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No, actually, I'd rather get rid of all taxes on all wealth transfers, since they are all counter-productive and injust. Refer to french economist Frédéric Bastiat's The Law for incisive, witty and insightful explanations about this.

Instead of Communist, I think you mean totalitarian. Back during the cold war it suited the US govt for people to think of the two as the same, so it's not suprising you are confused.

Communism requires the destruction of private property rights in the means of production, which in turn requires unrelenting violence, constant terror and mass-murder, as was predicted in the 19th century, as was repeatedly demonstrated throughout the 20th.

There was a Supreme Court case where somebody actually tried this reasoning. I don't have enough recall of details to google it, I tried. But of course there's always the Candlmaker's Petition.

why lie to ourselves about what we are doing

M. Bastiat's text:

French: http://bastiat.org/fr/cqovecqonvp.html#vitre_casse e

English: http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html

M. Bastiat's text:

French: http://bastiat.org/fr/cqovecqonvp.html#vitre_casse e

English: http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html

No offence, but you should read some Bastiat. Might I suggest Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas for starters?

If a government is to spend money for anything, it has to take the money from people who probably had some better use planned for that money. That's a net loss to society. There certainly are some things that governments should spend money on, but those things are few.

If you're opposed to H1Bs ask yourself a question... Are you using anything that wasn't made in America? Think of all the American jobs lost because you weren't checking for "Made in the USA". So why is it that cheap foreign labor is just fine when it makes your shoes and electronics cheap but "immoral" if it happens to affect the industry that employs you? The American car industry tried that in the early 80s and it backfired. Import tarrifs were needed to keep prices equal with the Japanese which raised prices for CONSUMERS un-naturally. Nobody wanted to pay the inflated prices so sales tanked costing 50,000 jobs. Sure, Americans working at the Honda dealership lost their jobs but at least the Japanese couldn't embarass us with their amazing productivity right?

I do not want to pay more for my stuff because you can't compete with foreigners. The alternative is that we just offshore the work in which case they don't spend money in America which is even "worse" for the economy. Please read Bastiat's famous plea to ban sunlight for the benefit of candlemakers if you disagree. They were making fun of this type of logic in the 1800s.

Is this even necessary? $308M is a lot of money (maybe not for our federal government, but for the average taxpayer) and this really seems to be a waste to tax and spend on a program that is better solved by private companies.

Will we need old information in digital format? How many old books have we needed to save that were better saved just by reprinting them? How much information will the future need, and is it important to save just about everything just for memory sake?

It just sounds like pork to me. Competitive pork, yes, but still pork. Our government has kept Lockheed afloat for decades.

I'm trying to find out where in our Constitution does the Federal Government find an enumerated power to pay for this. It is outrageous -- there are numerous companies out there already attempting to archive old data. Why does our government even care? I bet it has more to do with raising taxes, creating new taxpayers to be paid on the government dole, and increasing unemployment figures.

Similar to Hazlitt's Broken Window Fallacy, taxes are NOT good for creating wealth for the country. Instead, they create profit for certain select individuals and reduce wealth for everyone else.

Our elected officials continue to finance deficit spending, which will only make us taxpayers and the next generations poorer.

We can see what happens when they do all that. We can see all the nifty roads with the nifty potholes, we can see Amtrak, we can see the $400 hammers and $900 toilet seats that are defending our country.

We can't see what would happen if they didn't do that. It's quite possible that we would have a far richer society, with far greater social and economic equality, if they weren't doing all that ``for'' us.

Everything on your list of ``what the government does for us (whether we like it or not)'' has been provided by private enterprise, and could be again. Would we be better or worse off if the government gave up its monopoly on any or all of those things? I don't think the answer is obvious, but I lean towards ``better off''.

A knee jerk libertarian is a still a jerk.

And a knee jerk liberal is a liberal jerk. I'd suggest that you (and everyone who's afflicted with a jerking knee) read Bastiat's ``The Law'' and Henry Hazlet's ``Economics in One Lesson'' to help you avoid making unwarranted assumptions about how much good government is doing us all. There's a lot more to learn, but those two will get you started.

