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I want the FDA to enforce complete and truthful labeling for homeopathic remedies and other products intended for human consumption. If I point out instances of effective FDA regulation, you say that private entities could do the job. If I point out areas that the FDA doesn't effectively regulate, where private entities aren't doing the job either, you use those failings to argue that the FDA can't be trusted and ignore the absence of competing private agencies that you earlier claimed would materialize if government didn't regulate. I guess that less regulation is always the answer, no matter what the question at hand or the evidence.
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I did some more research trying to figure out why homeopathic product manufacturers haven't been pummeled by private action in the courts. I found a high profile action from 2003, where the defendants successfully argued that only the FDA, not the courts, can regulate homeopathic products. Since the FDA enforces no standards for efficacy on homeopathic products, vendors have free reign for fraud. Additionally, the defendants successfully recovered lawsuit costs from the suit initiators under anti-SLAPP law, arguing that their baseless medical claims were protected commercial speech. In the absence of government regulation, medical fraud is easy and profitable while fighting fraud is difficult and unprofitable. You can find hundreds of web pages by quacks and their supporters cheering this ruling: "our products still don't need any evidence for their claims, hooray for freedom!"
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Yes, there is fraud taking place. Products with at least some substance to them, like amino acids, herbal extracts, and tailored bacterial cultures, are being sold with wide variations in composition yet the same labeling. Pure quack products (like homeopathic flu remedies) are making zany medical claims for products that would never make it through the clinical trials required of mainstream drugs. It's not just affecting a few people; each year millions of Americans buy overpriced sugar pills in a futile attempt to treat viral infections. If it's fraud then it's illegal now and would still be illegal in a libertarian society. The fact that nobody cares to sue these companies means that nobody cares. If they don't care, why bother wasting resources to force people to care? Where exactly is the problem? The people have already spoken, by not speaking. You've missed a large excluded middle between "nobody cares" and "private action would have already solved the problem if the problem were real." I see libertarianism as laudable insofar as it promotes a greater spectrum of possibilities for most people -- enhanced freedom of personal choice, maximized to the extent that it doesn't excessively intrude on others' freedom. I don't see it as laudable if it's just an exercise in getting rid of shepherds so that clever wolves can exploit unwary sheep without interference. If people buy products that they otherwise wouldn't due to misleading or incomplete information, that doesn't promote a utility-maximizing market or personal freedom any more than waiting until people are drunk to ask them to sign contracts.
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For a modern example look at the nutritional supplements market, where the FDA has very limited regulatory authority. Independent academic testing has revealed wide quality variance between brands and even different batches of the same brand's product in the case of (e.g.) probiotic supplements. Nutritional supplements are also often promoted with scientifically dubious claims of pharmaceutical-like action that would not pass muster if they were regulated as pharmaceuticals. Private for-profit agencies are not providing the transparency and verification that the government has eschewed in this largely unregulated area. Quackery also doesn't seem to be effectively punished by marketplace discrimination. I am all for consenting and informed adults taking any sort of risk they like, but I won't defend the right of sellers to peddle nonsense and the right of buyers to be fooled by it. Is there fraud taking place? If so, why aren't these companies being sued out of business? Fraud is and should be illegal. If there is no fraud taking place then what exactly are you complaining about? It's your responsibility to learn about a product before you buy it. Also, vitamins aren't prescribed by a doctor. Comparing how doctors recommend medication vs. the average joe shopping at GNC doesn't really work. A few people being irresponsible is not an excuse to deny the rest of us our personal freedoms. Yes, there is fraud taking place. Products with at least some substance to them, like amino acids, herbal extracts, and tailored bacterial cultures, are being sold with wide variations in composition yet the same labeling. Pure quack products (like homeopathic flu remedies) are making zany medical claims for products that would never make it through the clinical trials required of mainstream drugs. It's not just affecting a few people; each year millions of Americans buy overpriced sugar pills in a futile attempt to treat viral infections. I won't speculate on the reasons that the companies aren't sued into oblivion or driven out of the market by private product evaluation agencies, other than to say it reminds me of the old joke about economists: An economist and his friend are walking down the street when the friend sees a ten dollar bill on the sidewalk.
