Slashdot Mirror

Yes, yes it did, and I quote a Randian rag based on hatorade, hand waiving and word salads

FTFY. No stats, no facts, no citations, just a bunch of tautologies. And your shitpiece is posted right next to one regurgitating 35 year old Cato propaganda on Social Security.

Flint's water problems were caused by an unelected emergency manager appointed by a capitalist to cut corners. So more tax cuts could be given to capitalist businesses and wealthy capitalists.

FTFY2.

Time to export all native born Texans.

https://object.cato.org/sites/...

>"there absolutely is an ethical responsibility to avoid purchasing products made in China, just as there is with Israel."

Did you just compare the human rights/freedom situation in China to the free/democratic ISRAEL?? Seriously?

https://object.cato.org/sites/... (USA 17, Israel 49, China 135)

https://www.heritage.org/index... (ISA 12, Israel 27, China 100)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (Israel #1 in middle east)

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/2... (Israel #10 of happiest people on earth. USA #14. China- not even on list.)

https://www.jewishvirtuallibra...

I remember once a discussion on the American civil war and I made the comment that as much as I disagreed with the Southern position many things; I agree on the right of people deciding who rules them, so if the majority of people South wanted independence they had the right to Independence.

Someone quickly pointed out my obvious mistake, that the black slaves didn't get a say, and would not have been in favour of splitting from the North. They were ABSOLUTELY right, and the fact that they didn't get a say completely invalidated the South's call for independence.

I think your promoting of Israel as "10th happiest nation", etc is making the exact same mistake. You're completely ignoring all the people living in apartheid in Palestine, you're completely ignoring the daily human rights abuses against the Palestinians, etc.

The European Jews living in Israel may be having a grand time and enjoying all sorts of rights, but the original inhabitants of that land are not having such a great time. Millions live in poverty and apartheid in Israel. Their voice deserves to be represented; just like the blacks in the Southern US deserved to be represented. The same human rights mistakes that happened with the colonization of the Americas and South Africa are happening today with the colonization of Israel and Palestine.

>"there absolutely is an ethical responsibility to avoid purchasing products made in China, just as there is with Israel."

Did you just compare the human rights/freedom situation in China to the free/democratic ISRAEL?? Seriously?

https://object.cato.org/sites/... (USA 17, Israel 49, China 135)

https://www.heritage.org/index... (ISA 12, Israel 27, China 100)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (Israel #1 in middle east)

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/2... (Israel #10 of happiest people on earth. USA #14. China- not even on list.)

https://www.jewishvirtuallibra...

And while we're trying to deal with the jackoffs killing 39,000, why would we want to add the problem of 2,000 more to the bunch?

The simple answer is that people in the United States illegally commit all crimes at a lower rate than American citizens. So, illegal immigrants actually bring down the crime rate.

Don't you want to bring down the crime rate?

But don't take it from me, take it from the conservative/libertarian Cato Institute:

https://www.cato.org/blog/whit...

Hey git. You are Caffeinated Bacon trolling again. Your pretence just is not working.
Did you pull your head out of the Bog? Apparently not. You continue to lie about everything.

Here is World banks simple average and it shows US way down at the bottom for 2017.
Here is Cato showing multiple averages and no matter which way it is done, the Yanks are down at the bottom
Go back to Xi. Your head is been banged so many times against the wall, that it is obvious that you are a bloody idiot.

• It's why we strive to further reduce airliner fatalities when it's already one or two orders of magnitudes safer than any other form of transport. The media gives plane accidents disproportionately more coverage than other transportation accidents, causing the public to demand planes be made safer than they already are.
• Same thing with child abductions. Abduction by a stranger is incredibly rare - only a few dozen cases happen each year. But because the media gives those cases wildly disproportionate coverage, every parent is scared to death to let their child out of their sight for 2 minutes.
• Shark attacks always seem to make the national news, even though on average only about 1 person is killed each year by sharks in the U.S. Meanwhile the approx 100 people killed each year by deer go unreported except maybe as a local news story.
• School shootings are another example - they've actually been decreasing over the last two decades. But because the media automatically splashes any school shooting on the national news, the public incorrectly thinks they're becoming more common. Statistically, more high school students are killed by complications from pregnancy (page 3) than from non-gang, non-suicide school shootings. But I've yet to see a news story take that angle against teen pregnancy.
• Terrorism. If you include all the 9/11 fatalities, you're roughly 4x as likely to die from terrorism than lightning. Exclude 9/11 and you're roughly 6x more likely to be killed by lightning. I think I've seen one news story in 40 years of someone being killed by lightning. Yet every terrorist incident, even the ones which fail and cause no damage or injury, seem to automatically make national news.
• Until the last couple years, the media basically ignored the decade-long rise in drug overdose deaths. It wasn't until it surpassed car accident deaths that they finally began taking it seriously. The day which crystallized this in my mind was the 2016 murder-suicide on the UCLA campus. That story immediately made national news with live coverage on all the major networks. On the very same day 2 people died and over 57 were hospitalized from drug overdoses at a music festival in Florida. But that story barely made it beyond the local papers, and I didn't see any coverage of it on TV. I only happened to see it because I clicked on a different story from a Florida newspaper in Google News.
• After overdoses and traffic accidents, suicide is the #3 cause of non-disease death. But it's extraordinarily rare to see a news story about a suicide unless it's a celebrity. Which is a real shame because this is probably the most preventable cause of death we have. And if more people knew how common it was, they probably wouldn't feel as alone with their problems to commit suicide.

