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Obama DOJ Sides With RIAA
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The Obama Administration's Department of Justice, with former RIAA lawyers occupying the 2nd and 3rd highest positions in the department, has shown its colors, intervening on behalf of the RIAA in the case against a Boston University graduate student, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, accused of file sharing when he was 17 years old. Its oversized, 39-page brief (PDF) relies upon a United States Supreme Court decision from 1919 which upheld a statutory damages award, in a case involving overpriced railway tickets, equal to 116 times the actual damages sustained, and a 2007 Circuit Court decision which held that the 1919 decision — rather than the Supreme Court's more recent decisions involving punitive damages — was applicable to an award against a Karaoke CD distributor for 44 times the actual damages. Of course none of the cited cases dealt with the ratios sought by the RIAA: 2,100 to 425,000 times the actual damages for an MP3 file. Interestingly, the Government brief asked the Judge not to rule on the issue at this time, but to wait until after a trial. Also interestingly, although the brief sought to rebut, one by one, each argument that had been made by the defendant in his brief, it totally ignored all of the authorities and arguments that had been made by the Free Software Foundation in its brief. Commentators had been fearing that the Obama/Biden administration would be tools of the RIAA; does this filing confirm those fears?"
Yup.
It has been well known the republicrats and democans are the tools of the MAFIAA(Music And Film Industry Association of America) and Omaba is no different. The libertarians have long known Obama is for as much change as Bush and Clinton, none. Both major parties are for corporate wealth and will use legislation to back said corporate wealth.
-bob
Perhaps this might be the thing to spark a true third-party movement in the USA? Have we not seen time and time again how neither Republicans nor Democrats are any different in the grand scheme of things? I can't remember how often I had been told that Obama was going to change things for the better, how somehow Obama was going to not be in the corporation's or the party's pocketbook because he got most of his campaign funds from independent donates... and what does he do when he gets elected? He carries on policies that have always failed, meanwhile undermining capitalism and sending our country deeper into recession by both his words and by the laws he wants to pass. A third party could change this, if our congress could include more than Republicans, Democrats and the odd Independent, our country would be a much, much, much, better place.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Change you can believe in...
In a word, yes. As does the bail-out shenanigans, etc.
.nosig
A change for the worse? I mean, when the government tries to 'help' a judge to make a fair decision...
The RIAA can't win in the courts, with advertising, or education of the young. Lobbyists haven't been able to get new laws passed. So the CEOs get their guys into the DOJ.
What did we expect?
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
As a registered republican, I knew that the republicans would do everything in their power to secure the oil interests.
Now that the dems are in power, you're surprised that they are doing everything to secure the media's interests? Really?
Raise your hand if you were surprised by this posting.
The U.S. government is EXTREMELY corrupt.
There was no reason for the administration to intervene at all in this case. There was no legal requirement for them to take a position in the case. This may not reflect favoring the RIAA so much as a general trend by the Obama adminstration to favor a very strong federal government going so far as to endorse many of Bush's worst positions (see for example http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/15/obama/). Restrictions on statutory damages would thus be something the administration would not favor. Either way this isn't a good thing, but it may be premature to conclude that this indicates any particular bias towards towards the RIAA.
How do you know a third party would be any different? The powers that be will smack down anybody who isn't indoctrinated into the way things are done.
The solution lies in those overseeing the public good being beyond the influence of big business. Get rid of the revolving door.
Sadly, it's exactly this type of behaviour that Obama said he was going to stop.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I swear Obama is trying to get assassinated. First the bailouts, then the cross attitude when AIG decided to sue the government, now siding with the RIAA. On top of that, the economy sucks and he wants more taxes and an increase to the deficit. No wonder his caravan has a fully automated defense torrent. Well, the good news is that no one will ever reelect him. Just four more years and we'll have another power hungry politician in office... Man thats depressing.
Claims of high damages and requests for high punitive awards will get the attention of the defendant and of others who might otherwise perpetrate the same offense.
Sharing copyrighted material is illegal. That goes way back.
No millions of young people are starting to get that feeling that their vote to "stick it to the man" resulted in getting stuck by the man.
I was listening to an interview with Peter Gabriel on 5live http://www.bbc.co.uk/fivelive/ Simon Mayo (worth the fee on his own - grab the podcast) was doing the interview.
Peter said, essentially, that the music companies had lost the plot.
Nuff said
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
But, this type of ruling/defense by the administration, along with other things are really starting to bother me.
There are several that are bothersome. The moving of the census to be controlled by the executive branch. This is scary enough, in that it should be more independent....and above political needs. I see on the news that possibly ACORN is being tapped to 'help' with the census. I'd think the controversy over the potential voting fraud they were associated with, would sideline them on this effort. Slanting the census will have FAR reaching influence over many, many issues and money for years to come.
Obama was promising that he'd try to cut down earmarks..."line by line" I think was his quote. Yet, that Omnibus bill was loaded with what, like 8K of them?
The move to help people in housing problems....where they are allowing judges to overturn, revamp the condition of valid contractual agreements, that is dangerous, with far reaching implications for valid contract law in the US.
While it is understandable that people are pissed over the AIG bonuses...the acts passed by the house which try to retroactively and specically target these, again, is scary and I'd think unconstitutional. If these payouts were from valid contracts signed in the past, I don't see any clear way they could be overturned...and going after them retroactively by taxes...wow. I'm hoping the senate and especially Obama himself votes this down. It sets a bad precedent, and could really start to hurt US businesses. If valid contracts can be messed with like this....who wants to do business when you can't count on the terms being enforced?
The latest proposals...to not only mandate what execs of bailout companies can make..but also implications coming out that they want to actually set limits on what healthy, non=bailout companies can pay....that acares me. Sounds very much the opposite of capitalism. It may be a populist view in terms of the current economy, but, wow....THAT would be a change.
I want him to succeed in getting the country back in step....so we can all go back to trying to make a living without the interference of the government. That is the US way....at least ideally. Some of these policies coming out, seem to be a change to something the US is not....and never has been.
I ask honestly...for not just those that voted for O, but, those that were adamant supporters...are these things truly what you were expecting for 'change'? Do you support all of this which seems to change what the basics of the US business is all about? I don't mean the corruption and waste...but, the basic principals that seem to be in jeopardy?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The right thing to do is never get discouraged. The important thing to do is methodically, constantly, Politely, Respectively continue your message.
As a businessman I believe Open Source Software reduces cost so an individual with a new idea can Quickly and for Under 2K get his message out.
I love life, live life to love.
The only place where people will gleefully ignore the fact that we torture innocent people in secret prisons without a trial, but froth at the mouth at the idea that you can be sued for copyright infringement.
Yes, clearly, THIS is the biggest issue of the year. Forget the economy, and health care, and two wars, and terrorism, and a weak government in the nuclear-armed Pakistan, and global warming, and the torture of people who never even received a trial. This issue, right here, is what matters. Obama was elected because "big media" bought the election, and now he's gonna come down hard on all us poor innocents.
I think it may be time to invest in Reynold's Wrap.
He's just as black as he is white. Maybe we'll stop voting both in office and have a native american president. After all, it is their land.
Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
The stories and info posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only fools would take it as fact.
False dichotomies are lies.
Obama: "Gotta protect Big Business, because Big Business IS the economy! If Big Business can't make tons of money off the backs of the clueless, the economy would cease to exist, the world as we (my buddies and I) know it would come to an end, the universe would implode, and the Rapture will begin!"