“Look,” he says, “it’s a ten dollar bill”.
“Nonsense,” says the economist. “If that was a ten dollar bill, someone would have picked it up by now.”To be clear: I think that companies should be allowed to sell vitamins, herbal extracts, and all the other stuff you find at the health food store. I even think that homeopathic junk should be legal, so long as full disclosure is in place. If the product isn't consistent in composition, that information should be disclosed on the label in statistical terms. The FDA should ensure that the products' labels contain the whole truth and nothing but the truth. If companies are going to pimp their homeopathic junk with a study or two about beneficial effects, they should also be required to mention, with equal prominence, the far more numerous studies that fail to show any benefit of homeopathy over placebo. For that matter, I'd like to see the FDA crack down on nonsense claims for (e.g.) shampoos that "nourish hair cells" -- your hair is made of dead cells, and nothing can nourish dead cells! I don't want to outlaw products. Philosophically I think that people should be allowed to make informed choices for themselves, even harmful ones, and pragmatically prohibition often creates more problems than it solves. I only want to see them compelled to engage in full disclosure of any relevant facts. I want to ensure that buyers and users have no excuse for being uninformed, rather than giving the sellers free reign and placing the burden on end users to hire private analytical chemists, biologists, doctors, and statisticians.
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It's abundantly clear from pre-20th century history. That was when information moved a lot slower and the average person knew a lot less. I actually half-agree with the implications of your post. I think that in the modern age the FDA's most important role is not punishing fraud and dangerous practices (the fines they issue, when they issue them, are usually trivial compared to the company's profits) but in revealing such practices so that they can be confronted with civil suits, bad publicity, and marketplace shunning. The information is disseminated rapidly and widely through private channels, and people pay attention to it, after the initial disclosure. I don't think that this information would be efficiently disclosed in the absence of government action, though. For a modern example look at the nutritional supplements market, where the FDA has very limited regulatory authority. Independent academic testing has revealed wide quality variance between brands and even different batches of the same brand's product in the case of (e.g.) probiotic supplements. Nutritional supplements are also often promoted with scientifically dubious claims of pharmaceutical-like action that would not pass muster if they were regulated as pharmaceuticals. Private for-profit agencies are not providing the transparency and verification that the government has eschewed in this largely unregulated area. Quackery also doesn't seem to be effectively punished by marketplace discrimination. I am all for consenting and informed adults taking any sort of risk they like, but I won't defend the right of sellers to peddle nonsense and the right of buyers to be fooled by it.
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We already have more than enough data about what happens in the absence of the FDA and its non-American equivalents. It's abundantly clear from pre-20th century history. The absence of government standards and inspection for food and beverages didn't give rise to competing private agencies safeguarding public health but with lower costs and more vigilance. It made fraud so easy and pervasive that some commodities were adulterated more often than not. Even when they weren't committing outright fraud, the absence of regulation made it regular practice for manufacturers to use compounds of arsenic, lead, and mercury as food colorants and additives. It wasn't that nobody knew eating lead was bad for you, or that nobody knew many commercial beverages and foods were tainted. The oldest reference to such problems I can quickly find on Google Books is from 1758, in Elements of the theory and practice of chymistry by Pierre Joseph Macquer and Andrew Reid: The Salt of Lead hath a saccharine taste, which hath procured it the name also of Sugar of Lead. For this reason when Wine begins to turn sour, the sure way to cure it of that disagreeable taste is to substitute a sweet one which is not disagreeable, to the taste, by mixing therewith Litharge or some such preparation of Lead: for the Acid of the Wine dissolves the Lead, and therewith forms a Sugar of Lead, which remains mixed with the Wine, and hath a taste which, joined with that of the Wine, is not unpleasant. But, as Lead is one of the most dangerous poisons we know, this method ought never to be practised; and whoever ever uses such a pernicious drug deserves to be most severely punished. Yet some thing very like this happens every day, and must needs have very bad consequences...
