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Point is, more anti-Obama crap, same as the anti-Bush crap but from another direction.

Originally from here - http://socyberty.com/issues/white-house-insider-obama-hesitated-panetta-issued-order-to-kill-osama-bin-laden/4/

Then here - http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2011/05/skulking-towards-bin-laden-obama-overridden-by-military-and-intel-officials-in-takeout-of-obl.html

It's been bouncing around since at least the 4th of May - http://mediamatters.org/blog/201105040021 and the original author is known to make up stories for pageviews in the past.

http://ulster-man.blogspot.com/2010_11_01_archive.html
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201105040021

Which sort of proves that most of the assumptions by those in love with Capitalism are at best incredibly dishonest. If people were guaranteed a relative level of stability (guaranteed housing, health care, food, and education) while being allowed to concentrate on what they love, you'd see humanity advancing by leaps and bounds.

I find your enthusiasm charming, but I consider it rather naive.

Who will provide the housing? If I don't like the housing, do I have the "right" to turn my nose up at it and demand better? Who will decide whether I deserve better housing?

Who will provide the health care? Everyone wants an infinite amount of health care; how do you ration it? If you pay the doctors well, where will you get the money for it? If you don't pay the doctors well, how do you get good ones?

Who will provide the food? Sometimes I like a fancy steak dinner; how often will I get one, and who decides?

But never mind these questions; let's get down to the important ones. Where on Earth, and when, has this been tried and shown to work?

The USSR was structured something like what you are describing. In theory, Communism gave to each as they needed. In reality, the economy was so bad that the USSR had a negative GDP: they were subtracting value. They took valuable iron ore and turned it into lousy Soviet steel. Then they took the lousy Soviet steel and turned it into lousy Soviet automobiles. The people were hungry, the health care was abysmal, and pollution was horrible.

The Pligrims tried something like what you described when they first arrived in America. It didn't work out.

In this country, in Chicago, there were massive "projects" built to provide housing for the poor. It didn't work out.

It turns out that people work both harder and smarter when they benefit from their work. And top-down-planning economies cannot possibly keep up with a a chaotic free market (and the creative destruction associated with it).

It is often argued that pure capitalism is heartless and cruel. But pure communism and socialism have even worse horrible disadvantages. If I'm going to live under pure anything, I'm going to choose the capitalism.

So, I'm happy that you have this faith in the innate goodness of humankind. But sorry dude, I don't think it's going to work.

steveha

The thing is, modern economic research has shown we are not primarily self interested. People are more motivated by notions of fairness and reciprocity than by self interest. Well, most people. In the right circumstances.

The key phrase being "Most people. In the right circumstances." Most people in the right circumstances can also be brutal prison guards and torture people. The Stanford Prison Experiment had to be ended after 6 days even though it was scheduled to last 2 weeks. People have asked how Germans allowed the NAZIs to get away with the Holocaust. A teacher in 1967 in a California high school was asked this so he set up an experiment, which got out of control, the The Third Wave. A fictionalized account was written as the book and movie "The Wave". Finally the German remake, "Die Welle" was released in 2008. Read some of the results Google returns.

Remember, Adam Smith also said, "Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all. " and "It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion. "

Adam Smith also believed in small government. He argued for a limited government, the role being to "provide national defense, the administration of justice, and public goods. In other words, it should protect citizens from external and internal aggression and supply goods that the free market may not provide."

Falcon

Cops don't make it into the top ten, they don't even make it into the top 20. You want a dangerous job? Go fish. Literally. Or try logging, or being a cabbie, those are dangerous. Driving around while heavily armed and wearing ballistic vests, with dozens of similarly equipped confreres a radio call away, is hardly "dangerous" -- hundreds of phony, "I love the police, because they keep me safe from legions of zombies", police shows aside. http://www.forbes.com/2008/08/25/dangerous-jobs-fishing-lead-careers-cx_mk_0825danger.html http://money.msn.com/content/invest/extra/P63405.asp http://socyberty.com/work/ten-most-dangerous-jobs-in-america/ About 60 police officers are killed every year in America, and the number is dropping. Astoundingly none of those deaths have been attributed to blogs! http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-30-police-killings_x.htm So please stop telling us how fraking dangerous it is to be a cop.

Link got deleted, here it is: http://socyberty.com/economics/was-john-maynard-keynes-a-socialist/

Sorry as long as there aren't good and verified explanations for all the UFO sightings out there we can't rule out the existence of alien craft visiting our planet. Having said that, the chances of aliens visiting us is really very small. The first reported UFO sightings are much older than 1897, BTW.

Well, it is partly going here, here, and here.