Maybe the RIAA HQ is an Indian burial ground?
Things will not change as long as the people with the gold are able to make the rules by buying lawmakers.
The fix is that candidates should only be permitted to accept campaign funds from people who are allowed to vote for them.
I'm certainly not surprised to see a Democratic administration support the entertainment industry, but in this case they probably have other motivation as well. An unfavorable ruling here could be generalized to the awarding of amounts unrelated to actual damages for any reason. Since it is often the government that collects such awards...
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Republicans are the party out of power. Democrats are big time in bed with the film and music and book industries and there's no chance those people will ever be close to Republicans either economically or culturally. So... why do Republicans support them? I'd say, we Republicans should be aggressive and go after these votes.
This is my sig.
The "Entertainment" industry has "contributed" massive sums to the Democrat party for many years. Did anyone think that there would be no reciprocity? Corporations and wealthy individuals do not make political contributions because they are ideologically motivated. They do it because there will be a return on the investment. Well, here it is.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
Commentators had been fearing that the Obama/Biden administration would be tools of the RIAA; does this filing confirm those fears?"
There is a implication there that the alternative McCain/Palin administration wouldn't have been tools of the RIAA. Whoever is in government is a tool of big industry. Its the fundamental natural of capitalist democracy.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Anonymous Bob - if you did vote libertarian all you did was help elect Obama. As long as we practice one-man-one-vote the system will swing to a two-party system. You only get to choose from a menu of two - and while it may look like a choice of rice and chicken versus chicken and rice, until you can get the menu to expand you pick one of the two or you don't eat.
In Obama America, hopes changes You!
Do you guys realise from reading the comments how Slashdot has become to libertarians as Digg is for liberals?
You just got troll'd!
I relied on IP, yes I spoke at conferences, and yes I wrote books. But guess what I don't do that anymore. Yes I realize that I am not the greatest of speakers and book authors.
BUT, and this is the big but. IP theft has made it a situation where I CANNOT make a living with what I used to. Before 2000 people used to buy books, and they used to buy things. I could make a somewhat ok living. Again I realize that I am not the greatest of writers and speakers.
I understand that many think the price of books is too high. I understand that completely. BUT please understand it from my perspective in that the situation we have is just as unsustainable.
I have also spoken and was good acquaintances with people who tried the Open source route where they gave up their books and asked people to buy print. It did not work and they made even less. Many have just left the market because they just don't think it is worth it.
So until this attitude of theft changes I for one am not going to be that critical of the RIAA.
BTW I do accept some theft, but not to the levels we have now...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
There will never be a point in voting Libertarian.
1) The candidate won't win.
2) You'll only peel votes from a Republican.
3) Some of them are scarier than the devils we know.
"it's a two party system you have to vote for one of us"
"Well, I believe I'll vote for a third party candidate"
"Go ahead, throw your vote away"
-Kang, Kodos and Random Voter
The Obama campaign was helped (and made "hip") by Hollywood & Co.
What did you expect? You didn't get a new kind of leader, you just got your average Chicago politician in the White House, that's all.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
The thing about libertarians is that they are VERY PRO IP, and very pro ownership. In fact, considering that I am libertarian and a card carrying member of the Swiss Libertarian party many would not like what libertarians represent...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
We need to decentralize the government. That way large corporations cant DoS our congress.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
This was already predicted when Biden wrote the following. http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=107_senate_hearings&docid=f:78178.pdf And it is only going to get worse... I really don't understand why the American pirate party supported Obama while i got this link from the international pirate party's mailinglist ages ago. Maybe some /. people can educate them ?
while it may look like a choice of rice and chicken versus chicken and rice, until you can get the menu to expand you pick one of the two or you don't eat.
What can someone do to expand this menu other than vote third party and volunteer for a third party campaign?
Of course none of the cited cases dealt with the ratios sought by the RIAA: 2,100 to 425,000 times the actual damages for an MP3 file.
I really get tired of saying this, but the damages have nothing to do with what it costs to purchase and download a song. These cases are not about a person downloading copyrighted materials (if it was, then the cost of the downloaded song would be correct to look at for damages). These cases are about uploading copyrighted material. The person is basically assuming the right to distribute the material. In these cases, the proper thing to look at is what the media company would charge someone if they wanted the purchase the rights to distribute the song, which is obviously going to much higher than the cost of purchasing a single download of the song.
If I call the RIAA and say that I want to purchase the right to put hit song X on my website for every visitor to my website to download for free and ask what it would cost to purchase this right, that is what the damages should be compared to. My guess is that this right would cost me much more than the cost of purchasing a single copy of the song, since I am basically buying the right to distribute as many copies as a I want. That is the right that is being infringed upon, and what the damages should be compared to.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Maybe the RIAA HQ is an Indian burial ground?
Well, then...
Theyyyyyyyyyyyyyy're baaaaaaaack!
and other recent laws could be viewed as "corporate protectionism", which is classically a right-wing action, the Democrats have historically been particular friends of the entertainment industry. Which leaves the American people without a Government protector in this area.
The only recourse we have is the courts. Let's hope that is sufficient.
You think big business is giving up control that easily? The voters have to stop voting for crooks.
THX PKD
What?
Big Entertainment told you to hate Bush and Republicans.
Big Entertainment told you to vote for Obama.
You did what Big Entertainment told you to do.
Why are you surprised that Big Entertainment now owns the government?
This intervening is just part of a laundry list of documents regarding the case. If someone finds something specific about this phase of the trial, please chime in. Below is a copy and paste job of the original complaints. The guy is apparently up against fines up to $1 million dollars, so wouldn't it make sense to just settle and get back to school? That is what my parents would of said, and they would have paid (begrudgingly) up to $10k if there was anything near a 5% probability of me having to pay $1,000,000, the downtime from school, legal expenses, social problems, etc.
Unless this guy, a Professor of law at Harvard Law School, and his family are all actually delusional enough to believe he is not expected to have to pay such a $1,000,000 fine to share music with his teenage friends. You know, the same stuff that you and I did as kids because we had more time than money and we really liked the latest music or even some of that older music that we heard on the radio.
Why don't they just legalize music? Or at least decriminalize it.
-hackstraw
This case, like many others now before the Court, is one for
copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. Â 106. The Plaintiffs are
some of the nation's largest record companies. The Defendants in
these consolidated cases are individual computer users -- mainly
college students -- who, the Plaintiffs claim, used "peer-to-
peer" file-sharing software to download and disseminate music
without paying for it, infringing the Plaintiffs' copyrights.
Many of the Defendants have defaulted or settled, largely without
the benefit of counsel, subject to damages awards between $3,000
and $10,000.
Joel Tenenbaum ("Tenenbaum") is one of the few defendants
represented by counsel, Professor Charles Nesson of Harvard Law
School and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He has
chosen to challenge the action through a Motion to Amend
Counterclaims (document # 686), his Opposition to the Plaintiffs'
Motion to Dismiss Counterclaims (document # 676), and a Motion to
Join the Recording Industry Association of America ("RIAA")
(document # 693), all of which will be heard on January 22, 2009.
Whether those counterclaims survive or not, he will proceed to a
jury trial in this Court currently scheduled for March 30, 2009.
While Tenenbaumâ(TM)s Motion to Permit Audio-Visual Coverage by CVN
(document # 718) is directed to all proceedings going forward,
this Order addresses only the proceeding on January 22, 2009,
where legal arguments on the motions above will be heard.