You didn't listen to me last time, so I'm going to say it again.

Not this again! Go read "What is seen and what is not seen" by Frederic Bastiat. http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html

To make the point as succintly as possible, your argument amounts to me stealing $100 from you, buying you an ice cream cone, and saying, "See! Without me, you wouldn't have ice cream! You go and enjoy your anti-theft life, but just remember: it's because of theft that you have ice cream in the first place!"

When you look at the history of scientific research over the last 100 years most ground breaking research has been paid for by government organizations. Now if you want to give up satellite TV, the internet, computers, and most of the other advances over the last hundred years then your viewpoint might have market but that's hey you don't know what you would be giving up so it must not be that important.

Not this again! Go read "What is seen and what is not seen" by Frederic Bastiat. http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html

To make the point as succintly as possible, your argument amounts to me stealing $100 from you, buying you an ice cream cone, and saying, "See! Without me, you wouldn't have ice cream! You go and enjoy your anti-theft life, but just remember: it's because of theft that you have ice cream in the first place!"

Wow. You just demonstrated perfectly the fallacy of the broken window. Congratulations.

The economy is not renewed by over-consumption. It does not get better by throwing things away and buying more. It is renewed by efficient production - that is, production that fulfills the most urgent wants and needs of the populace. The demand is totally natural - once our most urgent needs are met, our secondary needs and wants can be met. After that our tertiary needs and wants, our quaternary needs and wants, etc. My demand for a specific flavor of toothpaste only follows after I have already successfully fulfilled my other needs - food, shelter, and a toothbrush. It is not artificial...it is just what I can afford to focus on in a society of such wealth.

A poster farther up asks "how many tin foil hat types think theres a connection with today's bombings"... All things considered, I find the coincidence of today's bombings somewhat disturbing. If history is to be considered, then there is good reason to question whether or not there is a connection.

How much farther does this idiocy have to go before the proles wake up. Aside from a new and improved Asshole Act, I wonder what monstrous retaliation awaits the next targets of our country's arrogant and foolhardy wrath.

If knowledge is power, then ignorance must be impotence. So I beg you to do what you can in that regard, at least. Share the knowledge. Encourage the ideals. Stand by your neighbors. Voice your opinion. Be disobedient if you must.

Need some red pills for your trapped friends and family? Perhaps these will help:

The Law, Frederic Bastiat http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html

No Treason, by Lysander Spooner http://www.lysanderspooner.org/notreason.htm

An Essay on the Trial by Jury, by Lysander Spooner http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1201

Politics and the English Language, by George Orwell http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

The Declaration of Independence http://www.law.indiana.edu/uslawdocs/declaration.h tml

Civil Disobedience http://www.cs.indiana.edu/statecraft/civ.dis.html

Common Sense, by Thomas Paine http://www.bartleby.com/133/

Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, Ettiene de la Boetie http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/laboetie.html

The Discovery of Freedom, Rose Wilder Lane http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Wilder_Lane

Law of Nations, Vattel http://www.constitution.org/vattel/vattel.htm

Best luck to us all.

C

Of course, the government's decision to support something that wouldn't return a profit anytime soon led to an entire industry of home electronics. Time and time again, the government's infrastructure fuels private industry growth.

See A PETITION From the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns, sticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers, and Extinguishers, and from Producers of Tallow, Oil, Resin, Alcohol, and Generally of Everything Connected with Lighting. by Bastiat

And how, exactly, do you propose to do this? What wording would you suggest that would stop land being given to developers for higher tax revenues, but would allow 'justified' uses of private property theft (which I'm still not sure exist) to take place?

As John Adams said, we must have a government of laws and not men.

Not matter what laws we pass, they will still be enforced by men. The officials of our government aren't law-executing robots, they're fallible, corruptible human beings. They will find ways around any and all checks and balances we put on any governmental power. Should our eminent domain law require that the stolen property remain in the hands of the city or state government that stole it? No problem, the government will just then lease it to the highest bidder. Any restrictions you write into the eminent domain law will have loopholes that will be exploited, because you, too, are fallible.

