I think you do not understand either the GPL or copyright law, or both. Could you give an example of something that you think is legal to do with unlicensed copyrighted work in your possession, but would be illegal if that work were provided to you with a license to make copies under the terms of the GPL?

The submitter needs a better understanding of economics. He considers only the first-order effects, a classic blunder which is thoroughly discussed in Henry Hazlitt's classic book Economics in One Lesson, a rigorous treatment in layman's language which I recommend to everyone. (Google turns up a free ebook version that seems to be complete.) I'll give two reasons why this reasoning is bad:

1) The $5 coupons that are given to people who would have purchased the software anyway doesn't benefit the taxpayers at all. Say the subsidy spurs 50% higher antivirus sales over the next year, which I think would be a pretty incredible success. In that case, taxpayers are paying $15 for each "new" antivirus user. For every three subsidies granted, two of them would have purchased the software anyway. Thus for every 3 subsidies ($15), taxpayers have a net benefit of only $10. It's a losing deal unless you make VERY generous assumptions about the increased adoption rate due to the subsidy (I think mine was pretty darn generous), or the value of the positive externality (for which $10 seems reasonable to me, but is still pretty subjective and unproven), or both.

Note that, if $35 antivirus sold 50% more than $40 antivirus, someone probably would have already done it and made a bunch of money... which leads me to my next point:

2) You assume that prices would stay at $40. That would almost certainly be inefficient, irrational behavior by the antivirus company/ies. This is Hazlitt's One Lesson: you can't just look at one facet of your policy and assume everything else stays the same. Basic economic theory suggests that antivirus software would rise in price by somewhere between $0 and $5, and probably closer to $5 if the amount of the subsidy is a small fraction of the original purchase price and if prices are not being driven down by efficient competition (which seems unlikely, since there is free antivirus software available but companies can still sell theirs for $40).

Let's use an example: 50 million people would pay $40 for the software, and 5 million would pay $35 but not $40. (Also, of the 50 million who would pay $40, only 40 million would pay $45.)

Anti-virus companies have determined that the optimal balance of revenue per sale and number of sales occurs when they have a price of $40. The extra 5 million people are not worth lowering the price, because they'd make less on each of the 50 million that would have bought it anyway. $35 * 55m $45 * 40m, so neither raising nor lowering the price will raise revenue.

Now consider the $5 coupon. The companies will make the same pricing calculation, whether explicitly or implicitly. They will determine that the new optimal price is now higher than $40, because consumers will still make their purchasing decisions based on how much they actually have to pay out of pocket. Now they can charge $45 and still get 50 million sales, not 40 million, because everyone who is willing to pay $40 will now simply pay $40 + a $5 coupon. They will definitely not keep the price at $40, because they know only 55 million will pay $35+$5coupon, and $40 * 55 million $45 * 50 million.

As far as I'm concerned, this undermines the entire argument without even having to get into thorny moral issues of whether a government is justified in taking people's money if it thinks it can spend it on things which will benefit those people.

This is only a superficial similarity emphasized by your borderline-incorrect choice of wording. Any closer examination reveals that DRM and GPL are serving opposite ends using opposite means.

DRM is a technical framework that prevents you from doing things that are legal, and often does so in an unfriendly way. If it weren't for the DRM applied to a certain piece of media content you receive, you could do more with it.

GPL is a legal framework that allows you to do things that are otherwise illegal. If it weren't for GPL applied to a certain piece of software you receive, you could do less with it (due to copyright law). There are certainly copyright licenses which give you greater permissions than the GPL does, but using the GPL is still an act of freedom compared to the default of no license.

It's not that they wouldn't be able to receive it. It would simply be more expensive to them, because they have chosen to live in a place that is harder to supply with such services.

So my question for you is: If someone chooses to live in an area where it is easy and cheap to deliver mail, why should they also pay part of the bill to deliver mail out to my remote residence? My decision to live inefficiently is easier when I don't have to pay all the costs. Is that really something you want to encourage?

Okay, that makes more sense. Thanks for the clarification.

This is the same ridiculous, absurd reasoning that makes the summary sound so crazy. (In the case of the summary, it seems the real story is a bit more complicated. A misleading summary on Slashdot? I'm shocked, SHOCKED etc.)

UAL's stock (symbol:UAUA) recovered most of its value later that day, and the rest shortly after that. You can't even tell when the false story broke if you look at the last year of the stock's price.

