Free?  Are you a commie as well?  Do you have any idea that those would cost to launch those to orbit compared with installing solar arrays on the ground?  And if you want it to your house, you must say good bye to all other satellite communications, because the spectrum passing through to earth is very small, and multiple kW of power will mask all the low powered signals from communication and navigation satellites.

What!?  Are private companies forbidden access to space in your fscked up country?  Your nuclear pile is straight below you.  Drill far enough down, and the power is there.  It doesn't provide electricity directly (nuclear piles don't), but heat you can use to generate electricity.  It isn't regulated, just expensive.  Probably much less expensive than a safe nuclear reactor for home use.


This is because your government doesn't do enough for fixing the monopolies.  If e.g. the government provided free healthcare for all, you could do with half of your healthcare spendings.  That's almost 9% of your GDP in savings.  If you did it ten years ago, the USA wouldn't have any national debt now, and people and companies wouldn't have to pay insurance money for health either.  If you do it right now, the number will start decreasing.

Yep, in many countries with stronger regulation those old technologies has been deprecated and frequencies reallocated to e.g. wireless networking and mobile communications.  In my country the FM radio band will be freed for other uses in 2017, as we complete the switch to DAB and DVB.  I understand it is more difficult in the USA because the stations insists on having their own frequencies and transmitters.  DVB and DAB are very efficient because they are able to multiplex a lot of channels into the same stream, and allocate bandwidth as necessary.  For DAB all transmitters send on the same frequency, and due to the clever way redundancy is implemented the interference between two transmitters sending the same signal is actually beneficial.  It saves a lot of bandwidth and makes space for many more radio channels at the same time.


A natural monopoly does not need to cover the entire universe to be defined as a monopoly.  The FCC, which you call a monopoly, has no powers outside the USA.  It is sufficient to monopolize an area which covers more than your own property.

Using all high frequencies suitable for medium range communications at a decent bandwidth this way is fairly easy.  Let's say ~80 MHz to ~280 MHz.  Even a normal 802.11n network uses up to four channels with a bandwidth of up to 40 MHz each, but at higher frequencies with much lower range.  This is only five times more.  No, it won't have to mask directional transmission, unless you want FM radio transmitters to target every individual FM radio, of course.  It doesn't have to drown out everything else to make the frequency band useless for a large area.  You aren't going to listen to that FM station if there is a lot of static on the channel.  For DVB, DAB and other digital modes the interference will be even worse.  For current air navigation systems it would be a killer.  (VOR/ADF in the HF band will survive, but those are very inaccurate.)


No.  If another light source interferes with yours, it can easily be blocked out.  Two people can, but don't have to, share the same light source.  Light can be created by many means (no monopoly on the source) and by anybody.

Lack of possibility certainly does!  Cooperation on crossings is a theoretical possibility, but only theoretical because it would be much much cheaper for both to just use the same lines.  And this ain't going to happen, because the one who built first have every interest in protecting their monopoly.

Wordplay.  The frequency spectrum is a natural limited resource.  It is limited by the laws of physics, not by FCC or anyone else.  For it to be possible to use the frequency spectrum efficiently, one need exclusive use at the time it is used in the covered area.  Non-exclusive use will reduce the quality of the transmission, and no known technology will help that.  You can only work around the problem to a degree by sending more information (adding redundancy) by using more of the frequency spectrum.  The user of the spectrum monopolizes it, no matter how much or little the regulating body regulates.

We got spread spectrum technology for several reasons.  It was invented to make eavesdropping on communications difficult, and is much used today to comply with the regulators demands to reduce peak electromagnetic interference at certain frequencies.  It can help against some kinds of interference, but the Nyquist rate still limits the amount of information it is possible to send on a given bandwidth.

John Stuart Mill uses the same definition, more or less.  Natural monopolies are "those which are created by circumstances, and not by law".  Both are commonly accepted, but be welcome and pick yours, and I'll find examples for it as well.

