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Well, that's what fraud laws are for. People who commit fraud really should be in jail.

The thing is, regulation fails on two counts off the top of my head. One, if there were no SEC, Federal Reserve and FDIC people would take as much care, if not more, when picking banks, investment funds, etc, as they do when picking any other product in the market. What government does is take this individual decision away from people and substitutes it for a false sense of security.

We all saw what happened, the SEC got many calls saying that something was up in the Madoff business did nothing about it. Which leads us to Two, the government and its agencies fail big just as anyone, except we are all FORCED to put all our eggs on their basket, sometimes against our better judgement.

While I acknowledge this extreme example you gave about working hours, which is factual for the beginning of the industrial revolution, it does not follow to conclude that it was minimum wage laws that changed that picture. The reason for wage increases is increased productivity which is made possible by the accumulation of capital. That is what enables a worker to produce 4.800 gadgets a day, instead of producing maybe one with his hands, if he's good at it.

When I read your last paragraph I must stop and think too. Does this person not understand how a market works? Does he not know that employers bid up the employee's labor 'price' just as consumers bid up the prices of goods? That all minimum wage laws do is unemploy young people, disadvantaged minorities and unskilled people who are now forced to: 1. starve, 2. welfare or 3. work even worse informal market jobs?

Regulation is just a word. I think people usually support it on emotion alone. As with everything, the devil is on the details

Only right wing wackos care about the fairness doctrine these days. I wonder why that is.

Because it's not just right wind wackos who care about the fairness doctrine, left wing wackos also care about it. For instance Al Franken. Bill Clinton and other Democrats want to bring it back.

Falcon

Your state is $41 billion in the hole. When people like you tell the rest of us to "man up" who choose not to live out there, it really pisses us off. We're sick of carrying your broke-ass state every five years because Ahh-nold and the rest of your retard politicians can't quit spending money they don't have and won't stop paying for people who aren't supposed to be in the country in the first place. Learn to balance your budget like the rest of us have to in reality land, and then you'll have a right to talking about "manning up" and paying taxes. It's easy to be loose with someone else's money, isn't it? You do realize that people and companies are fleeing California by the THOUSANDS (144,000 last year alone) right now because of high taxes and cost of living and shitty quality of life, don't you? I've lived out in California and while I still love to visit occasionally, I'd never EVER live there again, in part because of all of the arrogant folks who think they know what's best for everyone else and our wallets. I got smart and moved far, far away eight years ago, and am considering moving again because my home state of MD is unfortunately headed down the same deep blue, manure-filled path to permanent Federal welfare. Good luck, comrade.

For some reason the U.S. has the most expensive and the least efficient health care system of all developed nations. In parts it is not even effective, e.g. not providing all U.S. citizens with even basic health services.

It is all due to this strange, but widely held belief, that the person most interested in their health care is the patient him/herself. This does not always hold true, of course, and the opponents of personal responsibility reject proposals, that "leave the decision-making process up to individuals" (I kid you not!).

When a fool, who used the freedom irresponsibly and chose a better car or whatever over health insurance, can't pay for care, he is presented as a poster-child for socialized medicine... And the case is made, for taking out that choice for good — along with others, lest they'll also be used to make decisions, that are worse than those made by the all-knowing, omni-potent, and benevolent government officials.

Right now, for most Americans, their employer decides, who their health-insurer will be, which, by extensions, decides, who their doctors will be.

McCain's plan is to give kill that setup for good by removing the tax-breaks employers currently get for providing it — Obama was right to comment, that McCain's plan would destroy the current arrangements. Where Obama is mistaken (or misleading) is in implying, that would be a bad thing, for some reason. Instead, McCain wants each of us to be free to buy health insurance wherever we want — if we want it. He'll compensate for the loss of health-related tax-break to businesses with tax-credits directly to us, and we'll no longer have to associate changing (or loosing!) a job with changing (or losing) health-care coverage. The Illiberals hate that plan for (I kid you not): leaving the decision-making process up to individuals.

