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Politics : Actual left/right wing discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: dybdahl who wrote (8650)	11/24/2010 2:18:51 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10087

I think that I put a lot more value into information than you I don't see any reason to think that's true, or that's its relevant. (Note: I'm not saying information isn't relevant, but rather that the relative value you and I place on it is irrelevant. The reality we are arguing about doesn't change if that relative balance changes. Possibly even our opinions about it would not change. If you have information that supports your argument, use it to support an argument, then its relevant. "You don't care as much about information" isn't relevant, and may even be a personal attack.) the main value in conscription lies in information Its not exactly clear what you mean by that. Having a larger army can give you more people to use as scouts, or to just see and report things why they are doing other jobs. It also gives you the information on their paperwork, etc. OTOH it also destroys or renders less useful (at least for a time) a lot of information. Examples include the information they have about local market situations, or about personal relationships with people they won't see in years or might never see alive again (we were using WWII as an example). It also keeps them from accumulating more information on these and other areas. More generally any time you operate by command and control (as you do with a draft) you distort or even destroy market information. The right information at the right place at the right time would have prevented the shelling in South Korea Its questionable whether any information would have helped prevent the shelling (although knowing when and where the shells where going to land would have saved lives), but assuming it would have, what does that have to do with this discussion? South Korea has conscription it didn't stop the shelling. . I don't believe in economic models, that assert that value production has a nonzero unit cost. I'm not entirely certain I understand what you mean, but I'm generally not a big fan of over-reliance on economic models either. There is a lot of information which market participants know, or that is contained in relative prices, that never makes it in to economic models. The real economy is far to complex to model in more than the most simplistic terms. for instance, if you buy a bottle of shampoo, what is the value of the pollution that it produces? A low negative value. Why do McDonald's fries cost the same, no matter if you throw the garbage away in nature or in a garbage bin? The costs to society are certainly not the same. Because the supply and demand factors don't change depending on how the purchaser later disposes of the garbage. The disposal is a later separate event. The nature of the disposal might create a small externality, to the extent the sum of these small externalizes are important its a disposal issue not an issue of the initial sale. Also to a lesser degree because of stickiness in pricing. In most markets prices don't continuously adjust. The Germans are very clever and spend a huge amount of time on making sure that they and their children make clever decisions. However, one of the outcomes of WW2 was, that Germany learned that they did not invent the best government system themselves, they need to learn from others. And they do. The fact that you learn from your mistakes does not mean that they where not mistakes. This information is probably worth more than the total cost of WW2. That's a staggeringly bizarre statement IMO. 60 million dead. Cities burnt to the ground. Human rights abuses on vast scale. Trillions of dollars (adjusted for inflation), from economies much smaller than what we have today. Rationing, shortages, even starvation. The world's major economies and many of its minor ones largely devoted towards the war instead of civilian consumption, investment, and research. Forced conscription on a vast scale, and not just for soldiers, but also slave labor. The establishment of the Soviet empire in eastern Europe. Possibly the establishment of communism in China and all the horrors that came out of that (I say possibly since it might have happened anyway)... Better government in Germany now is really worth all of that?!? And that assumes that government in Germany is much better than it would have been by now anyway. We have no way to know if that is true.