In many ways, this case is about the so-called Internet
Generation -- the generation that has grown up with computer
technology in general, and the internet in particular, as
commonplace. It is reportedly a generation that does not read
newspapers or watch the evening news, but gets its information
largely, if not almost exclusively, over the internet. See
generally Martha Irvine, Generation Raised Internet Comes of Age,
MSNBC.com, Dec. 13, 2004, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6645963/.
Consistent with the nature of these file-sharing cases, and the
identity of so many of the Defendants, this case is one that has
already garnered substantial attention on the internet.
Of course, the President is the tool of the RIAA.
RIAA has hired people to lobby... Slashdot or "the downloading public" has not hired anyone to lobby. You tend to be influenced by people who talk to you, who smile at you... even if these people are actually slime bags but there is no one there to point it out.
The public should figure out how to set up public interest lobby groups and generate funds to support their own lobbying activities, which can effectively counter balance the current lobbying efforts of private industries.
Individual tax payers should have the option to designate maybe 1 or 2 percent of their income tax to fund the public lobbying interest group of their choice.
The public could also organize massive-scale civil disobedience campaigns. What do you think would happen if 10 million American citizen would report himself/herself on the same day all over the country at the police stations as violator of copyrights laws?
It would paralyze the operation of the police for that day, it would paralyze the legal system by flooding it and I would like to see a government and a President, which would try to send to jail ten million citizens for copyrights violation at a huge expense of taxpayers.
At that stage the corresponding laws simply would not be possible to enforce.
As a businessman I believe Open Source Software reduces cost so an individual with a new idea can Quickly and for Under 2K get his message out.
That is, if new ideas even exist. Say someone named George writes a song, records it, and sells copies. If George's song is a hit, some big-name songwriter named Ron sues George, alleging that George's song was a copy of Ron's song and asking for hundreds of thousands of dollars. George says he didn't mean to copy anything, but the judge says it doesn't matter because George had heard Ron's song years ago. This actually happened, and Ron won. It turns out that there are only a limited number of possible melodies of any given length in a given musical scale, and judges compare only a few notes and contours of any two melodies to determine if they are "substantially similar". Under these conditions, how can anybody be sure that he actually has a new idea?
racist or anything, but I think that he'll be America's first and last black president. Do I think that because he's black? No. I think that because I think he sucks.
You're the one who's dragging colour into this, so it does make you a bit racist... there isn't a "black" opinion, they're people like everyone else. And like everyone else, they are individuals. Or would you like us to be judged by Bush' track record?
Your writing is actually pretty horrible if this post is any indication. Maybe English isn't your native language? I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
But let's assume that a lot of people wanted to read books' worth of your writing, and let's further assume that most of them decided to download their copy instead of buying it. Did you provide an easy-to-use, well-designed downloadable version of your book?
If not, then you did not provide what there was obviously demand for, and therefore have few to blame but yourself for your books' failure.
People still buy books they want. People still buy things they want. You just have to make the things you sell worth it.
The United States of America: We do what we must because we can.
The statement "There will never be a point in voting Libertarian." Is false and most likely flamebait.
I vote for the person that closest represents my value system and promises to do the things I would like to see done while they are in the White House. REGARDLESS of the fact that they may lose. Voting for either Republican or Democrat because "no one else will win" is not only morally bankrupt it is foolish.
Support instant runoff voting, or at least first-round/runoff voting for federal offices. Proportional representation to determine House delegations wouldn't hurt either, IMHO.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
The thing about libertarians is that they are VERY PRO IP, and very pro ownership.
What, all of them? I'd think that patents/copyrights would be considered an intrusion on people's liberty, since their essence is that one person is allowed to tell other people what they can't do.
So by that reasoning, G.W. Bush is the last white male president. Not because he's white, but because he sucked.
Maybe we'll stop caring about skin color altogether and actually start voting based on actual competence, whether black, white, yellow, red, purple, whatever.
All comments are properties and trademarks of the voices in my head. Not like I'm gonna claim them.
Wow, what an argument. Is this what typically gets modded up around here?
The inexorable march of technology will render any litigation irrelevant. The genie has been out of the bottle for years. There is no stopping encryption, P2P, self-organizing networks--and these are only the existing technologies. Future ones will only increase the speed and efficiency with which information is disseminated, shared, copied, and utilized. The battle was already won; all that remains is the question of how long the dinosaurs--whether they be companies or public "servants" (there's a misnomer if ever I heard one)--will continue to try to stem the tidal wave of knowledge, rather than embrace it.
You are part of this revolution. Do not accede to the will of those who seek to control you.
The RIAA intervention by the DOJ would not usually get my panties in a twist, but I think it is taking us in the wrong direction. It was the greed, arrogance, and unreasonable actions by wall street executives that got us into the current financial mess. The RIAA is no different and in my humble opinion, Obama's support for their arrogance and bullying is sending a clear message that he is duplicitous.
Either you are against this of behaviour or you are for it. You can't be both.
IMO, I think we always need to select the candidate likely to tax and spend and regulate liberty the least, and for now, caveat-ed with likely to be elected - in our government we've never had a problem of too little taxation - we certainly have problems with misappropriation and misdirection. We need to encourage liberty-seeking candidates to make that a centerpiece of their campaigns, but not being a member of one of the two parties is a waste of effort until we can change our voting system. We need to get enough candidates into office who have shown in their actions that they would risk their very lives to promote liberty. Anyone willing and desiring to *take* the effort of another to promote their own agenda, good agenda though it may be, rather than for the intentionally and greatly limited purposes the Constitution gave us, is the lesser candidate, because he is taking the ability to choose away from the people.
There is no point voting the two major parties, they're owned by interests, not by the people.
BTW, Jesse Ventura won the governor's race as an independent so not only is your logic false, it only serves the status quo.
And you would suggest something like two votes for women and minorities, because they have been oppressed for so long?
How about poor people getting three votes and anyone with a salary (not hourly) gets only 1/2? Maybe anyone not on welfare (must be rich, right) gets only 3/5ths?
Or maybe something silly like some of the alternative voting schemes where if you don't like the candidates your vote gets distributed around until your least-objectionable candidate gets it?
Or we just move the US to a parlimentary system where every faction has their group in the government. With all of the dealmaking being done hidden away in the government rather than just once every few years for the election.
No, I can't say the current US system is the best, but it sure sounds a lot better than most of the other governments out there. With a system like the UK or Israel has the US would tear itself apart in six months.
With the various "all you can eat" music services available, such as Napster, I don't see why anyone is complaining. If you can afford the luxury of buying music, it's cheaper now than it ever was before. $180 a year, for unlimited all you can possibly want music, at home and on your .mp3 player(s) I don't see how one has much room to complain.
If you don't like this there are also various radio options, ranging from Pandora to Sirius|XM as well as free alternatives in the mix if your dead broke.
CD's running $15 to $20+ a pop and even more for 2-disc/box sets IS a complete rip-off, and I can certainly understand that no one is going to pay those prices anymore, but honestly, $15 a month for absolutely unlimited music, with solid libraries to choose from, free internet radio options, and satelite radio alternatives, as well as garbage FM gives any consumer, or dirt broke down on your luck slob more than enough options to choose from.
The only additional thing I can think of for the music industry to do for it's customers, is to lower the price of retail CD's and full purchased downloads, as well as continue to update the all you can eat libraries, with old and new music selections, and not raise prices on anything.