Obama's desire, even if it is not immediately obvious to an untrained eye from his public speeches, is to have a Single-Payer health-plan, where the government will be making the payments, and thus, automatically, the decisions. The current employer-selected plan will die just as surely as in McCain's plan (what Obama does not tell you), but it will be replaced by something far worse, not better.

So, here are the choices:

1. People decide for themselves — as per John McCain.
2. Employers decide for the employees — the current situation.
3. The government decides for everyone — as per Barack Obama.

Make your pick...

Reid keeps the swamp brimming
By Examiner Newspapers
Examiner Staff Writer 9/18/08
As the stock market plunged nearly 1,000 points in two days this week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada was preoccupied with protecting billions of dollars worth of earmarks contained in a separate, unpublished committee report that got a one-sentence reference in a giant $612 billion defense bill. Reid engineered the 61-to-32 vote to limit debate on the bill, thus barring consideration of an amendment offered by Sen. Jim DeMint. The South Carolina Republicanâ(TM)s amendment would have deleted the reference to the committee report so that it would have to be considered separately. By leaving the language in the bill, the lawmakers were able to carry out one of their favorite maneuvers: Incorporating committee reports into omnibus bills so they can give billions of tax dollars to their cronies without recorded votes on specific spending measures. This is the same Harry Reid who with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised to "drain the swamp" of Republican corruption if voters would return the Democrats to the majority.

Dennis Miller's remarks on that "ashen pie-hole" are still fresh, more than a year later.
The US needs a feedback loop whereby other states can be told: "someone else, please" regarding their ballots.

http://www.dcexaminer.com/articles/2005/10/14/news /maryland_news/03newsmd14burning.txt http://www.nbc4.com/news/5097879/detail.html?subid =10101441

Summary of case: a woman went before a judge and asked him to extend a restraining order against her estranged husband, who had made several threats against her life. Against all sense of good judgment, the judge lifted the restraining order. The husband subsequently set the woman on fire, leaving her with burns over 60% of her body. A weapon could easily have helped here.

The judge, of course, has been demoted and justice is "served" from a statistical perspective. But the woman ... she's in the hospital.

The right to carry a weapon is the right to protect yourself from becoming a statistic -- precisely because we don't trust the law enforcement system in *any* country.

If we've got the likes of (Massachusetts Senator) Ted Kennedy opposing something as benign as offshore wind farms with obvious NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) arguments, how can we expect people to agree to deal with transportation and storage of spent fuel rods which have a half-life in the tens-of-thousands of years?

And BTW thanks for the science lesson professor. I was just making a joke concerning the sunscreen as things are going to get hotter with global warming. Next time I'll be sure to keep my joke scientifically accurate for the critical peeps.

The U.S.Gov't is already set to pass a National ID law. And as an added bonus our friends in Canada and Mexico will have free&easy access to it.

http://www.politechbot.com/2005/05/04/real-id-act/
http://www.dcexaminer.com/articles/2005/04/07/opin ion/op-ed/25oped08plummer.txt

As long as paper is cheaper than video screens there will be free papers. Case in point, Washing, DC just gained a new free daily The Washington Examiner in the last month, and within the last two year the Washington Post launched its own freebie paper, The Express.

They both seem to have viable business models and in fact the Express has already decimated small group of targetted suburban papers that had cost $.35 which have now either gone out print, or or free depending on the suburban county each served. And the Post is finding that its free paper is doing better than it is. Though I think that growth will slow because of the Examiner which seems closer to a real newspaers (if one only on par to the NY Post or NY News) than the Express which consists entirely of heavily cropped wire stories. The Examiner at least has unique features and few of its own writers - plus it runs in depth wire stories, especially in SPORTS - which with the launch of the Washington Nationals should 'sell' a lot of free papers.

SS was originally designed so that on average you got out what you put in. Not, the less you put in the more you get out (proportionally) that it has become. The only reason it wasn't called a pension plan is due to the bad name that pension plans had aquired due to the crash.

Look here for some of the alternatives to SS that some states came up with (that were allowed under the original SS plan) before the nationalized plan came into effect.

