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Both parties would like to see the economy grow - attacking businesses doesn't really help that.

Therefore, we should attack people, to ensure that large corporate monopolies remain profitable!

Neither party wants to see Americans attacked, especially on American soil.

Nonsense:

http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/overkill-rise-paramilitary-police-raids-america

The size of government will probably continue to grow under both parties, as well as the debt, but much faster under one party than the other.

Good thing we have a choice:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_party_(United_States)

One party is more inclined to try to "eat the rich", the other to create opportunities for more to become new rich (and pay taxes).

Both parties work for the benefit of the rich and powerful, they just do it in minutely different ways. Neither party is going to improve the lives of "commoners" like you and me, except in superficial ways. We have 3 decades of switching between Democrat and Republican control of various branches of government to prove that point.

That's the part I don't get, how does a gun protect?

If guns can't help protect you then why do cops carry them? Why do soldiers need to carry them?

Unless you happen to be able to hit the bullet the aggressor fires at you, it's not really a good item for defense.

Here are just a small subset of people who are only alive today because a gun is a good item for defense: http://www.cato.org/guns-and-self-defense/ .. maybe you can ask them.

Question for you, if you have a daughter someday, would you insist and prefer that she walk around unarmed and defenseless against rapists and other attackers?

The data about tobacco-related deaths is badly overblown (ref: http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/blowing-smoke-about-tobaccorelated-deaths), to the point of becoming a bureaucratic crusade, and a point for fanatics to get stuck up about. Once you really dig into the facts, most people would likely be surprised at the lack of real studies done about the dangers of tobacco; most of what is taken for granted to be true just hasn't been proven scientifically (second-hand smoke, for example), or it's badly outdated and uses questionable scientific method (such as those "studies" done by the 3rd Reich - Hitler notoriously despised tobacco usage).

I have had the benefit in a previous job of having access to a large amount of (PHI-redacted) medical record data used for research purposes - over 130 million lives with records ranging from 5-40 years back - including some social history including tobacco/alcohol usage. Try as we might, we simply couldn't build a solid case showing that smoking killed people. It just didn't seem to be the case; while people who smoke certainly do die at young ages occasionally, the striking fact is that people who don't smoke also occasionally die at young ages - and no matter how you slice the data, there's just nothing to build a solid case for proving that cigarettes cause early death.

What about the existing employees who already smoke? I can't imagine that the state can now impose such rules on somebody who has been working for them for 30 years and fire them a year before retirement. And before you say that maybe they want to save money on pensions, smokers have a shorter life expectancy. In fact, it has been suggested http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv20n3/reg20n3e.pdf that overall, when considering tobacco taxes, shorter collection of pensions and the fact that smokers and nonsmokers both die mostly of heart disease (the smokers are simply younger when they do), that smokers may be cheaper overall for the economy. I mean, I really hate smoking but this goes too far...

"Without technology providing additional food, or transport from farms to tables, I believe the balance point for hunter-gatherers or subsistence agriculture has already been exceeded."

I agree that human population now likely exceeds the capacity for traditional hunter/gatherer lifestyles (maybe by several times). Increasing population density leading to more structured bureaucratic militarized societies is probably a big reason most hunter/gatherer societies were lost (attacked or assimilated or pushed away onto marginal lands to fade away). But that does not invalidate the truths that according to Marshall Sahlins hunter/gatherers had *more* free time than most of us today, and what work they did was very self-directed, often more like professional work of today.

Most (95%?) of the labor hours expended today in the USA tend to be about guarding, engaging in non-productive make-work, or is just destructive or competitively wasteful, or is trying to compensate for the other ills of the society from the previous problems. For example, most heart surgery is apparently worse than useless according to Dr. Joel Fuhrman:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
Most schooling is harming kids according to John Taylor Gatto:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
Most farming (mainly for animal product production) is killing us and destroying our land:
http://www.ravediet.com/reviews.html
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
Much policing related to drug laws is destroying our communities:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States
Most of US military use is making us less safe:
http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/our-work/law-and-security/torture-on-tv/less-safe/
http://www.cato.org/store/books/power-problem-how-american-military-dominance-makes-us-less-safe-less-prosperous-less-free-har
Most computer software development is unneeded; for example IBM had a perfectly good in-house Forth they could have used as a command line interpreter rather than pay Bill Gated for MS-DOS which he bought from someone else. Most Wall Street computerized trading is of little-to-negative social value (just high stakes zero-sum horse racing and putting the whole unregulated derivatives system at risk of systemic collapse).
Most college degrees are not worth it either economically or educationally:
http://shine.yahoo.com/work-money/why-college-may-not-worth-133900551.html
I could go on... And on.. And on...
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html

So, figure out a way that we can stop doing all that 95%+ of excess wasteful labor, and we then would indeed have free time, and our collective standard of living would go up. But then how would people be able to afford to buy food and pay rent? (Thus a basic income or other alternatives become needed...)

My point is not that hunter/gather low-tech is better than high-tech. It is that both our current high-tech existence and our historical low-tech existence have different good and bad points. There are many forms of technology, too, (e.e.g the "appropriate technology" idea) so even high-tech and low-tech is a crude distinction when we are talking about com

No one has a right to Internet access, and it's not even essential to life like food is

One, food isn't a right either. And two, life isn't essential. Oh, and you don't pay the full cost of food either. Large corporations like Cargill get billions of US taxpayer dollars a year in subsidies. The Free Markets CATO Institute published a policy analysis about Archer Daniels Midland, A Case Study In Corporate Welfare. ADM like Cargill get billions of dollars in subsidies a year. I don't know about you but I'd rather choose who I hand money to, either as a trade or a donation. Government doesn't give that option though.

