An interesting point on healthcare: can you name the major turning point from the days of old when doctors made house calls to today? It is the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid, which permanently distorted the entire health care market. The government is very much involved with our health care system, and the result is growing trouble in health care. Adding more regulation will make it worse - history makes this point quite clearly.

I think government should provide our National Defense, the Justice System, and Police.

I would guess it was due to the previous difficulty of transferring injured people when today it is easily done with ambulance/automobile/helicoptor. Also, back then I imagine people would be far more reluctant to see a doctor so the serious cases only that would possibly prevent people from going in.

Plus, a doctor can't do X-Rays at your house or use his fancy gear.

There were plenty of automobiles around in 1965. I think they even had helicopters way back then.

I thought Hackers News was not supposed to turn into Reddit.

It hasn't, yet. How do you propose we make it work?

It's a hard problem. One of Hacker News's greatest strengths is that no one can downvote submissions. That will result in every story getting a fair chance at the front page (no bury brigades). However, any general topic that people find sufficiently interesting will get upvoted. And -technically-, stuff like this isn't offtopic. We're hackers, and we find it interesting. But this thread isn't really hacker related.

The only counterbalance to this right now is admins killing topics. Doing that after a story has generated a lively discussion like this one might cause users to revolt.

It's easy to get a big response about any topic people feel strongly about. I don't think there's anything hard about killing this thread. I really wish I could. Purely political and religious threads must be banned or this site will quickly begin to suck. These topics are simply too divisive. They will pollute the entire site.

Who cares about a "user revolt"? This site has a focus and that's what makes it great. Those people can discuss this stuff a million other places. There's only one place for hacker news.

Users have rights. If the community decides something they've done is bad, they can't get mad. If one person in the sky that they can't see decides they've done something bad, oh boy will they get mad. And they'll take anyone attached to that thread with them. You thought there was a lot of drama when it came to public attention that editors edit titles? Just wait until they start killing topics that have generated 30+ comments. And any drama that comes from that (topics like "omg goodbye 2 u hackr news i are leaving") can't be killed otherwise it would look like blatant censorship and would make even more people mad.

A counterbalance to this sort of thing that works is a community action, not an admin action.

A one way to implement the community action is to add downarrows. But when someone downvotes a story, the story karma is unaffected. It's only when the story has more downvotes than upvotes that the editors get the option to kill that topic. So that way, the community has decided something is offtopic, but the editor still uses his good judgment about killing a story. I don't see how users could get upset under that sort of arrangement.

Works for me.

I don't see the problem. We all have broad interests. Hackers do things other than hack. If a discussion doesn't interest you, don't participate. You say that politics will pollute the site but you give nothing to back this up. Certainly there is a big difference between day to day USA politics and questions about optimal governance. One is explicitly off-topic and the other isn't.

> You say that politics will pollute the site but you give nothing to back this up.

reddit.com

The problem is that the average quality of the politics discussions so far is much lower than that about startups. It's not "hacker-worthy".

Of course the politics discussion is going to be lower quality than the startup discussion. We have practical experience with startups. That doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile to discuss things other than hacking and startups.

Social news has been around for two years. Giving one example doesn't mean a whole lot, especially when the community of reddit is fundamentally different from the community of news.ycombinator. The editors of reddit believe in non-intervention. The editors of news.yc believe in active and regular intervention, which means that news.yc won't turn into reddit.

The discussion in this thread isn't anywhere close to what you see on reddit. We have a problem when discussions start actually polluting the site. But they haven't yet, so I don't understand what the problem is.

We need to consider exactly what we don't want to allow on this site. See my new thread.

Because of course 'real hacker topics' are not divisive..

So what kind of submissions do you want to see exactly???

Anything that's interesting to hackers with an explicit ban on topics primarily religious or political in nature.

As staunch implies, a good approach is to keep the general nebulous statement about what we do want, but then be pretty specific about what we don't want.