All the retailers of Wine have a custom of filling their bottles on a counter covered with Lead, having a hole in the middle, into which a Leaden pipe is soldered. The Wine which they spill on the counter, in filling the bottles, runs through this pipe into a Leaden vessel below. In that it usually stands the whole day, or perhaps several days; after which it is taken out of the Leaden vessel, and mixed with other Wine, or put into the bottle of some petty customer. But, alas for the man to whose lot such Wine falls! He must feel the most fatal effects from it; and the danger to which he is exposed is so much the greater, the longer the Wine hath stood in the Leaden vessel, and thereby acquired a more noxious quality. We daily see cruel distempers, among the common people, occasioned by such causes, which are not sufficiently attended to. In an environment with much less government control, the poor customer got the most poisonous wine. The poor customer also had the least leverage to demand pure food and drink, to contract private analytical services if he suspected the quality of a product, or to get restitution if a product was indeed unsafe. This and other dangerous and/or fraudulent practices were not greatly curbed in Britain and the US until another ~150 years passed, when governments established and enforced standards for food and beverage purity, safety, and labeling.
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Are you saying that outside influence have no impact on the choices that a person does? How did we go to talking about from responsibility to influence? If your friends dare you to throw a rock through a window are you no longer responsible for your actions? And what if you didn't get lower IQ, just high agression from the lead poisoning? Then what? Still fully responsible? Of course, unless you have some form of mental defect that makes you compulsively act out on your aggression. I covered that already. Environmental factors do give rise to mental defects. It's not just lead poisoning, though that is one of the most obvious. It's also malnutrition, fetal drug/alcohol exposure, even chronic harassment or witnessing violence. You were the first one to bring up influence in the OP, when you said "what anyone else does has absolutely nothing to do with your behavior." This can be taken two ways: as an empirical statement about reality or as a normative statement of your moral attitudes. On the first count it is false. On the second count, just like any normative statement it cannot be proven or falsified, but I disagree vigorously. Many crimes and disasters have multiple causes. We localize responsibility on one or a handful of people for criminal justice purposes because it's impractical to do otherwise, but that isn't the end of the story. I think that you're trying too hard to atomize responsibility. There can be more than one party responsible for a problem. If an arsonist sets fire to a night club whose fire doors were chained shut to discourage cover charge avoidance, there are several parties responsible for the ensuing deaths. Ordered by (my opinion) level of culpability: the arsonist, the club operator who disabled safety features, the local enforcement agency who failed to catch the safety violation, and the cheapskate patrons who used working fire doors to dodge payment. If we wish to minimize bad behavior rather than simply condemn it after the fact, it takes collective action: agencies to fund epidemiological research and uncover significant but non-obvious links between environmental factors and health/behavior. An EPA and FDA to ensure that people aren't unwillingly breathing, eating, and drinking chronic poisons. Social services to ensure that children are being fed and not abused. If you think that equivalent services have been and will be provided in the absence of government action, I will happily discuss examples.
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There is no more evidence for an independent "free will" above and beyond your flesh and blood nervous system than there is for the existence of fairies and unicorns. This does not mean that I think the concept of choice is irrelevant; even obviously deterministic systems like digital computers can be usefully described as making choices. So likewise can less-obviously-deterministic (though still made of and ruled by physical substance) human beings be said to choose. However, like any other organism, humans can be altered by forces not under their control.
One of the most obvious examples is the relationship between lead exposure and mental alteration. Exposure even to low lead levels in children correlates highly with reductions in IQ, short term memory, fine motor skills, and appropriate social interaction. It correlates with increased aggression and risk-taking. Children who are persistently exposed to lead are less able to do well in school, less able to compete in the job market once they grow up, and more likely to engage in crime and violence if they can't make it in normal society. Does this mean that we give a pass to carjackers if we find high lead levels in their bodies? No, but it does mean that trying to solve problems that need collective action by telling others "take personal responsibility" is an abdication of responsibility and a refusal to engage with reality.