The government isn't granting power utility companies a monopoly today.  Why should they when it is a natural monopoly?  It is the other way around.  The government's task is to ensure competition despite the natural monopoly.  I.e. make competition possible within a natural monopoly, and thereby making the negative consequences of the natural monopoly as few as possible.  This happens in the Nordic countries, where all power companies are allowed to sell power to all customers, regardless of their utility company.  The U.S. has chosen to regulate the price of power instead, which limits the worst consequences of the monopoly without generating a healthy marketplace for power.

I was very surprised when someone told me on IRC they have blackouts in his part of Texas on warm days due to power shortage.  The utility actually shuts off power to some areas due to shortage!  This would never happen in the Nordic countries.  Here high power consumption only makes the price rise, and more expensive production comes online.  E.g. coal and gas powered plants in Denmark, which then exports to the other countries.

As for radio frequencies -- don't forget that one kid among a million people is enough.  One who won't cooperate.  Like the one in a million who don't want to pay his taxes due to some misguided morals.  I would love it if my wifi reached across the city, and a hundred miles when I crank up the power and widen the frequency band.  And I'll get rid of those noisy aircraft that take off and land a few hundred meters from my house.  Win!  I'll lose TV and radio, but I don't care much about that anyway.

"People will figure out how to share based on their own needs and desires" -- is that Karl Marx, or Friedrich Engels?  Free market competition is all about market competition, and sharing only when it benefits yourself at least as much as the competitor.  In this case there is no way for sharing to benefit yourself.  If you race on a one lane road, you won't come first if you let the car behind you pass.  Cranking up the power and using more of the frequency band benefits yourself.  Yielding to something else only benefits something else.  You haven't lowered the tx power of your own wlan to make a little less radio noise and interference for your neighbour's wlans, have you?  So you are the kid, huh?

Yes, they are due to the laws of physics.  There can be only one electric power supplier to every house.  High power cables/wires can't cross each other without interference.  For allowing more than one utility company access to every house, the companies must cooperate to allow for crossings without interfering with the service of the other company.  Why would a company which enjoy a monopoly allow this?  It is not likely, and would be terribly inefficient compared to one cable/line.

Similar for radio frequencies.  If I use the navaid frequencies for the closest airport for my own wlan, the airport would have to close for all IFR operations.  The airport needs to have a monopoly on using those frequencies for the navaids to work.

Both monopolies are necessary by laws of physics, not artificial causes like government regulations.  (Thomas Robert Malthus' definition of a natural monopoly, I know there are many.)

How about natural monopolies?  Will they be regulated, or do you just deny their existence for simplicity.

E.g. in my country free competition is secured in the power market because electricity utility companies can't discriminate against producers.  I, as a consumer, can buy my electricity from whatever company I want to, and the utility company has to transport the power to me.  This ensures competition in the power market.  Before I had to buy electricity for the company which deliver the power, which was very much more expensive due to their natural monopoly.

Another example: Radio frequencies is a very limited resource.  I can easily make a new powerful long range high bandwidth wifi network for myself and my family, and at the same time make FM radio and VHF and UHF TV, all air navigation systems and all other medium to long range radio communication unusable in the area.  Should there be any regulation of the usage of this very limited common resource, or would that be immoral in your opinion?

Unlikely.  This may have been the case back in 2010 when one could still find blocks when CPU mining on common equipment.  (Those blocks weren't worth much, of course.)  Nowadays one need either very fast and expensive GPUs to get BTC at any reasonable speed and marginal profit, and investing in GPUs for mining now is guaranteed to be a loss.  Or one needs highly specialized equipment, which I doubt anyone will buy unless they have experience with Bitcoin already.  And Bitcoin has become very easy to buy.  It just doesn't make sense to invest in expensive specialized equipment with uncertain profit margin and mining for weeks for a few coins, when you can buy as many coins as you want today or tomorrow.  If you want to invest in BTC, you invest in BTC.  If you want to invest in mining, you invest in mining.

This does not deter people from driving or flying drunk, often ending up killing a lot of completely innocent people.  The risk of losing ones pilot or drivers licence for life + prison does.  Now all resemblance to John Locke's social contract is gone.  A working social contract must provide some security for the rest of the society.  Better security for one self and ones property is the reason why people will form governments, according to John Locke.  Your vision will be a large leap backwards towards anarchy, and even less security than the customary laws from before governments.  It ends up not working, because people will want more security for themselves and their property.