Obama is a tool, nothing more.
http://www.obamadeception.net/
~ awaiting spiritual enlightenment ~
That dogcatcher race in Intercourse is worth at LEAST $750.
I would rather pay for book than download it.
It doesn't feel the same to read from a computer versus reading in bed, bathroom, or outside.
I am surprised if what you say is true about downloads effecting sales of books.
I understand the internet kill paper press (it is always a least a day behind real time) but (good) books are timeless.
You won't get an expanded menu until you tell the restaurant owner you aren't buying either the chicken and rice or rice and chicken and stick to it. If you just keep buying one of the two exactly the same selections on the menu, he isn't going to change, no matter how much you ask or beg for a third or fourth or fifth choice.
With voting, you can do this. You have to crack 1% to get to 2%, then crack 2 to get to 3 and so on. We've had examples in the past where third party candidates hit close to 10%, and when that level hit and the high level corrupt goons in the R and D parties got scared, and with the help of the compliant media demonizing or outright ignoring those alternatives and hijacked congress keeping the voting regs tilted in favor of the same two parties, it dropped back down. And the media IS complicit, they only "allow" the two major parties in the so called national debates. The league of women voters dropped sponsorship of the debates over that stance and being forced to acquiesce to some other shenanigans like scripting in advance, they refused to participate any longer and called it a "fraud on the american people". The big corporate media should have had the integrity and balls to do exactly the same at the exact same time, but being mostly controlled tools and way more a propaganda arm of the establishment than being independent journalists, they didn't.
In other words, I categorically reject the notion that casting the ONE vote you have for who you really want is a waste. Maintaining that criminal gang duopoly by spending your one vote-and that is all you have realistically- on it is the only true waste (that or not voting at all) if you really don't want that criminal duopoly to remain in power. I know I have a clear conscious, been voting third or alternate party for decades now, and I can say I don't vote for the status quo of corruption and malfeasance in government as "business as usual".
If you vote for one of those back room and media picked for you political sock puppets. no matter what your reason if it is anything except really wanting that particular doofus...that's it, that is who you voted for and you are affirming their continuance of corruption and malfeasance. It doesn't matter what you think in the back of your mind, what matters is that you personally gave them a signal that what they are doing is perfectly fine. If you don't want to do that, then don't, and it is that simple.
The more people who are not made artificially afraid of that the better. I refuse to be intimidated by this threat of "wasting your vote", because I've been around long enough to clearly see the only major difference with those two criminal gangs is which of your pockets they want to pick first, and which of our born with rights they put at the head of the list to infringe on. I just slap refuse to vote in the affirmative for either of those bogus alleged choices.
While Libertarians are pro-ownership, in theory they should not be PRO-IP. For example, instead of Patent laws, Libertarians should support the inventors having trade secrets. This would be in keeping with the Libertarian focus on the free-market.
Patents are certainly a government imposed restraint on the free market, which goes against the rest of the beliefs.
That said, copyright would be more complicated, especially since individuals can hold copyright as well as corporations. Almost all Libertainans would agree that copyright law could stand to be reformed, but what the end result would be like is definitely subject to debate.
Libertarians should probably be PRO-Trademark. The restraints trademarks place on trade are pretty trivial, but they allow the free market to work well, in allowing companies to differentiate their products, without having to worry about a competitor passing off inferior versions of the same product using the same name. Trademarks by design have basically no impact on personal freedom, so everything seems good there.
But unfortunately all of that is what libertarians in theory should believe and stand for, which may differ from what they really do stand for.
The MAFIA stands for artificial value. Exactly what got us all in this financial crisis...
What, you think Libertarians are all about liberty?
Next, you'll be telling me you think Scientologists are all about science!
... As long as we practice one-man-one-vote the system will swing to a two-party system. You only get to choose from a menu of two ...
That's only true if you keep thinking that way. If you think your vote only counts to elect an official in the current election, then you'll always be caught in a two-party system. If you vote for the better candidate in one election, knowing that your candidate probably won't win, you let others know that this candidate has support. In the next election, more people may be willing to support the better candidate.
Of course congress and the administration are going to be pro riaa that's who helps get them elected.
What needs to be understood and apparently is not, is that it is not that the riaa is coming after people, it is how they are doing it and what they are doing once they "find" someone (ie - exorbitant damages).
Copyright infringement is wrong as is charging $3000 per song, and illegally cracking into someones computer to determine if they are infringing on your copyright.
The riaa have the right to protect their ip but they do not have the right to run roughshod over the rights of us citizens that is the governments job.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
>Swiss Libertarian party
Unless that's the actual name of an US party, please don't make the mistake of comparing European political ideologies with the same-sounding US ones.
After all, the democrats are "left" and the republicans are "right" although the democrats would have a hard time scoring anywhere near "center" (let alone left of that) among most European states.
If I ever met Ron Paul in person, this is something I would like to ask him about. Even though Libertarians are pro-property (copyrights and patents are in the Constitution iirc), he at the same time is very much against corporate welfare (voted against bailouts) and corporate fascism. So this new fangled IP (intellectual property) may not be so cut and dried.
I have a feeling he would have voted against all the copyright extensions and patents back in the day were not so bad when they protected implementations vs. now which is "intellectual property" vs. methods, thoughts, whatever, etc.
While I have sympathies to the pirate bay, a lot of it is just people demanding free shit which is a form of welfare if instituted on a public level. I enjoy using google books to find books and think fair use should extend to that although I don't demand the entire book for free.
One should remember while libertarians uphold private property rights, there is a real and distinct difference between private property vs intellectual property.
same as the old boss. I hope the media companies aren't the new big oil companies when it comes to government connections. Either way, it looks like all of Obama's promises about not being under the influence of lobbyists are going to be empty ones.
while it may look like a choice of rice and chicken versus chicken and rice, until you can get the menu to expand you pick one of the two or you don't eat.
What can someone do to expand this menu other than vote third party and volunteer for a third party campaign?
Revolution.
The best way would be to change the way we vote to allow people to vote for as many candidates as they want (but only one vote per candidate), then just take whoever has the most votes and they win. That way, no votes are wasted, and the most popular candidate still wins. Too bad people are too stupid and would never understand the difference between "vote for multiple candidates" and "vote multiple times".
You might want to read up on how elections are decided. Who you vote for only counts if the electorate agrees with you. Guess what? You have no say-so in who they are. Ergo, your vote doesn't really count unless you can decide who is on that group. The only chance you have to get a Libertarian on the ticket is to vote more of them in local offices. You won't do that until you vote Libertarian candidates into office. Republicans and Democrats are pretty much the same, as has be shown by Obama. Your only real option is to elect someone from a different party. None of them are the best choice, but the Libertarians seem the best bet to me with their stance on personal freedom and minimum government.
This is just another example of the very sage saying:
"Power corrupts"
No matter how altruistic a person's goals or aspirations, once they are placed in a position of power, the chances of them remaining uncorrupted are very small.
There are some who believe that wishing to run for a political position should immediately disqualify a person from holding such a position.
Our politicians should be selected like your jurors -- from a pool of people recruited at random and vetted for suitability.
Usually in politics, the words "in theory" mean "in my delusional world".
Despite what you think the libertarians ought to be, a majority of them are on record as pro-patent and this is the mainline stance of the party. Of course they throw in a line about how they are "concerned" about abuse of the system but never a concrete suggestion for reform (just like every other politician). For some reason, slashdotters believe the libertarians but not the others. Must be an underdog effect.
