Thread: The future of free speech
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mmurfin87 is offline mmurfin87
2010-07-06 , 22:59
Posts: 307 | Thanked: 157 times | Joined on Jul 2009 @ Illinois, USA
#27
Originally Posted by jnwi View Post
Regardless of whether anyone is an idiot, I don't believe people have the time to be knowledgeable about the vast majority of things they buy. People underestimate what luxury it is to go buy absolutely anything from a store while remaining fairly confident that you're not making a huge mistake. Modern society depends on this efficiency to some extent.
People have ~20 years before they become mainstream consumers. I'd say thats plenty of time to learn enough everything they need to know to get started. In the US today though, the average college student today is an idiot. The fact that we even tolerate people being able to drop out of high school is abhorrent the more I think about it.

I am a (recently decided) minarchist libertarian, and I struggle to compromise that belief with the absolute need for people to be educated in order for the world to work.

Originally Posted by jnwi View Post
Even though I don't hate them, Microsoft was a practical monopoly for almost two decades and caused immense harm just by forcing everyone to adapt to them. Linux wouldn't be a competitor if it weren't for the countless hours people wasted reverse engineering file formats.
This is the other end of my "Education" rant. Properly educated leaders would know that anticompetitive practices will lose them money, sometimes in the short run, but always in the long run.