Children aren't responsible for their own lead exposure. Even their parents generally aren't responsible. If you grow up in a middle class family America right now, you typically won't be exposed to much lead, due to no special action of your own or of your parents. If you grow up in low income family in America, you're more likely to be in old housing stock where exposure from lead paint dusts and chips is much more common, and to be located near an industrial facility like a smelter or battery recycling plant that emits airborne lead. If you were born in a Ghanaian or Chinese village where some residents make a living burning electronic trash to extract the metals, expect severe lead exposure along with mercury, cadmium, and a heady brew of carcinogenic combustion byproducts.
You don't even need exotic geography to be poisoned: just revisit the 19th century in the US or Great Britain. According to 1855 hearings before Parliament, adulteration of food, beverages, and medicines was endemic in Victorian Britain. For example, more than 85% of cayenne pepper examined on the market was diluted with various poisonous materials. The poisonous pigment red lead oxide was present in more than 45% of cayenne pepper, and in 30% of curry powders! Snuff was adulterated with lead oxide and lead chromate (two toxic metals for the price of one). Candy regularly contained arsenic, lead, and mercury compounds (and this was not even fraud -- there were no meddlesome laws against putting these colorful poisons in candy despite their known effects). In 1880 the Illinois Department of Agriculture published about similar problems on the other side of the Atlantic: poisonous compounds of lead, chromium, mercury, and arsenic in jellies, coffee, spices, lard, sausage, wine, cider, and tea. Turpentine in gin and sulfuric acid in beer. This in addition to dozens of less-dangerous corner cutting schemes such as dilution of butter with lard and coffee with burnt peas.
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For the sake of discussion, I agree that your conclusions follow from your premises. However, how do you determine what are really your rights and mine?
That's far beyond the scope of this discussion. Let's keep this focused on arguing about whether or not I can threaten to do what I have the right to do, or demand you to do what you have the right to do. This is like a Catholic offering to debate the nature of the Holy Trinity while saying that the question of evidence for God's existence is "far beyond the scope of this discussion." Your faulty conclusions follow logically from your flawed premises. Well played, Thomas Aquinas.
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I was responsible enough to be born in a stable middle-class American family that prepared me to be prosperous as an adult. People who chose to be born to abusive/crazy/stupid/addicted parents or in the Gaza Strip need to take responsibility for their terrible planning. They're probably the same simpletons who confuse threats of starvation or eviction with real coercion such as income taxes.
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That means that any nation that doesn't like your experiment can impose punitive restrictions on trade with Seatopia at trivial cost to its domestic economy but very significant costs to Seatopia.
For that to have any meaningful effect on a small nation you would need every country on earth to put sanctions on seatopia. Good luck convincing Cuba not to trade with them. Even if 100% sanctions were to happen, they never work. How's that embargo on Mexican Heroin going? I think that Mexico could be embargoed/blockaded quite effectively and cheaply if it were a few oil platforms in the middle of international waters instead of a large nation sharing thousands of miles of border with the US. I am assuming that Seatopia is going to offer legalized/deregulated services not found elsewhere, since A) they have little else in terms of comparative advantage for the domestic economy and B) if other nations offered what Seatopia does, people would just go there instead of to a platform in the middle of international waters. If Seatopia dares to live the libertarian dream -- no legal restrictions on weapons, drugs, gambling, prostitution, or private banking, and zero tax rates for everybody -- that's plenty of incentive for the IRS, DEA, and DHS (and most other nations' tax systems, drug enforcement, and counter-terrorism agencies) to shut down Seatopia.