The US market nosedive is a symptom of the bust portion of the latest boom/bust cycle driven by low interest rates in the 90's/00's. (If you thought a nation-wide personal savings rate closing in on zero was unsustainable, you were right!) While it's true that specific news events can pop a bubble in a sudden and dramatic way, that doesn't mean those events were the cause of the subsequent problems! The problems have been slowly building up as more houses were being built than people wanted to buy, and as artificially low interest rates caused stocks to be priced higher than (as it turns out) they were worth. There's nothing to be done now but watch the pendulum swing back the other way, as it would in any market where there's more supply than demand.

"Anyone who thinks that Mythbusters has science content is kidding themselves."

Zombie Feynman disagrees with you. (And so do I -- it's best to stay on the good side of the genius undead.)

Certainly.

This is not how inflation happens. With a fixed money supply, it can't. If a company sets unrealistic profit targets, and isn't going to meet them, it has a couple choices. (a) not meet them. This is what most companies do. (b) Raise prices and wages. Their competitors will eat them for lunch. (c) Raise prices without raising wages. Then they will just see workers leave to companies that have raised wages. (d) Collude with other companies, directly or indirectly, so they all raise prices without raising workers' pay and benefits. Then nobody will be able to afford the goods.

Companies raising prices doesn't magically make people able to pay those prices. There needs to be enough money out there in circulation for its value to go down (aka prices to go up). The only way for dramatic inflation to happen is for the money supply to increase in a similarly dramatic fashion. This is generally only possible with a fiat currency, when the government is able to print money as they please. You are absolutely correct that Zimbabwe and the U.S. have the same system in this regard... the US could trigger hyperinflation by simply printing $10,000 bills and using those to fund the stimulus package, for example. They wouldn't need to tax anyone, just to print their own money... but this would be an effective tax by destroying the value of everyone's money. Then they could do it again with $1M bills, and so forth until eating lunch would cost $1M like it does over there.

However, I find it pretty unlikely due to the checks and balances in our constitutional system, as ragged as it is after these past 8 years. The fiat money system is the same, but the people currently controlling are different.

This was the main nonsensical part. If the costs of goods have gone down, then the worth of the currency has gone up. That's the very definition of the worth of a currency. Did you mean to say "forces cost of goods up" rather than down?

The source of inflation in virtual worlds is the same: an increase in the money supply. Think about it: Everquest gold is created from nothing, simply by killing monsters. This gold goes into the economy, and since there isn't a good sink that takes it out of the economy as quickly, the total gold circulating between players tends to increase in an unbounded way. If it increases, then the supply is higher, so it won't be worth as much. ("Gold" responds to supply and demand like anything else.) Gold being worth not as much means the prices (as expressed in gold) are all higher. That's inflation.

(Interestingly, WoW gold maintained its value much better by constantly providing significant sinks to take the money back out. I don't actually play the game, so I'm not sure just how much inflation has happened recently, but I know they kept it under relative control for a while by charging so much for mounts and other things that people would really want.)

Ultimately, I'm not really sure what point your post was trying to make, since it wandered into so many different areas and it was hard for me to understand (with your many sentence fragments) which ideas you were advocating and which ideas you were criticizing. I saw some good ideas in there, but mixed in with some very strange ideas about how money works. That's why I said it was nonsensical. I also wanted to make the point that I was starting from the same place as WaZiX, to draw emphasis to the places where I felt his explanation was wrong. I'm glad you didn't take it as too much of an insult, and I'm glad that you could find the common ground in our posts: The government devaluing our currency is a bad thing, for many reasons.

"Future money" and "current money" are subject to the same laws of supply and demand as any other good, where the price of current money (as measured in future money) is expressed in the interest rate. Central banks targeting an interest rate is exactly the same as putting a price ceiling on current money: it will cause overconsumption of current money (excessive borrowing/consumption -- look at our negative savings rate in recent years!), with the government there to make up for the shortages in supply that would normally result from a price ceiling. I expect that, as an economist, you understand the price ceiling phenomenon pretty well... and I would hope that you don't usually advocate that governments set price ceilings at below-market prices!

This overconsumption manifests itself as "overoptimism," but it is just a rational response to the prevailing interest rate. If that interest rate were the true market rate, it would be the correct response... just "optimism." Unfortunately, the rate is often pushed lower by the central bank, which means the optimism turns out to be unjustified... leading (most recently) to the internet bubble and the housing bubble.