Falcon

Blame our (great)grandparents. Had they not ratified the 16th amendment, that particular imbalance would be much more difficult.

No, I blame the ratification of the 12th Amendment. The Democratic and Republican parties love that amendment. I propose an amendment myself, one than repeals the 12th. And the electoral college. With my amendment every candidate runs for president and the voters get to rank them, something like the Condorcet methods. In my preferred method though a vote of "0", zero, counts against the candidate whereas no vote does not. It works like this, all of a candidate's votes are added up then the total is divided by the number of votes. A zero counts as a vote whereas a blank does not. I don't know how it would work in practice but it'd stir up politics.

Thanks for the link, by the way. The data was fun to play with, even if only for a few minutes. (I spent some time looking for that other factor that I alluded to.)

I originally got the link from a page on CATO's website though I didn't find the page just now.

Falcon

Yeah, Detroit is disintegrating, but Wiki says:

16% of Chinese are in poverty, 33% of Indians, which is hundreds of millions of people. (Measured by the international poverty line, $1.25/day).

Just because a country has hundreds of millions of middle class or huge cities doesn't mean it doesn't also have huge numbers of poor (not just a few under the bridge).

Take Africa. The most expensive city in the world in 2011 was Luanda, Angola. Yet Africa has a poverty rate of 47%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_People's_Republic_of_China
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_India
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/capitalism-will-eliminate-poverty-africa
http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-worlds-50-most-expensive-cities-20120612-207lr.html

Yea great example; a banking industry that has been successively deregulated over the last 30 years

I have to disagree. I can't come up with a good measure of how much additional regulation that the banking sector experiences. But the US government is generating new rules at a rate nearing 100,000 pages a year and I strongly doubt the banking industry magically managed to avoid that deluge of red tape for thirty years. In addition, funding for financial regulation has almost tripled in the last thirty years.

no concept of good regulation

If there was a movement towards good regulation, then you would have something of a point (though you would see a decline in overall regulation just due to the removal of regulation without any redeeming feature). But I tire of hearing of how we should be striving for "good regulation" while simultaneously advocating pretty dumb moves like the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall.

As I mention elsewhere, the primary effect of Glass-Steagall is to create a class structure, those wealthy enough to invest in relatively high yield securities, and those who put their money in savings accounts.

Don't believe me? Surely some libertarian utopia in Texas or New Hampshire has gotten rid of cable monopolies; show me how great their cable and phone options are.

Here are some examples, from a quick Google search and result: "In the essentially unregulated Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania, two companies have competed successfully with each other for years. Edward Downing, business administrator of Bethlehem, Pa., asserts that the by-products of the region's laissez-faire attitude toward cable include price discounts, superior service, and freedom of choice.[16] The recent introduction of a second cable company in Presque Isle, Me.--a city of only 2,000 residents--induced the sluggish incumbent franchisee to dramatically update its technology and increase service options.[17] In Slidell, La., the city administrator, Reinhart Dearing, explains that the "spirit of free enterprise" that prompted the city to deregulate buses and taxicabs has also led to a thriving competition between two cable companies.[18]"

If cable is a "natural monopoly", then why do cities need laws preventing others from competing? You can't have it both ways. Either it's a "natural monopoly" or it's a government monopoly. Guess which one the government laws saying only one company can do something implies? I'll give you a hint, it's not "natural".

"You comment he was waiting for the police, but neglect to mention the fact he was waiting for them with a shotgun in his hands."

Even if this were true (it isn't), I don't find this shocking. If an unknown armed gang attempt a home invasion of my household I would also grab my shotgun to try defend my life and family. What would you do? Let armed robbers kill you? There is no way for an innocent home-owner to tell the difference, on a split second, between a home invasion by robbers and a police raid (which is why police raids for non-violent offenses are wrong and immoral; innocent people keep dying). You put it in bold, like we're supposed to find it shocking. In spite of being "peaceful" NZ does have a culture of gun rights.

The police are most likely to behave as you suggest when they either have the wrong address, or the offense involved is one prone to involvement with violence, such as drug cases

I know the media paints a scary picture, but most drug dealers or producers do not turn their homes into fortresses. SWAT deployment should be limited to extreme cases, where there is good reason to believe that the suspects are heavily armed and dangerous. Right now, SWAT assaults are routinely used to execute search and arrest warrants, regardless of there being any suspicion of the suspect being armed. Here are some typical examples of the excessive use of SWAT:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/oct/05/criminalizing-everyone/

http://www.ktsm.com/news/las-cruces-coach-accused-child-porn-passed-background-checks

There is no need for SWAT to arrest a man accused of downloading child pornography, and there is certainly no excuse for deploying a SWAT team to arrest someone who is accused of illegally importing orchids. These are not armed robbery suspects or terrorists, and there is no reason to think they would have even put up a fight had the SWAT team not shown up. Yes, by the way, these are typical examples:

http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/overkill-rise-paramilitary-police-raids-america

The executive branch has zero power to declare laws, although it can regulate

The executive branch has the power, under the Controlled Substances Act, to declare that a drug is illegal to possess or distribute for up to a year without any congressional or democratic process whatsoever -- and the same organization that has been delegated that power, the DEA, is also responsible for enforcing drug laws, which includes such declarations. A ban is not "regulation" by any sane definition of the word, and sending people to prison for possessing a substance is not "regulating" that substance in any way. The executive branch also has the power to overrule recommendations on drug scheduling to create bans that are not supported by regulatory agencies like HHS or the FDA.

This is not about "regulation" -- this is about a law enforcement agency, the DEA, which is part of the executive branch, having both the power to declare a drug illegal and the final say in whether or not drugs will be banned or regulated. That same agency is responsible for enforcing the very laws it can enact.

None of what you wrote negates what I wrote. The bureaucracy is as dependent on the legislature and president as always.

