I make a difference between long-term and short-term goal, like I make for the rest. If you take the medicine comparison made above, I'm aware that for now we don't know how to completely replace our Azathoth-made organic bodies with better, engineered ones. So for the short I'm advocating improving/fixing the body as we can. But for the long term, I would like us to find a solution to get rid of that Azathoth frame, and have an engineered body that is free of all the defects.
I made the same stance for the economy. On the long term, I want to get rid of free market, this Azathoth process that may end up finding solutions to problems, but doing so without caring for the suffering it produces, and without long-term vision. Every time a company goes bankrupt, it's a huge amount of waste in term of energy, time and resources, and a huge amount of suffering, broken families, ... and so on. Natural selection is cruel, and it is as much as in the economy.
But I'm aware we can't get rid totally of free market for now. We don't know how to do it. But we should try to improve what we can improve, fix what we can fix. Organs that can be made in a non-Azathoth way should be made so (EDF, SNCF, CERN for example). Safety measures should be added (unemployment money, working code, ...). Universal free healthcare and education. Things like that, that have working implementation already.
And we should also continue looking and experimenting for ways to make deeper change. We have a very small amount of workers control over companies in France, a "Comité d'Entreprise" elected directly by the workers in the company, and that have a say on safety/hygiene related issues within the company. We should increase its power and see if it does really improve working conditions or not. I spoke of Cybersyn in my initial comment. This project was made 40 years ago, with much reduced computing power, in only 3 years, and yet it gave interesting results, before it was drawn in blood by Pinochet. Couldn't try to make things like that, limited in some sectors, and see how they work ?
Wouldn't a working theory of utilitarianism "solve" the economy directly? Similarly if everyone had perfect market knowledge they would know from the prices set on goods and services (including "live forever" and "be free of pain and suffering") what everyone's utility preferences were and it would be possible in theory to calculate a course of action that maximized wealth and at the same time maximized utility.
The problem is that people produce artificial prices and utility values that don't reflect reality or their true preferences. Fixing that problem can only be done with more rationality, I think.
Or is the convention against discussing politics here silly?
I propose a test. I'm going to try to lay down some rules on voting on comments for the test here (not that I can force anybody to abide by them):
1.) Top-level comments should introduce arguments (or ridicule me and/or this test); responses should be responses to those arguments.
2.) Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
3.) Try not to downvote particular comments excessively, if they're legitimate lines of argument. A faulty line of argument provides opportunity for rebuttal, and so for our test has value even then; that is, I want some faulty lines of argument here. If you disagree, please downvote me, instead of the faulty comments, because this post is what you want less of, not those comments. This necessarily implies, for balance, that we not excessively upvote comments. I'd suggest fairly arbitrary limits of 3/-3?
Edit: 4.) A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate. (My apologies about missing this, folks.)
I'm going to try really hard not to get personally involved, except to lay down a leading comment posing an argument against abortion, a position I don't hold, for the record. The core of the argument isn't disingenuous, and I hold that this argument is true, it just doesn't lead to my opposing abortion. I do not hold the moral axiom by which I extend the basic argument to argue against abortion, however; I'm playing the devil's advocate to try to help me from getting sucked into the argument while providing an initial point of discussion.
Which leads me to the next point: If you see a hole in an argument, even if it's an argument for a perspective you agree with, poke through it. The goal is to see whether we can have a constructive political argument here.
The fact that this is a test, and known to be a test, means this isn't a blind study. Uh, try to act as if you're not being tested?
After it's gone on a little while, if this post hasn't been hopelessly downvoted and ridiculed (and thus the premise and test discarded as undesirable to begin with), we can put up a poll to see whether people found the political debates helpful, not helpful, and so on.