Any system of legal plunder, as eminent domain is, is fundamentally and fatally flawed. It cannot be reformed and can only be abolished.

Nice to know you're still with us, Monsieur Bastiat.

Do you ever worry that 80% of America might eventually be a polluted wasteland with 20% resort communities for the lucky few?

This would only happen if the owners of that 80% of America just decided one day to let their land become a polluted hellhole. They have a very large incentive to avoid that, because polluted land is worth less than clean land. Unless people started deciding en masse that they wanted their land to be worth as little as possible, it simply would not happen.

Also, I think you misunderstand the libertarian viewpoint on pollution. The first and foremost concern is for property rights - you have the right to do whatever you want to whatever you own. The corollary to this that so often gets ignored is that you have absolutely no rights to do anything to something that you don't own, unless you have the owner's permission.

The implications of this are that if I own an acre of land, I can totally pile it to the sky with nuclear waste if I so choose. But if you own an acre of land that abuts mine, I cannot do anything to your land. That means that if some of my waste spills over on to your property, or seeps into the ground and contaminates your groundwater, that is trespass and should be prosecuted as such. If you can prove that my property's trespass onto your land caused you harm, then you can file a civil suit seeking damages.

If I could have a reasonable assurance that the poorest among us would be BETTER off than now, and that society would become less stratified

The lives of the poor are constantly becoming better through free market processes rather than state intervention. To borrow an example from my copy of Libertarianism: A Primer, in 1971 44.5% of all households had a clothes dryer; in 1994 50.2% of poor households had one. Most poor people today are better off than medium-income people 50 years ago. Look back even farther and you will see that today's poor are better off than the rich of centuries ago. Louis XIV's palace at Versailles had no flush toilets. The most extravagant palace in the world at the time couldn't afford something that probably 99% of people in poverty have today.

But I'm not going to scrap our social safety net so that Donald Trump can have twenty yachts instead of ten.

What exactly do you think would happen if we "scrapped our social safety net"? There would be no government programs to help the poor, true, but weren't there poor people before LBJ's War on Poverty and other similar programs? There wasn't always a time when the government helped out the poor. If there was no forced charity, do you honestly believe that your fellow citizens would not increase their voluntary charity in order to compensate? They could certainly afford to do so, because the taxes used to fund welfare programs would have been cut. What the tsunami in Southeast Asia has taught us, if nothing else, is that people respond to other people in need. It's hardwired into our brains as a species survival tactic. Cutting forced welfare programs will not result in people starving in the streets, because voluntary welfare programs will always fill the gap.

I strongly encourage you to read That Which is Seen and That Which is Not Seen by Frederic Bastiat. The gist of it is that every state intervention produces two types of effects. The effects that are seen are the obvious, intended effects of the government program. In the case of welfare, the effect which is seen is poor people having more money. This seems like a great thing until you examine the effects which are not seen, sometimes called the unintended consequences. Where did the money we gave to the poor people come from? What else could have been done with it? If we're taxing, say, corporations to fund our welfare program, we have to consider what would have been done with that money if it had not been taxed.

Don't forget about the unfair competition between the Sun and the Candlestick makers.

I suggest you read "Petition of the Candlestick Makers". The flaw in your argument is that you don't "get more product" by paying more for it. You get more product by getting more product at less cost. Period. This is what free markets are wonderful at figuring out all by themselves. I also suggest you read The Law . Seriously, just give it a read.

I suggest you read "Petition of the Candlestick Makers". The flaw in your argument is that you don't "get more product" by paying more for it. You get more product by getting more product at less cost. Period. This is what free markets are wonderful at figuring out all by themselves. I also suggest you read The Law . Seriously, just give it a read.

Kids have a significant portion of their day "protected" by their parents as well. Eventually most kids like to move out. Or perhaps you're 45 and living in your mother's basement?

The problem with your argument is that you are arguing what is seen. To be fair, you also need to consider what is not seen.

You do make many valid points, though as well. Many protections of the environment, for example, are only implementable via government.

Returning to the gold standard is ideologically appealing to a certain type of person, but it's tatlly impractical. There's just not enough gold, and new gold isn't being mined fast enough to keep up with the creation of other types of wealth

is the sun. Shouldn't that be extinguished before open source software?