And these are the

The conservative Cato Institute published a response to that FAIR report.

Key quote:

FAIR’s biggest methodological error is that it does not consider the extra economic activity generated by illegal immigrants that would not occur otherwise. The tax revenue collected through that extra activity cannot be adequately measured by looking at IRS forms but must include the taxes paid by U.S. citizens who also have higher incomes as a result. Since the economy is not a fixed pie, removing millions of illegal immigrant workers, consumers, and business owners would leave a gaping economic hole that would reduce tax revenue. The authors of the FAIR study concocted their own methodology that is uninfluenced by the vast empirical, theoretical, and peer-reviewed economics literature that estimates the fiscal cost of immigration.

The U.S. is not necessarily more capitalist than Europe. If you look at common rankings of economic freedom, you will find that there are many European countries with as much or more economic freedom than the United States.

There is this pervasive and pernicious notion that the United States is somehow the bastion of free market capitalism and that Europe (particularly the Scandinavian countries) are immensely socialist. If you start looking at very specific parts of each, you can find plenty of examples where there is a sharp contrast, but taken as a whole, they are very similar.

If you bother to look at the data as a whole instead of just state spending per student, you'll see that state spending has been increasing. A more detailed analysis even shows that the cost increases that are being charged to students to offset this, exceed the drop in per student spending.

What's been happening is that more and more people are going to college and it's got to the point where a lot of them shouldn't be. Here's one university where it was reported that 14% of students were failing an intermediate algebra course, which is for people who can't even get into the first 100-level math course.

You're not going to fix the problems with education by throwing even more money at it and the current financial model that gives loans to anyone who wants them regardless of likelihood of succeeding or the likelihood of being able to pay that loan back.

I really enjoyed that book when I was a kid. (Unfortunately, it's got rather a lot of magical thinking, around the nature of the weapons themselves.)

If there were a correlation between gun ownership and freedom, you'd expect the top 10 gun owning nations to largely overlap the top 10 most free nations. Oh well, correlation does not imply causation.

To think about it another way, and quoting some pop culture: "Culture eats Strategy for breakfast". Countries with a culture of democracy don't mind if their citizens have guns---Switzerland and New Zealand both have quite a few guns, but very strict laws about their ownership. Without the culture, giving your citizens guns doesn't make them democratic, it just makes more of them dead.

Here's another graph like that. There is tons of them.

See, the secret is that spending a lot more money on research doesn't yield a lot more results. You can increase fusion research spending 100 fold and not much more will happen because the scarce resource in fusion research (as in any other areas) is smart people, and not a lot more smart people aren't going to waste their time and careers on fusion research no matter how much money the government spends.

You know how Russia ended up with Putin? Remember Yeltsin? Remember how we interfered with the 1996 Russian election and altered the result? Yeltsin was in the single digits before the Americans got involved.

You know what happened next? The US financial "experts" pushed Yeltsin to introduce neo-liberal shock therapy economics to the new Russian Federation. Ended up crashing the economy and leaving more in poverty then ever before. The number of people living in poverty in the former Soviet Republics rose from 14 million in 1989 to 147 million in 1998. As a result of the 1998 financial collapse and the devaluation of the ruble, the life savings of tens of millions of Russian families disappeared overnight. In the period from 1992 to 1998 Russia's GDP fell by half - something that did not happen even under during the German invasion in the Second World War.

Under Yeltsin's tenure, the death rate in Russia reached wartime levels. Accidents, food poisoning, exposure, heart attacks, lack of access to basic healthcare, and an epidemic of suicides - they all played a role. David Satter, a senior fellow at the anti-communist, Washington DC-based Hudson Institute, writing in the conservative Wall Street Journal, described the consequences of this victory of Democracy: "Western and Russian demographers now agree that between 1992 and 2000, the number of 'surplus deaths' in Russia - deaths that cannot be explained on the basis of previous trends - was between five and six million persons."

This secured Putin as a savior to Russians when he reversed it, and soured Russian public opinion to the US.

"Liberal order" visionaries are quick to give their ideas credit for the prosperity of nations from Western Europe to the Pacific Rim, finding causation in correlation. They deny such a direct link between their ideas and the problems of post-Soviet Russia. Yet it is hard to accept that measures like sudden privatization and the rise of monopolies in a corrupt country were not related to asset stripping and capital flight or that "eliminating the housing and utilities subsidies that sustained tens of millions of impoverished families" did not play a major part in the social ruin that followed. Western technocrats, diplomats, and politicians were deeply implicated in the new order's design.

The government doesn't create jobs. We're told this over and over. The Cato Institute says so. And they're not alone. A quick search shows a multitude of people all saying the government can't create jobs.

So why the big fuss over where a non-job producing venture is to be placed? It's not like anyone is going to get a job out of this.

Quick quiz - Who was the president that put in wage and price controls?

https://www.cato.org/publicati...

That's right, Another fine honest Republican, the honorable Richard Nixon.

On Aug. 15, 1971, in a nationally televised address, Nixon announced, “I am today ordering a freeze on all prices and wages throughout the United States.”