Except that over the past 40 years, more and more power has shifted away from the legislature and towards the executive. That is not "as always" -- it is a modern trend, and it is a trend with immediate and real consequences.

Pardon me if I assume that a "Briefing Paper" by a right-wing think-tank might also be biased. Both of them can cherry-pick bits of Milton Friedman to support one point of view or the other.

I find this paper to also be full of spin ; e.g.

More damaging for Klein’s case, Thatcher
was not implementing unpopular reforms. On
the contrary, surveys during the strike showed
that the public systematically opposed the
strikers, and that opposition grew during the
strike.

It doesn't cite who performed the surveys, what bias *they* may have had, etc. Never mind that we are talking about a government here, of a party that has recently been shown to be deeply in bed with the popular press, who as I recall, worked very hard to bias public opinion against the striking miners. I was quite young at the time, I remember having a preference for the Conservative party and Margaret Thatcher over the Labour party. I guess I was young and susceptible to spin.

Other evidence of bias : substitution of the word "liberalization" for "privatization" throughout the paper ; the corporate acquisitions being discussed in the Shock Doctrine are anything but "liberal" ; not the formation of a healthy market with multiple participants, but a sudden and complete monopoly over a local service or industry as the result of a disaster, often with Government sponsorship, which would seem to be the total antithesis of the liberal doctrine which preaches a diverse market with as small a Government as possible.

It also reads like a personal defence of a slur against Milton Friedman. I think the contention here is that while Mr Friedman may in fact have the good intentions he claims, the evidence is that liberal doctrine doesn't actually seem to work ; the intended liberalization of destabilised regions / economies doesn't actually take place. The natural path of capitalism is not liberalism but oligarchy, as profit concentrates power which begets more profit, ad infinitum. I think we can all agree that the liberal tenets of reducing the power of Government in order to reduce it's potential for collusion and corruption seem attractive ; but rather than "less government", what we tend to see demanded by corporate interests instead is "less of the government that gets in my way! (and the government that gives me money is just fine, thanks)". Pure liberalism is just as much an artificial, fanciful state of affairs as pure communism, because of this effect of concentration of power, so paradoxically, if liberalism is to take hold, you need strong regulation.

Much like taxing cigarettes. If cigarettes are so bad for the individual (as the government states - and anyone with a fucking brain knows) why is the government in the cigarette business?

Because the government learned its lesson from Prohibition. Banning it doesn't work but taxing it does apparently mitigate the problem. If you can't beat 'em, tax 'em.

Taxing soda won't do anything but hand over more money to the government. It won't stop a thing and people know it.

Actually the really perverse bit is that sugar is subsidized by the government. A lot of the obesity problem we have arguably stem from that subsidy. So we're taxing something that we're subsidizing? Why not just eliminate the subsidy? You'll accomplish much the same thing with a lot less overhead.

Want to stop children drinking soda? then simply make it illegal for them to do so. (Which I don't agree with)

We tried something like that in the 1920s. Didn't work then. Won't work now.

Even the Liberatarian Cato institute says starve the beast is a failure: http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj26n3/cj26n3-8.pdf

Does one success make up for the raids on wrong addresses that have occurred?
http://www.cato.org/raidmap/

If a technocrat really was operating on evidence, then they'd have to eliminate OSHA for not moving the needle on workplace safety.

Evidence: http://www.cato.org/pubs/handbook/hb105-36.html

but if you could prove that google is doing behind the scenes work to enable interception of your emails - or if they know beyond doubt that their ssl's are no good, you could sue google successfully.

Not likely. http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/telecom-amnesty

Well according to the CATO Institute natural resources aren't finite.

I also mail letters with the US Postal Service, which is a nice example of how efficient a government organization can be without partisan politics interfering.

The USPS now faces a budget crisis because Congress dropped 75 years of employee benefit funding on the organization, due in a span of only 10 years

You see how these contradict and back up my point, don't you? Do you think any government program is going to be different?

Even after proposing to close 3,700 offices over the next year, the U.S. postal service has a $9.2 billion deficit and is near a default.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2011/09/do-we-need-the-postal-service/

But you blame it on the same government that you want to run insurance? You do see the hypocrisy in that, don't you? Are you trying to support my point that government run services are no better (in fact, in this case worse) than private sector? Politics can just as easily kill a business as a CEO. And don't even get started saying that Healthcare is failing in the private sector. It's arguably one of the most regulated (ie: ah, those politics again) sectors of industry today.

You can go back 10 years and find out why it's failing... hard. And of course, they don't consider themselves accountable for any of that. That's definitely what I want my life entrusted to... and since we are on the USPS: Why is it that UPS and FedEx are doing so well? Is it because the USPS cannot deliver packages? No. They deliver packages. What must it be then? Efficiency? Customer Service? Reliability? What is the USPS failing on so hard that it can't compete with these private companies? I think the CATO report sums it nicely: "the Postal Service decided to improve mail service by delaying letter delivery" They delay. So let's push our healthcare under that same "efficient" system. Let's just say, "Hold on sir, we'll get you that heart... when we are damn well ready."

Yeah, let's keep stamp prices artificially low. It makes them look good. (whopping 55%...)

So what about that USPS? Do we still need it?

“Heck, the only thing I need a physical mailing address for these days is to get physical packages from Amazon, UPS and FedEx do just fine and do it with lower labor costs (53% of its expenses for UPS, 32% for FedEx compared with 80% with the USPS)—the private delivery services just run more efficiently as a business,” Chan writes.

From 2008 to 2010, sales revenue in the mailing industry, which includes private mailers and printing companies, grew by 10 percent to $1.1 trillion and increased jobs by 16 percent.

Yes, spam ... spam is saving the USPS. Not efficiency.

