Month: December 2019

12/28/2019

Excerpts from: Hugo Newman

… I’m willing to grant, for the sake of argument, that all historical cases of in-name-only socialist or communist states—among them, the Soviet Union, Maoist China, East Germany, North Korea, Cuba, Yugoslavia, Venezuela, Cambodia, and Ethiopia, to name just a few—were not, in substance, socialist states. At best, they were flawed and failed attempts to implement socialism.  …

… Now consider the following list of countries: the United States, Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Australia, Ireland, Chile, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands. …

… All of these countries certainly manifest their own internal flaws and failures which socialists are only too happy to publicize and criticize and then lay at the feet of capitalism. …

… none of these countries is really capitalist in the ideal sense. In fact, they’re all some admixture of state intervention and imperfectly liberal markets. … capitalism is no more “debunked” by these in-name-only cases than socialism is by its own list of in-name-only cases.

The political process has been unable or unwilling to prevent robo-calls, email spam, and junk mail. Time for the state to define property rights for phone numbers, email addresses, and mailing addresses.

For this discussion lets just talk about phone numbers. Parallel comments for email and junk mail apply.

With clear property rights to your phone number, you could have a service that would charge anyone who uses your phone number to call you a fee. At your discretion, the fee could be refunded. The only impact would be on those making unwanted calls. You would set the fee rate to a level that would either discourage robo-callers, or make you happy to have the fee.