Wow...... Wage and price freezes. Hey - how'd that work out? Probably as good as what will hapen with the tarriffs on Chinese tech, and then the US working to make certain that the jobs of the Cell phone mfgr we kicked out are saved.

Funny how the Demoncrats are called the party of socialism, when the Republicans actually implement it.

No, Reagan hated hostile aggressors AND Soviets, especially when they were the same, so he would hate Putin's Russia.

Because Newt Gingrich fought for it:

https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/no-bill-clinton-didnt-balance-budget

I personally heard Bill Clinton speak about this, and he admitted he wanted a quarter of a billion dollar deficit indefinitely. He wanted to bury us intentionally in debt.

American 'poor' typically have subsidies for a roof over their head, drinkable water, cheap reliable electricity, cable/satellite TV, smartphones, internet access, free healthcare, and food assistance.

Eliminate all subsidies and pay people a basic income. Those subsidies are enough to cover most if not all the costs of the basic income. Hell the corporate welfare queens Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, the largest private corporation in the US, each receive billions of dollars in subsidies.

Poor' is a lot wealthier than you may think. American 'Poor' typically receive more in gov't benefits than entry-level jobs pay, removing the incentive to get off the gov't teat.

Poor' is a lot wealthier than you may think. American 'Poor' typically receive more in gov't benefits than entry-level jobs pay, removing the incentive to get off the gov't teat.

Not even, on two accounts. One, because I survived a Traumatic Brain Injury, TBI, I have a disability income. If I had a minimum wage job I worked at fulltime I'd make $300 more than my Disability income. Two, abasic minimum income does not reduce the desire of most people to work. Because I hate being idle, as many others do too, I volunteered at a nonprofit. In my first 3 years I put in more than 4000 hours building pcs from used parts so low income people, and those who were trying to start their own business, could buy or earn a fully functional computer even if it was made from parts a few years old. And if they helped build pcs then they could learn to upgrade their pc for a lower cost than buying a new one.

FalconWolf

American 'poor' typically have subsidies for a roof over their head, drinkable water, cheap reliable electricity, cable/satellite TV, smartphones, internet access, free healthcare, and food assistance.

Eliminate all subsidies and pay people a basic income. Those subsidies are enough to cover most if not all the costs of the basic income. Hell the corporate welfare queens Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, the largest private corporation in the US, each receive billions of dollars in subsidies.

Poor' is a lot wealthier than you may think. American 'Poor' typically receive more in gov't benefits than entry-level jobs pay, removing the incentive to get off the gov't teat.

Poor' is a lot wealthier than you may think. American 'Poor' typically receive more in gov't benefits than entry-level jobs pay, removing the incentive to get off the gov't teat.

Not even, on two accounts. One, because I survived a Traumatic Brain Injury, TBI, I have a disability income. If I had a minimum wage job I worked at fulltime I'd make $300 more than my Disability income. Two, abasic minimum income does not reduce the desire of most people to work. Because I hate being idle, as many others do too, I volunteered at a nonprofit. In my first 3 years I put in more than 4000 hours building pcs from used parts so low income people, and those who were trying to start their own business, could buy or earn a fully functional computer even if it was made from parts a few years old. And if they helped build pcs then they could learn to upgrade their pc for a lower cost than buying a new one.

FalconWolf

Perhaps in the future, the parable of futility will be President Trump, holding back climate change.

You have the wrong president there, lol

Might want to look that one up; he's a law professor of some repute.

Here's some more information of interest:

https://www.cato.org/survey-re...

https://today.yougov.com/news/...

http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...

I believe, if you scroll up, that the original post was:

Dissenting opinions can be punished by the state, or the herd, but either way, the outcome is the same.

However, Hong Kong (and some of the similar economic zones within China) has what is regarded as the world's freest market. (PDF Warning)

Only if you discount Somalia, which I presume the "free market" evangelists do.

China proper doesn't have a a completely free market. The government has been fairly hands off in a lot of areas, but they still have rules related to foreign investment and how much of a company can be owned by outside investors. They also manipulate their currency in a way that makes a lot of their industries vastly more competitive than they would be otherwise.

However, Hong Kong (and some of the similar economic zones within China) has what is regarded as the world's freest market. (PDF Warning)

I think you're looking at it incorrectly to see negative campaigning as a free speech issue.

Well I'm certainly not alone.

An Ohio law against false campaign ads struck down on free speech grounds:
https://scholar.google.com/sch...

A position paper on the topic:
https://object.cato.org/pubs/p...

An explanation of the free speech issues surrounding negative campaigning:
https://www.factcheck.org/2004...

Their content is created by society, so they reflect society. If you don't like what you see reflected, breaking the mirror is a natural impulsive response but it doesn't actually change society. It just lets you pretend what you saw isn't there anymore. But since it was just a mirror, it's still there, only hidden and still festering.

If you're concerned about people being seduced by extremist content they encounter (be it online, in newsletters/books, or just by talking with other people), your effort is better spent figuring out why that extremist content is so seductive to them. Then taking corrective action to make said content no longer so seductive. A true free society does not fear extremist content, because it's educated its people well enough that they'll see the flaws in said content and reject it on their own, no policing by the government required.

