You know, I've thought for a long time that allowing the government to make laws that specify fines, and allowing the government to keep the proceeds from the fines, is a major conflict of interest. Any time a government want to raise revenue, but find that raising tax rates is unpalatable, they find it too easy to pass another law. It seems to me that laws should be passed to reduce harm to some (logical) class. In the case of red lights, and the running of same, the class of people harmed are the class of all drivers. I wish there were some way to divide all the fines amongst all drivers. That way there would still be an incentive for red light runners to forgo their favourite pastime, but there would be less incentive for governments to over-legislate red light running.

~Loyal

Yes, that's totally believable

That's where all the evidence points. It was her claim from the first. She has maintained it consistently for ten years. The objects of her rhetoric, who have great incentive for proving she's a shill for IBM, attempted to do so, but unsuccessfully. The court ordered IBM to disclose any relationship between them and Groklaw, and IBM claimed, under penalty of perjury, that there was none.

Your evidence that she isn't a paralegal attempting to learn how to blog is...it sounds suspicious.

Yeah, I know where the preponderance of the evidence is.

~Loyal

Founded just to cover the SCO/Caldera UNIX lawsuits back in 2003,

Actually, that's not true. It was founded so that Pamela Jones could learn about blogging. It just happened to occur at the same time that the SCO debacle was starting.

~Loyal

It sounds like some groups were attempting to break the law (perhaps due to ignorance or error in what non-profits are permitted to do), and withdrew their tax-exempt-applications when IRS investigations caught their violation.

I suppose it's possible that as many as 149 out of those 150 organizations withdrew their applications because they intended to do something illegal. I can't agree that they withdrew their applications when the IRS caught their violations, because the IRS didn't catch any violations.

However, it's also possible that none intended to do something illegal. Instead, it's possible that they withdrew their applications when they found that the IRS was going to, in the IRS's words, violate IRS policy in pursuing them and their families in a manner that was, in their words again, wrong, incorrect, insensitive, and inappropriate.

You know; either way.

~Loyal

That building owner was living the libertarian dream where his government couldn't stop him doing anything he wanted by enforcing pesky regulations.

Bangladesh is listed as 132 (out of 177) on the Heritage Foundation's 2013 index of economic freedom, which awards it the category of "Mostly Unfree." It's not quite as free as Tajikistan, but a little more free than Cameroon. It's not exactly a libertarian Utopia.

~Loyal

1) Fiat currency is good.

It has it's advantages, but it has it's disadvantages as well.

2) Government debt is the foundation of an economy.

So, you're saying that under anarchy there's no such thing as an economy? You're saying that a government without debt can only happen when the economy has been eliminated?

3) Greed is the cause of inflation.

So, that would mean that they're about ten thousand times greedier in Zimbabwe as they are in, say, the United States of America? That USAans are positively altruistic in comparison? That a wave of altruism swept America and the world in 1929?

4) You're lazy. If you want details, grow a pair and read.

No, I'm drunk. But in the morning I'll be sober.

~Loyal

That's like saying that Canadian Tire Money [wikipedia.org] is money because there are shops (and not just Canadian Tire) that will accept it as currency.

Actually, an economist would say that Canadian Tire Money (learned something new today) is money. Economists define money as "anything that separates the act of buying from the act of selling." For example, in post-WW2 Germany, currency restrictions made cigarettes and Cognac money. People would exchange what they wanted to buy, in one case gasoline, for cigarettes. The gasoline salesman didn't want the cigarettes for smoking; in fact she didn't want cigarettes at all. She simply wanted the things she could buy with cigarettes. Cigarettes were used from small purchases, and Cognac was used for large ones.

~Loyal

A gold standard isn't magic, nor does is prevent inflation or deflation.

Actually, it sort of is. Consider when inflation is high (that is: when the growth in the gold supply exceeds growth of the population), then gold isn't worth as much. That means that it isn't as valuable to people to mine and mint it. Marginal mines close down. CEOs decide not to produce minor veins. Workers move into other lines of business. The supply of gold falls. The inflation is reduced. Now consider when inflation is low. Gold becomes more valuable relative to the available goods and services. Wildcatters spring up. Chemists research more efficient ways to extract gold from tailings. People start using alternatives in electronic circuits. The supply of gold rises. The deflation is reduced.

Now consider fiat money. Unless there are rigid controls on the creation of money, and who gets to spend it, then the guy who decides to make the money benefits from making it, and there is little limit to how fast he would want to.

~Loyal

Just look at the outrage that these tweets have caused. It looks to me like gamers do care.

People who tweet about games care. Which is but a tiny fraction of the people who buy games (as tweeters are but a tiny fraction of the population in general, despite Big Media's attempts to have you believe otherwise, but I digress...).

This is Electronic Gaming's "AOL Moment." Back In The Day, we were all on Usenet. Which is to say, a rather insular community of us self-important early-adopter geeks that nobody could really make a dime from were all on Usenet. When AOL provided access to Usenet for all its users (or "AOLusers" as we called them -- weren't we so clever??), we bitched and moaned and derided and threatened and wrung our hands but there was nothing we could do because the great community of "Casual Users" was vastly larger than we hardcore hackers -- once they were shown what to do -- AND they spent money, AND they lined up in nice neat rows for the Marketers to measure and count and shepherd. The landscape was moved to catch where the dollars were dropping -- not to make Internet communities and communication better (well, at least as far as we self-important geeks judged "better").

And what is this based on?
My personal experience. I've played this course before...

Don't want a gaming console that requires a persistent internet connection? Don't get one!

Exactly right.