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Suppose for a moment that you have a "starter" seastead, Seatopia, of several platforms and 2000 people that is independent from any existing government. How is Seatopia going to remain independent? You're not included in any existing intergovernmental agreements, treaties, or trade organizations. That means that any nation that doesn't like your experiment can impose punitive restrictions on trade with Seatopia at trivial cost to its domestic economy but very significant costs to Seatopia. The Seasteading Institute offers this naïve explanation as to why it won't happen: The first seasteads will operate under the same maritime laws as existing ships... Although [cruise] companies have major operations within U.S. territorial waters, the U.S. does not interfere very much with their operations. This is due, in part, to the fact that cruise lines bring in jobs and revenue to the U.S. economy. If the U.S. were to try to interfere too much, the cruise lines would simply move their operations elsewhere. Similarly, seasteads will trade extensively with land-based businesses. The people who profit from those relationships will encourage their government not to interfere and drive away the seastead’s business. By the same logic, the United States does not and can not impose punitive restrictions on trade with Cuba or Iran. Theory says it doesn't happen because it would be economically undesirable. The theory needs some work.
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From the interview in Details: It goes like this: Friedman wants to establish new sovereign nations built on oil-rig-type platforms anchored in international waters—free from the regulation, laws, and moral suasion of any landlocked country. They'd be small city-states at first, although the aim is to have tens of millions of seasteading residents by 2050. Architectural plans for a prototype involve a movable, diesel-powered, 12,000-ton structure with room for 270 residents, with the idea that dozens—perhaps even hundreds—of these could be linked together. Friedman hopes to launch a flotilla of offices off the San Francisco coast next year; full-time settlement, he predicts, will follow in about seven years; and full diplomatic recognition by the United Nations, well, that'll take some lawyers and time.
Only $1.25 million? It buys a few years of studies and modeling at best. Might as well believe that he's going to build a libertarian space elevator out of Legos.
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Along similar lines, the Taliban outlawed poppy plants and burned down most of the fields right before 9/11 (95% of of pharmaceutical opiates come from Afghanistan, this would have bankrupted pharma companies)
WTF? Afghanistan isn't a supplier of legal poppy products for pharmaceuticals. The legal suppliers are India, Turkey, Spain, Australia, and France. The big pharmaceutical companies rely on patent protection to make money on medications. Once patent protection expires and generics enter the market, profit margins collapse and they have to find new drugs to patent. None of the natural or semi-synthetic medicinal chemicals derived from poppies are under patent or were under patent when the Taliban consolidated control of Afghanistan.
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If the market always "decides" gold is great, why don't cell phone contracts, insurance policies, mortgages, employment agreements, car leases, etc. specify payment in gold? Because of legal tender laws and Gresham's law. You can write a contract and specify payment in gold but if the other party doesn't pay and you sue them, you're required to accept payment in legal tender. You can't say "but I wanted gold!" Likewise, since you are forced to take legal tender if you want protection from the courts, according to Gresham's law, people would rather save their gold and pass off their paper currency to you. All of this serves to reduce the amount of gold in circulation as money and we get to the state of affairs like today where very few people could even pay in gold without first buying some with paper. That makes it hugely inconvenient and businesses don't want to shrink their market share. Remove the legal tender laws and have courts honor gold contracts and then you can make an argument. As it stands, when there is a truly free market, without government threats, the market prefers gold. You claim to be big on evidence so let's not ignore thousands of years of history. You may have to take legal tender, but you can link the amount of tender to the exchange rate with gold. A gold clause still lets you do that and it's been perfectly legal to enforce since 1977. See 216 Jamica Ave. LLC v. S&R Playhouse Realty Co.. Gresham's Law makes sense but it also contradicts the idea that the market will always choose gold. You just named some important reasons that market participants will continue to contract in fixed quantities of fiat currencies instead of gold-linked quantities, such as convenience and retaining market share, even though it is legal to specify payments in terms of gold. If market participants prefer gold, it's even more puzzling that gold doesn't dominate savings. Right now Apple is sitting on more than $75 billion in cash. Microsoft has more than $50 billion and Google more than $35 billion. They don't appear to be in a hurry to spend it. There are many large companies with multiple billions in cash on hand. Why not convert it to gold if gold is stable and fiat currencies are unpredictable? They don't need to worry about any market share loss or customer inconvenience from what they do with their savings.