I posted this elsewhere in its own topic yesterday, but it is relevant here too. I think there should be simple guidelines either displayed or linked to on the submit page. I would propose "No politics. No old stuff. If you post a question, post 1, not >1."

I believe the government should provide the following services:

1) Emergency services. These are things you don't really have time to negotiate price on or do research for. Police, national defense, fire and rescue, emergency medical. These should be handled by the government because otherwise you could maximize your economic gain by taking advantage of those in duress. "Your house is burning down and your daughter is still inside. Sign here and agree to pay us $250,000 and we'll go get her."

2) Infrastructure, The government should own and operate various infrastructures and provide rules and regulations for common use. Roads are a great example of this as are the majority of airports. Another I would love to see is 'bandwidth'. Have to government own the fiber that connects my house to a central point. Then allow me to select any ISP and/or service that can be delivered over that line. Ask yourself how much cheaper and better your internet connection would be if more players than just Comcast could use your cable line, and Verison had competition on its dsl service.

The reason I believe governments should look after these types of services is that they can afford to make the capital heavy investments needed to provide it, as well as provide a neutral platform for capitalist enterprises to compete over and provide greater value. I also tend to put education here.

3) Public trusts. This has no real economic value, but I don't really trust Haliburton with proper management of parkland or the like. Things with both a very high monetary value and societal value should not be trusted to an enterprise with a profit motive.

> Have to government own the fiber that connects my house to a central point.

What's the incentive for them to provide more, particularly since fiber lines usually cut across constituent boundaries, yet don't cut far enough to make a majority in Congress?

I'm not sure what you mean by 'provide more'. The entire idea behind the government owning the infrastructure and not the services that run on them is to stimulate fair competition between private enterprises. I wouldn't really want the government to do more than provide a usable signal to my jack.

Since I'm not a USian, I don't know what to make of your arguments about congress and the like, but it worked out fine here in the past.

I live in Alberta and up until a few years ago the telecom was owned and operated by the provincial government. It dropped copper to every house. I don't see why fiber would be any different. Some provinces still run their own telecoms.

Bandwidth consumption tends to grow, right? So eventually you fill the existing capacity. Somebody's then gotta build more, or the system becomes overloaded. I don't just want a usable signal, I want a fast signal, and one that gets faster over time.

One of the reasons we've got YouTube was that private fiberoptic companies (stupidly) overinvested in laying new fiber cables during the dot-com boom. When the crash came, the price of bandwidth fell through the floor. Then it became economical to build video-sharing services and AJAX webapps and other high-bandwidth apps.

In the U.S, our electrical grid is a regulated monopoly - not quite government owned, but it functions effectively like it is. A couple years ago we had a huge problem with blackouts and brownouts and a general lack of electrical power. All the spare capacity in the grid had been used up, and nobody had an incentive to build more. I worry that government-owned bandwidth will result in the same problem.

> I don't just want a usable signal, I want a fast signal, and one that gets faster over time.

But shouldn't the government only be concerned with providing a usable signal? If you want a fast signal, then leave that to private enterprise. You can pay them for a faster connection, and they can pay the government to upgrade the infrastructure in a particular area.

I've never been Libertarian nor a believer in the Free Market. I don't think I really grasp the core concepts, though, because as I'm reading through Wealth of Nations (among other things) I find the laissez-faire attitude is incredibly naive.

Real markets are filled with things like marketing, fraud (two points, I would argue, along the same continuum) and consumers who are not going to do what's best for themselves.

My own view is that the government should provide a decent life - including paying for meals and shelter if need be - for every single person. I'm at a school where I'd rather not be, taking classes I'd prefer not to, because I will need a degree to get a job. If I knew that the government (or rich relatives, for that matter, although unfortunately I have none) would support me if I were to fail at entrepreneurship, I'd drop out tomorrow.

Basically, the government should guarantee that it'll keep all people at a basic level of human decency. This would allow all citizens to take risks, which is essential in innovation.

