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

To: neolib who wrote (8104)	12/28/2005 1:29:42 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542024

I personally think bankruptcy laws are useful. They can be abused, but I don't think they should be tossed out. Even if they where tossed out how do you collect from people who have nothing left? You can't. You would try to connect from third parties. I'll get to that next. " The unfairness is in assigning them to some third party I'd agree if the third party were unrelated. What I propose is only to affect related parties, those that benefited in some way from the activities which resulted in negative numbers. I don't think a family relation is significant in this regard. If my father causes damage, or incurs a debt that he cannot pay, I am a third party to the transaction. Imposing it on me is just as unjust as imposing it on you would be. 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. They do in fact simply sit in a mega-sized database. Many financial transactions do not. People pay for things with cash. I suppose you would do away with cash (something else I would oppose but that is a separate issue), people barter goods and services. There would be more incentive to use these methods under your proposed regime but they exist already. Same as now. The only thing I suggest is there be a good record of all involved. Which is a lot bigger proposal then what it would seem to be if you only look at it on the service. You say CEO's shredding files won't help, so presumably there would have to be records outside of the companies control. The companies still need their own records so you are proposing a new system. These records would probably be controlled by the government. (decreasing our privacy more than George Bush's anti-terrorist orders have done), and would have to be very secure and reliable and very accurate. A secure, reliable, accurate system that is large enough and updated frequently enough to cover all such transactions would be very expensive if it is even possible. There is nothing in my suggestion that decides if or how much damages should be. You keep coming back to this, but I don't propose any new such mechanisms. Some mechanism would have to be at the core of any actual implementation of the system. The only one objection which is valid would be to note that American lawsuits have a long history of awarding liability in proportion to the available money to pay, i.e. deep pocket laws. As part of my system, I would say that liability is proportional to involvment, and deep pocket laws are not allowed. While I don't agree with the deep pockets idea where if someone is .1% responsible but they have the money they pay most or all of the damages, I don't think assigning the damages to someone's decedents is more fair, in fact it is less so because they might have 0% responsibility. A free market which can buy or sell the legacy based on any external factors which might imply current or future value does that. The market will set zero value on most transactions because they don't see any angle to make or loss money on them. Take my breakfast this am. Cornflakes. Not likely to have any longterm value. Perhaps thought they were produced from GM corn, which caused the Monarch butterfly population to crash, resulting in a bunch of lawsuits. Oops, now my breakfast has a slight liability, perhaps $0.10. A free market will not impose that $0.10 cost. A Lawsuit might, but no one is going to sue me for eating cornflakes and a lawsuit is not a market setting a value. if you tried to track every transaction of any type and calculate all the costs and consequences of it for all time Not part of the system. Only the record keeping, which is cheap as I have pointed out. So the courts are going to decided to impose a penalty of ten cents on everyone who the record shows bought cornflakes? Unlikely. The court is empowered to impose the penalty only on people who are parties to the suit. Is the government or some environmental group going to sue tens of millions of cornflake eaters? Good luck with that idea. (And what about people who eat them but didn't buy them?) "What about the market operations that are perceived to have zero value but later turn out to have a strong net negative or positive.?" Economists have long touted the 'fact' that markets are the most efficient means of setting prices. This applies for futures trading as well. If you could suggest a non-market means of doing so, that would appear better, I would accept that perhaps. But I don't know of any. You keep saying the market will impose the price but the only specific mechanism you have entered in to the argument is lawsuits. That isn't a market mechanism, and I don't think the proliferation of lawsuits would be a good idea. Also you didn't answer the question. I'll rephrase it. Will you track and later impose a cost (through lawsuits or other mechanisms) on financial transactions that appear to have zero or near zero future cost but which later turn out to have a real cost. Judging from your cornflake example the answer seems to be yes. And not only that but you would impose it on people who did not in any way participate in slavery. A gross injustice. If they did not in anyway participate, they would not in anyway be liable. Only if their inherited economic legacy includes slavery will they be liable. Inheriting money from someone who inherited money from someone who inherited money from someone who owned slaves does not mean that you participated in slavery. The future is always the source of any corrective actions. They might decide, just as we do now with slavery, that no compensation is in order. If so, none will happen. If they decide that compensation should occur, they have the necessary record to assign liability. Thats all. At the beginning you talked about monetizing all future costs. Now it seems you just want to have more lawsuits, possibly with more small defendants. Your vision seems to be shrinking, perhaps making it more realistic. If your vision didn't actually shrink, just my understanding of it, then you probably phrased to expansively. Tim