From an anarcho-capitalist and Austrian perspective, the attack of these subjects is severe. The core criticism is that welfare economics often dresses political value judgments in mathematics and presents the result as scientific optimization.
The Austrian objection starts earlier than the libertarian one.
There is no measurable quantity called âoesocial welfare.â
You value a steak dinner. I value the money more. We trade. Both reveal, through action, that each prefers the new situation.
Economics observes the voluntary exchange.
Now a welfare economist writes something like:
Social welfare = Aliceâ(TM)s utility + Bobâ(TM)s utility + Charlieâ(TM)s utility.
The Austrian response is: what units are you adding?
Utility is ordinal. You prefer A to B. This does not mean your satisfaction is 17.3 units and mine is 12.8 units.
You cannot scientifically establish that taking $1,000 from one person causes less lost utility than giving the money to another person creates.
You can support redistribution as a moral or political position. But calling the resulting calculation a social welfare function does not transform the moral judgment into an objective measurement.
âoeSociety choosesâ is dangerous language.
Individuals choose. Individuals act. Individuals own things. Individuals bear costs.
âoeSociety decided to spend $10 billionâ usually means a political process selected an expenditure and taxpayers were compelled to finance it.
From an anarcho-capitalist perspective, aggregating millions of people into a fictional decision-maker hides the essential question:
Who decided?
Who pays?
Who benefits?
Who refused?
What happens to the person who says no?
Social choice theory deserves some credit here. Its own results expose serious problems with turning individual preferences into a coherent âoewill of the people.â
The Condorcet paradox shows that majority preferences can cycle. Arrowâ(TM)s theorem shows that no general ranking system satisfies several attractive conditions simultaneously.
The anarcho-capitalist reaction is almost sarcastic: you spent decades proving mathematically that there is no coherent social preference ordering, then continued discussing how experts should optimize social welfare.
Pareto efficiency is much narrower than political rhetoric suggests.
Pareto efficiency has a legitimate analytical meaning. The trouble starts when economists move from voluntary exchange to hypothetical compensation.
Suppose a regulation gives Group A benefits economists estimate at $100 million and imposes costs of $60 million on Group B.
Some welfare analysis says the policy produces a $40 million net social gain.
The libertarian response is simple: Group B lost $60 million. Did anyone ask them?
If A gains $100 and B loses $60, saying âoesociety gained $40â treats separate people as entries in one accounting ledger.
An anarcho-capitalist rejects the premise. A benefit to one person does not cancel an imposed loss on another person merely because an economist performs subtraction.
The knowledge problem destroys the fantasy of optimization.
This is the Austrian argument associated especially with Friedrich Hayek.
Economic knowledge is dispersed. Prices contain information produced by millions of independent decisions. Preferences change. Local circumstances change. Resources have competing uses.
A central analyst does not possess the information needed to calculate the âoeoptimalâ allocation.
A market does not require one person to know everything. Prices coordinate plans without a central mind directing the entire system.
Welfare economics often asks, âoeWhat allocation maximizes welfare?â
The Austrian response is, âoeYou do not know the relevant preferences, opportunity costs, entrepreneurial discoveries, future alternatives, or counterfactual prices required to answer your own question.â
The calculation problem is worse without genuine market prices.
This is the argument strongly associated with Ludwig von Mises.
A bureaucrat deciding whether resources should produce railways, hospitals, housing, batteries, or server farms needs meaningful prices for capital goods.
Those prices emerge from exchange, private ownership, profit, and loss.
Without genuine market pricing, planners are not optimizing. They are allocating according to administrative rules, political pressure, historical budgets, lobbying, and guesswork.
A spreadsheet does not solve the economic calculation problem. More computing power does not solve a missing-price problem.
âoeMarket failureâ analysis often compares reality with an imaginary perfect market.
This is one of the strongest libertarian criticisms.
The usual pattern is:
Real markets have imperfect information, transaction costs, externalities, monopolistic tendencies, and unequal outcomes.
Therefore, government intervention might improve the result.
The missing step is institutional comparison.
Government officials also have imperfect information. Regulation has compliance costs. Voters are rationally ignorant. Agencies seek larger budgets. Politicians respond to concentrated interest groups. Regulations create unintended consequences.
The relevant comparison is not:
imperfect market versus perfect government.
The relevant comparison is:
imperfect market process versus imperfect political process.
Once you make that comparison, many clean textbook conclusions become much weaker.
Social choice theory accidentally supplies ammunition to libertarians.
This field is less inherently collectivist than welfare economics.
Social choice theory demonstrates that collective decision mechanisms have deep structural problems.
Majority rule can cycle.
Agenda setters can influence outcomes.
Strategic voting changes results.
Different voting systems produce different winners from the same underlying preferences.
There is no neutral mechanism for converting individual rankings into a single collective preference under all desirable conditions.
A libertarian conclusion follows naturally: if collective choice is structurally problematic, reduce the number of decisions imposed collectively. Leave more decisions with individuals, families, firms, voluntary associations, insurers, cooperatives, charities, and contractual communities.
Social choice theory often asks, âoeHow should everyone collectively choose one option?â
The anarcho-capitalist asks, âoeWhy must everyone choose the same option?â
That question cuts much deeper.
The deepest conflict concerns consent.
Mainstream welfare economics often focuses on outcomes.
Anarcho-capitalism focuses heavily on means.
Suppose forced redistribution produces a statistical improvement under some selected welfare function. The anarcho-capitalist still asks whether coercion became legitimate because an economist assigned weights to different people's utility.
From this perspective, the central problem with much welfare economics is not bad arithmetic. The problem is a category error.
Economics studies choices, scarcity, exchange, prices, production, and consequences.
The moment an economist says, âoeThis distribution is socially better,â a moral judgment has entered the analysis. The economist should identify the ethical assumptions instead of presenting them as a technical output.
The harsh Austrian verdict would be this:
Welfare economics starts with subjective individual preferences, admits they cannot be directly measured or meaningfully added across people, constructs a mathematical social welfare function anyway, inserts political judgments into its parameters, and then announces an âoeoptimalâ social outcome.
Social choice theory is more interesting because much of its best work demonstrates why the phrase âoesociety prefers Xâ is often logically unstable.
The anarcho-capitalist alternative is less ambitious and more disciplined: voluntary exchange, private property, freedom of association, decentralized decision-making, and liability for harms. Instead of trying to maximize an imaginary aggregate welfare number, allow people to pursue different goals and coordinate through consent.
The strongest criticism is not âoeall welfare economists are socialists.â Many are not. The stronger accusation is that the framework gives technocratic politics a scientific-looking vocabulary. Words such as optimization, social welfare, efficiency, and compensation criteria often conceal the real political questions: whose property is taken, who decides, who pays, and whether refusal is permitted.