A few people who are outliers will still fall for it, whether due to low IQ or mental illness or they just happened to have the right confluence of events in their lives that the extremist message rings true to them. But seeing as your odds of being killed by an extremist in a terrorist attack are somewhere down around your odds of dying in a storm, by a dog bite, or to a lightning strike, it's simply not worth the massive effort being proposed to try to prevent those deaths. Direct that effort instead to mitigating more mundane but deadlier risks, like ladders and swimming pools and stairways (not to mention fires, motor vehicle accidents, and poisoning). Heck, a program which reduces the suicide rate by 5% would save more lives than 100% effective anti-terrorism measures in the UK. (In some countries a mere 1% reduction in suicide rate would suffice.)

Ask yourself why Comcast is the only cable provider in your area? Is it a natural monopoly, or a monopoly government regulation created?

https://object.cato.org/sites/...

March 13, 1984
Clint Bolick

Clint Bolick is an attorney specializing in constitutional litigation with Mountain States Legal Foundation in Denver,
where he is counsel of record in a legal challenge to municipal authority to award monopoly cable franchises.

Executive Summary

The invention of print...made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the
process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which it made possible...the
possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the state, but complete uniformity of
opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.
--George Orwell, 1984

It is 1984. Many of the more horrific Orwellian prophecies fortunately have not come to pass.

Nonetheless, ours is an
enlarged government, taking unto itself increasing functions that were once left to voluntary interaction among
individuals.

In tribute to Orwell's book, consider the following scenario, which, if it occurred, could sow the seeds for the world he
envisioned. In this scenario, our benevolent city fathers, concerned about the trend toward one-newspaper cities,
decide that the increasingly monopolistic tendencies of newspapers in local markets necessitate governmental action to
protect the public interest. Assuming that newspapers are natural monopolies, the city must act to protect consumers
against such inevitable effects as price gouging, one-sided news, and lack of public access to the medium. Because
newspaper boxes, trucks, and carriers use the city streets, the local government concludes that it has jurisdiction to take
whatever action it deems necessary.

The city quickly realizes that if it supplants the marketplace and controls the mechanism that determines which
company will enjoy the local news monopoly, it can extract enormous concessions in return from that company. It
promotes an intense bidding war for the franchise, the winner of which must be not only wealthy enough to meet the
costly requirements demanded by the city but possessed of sufficient political know-how to appeal to the city's
decision makers as well.

The competition is fierce. Each bidder spends $1 million to curry favor with the city, staging media events, gathering
support from prominent community figures, and wining and dining the decision makers. Finally a winner is chosen to
serve the community.

The franchise does not come cheaply, for the winning bidder must pay millions of dollars in tribute to the city, both
now at the outset and then throughout the life of the franchise. And for the first time in U. S. history, a newspaper
must cede editorial control to government officials. It must publish verbatim transcripts of all city council meetings,
make available and relinquish content control over access pages for specified special-interest groups, and provide
training centers to teach people how to write newspaper articles. Any changes in the initial editorial format are subject
to city approval, as are transfers of newspaper ownership. Free newspapers must be delivered to all city offices. The
price of the newspaper -- 22 percent higher than before owing to the costly giveaways -- is controlled by the city as
well. The newspaper is guaranteed a minimum rate of return. The primary quid pro quo, however, is a guarantee from
the city that the newspaper will be insulated from all competition for at least 15 years.

Of course, we know that this scenario is ludicrous. It would shock our consciences to allow government control of our
newspapers to this extent. Our Constitution, through the First Amendment, forbids government interference with t

That "study" is from the Cato Institute. I have no interest in reading the whole 52 page paper on it, but I'd take whatever Cato has to say with a grain of salt. They and other Koch-funded groups have been pushing this whole "welfare queen" narrative for decades, now.

That's literally the definition of ad hominum.

"Then I won't read any Soros funded stuff!" - see how that works?

That "study" is from the Cato Institute. I have no interest in reading the whole 52 page paper on it, but I'd take whatever Cato has to say with a grain of salt. They and other Koch-funded groups have been pushing this whole "welfare queen" narrative for decades, now.

Except that pretty much anyone who works in retail has seen these welfare queens with their own eyes.

That "study" is from the Cato Institute. I have no interest in reading the whole 52 page paper on it, but I'd take whatever Cato has to say with a grain of salt. They and other Koch-funded groups have been pushing this whole "welfare queen" narrative for decades, now.

Finland pays them over 100K a year

Teachers in Finland are paid $37,500 on average, which is considerable less than most American teachers make.

Disclaimer: I'm from Finland

Relatively speaking I would suspect that teachers are still paid more in Finland than in America. In Finland the earning distribution is much flatter than in US and the wages are generally smaller. The salary of a teacher (3400-4200 eur/month) is roughly the same as that of an engineer. Engineers make slightly more but teachers have much longer holidays.

Finland pays them over 100K a year

Teachers in Finland are paid $37,500 on average, which is considerable less than most American teachers make.

You need a masters degree too

There is no evidence that advanced degrees improve teaching ability in any objectively measurable way.

Dear lord, Maine 'invested' $12M x 15 years, or $180M, in something that had no appreciable impact on student test scores?!?!

Telling me it is just 1% of their education budget has me wondering what in the world Maine is getting for their $1.2BN 'investment' in public education.

Maine has a voucher program that puts 15-20% of the state's children in private schools - did they get laptops as well? Probably not...

