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Two things that you seem to be off on here:

A. I certainly didn't say "only racism". It's more than a little disingenuous of your to imply I did, especially when I specifically cited another major factor. And I won't even pretend it's just those if you ask.
B. Racism absolutely did play a role. Harry Anslinger, who you could consider the godfather of the war on drugs, put his racism about it in no uncertain terms.

Then he said, google's customers don't care about privacy and would gladly sell google the rope used to hang them.

http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote/vladimir_lenin_quote_068c

WBC isn't exercising free speech. They're exercising hate speech. Burning a cross on a black man's lawn is free speech, and yet is also a hate crime. WBC is a community of criminals and needs to be stopped.

http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote/louis_brandeis_quote_8f28

"If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."

There is certainly time enough to expose the lies of WBC.

In the unsurpassed words of Hermann Goering as cribbed from http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/

"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

That quote alone was worth winning the war, for which America was justifiably proud. Gosh it's hard to remember that far back.

All my life I struggled to identify myself on the liberal/conservative axis. It wasn't until I read Tibshirani and Hastings on PCA that I figured it out. The choice of principal component is often rather arbitrary when you have a cluster of aligned traits. In other words, the axis of ideology can be projected in many different ways, most of which are valid to the same approximate degree. When you subtract out whichever one you pick first, you've grabbed most of the explanatory power of the entire bundle.

One meme about conservatism is that it is more threat sensitive. I don't agree with that. Conservatism is more sensitive to threats from without. Liberals are more concerned from threats from within. In one case, you want to defeat the Nazis; in the other case your wish your own society not to become the Nazis by succumbing to the same Patriotic tendencies.

Sure. The basic economic principle of a communist government is "to everyone according to their needs, from everyone according to their skills". This principle is roughly equivalent to a Pareto efficient economy (you can look that up), with the additional catches that there is no social inequality that is due to inheritance or to monopoly rents on either supply or demand side, and that every member of the society starts off on a level playing field, as all receive the same chances of education, etc. Theoretically, it is even better than an "efficient" market. So, this is your scientific justification, mmkay?

I didn't say you couldn't throw together a scientific justification, just that it wouldn't necessarily be reasonable. In the case above, since there is no way to determine "need" or to deal with conflicts of interest, the whole system fails from the start. Equality is attained at the expense of freedom, a more desirable social trait. And monopoly rents still exist because someone has to enforce the conditions above, they can (and will due to conflicts of interest) instead use that power to create monopoly rents. In the Soviet Union, for example, the primary monopoly rent was the concentration of government power in the hands of a few elite.

One huge theoretical benefit is there will be no need for a financial system like the one that causes the "business cycle".

The actors have imperfect knowledge. That means even in a completely rational world, business cycles would still occur. They probably wouldn't be absurdly exaggerated like the bottle rocket activity that occurs in developed world economies every decade or so today, but the fundamental cause of a business cycle is that expectations get out of line with reality.

Communist countries over the past century have suffered from this effect many times with famines, overproduction, and the notoriously unrealistic "five year plans."

The fact that we still don't have a workable system is, actually, sad.

Let's look at what you claim breaks the "free market" (actually market plus democracy model):

Things like, you know, political abuse of democracy (buying votes, lobbying, etc.), monopoly rents, pollution and other externalities, etc.

Doesn't sound all that bad to me. Presence of these problems doesn't mean that the system works or not, just as famines and the other failures of a central planning system doesn't imply that the system works or not. Still the failures of the former seem to kill a lot less people than the failures of the latter. In any case, a market democracy with good legal infrastructure works better than any instance of communism practiced in the 20th Century.

Then there is nothing wrong with communism, as it does not require deception to work, it just requires excellent communication and total openness from a society where everyone has excellent education. Kind of like open source development, only applied to everything else.

If that's true, then why is there so much deception required for it to become established in societies? I noted at least twice when you've remarked on supposed attempts to advocate or implement communist policies in secret.

It's well known that "capitalists" are portrayed as rubes to be exploited by the communists. For example, Lenin wrote (this incidentally in a thread discussing whether communists had said anything about capitalists selling the rope used to hang themselves with):

"They [capitalists] will furnish credits which will serve us for the support of the Communist Party in their countries and, by supplying us materials and technical equipment which we lack, will restore our military industry necessary for our future attacks against our suppliers. To put it in other words, they will work on the preparati

The tax on a car would be just as much as the cost if your scenario came true. It simply would not work.

BS! Revenue is not the problem, spending is. And a federal government within the limits put on it by the Constitution of the USA would be much smaller than it is now. Hundreds of billions of dollars going to the military? The USA's Founding Fathers feared a standing army. United States Department of Housing and Urban Development or HUD? Where is the constitutional authority for it? Department of Agriculture? What's the authority for it? And why does it have to be a separate cabinet department and post than the Department of the Interior? The same for the authority of the Department of Labor, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Education, and the Department of Homeland Security?

James Madison said this of standing armies:
"A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence agst. foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people."
That webpage has other choice quotes on standing armies from other founding fathers. Madison also had choice words about government not having limited powers. And don't try to use the general welfare clause, Madison dealt with that too saying:

"With respect to the words of general welfare, I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators."

