March 20, 2006
From the desk of Jane Galt:All right, all right . . . I give in
Opposite day is flourishing everywhere. And Jane, who was one of those little girls who would just absolutely die, like, right now if she didn't have fringed suede boots like everyone else, is jumping on the bandwagon.
Suggest a topic that you'd to hear argued in my characteristically digressive, discursive, and distracted style--except from the opposite point of view. First topic to get three mentions wins (and I can see your IP addresses, so no funny stuff!) Caveat: I will not select a topic that is inherently repulsive (Resolved: a wife should be her husband's property), and since I don't want my name on the opinion, it will be my evil twin, Jennifer, who will provide your post. Jennifer looks exactly like me, except that she has long red nails, and likes to smoke expensive foriegn cigarettes--and, of course, she never got over our adolescent fixation with building a gigantic state apparatus to manage everything that bothers us about the world.
Posted by Jane Galt at March 20, 2006 1:18 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksResolved: Abortion should be available to any woman at any time, for any reason and entirely at public expense.
The state should provide modest funds for aspiring painters, sculpters, performance artists, etc. to foster a viable creative arts community in the U.S.
Bonus points for integrating affirmative action based on ethnicity.
Bush's tax cuts (in the real world, without commensurate spending cuts) were "the responsible thing."
Moscow on the Hudson should really be more like Moscow.
Those "expensive foriegn cigarettes" - are they in fact the kind of cigarettes one rolls from expensive foreign plant material? How about arguing for changing their legal status.
The new French youth (un)employment law.
All software the typical person or business needs (eg, operating systems, office suites, databases) should be produced by the government and released into the public domain (or, alternately, under a license similar to the GPL).
All software the typical person or business needs (eg, operating systems, office suites, databases) should be produced by the government and released into the public domain (or, alternately, under a license similar to the GPL).
-2nd post
All software the typical person or business needs (eg, operating systems, office suites, databases) should be produced by the government and released into the public domain (or, alternately, under a license similar to the GPL).
-3rd!
Noah Yetter: "The new French youth (un)employment law."
Is that an argument for or against the law? I'd love to see Jane, er, I mean Jennifer try to argue that French workers deserve the equivalent of tenure.
All software the typical person or business needs (eg, operating systems, office suites, databases) should be produced by the government and released into the public domain (or, alternately, under a license similar to the GPL).
-4th (just to make sure!)
Paul Krugman would be one option...Margaret Mitchell another...
Okay, let me clarify . . . an argument that some sane person, somewhere, is making. I am tossing the software argument because I cannot come up with one good argument for it.
Defend and elaborate upon the Crooked Timber response to Cato Unbound's "does inequality matter?" - to wit, that forcible redistribution of income & wealth by the state in the name of "equalizing opportunity" is both just and in the long run more efficient than the market.
Really? I'm suprised by the reaction on both sides on that... I think it's a bad idea, but I can think of various reasonable and bad-but-plausible-sounding arguments: software has numerous qualities leading to market failures; asymmetrical information, zero marginal cost, natural monopolies in many cases.
[shrug]
Relative poverty matters: thus, increasing the absolute wealth of the poor may still be bad for the poor if inequality increases.
jane,
i respect your veto but on the software thing, google "software public good" and you'll come up with more than a few arguments, many of them from apparently sane persons.
It would be better if Jennifer's name were Dagny.. Just sayin'.
How's this: School choice is inherently unjust.
I'll support Noah,
Pro: The new french unemployment law is unjust, immorale, ,illegal and violates the rights of man. Worse it would start us, the French, down the slippery slope of looking like the US labor market where 'evil' management can destroy our lives on a whim. Long Live the Revolution! Long Live Napoleon! (oops..)
I might be able to make a good argument for killing Microsoft's copyright . . . but anyone who has spent more than five minutes in a government office would shudder at the idea of having government IT people design our software. Government IT is *awful* (to be fair to the IT people, that is because of the government procurement process, not because there's anything wrong with the government IT staff).
1.) Defend governments right to restrict space exploration so that only they can do it.
2.) Defend rent control in NYC.
3.) Defend tax-exempt status of religious organizations.