Oh, and the government should handle most things that private insurance companies do nowadays. The way I see it, people shouldn't have the choice to not pay for some things. If we were to give people the option of not buying health insurance, it would make us a very cruel and cold society to stand by as the unfortunate souls who chose not to get insurance die of an expensive, treatable diseases. The cultural cost to society is far too high.

Edit: Word choice, among -> along

Biometric identity management.

You need a single namespace for human beings, which is cryptographically protected so that the only entity which can link a person's reputation to their biometric profile is a court of law. When there can only be one of something - and there are good reasons for not federating biometrics databases - then it makes sense for the government to offer that service, rather than private enterprise.

On top of this, build a contract infrastructure - a set of technical standards for digitally signed contracts - this could be free market, but the standards body should again be unitary, so that contract standards are singular. Hence, the standards body is quasi-governmental.

This is infrastructure which is essential to commerce, but - because of the namespace issues - it cannot be entirely provided by the free market, which would naturally tend to fragment the namespace. You can see an entire parallel chain of development with DNS.

Power grid: do not offer, do not want. http://smallisprofitable.org

Similar approaches for water supply and sewage treatment: set standards for those offering the services, sue those who fall below those standards, leave it to the market. This stuff used to be unitary-provider 200 years ago, which is why govt. still does it now, but technology has moved on.

I have a couple of not-read-for-prime-time papers on the concept I've been working on for disaster relief called "State In A Box" that I can pass along if you are interested: hexayurt@gmail.com http://hexayurt.com/

Police, courts and defense, with defense also including the 'most important' vaccinations for all who enter, whether through ports or by birth. Some reasonable upper bounds on the destructiveness of weaponry and toxins sold over the counter are likely also necessary, even for purchasers who haven't per se 'done anything wrong'.

There also need to be some regulation of how individuals use 'commons' like air, water, electromagnetic and sonic spectra etc., as well as land use rules, to avoid one person land locking others, parking their mile long yacht alongside Golden Gate Bridge, blocking bay entry, and such.

Some minimum levels of diplomacy, aimed at providing Americans, both individuals and organizations, 'fair and reasonable' treatment abroad would be nice, as well, especially if backed by military muscle.

I'm sure there is more, but those are the ones I can think of right now.

I was gonna post a comment similar to this one on Reddit, but I didn't think it'd be appreciated. I think I'll manage to piss off both the Austrian school mises.org Libertarians and the I-always-get-screwed-by-corporations Liberals.

Free markets work when they transmit information with each transaction. When a factory owner raises his prices to cover rising costs, he's encapsulating information about everything that's happened further up the value chain. When a shopkeeper lowers the price he's willing to pay, he's encapsulating information about consumer demand and everything downstream in the value chain. If a new means of production becomes available that's more efficient than the old one, there's a profit opportunity available for the aspiring entrepreneur. And everybody has an incentive to pass on correct information, because otherwise it's their own bank account that will suffer. This appears to be the only way to organize an economy efficiently.

Free markets fail when transactions conceal information. For example, many subprime loans were made to people who had no conceivable way of paying them off, but mortgage brokers had every incentive to hide that information from the hedge funds who bought them, and didn't have to shoulder the risk of default themselves. Health-care patients have no way of knowing whether a particular procedure is medically necessary and no incentive to find out, because the insurance company pays for it. Microsoft customers had no way of knowing whether Windows is the best OS, because there were no alternatives (well, except Apple and Linux...pretend this is 1997 or so).

There's also the issue of transaction costs - it costs nearly as much money to collect tolls as it does to just build the damn highway, so the "information" that the customer sees is heavily distorted by the process of having to collect that information.

So, based on this, I can derive some general principles for the role of government:

1.) It should provide the institutional framework necessary for the market to function at all, eg. contract laws and defense.

2.) It should rectify the "lemon problem", where sellers conceal vital information from buyers or vice-versa, eg. consumer protection laws, implied warranties, truth-in-advertising laws, full disclosure on mortgages, SEC regulation, etc.

