GBRK
4d ago
That would be a mechanism by which congress-- not the courts, not the executive (except as duly assigned by congress)-- could potentially intervene, yes... But do you honestly believe the interstate commerce clause grants the federal government the unlimited ability to interfere with how states delegate municipalities the power to decide how they're going to charge people for using vehicles on their roads? If this argument was about interstate highways I'd understand your point, but the congestion fee applies to municipal roads. NYC taxes pay for those, so NYC gets to decide what to do with them and who gets to use them.
GBRK
4d ago
That's really not what the equal protection clause means. Being a resident of a state or city gets you cheaper or free access to public services like museums and universities. Why not roads?
GBRK
5d ago
GBRK
5d ago
I don't understand why you're presenting this like a bad thing. NYC citizens pay taxes to create a city that people want to come to. What's wrong with them instituting an entrance fee for out-of-towners that would be freeloading otherwise?
GBRK
5d ago
It would be a context-dependent response, and I'm not convinced that it was the right context in this exact case, even if the defendant's claims of bullying were true. But it's really not that hard to imagine scenarios were even motivationally innocent behavior from a physically threatening individual can be reasonably perceived as a threat.
GBRK
5d ago
The defendant is alleging a history of bullying from the person who got stabbed. I don't know if that's true, but if it is it would substantiate claims of self-defense.
GBRK
6d ago
I think I could beat up the "average" person (inclusive of women, I'm not good enough that I can confidently claim I would beat up the average guy.) But if I got into a heated argument with someone weaker than me, it would be ridiculous to expect them to just concede to my physical prowess. Therefore, I would consider it a proportional act for them to pull a knife on me. Similarly, if I'm in a reversed situation, where I'm facing a black belt or prizefighter in their prime, I would rather pull a knife than let them give me brain damage. In full space of hypotheticals, I think the fight would de-escalate from there the vast majority of the time-- few martial artists are stupid enough to actually fight someone who'd afraid and has a knife, including myself, but I can't strictly exclude the chance of conflict.
GBRK
6d ago
Characterizing them all as "rioters" who wanted to "burn a community down" is a credible, but not unimpeachably true claim. I suppose it maps onto the (again, credible, but not unimpeachably true) argument that the black kid in this case was being bullied, but I think the difference here is that assigning an intent to a group does not assign an intent to the individual people Rittenhouse shot, while at least an in principle a claim about bullying is a claim about a history of negative interactions between particular individuals that let them predict how the other will act.
GBRK
6d ago
Talking about fundraisers is comparable but peripheral. Central to the rittenhouse controversy is a scissors statement about "is it reasonable to walk around with exposed guns." Central to this controversy are facts that are yet undisclosed-- that being, what exactly lead to the stabbing. It's possible that the two cases might start looking more alike, if during witness examination the prosecution makes a credible case that stabber was in some way looking for trouble (regardless of what the stabee what up to), but it also might start looking less alike, if the defense can establish a history of bullying and negative interpersonal interactions between the stabee and stabber. At this point, I think it's too early to tell, and people drawing connections are being pointlessly inflammatory.
I do martial arts also, and I predict you'd be facing an unsympathetic DA and a very tough jury if you did that. "People can be killed with bare hands!" Yes, but it's very uncommon, and pulling a lethal weapon is an obvious escalation and most courts will see it that way.
Of course it's an escalation. But it's very rare that situations begin perfectly even. If I was having a heated argument with a five-nothing woman, by the very nature of my size, sex, and training I have already pre-escalated. If I even unconsciously clenched my fists, her bringing out a knife would be a reasonable response. Neither of us would necessarily want a fight here-- but then events might conspire to put us in conflict. I'd prefer to run, but if my back was against the wall, I might instead make a grab for the knife. Under those circumstances, it would be perfectly reasonable for her to try to stab me. Regardless of which of us comes out the victor, either of us could be plausibly at fault.
GBRK
6d ago
It's really not that concrete at all. In the rittenhouse case, rittenhouse claimed to be provoked into acting in self defense (credibly) but his opposition claims (also credibly) that he deliberately created a situation such that that provocation would happen and he would have an excuse to commit violence. In this case, the stabber also claims that he was acting in self-defense (unknown credibleness), but no one (so far) claims that he was looking for an excuse. Plus there's the additional matter of him using a knife, rather than a gun, and killing one person instead of many. The situations at hand are neither symmetric nor complementary.