Interesting how this voucher program, open to all children in the state, has been going since 1973, but the left (which vehemently opposes school vouchers) never seems able to shutdown this program.

Unless the scammer made $120M in profits, this goes a little beyond punitive.

So scam artists who attempt large scale fraud but who fail to make a profit shouldn't be fined?

Oh, poor little hysterical ScentCone, pretending that an objection to an excessive fine means something other than what it does.

Too bad for coy little you, the sentence can be read accurately, and judges have realized that excessive fines and financial penalties are unconstitutional?.

But go ahead, twitch your little lips, and blubber some more.

That is a bunch of nonsense, there is nothing to do with the GOP there.

Fascists and Nazis get listed, but those are Left ideologies - socialists, national socialists. Oh sure, they're to the "right" of Communism, but still in the progressive camp. White Supremacists doesn't get you very far away from the Nazis so there is nothing much anywhere close to the GOP. It is actually kind of funny to think that someone is trying to pin "racism" on the party formed to free the slaves, and that fought segregation. Not even the "anti-government" stuff gets close. The GOP is for limited government, fiscal responsibility (at least officially), and personal liberty, not an absence of government.

Misconstruing Mussolini
Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian
Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt

British Fascists To the Left

More on the BNP’s success at stealing labor votes. Here are some wonderful posts about the BNP by Daniel Hannan. For instance:

Incidentally, any BBC presenters reading this, why do you keep calling the party “far Right”? Weren’t you listening to Nick Griffin’s acceptance speech? He wasn’t going to talk about immigration policy he said, since everyone knew where he stood on the subject. No, his priority was to expose the way in which public assets had been privatised. Look at the BNP’s manifesto: it wants nationalisation, subsidy, higher taxes, protectionism and (sotto voce) the abolition of the monarchy. And look at where its votes came from. The BNP is a symptom of Labour’s collapse.

Plus readers might remember his interview with Vox Day:

VD:One thing that tends to confuse Americans is that the British National Party is not very popular despite holding what appear to be populist views on immigration and the European Union. Why do they enjoy so little support compared to the three major parties?

DH:Because they are, contrary to the way they are described in the BBC, a party of the far left. They’re in favor of nationalization, they’re in favor of protectionism, they want workers’ councils to run industry, they want a massive state program of rebuilding manufacture. Like Hayek said about the socialist roots of Nazism, they are a national socialist party and the socialist bit is very important to them. Plus, there is a line, a very important line in politics, between being anti-immigration and anti-immigrant. And they’ve crossed that line.

VD: In a certain respect, they really are fascists, but in the Italian Fascist sense.

DH: Yeah. I think most of these so-called “far right” parties are on the left by any normal definition. It’s a brilliant media trick in Europe to always refer to them as “the far right”. The target of that is the mainstream right. Every time you read about the BNP in the press, it’s always prefaced with “the far right BNP”, as though they were like us, but more so, which is the opposite of the case. When somebody reads that, it doesn’t make them think any worse of the BNP, it makes them think worse of the right. Which, of course, is why they do it.

Communism and fascism/National Socialism are both "progressive" left wing ideologies. National Socialism may be to the right of communism but it is still a left-wing socialist ideology.

Misconstruing Mussolini
Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian
Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt

British Fascists To the Left

More on the BNP’s success at stealing labor votes. Here are some wonderful posts about the BNP by Daniel Hannan. For instance:

Incidentally, any BBC presenters reading this, why do you keep calling the party “far Right”? Weren’t you listening to Nick Griffin’s acceptance speech? He wasn’t going to talk about immigration policy he said, since everyone knew where he stood on the subject. No, his priority was to expose the way in which public assets had been privatised. Look at the BNP’s manifesto: it wants nationalisation, subsidy, higher taxes, protectionism and (sotto voce) the abolition of the monarchy. And look at where its votes came from. The BNP is a symptom of Labour’s collapse.

Plus readers might remember his interview with Vox Day:

VD:One thing that tends to confuse Americans is that the British National Party is not very popular despite holding what appear to be populist views on immigration and the European Union. Why do they enjoy so little support compared to the three major parties?

DH:Because they are, contrary to the way they are described in the BBC, a party of the far left. They’re in favor of nationalization, they’re in favor of protectionism, they want workers’ councils to run industry, they want a massive state program of rebuilding manufacture. Like Hayek said about the socialist roots of Nazism, they are a national socialist party and the socialist bit is very important to them. Plus, there is a line, a very important line in politics, between being anti-immigration and anti-immigrant. And they’ve crossed that line.

VD: In a certain respect, they really are fascists, but in the Italian Fascist sense.

DH: Yeah. I think most of these so-called “far right” parties are on the left by any normal definition. It’s a brilliant media trick in Europe to always refer to them as “the far right”. The target of that is the mainstream right. Every time you read about the BNP in the press, it’s always prefaced with “the far right BNP”, as though they were like us, but more so, which is the opposite of the case. When somebody reads that, it doesn’t make them think any worse of the BNP, it makes them think worse of the right. Which, of course, is why they do it.

.

There is plenty more.

https://www.cato.org/blog/just...

...then we should pay for it through publicly raised taxes and published budgets. Then at least it's visible and transparent.

Subsidizing schools by setting price ceilings only obscures the issue and transfers the cost on the ISP's shareholders, employees, and other customers. I don't see why any of them should pay extra to support schools.