Do you know of an example where protectionism been successful in the long term? It's been used many, many times. The result is always less competition. Doesn't protectionism, by definition, means you're protecting (coddling) an industry? The topic has been illustrate well in satire: The Candlemaker's Petition.

The justification of a protectionism is always that it'll have some general benefit to society, but it's always really a hidden transfer of wealth from consumers (who would otherwise pay less for the protected good) to local producers. For example, costlier steel (because of tariffs) doesn't help America, it just means our cars cost more.

P.S. I'm just as opposed as the next guy to corporate welfare.

Frederic Bastiat put it rather well in his satirical Candlemakers' Petition. And SCO is essentially arguing here that is good for Americans to pay higher prices for software that has not been commoditized. They are saying that their jobs are more important than mine or yours. Also well worth reading is his That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen. Regrettably, his argument about the invisibility of widely dispersed costs and benefits is an economic one that is at odds with the political strategy of aiding a small group in a large way at a small expense to everyone else.

Either Darl McBride is ignorant of basic economics, which is entirely possible, or he is aware of exactly what he is doing. Either he is incompetent to run a corporation or knows he is lying.

Frederic Bastiat put it rather well in his satirical Candlemakers' Petition. And SCO is essentially arguing here that is good for Americans to pay higher prices for software that has not been commoditized. They are saying that their jobs are more important than mine or yours. Also well worth reading is his That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen. Regrettably, his argument about the invisibility of widely dispersed costs and benefits is an economic one that is at odds with the political strategy of aiding a small group in a large way at a small expense to everyone else.

Either Darl McBride is ignorant of basic economics, which is entirely possible, or he is aware of exactly what he is doing. Either he is incompetent to run a corporation or knows he is lying.

You forgot Albion.

A tax on sunlight? Something similar has been suggested before. More than 150 years ago Frederic Bastiat wrote his satire where the light manufaturing industries complain about the unfair foreign competition from the sun and ask the lawmakers to outlaw windows. Excerpts:

"We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a foreign rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly that we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us."

"We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull's-eyes, deadlights, and blinds--in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat."

So Americans wants $2billion worth of IT services. Well, the world doesn't owe America a living. If Americans want $2billion worth of IT services they are going to have to work for it. Either they can do it themselves, or they can do other work, making jet planes, medicines, semiconductors, cars, etc, to the earn the $2billion and buy the IT services from abroad. There is $2billion work of work to be done in America either way.

Ah, but what if outsourcing saves money? What if Americans do $2billion worth of other work, but get to buy their IT services for $1billion? Well, they get to keep the other $1billion, all those jet planes, medicines, etc stay in the USA. Getting stuff cheap makes you better off!

Bastiat explained all this very nicely 150 years ago, but human ignorance is invincible.

Children who have been born into the caste of software developer are forbidden by religious law from taking other employment, so have only a life time of destitution to look forward to. I guess out sourcing sucks for them.

That would be "A Petition From the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns, sticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers, and Extinguishers, and from Producers of Tallow, Oil, Resin, Alcohol, and Generally of Everything Connected with Lighting." by Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850), not Swift. You can read it here

Government is an invention to oppress people; if you want to talk specifically about government, say "french government", not "France"; if you want to talk about the country, say "France", not "french government". I am french, yet I feel little solidarity with present, past and future french governments; I know for sure than in other countries were governments are even more on the loose than in France, people feel even less solidarity with their governments.

That said, like many french people, I think that the "anti-racist" law is itself a very racist law (apart from being most inappropriate), since it makes a special case for the jews; of course, I can't say it on any french media, least I be censored by this very law.

-- Faré @ TUNES.org

As a side note, I found a text by the same author against patents, but one for copyrights (none on the 'Net in english, AFAIK). Not that I agree with him on the latter point...

-- Faré @ TUNES.org

As a side note, I found a text by the same author against patents, but one for copyrights (none on the 'Net in english, AFAIK). Not that I agree with him on the latter point...

-- Faré @ TUNES.org