A majority of people who are poor are where they are at because:
1. they are disabled/old/children and cannot help themselves
2. we as a society disenfranchise them
3. the rich (or the people who are NOT poor) keep them down by our racism and discrimination.
4. our government doesn't do enough to give them a leg up
Jane - I love it when you talk about society and the cause of being poor!
Jane underestimates how Jennifer can be.
Something was swallowed. That should have read "Jane underestimates how *clever* Jennifer can be."
I think it would be refreshingly different for Jane to make an unambiguous pro-choice argument that didn't slobber all over the other side.
... it'll never happen
#1. A woman's place is in the home.
#2. Man is here as a result of intelligent design.
A departure from the govt.-software option - watered down to:
"General-use software titles (e.g., operating systems, office productivity, WYSIWYG sitebuilding, DTP, simple photo adjustment/repair, tax preparation, certainly others) with a monopoly share should be required to abide by the terms of an Open Source License (the LGPL looks promising in this regard), immediately upon ruling that the software in question has a monopoly share."
(The more I ponder that one, the more I like it, though it does hold the potential of turning compatibility issues into a nightmare.)
My nomination:
"Resolved: that combined federal, state, and endowment subsidies of postsecondary tuition and books be increased to 100% for all students, without qualifications."
I'm dubious the French unemployment law is more defensible than socializing software, but I suppose I can write my own essay if I want one. :)
Ben:
I'm pretty sure that would turn into a fiasco, as everybody jacks up prices on their software to make sure they never get more than 40% market share. A vaguely similar scheme I've seen mentioned was to reduce the copyright on software to 5 years; that one might even work.
School vouchers would inevitably lead to the further impoverishment of the worst schools by causing the flight of their best students. Lest we do more harm to the students and teachers at these schools, vouchers must be stopped!...I think this is the main argument against them, isn't it?
Someone wrote:
2.) Defend rent control in NYC.
Wow, I would love to see that one. As Jane's writing style is so... discursive... maybe she can work it in. :)
I predict this little game will turn out to be less amusing for Jane than she thought it would be. :)
In case there's a second "Jennifer" post, I vote for defending New York's rent control, or strict rent control in general. Bonus points for defending rent-control-in-one-city, the way we have it here in the Bay Area (where only San Francisco and Berkeley, which are about 10% and 2% of the Bay Area's population respectively, have strict rent controls).
The United States should adopt the same strong line on human rights in takes in countries like Venezuela, Cuba etc on allies of the US such as Turkey Egypt Saudi Arabia.
This is on the basis that the US has told us for some time human rights are 'universal',therefore they should be upheld everywhere, not just applied against governments that are bad for business.
Children should have the right to vote as soon as they can read.
(Or does Jennifer hate children?)
I found an article that Jennifer can use to help her on her quest to argue against the French Unemployment law:
http://www.nyunews.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2006/03/20/441e39844d30e
If she's as half as smart as Jane, then she is twice as smart as me, so perhaps she can figure out the neck-snapping turns of logic in this paragraph:
"The French government is obviously taking its cue here from the U.S., which has had a head start of several decades in eroding job security and casualizing the labor force. While it has yet to reach the level of France, where almost one in four working-age people under the age of 26 are unemployed, the prolonged hollowing out of union protection and workers’ rights laws have carried the job problem here in the U.S. to a disturbing level."
So there you go Jen. Just connect the dots and tell us how the U.S. simultaneously leads France in this evil business of eroding working rights, and yet is playing catch-up with it in joblessness, because France is so far ahead of the U.S. in terms of following the U.S. down the rabbit hole. If only the U.S. followed the U.S. model as fast as France follows... aww, see! I just don't get it.
I vote for NY rent control. I don't care if it is too late.
After reading Tak D's commentary, I vote for the French unemployment laws.
It doesn't fit your question exactly, but I'd like to see Jane-ifer (a third party) explain why we should scrap the current tax regime with a LVT.
Ren will go to heaven, Stimpy will go to hell.
At least you could have argued that any software written by the gov't should be public domain. I mean, that makes sense. The public pays for it, they should own it.
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