Tag: philosophy

Deregulation

I’ve always believed anarchy was a wonderful governance methodology — for very small communities of highly intelligent, self-aware individuals. I do not find the methodology scalable.

Pure free market principals suffer from the same problem. The free market involves informed actors making rational decisions. Rational is the word that always stood out to me — how many decisions (purchasing or otherwise) are truly rational?

But a recent report regarding a study from before there were regulations about disclosing the source of a study’s funding highlights the “informed” component. How can you be an informed actor without regulations that ensure the “facts” are not being paid for by industry associations?

This isn’t to say I believe we limitless regulations to avoid the possibility of an individual making a poor devision, or that it wouldn’t behoove us to review existing regulations to determine if they are still sensible. But I cannot understand anti-regulation fervor.

 

The Time Travel “Bad Guy”

I saw a commercial for a television show called “Timeless”, the premise for which is apparently that some malevolent person has stolen a time machine and is trying to use it to change history and destroy the country. So the protagonists are “saving” the country by undoing whatever changes are made. But what if the change initiator has no ill intent. They are going to stop the Hindenburg from crashing, or get a ticket on the Titanic to keep watch for iceburgs, or introduce the germ theory of disease centuries earlier all to save lives and help people. But to maintain temporal continuity, the “time police” have to prevent (or undo) these changes. A philosophical anti-hero doing the ‘right thing’, but would people still consider them to be a “good guy”?