Re: Stallman calls for an end to file sharing war

[Snit]

Tim Smith stated in post
reply_in_group-A55ECC.10411002102010@news.supernews.com on 10/2/10 10:41 AM:

> In article <4CA70447.847FD5B3@web.de>,
>  Alexander Terekhov <terekhov@web.de> wrote:
> 
>> Tim Smith wrote:
>> [...]
>>> Digital music, computers, and the internet have changed that. First of
>>> all, copying is fast and easy.
>> 
>> Since shoplifting in a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermarket is
>> certainly faster and easier than stealing in the pre-supermarket era,
>> why not go 'total communist' and make food and household merchandise
>> free as well?
> 
> Last time I checked, food and household merchandise have the necessary
> attributes that allows a free market to give economically correct
> resource allocation, and so have not had to rely on an artificial
> infusion of those attributes combined with a societal agreement that we
> will pretend that these attributes are real, and so with food and
> household goods you do not have the case that you have something with a
> marginal cost of zero relying almost completely on people being nice for
> it to work.

Food is nowhere near based on a free market, at least not in the US.  Beef
and dairy, for example, are heavily subsidized and non-organic produce is
often subsidized as well.


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