So... why is it that:

Postal services in the Netherlands and Germany have been privatized...

And about those markups. Since you cherry picked a single (highly regulated) business that's failed you, let me point out a few government programs that have/are failing as well:
Cash for Clunkers
Fannie Mae
Freddie Mac
TARP
Heck, there was just an article the other day about Solar Energy in America and how it's being exploited by China ...

More devastating than direct efficiency comparisons is the tendency for government to eventually bankrupt everything it manages, including itself. Amtrak, the Postal Service, Social Security, Medicare, Fannie and Freddie, FHA, FDIC, FSLIC, Student Loans, etc. are some examples.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/12/government_gone_wild.html

I'm sick to death of seeing knuckle dragging Neanderthals (who have voted the way their television told them to) have as much say as myself (if I don't understand what the vote is on, I'll make sure I read up on it).

There are a bunch of flaws with this sort of thinking:
  * If your sources are not providing useful unbiased expertise on the subject, then your vote is no smarter than the "knuckle-dragging Neanderthals". For instance, if the main issue is tax policy, you'll get wildly different answers depending on whether you check with the Tax Policy Center, Americans for Tax Reform, FairTax.org, or the Cato Institute.
  * If it's an issue like "Should we approve this school tax levy?", checking the sources won't help you make several value judgements (Should there be a well-funded public education system? Does the improvement in home values that comes from having a good school district outweigh the cost of the higher tax? What effects, if any, will the tax change have on local businesses?)
  * For candidates rather than ballot issues, you may find yourself in the position of "I agree with Smith because of ABC, but disagree with him about DEF, while I like Jones' position on GHI but dislike JKL." Again, you're making value judgments which have nothing to do with level of education or research.

The Koch brothers have filed a lawsuit for control over the Cato Institute, a Washington DC-based libertarian think tank.

As far as I can tell, Cato Institute's business consists of conducting research for well-healed corporate clients, to generate one-sided reports which can then be used in lobbying and congressional and judicial testimony. They did a lot of work for Microsoft around the time of the DOJ antitrust investigation.

Name a single Democrat who is as far on the insane left scale as Santorum is on the insane right scale. You can't.

Would you care to name a few opinions/posititions, the holding of which you think would qualify someone as "insane left"?

Democrats are, in fact, farther to the right on most issues than most people who are called "leftists" anywhere else in the world.

On economic issues, close, but not 100%. In the Cato Institute's "Economic Freedom of the World", the US is ranked 10th out of 141, higher ranking being rightward. Same result on the Heritage Foundation's equivalent report, out of 179, though the reports disagree slightly about which countries are further right, and which order. They agree we're leftward (less capitalist) than Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Canada, Chile, and Mauritius. Cato says the UK is more capitalist than us, while Heritage says that Ireland is.

Where's the court? Isn't the Government too small to be able to provide it because it's not getting any taxes from those Libertarians?

In the days before the Income Tax was passed into law, I believe that the US government got most of its revenue from import duties from international shipping. They had enough money to hire judges.

Some libertarians claim no government is needed at all. Others want a government, just a smaller one. So take it up with the former group to find out how society will function with no courts at all; I think that's a fantasy, personally.

Consider what removing the authority of government and instead having a nation led purely by the wealthy and their descendants does after a generation or two.

Okay, I considered it. Now you consider that your little scenario has nothing to do with libertarianism, which does not mean "rule by the wealthy". Perhaps it is your opinion that the one will lead to the other, but it is not a self-evident fact you can just assume.

Of course "Libertarian" really is nothing but a meaningless self applied title for those that don't want to be labelled for what they really are, no matter what portion of the political spectrum they sit on.

I don't even see any evidence that you actually know what the word means. Seems like you are painting all libertarians with a pretty broad brush here.

If you would like to know what libertarianism is actually all about, here's a short intro:

Key Concepts of Libertarianism by David Boaz

And if you are willing to read something long and detailed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism

That means any criticism hits the "real Scotsman" problem

Tell you what, you read the links I provided, figure out what "libertarian" actually means, and then you can decide for yourself whether someone is really a libertarian or is just a selfish person wrapping himself in some sort of metaphorical flag.

steveha

can you cite sources for this argument? I want to believe it, but without any sources it is not creditable. (please no Wikipedia links)

Sure can! But only because you asked so nicely...

Libertarian think-tank contends nuclear power is not economically viable in a free and fair marketplace

If you prefer to trudge through raw data sources, which will contain tons of stuff that isn't relevant, you can look at the DOE's 1992 report on direct government subsidies to energy production and the 1999 update to that report, and of course you can look up the actual Price-Anderson act at the NRC site (note in passing how the NRC pretends it isn't a subsidy, and how they gloss over the goverment's role in assuming costs of fuel and waste processing). At the NRC's site you can find an attempt to refute my statement, in which the NRC will do all sorts of gymnastics to try to explain the fact that no profitable enterprise is willing to build a plant without subsidization. That's the real proof - when subsidies exist, there are new license applications, and when subsidies expire, there are none. I can link stuff all day long but the empirical proof is hard to ignore!

This post will likely get marked "troll" too, because the nuke shills have a bury brigade here on slashdot. Sorry about that.

can you cite sources for this argument? I want to believe it, but without any sources it is not creditable. (please no Wikipedia links)

Sure can! But only because you asked so nicely...

Libertarian think-tank contends nuclear power is not economically viable in a free and fair marketplace

If you prefer to trudge through raw data sources, which will contain tons of stuff that isn't relevant, you can look at the DOE's 1992 report on direct government subsidies to energy production and the 1999 update to that report, and of course you can look up the actual Price-Anderson act at the NRC site (note in passing how the NRC pretends it isn't a subsidy, and how they gloss over the goverment's role in assuming costs of fuel and waste processing). At the NRC's site you can find an attempt to refute my statement, in which the NRC will do all sorts of gymnastics to try to explain the fact that no profitable enterprise is willing to build a plant without subsidization. That's the real proof - when subsidies exist, there are new license applications, and when subsidies expire, there are none. I can link stuff all day long but the empirical proof is hard to ignore!

