I won't say what you should or shouldn't do, but I can give you a few reasons to care:
First, to clarify, it's not innguest's moral problem; it's a quandary at the intersection of ethics and politics. If you care about ethical questions at all, this one's meaty: it tugs at the threads of social organization, sanctioned force, individual liberty, international law, and capitalism.
Second, innguest has rationally advocated a position; that's reason enough for me, at least, to pause and consider.
Third, if you're in the US, you have something directly at stake in this argument. Sure, the politics may already be decided on party lines, favors, and lobbying, but as the citizenry we owe it to ourselves to form a coherent political philosophy to serve as the yardstick informing us just how bad the government's decisions are.
Fourth, there should be a huge bar to clear for any party looking to impose invasive rules on someone else using the hand of government. The folks writing the laws are almost uniformly not subject matter experts; they act in self-interested ways that are well known; any proposal will be highly adulterated by the time it passes; any new law becomes a precedent for the next; and unknown consequences are rife, particularly with rights and the economy. I'd be highly critical of anyone willing to advocate this without deeply considering all facets, including innguest's points.
And finally, while morals are of course subjective, they should at least be held to the standards of justifiability and internal consistency; I don't believe this net neutrality push meets those requirements. If government enforces this on cable companies, can it determine which products Walmart carries, and which go on the prized middle shelves? Maybe it's only for monopolies, though...but then, I have no fewer than 4 choices to get Internet to my house, so it's not a monopoly. Unless it's only service of a particular quality. Who sets the quality requirements? And should the provider really not have the ability to charge more for heavier usage of the pipes? You pass something like this, you better have answered all of those and literally hundreds of others, and guaranteed that in every law where that happens, most of the answers are arbitrary.
"The worst part is the thesis of [...] media; that while you do everything right, some nebulous [...] agenda is taking away everything that you hold dear, and are entitled to as a working person"
That's not particular to conservative media; it's the same tactic used to convince whole swaths of the population that the rich, the white, sexists, racists, jingoists, big corporations, government, etc. are keeping you down.
Leveling it at only one side of a debate is falling into the trap polemicists set up. They all do this, from every angle and via all means possible. It's just propaganda, and one insidious aspect of it is that they convince people only the other side engages in it.
True, but Fox News is the best at it, so they get the flak. I'll give the other channels for convincing people Obama was going to change things, but those people already mostly wanted change (especially after the financial crisis). Fox News did more than that. They convinced people who had been Republicans for 30 years that they have been libertarians fo 30 years. That's just really scary.
Meanwhile, people who have been actually libertarian for 30 years have to find another word to use for themselves. Again.
If you want to be truly libertarian, guys, you also have to embrace open borders, support non-interventionist foreign policy, and desire that drug prohibitions cease. Defending gun rights and complaining about taxes and welfare is just a tiny part of the package. You can still oppose state-sanctioned gay marriage if you want, but only to the extent that you oppose government involvement in any kind of marriage.
As I am a long-time libertard, the people who talk about freedom after watching Fox News make me laugh. They fill their heads with mass-media talking points all day, meet with like-minded people to create an echo chamber for the ideas they were force-fed, then worry about having adequate self-determination.
The question that arises for me is how the changes affected the performance of the department, however that's measured (e.g. entrepreneurs, investment, placement, grants, average graduate salaries, etc.).
The outcome, good or bad, wouldn't necessarily reflect on the changed proportion of women; it might just as well indicate something about the particular measures they took to achieve it. For instance, they shifted focus more to potential than to prior experience; were their markers for potential the right ones? Were leadership, math, and science emphases balanced properly?
Getting more women into the program is a great start, but do they go on to be successful? Is leading with gender the right way to do it?
I can see it. I've never talked to the Mormons (although I see them biking in pairs near my office most days), but I've had a number of pleasantly spirited debates with some Jehovah's Witnesses.
We don't see eye-to-eye on religion, but I admire their persistence and resilience in plugging away in the heat and cold, day after day, dealing with an almost certain high level of rejection and, often, hostility.
In my experience they've always remained respectful and polite, too, far beyond the low threshold most people seem to have. I could see that laying an excellent foundation for entrepreneurial gusto.
The justice system still sets the parameters and manages the procedures by which sentences are handed down. If a court determines you're going to prison for 10 years, you're going -- the private company manages your environment for that time.
And given that private parties also manage your medical care, hospital stays, air travel, car manufacture, work environments, home building, and thousands of other mechanisms and environments that determine your safety and quality of living, I struggle with finding a moral difference when it comes to prisons.
You could argue that these other things are voluntary and prison isn't, but it's involuntary even if run by government; most inmates would opt out either way.