3.) It should prevent companies from leveraging a monopoly to enter a market.

4.) It should rectify externalities, where a firm takes something of value to others but doesn't pay for it, usually because it's too difficult to arrange a transaction. The classic example is pollution.

5.) It should provide goods and services where the transaction cost of attempting to measure and restrict usage is greater than the actual value of the service. Markets will never develop in these areas otherwise. A good example would be roads.

Some concrete examples, which'll probably seem kinda out-there:

To start, I wouldn't have any taxes at all. Instead, the government owns all land, and raises revenue by auctioning off leases on land, natural resources, and pollution credits. These leases would be tradable, subdividable securities, and would be subject to normal SEC prohibitions on disclosure and insider trading. If you wanted to construct a skyscraper that you expect to last 50 years, you'd buy a 50-year lease on the land. If you ended up selling it after 20, you could sell the lease on the open market, but the land itself would revert back to the government after another 30 years. The government can also buy the lease back by paying market rates.

This helps the externality problem, because every time the voters want to prevent something like a polluting factory, they have the legal ability to, but they also have a precise dollar figure for how much it'll cost, in economic terms. If people don't want oil companies to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, they can simply block the lease on drilling rights, but it will cost them a few billion dollars. Then they can decide whether the economic value to oil companies is worth more than the government services they will receive from it.

As for spending itself - roads are an obvious one, because the transaction costs of tolls are hellish. Defense is another one - I don't think we need to spend quite so much as we do, but we do need a strong military.

I would not provide free education, other than the basic literacy and civic requirements necessary for democracy to function. You tend to get what you pay for. Free education not only leads to bureacratic, uncaring schoolboards, but it also leads to freeriding, uncaring schoolchildren.

Instead, I'd create rigorous public evaluations of all schools - not necessarily tests (which generally reflect the politicians' biases more than actually useful information), but statistics about where graduates end up, satisfaction levels, evaluations from past students, etc. Then let people choose - and spend their own money - on schools. Since people shouldn't be denied education based on what their parents do, there should be loans available - but through the private sector, not public.

Also, education has a problem in that it takes years for it to pay off, and market conditions can change dramatically between when you enter and when you exit. To insure against this, I'd create a tradable derivative called "salary futures" (again through the private sector). This is not insurance on your salary (that would have a huge moral hazard problem), but rather a promise to pay the change in the difference between the average salaries of two professions. These can be bundled into funds if necessary, to diversify across the whole economy. So if you want to become an engineer but find that salaries have gone way down by the time you graduate, your salary future will kick in with the difference for X number of years, and then you can decide whether to stick with it or retrain as a lawyer.

Health care is tricky because nobody wants to die, and if life really is priceless, then people should be willing to pay infinite amounts of money to avoid dying. Markets aren't meant to deal with infinities. I'd need to think about this; I suppose if I actually came up with a workable solution I'd be rich and famous and wouldn't be posting it on a glorified message board. ;-)

Good ideas, but I still think that having no real free education will end up destroying the lives of a large number of poor kids.

An unwed mother has a six year old boy that is only a burden to her. She doesn't care about her son's future so she's not going to spend her hard earned money on sending him to school. He goes to the free schools for the two years it takes to learn how to read.

What happens next? The mother isn't going to take out a loan to pay for her son's education. Does this eight year old have to decide if he wants to take out loans to keep going to school? I don't think many economically oppressed eight year olds would make the right decision.

I was thinking that free education would extend up through 7th/8th grade, more for political reasons than for economic reasons. An educated citizenry is a prerequisite for democracy. Without it the whole system risks collapse.

But primary school should teach things necessary to evaluate the claims of others, not to prepare you for the working world, however. Reading, writing, and rithmetic are obvious ones. But instead of branching off into algebra/biology/geology/etc, I think they should teach probability & statistics, economics and finance, the scientific method in general (with the emphasis on the process, not on the findings), and a lot of history.