Interesting that one of the solutions proposed for SS is to raise taxes. Even more reason to eliminate it. (Or get out of it).

Higher classes get most of their incomes from different areas, like capital gains, which do not pay their due burden for our government. As for the poor and middle class being more burdened, fewer people are paying any income tax now. http://www.taxfoundation.org/ff/zerotaxfilers.html A flat rate, with no deductions, on all whould tax everyone equally. It would also prevent a need for moving around the brackets as wages move up.

Solution: Eliminate corporate income tax (otherwise it is a double tax on the divedends) and count divedends under income. Flat tax on all income including that which is currently defined as captitol gains.

Remember that SS was put into place because most Americans weren't putting any (or enough) money away for retirement.

So some should be penalized for the idiocy of others? It wasn't meant to be the wealth redistribution scheme it has become. Also SS was not originally supposed to be under federal control. Also, there are several states that have their own pension plans in place of SS that give much better returns (http://dcexaminer.com/articles/2005/02/08/opinion /editorial/01aaedit.txt. that 3% figure that they give in the article you have should be more like 2% from what I have read. (sorry, can't find that link, though this may help http://www.heritage.org/research/features/socialse curity/)

[1] For the record, I'm still trying to figure out if his SS plan is good or bad overall. However, excluding the numbers from the budget is wrong and deceitful.

Oh, my me. I get to have some fun with this given some information I just read in the paper yesterday. Lets see if I can find a link.

Summary: Social Security pays shit on returns and state run pension plans give back a much better return.
http://dcexaminer.com/articles/2005/02/08/opinion/ editorial/01aaedit.txt

Article text, since it won't be there forever:

Dems favor privatized accounts for a few ...

Published: Tuesday, February 8, 2005 12:56 PM EST E-mail this story | Print this page

If Social Security is such a great deal for American workers, as its supporters insist, then why are more than 5 million of them desperately trying to keep out of the program?

Thanks to the way Social Security was established 70 years ago, state and local government workers in 15 states aren't covered by Social Security. These teachers, firefighters and police officers don't pay a penny into the program, putting money instead into state-run pension programs. And if they spend their entire careers in these state jobs, they get nothing out of Social Security. Their retirement income is financed entirely by these state plans.

Groups like the AARP, formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons, want to force these folks into Social Security as a way to shore the program up. As the AARP sees it, once they start paying 12.4 percent of wages just like everyone else does, a total of $200 billion will pour into the bankrupt system.

The idea meets intense resistance from the state pension program managers, giant public-sector unions such as the American Federal of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) -- and prominent Democrats who are normally singing the benefits of Social Security.

Better than Social Security . . .

Why? Because it turns out that these state and local pensions offer a far better deal that Social Security.

The Louisiana State Empoloyee's Retirement System (LASERS) notes that a state worker who earned an average $35,000 a year and retired at age 65 would get more than $2,100 a month from LASERS -- but a paltry $886 per month from Social Security. "LASERS's monthly benefit is almost two and a half times higher," it noted in an article decrying reform ideas like the AARP's. Plus, many of these state workers can retire at age 55 with full benefits, and most provide disability and survivor benefits.

As Kennedy, Kerry, Reid, Boxer and other more than a dozen other Democrats and Republicans, noted in a 2001 letter to President Bush's Social Security commission: "Millions of our constituents receive higher retirement benefits from their current public pensions than they would under Social Security."

Because it invests in stocks and bonds...

How, exactly, do these state and local governments manage this trick? As LASERS put it, the state's benefits are substantially higher than Social Security because the contributions the workers and their employers make into the program are -- gasp! -- "invested in a mix of equities, bonds and other investments whose return far exceeds returns earned under Social Security's fixed income-only approach."

The director of Ohio's Public Employees Retirement System reported in testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee that "over 80 percent of our benefit disbursements are paid by investment income." Investment income, imagine that!

Seems that if investment in stocks and bonds is a good enough retirement plan for a school teacher in Boston, then it ought to be good enough for a factory worker in Detroit.