This post will likely get marked "troll" too, because the nuke shills have a bury brigade here on slashdot. Sorry about that.

can you cite sources for this argument? I want to believe it, but without any sources it is not creditable. (please no Wikipedia links)

Sure can! But only because you asked so nicely...

Libertarian think-tank contends nuclear power is not economically viable in a free and fair marketplace

If you prefer to trudge through raw data sources, which will contain tons of stuff that isn't relevant, you can look at the DOE's 1992 report on direct government subsidies to energy production and the 1999 update to that report, and of course you can look up the actual Price-Anderson act at the NRC site (note in passing how the NRC pretends it isn't a subsidy, and how they gloss over the goverment's role in assuming costs of fuel and waste processing). At the NRC's site you can find an attempt to refute my statement, in which the NRC will do all sorts of gymnastics to try to explain the fact that no profitable enterprise is willing to build a plant without subsidization. That's the real proof - when subsidies exist, there are new license applications, and when subsidies expire, there are none. I can link stuff all day long but the empirical proof is hard to ignore!

This post will likely get marked "troll" too, because the nuke shills have a bury brigade here on slashdot. Sorry about that.

Your explicit salary has increased more slowly than executive salaries. Your total compensation, factoring in health benefits (provided you're not a top-decile earner) has increased more quickly than executive compensation.

+1, informative, and a very good find. Readers, scroll down to "Wage Inequality" in the reference.

Your explicit salary has increased more slowly than executive salaries. Your total compensation, factoring in health benefits (provided you're not a top-decile earner) has increased more quickly than executive compensation.

Then may I present to you http://newsbusters.org/ http://www.aim.org/, http://www.cato.org/, and http://nlpc.org/.

Never heard of most of those, but I'm sure there is no immediate bias at http://www.oreilly-sucks.com/ and even liberals deny being tied to http://mediamatters.org/ .

I'll just leave this here for you. http://cato.org/pubs/pas/pa564.pdf

Well, FUD you too, then.

Carbon credits are merely a capitalist proposal on how to deal with carbon reduction - nothing more, nothing less.

And if we must impose Draconian limits on carbon emissions, I do think a market in credits is a good way to go. Markets tend to work better than top-down controls.

And the "trillions of dollars of harm to the economy" is of course a pack of nonsense.

I'm not an expert on this stuff, but I found some numbers on the Internet. They should serve for a back-of-the-envelope sort of calculation.

According to this report, the cost to the USA of complying with the Kyoto Protocol would be on the order of 4% of GDP. According to Wikipedia, the GDP of the USA is over 14 trillion dollars per year. That means it would cost half a trillion dollars per year, every year, just to comply with Kyoto.

I skimmed that report and I don't believe that the 4% number includes jobs lost (for example, the coal miners, the truckers put out of work because the costs of running a truck are so much higher, etc.). The actual costs would thus be higher.

And Kyoto, by itself, is not enough to satisfy the people who are really worried about AGW.

Saving energy is saving money in the age of peak oil.

Everyone wants to save money where they can. We replaced our windows with modern double-pane windows, sealed and filled with argon, to save energy. So I don't argue this statement, by itself. But it's kind of irrelevant to this discussion.

A really effective plan to curtail carbon emissions in the USA would need to do something about the coal plants that produce the majority of electricity. According to this page, coal power produces almost 50% of all the carbon emissions in the USA, generating about 1.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.

What will you do to get rid of the carbon dioxide from those coal plants? Shut down half of them and quadruple the cost of electricity to encourage people to conserve energy? Tear them down and build nuclear power plants? (I'd be in favor of that; cleaner air right away, and cheaper power in the long run. But it will cost a lot of up-front money to build all those nuke plants, and one or two people will object, so you had better plan on hiring lawyers to help push the project forward.)

You cannot seriously propose to replace those coal plants with solar or wind power, because you won't get anywhere near enough power. And coal and nuclear power plants can operate continuously, while wind and solar plants seldom operate at 100% capacity.

You can't replace them with hydro power, because all the good hydro locations have already been built; and environmentalists hate the damage a dam does to the ecosystem of a river, so good luck building any new ones, let alone enough to replace 1500 coal plants.

So then, having solved the coal plants, you have to solve the other half of the problem: trucks and cars. All-electric vehicles are currently not practical for general use; the batteries are expensive and charging times are slow. If you want to either force people to use electric cars, or subsidize the cars to encourage people, either way it will cost a lot.

Or, you could just quadruple the price of gasoline and diesel, using taxes. That would encourage people to drive less. But that will cost a lot.

Hybrid vehicles are already being sold (the Prius is rather popular) so, given that saving energy is saving money, the government doesn't need to do anything; those cars are already selling. But they don't have zero carbon dioxide emissions, just somewhat less than non-hybrid vehicles.

So as I said, if you are going to do something really effective to actually reduce carbon

But perhaps we are being unfair to former President Clinton. After all, in inflation-adjusted terms, Clinton had overseen a total spending increase of only 3.5 percent at the same point in his administration. More importantly, after his first three years in office, non-defense discretionary spending actually went down by 0.7 percent.

The story mentions :
"The new licensing procedure is intended to cut costs, which ran so high
  in the last round of construction, in the 1970s and 1980s, that many
  projects were abandoned half-built."

