Date: Wed, 24 May 2000 23:53:19 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: Doug@gorean.org (Doug Barton) Cc: brett@lariat.org (Brett Glass), chat@FreeBSD.ORG, adsharma@sharmas.dhs.org (Arun Sharma), rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in (Rahul Siddharthan) Subject: Re: The Ethics of Free Software Message-ID: <200005242353.QAA08949@usr05.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0005231800590.50257-100000@dt051n0b.san.rr.com> from "Doug Barton" at May 23, 2000 06:02:30 PM
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> > > Many brilliant economists would vehemently disagree with > > >you. Chief among them is Arthur Laffer. > > > > Sorry, but the more famous an economist is, the more likely it > > is that he represents a "religion" rather than realistic, proven > > theory. All systems have limits, and any statement to the contrary > > is absurd. > > Right. And man was never meant to fly, either. I realize that > arguing this point with you is silly because you just don't have the > background to understand how little about this topic you understand, so I > won't try further. Unfortunately, Brett answered an "appeal to authority", which is an invalid form of logical argument, with an "ad hominim", which is another invalid form of logical argument. Brett's point, however is correct: all systems have limits; he just didn't make that point very well. I personally don't believe that the economy (or life, for that matter) is a zero-sum game. It is a positive-sum game. From a pure games theoretic perspective, however, it can't possibly be an infinite-sum game, since that ignores the observed physical universe and the second law of thermodynamics (i.e. if it were an infinite sum game, then the sum total would encompass everything, and that includes entropy, which makes it less than infinite sum, by definition). I have never really understood the idea of the chairman of the U.S Federal Reserve bank raising interest rates "because the economy is running too hot". There may be good reasons for artificially braking the economy from where it would go in an otherwise unregulated system, but I haven't ever seen any math to tell me why where it would go in an otherwise unregulated system, at least for the interest rate constraint, would be an undesirable place. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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