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wedrifid comments on The Second Best - Less Wrong
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Fred has a 'Jesus' machine. It is a machine that can take one fish and turn it into three units of foodstuff, where a fish usually has one unit.
Fred starts with three fish. I start with 9. It costs a fixed 0.5 units of food to transport between me and Fred, payable at the end of the month.
Sally the Senator, she's neither crazy nor evil and she's also good at basic arithmetic. She proposes a law that says I must give one fish to Fred for him to manufacture into three units of food. Fred is to split the produce between the two of us evenly.
Sally can see that this outcome will give 10, 9 to Fred and myself respectively, where without Sally's coercion we would have got 9,9.
I think the libertarian answer is "No comment".
I don't think libertarians have nearly as much to say about optimization as they do about regulation. The libertarian answer would be, If you and Fred want to work something out, fine, but Sally has no business telling either of you what to do with your fish.
That was my impression.
My libertarian answer is that you've just convinced the future Freds of the world to keep quiet about any Jesus capabilities they discover.
And if my illustration didn't, then this one might!