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Kinky Friedman, professional satirist and candidate for Texas Govenor recently said it on NPR last week, but I've seen parts of the quote attributed to Davey Crockett several places. http://freedomkeys.com/politicians.htm The joke seems quite old.

See: broken window fallacy. All those people who we no longer need as clerks can go find something more valuable to do.

Appeal to Consequences

The TSA has very little to do with the economic situation of the USA. If you say that the almost unnecessary TSA is helping by employing folks, then 1.) I would remind you that every TSA employee increases the tax burden of the average US citizen & 2.) that would be a great example of the Broken Window Fallacy.

You act like we can only take care *one thing at a time* which is so silly it almost doesn't warrant comment. There are ~230 million adults in the USA & I'd hope we weren't so ADD that we can concentrate on more than one issue at a time. Of course, all we can really do is vote, write & rally. Hopefully our next group of leaders will be a little more responsible than those of the last 30 years or so, but I seriously doubt it. They will keep selling us out to foreign powers, keep eroding our civil liberties & keep sucking at the teats of multinational corporations.

They are not an "investment". War production isn't wealth.

Regardless of the morals and ethics, the bottom line is its good skilled and technical jobs for America that include retirement packages and healthcare. Get rid of the nukes and we put 10s of thousands of people out of work.

Oh, jesus christ. read and learn

  (This is definitely putting my dad out of work.)

Your dad is an example of a misallocated worker.

-jcr

If he wasn't robbing banks, perhaps "Slippery Jim" deGriz could have gone around breaking windows with the same justification.

Al Gore may not be an authoritative source himself but he is one of the biggest figureheads in the fields of environmentalism and global warming research. Guess where he gets his information.

The Intarwebs?

I don't know where he gets it but I found a more reliable source.

Then again, maybe he's just retelling it wrong.

Wow. Can I have some of whatever it is that you're smoking?

So do you put on your telepathic helmet in order to discern what it is that FSF really wants? Or do they you write secret emails, boasting about their plan to conquer the world? Perhaps they just beam this information directly to your brain.

There's no secret agenda here. The developer writes something and copyrights it, just like everybody else. For whatever reason, the developer then says, "Here, go ahead and use this. Do what whatever you want with as long as you respect my copyright. Here's a copy of the source code as a bonus, so you can see exactly how I did it. You know what? I'm feeling so generous that you can even have a copyright exemption in order to distribute this wonderful code as you see fit. One caveat though. Since I gave you the ability to see how its done with the source code, you need to give others that same ability when you distribute my work. If that's too much to ask, then just don't hand it out."

I do admit that I like your unstated base assumption- that only GPL'd software is worth having, and that by not having access to GPL, no computer would be worth anything. Let me take a moment and savor the thought of a world were anything other than GPL protected software was simply a joke... Ahhh. refreshing. Strangely though, I can't anyone thinking that's the way world is now, nor do see anyone claiming it should be that way.

As for defending freedom, I do believe no one has ever claimed that "Liberty is free", at least, not while sober. In fact, I can easily find many claims to the contrary. Here, try these guys Freedom Monkeys, they have a bunch of quotes. I suspect that those principles apply just as strongly to software liberty as they do for personal liberty. If you want your software to be freely available and usable, then it wouldn't make sense to hand it over to those who will just take it and hide it away. The GPL prevents this. Your way doesn't. Since your goals aren't aligned with those who choose the GPL, then you can simply not use the GPL.

How did you put it?

The solution is simple; we need to abandon the GPL.

Here, let's fix that.

The solution is simple; I need to abandon the GPL.

See? So much better for all of us.

That's completely retarded; this is a textbook example of the fallacy of the broken window. Why are so many idiots elected to office?

That doesn't mean these scum will ever give up.

I'll see your quote, and raise you with some others:

http://freedomkeys.com/vigil.htm

"Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Liberty"

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." ...

Completely aside from the fact that the implementation is dreadful, the things are designed to do people out of a job, in a town that sorely needs jobs.

Yet another instance of the Broken Window Fallacy. Yes, increased efficiency may put these individuals out of a job. But it also means that the grocer saves money, and we do too. That money doesn't just disappear from the economy, we spend it on better things. Maybe we go out to eat more often, and maybe the owner of the grocery can afford to add on to his house now. Those activities create jobs. Efficiency is better for everyone.

BROKEN WINDOW FALLACY

http://freedomkeys.com/window.htm

I've never seen such a beautiful example of the broken window fallacy. Good job /. for not realizing it.

Another way to look at this is as an application of the Fallacy of the Broken Window. Briefly, a broken window may seem like a boon to the economy, since it creates jobs for window makers, etc. But that money spent on window makers, cannot be spent elsewhere in the economy, so there is no net gain of jobs.

Similarly here, forcing someone to pay for an operating system may seem to create jobs for OS makers, but it's really just draining money from other parts of the economy. A business that saves money because of free software can spend that money on more employees, raw materials, etc.