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I think there is a substantial amount of magical thinking that leads people to specifically value gold or silver, and advance justifications for those metals as currency standards after they've already made up their minds. If they were starting from their claimed justifications, and simply looking for durable, rare substances whose production is limited and cannot be rapidly increased, then I'd expect as many cries for the Selenium Standard as the Silver Standard. There's nothing magical about it. Gold and silver have thousands of years of historically being accepted as money therefore it's likely to continue that way. Whenever the free market decides what it will use as money, it settles on gold and to a lesser degree, silver and other metals. That's what I'm more interested in, free market money, rather than any specific metal. Let the market decide. Historically, it's been gold. What's the point in trying to fight that? Just so you can seem sophisticated? I'm a scientist, or at least I was until I discovered that employment writing software offers steadier and better pay. I was first interested in Bitcoin as a field experiment in economics. Later I realized that with wide enough adoption it could be a truly disruptive technology, due to its international reach and lack of central control. The deflationary nature of Bitcoin has never been especially important or interesting to me, but it seems to have attracted people who make wild, unsubstantiated claims about deflation, the nature of money, precious metals, and related topics. My bullshit detector goes off when someone makes a claim contrary to empirical evidence, without empirical evidence, or of such a nature that it cannot be tested. Examples of popular bullshit in this vein include "vaccines cause autism," "a truly free market will care for the destitute better than government," and "God created the universe 6000 years ago but doctored the evidence to make it look older." In the United States it has been legal since 1977 to write contracts specifying payment in gold and it has been legal to acquire and keep any quantity of gold in any form since 1974. These changes reversed the 1934 Roosevelt order that outlawed private gold hoarding and gold clauses in contracts. Yet gold is still only storing a small fraction of US savings and enters into only a tiny fraction of contracts involving payment. If the market always "decides" gold is great, why don't cell phone contracts, insurance policies, mortgages, employment agreements, car leases, etc. specify payment in gold? It's legal right now and has been for 30+ years. I'm not interested in promoting mercury or selenium as the basis for currencies, only poking holes in the stories told about gold and silver. I do it in the same spirit as Richard Feynman: "The first principle [of science] is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool." If I'm fooling myself I hope that gold/silver promoters will rise to the challenge and provide empirical evidence for the great stability of their metals. If I'm seeing clearly and others are being fooled, I hope that I can convince others to at least approach economics and economic theories with the same scientific, empirical mindset that we'd apply to chemistry or physics.
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Gold is compared to everything, continuously. That is the very point of using the standardized unit of value measurements that we call 'currency', to have a common reference to base those comparisions on. Since we are no longer on a gold standard, that reference floats, so there must be a 'gold price' in the fiat currency in order to make said comparision. Steel, copper, wool, maize, industrial chemicals of all sorts, most agricultural products, and coal have dropped in their relative value due to massive improvements in productivity over the past 100 years. Thus, using any or all of these things would give you a distorted perspective, as the value of the currency dependent upon them would change with every significant improvement in any of those industries, thus making the economic calculations (and thus predictive capacity of economic calculations) vastly more complex and inaccurate.