Others have commented about shrinking school budgets. We're paying something north of 2.5x as much per student today versus 1970 (adjusted for inflation, e.g. here). I don't know where the money is going but it doesn't seem to be flowing down to the classroom. That's a good issue to get irate about but it has nothing to do with ISP pricing.

First, FDR certainly did not express open admiration for Hitler and Mussolini.

He most certainly did. There are plenty of other sources.

Second, trust busting happened under a different Roosevelt (hopefully you knew there were two). Teddy Roosevelt was president at the turn of the century, and was a Republican, so really has nothing to do with your screed on FDR.

They were both progressives and they both believed in massive interference in the economy. Their party affiliation is largely irrelevant: although progressives (and their bad ideas) were more common among Democrats, they existed in both parties. Next time, just be specific which Roosevelt you are referring to.

I can't verify or deny that as far as Sweden specifically, but immigrants tend to be less violent than native populations, so Sweden stats would have to be substantially different from the US statistics for it to be true.

I have to chime in to support Roca on this point about schools and charity.

For many decades, the only viable choice for education for many poor, minority, inner city kids has been the private Catholic schools. The Catholic church pours millions of dollars into scholarships in each inner city in the country.

As for "starving the funding" of inner city schools, even adjusting for inflation, funding of public schools has only gone up. Here, there's a chart for that. Or if you prefer politics with your facts, here's a left-leaning takedown of Republican claims that education spending is up astronomically and the results are flat. They rate it "mostly true". No honest broker could claim that any public schools are starved of funding. (Or that evil Republicans or conservatives are running any inner city schools or setting their funding levels.)

However, the cost of administering public schools has gone up exponentially over the same period. A problem that things like charter, magnet and religious schools seek to address. Christians and conservatives (and big, greedy corporations) have put their money where their mouth is on this topic, funding "school choice" voucher programs in inner cities around the country (most notably in Milwaukee) as a demonstration of their commitment to educational excellence for all and as pilot programs to demonstrate a better way of running public education. The left have predictably opposed these moves. (Obama notably killed off Washington DC's voucher program as one of his first acts, relegating thousands of minority students who were doing well to failing schools)

As for Christian charities, well... c'mon. You can't seriously suggest that Christians don't do charity. Just look around the city you live in. What are the hospital names? Baptist Hospital... Methodist Hospital, St. Jude's Hospital, St. Anthony's Hospital.... in fact, the healthcare system in America was largely founded by Christian charitable organizations. And those homeless programs? Mostly Christians. Ever been to a soup kitchen? They are usually in church basements.

Being an atheist doesn't mean you have to deny the reality all around you. Guidestar maintains a directory of all US charitable organizations, searchable by category. They have 84k christian charities. 48k secular charities. There are thousands for other religions as well. Religious people do charity. That's kinda their thing. In fact, many (if not most) of those secular charities are founded by religious people. The Red Cross is theoretically non-religious. Yet it was founded by people who were Christians, and is now expanded with lots of Muslims as well. The United Way was founded by a group of ministers and a rabbi. Like I said, religious people do charity.

My mother was involved in Meals on Wheels for decades. Her Methodist church was the primary source of funding and volunteers for the program in her county. This silly partisan attempt to make state block grants all about Meals on Wheels is stupid.

My wife had several hundred hours volunteered at our local public school last year. Plus time put in as an officer of the PTA. Plus thousands of dollars spent on supporting the schools. I put in quite a few hours as well. And we both find time to volunteer at our church every week.

So yeah. Christians do put their money where their mouth is. And their time. Whether it is in education or other charitable works.

I'm going to put this anonymous, because I don't like to attach politics to my handle. Besides, being passionately in favor of individual rights and opposed to killing people around the world, my personal politics are decidedly at odds with both major political parties, so getting in political arguments is off-putting for everyone who attaches their self-worth to either team red or team blue.

23rd out of 159 countries, https://www.cato.org/human-fre.... Posting anonymously because I know any criticism of USA will earn a lot of hateful responses not matter how it is stated or what references are provided.

What we need is good public schools, not a giant money transfer to for-profit companies, which is what a voucher system would very quickly degenerate into.

It wouldn't "degenerate into" that, that is what it is designed to do. That is, it is intended to encourage for-profit companies to offer better education than public schools at the same price. If for-profit corporations cannot offer better education than public schools at the same price, then parents will not send their kids to private schools. If for-profit companies succeed at offering better education at the same price, then parents will take their kids out of public schools, send them to private schools, and we can shutter the public school system.

In fact, it is crystal clear that there is no significant relationship between per student spending and educational outcomes beyond a minimum [1] [2], and all policies trying to improve public school performance have failed. Public schools, a one-size-fits-all scheme subject to massive lobbying, is intrinsically limited in the quality of education it can deliver.

The opposite approach would actually do much more to improve education - a complete ban on private schools would motivate parents with more resources to push for improvements instead of pulling their kids out.

Coming from a country that tried that, I can assure you: it doesn't work. The wealthy and powerful simply send their kids abroad, and the public school system is intrinsically incapable of improving no matter what politicians do or how much money they throw at it.