I, for one, would vote for you over any of the current major party candidates. I do, however, think you overestimate the need for government in some areas.

I agree with point 1). I think most people do, other than Somali Warlords and their like.

I think what you are trying to solve with 2) is better left to individuals. There will never be any surefire way of deciding what information is 'vital', is included in 'full disclosure' etc. Laws as vague as these always, in practice, degenerate to my-lawyer-is better-than-yours, jury shopping and other pathologies. Absent such laws, there is no reason why, for example, some form of 'standardized' contract for the most common transactions won't be written. These contracts have the advantage of being standard, widely used, and hence come with predictable legal precedent. And they are optional, so not everyone have to use them all the time.

Another problem is that such regulations tend to render a seller's efforts to build a reputation less valuable. A seller who has carefully cultivated a great reputation amongst an audience, can no longer benefit competitively by giving his 'word'. Instead he is subject to the same consumer protection laws as any random huckster, with the same cost of compliance. This leads to less incentive for him not to just act like a huckster in the first place.

3) The only 'monopolies' that can develop in a free world are those that are enforced by government, and possibly those related to physical resources. I think your land lease scheme would take care of the latter, and a reasonably limited government wouldn't contribute unnecessarily to the former. Most current day 'monopolies' are just companies someone finds hard to compete with (MS), or government sanctioned ones in (light) disguise (Telco's, utilities).

4) Hard to argue with that. Just make sure everyone has an equal 'claim' on these externalities. The right to emit CO2 should be given equally to each citizen, not as quotas to Exxon etc. Then Joe bicyclist could sell his share to Exxon, or if he so pleases, donate it to the Sierra Club.

5) For local roads, absence of government involvement does not mean a developer could not buy (or lease for a sizable term according to your scheme) a plot of land, put roads in place, and profit by selling off individual (now presumably more valuable) lots. The selling price could also include a contract to maintain roads for some lease term. Bigger arterials are a lot easier to price by usage.

I totally agree with you about obtaining government revenue from real estate rather than income. My 'scheme' would be a bit different than straight leases, but that's just details. Currently, most libertarians I know, especially American ones, seem very opposed to this. Most want government intrusion to, at the very least, stop at their property line. Since libertarian candidates are consistently getting less than 2% of the vote, and their share is not increasing, I think reworking some of their policy prescriptions are wise, though, and taking the hammer to some old dogmas about real property might be just the ticket.

Besides a lot of the safety stuff you mentioned, health care for orphans and subsidized college education based off of merit and inability to pay (combined with a co-op, if the education is expensive), not disadvantagedness. I have always been surprised not only by libertarians not talking about this type of stuff, but how mainstream anti-libertarian arguments don't focus on these glaring issues.

How about the service of giving back 4/5ths of that 25% and providing the same services the government did when tax rates where in that range? (courts, policy, legislation and defensive military)

A death penalty for off-topic open threads?

Intellectual property rights preventing reuse of famous three-letter logins by people without those initials?

I don't believe in the death penalty or intellectual property rights. Thanks anyways.

I think this is by far the funniest comment/response that I have seen on news.yc to date.

First of all, there isn't much of a free market in health care. There is much regulation, and the current model of requiring corporations give their employees health insurance is flawed. Contrarywise, prices have fallen in cosmetic surgery, the only medical field mostly left to the free market.

(And where did you get the entire that free education means government education? There have been free schools in America since before there was a country called "America.")

Second of all, an economically free society would likely have taxes nowhere near 25%. That's higher than Hong Kong's income tax today, and much higher than America's income tax when income tax was legalized.

I've decided that the bare minimum of government that must be had are the courts (and the power to enforce their rulings). A libertarian society will be highly dependent on contracts; society could not function if you knew a powerful client could refuse to pay and ignore court rulings. I have trouble visualizing a fair, for-profit court system. If competing court systems exist, then how is the court system for a case chosen? Presumably, it would be spelled out in the contract, which gives a perpetual advantage to the vendor. Of course, the buyer could ignore the summons, but said court could force him to arrive and would then rule that it was justified doing so (as it was).