I've never gotten a good answer from an L to this question: if the government is too incompetent to tax us, why are they competent enough to grant 17+-year monopolies on ideas?
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
What? In politics maybe, but not the libertarians I know.
Private property is the solution to limited resources, and modern intellectual property is not limited in any sense.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
False - though you may not gain executive power, you still can win voices that can be heard and votes in the house and the senate.
--
How can you get rid of corruption if people rather vote for who they think will win rather than what they believe in?
IRV - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
If Minnesota used that system for voting, we'd have a legally appointed Senator by now.
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
They only won't win if no-one votes for them. That's sort of how elections work.
The motion filed by the DOJ claims that neither side's counsel opposed the motion.
Probably a grudging acceptance that is mandated by federal law, but some insight into how these motions work would be nice.
Are you sure? France, Italy, Israel and Australia, all have one-man-one-vote systems just like we do, and they have so many active political parties that it's almost impossible to form a government that isn't a coalition. Of course, they also have proportional representation to a greater or lesser extent, and that means that the tiny parties, with just a few votes, have a disproportionate amount of power because if they don't get their way, they pick up their marbles and go home, killing the government's majority.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Perhaps this might be the thing to spark a true third-party movement in the USA?
Yes, the immense dissatisfaction that the american public has with the Obama presidency will spark off a independent party revolution, and both major parties will be shut out in the next round of elections. Either that, or a bunch of nerds on the Internet will just get pissed off over a relatively minor ruling on IP law.
Even if the voting laws magically changed overnight, Obama is going to have to screw up pretty badly to not be in Washington for the next eight years. The GOP is behaving like a pack of drooling idiots, and it doesn't look like they are going to shape up and get back in the game anytime soon.
If a third party is going to be created in the next few years, it isn't going to be dissatisfied Democrats, its going to be conservatives that are pissed off at the neocon fuckups that are alienating the voters. This will splinter the conservative base, and help keep Obama in office until 2016.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The thing about libertarians is that Ron Paul sucks.
From reading Slashdot, I have deduced that Libertarians are like Republicans, only without the empathy and concern for their fellow man.
It's really depressing that so many people are this stupid. Every argument against voting third party eventually boils down to "third parties can't win" which completely misses the point.
If you're voting against what you really want just so you can brag that you voted for the winner, then you're doing it wrong. Do us all a favor and stay home next election day.
Maybe not
Has the EEF requested a meeting with Obama and Biden to discuss this with them? They really should do so. Whining on the web will not change a thing about this.
Copyright extortion here I come. $ 750 just for the asking.
The Congress endorses it.
The Executive endorses it.
The Judiciary can't be far behind.
Of course I will have to trash a lifetime of moral values, but I am sure I can get a new set by emulating the RIAA and Politicians. /sarcasm
"The candidate won't win."
1. They will if they are voted for
"You'll only peel votes from a Republican."
2. The "popular" republicans are just as wrong as the democrats right not. Real Liberatarians don't want them to win either.
Some of them are scarier than the devils we know.
3. But they make sense. All of this other bull clearly isn't working.
Ron Paul 2012!
Do us a favor and vote for one of the two candidates most likely to promote liberty.
That's where Diebold comes in ....
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
Godfuckingdammit
By helping the RIAA and other respectable organizations like it, Barack is bringing Change and Hope to America. And with over seven additional years of presidency left, he's only getting warmed up. Enjoy! Bwaahahahahhhahhaaahhahhahhahha!!
I'm sure the fact that he's a former wrestler / actor / radio and television talk show host had nothing to do with it...
He could have been a Republican and won that election. He's Jesse Freakin' Ventura.
I suppose it's possible for the independent party to win in the future, provided they can find a famous enough celebrity to run... but I wouldn't bet my ever-shrinking stocks on it. No Independent Party candidate has been elected president since George Washington, and I don't expect that to change in the next few centuries.
Oh yeah, and Jesse turned out to be a pretty crappy governor.
Revolution.
Dance Dance? Or Wii? If you mean armed rebellion, how is that a viable option with the U.S. Armed Forces as strong as it is?
They won't win the presidential election- not now.
But they might if we can put a few in the state legislatures, then the house, and then the senate.
There's no point voting for the major parties. They're going to win anyway.
Property is theft.
I also voted for a candidate who understands that the Government's role isn't to diminish itself small enough for Grover Norquist to drown it in a bathtub and that regulation of markets is a good thing. Sure, legal pot, no Taxes/IRS and "liberty" as it's defined by libertarian wackos, sound great, but let's work in the real world. We had that. And it went all wrong. Booms and busts. Bank failures, market failures, depressions, recessions, all happen independent of regulation but the effects are made much *much* worse when there is nothing there to keep the market from deciding to shit it's collective pants.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
From reading Slashdot, I have deduced that Libertarians are like Republicans, only without the empathy and concern for their fellow man.
Well shoot from reading Slashdot, one could deduce that women are like cars but without mufflers.
You're thinking small. Why miniaturize the laser, when we could instead enlarge the sharks? -John Searle
There is no condition of novelty for copyright. Copyright law allows for independent creation of identical works. Of course it's unlikely, but if you just so happened to write or compose a "substantially similar" work as someone else, and it's clear you never had access to their work, you have not infringed.
The whole point of the case you cited was that George Harrison did have access to Mack's original work. As Owen says:
Did Harrison deliberately use the music of He's So Fine? I do not believe he did so deliberately. Nevertheless, it is clear that My Sweet Lord is the very same song as He's So Fine with different words, and Harrison had access to He's So Fine. This is, under the law, infringement of copyright, and is no less so even though subconsciously accomplished.
If Mack's song had never received the airplay it did, Harrison could have argued that the similarity between the two was entirely coincidental.
BTW, if a passage that is substantially similar to a published article shows up in an essay I write for school, it would probably be treated as plagiarism, even if I did it subconsciously.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
most certainly was a whore.
(emphasis mine)
personally, I'm for negative voting
it totally ignored all of the authorities and arguments that had been made by the Free Software Foundation in its brief
Now, I'm not a lawyer, and I confess I haven't dug through the briefs. Leaving aside the question of why the White House is involved in this at all, this line confuses me.
First, if the WH's brief concedes that statutory damages are subject to excessive damage review, I don't know why they would address the FSF's argument further in that regard.
Secondly, if the administration cited SCOTUS and Circuit Court rulings, why would they need to address law review articles and District Court rulings? I'm under the impression that the higher courts trump the lower ones. I'd suggest, again with little knowledge of the matter, that the FSF failed by using weak citations. In an argument on Constitutional grounds, I have trouble seeing where the lower court rulings and journal articles should have more weight than a higher court ruling on a general case, even if the subject matter is more directly related.
Any insight into this from someone who's read the briefs and, ideally, studied some law would be appreciated.
Returning to the matter of the White House's involvement at all... guk. This seems to me to be, simply, beneath the White House. There's no reason I can see why they should feel they have an official interest in the matter. This should frankly be true when it comes to any Constitutional law decision of the courts; their job is to obey the big C as the courts interpret it, not to attempt to influence this. I've long held that the executive branch should show no interest in legal - especially Constitutional - interpretation beyond enforcing, obeying, and occasionally clarifying it.
It is interesting that the Administration is described as being a "tool", and not only that, but of being tool of an institution.