This theory may sound like paradise in some disgruntled peoples ears.  Most thinking people can easily see that it won't work.  Much like communism.

Unfaithful husbands and stuff, yes.  For a serious investigation they would need access to the garage where I keep my stolen cars and the bodies of the people who were in them (a simple way to make the self-defence part void, because there would no longer be a self to defend, and nobody to claim their property), and by your agreement they can't.

If you get into a fight you weren't a part of to start with, you are initiating force.  No force was used against you before you initiated force against the other participants, and they probably never intended to involve you.  If this can be used as an excuse for initiating force, the rule has no meaning.

And the judge will use what law?  A dozen different social contracts may be involved, in addition to free people and perhaps minors.  Perhaps a conservative Jew who only accept the Torah as law, and put one radical Islamist, a fanatical Christian and an atheist in the mix.  Sweet dreams.  This is going to work as smoothly as the Middle East, right? 

Both, but the group would be targets if they work in the open.

Sorry to hear about that story about security companies "supplementing" the police.  That's terrible!

Go back and read it again.  You still don't understand the simplest logical primitives, and without them you are useless at discussions.  You should start with those before you start reading the philosophers.  I can't explain your logical fallacy better than I already did.

Yep.  The courts in my country frequently judge against the other parts of the government.  If it doesn't work in your country, I suggest a revolution.

Incentive to find an indifferent judge?   No way!  No party will ever want an indifferent judge.  If I can't pay a judge to judge in my favor, and there is a real risk that I will lose the case, I have an incentive for not agreeing to a judge at all.  There won't be a case with an indifferent judge.  You will have an incentive for accepting my suggestion, hoping you will be able to get my cheap judge over to your side with enough money on the table.  Indifferent judges will never get any work.  You will either end up with a judge from one of the sides, potentially getting paid enough during the case to switch sides (you have no rules against corruption, btw) or no case at all.

Restitution must be.  Otherwise you will not be allowed to take my property, which means you will only be able to get compensation.  No restitution.  (This is by the way common practice in most countries.  The USA is the only one I know of where restitution is commonplace.)

At least there won't be any illegal copying by this law.  If I copy some copyrighted work, the only punishment would be copying the work back from me! 

And if you don't know for sure who did it, you are lost.  Nobody has the authority to take a suspect in for questioning or to investigate anything on other people's property.

I can see you want to legalize drunk driving.

Self-defence is defined as defending one self, not defending other people, but the definition of this will probably vary.  It certainly needs some clarification.  Clarification could be done by courts, but you don't want it.  At least not one authoritative court.

Defending someone else is by definition not self-defence.

No.  The situation I want to avoid is a lot of "defence" and "security" agencies, or criminals with weapons, and street gangs (it's pretty much the same), walking around and making the society unsafe for all other people than their customers.  My society will have a definitive prohibition against such agencies, with long prison terms for affiliation.

When executing government authority they have the obligation according to the law, which a majority of the society agrees on, to act in this way.  This makes the actions moral when they do it, and immoral if you do it.  I think it is very sensible to limit those powers to a small well controlled group.

This is basically what is done now, yes?  Democracy and all.  John Locke never intended everyone to sign every law.  There were customary laws long before governments.  The laws where usually not written down, yet one would get punished for breaking them.  After describing the law of nature, he described why governments will come into being as a natural next step.

This does not make sense.  The market has no incentives for using an indifferent judge.  I would pay for the cheapest judge to judge in my favor.  The market will not guarantee a division of power either, which was important to Locke.

Your society does not mention restitution!  And the point of punishing people for crimes is (in most countries, probably not yours with it's insane amount of prisoners per capita) not the punishment itself, but to give them education and guiding back to society as a normal law-abiding citizens.  Focus on punishment only brings us back to medieval times.  Hurting people physically will not accomplish anything but revenge.  We also have the case of mentally ill people who need treatment.  Punishment will only make them worse.