Everything that is not a court can belong to the free market, but that does not mean should. For example, you could purchase the privilege to drive on one company's network of roads, but, barring some major advances in scanning technology and some means of stopping trespassers, the need to enforce that only paid cars use the road would be extraordinarily cumbersome. The best private road system I could see would be to have a monopoly on roads in every region; road companies could then make deals with neighbors for interregional traffic and coerce developments into requiring residents to pay the road company, at the risk of having the road company block access to the development. However, I'm not sure I can trust a private monopoly more than a government monopoly.

Law enforcement is also a good candidate for government control; however, private police forces are not out of the question. There would probably be less overhead to hire police to protect an area rather than individuals, so police might not necessarily turn a blind eye to a homeless man getting mugged (not to mention that said criminal should be caught for the same reason Animal Control kills animals becoming accustomed to attacking humans). However, a system where every five feet is patrolled by a police force with different opinions of what an arrestable offense is is hardly ideal.

Fire protection, another commonly cited candidate for government control, could actually work pretty well privately. A computer can easily check whether a certain building is protected, and the benefits of competition will result. However, one problem is that a fire on an unprotected building endangers adjacent buildings.

Free education doesn't have to mean government education. A system of vouchers or subsidies could work. I'm not familiar with America's historical free schools. Were they charities?

The 25% number is completely arbitrary. I picked a number that is lower than what I pay today and gives the government a whole lot to play with. There's a good chance we'd be better off with a sales tax or transaction tax instead of an income tax, but it's not important for deciding what services the government should provide.

Why are you glad that every road isn't a toll road? You are imagining that would cost you more, I think. But if you pay X dollars of taxes towards the roads every year, and otherwise would pay Y dollars in tolls, why assume X<Y? In general the free market does things more cheaply/efficiently -- why wouldn't that be true of roads too?

Also, isn't is a bit ridiculous to call government schooling a success? It's failing in a wide variety of practical ways quite apart from any philosophical objection to the government deciding which ideas our kids are supposed to learn.

You have never spent hours baking in 35C weather waiting in traffic backed up at a tollbooth on the Italian Autostrada. Sometimes traffic is backed up for kilometers and kilometers.

The people that own them don't really care that much, because they get their money just the same, and since they have a monopoly, they don't have any real competition unless you take the train or a plane, which simply isn't possible in many cases.

Transaction costs. Toll collectors get paid shitloads of money. You also pay a cost in lost time. If you get paid $50/hour and spend 5 minutes a day stuck at a toll plaza, you're wasting over $4 in time daily, which is often 4 times the monetary cost of the toll. Over a work-year, you'd spend nearly $1400 in lost time while waiting for tolls.

Maybe competition between roads would reduce the time spent at tolls. Also, presumably, unmanned toll booths would be used.

You may currently be spending more than $1400 to the government to pay for government roads. With competitive incentives in road placement and size, you might save more than enough time to offset the transaction costs.

Until the development of electronic transponders, there was a physical limit to how quickly you can collect tolls. It may be somewhat practical now that you have drive-through tollbooths, but there are a bunch of other problems it creates. For example:

Roads are a high-fixed-cost-low-variable-cost industry. I posted on these at Reddit - http://reddit.com/info/2fquz/comments/c2fttk. Everything that's wrong with airlines will go wrong with roads, and more. I suspect that you'll see massive overinvestment in roads as road companies try to capture market share, then the huge number of intersections (all toll, remember?) will reduce driving efficiency.

Free markets solve a lot of things, but they don't solve everything. There's no magic wand that makes them more efficient than a public solution. There are, however, a series of incentives and information-transmission mechanisms that usually give a free-market operator an information advantage over a public operator, hence letting them produce more efficiently. If the incentives point in the wrong direction, though, you get less efficient production.