  While I'm not sure of the full reason. Two plants were shut down in this area
  in the middle of construction (1980's), and can still be seen.
  Located at Lat 4628'13.42"N - long 11918'49.85"W

For those who need a bit of help
Paste
4628'13.42"N 11918'49.85"W
into Google Earth, Google Maps, or similar.

They will never operate. only the one to the left was finished, and has been operating for over
20 years now.

A friend of mine who had been studying for over a year to be a reactor
operator was told one morning before class to go home it's was over.

WPPSS the contractor is responsible for the largest default in the history
of municipal finance http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa028.html (1983).

Just because they're not in a big city doesn't mean that they don't have problems better handled by SWAT than by general officers.

I'm not arguing the specific case you gave here. But in general, I think the creation of SWAT teams should be a last resort. Let them exist at the state level, to be called in by local police forces.

When there are more SWAT teams they will get more use. And every time a SWAT team is used it's an opportunity for something to go wrong. See for example this map of botched SWAT raids, including numerous examples of SWAT killing innocent bystanders.
http://www.cato.org/raidmap/

You have to admit, that while SWAT teams do provide a benefit they also provide a cost. A monetary cost, a freedoms cost, and avoidable death cost. The question is if the cost/benefit is worth it.

Glenn Greenwald wrote a nice report for the Cato Institute a couple of years ago on this subject:

Drug Decriminalization in Portugal: Lessons for Creating Fair and Successful Drug Policies

The data is, of course, noisy and complicated, but, as of 2009, Portugal’s 2001 drug decriminalization policy really does seem to have been successful.

Reason Magazine interview

Starve the beast in a failure, at least according to the Libertarian Cato Institute: http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj29n3/cj29n3-7.pdf

The article backs up a previous Cato study that says the same thing.

How come my posts are supported by actual facts and your posts are only supported by your vivid fantasies?

http://www.thenation.com/article/159997/nuclear-dead-end-its-economics-stupid

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/radioactive-corporate-welfare/

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/nuclear-renaissance-is-short-on-largess/

http://www.economist.com/node/14859289

http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv15n1/reg15n1-rothwell.html

Terrestrial nuclear fission plants cannot compete in the marketplace. They are a handout of government money to favored corporations.

Nuclear fission power plants are not economically viable in a free and fair market, which is why the US government uses taxpayer dollars to subsidize it. It's old, obsolete, lame technology that favors entrenched corporate interests and provides an excuse for the ongoing centralization and militarization of commercial power generation.

If you do no other research at all, PLEASE read this: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9740

In 2005, as part of the infamous Cheney sellout of national energy policy in closed-door meetings with entrenched corporate powers, the economic landscape for nuclear was completely restructured.

The Price-Anderson act, originally a "temporary" 10-year measure to encourage the development of a nuclear power industry, was re-enacted - this time until 2025. Libertarians paying attention will note that Price-Anderson is a direct affront to core Libertarian principles - it caps liability for nuclear operators and forces taxpayers opposed to nuclear power to subsidize preventable failures.

Per-watt subsidies for nuclear power were also enacted, in the form of 1.8-cent per kilowatt-hour tax credits from new reactors during the first 8 years of operation (costing a projected $5.7 billion in revenue losses to the U.S. Treasury through 2025). This subsidy is necessary in order for nuclear-generated electricity to stay competitive with methane-powered generators, because of the total inability of the nuclear industry to deliver on the "energy too cheap to meter" promises they've been making since 1948.

In the 1980s government audits of nuclear operators determined that many of them were not setting aside decommissioning costs as required by law. The 2005 energy bill retroactively makes this legal, providing strong disincentives to any responsible operator willing to plan for the future.

Occasionally you will hear claims that government over-regulation of the nuclear industry means that licenses and permits are difficult and expensive to maintain. In reality, the industry itself rewrote the rules for licensing application in the 1980s so that permits are cheap, long-lasting and do not require any real commitment. Later policy revisions go even further and reduce the total paperwork by two thirds as well as increasing the speed of review, removing barriers to approval, and increasing the time a permit is valid to 40 years.

Today, nuclear plant licensing is going strong. The period when no new licenses were applied for closely corresponds to the period when lack of taxpayer subsidies and the lapse of Price-Anderson made building plants economic suicide - and the fact that license applications revived almost immediately after the GWBush administration reintroduced them is strong circumstantial evidence that nuclear operators must fleece taxpayers in order to survive in the US market, just as they do in every other country that uses nuclear power.

If you believe in capitalism, free markets, or representative government all this should offend you. The White House and the neo-con wing of the Republican party forced an unconsenting electorate to sponsor a huge market distortion - potentially driving market-selected options out of the competition - in order for their corporate buddies to plunder the public pocketbook.

It was the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 Clinton and the Democratic

Nonsense.

From http://rpc.senate.gov/releases/1997/BUDDEAL2.JT.htm:

Prior to Republicans assuming control of Congress in 1995, President Clinton refused to embrace the idea of a balanced budget. Clinton's first budget called for an astronomical tax hike of $220 billion that Democrats in Congress increased to $240 billion. Clinton's first three budgets -- released in 1993, 1994, and 1995 (for FYs 1994, 1995, and 1996 respectively), left deficits of $241.4 billion, $201.2 billion, and $194 billion by his own estimation (which CBO scored at $228.5 billion, $206.2 billion, and $276 billion respectively). In the meantime he vetoed the Republicans' budget in 1995 -- a budget that would have cut taxes and been the first to have balanced since 1969. Not until election year 1996 did he even aspire to balance, producing a budget that left an $81 billion deficit in its final year.

From No, Bill Clinton Didn't Balance the Budget:

And 1993 -- the year of the giant Clinton tax hike -- was not the turning point in the deficit wars, either. In fact, in 1995, two years after that tax hike, the budget baseline submitted by the president's own Office of Management and Budget and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted $200 billion deficits for as far as the eye could see. The figure shows the Clinton deficit baseline. What changed this bleak outlook?

