scrape_r_rational/data/cache2/4g1x1f.md

Tom Smith and His Incredible Bread Machine

• Author: u/None *

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• Score: 3

• Created: 2016-04-23T03:31:30

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u/UltraRedSpectrum [+2] (20 minutes later)

Yudkowsky quoted a line from this in HPMoR, or else both quoted the same line from an outside source. It was: "The rule of law, in complex times, Has proved itself deficient. We much prefer the rule of men! It's vastly more efficient."

u/electrace [+2] (an hour later)

So, I guess we mine as well go into why anti-competition laws exist, but first let's clear up a few things the poem got wrong.

1. Charging more than your competition isn't price gouging. Colluding with your competition to set a high price is price gouging.

2. Setting the same price as your competitors isn't necessarily collusion. In competitive industries, prices will always be right around each other, because charging more will just make consumers choose your competition. It's collusion only when you price gouge (see above).

3. Charging less than your competition isn't unfair competition, as every off-brand product maker can attest. Charging less than your competition's (and your own) cost to make the product is unfair competition.

So, why do these laws exist?

1. Because while it can theoretically be Pareto optimal to collude to set the monopoly (high) price, it isn't seen as fair. A society where businesses are free to collude is one where the consumer pays exactly what the maximum amount that they are willing to pay is. That doesn't sound too bad, until you start applying it to necessities.

2. Again, see above.

3. This seems to be the least valid point, and it is. Unfortunately, large companies like Wal-Mart had a tendency to come into smaller towns, set their prices extremely low, (experience a temporary loss on each sale) wait for the neighborhood supermarket to go out of business, and then raise their prices. The government decided that that was bad (and it is), so they instituted that section of anti-trust laws. If businesses have negligible start up costs, then there wouldn't be a need for these laws.

u/electrace [+2] (an hour later)

I'd like to see the version of the poem where he bankrupts every other food producer on the planet, and then charges $100 per slice of bread.

u/None [+1] (2 minutes later)

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u/PeridexisErrant [+1] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (49 minutes later)

I'm not seeing a particular lesson in this, beyond the terribly unsubtle "government bad, industry good".

Care to explain what makes this rational fiction?

u/traverseda [+1] With dread but cautious optimism (51 minutes later)

It doesn't, I was borderline on posting it.

It does fit with the "economic fables" thing that's been posted.

But I mean look at the website it's posted on. It's cute, and I hope people here aren't going to get all randy about it. Randy in the ayn rand sense that is.

u/PeridexisErrant [+1] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (54 minutes later)

I disagree; there's practically no economics in it aside from straw-man regulators. Apparently ingredients and distribution are free, for example...

u/traverseda [+1] With dread but cautious optimism (57 minutes later)

I think it brings up points other then "government bad", as an example, it brings up the idea that taxes can hide the true costs of things.

I could post manna as a counterpoint to the libertardian message, if you'd like.

u/PeridexisErrant [+1] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (an hour later)

Yes, I removed it - not for the political message, but because I don't think it qualifies as rational fiction (and neither does Manna, IMO).

Happy for /u/eaturbrainz or /u/alexanderwales to overturn this though, as unconscious bias is a real thing.

u/None [+1] (an hour later)

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u/None [+1] (11 hours later)

/u/eaturbrainz is a pretty avowed socialist last I checked ;p

Yep, which is why I'm automatically disinclined to like anything from mises.org. However, I do share /u/PeridexisErrant's actual objections here: rather than the work having a specific statement to make about economics, even an Austrian one, it simply portrays a straw benevolent rich industrialist being mindlessly attacked by a straw ignorant public and a straw evil government who of course give him zero legal options for how to run his business and the whole problem is caused by a straw tax that's literally just called the "business tax". And then, just to top off the massive heap of straw, after the straw government straw-nationalizes the straw-bread-bakery, they somehow sell bread for half a cent plus $0.995/loaf in taxes, a nice straw tax rate never seen anywhere in the planet or real history to my knowledge.

Because if you're letting a bunch of other crappy posts through, and dropping this one, my estimate that there's some political bias at play goes up a bit.

If I was exercising all my political biases, personally, a whole lot more would probably be removed :-p. Or maybe not.

But, as a general rule, low-quality content that acts as pretty mindless entertainment is less likely to be kept up than low-quality content that is low-quality because it's propagandizing a point of view in really transparently obvious ways while pretending not to.

If you want to post propaganda and have it kept up, there's also a simple rule-of-thumb: just let it be completely obvious about being propaganda.

Good examples: here and here. Example of what I'll remove: here.

u/None [+1] (18 hours later)

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u/None [+1] (20 hours later)

You're not claiming that the post is subtle, are you?

I am claiming that it's overly subtle. Instead of just saying, "Boo government, we at the Von Mises Institute hate the government, it does so many bad things!", which would then encourage questioning of which bad things and a desire for examples, it instead sets up a fictional world in which the desired ideological point can be shown-not-told, irrespective of real-world truth.

It's subtle in the same way that fairy tales are subtle.

Or perhaps "sanctimonious" is the better word. Yes, very probably.

u/None [+1] (20 hours later)

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u/PeridexisErrant [+1] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (21 hours later)

(ironically, this was removed by automoderator for being a disguised link)

Just type http://example.com, rather than [http://example.com](http://example.com) - the latter could link to sneakylink.com, so reddit spam-filters any posts with a url in the text field of a link.

u/None [+1] (21 hours later)

I guess I would say: if someone wants to be anvilicious in talking about real life, fine, but if they want to be anvilicious by constructing a fictional world in which their point is obvious truth and then just letting the reader's irrationality transport their point back into the real-world, then I'd call that a nasty piece of Dark Arts -- proof by fictional evidence.

u/None [+1] (11 hours later)

I could post manna as a counterpoint to the libertardian message, if you'd like.

Also agreeing with /u/PeridexisErrant that "Manna" is horrifically irrational. I mean, seriously, it has a "happy ending" where a guy's got a brain-to-nationwide-AI interface implanted in his central nervous system and no thoughts are given to what makes that social system work well rather than badly. Insofar as it qualifies as inadvertently-socialist fiction written by someone completely benighted by the neoliberal view of history as a March of Progress towards American Capitalism, it fails to consider what comes after the revolution it proposes (ie: what comes after you share the robots and AI among citizens).

So it ends up with a very bog-standard critique of automated capitalism, followed by proposing that a totalitarian regime (literally capable of shutting off the citizens' bodies remotely) with little worldbuilding effort will bring about an egalitarian high-tech eutopia.

And the characterization sucked so fucking much it was embarrassing to the entire genre of social science fiction.

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