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Samael <Samael@dial.pipex.com>Wrote:
>PAP?
Private Protection Agencies.
>you have a system of government (I assume that's what the PAP is)
No.
>capitalism doesn't work for _everybody_,
That's where charity comes in. It's true that if everybody is hard hearted then the weak will starve, but government can't help, if people won't give voluntarily they won't vote for politicians to make them.
>Please define property.
No. Like all the most important things the meaning of this word comes from usage not definitions.
>It doesn't have an intrinsic meaning.
A keen grasp of the obvious.
>Please show that exists anywhere but inside peoples minds.
Please explain why it needs to exist anywhere but inside people's minds.
>The government is there to act to make sure that those people who got
>there first, or who have the most power do not use that power to stop
>those without power from sharing in the objects that exist.
It's easy to understand why government politicians would make noises like that with their mouth, but for the life of me I can't see why they would actually do it. Making friends of the poor and the weak and enemies of the rich and powerful is not a good strategy for a successful politician.
>The free market generally provides the best solution,
True
>but government is dead handy for avoid things like monopolies,
Not needed. Your company and mine produce all the steel made in the world. We make a good profit now, but we want more, so we get together and double our prices. Now we each make a huge profit on each ton of steel sold, so we would both like to make lots and lots of steel. However, because the price of steel is now very high demand is down, so part of our sinister plot must be an agreement to limit production. The higher the price gets, the greater is the temptation to secretly cheat on the agreement and produce more steel than was agreed to, and that would kill the cartel.
There are even more problems for our poor cartel. Now that the price of steel is sky high and the profits are huge, other companies will want to get in on the act and start making steel. Also, consumers of steel will not want to shell out all that money for that metal and will start looking for replacement materials like wood or plastic or aluminum or composite fiber.
>unfair trade,
Not needed. I manufacture 99% of the worlds widgets, you make 1%. I want to drive you out of business, so I figure I'll lower my price until you go broke and then I can jack them up to anything I want. So now you louse money on each widget you sell, the trouble is I do too. I have 99 times as much money as you do, but I'm lousing it 99 times faster. Even worse, because the price is very low the demand for widgets is huge, and if prices are to remain low I must build more factories and increase production. I'm lousing money faster and faster, meanwhile you just temporally halt production in your small factory and wait for me to go broke. It won't be a long wait.
>basic research
Not needed. Just this a few months ago a very small private company, Geron Corporation, found a, perhaps the, key to cellular aging. Last year another small company found a way to clone mammals.
The breakthrough on High Temperature superconductors was made by IBM at their Zurich laboratory, Muller and Benders, both IBM employees received Nobel prizes. The very same IBM lab also made what is unquestionably the single most important advance in Nanotechnology up to this point, The Scanning Tunneling Microscope and earned another Nobel prize for IBM employees Binding and Rorer. IBM is also where the newer Atomic Force Microscope and Magnetic Resonance Microscope were invented. They used these machines to make the smallest possible logo, spelling out the name "IBM" atom by atom a few years ago.
IBM didn't do everything, the first laser was made in May 1960 at the private Hughes Research Laboratory by Harold Mamma. 60 years ago Bell Labs discovered that some radio waves come from space and built the world's first radio telescope, more recently Bell Labs revolutionized Cosmology by detecting the 3 degree Kelvin black body background radiation from The BIG BANG and got a Nobel Prize for it. Bell Labs also invented the transistor and got another Nobel Prize for that. Texas Instruments invented the integrated circuit, INTEL invented the microprocessor to fulfill a contract from a Japanese calculator company.
A lot of good work comes from private universities. MIT was started in 1845 Largely with Ersatz Bigelow's money, he made a vast fortune in the power loom manufacturing business. CAL TECH is also a privet institution, so is Harvard, so is Yale, so is Princeton, so is Carnegie Mellon, so is The Institute For Advanced Study, so is Stanford. Speaking of Stanford, Calvin Quate of that privet university used an Atomic Force Microscope invented at IBM to make the worlds smallest transistor. He was able to make lines less than 100 nanometers wide.
Most of the world's great telescopes were built with private funds donated by rich men, including the largest of all, the 394 inch Keck on Mauna Kea, a second private instrument of equal size recently became operational just a few hundred feet away. I think it's interesting that one of the biggest contributors to Big Science, Charles Yerkes, made much of his money by building street car lines, until government put him out of business when they decided they could run them much, much better. None of the men who gave money for these things expected their telescope to make a profit. If government wasn't around to steal a large pat of their money people like this would give even more.
John k Clark jonkc@att.net
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