"If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one ..."

Quite simply, by reducing the size of the federal government to put it within the limits put on it by the Constitution federal spending would be cut dramatically. Each state could then be used as a laboratory and experimented with to find what works best. States could do the same and devolve power to localities, to cities, counties, and parishes.

Don't tell me what I outlined before will not work. If you want to convince me provide facts not opinions.

Falcon

"Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands." - Judge Learned Hand

Section 8: The Congress shall have power To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defence and general welfare...

Limited vs. Universal Powers

"I say... to the opinion of those who consider the grant of the treaty-making power as boundless: If it is, then we have no Constitution. If it has bounds, they can be no others than the definitions of the powers which that instrument gives." --Thomas Jefferson to Wilson Nicholas, 1803. ME 10:419

Quote by James Madison

"If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress.... Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature
of the limited Government established by the people of America."

I am sure I can find more but if this doesn't change your mind I doubt bringing the Founding Fathers back to life to explain it to you would help either.

Falcon

I don't care what "quotes" you have from the founders, I care about what they put into law .

The Founder's weren't stupid, they were perfectly clear about what they wanted in the Constitution and provided safeguards to ensure it functioned properly (The Supreme Court, for example, is the *ultimate* safeguard of which there is no going around).

It is completely improper to simply attempt to make up law as we go about (such as ignoring the "General Welfare" clause in the constitution) based on belief alone.

Congress should use all powers at there disposal to ensure the Welfare of the citizenry under it's care and should the matter truly be of legal question (such as if Health Insurance falls under the powers allotted to Congress), then *ANYONE* is free to take the matter as high as the Supreme Court if necessary to seek judicial relief.

These arm-chair constitutional/arm-chair historical "quarterbacking" of these matters is completely IMPROPER and short-circuits the very safeguards the founder's provided.

The avenue's of relief are there, you just need to be willing to do the leg-work AND USE THEM.

Can you point to one place in there where the federal government is given the power control health care and medicine?

Section 8, powers of the congress, first sentence: General welfare.

General Welfare doesn't mean what you think it does. I'll go ahead and copy and paste another post I made on it:

Limited vs. Universal Powers
"I say... to the opinion of those who consider the grant of the treaty-making power as boundless: If it is, then we have no Constitution. If it has bounds, they can be no others than the definitions of the powers which that instrument gives." --Thomas Jefferson to Wilson Nicholas, 1803. ME 10:419

Quote by James Madison
"If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress.... Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America."

Quite simply the USA's Founding Fathers didn't mean for "general welfare" to be used to get around the limits of the Constitution.

Falcon

Section 8: The Congress shall have power To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defence and general welfare...

Limited vs. Universal Powers
"I say... to the opinion of those who consider the grant of the treaty-making power as boundless: If it is, then we have no Constitution. If it has bounds, they can be no others than the definitions of the powers which that instrument gives." --Thomas Jefferson to Wilson Nicholas, 1803. ME 10:419

Quote by James Madison
"If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress.... Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America."

I am sure I can find more but if this doesn't change your mind I doubt bringing the Founding Fathers back to life to explain it to you would help either.

Falcon

.
Judge Learned Hand

Gregory v. Helvering 69 F.2d 809, 810 (2d Cir. 1934), aff'd, 293 U.S. 465, 55 S.Ct. 266, 79 L.Ed. 596 (1935)

Judge Hand was a very interesting judge who has had a massive impact on the US judiciary at all levels. I would submit that it is, in fact, patriotic to minimize one's taxes to provide a check and balance on the size and scope of Government through restriction of the purse strings (not that it really matters with the current Administration racking up multi-trillion dollar annual deficits...)

.
Judge Learned Hand

If only we had more judges and politicians with such common sense as Judge Hand showed...

- Judge Learned Hand

End result is unfortunately either a bloody coup and/or civil war.

Thomas Jefferson once said there should be a revolution every 20 years or so. He said it in his quote about the tree of liberty needing to be refreshed periodically with the blood of patriots and tyrants:
"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."

Falcon

The Communist Chinese government (for the IOC is for now their cats-paw) using the concept of "intellectual property" to quash negative publicity.

Well, Comrade Lenin DID say that the capitalists would "sell us the rope with which we will hang them."

I guess Thomas Jefferson wouldn't have gotten a security clearance either.

Whose company would you rather keep?

http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Thomas.Jefferson.Quote.EFEC

We can't even agree on most of the amendments, certain sentences are twisted and abused, the entire constitution of the US is wrapped up in a semantic nightmare wherein we try to interpret what we -want- to interpret out of a two hundred year old document.

The only reason the amendments, and Constitution, have been twisted around is so that those who do the twisting get to say what it means. Take for instance the 2nd, because it mentions militias anti-guns activists say the right to bare arms is not a person right only a collective right. However if you read the writing of the Founding Fathers that it is in fact a personal right, the Founding Fathers feared government and wanted people to have the means of overthrowing the government. Thomas Jefferson said it quite succulently when he wrote:

"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."