Another day.

Where do I start?

First of all there is no defence against abuse, except other members are prohibited to use force against me.  If they get away with it (I can only defend myself, nobody else, and nobody else can defend me without breaching the second).  The most worrying part is that there is no mention of relations to other societies.  There are also no mention of limits to defence.  It may end up like some sick cult where the members think they are allowed to kill people in "self defence" for the simplest offences.

Small children and people without the mental capability of signing a contract have no way to defend themselves.  If someone attacks my two year old son without attacking me, I have no right of initiating any kind of force against the offending individual to save my own son.  If I do, the attacker has the right of self defence by unspecified means.  No, I wouldn't dream of signing this contract.

Se the quote at the bottom for more reasons.

You have no right by your contract to delegate the ability to defend yourself.  It belongs to the individual.  Your defenders can't initiate force against my police.  Only defend themselves.  Assuming they belong to the same society as you, but they will likely not.  They can make up their own contracts.  My police will certainly go directly for you and throw you before court and then in prison.

My society will be explicitly against dealing with so-called defence agencies.  We will have a secret group responsible for poisoning their water supplies with psychedelic drugs, hopefully keeping them out of business.  We don't want South African conditions.

I don't get it.  What other contract than the law do the government have with this woman?  In what way would she have better protection if she was in your society, where there are no courts of laws or police or right to defend anyone but one self?

I told you already as well.  Contract as of Locke's social contract.  Not your kind of contract.  You don't need to sign Locke's social contract.

They are not above the law.  The law, and the fact that the majority of the society backs the law, makes the actions moral.  Why do you think you are above the law?

I think you can rewrite "based on Locke" to "may have a distant relationship to some of John Locke's ideas".  For Locke government was inevitable.

Of course.  Many later philosophers have based their works on works of Locke.

I, for one, wouldn't dream of signing the Shire society declaration.  I don't think many thinking people would.  It has to many holes and no security.  I don't think you would get everyone to agree on the same contract.  We are all individuals.

Different social contracts will have contradictions.  My social contract will have a police force to handle cases where the contract is broken.  E.g. if you steal my car.  If you belong to another contract, e.g. this Shire society, you wouldn't accept any of my police, and use "self defence" (whatever self defence is -- the contract doesn't specify e.g. proportional force like the Geneva conventions).  In the resulting fight, which is easily won by "my" police force, you hurt an innocent bystander by accident.  The bystander is member of a third society, which is basically a street gang which by their contract now have the obligation to take out revenge on all members of your society.  And we have it going.

No, this isn't going to work.  I prefer Locke's society to your plethora of intermingling societies.

I have.  It had references to laws.  Which one was broken in this case?

Whatever.  It's all in the contract.  Laws.  A majority of the people around you, the civil society, think they are a good idea.

John Locke's philosophy is what it is.  If you change it or add to it, it is no longer Locke's philosophy.  Locke himself built the work of many other philosophers.  If you choose to build on elements from Locke, it doesn't make it his philosophy.

I don't think Locke's social contract establishing civil society would work if every person in the society would have their own contract with everyone else, and some will end up without a contract, or a contract signed only by a few other people.  Not to mention the humongous bureaucracy we would get when everyone were to sign each others contracts, and to stay up to date those contracts would need renegotiation from time to time.  In some areas people would become entirely unprotected.  Your rape story suddenly get relevant again.  Perhaps you don't want any mention in your contract that you are not allowed to rape minors.  No, Locke wouldn't agree.  It contradicts his philosophy in so many ways.

Locke's is very clear that the citizens have a right to revolution to replace the government when it acts against the interests of citizens.  His social contract must be generally agreed to, not something which everyone are forced into against their common interests.  How is this revolution going to work when some have social contracts acting against the interests of a clear majority of the citizens?

It concluded that the contract (the law) didn't cover this particular case.  Which law is your definition from?  Courts judge according to the law, not the dictionary!

I never claimed John Locke said that.  And by the way, I want in my contract that grinding the owner of some land under my foot makes the land mine!  I'm going to this among a lot of legalese mumbo-jumbo on page 6502 in my contract, of course.

