Date: Tue, 23 May 2000 23:57:55 -0700 From: Doug Barton <DougB@gorean.org> To: Arun Sharma <adsharma@sharmas.dhs.org> Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: The Ethics of Free Software Message-ID: <392B7D73.46990B2A@gorean.org> References: <4.3.1.2.20000523191700.049c5260@localhost> <Pine.BSF.4.21.0005231825510.50384-100000@dt051n0b.san.rr.com> <20000524101006.A29351@physics.iisc.ernet.in> <20000523224731.A16545@sharmas.dhs.org>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Arun Sharma wrote:
>
> On Wed, May 24, 2000 at 10:10:06AM +0530, Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
> > Doug Barton said on May 23, 2000 at 18:34:55:
> > > On Tue, 23 May 2000, Brett Glass wrote:
> >
> > > My purpose in posting to this thread at all was merely to point
> > > out that there is another view, so that people who don't have a background
> > > in economics are not tempted to take the "There's only one pie, and it's
> > > always going to be the same size" argument seriously.
> >
> > And this, by the way, is the archetypical communist argument. They
> > want to redistribute wealth because they think you can only become
> > rich at the expense of someone else.
>
> I don't have a formal training in economics. But common sense tells me
> that if everyone multiplies their wealth by 100x, the world is
> essentially unchanged and the economy would've expanded by 100x.
The problem is, "common sense" rarely applies to economics. What you're
saying is (effectively) true, but totally meaningless, since it has no
application in the real world. In the real world, "wealth" moves from
one economy, one country, one place to another. One of the reasons the
pie isn't always the same size is that the definitions of what is
valuable change as time goes on. Take the stock market for example. The
value of any given stock changes on a day to day basis, but the overall
trend of the market is upwards over a sufficiently long period of time.
This happens for a lot of reasons, one of the more significant of which
is the entry of new companies into the market.
> Strategic inflection points, as Andy Grove famously called them, don't
> happen everyday.
>
> I find the communist bashing and repeated references to their stupidity
> a bit amusing. Even Meyer's article had references to it. After reading
> some of these discussions, "You're a communist", sounds worse tha
> "you're a filthy dimwit bastard, with no morality" :) Stallman, Linus
> and every major personality seems to be afraid of the term, even when
> they share some of the same philosophy.
Well, I agree that bashing them is rarely fruitful, but from the
american standpoint, it is (for the most part) a perjorative term. The
whole communist agenda goes against the traditional protestant work
ethic that americans are inculcated with. Another reason I would
consider it perjorative is that following a communist philosophy is just
plain silly. It's been proven repeatedly to be unrealistic and
impossible to adhere to on a large scale.
Doug
--
"Live free or die"
- State motto of my ancestral homeland, New Hampshire
Do YOU Yahoo!?
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?392B7D73.46990B2A>