending over generations rather than only when your creditors force you to, you can have a much better society.
Debts on a national level will only rise as long as there is demand for that debt and confidence in it, or banks out to make money by selling people shit and betting against it.
It's worth noting here that Greece lied about its financial health for a time (and may still be lying, not like I care). So some of that debt was picked up under false pretenses.
You believe that thick, expensive concrete walls will appear magically by themselves without regulations? Or that a business won't sell some plutonium to the highest bidder if not prevented by the higher cost of a penalty? Then you're delusional.
There's always liability. And given the current huge burden of regulation, I don't buy that it's making nuclear plants safer, especially when we have nuclear plants operating well past their design lifespan.
You need examples? Check out Fukushima and Chernobyl.
Neither which was a failure of regulation, let us note. Fukushima was overwhelmed by a natural disaster for which regulation was inadequate at the time, but would have in around five to ten years (IMHO). Chernobyl was run by the people who regulated it. They deliberately ignored their regulations and took it into a regime where it would fail.
You have the same influence over the government as you do over the market. Actually, because of the *one person, one vote* thing, you have much more so
No. There are very substantial differences between the two. The most important is simply that markets can cater to small groups and interests and wants that change day to day. They have a responsive to wants that are simply not present in a government.
Further, this lack of immediate responsiveness in government is by design. There is no democratic government in the world that allows real time modification by its constituents/customers.
I think it's completely foolish to equate the infrequent and very coarse-grained opportunities for control changes of an election to the fluid and fine-grained changes of a modern market.
Yes, you are, with your vote
What does "control" mean here?
As an individual, you have just as much control over the government as you do the market.
I think I've already explained why that isn't so. You seem to have not gotten the point of the orange juice example. There's no analogue to the light weight activity of buying orange juice in a government.
And the government, as our representative, has every right to compete in the market and inform us where danger lies.
That would be termed an obligation not a right.
Otherwise, it's not really open, it's merely privateering, with everything simply going to the highest bidder, which is really what we have because presently that is who the government serves, and that is because the public can't be bothered...
So why are you wasting my time? I'm supposedly controlling this mess? That's news to me.
Meanwhile no biggie. There's enough demand to keep the orange juice infrastructure afloat and the price almost reasonable. But the real truth is that the price is arbitrarily set by some commodity brokers in London, Hong Kong or New York, under the watchful eye of the triads, yakuza and other wealthy "families". The whole "supply/demand" thing is a total myth.
Nice to know that. Here's the problem. Supply and demand is not a myth, but rather a basic observable thing of any market. It doesn't matter who sets the price when I can choose not to buy and the supplier can choose not to supply.
you ain't gettin' any for less than a thousand dollars a quart
Which I can do should I desire it enough.
Oh yes there is. You're demonstrating it right now. Capitalism has failure baked in BECAUSE it doesn't have murder baked in.
See, capitalist free market competition creates winners and losers (failures).
The obvious rebuttal is that the loser can win later. There's nothing forcing you to do job X forever on, especially, when you demonstrate that you aren't good enough at job X to make a career of it.
Capitalism assumes, just like how communism makes assumptions, that the people who fail during the down times would pick themselves up the capitalist way. They don't. At least some of them will become disillusioned with capitalism.
So what? Capitalism is not a system of inspiration, but rather a system for getting shit done. And how are these "disillusioned" people going to do better in any other system? They have behavioral or psychological problems. Those don't magically get better in other systems.
But capitalism doesn't have murder baked in. So instead of letting those people die off, capitalism would try to uplift them too.
Why is letting people "die off" supposedly better? You do realize that capitalism also licked the overpopulation problem too. Just employ women gainfully. There's no need to kill people off.
In other words, capitalism's baked in failure is that it provides the perfect breeding ground for communism. Marx himself was a rich boy, whose wealth came from capitalism. Didn't stop him and other rich boys from biting the hand that fed them.
No. It's status signalling, like buying a huge yacht.
And just like in the market, you can vote for the government you desire.
In a market, I get what I want when I "vote" and the decisions can be fluidly changed. If I want to drink orange juice in the morning, I don't have to assemble a coalition of like-minded orange juice drinkers. Nor do I run the risk of losing and having to drink Coke for the next four years because I couldn't persuade enough of my fellow citizens to drink orange juice instead.
In government, all we have to do is stop reelecting crooked politicians, you know, like maybe being a bit more involved during the primaries, and demanding open primaries that don't favor any particular faction, and learning how to tune out propaganda.
I already did that. Somehow the crooked politicians keep getting elected.
The huge difference here is that actual markets are quite refined. I control how much I choose to spend and how engaged I am with other members of the market. With a government, I don't have that degree of control and a lot of other people wouldn't like it if I did have the desired degree of control. That's the primary reason I favor throwing off most government functions to the private world. I get to have the control I want and you get to not care.
So what's the best we can hope for?
A free society where we can be the best we can be as we see it.
Outcomes. We try to optimize outcomes.
There isn't one obvious standard of optimization. Optimization inherently requires a choice about what is to be optimized. For example, a common failure mode is to optimize that which is more easily measurable. Governments do this all the time economically with GDP, a measure of economic activity. This results, among other problems, with the well-known problem of the Broken Window fallacy where economic activity is considered more important than the creation of value.
So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of money? -- Ayn Rand
