Re: Comparing Lisp conditions to Java Exceptions

Robert Marlow <bobstopper@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote on Wed, 04 May 2005:
> Ah, just as I thought would happen It's been assumed I'm some
> kind of state communist. Oh well.

Well. You did write:
>>> Why can't we all just do what needs to be done and have everyone share
>>> the wealth?

It's hard to imagine what else your vision might be, other than something
similar to communism.

> I just think value can be set by simply adding the cost of production to
> the cost of labour - generally assumed to be static. It's called the labour
> theory of value

Why does all labor have the same value, in your mind? Haven't you encountered
programmers who seem to be ten times more productive than other programmers?
Do you imagine that it is not possible to improve in one's job, say through
practice or training? What would be the incentive to do so, in your system?
In fact, there seems to be a disincentive: namely, that if after you improve
you can do your old job in less time, apparently you'll now get paid _less_
for it!

Second problem: you haven't accounted for the allocation of scarce resources
on the demand side. If you fix prices in this way, you'll find that some
items are vastly more popular than other items, despite costing the same to
create. For example, many more people want Apple's iPod than a similar
offering from Creative. Yet, if prices are fixed, then the manufacturers have
little incentive to make more of the more popular ones.

So what is your solution to the allocation problem? If there are only
500 iPods, on sale for the fixed price of $50, and 100,000 people want them
at that price, who gets them? Do you imagine a first-come first-served, or
a lottery system, or perhaps long lines at the retail store in the days and
weeks before initial release, or what?

And don't forget that you'll have a huge black market problem, since people
are willing to pay far, far more for the limited item then the offical
state-sanctioned price.

> When something is produced cheaply but damage 3rd parties like the
> environment or other people it is often still preferred to an equivalent
> product which doesn't have these externalities.

Sure. Unregulated free-markets have well known failures. Externalities is
one of them. (Others include "tradegy of the commons", monopolies, etc.)
Nobody is arguing for unregulated markets. But once you account for the very
few modes of free market failure, what you get with floating prices and
competitive manufacturers seems to be about as good as anybody has ever figured
out.

> I know very well how prices are set. And marketing is a big part of
> any real market as the name implies. Lower bound prices are set by supply
> and then you try to get demand as high as possible so you can force prices
> up. It's not difficult to see how values get skewed by successful
> brainwa uh... marketing.

I never said that marketing had no influence at all. But it's a distant,
minor influence on prices, far below: production costs, market structure
(how many producers/consumers are there), design, current fads, etc.

>> 2. Somebody still has to decide the relative worth of various jobs.
> (+ production-costs
> (* price-of-labour average-hours-of-labour-in-production))

So, the more efficiently that I work, the less money I make. Nice!

Apparently, I do best by being really, really, really slow and lazy.
Then I get paid the most!

> You could I guess argue that "the majority" might become tyrannical but
> that's a different debate.

I disagree with you about this too. Let's try a different quote: "Absolute
power corrupts absolutely." The best thing about the US Constitution is the
_limits_ on government: two houses of Congress, checks and balances between
three branches of government, and most especially the Bill of Rights,
providing large protections to individuals.

"Majority rules", like you seem to suggest, is a terrible idea. Do you support
slavery in the 1700's in the US? Lynchings of blacks in the US south in the
late 1800's? These kinds of things had majority support of the local
population.

> Suffice to say I'm confident that "tyranny of the majority" is in large
> part a myth

I couldn't disagree with you more strongly. Maintaining minority rights
(where I mean "minority" as generally as possible, not just in a racial sense)
is the single most critical feature of a proposed system of government.

-- Don
_______________________________________________________________________________
Don Geddis http://don.geddis.org/ don@xxxxxxxxxx
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only
exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves
largess out of the public treasury.
-- Alexander Tyler, eighteenth-century Scottish historian
.

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