Personally speaking, I do martial arts, and I would consider pulling a knife on someone who wants to throw hands a reasonable, proportionate act. There are far too many ways to get permanently injured or killed from blunt trauma. I would not consider it reasonable to then attack them with that knife if they backed off-- but maybe the football player saw the knife, assumed there was going to be some stabbing, grabbed for it-- and as a consequence, got Rittenhouse'd. Is that what happened? I don't know. But I'm content to say, "stabbing people is bad" and let the rest sort itself out through the legal system.
(I don't know anything about the gardener case. When I look up "gardener murder" I get a convict who committed a bunch of rapes and murders.)
GBRK
6d ago
It's worth noting that in at least one place (https://old.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/1jzgmzs/please_explain_karmelo_anthony_support/), the response to this from self-professed liberals has been pretty uniformly, "stabbing people is wrong."
GBRK
6d ago
I'd wager that the difference is largely practical.
If there's a large group of people that believe in a source of objective truth and mortality deeper than any human logic, no propaganda will sway them from its commandments. And if you try, you get martyrs and religious warfare. So, the government lets them swing their fists until they hit someone else's nose.
For non-thesists, however, while their beliefs can be self-consistent within an axiomatic system by definition there's no source of irrational/beyond-rational (depending on your viewpoint) certainty in the axioms they use. Therefore, the government can reasonably bet on trying to shift their axioms-- especially since they're not in any sort of community that might organize retaliation.
(If atheists get together to decide on objective moral principles they're going to set in stone and propagate forever... then congratulations, they've re-invented religion and become entitled to the same protections. See: the "Church of Satan" people.)
I think what you're missing is...
nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;
Contingent on the supreme court actually deciding to go for the outlaw thing (which is won't, and probably shouldn't), a court declaring someone an outlaw would be the due process of law. If you want to talk about traditions, americans have historically been a great fan of lynchings, and very often none of the perpetrators ever faced trial. If one branch of government can simply decline to use its powers because it doesn't like what another branch is telling it to do... well, that's pretty generalizable.
GBRK
12d ago
I bring up GDP growth because I think it's a good indicator of innovation-relative-to-resources. I'll concede that if we had some measure of absolute innovation, the chinese would probably not be ahead-- but the important part is that they're system structurally advantages them, and as the resource gap closes their innovation will accelerate, not decelerate.
The fact that the most productive chinese people live outside of china is the opposite of reassuring-- it means they're not even operating at their full power level. As china approaches parity with the US, while also having better infrastructure and standard of living for elites, re-immigration will look increasingly attracive. That's a double benefit for them-- strengthening them at the cost of the west.
America's main competitive advantage is it's historical ability to drain the best brains of the entire planet, but Trump is putting sort of a damper on that given his obvious hostility to even university-educated immigrants.
GBRK
13d ago
Empirically, GDP growth is higher than ours, and they're an increasingly large part of earth's industrial and scientific base (measuring by goods produced, scientific papers written.) I understand the impetus to blame copying and catch-up effects, but I think that's cope; if it were true their growth would be going s-shaped but instead they're releasing Deepseek and producing electric vehicles and solar technology better than everyone else.
GBRK
14d ago
The difference between actual private property and intellectual property is that private property i excludable. If a person other than the owner takes that property to use for themselves, then the owner is directly harmed by their inability to use it. Consequently, it makes moral sense to defend that property because you are defending against an aggressor, and the state ultimately benefits from reducing the cost o violence by taking that responsibility to prevent theft upon itself.
But intellectual property isn't excludable. You are not harmed when another person uses it. You have no moral right to commit violence to prevent other people from innocent use of your ideas. You're raising the "but what if we have less innovation" objection as a practical objection-- but in the natural experiment of the US versus china, the chinese have been out-innovating us as a direct result of their poor enforcement of IP law. The empirical result is that the justification for IP law is fundamentally unsound.
GBRK
14d ago
This means that everyone who invested valuable early 21st century dollars into fixed-income dollar-denominated assets gets paid back in worthless middle 21st century dollars.
That's probably the optimal outcome. Old people and rich investors caused the problem with their poorly thought-through voting and investment strategies, so it's only fair if the fix comes out of their pockets.
GBRK
18d ago
You can't run a drug research program off of kickstarter. You can't build a new airplane internal part by having all the airlines sign up for an engineer's Patreon.
Do you seriously believe there are no possible financial instruments that could result in complex projects being completed without IP law?