You seem to be asserting that consumers are not better off with the airlines deregulated. Although I hate air travel and everyone likes to complain about it, I don't think you can argue that, as government has been removed from airline regulation, air travel has become vastly more cheaper and available to more people and that it is possible to reach many more locations by plane.

Similarly for another high fixed cost industry which you cite - telecommunications.

Free markets might not solve everything, but they're almost always better than the alternatives. As examples of the alternatives, consider the postal service, government-run schools, Medicare and welfare.

The governments subsidize airports through enormous amounts of land close to cities at below market rates. Without this intervention, airfare would be much more expensive. Do you think we would be better off if airports would have had to purchase their land on a true free market or is it good for a government to give airports cheap land?

It's hard to know. Presumably the system would look different today if the government had not distorted it in that way. Perhaps if market incentives were allowed to operate instead of the land being taken, we would all be flying around in the jet cars we expected.

I doubt it. Fossil fuel based flying cars are even more unsustainable than our current cars...

You sound so sure. You don't think if the enormous amounts of subsidies the government had spent on airports had instead been allowed to flow to alternative transportation modes or energy research, things might be different?

OK, it is certainly true that things would be different in a better way if our government would spend a sizable portion of the taxbase on energy research instead of wasting it an utterly insane manner.

There don't have to be toll booths. If you think that's a bad idea, why assume it would have to be used?

Another option is a monthly subscription fee for unlimited access to all roads a company owns. If there are a small number of large companies this might be convenient. And don't complain about fear of monopoly -- the alternative is a total government monopoly.

There are various possible ways the road use for subscribers only might be enforced. Offhand, none sound especially convenient. But they all sound better than the status quo: all people in the area are counted as "subscribers", even if they don't own a car, and are all billed, and this is backed up with guns. That's worse than any of the non-ideal enforcement mechanisms I can imagine. And while it may save a bit on transaction costs, it does that by not even trying to differentiate a subscriber from a non-subscriber.

How do you collect the money if there are no toll booths? Subsidize the private corporation by having police stop people without them?

You don't seem to be considering a couple of things:

The "backed up by guns" (if you want to have a serious discussion, these sorts of libertarian cliches could perhaps be checked at the door) tax funded roads have benefits that extend beyond the road users. "Externalities" as it were, in terms of lower prices for goods that are easily and quickly shipped to the area, competition for other modes of transportation, and perhaps jobs in sectors like tourism.

If, ignoring the externalities, you wish to more directly attach the costs to the people utilizing the roads, you could raise gas taxes. Of course, that has its own positive and negative aspects, and winners and losers.

The real world is tremendously complicated, and I don't think it's really possible to predict everything. However, I don't think that means that you can simply ignore some of the more interesting facets of economics and say "errr, just let the market take care of it" - it's just too simplistic.

I think a 99% literacy rate shows the success of our schools at providing a certain base level of education. If our poor population had to choose between food, energy, and school the literacy rate would plummet.

No, children should not have to or be able to make a choice about basic education. As nostrademons was saying, democracy begins to fall apart with a completely uneducated populace.

Not children, or their parents, I take it. So, how exactly do you draw the line of which ideas should be forced on unwilling families in the name of basic education?

You're asking me to describe a curriculum. The curriculum nostrademons proposed sounds great to me. As a start, it's good to force reading and math on unwilling families in the name of basic education.

That's great if everyone agrees to put nostrademons in charge. Instead what you get is:

"When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of schoolchildren."

-- The late Albert Shanker, former president of the American Federation of Teachers, 1985

OK... You asked a question, I answered, and you tell me my response is invalid because I don't have any power. This should make your responses similarly invalid. One of the assumptions in this thread was that we did have the power to make changes, otherwise all we could talk about was whether to vote Republican or Democrat.

I didn't ask that question. But the point is your solution requires putting/keeping the government in charge of education, just like we have now. Once the power is given, all kinds of interests become involved and people like Albert Shanker participate in how kids are educated.