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

"Premptive war"

Not quite. Saddam has been involved in a number of terrorist attacks on the US.

* WTC1 - the main guy, Ramzi Youssef, is thought to be w/ Iraqi intelligence, and received his passports from Iraq (he also had a Pakistani passport, which was from a Pakistani national who went missing in Kuwait after Iraq invaded). The one guy who got away went to live in Baghdad living off of Saddam's money.

* OKC - Terry Nichols was trained by Ramzi Youssef in bomb-making in the Phillippines. With McVeigh that day was former Iraqi republican guard member Hussein Al-Hussany. This was attested to by multiple eyewitnesses. Al-Hussany then went to work for Logan National Airport. You can read about this in the book The Third Terrorist by OKC reporter Jayna Davis. Al-Hussany sued her for libel and she won. You can find more info at jaynadavis.com

* The attempted assasination of GHWB in Kuwait

* TWA Flight 800 - not sure if this was Saddam, but this actually was a terrorist attack that Clinton covered up (he wanted to be associated w/ peace and not war, so he covered up anything that might indicate the need to go to war). That this was a terrorist attack has been mentioned by George Stephanopolous and John Kerry.

* WTC2 - Muhammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence a few months before 9/11. In addition, a few months before, Iraq's state paper basically predicted it -- said that Osama would attack America with all of the force of the bedouins, hitting the pentagon, the white house, and New York on "the arm that is already hurting".

Also, many of the other attacks outside our borders seem to have Saddam be quite complicit. He would make a threat, and then a month or two later Osama would strike.

Some links:

http://www.worldthreats.com/middle_east/Iraq%20Ter ror.htm

http://freedomkeys.com/secrethistory.htm

A good list of links

If I, as an American consumer, have $50 and want a pair of shoes, and I have the choice between a $50 pair of shoes made in America and a $30 pair of shoes made in China, then I'm clearly better off buying the $30 shoes--at the end of the transaction, I still have a pair of shoes, but I also have $20 more dollars.

Don't talk to me about "nations", or "trade imbalances". The fundamental unit in economy is the consumer, and anything beyond that is an abstraction. In this scenario, the consumer is better off because they can buy cheaper shoes. Period end of sentence.

What of China, who has artificially subsidised these shoes? If it costs them more money to make the shoes than they'll get by selling them, then they'll eventually run out of money and fail. Meanwhile, they have transferred their wealth to the American consumer. Subsidies are good for consumers, and rotten for the business attempting them.

Let's assume for a moment that they're not losing money; perhaps they made a small profit by employing cheap labor. That being the case, now the shoe manufacturer in China is richer as a result of the trade. And that's a good thing. History clearly shows that as a society becomes richer, it becomes freer. The Chinese shoemaker with extra money can now afford better school for his child, or to take time off to protest, or whatever he or she thinks is best. It affords him choice, and with choice inevitably comes freedom. If we want China to become a free society, we should trade more with the Chinese, not less.

larry

Looks like another variation of the Nolan Chart.

The basic idea of the Nolan Chart and its variations are to clump the many separate components of political opinion into TWO groups, rather than one.

Measuring their values and laying out "political position" in two dimensions more clearly shows clustering of ideologies and differences between them than collapsing the many components of opinion into a single "left-right" scale. Using only one dimension causes ideologies with a pair of extreme positions to be mashed together with middle-of-the-road milksops, obscuring major difference.

More dimensions would be better. But opinions on various subjects tend to be highly correlated. So it's easy to pick two (or three) sets where cancelation won't confuse any two popular ideologies. Also: Examining (and naming) the nature of the subjects where opinions cluster can lead to additional insight into political thought.

My personal favorite version is World's Smallest Political Quiz, which groups opinion on ten subjects into two groups of five - half on regulation of personal behavior, half on economic behavior - then displays the data with the chart rotated into a "diamond" position, so that the traditional "left-right" axis (which ends up at 45 degrees in a 2-D cartesian plot) is left-right, while a new "authoritarian-libertarian" axis appears as up-down. (Of course the "libertarian" corner is at the top. But a communist, fascist, or member of a US political party might prefer to invert it. B-) )

Don't hold your breath waiting for a coherent response. Your opponent is quite adept when it comes to arguing without consulting logic, or for that matter, facts. Most likely, he'll keep coming back with statements that effectively amount to "nuh uh!"

BTW, good job quoting Boortz... I was going to, but then I saw your post. It would be very nice if he would get a search feature to search through his fabulous Nealz Nuze blog. There have been many times that I wish I could refer to articles he's posted, or facts he's summed up, but had to go back through by each day. Also, if you're interested, you can hear him on these streaming stations.

Am I really willing to go to the poor house over this issue? Am I really willing to throw away a fair job, an OK home, and my car?

Freedom, n.
1. nothing to lose

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." -- Wendell Phillips (1811-1884), abolitionist, orator and columnist for The Liberator, paraphrasing John Philpot Curran

I guess we're all either slaves to another, or slaves to our own libery. I'll leave the choice up to you.