Have you ever priced a project or investment for a company, to determine whether to undertake it or not? I have, and a crucial part of the decision is calculating the present value of the future cash flows in different scenarios. The lower the interest rate, the better a project will look when it involves a cost now for a payoff in the future. There will be fewer scenarios where it loses money. Seen from a different standpoint, the borrowed money to fund the project's upfront costs is cheaper to acquire. That's how low interest rates are linked to "optimism." When the interest rate gets lower, people's rational response is to undertake more of these projects. (These "projects" are not just by large businesses... they can also be individual investments such as buying/building a house. People definitely look at the mortgage rates when deciding whether they can buy a house or not, although they won't generally make the same type of formal calculations that a large business would.)

When the interest rate is artificially low due to a central bank price ceiling, people's rational response to that market signal is to undertake projects that would have been too risky and/or costly otherwise. Those projects eventually reveal themselves to be bad investments, often when the interest rates come back up. The project owners find themselves unable or unwilling to continue funding what is now a money-loser, and they have to do all the things that are typical of a bust: default on their loans because the project didn't pay off, lay off the people who were working on the project, and so on. Nothing about this scenario necessarily involved irrational behavior on the part of the investors... they simply used the market signals that were available. The distortion of those signals is what causes some of the effects of the boom and bust cycles.

I'm not claiming that all business cycles are caused by central banks or fiat currency, but I am definitely suggesting that they make things worse with their active "management" of interest rates, and that you can predict and explain the effects using supply and demand.

In general, a growing economy with a fixed money supply should see deflation, as the same nominal amount of money will be chasing a greater number of goods... at least, that's how supply and demand would work out. Can I ask why you think otherwise?

The reason why we usually see inflation over the long run is because the money supply is NOT fixed. (That's the problem with a fiat currency.) The money supply is more than keeping up with the growth of real wealth.

For example, if the real economy is growing at 3% and the money supply at 5%, the reported CPI would show 2% inflation (over the long run, ignoring any temporary shocks to supply or demand of money or goods as a whole). I would actually consider that to be 5% inflation: However many dollars I was holding at that time, they lost 5% of their value due to the increase in money supply, since that increase was a completely independent event from the real economy growth.

(As an aside, this money supply increase could happen either if the central bank increased the quantity of the fiat currency arbitrarily, or if we had a gold standard and someone discovered a cheap way to synthesize gold or located a huge untapped deposit. However, at least in the case of a hard currency it would not be subject to complete and arbitrary control! The better solution than either of those is a broader commodity-basket-backed currency, so that the money supply is unlikely to go up or down significantly.)

I'm guessing you don't remember seeing opposition because you agreed with that opposition, so it didn't stick out as much in your mind. Either way, some people have complained very consistently about both: libertarians and other people who value fiscal responsibility.

Then you have the two camps that don't actually care about deficit spending, but suddenly (pretend to) care about the national debt when it isn't being spent on the things they consider important. We call those people Republicans and Democrats.

We did bring it up before. Yes, there are some hypocritical fuckers in the Republican party that loved to borrow money against our future to pay for Bush's wars and only now are turning on the waterworks about the national debt... but please don't lump us in with them, or pretend that their existence means nobody can complain about Obama borrowing from my future to pay other people now.

I've bitched about borrowing to fund Bush's insanity and I'll bitch about this, in part because I'm young enough that I'll probably see it come back to bite me.

GPs post was pretty nonsensical, and I would responded if you hadn't already done so. Still, there were a couple things about your post that struck me as odd.

Except that the Federal Reserve Bank either pushes money in or pulls money out by buying or selling those loans in their "open market operations"... there's nothing natural about those transactions.

I hope you will agree than the higher the money supply is, the less each individual dollar will be worth, also known as inflation. (That is, of course, assuming the total amount produced remains roughly constant.) Dollars react to supply and demand just like any other good, aside from the fact that the supply is controlled by government printing and fractional reserve requirements. Check out the increase in money supply in the past 8 months, and then tell me whether you think there will be inflation whenever consumer demand (which some call "velocity") picks back up.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/M1SL.txt

(M1 may not be the best indicator... M3 is probably better, but the fed stopped reporting it in 2006, as it started showing higher growth rates than M1 and M2.)

Using CPI as a measure of inflation is... not optimal. They keep changing it, starting in the early 90s, which is (not coincidentally) when you cited as the last time the CPI was above 4%.

http://www.shadowstats.com/article/56