I'd prefer to let parents decide how best to educate their children. The entire system shouldn't be designed to accommodate the outlying parents you fear who don't care about their kids.

My intended question was by what method the required curriculum should be decided. But I think that's clear now: what you consider "basic". What you are proposing is to set up a ruling system that permanently entrenches certain ideas (such as math lessons). No disagreement is allowed: the unwilling should be forced, not tolerated.

I think this is a step backwards. In the USA we have moved away from Who Should Rule? and Which Ideas Should Rule? and the focus is more on how should disputes be decided. Force is not a rational answer to that, and we have embodied this in our tolerance for queer and strange people/ideas, even disagreeable ones. The main feature of our system of Government is also about how disputes should be decided: it is responsive to changes in opinion of our citizens (via voting): when many people change their minds about an issue the government is changed correspondingly -- even about basic education. So disputes can be decided by persuasion instead of force.

It's worth noting that basic math or reading education are not presently required in some States, so requiring them would reduce freedom of choice relative to real life today. For example, in Kansas, there are essentially no requirements for home schoolers, including no record keeping, testing, or required subjects. http://www.hslda.org/laws/default.asp?State=KS

"I don't think any argument exists against the required teaching of these two subjects, other than stating libertarianism is always better." - rms

Two competing schools of thought about how to treat the best ideas we have today -- the ones we feel most certain of, and have the hardest time imagining a reasonable person could dispute -- we might call the School of Certainty and the School of Fallibility. The first believes our best ideas are the ultimate truth and wishes to set up societal institutions which best embody those truths. The second believes that it is important to remember we might be wrong and our vision is limited, so we should set up institutions with a focus on error correction, which means openness to new ideas and approaches, tolerance of differences, and not using force in the name of sanctioned ideas. The first school is more concerned with creating a good society by present day standards. The second is more concerned with creating a free society where people live by their own standards.

The School of Fallibility is often ridiculed. Certainly we aren't all wrong about common sense opinion X, it's so obvious. Why do we have to be so careful and cautious about even the most basic things? That's a lot of wasted effort, and it allows people to make huge, unnecessary mistakes and ruin their lives.

We live in a period of rapid change. Many mainstream, traditional, long held, obvious, common sense opinions have been thrown out in the last century. This story is well known for science, and civil rights and many other issues. But still people are complacent. We changed. We got better. What remains obvious today must be even more certain.

So, rms, perhaps I can surprise you away from complacent certainty by presenting an argument which you did not think existed.

I know a lot of people who don't like math, and who actively avoid using it in their lives. One can have a successful life today even in the extreme case of irrationally avoiding all math. Consider the adults today who dislike and avoid math: forcing childhood math lessons on them did not turn out to have helped. Now they have a grudge against the subject fueled by deeply unpleasant memories. It's harder for them to actually learn math now, should they find a use for it. Therefore it would be better not to require math lessons, and instead to let people learn it themselves on their own initiative if/when they find a reason to want to. We might call this approach Just In Time Learning.

Most adults are mentally well adjusted enough that the mental scars of early torture by long-division fade into the background. Even adults that dislike math need to use it in their day to day lives. I don't think the math that many people truly dislike because of its perceived uselessness, like geometry and algebra, need to be mandatory, but someone with a McJob needs to make change and calculate their monthly wage from their hourly wage.

I would be curious to hear your examples of someone leading a successful life while irrationally avoiding all math.

People with a McJob don't need to calculate change: that's the cash register software's job. And many people avoid calculating their wage or budget -- their spouse does that kind of thing.

Perhaps you will reply they at least need to be able to count to 4 to hand back the right number of each coin. And need to be able to read numbers to answer questions like, "What does the Super Mushroom Burger cost?"

But the blatant usefulness of a skill is no argument in favor of required education of it -- won't people want to learn it voluntarily? And those who disagree, why can't you leave them alone?

A perfect government would only concern itself with monitoring currency and prisons.