High frequency traders tend to provide higher liquidity to the markets that they trade in, which is objectively better for the marketplace as a whole. As evidence of this, I submit the fact that a number of exchanges actually pay traders to increase liquidity, while charging traders to decrease liquidity.

This is the real problem with the current system. Market makers that have the ability to see incoming trades and place their own trades ahead of them have a huge unfair advantage over everyone else. This behavior is what I would call "basically stealing" as it allows some participants in the market to see the future before everyone else does. And I don't just mean because they have a fast connection to the exchanges. Allowing these people to see incoming bids/offers before they are executed is tantamount to allowing them to see everyone's poker cards before they are played.

So in summary, high frequency trading is a good thing, unless it is coupled with incoming bids/asks before they are executed on the market. Taxing high frequency trades penalizes both the good and the bad, so the tax is a bad idea. Instead we need to eliminate the information asymmetry by prohibiting trading based on incoming bids/asks.

Analogy fail.

What you describe is exactly what we want to have happen. The idea is to make the action that causes harm expensive, and the action that does not cause harm cheap. Thus, molestation should be made expensive (illegal) while possession should be made cheap (legal), discouraging people from causing harm to others.

Where your analogy fails is that murder is exactly the problem we are trying to prevent by making it expensive (illegal). The GP is making the distinction that possession of child porn is not the actual problem, molestation is.

That's a step in the right direction, but the actual proper way to use the tax code to influence behavior is to tax pollution.

Imagine if we could magically get electricity from sources that have no external costs. Then we would not care how much electricity people used because nobody is harmed by the use of electricity. It just so happens that we get most of our electricity from sources that have huge external costs in the form of pollution. So tax the emission of pollutants and the actual harm to society either stops or is paid for by the tax revenue.

Note that this tax is not designed to raise revenue just for the sake of raising revenue. If all electricity was generated by solar power (which has minimal external costs), only a small amount of revenue would be generated. In the case of photovoltaic solar power, only pollution generated from creation and disposal of the panels and electronics would generate revenue.

In a completely free market, this is when a third producer of widgets will enter the market and compete with the monopolistic widget seller. The ability for anyone to enter a new market and compete with the existing players in that market is one of the keys to having a properly functioning capitalistic economy, yet this freedom is often overlooked by many. In your example, consider what would happen if the two original widget makers were evenly matched. After a while, they might both become complacent and the price of a widget might start to rise. As soon as an outside entity sees the widget market and decides that they can produce a better or cheaper widget, they will enter the market regardless of how many producers of widgets exist already.

The real problem with capitalism as currently implemented in the United States (and many other places) is that some markets have significant barriers to entry that new competitors must pass. The market for cell phones and mobile internet is a great example of these types of barriers. In order to enter the market, each competitor must have the use of some chunk of electromagnetic spectrum for their devices to use. Suitable spectrum is limited by simple physics so the number of competitors is clearly limited. Also the government has allocated some spectrum for other uses, so the available spectrum is even more limited. Without the ability for new competitors to freely enter the market, a natural oligopoly forms based on whoever has control of the spectrum, and competition is limited.

Note that the existing competitors in the cell phone market don't necessarily even need to collude to drive prices up. They can each independently examine the market and determine that since the market has become controlled by a limited number of entities, each competitor's profits will be maximized by keeping prices high. It might be true that in the long term, the most efficient competitor will do better by lowering prices to capture the entire market, but that will take years or decades to accomplish. And in the meantime, their profits could have been higher by keeping prices higher. We've all seen the obsession with next quarter's results, so it is no surprise which path is taken.

Wired internet services have the same problem, but with slightly different barriers. Many communities have exclusive franchise agreements limiting competition. But even without those governmental limits, future competitors face increasing resistance from residents because many people in a community do not enjoy having roads torn up to put in parallel infrastructure. Another problem is that geographically large competitors can artificially lower prices in areas where new competition happens to pop up. They may even take a loss in these areas for a short time until the new competitor is driven out of business. The large competitor is able to do this because they have captive areas where the prices remain high and can use the profits from these areas to subsidize the losses in the competitive areas.

These types of problems don't happen in markets without significant barriers to entry. Take the production of pencils. Anyone can start a company producing pencils if they wish. You can even make one at a time in your basement if you wish. Because of this freedom, pencil prices are driven close to the cost of production by existing competition, along with the threat of more competition if the existing competitors become inefficient.

In summary, I think the problem to which you refer is not one of capitalism itself, but of the current implementation. "Unbridled capitalism" does work in free markets, but not in markets with significant barriers to entry.

Actually you gain weight when falling off a building. Your mass m = E/c^2. When falling, the energy contained in your body has increased by the amount of kinetic energy you mention. So the mass of your body has increased by the amount of kinetic energy added to your body divided by the square of the speed of light.

Your weight has thus increased assuming a constant gravitational acceleration. Since you're falling toward the earth, you will actually experience even more weight gain because the gravitational acceleration due to the earth's mass gets larger the closer you get to the Earth. The increasing gravitational acceleration will have a much larger effect on your weight than the small amount of mass gain.

Not such a good weight loss plan.

I don't think it's really fair to say that nuclear and fossil fuels have the same problem of limited supply. Technically it's true, but the limits are so much different. With fossil fuels we might have on the order of 1,000 years of fuel left at earth's current power usage. But with nuclear fission (including thorium reactors and seawater uranium extraction) we might have on the order of billions of years of fuel available at our current power usage. Even if we were to sustain exponential growth in power output, nuclear fission might be able to get us through on the order of 10,000 years.

That said, I like your forward thinking, and I wish more people would consider the future beyond next quarter's financial report.

Of course it is absurd that the Texas school board is even considering such changes, but it really is up to the people of Texas to fix their school board.

On the other hand, if an education in Texas gets bad enough, universities and employers might start to pass over applicants from Texas because they are under qualified. This seems like a good thing as it is basically the free market sorting out the educated from the ignorant.