And I think it's highly naive, this distinction between private companies as greedy, interested parties and government agencies and functionaries as objective arbiters of truth and goodwill. Either way you have ridiculous salaries, internal power struggles, marketing/perception, budget committees, and cynical people inured to the hard realities of the lives they affect.
A prison is a place where people are deprived of liberties. A society can justify depriving people of liberties. A private interest should not have the right to do so.
Yes, it's not the private interest who condemns the prisoner, but they run these facilities at a profit, turning what should be a rehabilitating environment into an environment that is designed to promote full prisons to enrich an individual.
A good prison should work at a financial loss because there should be a societal benefit to rehabilitating inmates. If a higher prison population turns into a financial incentive, there is no incentive to help inmates or even reduce recidivism.
This is especially true when you consider how many minor offenses can send people to jail in the US. It is also interesting to consider that when slavery was abolished, many plantations turned into for-profit prisons; or that the incarceration rate of the US is the highest in the world.
The government delivers citizens into the hands of private management all the time: required insurance policies, training programs, licensure, etc. Mandating that every obligatory service be not only funded, but implemented, by government would extend its rolls of employees, budgets, laws and legal complexity, competencies, and requisite voter knowledge beyond any reasonable possibility.
You seem to be ascribing a negative to the mere profit focus of a private company, rather than the outcome. We could do the same for insurance, medical practice, automobiles, plane travel, lodging, and everything else important; but we don't, because private companies in the open market perform better.
Would you then deliver everything important into the hands of government monopoly, despite everything we know about the benefits of competition, for the moral premise rather than results? And if you think the results weigh against private prison companies, might we restructure the government/private arrangement before nuking wholesale the notion of the market?
WRT the incarceration rate, I'd have to see something linking that to private companies running prisons, rather than problems with the justice system itself.
Consider the abysmal performance of government-run schools, among others, as a counterpoint.
Well, the basic idea is that a government prison would have the goals of society in mind (both security and rehabilitation) whereas a private prison's profit motive benefits most from having as many prisoners as they can get for as long as possible.
Actual rehab runs contrary to that; facilitating a state of affairs that results in more prisoners (repeat and new) for longer periods is going to be a primary goal.
What solutions are there that aren't simply large carrots (bonus' for prisons when repeat offense rates fall?) or large sticks (penalties/fines for the opposite)?
Agreed that that's the basic idea behind government-run anything -- its ostensible adherence to the benefit of society. But that's the naivete I was referring to: in the end there is no "government" per se, just a bunch of self-interested individuals. They all stand to benefit from overemphasizing a need for their department, bigger budgets, better benefits, tenure, and the political clout to influence those things.
There will always be undesirable incentives. Say we reverse things and pay the company more for reformed prisoners who make parole earlier. Now the incentive is to err on the side of leniency and potentially release more dangerous criminals earlier. You might then counteract it by penalizing the company even more if one of their parolees ends up back in the tank within X period of time; that might help, but depending on the parameters it could make them so gun-shy that we're back where we started -- holding people for longer -- but with a more complex system with more opportunity for schemes and loopholes.
It's not an easy problem by any means. As I said, I want to find some studies; I'm open to what the results show, but I'm very wary of trusting government simply because their purported goal is social benefit.
It starts to become a problem when judges and district attorneys own shares of the companies that run the prisons. This creates a clear conflict of interest (the more people they can convict, the more money they will make) which so far doesn't seem to be noticed as you read about such circumstances at times.
That's fair, and unquestionably a conflict of interest. However, it's not an irrevocable quality of a prison run by a private company (and therefore evil "by definition").
OTOH, purchase of shares is at least an above-board, traceable interaction. Government officials have always gotten perks and kickbacks from private companies, rich individuals, NGOs, and their own budgets that are either off the books or disguised as something else, and therefore less transparent.
I haven't seen (or yet hunted for) a study of publicly run vs. privately run prisons, in terms of treatment, costs, etc.; but I'd be curious, to say the least.
>And I think it's highly naive, this distinction between private companies as greedy, interested parties and government agencies and functionaries as objective arbiters of truth and goodwill.
Higly naive?
A government agency can be greedy or good.
A private company is by definition greedy. It exists to make money.
Unlike the second, which does what the owner/director likes, a government can be controlled by a vigilant voting population, that eagerly participates in political debates and raises issues.
The issue isn't that the company is private, the issue is with the fact it's a for-profit entity. This leads to a host of perverse incentives such as providing the lowest possible level of care for the most money possible and a lack of effort put into curbing recidivism (repeat business!!).
There are juvenile facilities that are run by non-profits and they exhibit lower rates of recidivism with a cost far lower than public prisons still.