It wasn't long ago that people didn't directly vote in their Representatives and Senators.

The citizens voted for the Representatives it was the Senators the state legislators chose, see:

Section 2 - The House
The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States

And:

Section 3 - The Senate
The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, (chosen by the Legislature thereof,) (The preceding words in parentheses superseded by 17th Amendment, section 1.) for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote.

That's a pretty big change don't you think?

And changed via the 17th Amendment.

The fact that the constitution sets out so little on the requirements for election?

The only requirement I see that could be added was a test on the Constitution, which I fear most politicians would lose. Are you suggesting only a certain class of people should be representatives and senators, an aristocracy? The Constitution specifically bans an aristocracy.

"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
Justice Louis D. Brandeis, US Supreme Court Justice 1928 Source:dissenting, Olmstead v. United States, 277 US 479 (1928)

"Men have discovered no technique for long preserving free government except that the executive be under the law."
Justice Robert H. Jackson Source:Sam Ervin, The Whole Truth

"The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism, but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false; for the government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it, which are necessary to preserve its existence; as has been happily proved by the result of the great effort to throw off its just authority."
Justice David Davis (1815-1886) U.S. Supreme Court Justice 1862-1877 Source: Ex parte Milligan 71 U.S. 2 (1866) DAVIS, J., Opinion of the Court http://liberty-tree.ca/qb/David.Davis.Quote.5879 [liberty-tree.ca]

Every US citizen should regularly read quotes from The Supremes:

"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
Justice Louis D. Brandeis, US Supreme Court Justice 1928 Source:dissenting, Olmstead v. United States, 277 US 479 (1928)

"Men have discovered no technique for long preserving free government except that the executive be under the law."
Justice Robert H. Jackson Source:Sam Ervin, The Whole Truth

"The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism, but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false; for the government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it, which are necessary to preserve its existence; as has been happily proved by the result of the great effort to throw off its just authority."
Justice David Davis (1815-1886) U.S. Supreme Court Justice 1862-1877 Source: Ex parte Milligan 71 U.S. 2 (1866) DAVIS, J., Opinion of the Court http://liberty-tree.ca/qb/David.Davis.Quote.5879

Find them. Read them. Absorb them.

But programming is supposed to be a science and a process. If you prepare a precision algorythm and carefully test it before coding with all manner of valid and absurd inputs, then it shouldn't matter what level of so called skill a programmer has when the coding proceeds.

Oh, you mean a 'good programmer' is one who by lucky accident gets working code without using developing a complete algorythm first? What do you guys do, design microwave ovens for a living?

There's no such thing as a good vs average programmer. There's only those who follow the algorythm and the lucky artists.

First, without a good programmer on hand, who do you think is going to design the 'precision algorithm' or the test plans? For any given problem there are countless different solutions (most of which, as the aphorism says, are simple, easy and wrong), and figuring out which solutions will be appropriate to the problem domain, and scale well as the problem evolves, is an unavoidably creative process, for which you need creative people (i.e. good programmers).

Second, even when you have an algorithm already in hand, you need to have someone who can write the code in such a way that it can be easily understood, maintained and extended. This is also an unaviodably creative process: for any given algorithm and any given implementation language, there are, again, countless concrete implementations, each with their own advantages and handicaps. If you hire an average programmer, one without imagination or initiative, you can only hope that they will stumble, by pure luck, on the minority of implementations that don't paint you into some unfortunate corner two years down the road (requiring an astronomical investment in re-engineering the program). Hiring creative and independant people (i.e. again good programmers) will greatly increase the liklihood that the resulting programs will be well engineered.

Anyone who doesn't understand these two simple facts is either a nitwit of a PHB or an average programmer. Engineering of any type is hard, unavoidably so, and software engineering is harder than most other disciplines. The only people who think otherwise are either not aquainted with real-world software engineering (ivory tower types) or are simply blowhard dilettantes with no real interest in the problem (often with a silver bullet to sell).

"...unfortunately we can't control the actions of everyone." - Bill Clinton, April 20, 1993

"We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans..." - President Bill Clinton, USA Today, March 11, 1993

"When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it." - Bill Clinton

[Source for my quotes, which lists original sources]

Here's the context of the last quote: "When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans ... And so a lot of people say there's too much personal freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it. That's what we did in the announcement I made last weekend on the public housing projects, about how we're going to have weapon sweeps and more things like that to try to make people safer in their communities." - 3/22/94, MTV's "Enough is Enough"

Was Clinton using the issue of crime to remove our rights?

More Clinton quotes:

"The purpose of government is to rein in the rights of the people."- during an interview on MTV in 1993

"You know the one thing that's wrong with this country? Everyone gets a chance to have their fair say." - May 29, 1993, The White House

From the inventor of the concept:
"Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism as it is a merge of state and corporate power."
-Benito Mussolini

http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quotes.nsf/QuotesByC atPerson?ReadForm&RestrictToCategory=Benito+Mussol ini

At least the Federal government in the United States isn't controlled by corporate power. Oh damn.