Patreon is an an object lessons of how the market adapts to scenarios where IP law stops being relevant. (In this case, to how the internet makes traditional enforcement of copyright law against individual consumers near-impossible.) Kickstarter proves that complex engineering products can be pre-funded directly by consumers, without need for investors. It's true that we don't currently have Biotech Patreon, for example-- but I'm arguing that that's a consequence not of the boundary conditions of capitalism, but of the specific market distortions introduced by government enforcement of IP law. Looking at the current state of things and saying, "this is the only possible system that results in innnovation" is like living in the 1800s and saying, "the royal monopoly granted to the British East India Company is the only possible system that result in trade with India."
GBRK
18d ago
All businesses can profit from creating useful IP -- whether they are joint-stock, private, sole-owned or otherwise. This ability is completely independent of ownership structure.
But if there was no IP, the valuation of a business becomes more independent of its past accomplishments, and rests more on its ability to keep producing new ones. It would destroy the ability for vulture capital firms to buy up a business with promising IP, fire all the innovators, run it into the ground while extracting maximum rents, and then sell of just the IP later, for example. Removing IP law would change the balance of power between middlemen and producers, to the benefit of producers.
You say that executives determine all of corporate spending, but that's missing the deeper point-- that some proportion of business spending is allocated towards productive investments, but that executives use the power inequalities between them and their consumers/producers to claw away rents for their own personal benefit. I'm talking about corporate money spent on making impressive executive offices, building new corporate headquarters closer to where they live, buying prestige-enhancing charity products, etcetera. And like you mentioned, re: inefficient firms, the ability for executives to do this is a direct result of corporate bureaucracy and much of corporate bureaucracy exists because of IP law. Paying people to file IP claims raises the "value" of a company, but has no material effect on its ability to actually produce a product.
GBRK
18d ago
As much is invested and it's done by what is essentially the same apparatus as today.
That's just not what empirically happens. Look, we've effectively already performed a natural experiment on repealing IP law when it comes to art, books, and music. Instead of no one publishing anything, or alternatively the exact same business models persisting, we get Patreon + Kickstarter for the writers and artists, and Soundcloud + Touring/Streaming for the musicians. There are still middlemen involved, of course, but as compared to publishing companies or record labels they're taking far smaller cuts.
GBRK
19d ago
You're coming at this from the perspective that the current dominance of stockholders is a just a natural feature of society, but it's not. Joint-stock companies are a useful economic innovation, and stockholders a necessary feature of capitalism, but their power is completely distorted by their ability to extract rents from using IP. If the government didn't enable that, stockholders would have less money, and consumers would have far more, and consequently consumers themselves could provide the capital investment required to create-- for example-- new vaccines.
And I'm absolutely sure that should be possible all capital investment ultimately derives from consumers paying for things anyway. The money required is already in the economy. Have no fear of free-riding stifling innovation. If people want a product, they'll pay for it, and financial-services whiz kids will figure out how to connect buyers to sellers regardless.
executives are paid massively, but are so few in number that they constitute a tiny fraction of corporate spending
They constitute a tiny fraction of corporate spending (ignoring stock compensation, which I'm lumping in with "stockholders"), but they determine a massive part of it. And specifically, they determine it should go to all sorts of middlemen-- layers of layers of lawyers and middle management and HR. Not because that actually enables them to make more products, but because those are the people that let them extract their economic rents.
GBRK
19d ago
IP is corrupted because investors capture most of the value of the IP development what if instead we [A system in which investors capture most of the value of the IP development].
Not investors-- consumers. There's a critical difference. An investor doesn't necessarily need or want the end product; they want the chance to perform arbitrage between the producer and the consumer. But-- to use a concrete example-- pharmacies, hospitals, government entities, and charitable organizations would still want new antimalarial drugs even if they can't prevent other people from manufacturing them. Their goal would be to fund the research and production of a certain amount of drugs at a particular price-- and then if other people get the drugs after they do, that doesn't change whatever supply/demand calculus drove their funding in the first place.
There would still be a role for investors in creating financial instruments intended to mitigate e.g. the free rider problem. But after the information is actually created, they wouldn't have the power to extract rents for using it.
GBRK
20d ago
My argument applies globally. Why should the researcher get to create a rent-seeking monopoly to extract wealth from the work of process engineers? Why would process engineers get to rent-seek from the work of factory laborers? If people actually want a thing, and are willing to pay for that thing, there will still be plenty of market forces conspiring to give them that thing. I just want to take all the rent-seeking out of the equation. Maybe it served a purpose two hundred years ago when we had far worse transportation and communication infrastructure, but now it's a crutch. Our financial services technology has evolved to the point where IP law is wholly unnecessary.
Then I guess NYC will just have to resort to universal tolls paired with a rebate to new yorkers specifically.
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