This twisted rhetoric not only ignores the the essential fact that institutions are tools of people, but also denies the possibility, even probability, that the RIAA effectively represents at least some of the opinions of the President.
To put it another way: the RIAA is a tool of people like myself who want to see aggressive promotion of intellectual property rights, and with only minor regret, accept the minuscule number of strong-handed actions being used to oppose the masses who have been pretty much thoughtless about the merits (or even demerits) of intellectual property theories/practices.
Slashdot is an endless forum for knocking RIAA practices, declaring them as being ineffectual at best and evil at worst. But by my own observations, I see the typical person of 2009 actually considering the legality of their media consumption, and even having a preference for legal practices (even though they still commonly engage in violation of intellectual property rights). As I recall, these legal considerations were typically non-existent in Joe Q. Public 8 years ago. The shift in attitude is not a result of increased virtue, schooling, nor for sure because of the advice of Slashdot pundits. It is, quite simply, some semi-intelligent byproducts of awareness that comes from the buzz surrounding the irrational fear of being prosecuted, even though the likelihood of that happening is so small as to be safely ignored.
Music distribution is flourishing. Artistic variety is flourishing. Consumer cost is dropping. Consumer access is rising. And intellectual property awareness is on the rise too. Those are all good things.
Enjoy flogging your bogeyman (read: the RIAA). He is my tool.
How can you get rid of corruption if people rather vote for who they think will win rather than what they believe in?
By voting for the liberty-seeking candidate of the likely to win choices.
This post implies that Republicans posses empathy and concern for their fellow man and is therefore flawed. Other than that, spot on.
I'm a fan of two different book series. I'm also a fan of my Sony Reader. One of the series provides reasonably-priced electronic copies of the novels. The other one doesn't. Guess which one I've stopped reading(and by extension purchasing) entirely? Amazon gets it. Google gets it. Even Sony gets it. I suggest you get it.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
The award of statutory damages means that your actions have consequences even when their cost can't easily be quantified.
That is too important a principle for the government to surrender it lightly.
The geek needs to think carefully - very carefully - about the alternatives. The use of statutory formula to calculate damages may dramatically limit his exposure in other cases.
That's a problem... at the national level. What needs to happen is people need to stop focusing on Washington and focus on their own back yard. Vote out local/state Reps/Dems; Weaken their community from the ground up.
You can't stop this in one fell swoop come an election year.
No sig for you!!
There will never be a point in voting Libertarian.
1) The candidate won't win. 2) You'll only peel votes from a Republican. 3) Some of them are scarier than the devils we know.
Show me a libertarian who has a snowball's chance in hell of winning, and I'll vote for him. I didn't like all of Ron Paul's stuff, but I liked a lot of it. Damn the major parties, full speed ahead.
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
3 months ago, those 2 and 3 DOJ lackeys worked for the very organization on which behalf they're intervening.
If the administration were serious about that whole lobbying conflict of interest line they touted in the beginning, the DOJ would quietly side-step this one.
They're not, showing that the whole entertainment lobby is untrustworthy.
I've said it before, but this proves it, those appointments were just plain stupid. Whomever Obama chose to vett those picks was not aware of the truth, damn truth, or actual truth in that matter.
That they were qualified to work those posts may be true, but the appointments having the integrity and loyalty to serve is just truthy.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Unfortunately, that ends up being pretty close, though not on purpose. The problem is that there are fundamental inequalities in the world. A Libertarian position would be ideal if that were not the case, but as soon as you have one subset of the people (or corporations or unions or...) that have greater power and control due to their financial position, any legal system that does not protect those who are less fortunate/powerful from abuse by those people who are more fortunate/powerful is a system doomed to increasing that inequality until the two ends have nothing in common with each other, which almost inevitably leads to a revolutionary war, historically speaking.
That's why laws that attempt to create a fully free market economy end up wrecking the economy. The individual consumer is relatively powerless compared with a corporation, and without protection against monopolization, collusion, and other anticompetitive actions by those corporations, the consumer gets screwed, but is essentially powerless to create new competitors because of the inherent inequality in the money supply and the huge capital needed to create a competing business in all but the narrowest, most naturally local industries.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The government can't suade how the judiciary will decide, and in fact, in criminal trials they are nothing more then one of the two petitioning parties, and in civil suits they are nothing more then third parties, at best amicus curiae...
if the judges have spines, that is.
The way some of you are discussing this leads me to believe you have very rigid beliefs about what makes one libertarian; rigidity that I don't see associated with other parties/political theories.
Do all democrats believe one thing? Do all democrats truly represent democracy well?
Do all republicans truly believe in a true republic? Shit, Lincoln was a republican, compare his politics to that of the GOP of today...
And the guy that brings up Ron Paul makes my point, because Ron Paul wasn't a libertarian candidate; he's a republican (even though he holds a lot of core libertarian values).
Basically, in this day and age in America the party a candidate associates his/herself with doesn't mean that much, in that it certainly doesn't mean that that person holds to an encyclopedic manifesto of party beliefs and positions - it's not like it used to be....people seem to have this idea of libertarianism that is rigid and sounds like an encyclopedic definition, (EG a definition of theory, but not of practice) - that any candidate who is a libertarian either wants to put everything up for sale or is crazy and can't win - I think that many people hold libertarian values, and from the years I have spent on Slashdot I would say that a large number of the people who comment here have a strong libertarian bent (not necessarily the libertarian party, but libertarian as in beleiving strongly in personal freedom).
My feeling (especially in these times) is that with any school of thought, you should take what you want, what you believe - and leave the rest...Of course, the media and the government don't seem to like this, because they want people to be easily pigeonholed and thus easily manipulated....
About right now I find it hard to believe that the US would not be better off had someone other than Obama or McCain been elected - I'm not saying any candidate is perfect, but certainly had Ron Paul won we would have someone who isn't in the pocket of big business and big money/industry and someone who does more than provide lip service to respecting the constitution.
As has been said many times before, until we get away from these two big money political parties there isn't going to be any real change; and not only that, things seem to progressively be getting worse for just about everyone.
"Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost." -- John Quincy Adams I think many so-called Libertarians these days would feel more closely allied with the Constitution Party, which supports enforcing the borders and is pro-life. The Libertarian stance is for open borders and no restrictions on abortion.
So if I voted libertarian instead of Obama, how does that HELP Obama?
Living in a state for which the vote outcome was definite from the beginning, I felt it would be better to wait until I saw that this kind of thing Wouldn't happen, before I started in with the quasi-religious chanting of anyone's name.
I think it's premature to expect all officials to tow the Obama line. Don't forget that the Bush government had 8 full years to "recalibrate" officialdom to its liking (which was amply demonstrated by Europe having to read MS the riot act instead of the US), I doubt you'll be able to see any change for at least another 2..3 years.
Having said that, nothing wrong with getting questions asked. What the RIAA has been doing is IMHO subversive and that needs to be stopped, DoJ in tow or not.
Insert
...the campaign and the actual end direction of the Obama admin, they will find another word to use meaning bait and switch.
Obama, really should be careful to be genuinely fair, otherwise he only puts more weight on the public camels back.
Otherwise its gonna break and the civil out break against the government that has been analyzed by economists and reported as a real possibility, will happen. Its predicted to happen next year.
The current laughability level is that of what it was before the Soviet Union collapsed, bu the laughability of this at one time, did not stop it from happening.