The detachment you describe is fleeting, at best, in this example.

Sure, they arrive at a separate terminal, they enjoy a shorter TSA line, and they can spend some time in a more private, less crowded area UNTIL they need to board their commercial flight - then they board a shuttle, travel across the runways, then disembark and walk the regular terminal to get to the gate where they wait to board their commercial flight just like everyone else.

This terminal is targeted at the traveling salesman that can expense the $5K/year membership - this is not a service for billionaires (they fly private) or celebrities, this is for guys with expense accounts.

Even if you paid the $5K for this terminal, you wouldn't avoid any of the things you complain about - you board the plane from the same gate as everyone else, and you are still flying commercial - you just have a nicer place to wait and a shorter TSA line. Oh, and maybe snacks.

This terminal is nothing more than a perk SFO can offer that traveling salesmen based in SF can expense - this is not a rarified community of billionaires avoiding the less-affluent - at the end of the day they are taken from this membership lounge to the terminal where they can walk to their gate and wait in line to board the plane just like they did before the new subscription terminal was built.

This idea stopped making sense as soon as they said the premium terminal they are proposing will be on the other side of the runways from the existing terminal - I have to board a shuttle to get to my gate for my commercial flight? No thanks, I'll just get a PreCheck or whatever they call it and spend less time at TSA. Rather than spend $5K on a membership I'll go to the over-priced bar and wait for my flight...

What are you talking about - this private terminal is for folks that can't/don't fly private - this isn't the billionaire class, this is the "I convinced my boss to buy me this perk because I travel out of SF so often" class, wage slaves, not masters of industry.

It's $5K/year to have a separate TSA line, a smaller, more comfortable waiting area, then a shuttle service to take them to the very gate they paid $5K/year to avoid.

While the private TSA line may be a time saver, I suspect the shuttle across the tarmac to the terminal to make your flight removes any illusion of "saving time" or being more convenient.

You do realize this terminal services commercial flights, not private planes, right?