The Whiskey and Gunpowder post you used to start this thread says Largely forgotten the silver version of the currency is keeping its value relative to things you buy. A gallon of gas is still less than $0.20. Twenty REAL cents. Not the forgeries that pass for money in the minds of the unwary. If you think that’s something, realize that a gallon of gas is just five or six cents in terms of the old dollar bills that were also gold certificates. (One pre-1934 dollar was good for 1/20 ounce of gold, or about 80 of today’s dollars.) That’s an even more impressive holding of value than the silver coins. That's a claim that is subject to empirical scrutiny. It is not a distortion to cross-correlate exchange rates of different commodities, precious metals, and currencies. It's a test of the hypothesis that silver and gold have characteristically high exchange rate stabilities that justify their use for savings and for backing currencies used in day to day transactions. If you have a better test, please explain it and your reasoning. The fact that no nation has ever backed a paper currency with mercury is actually irrelevent. Mercury has been used as a trade medium on occasions. However, mercury does not have better properties for commerce than gold silver or copper. The first and most obvious, is that the liquied state of mercury is a problem for trade, as it requires that those who trade in it have both vessels to hold it and scales to measure it, but also a means to verify that it's all mercury in the bottles. You can weight the bottles full, and then empty them into another container using a strainer to make sure that tere is no lead dust mixed in, but that is a lot of work for the common trade. The minted coin, with a recognizable size and weight, and the mark of a trusted (bank, government, king, whatever) tells the casual trader the value of the thing pretty fast.
Coins could be and were debased, forged, and clipped. If the trader actually measured coin mass and density to check its composition and value, there is no reason he could not do the same with mercury. In any case, I have the (perhaps mistaken) impression that enthusiasm for a return to gold or silver standards does not literally imply that every transaction would involve the trading of metals in person. It simply means that the issuing agency of a currency would maintain a fixed metal:currency unit exchange rate, and would trade its currency (paper, coins, electronic records...) for the metal on demand. There's no reason that we would have to give up electronic bank transfers or lightweight paper bills for everyday use as long as users always have the option to exchange for metals. By that same reasoning, it is strange that enthusiasm for silver does not extend to other materials whose availability is limited by geological facts. Why no bismuth, indium, or mercury standard cheerleaders? Silver is more abundant and currently mined at a higher rate than any of those elements. Geologically speaking none of them is any more likely to go inflationary than silver. I think there is a substantial amount of magical thinking that leads people to specifically value gold or silver, and advance justifications for those metals as currency standards after they've already made up their minds. If they were starting from their claimed justifications, and simply looking for durable, rare substances whose production is limited and cannot be rapidly increased, then I'd expect as many cries for the Selenium Standard as the Silver Standard.
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I agree that Kurzweil has major blind spots that contain quite a few problems for his vision of the Singularity. But in the areas where he's personally worked he has been astoundingly productive. When I say the Singularity might be near if only there were more people like Kurzweil, I meant if there were a million more people with his tremendous creativity and productivity working in different areas, not if we had a million people who'd all worked in optical character recognition and electronic music. Ironically, I'm basically saying "the precondition for an intelligence explosion is an intelligence explosion." Phrased this way, you can also see that the road to techno-utopia is mundane and counterintuitive: global access to basic health and high quality education, so that potential world-changing geniuses can grow up and reach their potential no matter where they're born or how much money their parents had. How many potential Indian geniuses have been wasted because they were born to poor rural parents and died young or spent their lives on simple survival instead of research and invention?
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Who decided where to set the $1 baseline on that chart and what are they using to consider how value has fluctuated? It seems like they've used gold (no surprise there). Is a speculative metal like gold the best thing to use to determine relative purchasing power of the dollar? Why not use eggs, milk, iron, corn, sheep, oil, etc.?