And the market will show that the vast majority of gamers could not care less whether an Internet connection is required or not, so long as the game is fun. And since game development is all shifting towards multi-player anyway, with only token efforts being made for the lonely solo console players, this whole issue borders upon moot.

Five years from now, just two categories of game will be made: Multi-player for consoles, solo (with multi-player functionality) for mobile devices.

The reason drugs can get banned is because they are so incredibly devastating to individuals to families and to communities when their use becomes common.

That has to be balanced against the incredibly devastating effects of imprisonment. Forget for a moment that we're discussing some filthy, undesirable, immoral, mewling quim. In fact, literally forget it. Imagine, for whatever reason, that we've randomly selected some fine, upstanding, pillar of the community and decided to imprison him for twenty-to-life. What do you think would be the effects on the individuals, families, and communities, then? Now imagine that we've done that to the extent that it's doubled our prison population. Are the effects cumulative? Or even emergent? Okay, now let's add in the asset forfeiture laws giving the random selectors incentive to randomly select more marks, errm...criminals. How do you like your results now?

~Loyal

I personally think freedom of the press is really important, but that you do not have a right to publish lies.

The really nice thing about the right to publish lies is that there are then no custodians with the power to determine whether something is a lie or not. Suppose you're a Conservative who's written, "Obama is the worst president ever!" Do you really want a bunch of Liberals judging whether that's a lie or not? Or suppose you're a Liberal who's written, "Bush lied, and people died!" Do you really want a bunch of Conservatives judging whether that's a lie?

The downside is that people are going to read lies, but it seems to me that the latter is preferable to the former.

~Loyal

Here's where theory and reality conflict.

I wouldn't say that it's theory and reality conflicting so much as it is ideology and reality, or possibly desires and reality. The fact that, the higher price a good or service is, the less that's demanded is so well established that it would hardly be worth arguing about if it weren't for entrenched interests who benefit from claiming the opposite. The only exception I know of to this general rule are "other than normal" goods.

So, is labor an other than normal good? I don't think any economist would claim such. An other than normal good is something like the potato during the Irish potato famine. What happened is that the demand of potatoes went up as the price went up. That seemingly paradoxical result was because all the alternatives were even more expensive. People reverted to potatoes because it was the only way they could get the needed calories to stay alive.

So for labor to be an other than normal good there would have to be no alternatives. Unfortunately for proponents of minimum wage, there are. Hiring highly productive people to replace more low-skilled people is one alternative. Outsourcing to other countries without a minimum wage is another. Increasing automation is a third.

Let's try a thought experiment. Suppose we're trying to decide between two minimum wage laws, one setting it at 10 credits per parsec (Yes, I know.) and the other at 11 cpp. If increasing the minimum wage truly didn't reduce employment then the law setting the minimum wage at 11 cpp is clearly better because low-paid people now have more money to spend, and employers continue to make a profit. Employers continue to make a profit because otherwise they would go out of business, which would reduce employment, and our assumption was that wouldn't happen. Now consider a law setting the minimum wage at 12 cpp. It's clearly better than one setting it at 11 cpp. A law setting it at 13 cpp is clearly better than one setting it at 12 cpp. This can continue, considering higher and higher minimum wages, until each worker is granted an infinite amount of money per parsec. This is clearly impossible, therefore the minimum wage law must affect employment.

There's no concrete evidence that the minimum wage reduces employment.

That's not true. There's plenty of evidence that it does--most notably the 1983 Brown study.

Some studies go one way, others another,

Some studies are seriously flawed. For example the 1992 Card and Kreuger study is flawed for studying same-store employment. Since most new businesses fail before two years pass, studying same-store employment discards lots of important data. There's a humorous example why this is true in the proof that no one is ever executed on death row. Imagine an economist trying to determine how many people are executed by taking a survey of people on death row one year. Then the following year they go back and survey those same people. If the people are no longer extant, then they discard that information. Thus they arrive at the conclusion that no one was executed because all of the people in the final data set were not executed during the year.

Other studies are flawed because they look at one measure at the exclusion of others. For example, unemployment is defined as the number of people looking for work divided by the sum of people looking for work plus those having a job. Clearly the desire is for unemployment to go down. However, a myopic focus on the unemployment figure can conceal negative consequences. The 1983 Brown study I mentioned earlier found that teenagers leave the work force in response to increases in the minimum wage. If those teenagers leave the work force then the number of people looking for work may fall, despite there being fewer people having a job. The unemployment figure could fall, but no one concerned with the welfare of teenagers would claim that their state has improved.

~Loyal

Because it's never existed, never will exist even Adam Smith saw that the government was going to have to be involved to keep the actors honest.

You might profit from a brief study of the semantic version of the slippery slope fallacy.

~Loyal

You live in a deluded fantasy that free market and zero regulation means honest brokers and business ventures. Grow up and get passed Friedman's fallacy along with Ayn Rand.

Despite your post being chock-a-block full of cogent reasoning and nearly unassailable data, I'm forced to disagree. Firstly, cshark never claimed that free markets and zero regulation meant honest brokers and business ventures. He claimed that it meant innovation. Secondly, and assuming you meant "past" instead of "passed," Friedman's fallacy appears to be failing to live up to it's name. The Heritage Foundation has an annual survey of countries rated by economic freedom, and invariably the countries with the most economic freedom either have the most affluence, or they have the fastest growth if they aren't already affluent. You can find it here. Thirdly, you're mistaken* when you lump Friedman and Ayn Rand together. Friedman was a Republican with libertarian leanings, while Rand was an Objectivist with strong lunatic leanings.

~Loyal

*Unless you meant that Ayn Rand had gotten past Friedman's fallacy, in which case I'm without words.