McCain Wants Ballmer For His Cabinet

While many people jumped all over presidential hopeful John McCain's wrong-headed view on network neutrality, few noticed his infuriating love for Microsoft. "[T]he 70 year old presidential hopeful also said that he would ask Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to serve on his cabinet to deal with technology issues if elected. He did not however say what position Ballmer might be hired in, but did joke that he might consider him for a diplomatic position, such as ambassador to China."

Comments

But a sad Joke

[Anonymous Coward]

McCain was once a Republican I could vote for: His own man. But a few years ago he became little more than a lapdog for the RNC. Makes you wonder what kind of dirt they have on him. He's not White House material. Once maybe, but not anymore. Not because I think he's become crooked, but because I think he's become weak.

Re:McCain's Bad Taste

[Dachannien]

You act like John McCain made it up. It's actually an old parody cover that came out of the Iran hostage crisis of 1979.

By the way, I thought it was kinda funny.

Re:Indeed, a bought man

[ichigo 2.0]

I had mod points but decided to respond.

Even worse, if the population increases faster than we mine gold, then we get bad deflation.

And deflation is bad because?

Deflation increases the value of money. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on who you are. For wages, deflation increases unemployment, because the real price of labor goes up. The same is true in reverse, inflation increases employment because real wages go down. However, from an economic point of view, nothing has changed. Increased employment through inflation is essentially reducing the wages of those who are employed and giving it in form of new jobs to the unemployed.

Another claimed "negative" side of deflation is that if you have borrowed money, the real amount you end up paying grows as the value of money increases. With inflation your debt decreases the more inflation eats the value of money. Obviously this causes problems in a central bank-run monetary system. Which however isn't an argument for paper money, but is an argument for letting the market decide what the rate is. In periods of great inflation, this would cause high interest rates, and in periods of deflation, the interest rate would be zero, and in some cases negative.

Tying inflation or deflation to the amount of a specific metal that we happen to dig out of the ground is a pretty bad way to do things. See what happened during the price revolution, where nations rapidly increased their silver production, in part causing a lot of inflation.

Oh my. The awful price revolution, where prices increased sixfold in a period of 150 years. This is obviously why paper money is superior to a gold standard!

Do you know how much a 1966 dollar is worth today? 6 dollars. That is the same sixfold increase in prices, in a period of 40 years, and that's for a relatively strong fiat currency . To make an apples to apples comparison, we need to compare the price revolution to a similar case of extreme growth of money supply. A good example would be Germany, from the year 1914-1924. During this time period, the prices in German papiermark grew an incredible one trillion times!

Compared to the horrors of paper money, a gold standard is rock solid. Such stability would increase the predictability of the economy, and would benefit almost everyone. There is one huge problem with moving to a gold standard however. Losing the power to inflate, means that the US government would have to pay for military expenses through taxation, instead of just borrowing money from the Chinese and inflating the debt away. If the people actually saw in their taxation how much it all costs, the empire would dissolve overnight.

Re:Oh God

[aurum42]

And here are citations for Halliburton's and Cheney's involvement with "axis of evil" fulcrum Iran: First, from Fox News of all places.

An excerpt:

While he headed the Houston-based oil services and construction company, Cheney strongly criticized sanctions against countries like Iran and Libya. President Clinton cut off all U.S. trade with Iran in 1995 because of Tehran's support for terrorism. ...

Much of Halliburton's business with Iran comes through Halliburton Products & Services Ltd., a subsidiary incorporated in the Cayman Islands and based in the United Arab Emirates. Halliburton Products & Services opened a Tehran office in early 2000, before Cheney left Halliburton to become Bush's running mate.

And something more current regarding Halliburton's current relationship with Iran.