Those incentives are often there when a private company and the government make a deal.
It's certainly not a problem with for-profit entities in general, though: Apple and Ford and IKEA and every other private manufacturer has those same incentives -- decrease cost and quality and increase price, with a corresponding interest in recidivism.
Obviously in government scenarios -- defense contracting, roads, schools, prisons, utilities -- local or regional (or temporal) monopolies suppress the competition that keeps other companies' base desires in check on the open market.
There are a lot of pressures to the contrary and obvious reasons it's the initial path of least resistance to grant such monopolies, but I wonder if there's a better way to structure deals like these to encourage competition at the same time.
Most gun stats blithely show aggregate rates of gun ownership and gun-related homicides, and the public reacts in fear; who wants to live in a country like that?
But criminal-on-criminal violence is a disproportionate share. Are we supposed to think that the presence of guns is what drives the violence, or is it possibly that you've got millions of young men with no jobs and nothing constructive to do, with parents who don't care to bring them up right (or who can't control them), running drugs and fighting turf wars, cooking up ways to make bank? There's an argument that for some people, access to guns creates an opportunity; but there's a lot more at work here than that.
There's a social rot underneath it all -- and I'd venture that gun violence in the US is a symptom of the rot rather than guns being a cause. It seems remarkably dangerous to me to demonize the mechanism by which someone murders another person in the name of progress; politicians feel like they're accomplishing something, even though we still have a bunch of people willing to kill someone, if only they had the means.
There's significant collective cognitive dissonance in American society on this topic, I think.
I'd argue this is up to the folks commenting rather than the OP, which is a link to some polling that produced a bunch of data points. It can be strictly analytical without blowing up into petty arguments.
"A few gems in the credibility department from CEO Steve Ballmer: 'We don’t have a monopoly. We have market share. There’s a difference.'"
For a financial magazine, lampooning this comment shows a surprising ignorance of economics. Even 100% marketshare (which Microsoft never had) isn't equivalent to a monopoly. They'd have to be the only supplier, usually the result of significant barriers to entry (most often cost or government intrusion on the market).
Windows competed with Unixes, OS/2, Linux, Mac OS, BeOS, and others. Likewise, IE had Netscape and (later) Firefox, Opera, and Chrome.
Windows had obvious usage advantages over its competitors; but feature-parity isn't something the market guarantees. Its competitors had advantages over Windows, too. In the end, all were available, each had pros and cons, and users freely chose Windows computers in far greater numbers than the alternatives.
Strategic conduct on the part of businesses isn't the same thing as smart (or ethical, or legal) conduct when it's done by governments. Everything has a context.
I agree. Which is why government making the risky investments that more conservative businesses won't in order to create the empowering innovations that will save our environment and improve our economy is a major positive for me.
And if it just happens to benefit major contributors and bundlers to the party of the President that is in power, well, that is entirely a coincidence!
The very first word in the instructions, "cryptograms" -- coincidentally the entire subject of the exercise -- is misspelled. Pretty sure that will fall on them. It's not very reassuring in an agency where attention to detail is of paramount concern.
First, to clarify, it's not innguest's moral problem; it's a quandary at the intersection of ethics and politics. If you care about ethical questions at all, this one's meaty: it tugs at the threads of social organization, sanctioned force, individual liberty, international law, and capitalism.
Second, innguest has rationally advocated a position; that's reason enough for me, at least, to pause and consider.
Third, if you're in the US, you have something directly at stake in this argument. Sure, the politics may already be decided on party lines, favors, and lobbying, but as the citizenry we owe it to ourselves to form a coherent political philosophy to serve as the yardstick informing us just how bad the government's decisions are.
Fourth, there should be a huge bar to clear for any party looking to impose invasive rules on someone else using the hand of government. The folks writing the laws are almost uniformly not subject matter experts; they act in self-interested ways that are well known; any proposal will be highly adulterated by the time it passes; any new law becomes a precedent for the next; and unknown consequences are rife, particularly with rights and the economy. I'd be highly critical of anyone willing to advocate this without deeply considering all facets, including innguest's points.
And finally, while morals are of course subjective, they should at least be held to the standards of justifiability and internal consistency; I don't believe this net neutrality push meets those requirements. If government enforces this on cable companies, can it determine which products Walmart carries, and which go on the prized middle shelves? Maybe it's only for monopolies, though...but then, I have no fewer than 4 choices to get Internet to my house, so it's not a monopoly. Unless it's only service of a particular quality. Who sets the quality requirements? And should the provider really not have the ability to charge more for heavier usage of the pipes? You pass something like this, you better have answered all of those and literally hundreds of others, and guaranteed that in every law where that happens, most of the answers are arbitrary.