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What Lessig wants is mostly right, but by refusing to trust the market to get there, Lessig is willing to give power to DC politicians at the expense of property rights and individual choice. Historically that seems like a bad recipe for both freedom and innovation.

Lessig wants to believe that politicians could become "technocratic philosopher kings," while failing to appreciate the systemic factors that ensure that politicians will always be among the least noble and least qualified to make the required judgments.

While I've yet to try a Kinesis keyboard, I can attest that TypeMatrix (http://typematrix.com/) keyboards are superb (~ $120). Once you try one, you immediately realize how utterly backwards staggered keys are in the modern world.

Fraud is a crime. Cities have been dealing with it for a long time. People don't need bureaucrats in DC to tell them to not stick jellybeans up their nose.

Also, from an epistemological perspective, you almost have to use the exceptional cases to spot the trend while they are still exceptional. Once they become commonplace, we stop noticing them. They are no longer new, so they are no longer news.

That no end can be moral if the means to that end require using violence and force against a peaceful individual who has not aggressed against his neighbor.

That a free society is a strong and secure society.

That only freedom can breed sustained innovation and growth.

I'm assuming that the author of the linked stub was going to address this in the full article he mentioned.

Like all the members of Congress who voted on this though, I'll admit to not having actually read the full 63-page bill and the thousands of pages of existing law that it references, extends, and amends. So if I'm categorically wrong, and you've fully read and understood the consequences of the law, please set me straight.

I am clear on the fact that this law has been a serious concern for small manufacturers, though I presume they could fall under more onerous regulation than yard sales.

http://www.acresusa.com/toolbox/reprints/Salatin_Sept03.pdf

He also has a book:

http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Want-Do-Illegal-Stories/dp/...

I'm speaking to the US audience.

Do we?

Yes. I don't have rigorous data in front in me, but as a society we've become wealthier over, say, the last 60 years. In every community I've every been a part of, talked with others about, or reviewed data on, taxes for schools, as percentages of property values, income, or sales, have gone up. Greater wealth * higher tax percentages = more money/resources spent on schools.

And declining since when?

Though I'm skeptical of using test score data, the US results haven't been pretty from at least the 1970s onward. Anecdotally, however, this seems confirmed by consensus opinion. Education quality and loss of competitiveness of the median high school graduate relative to the rest of the world has been a continuing political issue for decades.

And how much?

There's no way for me or anyone to precisely quantify either part.

As for your skepticism, I simply assumed that readers knowledgeable about modern US history could appreciate the truth of my point based on the weight of their own observations.

Neither does anyone else until you put it before a jury. That's a large part of the problem.

(I'm assuming here that the original advertisements were placed with the permission of the property owners. Otherwise the placing of the initial advertisements was vandalism, as is replacing them with something else.)

We're trying to make a point here that the public should be the ones using the public space and not commercial and private interests.

This guy lives in a different world. Equivocation aside, those 'public' spaces are privately owned. When this guy says that the 'public' should be the ones to decide, what he really means is that he thinks his opinion of how the space should be used ought to trump that of the owners who pay to own and maintain their property.

Why bother? It would be trivial to game.

"That means that if we want to achieve our ideal of equal salaries for men and women, we may need to legislate the principle of equal pay for less work. Personally, I support that principle. But I recognize it's a hard sell." (emphasis mine)

It takes a special kind of commitment to the truth to write an extended, compelling piece that ruthlessly undermines any rational basis for a position you support.

I object to this submission being killed. I understand the desire to keep HN 'pure,' but Peter Thiel is interesting to hackers and founders in the same way that a PG essay is interesting even if it is not a direct dissertation on Lisp or startups.

There are also plenty of smart and wealthy folks who live in Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Florida, in part, because the taxes are lower. As with any marginal change to a policy, you have to look at the effect on the marginal cases. You have to ask, "if taxes in CA were reduced by X%, what Y% more smart and wealthy people would choose to live there?" I guarantee Y > 0 for any X > 0.

No, it isn't. Policies that inhibit growth at a local level also inhibit growth at a national level. The effects may simply take longer to become visible.

Neither of the company's two founders, nor any of their successors, can alter the product's basic economics.

This former executive claims they were trying to sell a product for $1.29 that cost them more than $1.00 to produce and distribute. If true, this sealed the company's fate regardless of any drama or inattention to detail.

Your argument makes zero sense. You may believe MS's monopoly is insecure, but if the markets believed that as well, then you wouldn't have to pay so much to own MS. The short term dividend returns would be greater because investors would be expecting capital loss.