Even I find the map laughable but tax payers are getting very tired of footing the bill for billionaire bull shit.
Read the Declaration of Independance for an example or awareness of the public.
"Approval" voting is a little easier to explain to people, while still having a lot of the beneficial behaviors of IRV.
Do us a favor and vote for one of the two candidates most likely to promote liberty.
There is no significant chance of either of them doing so.
People thought if they could distract him with politics he might stop acting.
Actually, I would expect most libertarians to be in favor of only limited intellectual property protections. Copyright, patent, and trademark laws are the very essence of government manipulation of the free market. When the government arbitrarily sanctions monopoly power through intellectual property laws, it creates artificial scarcity where there should be none. This raises the prices of goods and services for all Americans, and limits true innovation. It also puts Americans at a competitive disadvantage, because our competitors don't share our draconian intellectual property laws and therefore can operate at lower cost.
Certainly the game is rigged. But if you don't play, you can't win.
if you just so happened to write or compose a "substantially similar" work as someone else, and it's clear you never had access to their work, you have not infringed.
True, avoiding access gets one off the hook. But I don't see how avoiding all access to all non-free music can be a viable strategy. Commercial FM radio and the background music played in shops have the effect of "tainting" everybody with access to major label copyrighted works.
If you think that IP theft is the reason people are reading less, then you just don't get it. People are reading more. They are just reading more electronic content on the Internet, and that is supplanting their book reading. They aren't getting electronic copies of books, though. They're reading CNN. They're reading Slashdot. They're reading Digg. They're reading xkcd.
It's not theft of IP that is causing the downfall of books, but rather the cumbersome nature of books themselves coupled with a rapidly dwindling attention span resulting from the proliferation of blogs, the proliferation of text messages full of short little bits of text that are barely long enough to convey a complete thought, the replacement of in-depth newspaper articles with short little sound bits on TV news shows, and the increasingly hectic pace of modern life.... People are gravitating towards content that is brief in nature because they've gotten used to that. It should be no surprise, then, that books don't sell as well as they used to in light of the changing entertainment style of the modern public.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Yeah, it says that in the Declaration of Independence. However, the basis and underpinnings of all US law is the Constitution. Two different critters.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=12121417
Or even with mufflers.
The fact that the idiotic parent got modded "+5 insightful" only proves that there are a lot of retards on slashdot. The USA *was* libertarian prior to the Great Depression.
[CLUE: It didn't work out at all, hence the Great Depression ]
The problem is as soon as the libertarians get into power they'll be in the same pocket. In fact as soon as they get CLOSE to being into any sort of power they will be.
Also the core ideology is well off in fantasy land.
What's so silly about 'some of the alternative voting schemes where if you don't like the candidates your vote gets distributed around until your least-objectionable candidate gets it'?
There is a difference between being pro IP and being pro RIAA. A true pro IP stance would ibvolve the DOJ getting involved when independent artists with no money get their crap stolen by a big magazine or the like. The current setup of IP law favors only those with big money, and the DOJ is helping those who can already help themselves, instead of small fish.
Where is the DOJ action over Ebaum's World stealing things from Newegg artists? This is pure industry subsidy, not any attempt to enforce copyright.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
There will never be a point in voting Libertarian.
1) The candidate won't win.
2) You'll only peel votes from a Republican.
3) Some of them are scarier than the devils we know.
There is always a point in voting for the person you would actually like to see in office.
1) I don't vote to be on the winning team. I vote for who i want to see in the position. Independents will never be able to win if you keep voting against people instead of for people.
2) This one is ridiculous. If you are voting for the Libertarian, you clearly dont want the republican in office, so how are you peeling a vote from the republican? If i dont want any of the people running in office, i dont vote for any of them. The lesser of two evils is still fucking evil.
3) I dont vote for scary libertarians.
i do not hold a political party affiliation. I'm not advocating voting libertarian. I'm advocating voting for anyone, regardless of party, that you think would be good in the position.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
At which point the compromises that they will have to have made, combined with the "established tradtion" of the party will ensure that they are just another flavor of the same thing we have today. Politicians are politicians. You don't get elected by the majority of a nation as big as the US without being mostly middle of the middle, except in years when it's fashionable to be left or right of the middle of the middle.
The fantasy that all we really need is "everyone to go out and vote libertarian" ignores the fact that there is a reason they don't right now. And that reason is, regardless of how strongly the 'true believers' have convinced themselves that this is the path, most of us don't agree.
You want a nation to vote libertarian? Screw the fucking elections and actually work from the ground and convince us that libertarism isn't just another pipe dream.
When did we have this? If you're thinking pre-1912, I can categorically say that perhaps the US was better off with a small government, no Federal income tax, an isolationist foreign policy, and not a whole lot of military presense outside of our own hemisphere.
So, answer me this. What's so criminal about smoking a bowl in the privacy of my own home, zoning out in my recliner and vegging out on TV after snacking on everything in my fridge? Who gets hurt?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Only two candidates? Are you so fucking retarded that you can't make a choice from more than the two that are presented to you by the MSM?
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
To take a lesson from history, the American Progressive Party never won a presidential election, but took enough votes from the Rep/Dem parties that both parties began to adopt elements of the Progressive platform.
compared to some of the fine Democrats and Republicans like....mmmmmm....the Governor of Illinois?
There, FTFY.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
oooooooh! Good one!
I would rather help vote someone into office that I don't hate, than vote for my first choice and see the candidate whom I dislike the most receive the popular vote.
You can vote for the underdog if you want, but if you do, you might just get burned.
Yep. States first, then their federal reps. Congress has always had more power, anyway. That's where we want our alternate-party candidates. A federal legislature that consisted of more-or-less equal parts Republican, Democrat, Green, Libertarian, and Independent would do a lot better at representing the public interest.
The corporations and unions wouldn't be half as powerful if there weren't a lot of politicians around, who could give them hand-outs. Less politicians, more oversight, less corruption. Every libertarian I know of favors less politicians and bureaucrats. Also I would love to know which the attepts to create a fully free market economy are. In my experience it seems like most every major economic downturn, starts in industries with clear government ties. Banking, military, oil. Banks' license to in essence print money, might be 'pro business', but it isn't 'pro freedom'. It might be good for capitalists, but not good for capitalism. Unfortunately, a lot of people who can not differentiate between the two, have been put in charge of all our future.
John Carmack fan, browsing at +5 since 1999.
Of the banks.
Of the telcos.
Of the media.
But at least they're taking the defense industry to the cleaners, right?
For eight years we haven't been represented, and I'm not eager for a ninth, much less a twelfth or a sixteenth.
If you're voting against what you really want just so you can brag that you voted for the winner, then you're doing it wrong.
These days, people don't vote because they want a candidate, but because they fear being governed by them less than being governed by any of the others. Even though this may not be particularly uplifting, it is reality and a valid reason for voting, and until Libertarians understand this and become less scary-crazy, they're not going to get out of the fear category enough to gain a significant amount of votes. And in case someone thinks I'm Lib-trolling, the same is true of the Greens.
That is all.
No, no: you've got it all wrong. A Free Market will prevent/fix all of that...somehow.
Yeah, I don't much buy into that either. I support a free market at the small business level, but would just as soon see all corporate charters revoked and incorporation made illegal.
However, as a fair compromise, I'd support small private corps and co-ops. But none of this public shares nonsense.
Yeah, I know...keep dreaming, right?
The federal deficit is at a point where a future government debt collapse is guaranteed.
