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Grow up and stop being so easily offended. It's just a funny stereotype, like Americans being loud, and British food sucking.

Interestingly, General Motors has done the opposite: paid their best employees to work for someone else.

I'm utterly non religious. I'm not particularly opposed to a single payer style system; it would likely be an improvement over the status quo(and certainly would be for me personally, as I would get better access to a large pool, but I'm young and poor, older, wealthier me might not be happy about more taxes), but I don't think it is any sort of wonderful panacea(go back and read the first half of the last sentence of my first reply to you, I say something about "changing the regulatory model"...).

This provides excellent context to explain what I meant about worshiping yourself. You are so eager to compare my and anyone else's ideological flaws to your perfection, you pigeon hole and assume yourself way further than you can hope to justify, and then rail against your own assumptions. How boring.

Anyway, here's an interesting analysis of just how far socialization is *not* going to take us:

http://www.janegalt.net/archives/009873.html

The meat of it is that Medicare and Medicaid spend in excess of 7% of GDP covering about 1/3 of our population; boosting that to France's 11%(or 12%, whatever) isn't necessarily going to improve things for the other 2/3. Providing universal coverage is definitely a good thing and something to strive for, but I would reach for the politically unlikely 'baseline' model, where certain treatments were provided and or subsidized, and everything else is the individual's problem. A baby born into a poor family with cystic fibrosis is not less deserving of care than a baby born into a rich family. A smoker is less deserving of care than a non smoker. And so on.

The big company says they'll ship the job to where they can save on the labor, to increase their bottom line and some CEO salary by a few million, because it's insanely cheaper there, yet they want the same loot for the product.

That profit just doesn't go into someone's pocket - its reinvested, mostly in more R&D type jobs to expand the business. By taking some aspect of the business and making it cheaper to operate there is an opportunity to do something that would have been too expensive to do otherwise. Take the thousands and thousands of jobs that secretary pools used to do. They all disappeared and have been replaced by thousands and thousands of IT jobs. Companies have been able to invest in this type of expansion because they are no longer having to pay all of those secretary jobs. Some (or maybe even most) of those secretaries were hurt in the short run, but the economy and people overall have benefited.

Yet, I am not seeing any big push by the capitalists or their stooges in government to drop rentals or mortgages or real estate property prices, or even freeze rates by law,nor utility bills, nor cost of transportation, nor local property taxes to pay for the illegals invasion, etc, none of that.

Government has tried to do similar things in the past and it was disastrous. I don't even see why it would be necessary. Median wages and total compensation have both been growing steadily for quite some time.

You can go to the poorest cheapest cost of living place in the US and you still couldn't live on a buck an hour, even if your house was completely paid off and your car was completely paid off and you never needed new clothes.

I don't see any evidence that living off a buck an hour is even a remote risk. I'm not sure why you are concerned about it.

You lose it as a worker in the middle of paying off a house and car and etc you can go down the tubes fairly readily now, and you do it in some area where the bulk of the adults are all in the same industry and all of a sudden everyone is laid off you can't even hardly sell your house.

Trade can hurt some people in the short term - but as a whole trade makes the average person better off. By eliminating all risk, you destroy growth and innovation. Change can be hard, but it is important for society to progress. After all, it was very hard for blacksmiths and grooms when everyone stopped riding horses.

They have to cook the books on the economy to make it look good, use every possible word parsing tactic to call credit "wealth" and get people to believe that fairy tale, they dropped some of the FED reporting on cash in circulation to coverup the on purpose credit expansion by running the presses and just adding zeroes to the data entries,

If money supply were expanding like you claim then inflation would be soaring - the fact that inflation is still quite low gives lie to your assertions.

they adjusted cost of living and took out critical necessities to make it look good,

Which critical necessities did they take out?

they reclassified jobs, and we are now

Which jobs did they reclassify?

without any shadow of a doubt and this is not debateable, just accept it the most in the red any nation has ever been, all within the last 20 years of this big globalism push.

so I'm just supposed to accept your assertion without any evidence? It just so happens that the US deficit is less, as a percentage of GDP, than most of Europe and Japan. But don't take my word on it - look at the numbers from OECD (summary here) Of course that has almost nothing to do with how the economies perform, but the fiscal restraint of their governments.

If globalism worked, we'd see some results other than cheap crap at walmart.

How about the fact that more people own homes now t

I'd have to strongly disagree. First of all, in my experience, the intellectual quality of bloggers really puts syndicated columnists to shame. (I'm talking about the upper end of them -- no doubt you can find lots of bad quality.) They can write much more and link to the basis for their claims. If anything is in error, they'll typically have comment and trackback capability so others can instantly expose them. Rarely will columnists deign to defend their assertions. After reading blogs for a few years, I checked back to some of the syndicated columns I had read (this is what I had in mind) and just marveled at how intellectually shallow they were. In contrast, check out this list of some of the blogs I read:

http://econlog.econlib.org/
http://www.overcomingbias.com/
http://www.economist.com/debate/freeexchange/
http://www.janegalt.net/
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/
http://patrick.net/wp/

Several of those are professors. Now, tell me they're not more refined than the columns you'd read in the paper.

I think the definition of the word *was* the point. Since you claim you know what the meaning is, it surprises me the distinction you made in your previous post.

It surprises me that you thought you needed to introduce me to the concept after having read my post. See below.

which isn't at all true in the context of rivalrous goods. Absolutely nothing is lost in the sharing of non-rivalrous goods.