Newt Gingrich and company -- for all their faults -- have received virtually no credit for balancing the budget. Yet today's surplus is, in part, a byproduct of the GOP's single-minded crusade to end 30 years of red ink. Arguably, Gingrich's finest hour as Speaker came in March 1995 when he rallied the entire Republican House caucus behind the idea of eliminating the deficit within seven years.

TL;DR version - this post is chock full of links, from a grab-bag of right-wing, left-wing, and non-partisan sources. If you only have time to read one, read the Cato Institute one. It clearly lays out the economics of nuclear power in toto, unlike all the other links that are merely documentation of individual points.

OK. Now, despite propaganda from pro-nuclear right-wing pundits, there simply is no ban on nuclear power plants in the USA. If there was such a ban, there would have to be some regulation or policy to say so, and there isn't. New reactors are on the way, according to the NRC licensing authorities.

http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/col/new-reactor-map.html

You can argue that the Clinton administration's refusal to relicense unsafe plants and active discouragement of subsidies was a de facto ban on new nuclear power sources, and I would tend to agree with that. But that argument only applies to the duration of Clinton's presidency.

http://www.google.com/search?q=bush+new+nuclear+plants

In 2005, as part of the infamous Cheney sellout of national energy policy in closed-door meetings with entrenched corporate powers, the economic landscape for nuclear was completely restructured.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0425-06.htm

The Price-Anderson act, originally a "temporary" 10-year measure to encourage the development of a nuclear power industry, was re-enacted - this time until 2025. Price-Anderson, incidentally, is a direct affront to core Libertarian principles - it caps liability for nuclear operators and forces taxpayers opposed to nuclear power to subsidize preventable failures.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act

Per-watt subsidies for nuclear power were also enacted, in the form of 1.8-cent per kilowatt-hour tax credits from new reactors during the first 8 years of operation (costing a projected $5.7 billion in revenue losses to the U.S. Treasury through 2025).

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c109:6:./temp/~c109UZ5s3O:e1304068:

This subsidy is necessary in order for nuclear-generated electricity to stay competitive with methane-powered generators, because of the total inability of the nuclear industry to deliver on the "energy too cheap to meter" promises they've been making since 1948.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9740

In the 1980s government audits of nuclear operators determined that many of them were not setting aside decommissioning costs as required by law. The 2005 energy bill retroactively makes this legal, providing strong disincentives to any responsible operator willing to plan for the future. Allowing politically connected players to break lawful contracts with impunity is not only philosophically anti-Libertarian, it's anti-Socialist, too - I'd call it fascism.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c109:6:./temp/~c109UZ5s3O:e1336416:

Occasionally you will hear claims that government over-regulation of the nuclear industry means that licenses and permits are difficult and expensive to maintain. In reality, the industry itself rewrote the rules for licensing application in the 1980s so that permits are cheap, long-lasting and do not require any real commitment. Later policy revisions go even further and reduce the total paperwork by two thirds as well as increasing the speed of rev

TL;DR version - this post is chock full of links, from a grab-bag of right-wing, left-wing, and non-partisan sources. If you only have time to read one, read the Cato Institute one. It clearly lays out the economics of nuclear power in toto, unlike all the other links that are merely documentation of individual points.

OK. Now, despite propaganda from pro-nuclear right-wing pundits, there simply is no ban on nuclear power plants in the USA. If there was such a ban, there would have to be some regulation or policy to say so, and there isn't. New reactors are on the way, according to the NRC licensing authorities.

http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/col/new-reactor-map.html

You can argue that the Clinton administration's refusal to relicense unsafe plants and active discouragement of subsidies was a de facto ban on new nuclear power sources, and I would tend to agree with that. But that argument only applies to the duration of Clinton's presidency.

http://www.google.com/search?q=bush+new+nuclear+plants

In 2005, as part of the infamous Cheney sellout of national energy policy in closed-door meetings with entrenched corporate powers, the economic landscape for nuclear was completely restructured.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0425-06.htm

The Price-Anderson act, originally a "temporary" 10-year measure to encourage the development of a nuclear power industry, was re-enacted - this time until 2025. Price-Anderson, incidentally, is a direct affront to core Libertarian principles - it caps liability for nuclear operators and forces taxpayers opposed to nuclear power to subsidize preventable failures.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act

Per-watt subsidies for nuclear power were also enacted, in the form of 1.8-cent per kilowatt-hour tax credits from new reactors during the first 8 years of operation (costing a projected $5.7 billion in revenue losses to the U.S. Treasury through 2025).

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c109:6:./temp/~c109UZ5s3O:e1304068:

This subsidy is necessary in order for nuclear-generated electricity to stay competitive with methane-powered generators, because of the total inability of the nuclear industry to deliver on the "energy too cheap to meter" promises they've been making since 1948.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9740

In the 1980s government audits of nuclear operators determined that many of them were not setting aside decommissioning costs as required by law. The 2005 energy bill retroactively makes this legal, providing strong disincentives to any responsible operator willing to plan for the future. Allowing politically connected players to break lawful contracts with impunity is not only philosophically anti-Libertarian, it's anti-Socialist, too - I'd call it fascism.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c109:6:./temp/~c109UZ5s3O:e1336416:

Occasionally you will hear claims that government over-regulation of the nuclear industry means that licenses and permits are difficult and expensive to maintain. In reality, the industry itself rewrote the rules for licensing application in the 1980s so that permits are cheap, long-lasting and do not require any real commitment. Later policy revisions go even further and reduce the total paperwork by two thirds as well as increasing the speed of rev

Interesting how you neglect to mention the deaths of police and innocent civilians caused by the purveyors of recreational drugs.

