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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (7954)	12/27/2005 3:32:26 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541990

Whats the difference if a tobacco companies assets are taken from +100M down to +10M vs. going from +50M to -40M due to a -90M liability? In the current system the difference is that we zero them at zero, i.e. don't allow negative numbers. All of your talk about unfairness comes down to the objection of handing someone a negative number, as opposed to a positive one. Reality limits them to zero. If a company has a negative value it will just be bankrupt. All that negative value disappears. The unfairness is in assigning them to some third party. I suppose if you wanted to get rid of the idea of a limited liability corporation you could assign them to the shareholders but than many of them will also declare bankruptcy. It is no more complex at all. Its a lot more complex. You didn't want to just assign large fines and settlements, you wanted to apply the cost to every transactions. In theory you could assign a $90bil liability to a company worth $50bil (although in practice it is probably pointless), but your idea went well beyond that. "Basically we replace our current monetary system with metamoney, which simply tracks all economic interactions" Message 21994549 Nothing simple about tracking all economic interactions at all. Not all economic interactions even involve cash, and not all interactions with economically damaging or beneficial results are something that would immediately recognized as economic transactions. But even tracking all transactions involving currency, credit, securities, and commodities, would be a major undertaking. If that was all you had to do, I suppose it might be possible that you could get a big chunk of them in to your system, maybe even the majority, but your system is far more complex than that. They aren't just sitting there in some mega-sized database (which might be an interesting target for hackers by the way) but rather you want to determine and impose costs and/or benefits on these transactions and change them over time. The vast bulk of all transactions will have zero future value. How do you determine that they have zero value? If you think, they will have zero future value do you just toss them out of the system? If not, if you have to track them and calculate and impose costs or benefits than this point is irrelevant, zero value or not you do not reduce the complexity of the situation. Many hundreds of individuals entire financial life could be stored on a single $50 hard drive. There is literally no cost involved. Hard drive space is not the main cost problem. But even with hard drive space there would be a problem if you tried to track every transaction of any type and calculate all the costs and consequences of it for all time. And of course all of this stored data would have to be stored in systems with extraordinary reliability, regular (and reliable) back up, and very high levels of security. There is no issue of worrying about the chain of those involved, to use tobacco, from grower through user. Fault, if any will be determined in the normal legal manner... ...If global warming makes Canadian real estate boom, and the future thinks that some of that wealth should flow to those that consumed hydrocarbons, then the financial transactions of those gas gallons will be positive. If not, they'll be zero. If global warming raises sea levels, and Tonga gets flooded, they can sue to recover from anyone in sight, which they would under the existing system anyway. If they win, those gas gallons will have negative worth. The legal process isn't going to impose costs for consuming gasoline on consumers. And if Canada benefits from global warming there is no way they will want to send large checks to Americans (or even to Tonga). At the beginning you seemed to want to impose a cost or benefit for every transaction and have the cost be variable as quickly as market prices can change. Now you seem to be saying that we should have costs determined by lawsuits or fines, and just apply the idea that the imposed costs can be greater than the total net worth of those who have to pay them. Those are two very different things. You might be arguing for more lawsuits and a wider spread of the costs among smaller players, and more active trading of the risks of these costs. Those things might indeed happen, but there will make things more expensive. Court cases would presumably be more numerous and/or more complex. The transaction costs of trading all these risks would be far from nil (and often they probably wouldn't be traded at all, they would be insured in a simple way or people would try to "self-insure" or people would just ignore them). As for benefits I don't see how you are going to have the equivalent of someone suing a third party to their economic transaction because the third party received a benefit. If you rely on the legal system it will mostly only redistribute costs. Like I say, the vast bulk of ones financial dealings will likely have zero long term value, and the market will price them as such. What about the market operations that are perceived to have zero value but later turn out to have a strong net negative or positive.? Why is this system good? Precisely because it encourages people to consider the longterm impact of their actions. Too much need to consider all possible future consequences, esp. with actual liability imposed by a future system that is different economically, politically, socially, and philosophically can discourage actions (amounting to an economic slowdown) or reporting of actions (amounting to an increased black market). Consider slavery in the 1800's under my system. Yes lets consider it. It was a legal and accepted practice in 1800. It was a tradition that went as far back as recorded history. You would impose a cost 2 centuries after the fact. And not only that but you would impose it on people who did not in any way participate in slavery. A gross injustice. Indeed, a slave owner in the mid 1800's could look at the world and see quite a diversity of opinions which might make him think it risky behavior. Many people continue to pursue risky behavior long after it is obvious to others. Many other actions have been or are now legal and accepted, and may be considered horrible abominations in the future. Presumably "in to the future" could be indefinitely in to the future. People could be different even biologically, let alone in terms of philosophy, culture and law. Could the strongly and actively pro-life decedents of someone who has or performs a legal abortion today be liability for the entire projected life time earnings of the aborted fetus (had it lived) plus accumulated interest? What about actions that are not even controversial now, where there is no serious (or even no existent) argument that something is an injustice or in any way negative? It would seem you would open a can of worms the size of the grand canyon. The existing system simply says that if it is legal now, there cannot be future negative consequences (in general, but there are exceptions of course). That encourages poor behavior IMO. I'm a strong believe in the prohibition of ex-post facto laws. I suppose that if you put your system in to effect in 2015 that a cost imposed in 2030 would not technically be the result of an ex-post facto law, but it would impose a cost in a similar way. Something should be legal or illegal, and it should be as clear as possible which is which. It is not practical or just to come years or generations after the fact and try to penalize the formerly acceptable act. It is esp. unjust because you would impose the penalty on innocent people who did not commit the initial act or in any way aid in its commission. Tim