True. But -- and here's the point you completely fucking missed because you're unwilling to entertain the notion that you might be wrong -- which good are we talking about? The enjoyment of the informational content -- which you were probably thinking about when the blood flowed into your dick -- is indeed a non-rivalrous good. And a lot of morons, like this one say that's the end of it -- the information isn't scarce, so there's no basis of rights. If, on the other hand, the relevant good is *that* the information be enjoyed/used, it's no longer non-rivalous. Let me spell it out for you, since before this post the concept didn't even exist in your mind: The artist's (or his agent's) desire to that only those who paid him a cut gain access to his work, and the desire of others to have a copy without paying him a cut for the work, cannot simultaneously be satisfied. That good (literally, the truth of whether people have a copy without payin royalties), is rivalrous. To you, however, it "doesn't count" because you adhere to the arbitrary rule that, "heyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy mannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn a good is something you can touuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuch, man, something you can feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeel". Ridiculous -- adoration from one's lover is utterly non-tangible, but a good nonetheless.

Now, I'll accept your apology for the foot-in-mouth "rivalrous" post.

The problem is (imho & based on how I read your other posts) that you've bought into the false notion that intellectual monopoly is required to generate content and cause creativity. But this is clearly false. Humans created long before these artificial barriers to market were introduced, and will continue to innovate long after they've been dropped.

Actually, the *real* problem is that you are incapable of attacking anything save a strawman. I NEVER SAID OR IMPLIED that there would be no innovation/creativity without intellectual property rights. I was very careful to constrain my statements to FOR PROFIT PRODUCTION. You would have noticed that if you had read my posts. (Skimming isn't reading.)

So long as we're clear that the 'they' in this sentence is the recording industry: not the artist.

Oh geez.

You would be correct to say that perhaps they didn't change methods, adapt, etc. as necessary. But to claim that publishers literally contribute nothing? That's false, a result of a simplistic approach to this whole topic. No matter how good your music is, that does NOT guarantee that the people that will turn out to like it, will ever get a chance to hear it. Artists generally cannot marshall the resources necessary to persuade lots of people of the merit of their work, or to get it to the point where they hear it, even if they are very good. This is what the publisher attempts to accomplish. Has new technology changed the specific tasks the publisher has performed? Sure. Have many of the transaction costs decreased? Of course. But your attempt to paint this sharp dividing line between the "real" producers (who are artists) and the leeches who "merely" publish rings hollow. Great post on the matter.

Words of wisdom: a good that consumers are unaware of, is not a good. (I mean a good in the economic sense, not the hippie sense you're familiar with.)

Sure, and the original condition was a bargain between publishers and the public. A 17yr right to be the only

If the executives get paid more, they pay more taxes. If the companies use the capital for investment, jobs are probably created. If they pay it to shareholders, it is taxed a little, but also probably used for investment. A simpler tax code makes it harder for those executives to weasel out of thier taxes.

Putting the tax professionals out of a job is the point. It sucks for them, but overall, it saves money(or productivity, whatever). Presumably, those tax professionals would find other work, work that isn't pointless(if the corporations don't pay taxes anyway...).

There isn't any reference other than 'I say so' here:

http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/000174.html

but there is discussion(arguement 2) to the effect that corporations pay more to file thier taxes than the goverment collects. That's moronic.

It's just derived from common sense:

The limits of your imagination are not the limits of reality... How did people go so badly wrong? Well, to start with, they fell into the basic fallacy that economists are so well acquainted with: they thought about themselves instead of the marginal case.

- Jane Galt a.k.a Megan McArdle

Where is this wonderful place?

I didn't worry about being an imperialist american bastard because the article is very much about USian taxes.

That said, are there services that you want your government to provide that it doesn't? Do you want to increase taxes for these services? Or are you happy with the current tax and gov. service levels? I was mostly protesting how general your comment about increasing taxes being a good thing was...it is only a good thing if you believe that the value of the services outweights the cost off the taxes. This often isn't the case.

I'm not a huge fan of strictly progressive taxes. One of the more interesting ideas I have seen for a tax scheme was somewhere on http://janegalt.net/ where the bottom end of the bracket(below the poverty line or so) was a rebate that progressively went away. This nicely provides a decent standard of living without disencentivising work(which current US welfare programs tend to do).

The US would need to make some serious sacrifices to obey Kyoto. Keep in mind that most of the US lives much, much more sparsely than Europeans. They are not (for the most part) crowded into dense polluted cities. They are spead out over rual areas with clean air, clean water, and blue skies. Now they hear this:

"We MUST reduce emissions now! Before we destroy the planet!"

We've been hearing this sort of thing for three decades now. Eco distaster is always just around the corner. We are always near the tipping point, close to the point of no return. Horror is coming!

But it hasn't. I don't think people are being unreasonable when they conclude that people are crying wolf. Environmental scientists have been wearing a sign that says "THE END IS NEAR" for thirty years, and people are just used to it. Every single weather event is treated as "proof" that we are near cataclyism. Its a bad winter! Its a mild winter! Tsunami! All blamed on global warming.

Despite the dire claims, we have yet to see any REAL environmental disaster. Nothing truly spectacular has happened (not on the scale the doomsayers have been predicting) and now we get Kyoto.

Here is what the average American can plainly see:

1. The air and water seem pretty good. Weather seems normal.
2. Kyoto WOULD create a nasty economic downturn. Everyone over 30 can remember the last one, and it wasn't pretty. Worse, the Kyoto downturn would be PERMANENT.
3. Europeans dislike us, some HATE us, maybe they don't have our best interests at heart with this thing?

Or at least it would be, if the loathesome alcoholic murderer Ted Kennedy and his hypocritical limousine liberal friends would let the windmills be built where they actually had a chance at being economically viable.

-ccm

http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/004940.htm l

clicky link

200 economists ain't barely nobody...