I think you're asking the right questions. Gold and the dollar need to be compared to at least one additional commodity to triangulate stability, but ideally you should compare multiple commodities with substantial historical data. Similar to your suggestion, I might include cement, steel, copper, wool, maize, sulfuric acid, sodium hydroxide, and coal. This includes construction materials, industrial metals, plant and animal farm products, commodity chemicals, and energy. Everything in the collection has been produced and traded on a large scale for at least 100 years. Once you have the basket of items to compare, you can see how different prices correlate over time. If gold is more stable than the dollar then you should see a stronger positive price correlation coefficient, with lower standard deviation, between gold and the members of the basket of commodities than between the dollar and the basket members. That is, if 1 gram of gold buys 150 kilograms of steel today, and 1 dollar buys 2 kilograms of steel today, the gold to steel ratio should deviate less over time (past and future) than the dollar to steel ratio, and the changes should be positively correlated: steel moves up when gold moves up, steel goes down when gold goes down, and by similar amounts. You can even perform the correlation exercise with pairs of mundane commodities: maybe it turns out that sulfuric acid tracks other commodity prices more closely than dollars or gold, and cautious savers should actually clamor for an acid-backed store of value. Even without running the exercise over a full century of data -- which I don't have to hand, alas, else I would have -- I don't think gold is going to perform too spectacularly. The tremendous gold price volatility around 1980 was not, so far as I know, reflected nearly to the same degree in mundane commodities like coal and wool. It may well be that gold holds its value better over long periods if you smooth the time series, but people can't (directly) trade in smoothed time series: someone who decided to convert all their saved dollars (or steel, coal, wool...) to gold in July 1980 would have taken a heavy loss only a year later and would have needed to wait 10+ years to recover anything like their previous holdings, converting back from gold to useful commodities. The same specious arguments (scarcity, durability) sometimes advanced now to justify an irreversible value increase for gold were being touted just a few years ago about real estate. Value is always relative. Let's get back to silver dimes and silver as a value store for a moment. Mercury is rarer in the Earth's crust than silver, it's been known since antiquity, it's shiny and dense, it can be neither created nor destroyed, and supplies and production rate from mining are limited. It even has more desirable properties for commerce: since it's a liquid at room temperature, it can be subdivided for any transaction as needed, down to the limits of the traders' scales. So why do the traditional coinage metals have their privileged position, if (as sometimes claimed) precious metals are "natural" monetary standards rather than reflections of human psychology and historical inertia? Despite all these wonderful attributes of mercury which should make it equally or more precious than silver, it currently trades at less than 5% of silver's price, and no nation has ever backed its paper notes with mercury.
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- The end of Moore's Law and failure-to-materialize of the Technological Singularity*
*This is more of a refutation of another popular megatrend idea than a trend in itself Yes. I am in real agreement here. I'll assume you read some of Kurzweil's tome? I found it kind of easy to find problems with the way he defines even simple concepts like computational power. Kurzweil is an interesting guy. If you can find his earliest book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, you can see a lot of things that he predicted correctly when they looked like Star Trek fantasy to most people. You can also see the first of his repeated predictive mistakes there (in that book, like other writings since, he incorrectly predicted that voice recognition was just a few years away from dominating computer user interfaces). Most of the Singularity ideas Kurzweil popularized were first discussed on the Extropians mailing list starting in 1991. And -- interesting Bitcoin connection -- the early Extropians were also connected to the Cypherpunks movement, which started discussing secure digital communications, decentralized payments and contracts, and the other electronic building blocks of radical libertarian utopia, nearly 20 years ago. Vernor Vinge, who invented the Singularity concept, also practically invented the Cypherpunk vision in his 1981 story True Names. I think Kurzweil is wrong about the evolution of coming technologies, particularly about how fast they're going to evolve. I think that most of his predicted technologies could some day come to pass, but I very much doubt that they're all going to arrive in the next 50 years like he does. In a way I almost feel sorry for him, because I think many of his predictions could come true on the given time scales if everyone were as bright and educated as he is. He is an exceptional person who has made the unexceptional mistake of assuming that other people are basically like him. The fastest way to gage Kurzweil's predictive ability is to look at his predictions from The Age of Spiritual Machines. He made a lot of predictions about future decades, and we are now living in the earliest of those predicted eras. My evaluation is that he was right about some things, wrong about more things, and you can see a pattern to his mistakes. He ignores social, political, and even scientific factors that could derail his predictions, like wars, fashions, legal liability, investor expectations, the complexity of neurobiology, and so on. Even though he is wrong in the particulars I think it's good to have at least one prominent figure who is really excited about the future and believes in the power of technology to improve everything, lest we all get sucked into a gloomy vision of the future where the only excitement comes from calamities.
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