You get to avoid long TSA lines, you wait in a premium lounge, but then you hop on a shuttle and get taken to the gate for your commercial flights, where you wait to board along with everyone else... seems like more hassle than convenience, a real premium to avoid long TSA lines...

That is NOT my experience.

It is not the case that more than half ("most people") run Linux on non-Apple laptops, at least not anywhere I see large groups of people with laptops.

Of course, I am gainfully employed outside the conventional IT industry, so my interactions with others doesn't skew towards "code monkey" working "in the valley" which is a bit different than my experience in corporate America in flu-over country.

Every company ought to always be required to make technical documentation and replacement components available for their products.

I just had this on a much smaller scale: a cordless Bosch vacuum cleaner. It almost certainly needed a battery replacement. Nowhere on the internet is there a diagram of how to disassemble it. Remove all the visible screws and...nothing. Finally get it apart, and: the seven batteries (in series) are installed in such a way as to be very difficult to remove. Of course, there is no information on what their specs are, and as far as I can tell, Bosch won't sell you replacements. Ultimately, we threw it away and bought a new one (from a brand that does sell replacement parts).

It's absolutely irritating to have to trash an appliance that just needs a simple repair. This is where government regulation would actually be important.

No, they see Computer 1 that runs the same OS as they are used to at work, and Computer 2 which looks nice, costs just as much or a bit more than Computer 1, and looks different.

The average computer user buys a windows machine to replace a windows machine, and a Mac to replace a Mac. Yes, occasionally a windows user will buy a Mac out of frustration or curiosity, or a Mac user will buy a windows pc "for work", but I don't think the average buyer does an exhaustive market analysis that would lead them to conclude that Mac is getting comparatively much, MUCH better than windows, even if can't run as many games - they just want to replace what's broken or unsupported with something similar.

Define "severely".

What do you believe is the real end-user market share for Linux users?

Remember, as noted in the summary, this is really a "web activity" tracker, not OS installation tracker - it is based on web page activity at select sites that choose to support their tracking code. I suspect their sources are predominantly English language sites, which likely skews the findings, for example.

I suspect the reported stat is correct, about 5% of desktop users run Linux, where Linux has greater market share is on servers, and in my experience servers rarely browse websites enough to actually be accounted for in a superficial traffic study like this.

Do you really think more than one out of twenty users are running Linux, assuming Android devices are accounted for separately?

Funny, the headline doesn't refer to this as "web activity"...

I'd like to learn a bit more about the sites that agree to support this "tracking code" to see how that influences who gets counted. For example, let's say X (formerly Twitter) chooses to participate, but BlueSky doesn't - based on stereotypes I'd expect X to see largely windows users and the large
macOS/OS X user base on BlueSky wouldn't be counted.

And that 20% unknown OS is troubling - it points out the weakness in their methods. I'd like to see the breakdown of what the actual numbers were for each "unknown" response, that would be interesting. I wonder who, and why, some users choose to change their browser response string from their actual OS - to hide what they run? To throw off attackers? And are the folks that are likely to change their response strings generally running Windows, Mac, or Linux?

Cool idea for satellites near the earth. The thrust will be pretty minimal, but since it's basically "free" that doesn't matter.

Moon and Mars...hmmm...gonna be a slight lack of magnetic fields to push against, as soon as you are away from the Earth. Neither the Moon nor Mars has a significant magnetic field.

ChatGPT points out that the magnets are likely more useful to maintain orientation. Any actual thrust will be on the order of nano-newtons. Let's be generous and assume an entire micronewton of thrust, and that this can be maintained throughout the entire orbit. For a 100kg satellite (that's quite small), that could give you a velocity change of 0.3 m/s over the course of a year. That could be useful for satellites in mid- to high-orbit. It is far too little to be useful in LEO. Of course, the magnetic field is weaker at higher altitudes, so...

Please, describe a "mission critical" use of social media (like instagram), and then explain why these users would resort to "throw-away alias accounts" for these "mission critical" cases?

I can see, say, a medical organization posting health warnings/advice as a mission-critical use (educate the public), but hiding behind a throw-away alias account undermines their credibility/effectiveness of their effort...

You gave up your rights when you posted your content as "public"

PS - your public content is only used if the AI user specifies your public instagram account specifically, by name. Be flattered, they know your name and appreciate your content and hope to use it... that's why you posted it on social media and marked it public, right?