I realize that the odds are extremely low, but that statement is ridiculous. They can't possibly have the data to make that calculation. In order to determine the odds of an American being killed by a foreign born refugee(1975 -2016), they would need a list of every single refugee that has entered the country since ... say ... 1900 (any refugee that could have been living in 1975). Does that data even exist? Then, they would need to be able to match that list of names with 40 years of crime records to find every single murder committed by every single refugee.

You obviously haven't read the article. Here's a direct link to the study.

https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/terrorism-immigration-risk-analysis

This policy analysis examines foreign-born and immigrant terrorists and so excludes American-born terrorists except for purposes of comparison. For attacks planned or carried out by native-born Americans in concert with foreigners, the Americans are excluded and the immigrants are credited entirely for the terrorist plots and murders. That choice increases the estimates of the harm caused by foreign-born terrorists. For plots that included many foreign-born terrorists and victims, each terrorist is credited with an equal number of victims. For instance, the 1993 World Trade Center attack was committed by six foreign-born terrorists; six people were murdered, so each terrorist is responsible for one murder. Airplane hijackings that started in the United States and ended in different countries — such as the September 10, 1976, hijacking of TWA Flight 355 by Croatian nationalists that eventually terminated in Paris, France — are also included. However, this analysis excludes terrorist attacks in which the identities of the perpetrators were unknown, as well as attacks that occurred or were intended to occur (but were not successfully carried out) abroad.

No one from those countries has killed someone on american soil in a terrorist attack for at least 40 years.
Unlike countries not on his list like saudi and pakistan.
The whole "its obama's list" talking point is just there to give cover to people who like the idea of banning muslims but don't want to admit it publicly. Don't be a pawn.

Reality is countries who letting these refugees in are finding out the hard way how incompatible the cultures are, and some people are paying for it with their lives.

The residents of the countries on that list have performed 0 terror attacks on US soil since 1975. And the source for this is not some 'libtard' site bit the conservative as Cato institute:

Foreigners from those seven nations have killed zero Americans in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil between 1975 and the end of 2015. Six Iranians, six Sudanese, two Somalis, two Iraqis, and one Yemini have been convicted of attempting or carrying out terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Zero Libyans or Syrians have been convicted of planning a terrorist attack on U.S. soil during that time period. - -

In addition to the visa restrictions above, Trump’s executive order further cuts the refugee program to 50,000 annually, indefinitely blocks all refugees from Syria, and suspends all refugee admissions for 120 days. This is a response to a phantom menace. From 1975 to the end of 2015, 20 refugees have been convicted of attempting or committing terrorism on U.S. soil, and only three Americans have been killed in attacks committed by refugees—all in the 1970s. Zero Americans have been killed by Syrian refugees in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil. The annual chance of an American dying in a terrorist attack committed by a refugee is one in 3.6 billion. The other 17 convictions have mainly been for aiding or attempting to join foreign terrorists.

President Trump tweeted earlier this week that executive orders were intended to improve national security by reducing the terrorist threat. However, a rational evaluation of national security threats is not the basis for Trump’s orders, as the risk is fairly small but the cost is great. The measures taken here will have virtually no effect on improving U.S. national security.

Meanwhile, Saudi-arabia is the largest propagator of Wahabbism which is both the state religion of the kingdom and also at the core of ISIS ideology. Saudis are also largely behind the funding of ISIS. 15 of the 911 attackers were Saudi nationals, 2 were from United Arab Emirates, 1 was Lebanese, and one was from Egypt, But is Saudi-Arabia on the list? Nope. And neither are Egypt or Lebanon. They're still considered your 'allies'. In fact Saudis themselves seem 'very optimistic about Trump.'

So he's planning to combat radical Islam by maintaining military and financial support to its largest state sponsor in the world, while banning a list of countries that have done the US zero harm comparatively? So what, exactly is this 'fixing' outside playing right into the hands of your enemies by allowing them to trump up the rhetoric of 'holy war' and senseless persecution of muslims in an attempt to radicalize the american muslim population?

Nothing. You're being played like a cheap fiddle. The ISIS commanders are laughing their beards off and Sun Tzu is rolling in his grave because of such utter strategic incompetence.

Yeah... calling people who are worried about what a fascist tyrant may do "little snowflakes" would be more impressive if the conservatives in America were not the most censorious little snowflakes in the country.
Seriously - there is nobody more easily offended than a conservative. They may rail against political correctness but they have their own brand of it. The major difference is that theirs is not polite and isn't done out of concern for anybody but themselves. Liberal PC tries to keep you from harming vulnerable people. Conservative PC tries to keep you from being appropriately critical of government policy.

Liberals complain if you use the n-word. Conservatives complain if you burn a flag. Liberals just want trans people to be able to pee where they feel most comfortable, conservatives can't stand that but will defend a politician who enjoyed walking in on nude, underage girls in their dressing rooms.

Liberals say "maybe we should stop shooting unarmed people for walking while black", conservatives call them racist for just daring to be critical about police behaviour. Conservatives consider all unionized public workers to be arrogant thieves more interested in their own power than making things better for members... EXCEPT of course when it's police or border patrol - then they are dutyful public servants who risk their lives and deserve nothing but uncritical respect. And if you dare question that narative it's job-loss and ostracising time.