The population of Norway may not be high, but it is spread over a large area.  The distance from the southern tip of Norway to the northern tip is about the same as Vancouver to San Diego, and UK is more densely populated with roughly 2/3 of the area of Norway (mainland only).  Lower population density leads to higher costs.  And, yes, Norway is fortunate to be an energy exporter.  In percent of GDP Norway spends 9.6% and UK spends 9.8%, which is about average for Europe.  US spends 17.4%!

I can buy a private insurance as well, but I don't think I will find specialists around here much faster no matter what insurance I have.  There are a few obvious differences between rural Norway and NYC, making comparing difficult.

Bad headaches which the doctors can't find the cause for are quite common.  As long as the headache isn't caused by a tumour (and I suppose they checked that early), the odds of finding the cause for it is rather low.  It can be trigged by food or beverages, lack of sleep or to much sleep, etc.  Doctors can usually only give advice and painkillers.

Offered, of course.  There is no pressure.

In my opinion a free market health system is impossible, because a large part of it is a natural monopoly.  It can't be a free market because the customer often don't have a real choice.

Some parts of the health system can work as a free market.  E.g. dental services and cosmetic surgery.

For a moment I thought you had read Locke.  You obviously haven't.    I used Locke's terms there, and even specified it in parenthesis to make it clear.

Huh?  This court concluded that the contract wasn't broken.  If you think it should be in the contract (your nation's laws), you have to tell your lawmakers that.

I must admit my philosophy education, of which John Locke was only a small part of the curriculum, is limited to one semester at university.  Care to give any examples of what you think I misunderstood?

I'll get a doctor the same day if I'm ill.  If it isn't necessary, perhaps I want to fix an ingrown toenail or something which isn't critical, I may have to wait a few days, or more if I need a specialist.  If the public heath system in the USA will find me a specialist and fix my problem the next day it would be great, but I doubt it.  I think you are comparing apples and oranges.  It is by no means forbidden for me to find a private specialist and pay for it myself, or get a health insurance which will pay for it, but most people don't care that much.

And much more effective than the U.S. system measured in what they get per dollar.  They just spend a lot less dollars on it.

It can probably explain some of the problem, yes.  If you are to fat in Norway, and no diet helps, you will be offered free surgery to fix it permanently.  E.g. removing 90% of your stomach and some of your intestines to make it impossible to eat to much, and make your body take up less fat.  It is a drastic measure, but very effective.  The patient will likely be able to work more and need less health services in the future.  One will typically have to wait for more than a day for this procedure as well, but I don't think that is much of a problem.  Faced with not being able to eat more than half a small yoghurt beaker and some vitamins in one meal for the rest of her life, the patient may want to try that diet again, and perhaps another diet and some exercise before the surgery.

Funny you call the least effective system in the world "pretty efficient".  I think you need to do some more research.

Why would there be less abuse of the public health system if it was almost entirely public, like in the countries with the most effective health care systems?  Are people living in the USA more prone to abusing public services than other people?  Why don't people abuse their private health insurances instead?

Yep, and under your contract with the government (as Locke would put it), you are obliged to pay tax from the fruits of your labour as well.  Both you and the government are bound by that contract.  You are however, according to John Locke, free to join the rest of the citizens in a revolution to replace the government if the government is working against the interests of citizens.

No, John Locke isn't a commie, but you obviously only agree to small pieces of his philosophy taken completely out of context.

Scary, huh?

No, and now I really don't understand you.  Adam Smith, if we are both talking about the Adam Smith who wrote "The Wealth of Nations", examined a lot of different taxes and how to maximize the income of a nation without a negative impact on the efficiency of the market.  His work has become a model for modern welfare states.  He especially advocated progressive tax rates and luxury taxes.  What would the wealth of nations be without taxes?

"Every tax, however, is, to the person who pays it, a badge, not of slavery, but of liberty." -- Adam Smith

True, I didn't notice that.

You are a commie!

Face the reality.  Some of the fruits of your labour belong to the government.  By law and right.  You are just a peasant.