Because it's irrelevant to the discussion. Those are not actions sanctioned by the state (although the state's very prohibitionist stance on recreational drugs has certainly precipitated the environment in which black marketeers become violently defensive of their activities).

So when the police have to deal with these gangs that do so using heavily armed, highly trained units.

I won't excuse the actions of the state when they have created the very atmosphere of violence they are claiming to combat.

If you don't want to get shot when an SRU shows up then don't pull a gun.

That doesn't help most of the time, and especially when you aren't given an opportunity to identify the group that's invading your home before they open fire on you.

I do not see how the use of radar expands the US anti-terrorism powers.

It doesn't (it's hard to imagine how they could be expanded further). It expands surveillance powers, whatever the excuse. And it does so at the expense of freedom and 4th amendment protections.

"If not for NASA then we wouldn't be spending people into space right now private or not" [citation needed].

In all honesty, why do you think no one would have spent any time and effort trying to reach space without government intervention? Other government intervention, in the form of arms control, is the only plausible reason I can imagine. Aeronautics did not start in government labs.

On another note, basic scientific research hasn't always been the purview of government either and still got done with private funding. It's quite plausible that government funding crowds out private research in a way that is detrimental to progress. It's not exactly measurable, but you seem to have a blind faith that private funding doesn't happen, and you should really double check that sort of premise before you draw too many conclusions from it. Judging slowly on the rate of increase of our understanding, I'm open to the argument that either public or private is better. However, please consider the possibility that private systems may lead to faster overall development even with the distasteful side effects such systems bring.

Subsidize the steel industry!
Oh wait, that already happens

I know your point wasn't to focus on the steel industry and rather the ill-effects of tariffs on trade. The wonders of history. It's just ridiculous to me that free-market advocates quote the period pre-WW1 as some golden era of free-trade. Also, isolating Smoot-Hawley as the cause of the Great Depression is an exercise in futility. There were many factors involved in that spectacular mess.

That doesn't mean tax receipts go down when you raise taxes on the wealthy.

Right, not necessarily - it's dependent on the rate - the setpoint of that curve is what Laffer was getting at. I think this has the data you're looking for:

The individual income tax brought in 7.8% of GDP from 1952 to 1979 when the top tax rate ranged from 70% to 92%, 8% of GDP from 1993 to 1996 when the top tax rate was 39.6%, and 8.1% from 1988 to 1990 when the highest individual income tax rate was 28%. ...
Using IRS data, Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley have estimated that realized capital gains accounted for just 13%-22% of reported income among the top 1% of taxpayers from 1988 to 2006, when gains were taxed at 28% â" but that fraction swiftly reached 29%-32% in 1998-2000, when the capital gains tax fell to 20%. ...
The average tax rate of the top 400 fell to 16.6% in 2007 from 22.9% in 2002. Even though there was no stock market boom as in 1997-2000, real revenues of the top 400 nevertheless doubled again â" to $14.5 billion in 2007 from $6.9 billion in 2002. Instead of paying less when the capital gains tax rate went down in 1997 and 2003, the top 400 instead paid much, much more.

Lies, lies and more lies: http://www.cato.org/pubs/tbb/tbb-0508-25.pdf

Subsidies and artificial price inflations of natural petroleum is what causes solar and wind to become "competitive". The actual unsubsidized cost per kWH still shows a significant market gap, often of double or more than double the alternatives:

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-280.html

For wind, you also have the problem of reliability, so every kW of wind power needs to have a corresponding emergency natural petroleum generator to take over when wind dies down.

There's no indication at all that basic research has gotten us significantly closer to economically competitive alternative energy - if it had, we would no longer need subsidies.

People are violent. That has never changed and shows no signs of doing so. On the other hand, those that are disposed to violence are typically those that will pick targets that they can likely "win" against. That's why you rarely get jumped by one guy, and these are gangs of youths doing these crimes. If the playing field is leveled, then there's less violent crime.

More reading: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4706

There's more crime per capita in your "principled" civilization in Great Britian according to NationMaster, as well as double the number of assaults per capita. You can't just compare raw numbers because Great Britain is tiny compared to the USA. You really have no concept of how small your country is. You're sitting at around 62 million people. The USA has 308 million. Really, all you show is a major disconnect from facts but you have a very strong "feeling" that you're right.

Expenses over and above income are debts, unless I'm missing something basic and need more caffeine.

1. The government write a contract with someone saying "Give me $100 and in 10 years I will give you $101 back." That's a public debt, a legal debt in the name of the public.

2. The government writes a budget that says "Next year we're spending $100 on roads, even though we only have $50 of actual income devoted to it.. we'll borrow the rest." That's not a debt, it's a projection. The next year comes and they say, "We changed our minds, we're spending $50 on roads." That's not a default, it's a change of budget.

If spending through budget or appropriation is legislated, and it is over income and requires taking on debt, it would then be authorized by law and meet the wording of the 14th Amendment.

The debt itself would be covered under the 14th amendment. If the debt weren't taken on because the budget was changed, the original budget would not be covered.

As far as SS goes, the law that created SS in the first place mandates the spending. That is why it is called an "entitlement".

By my strict reading (and IANACL), all Entitlements would have to be paid regardless.

What are you reading? Just doing a quick search leads me to:

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5776

Many people believe that Social Security is an "earned right." That is, they think that because they have paid Social Security taxes, they are entitled to receive Social Security benefits. The government encourages that belief by referring to Social Security taxes as "contributions," as in the Federal Insurance Contribution Act. However, in the 1960 case of Fleming v. Nestor, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that workers have no legally binding contractual rights to their Social Security benefits, and that those benefits can be cut or even eliminated at any time.