There is nothing more hypocritical than a conservative complaining about "PC" ness. They are pointing long fingers at a behaviour they themselves engage in more frequently, more passionately and with far more power to call upon.
They complain about liberals who defend traumatized students right to be forewarned if the material they are about to cover relates to the source of their trauma in order to let these students properly mentally prepare themselves to confront this material and so be able to actually participate in the debate. But then they do a name-and-shame campaign of "professors who teach from a liberal perspective" because conservative students can't stand the idea of being confronted by non-conservative ideas in class. At least one professor on the list, who happens to be female, was written up for "teaching from a female perspective".

https://www.cato.org/publicati...

You don't get to complain about political correctness until patriotic correctness no longer exists.

> The *worst* outcome is when the "laws" are secret or unknowable and enforced arbitrarily.

We are heading in that direction (if not there already).

There are a bajillion laws and "ignorance of the law is no excuse", also there are various regulatory agencies that make regulations which have the force of law.

There are so many laws that you are probably violating something that you don't know about, and some things you know about but figure no one will care about.

"Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime."

https://mic.com/articles/86797...

http://wayback.archive.org/web...

https://www.cato.org/events/te...

In today's libertarian paradise

I'll note such a thing doesn't exist.

You note correctly. In my US-centric view, which is where the big jobs question is being asked, people whose careers are being replaced are out of luck. And I am frustrated that here in the US especially, the people who are hit hardest by economic dislocation have the least resources to recover. The source of my frustration is that the benefits of technological development and world trade are shared broadly, while the costs are concentrated on those least able to find viable work in the new economy.

it's entirely possible to pay big bucks for entry into school

Education definitely is not a libertarian paradise. As to the rest of your US-centric criticism, where is the acknowledgement of the US government's decades old role as driver of inflating education costs at several times the rate of monetary inflation? That most definitely is not libertarian policy.

Libertarian philosophy is *explicitly* to "keep government out of the way", limiting government's role basically to defense and police work. Over the last 40 years, while demand for quality education has become strongly inelastic (it's necessary for individual economic survival, we'll pay through the nose to get it), the libertarians in our society have successfully reduced education funding at all levels, with college and grad school seeing the largest shift from public funding to students and families.

Libertarians in the US tend to be strict constructionists, and since education is not mentioned in the US Constitution, they believe it does not belong in the hands of federal government Cato Institute article. The states' management of education funding is inconsistent at best, and with the rise of "center-right" politics in the US, the states are reducing their funding too.

Thus my argument that the people who are dislocated by technological change rarely have the resources to restart at mid-life. Getting education is expensive, changing from skilled trade work to intellectual work is very difficult, and income while starting over is insufficient to cover expenses typical to a worker in mid-life.

It's late now, so I don't have the time to do a proper search for references... But I am pretty sure I've read that a high quality education policy tends to have a high return on public investment, particularly when it's properly managed.

There is not ratified treaty, there is nothing beyond a gentlemen's agreement that other people won't behave badly. It is not often you find agreement between such idealogically disparate organizationshttps://www.cato.org/publications/testimony/pitfalls-unilateral-negotiations-paris-climate-change-conference or https://thinkprogress.org/no-the-paris-climate-agreement-isnt-binding-here-s-why-that-doesn-t-matter-62827c72bb04 or even http://www.climatedepot.com/2016/09/01/un-paris-climate-pact-remains-non-binding-meaningless/

as for the laws of nature, suckers stop chanting and start running now. Zika forever. http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/zika-virus-travel-brazil-male-infertility-sterility-south-america-central-america-caribbean-a6834091.html

We could give everyone a UBI of at least $5k today, possibly even $10k, without costing anyone an extra dollar. There may or may not be moral hazards, although recent surveys from Sweden suggest that these are not as bad a people initially think. And this might sound harsh, but the sort of people that would stop working after receiving a $5k or $10k UBI are probably not really contributing that much to society anyway, so it might not be that big of a loss to the rest of us if they drop out of the economy.

But anyway, here's how the math would work:

The population of the US is 319 million.

Of those, 122 million pay federal income tax (source: https://www.reference.com/gove...)
Suppose that for those 122 million people, we gave them a tax hike of exactly $5k
Under a UBI, they could get an extra $5k, which exactly offsets this tax hike

So there are 192 million people left
Keep in mind that UBI replaces existing welfare payments, like social security and food stamps
Social security taxes bring in $920 billion (source: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS...)
Food stamps cost us $74.1 billion (source: http://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/sup...)
That's enough to pay just over $5k to each of those remaining 192 million people

I haven't bothered to look into how much we're spending in admin costs to apply means testing to these welfare systems, and I haven't looked into how much money the various state governments are spending on various welfare schemes - all of this would become unnecessary under a UBI.

However the Cato Institute has looked into this, and they think we're spending $1 trillion per year on "welfare" (source: http://www.cato.org/publicatio...). I'm not sure I fully trust their analysis, but I'll take this as an estimate of the upper bound of what we could afford. So this, combined with social security revenue, would add up to $2 trillion per year to share amongst the 192 million non-taxpayers, which would give a UBI of just over $10k.

No need to tap into our Medicare funds, or cut any of our other expenses. We could continue to pay medical expenses, pensions, fund NASA and wage unnecessary and expensive wars around the world.

So that's where we're at today. In the future, there could be technological advances that make us more productive, and mean that we can lower our labor participation rate. The OP asks us whether UBI is the way to go in the future, and I'd say it's a plausible option.