President Clinton: The United States on Track to Pay Off the Debt by End of the Decade
Negative voting just reverses the problem demographically; if you are on the side that has one favourable candidate, you'd only be able to decide against one of your unfavourable ones.
The thing about libertarians is that Ron Paul sucks.
From reading Slashdot, I have deduced that Libertarians are like Republicans, only without the empathy and concern for their fellow man.
Really? I'm concerned with my fellow man's liberty and freedom. I think Democrats and Republicans are concerned about their fellow man's money and property.
You're just being silly; you know he didn't mean that anyone should be given more ballots than the next person, but rather that the system of voting be expanded to not force the reduction of a complex political alignment into a single 'X'.
And what exactly is wrong with voting for your least-objectionable candidate? Seems like that is pretty much the whole idea...
So, answer me this. What's so criminal about smoking a bowl in the privacy of my own home, zoning out in my recliner and vegging out on TV after snacking on everything in my fridge? Who gets hurt?
Quite frankly, nothing. But if that comes with deregulation and non interventionist policies, then fuck that. Iraq *was* a mistake, but it's not the antithesis to American intervention which is making good on treaties and agreements which we're in. Bosnia and Kosovo are great examples of *why* we should do this. Yes, it still sucks there, but it takes time for countries mired in a history of conflict to recover. Often longer than the conflict that tore the country apart lasted. Libertarians hated the Marshall plan, but among libertarians, who among them drive Volkswagens and watch Sony TVs? Who among them listen to Kraftwerk or watch anime?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I think only the purest of libertarians believes in a fully free market. There should exist some room for compromise but the ongoing socialism is getting out of hand.
I'm not saying Democrats and Republicans are great stuff. Far from that. (Just look at Obama. :D)
rolfwind was using Jesse Ventura's victory as 'proof' that Independents do stand a fighting chance, but that argument is flawed, since he most likely would have won no matter what party he was affiliated with. 99% of the time Independents do not win, no matter how much more 'wholesome' they may or may not be than the Democans or the Republicrats.
That's why if the founding fathers were alive today they'd all be in Gitmo.
If you're fucked either way, why vote at all?
Like I said before, next election stay home. If enough people like you stay home, maybe the rest of us can have a decent election for a change.
Maybe not
Bank failures, market failures, depressions, recessions, all happen independent of regulation but the effects are made much *much* worse when there is nothing there to keep the market from deciding to shit it's collective pants.
I'd like to point out that the boom/bust cycles only really started after the Federal Reserve was created. Prior to that the only real influence on the economy was a major war, and I think we're done with those from a global perspective (just incessant minor conflicts, most of them started by us). It's a major Libertarian platform point for the abolition of the Fed.
Now, I'm not one to say that a completely free market is the way to go; I think it's a bit of twisted thinking that a society that runs on pure greed will function at all properly - but the Libs do have some good ideas, and giving them a run at the helm for a little while would definitely make for some changes for the better.
Also, trying to arrest an economic downturn just draws out the whole thing far longer than it needs to go. Better to let failing businesses fail: propping them up just allows them to continue failing for a longer period of time. It's very similar to the idea of pulling off a band-aid slowly as opposed to just ripping it off - it might hurt more, but it's over sooner. Also, it leaves a reminder for other companies not to screw up so badly, as opposed to leaving them thinking "Oh, it's OK if we completely and abjectly fail: the taxpayers will bail us out".
You didn't believe me when I told you Obama is just another politician like any other, no better and no worse. You've probably forgotten Bush's attourneys general already, but Eric Holder is definitely stamped from the same mold and you're really going to enjoy his antics for the next several years. You're also going to love the new old FCC, and of course Turbotax Timmy is busy destroying or giving away your wealth at the same time. Clinton's kept a low profile, but she's bound to bungle it soon and make you wish for Condi back (yes, really - she was the best of the Bush lot by a wide margin). Bottom line, this might be the worst administration since Grant's, and the guys at the top are not fundamentally better or smarter than the ones they replaced.
If you can manage to remember anything for as long as three years, please do. Then you can join me in voting for Ron Paul again. Or, you know, just vote for more of the same. Again.
I think that at least part of the reason many Libertarians are "pro property rights" is really that they're for reduced government control. In the case of real-world [physical] property, governments can usurp individual property rights by eminent domain, which Libertarians are often opposed to. Thus in those examples, "pro property rights" is really synonymous with "reduced government power".
Point being, I'd think that among Libertarians there would actually be strong opposition to strict pro-IP laws, as they increase the power of the government at the cost of a reduction of individual freedom. That reduction is [in theory] a trade-off for increased production of creative works. But with other issues Libertarians tend to require a much larger benefit to society in order to outweigh the cost of individual freedoms (think about the extremes to which this is sometimes taken, like those that are against the National Park Service). So I'd expect the same would apply here.
This is nothing less then corruption. The former RIAA lawyers should be fired and then sued into the ground for bad practice and intervene into due process.
As long as we practice one-man-one-vote the system will swing to a two-party system.
Somehow every other western democracy has a one-citizen-one-vote policy, and most of them did not swing to a two-party system.
It's not so much one-man-one-vote that does it, but districted first-past-post winner takes all that results in two party systems.
Proportional representation systems tend to work slightly better for allowing politics to shift according to voters preferences. But considering that such a gain for democracy would come at a price for the players in the current system it's unlikely to happen; it's simply more profitable both for politicians and lobbyists to have only two choices available.
Welcome to real life, hipsters. Democrats are confidence tricksters.
So in other words prohibition, the federal reserve, and pro corporate policies were somehow libertarian? That's funny but the federal reserve and prohibition were both created by progressives, not libertarians. The federal reserve and prohibition were two of the key causes of the great depression. Pro corporate policies were created by conservatives and progressives alike. Libertarianism, or classical liberalism not only avoids creating policies and departments that are unconstitutional, but also changing the constitution in ways that eliminates ones rights. Libertarianism is all about freedom and liberty.
--
A vote against a Libertarian candidate is
a vote to abolish the Constitution itself
Obama - Change (in the pockets of the RIAA) we can believe in. So much for Obama sticking it to the corporate mofos.
Show me a libertarian who has a snowball's chance in hell of winning, and I'll vote for him.
Substitute any third party for 'libertarian' above and your statement makes just as little sense.
What's the point of voting for someone who is going to win anyway? Might as well just stay home. Of course, the two major parties would have you believe that if you don't vote for a major party candidate, you're just "wasting your vote" -- which is utter bullshit. You're only wasting your vote if you vote for someone who doesn't support the policies you believe in. Yeah, your guy may not get elected, but at least you did your bit -- and if enough other people feel the same way you do (including rejecting the nonense about "wasting votes"), then your guy might actually make it.
Or at least put a big enough dent in the major parties' vote numbers to make them reconsider their policies.
-- Alastair
I know it's impractical for various reasons (is Apple in the same market as Dell?), but it sure would solve a lot of problems.
Got a perfect monopoly? Pay a 100% tax.
Just starting out? No tax for you!
A similar idea is taxing according to company size. (and yes, measuring size is problematic too)
Mergers would almost be a thing of the past. Every market would have numerous competitors.
Gotta keep the industrialists happy!
EXTREMELY corrupt? Compared to who?
It's not compared to who. It's compared to being honest and caring toward the citizens.
Are you really thinking, "Oh other governments are corrupt too, so it's okay if the U.S. government is corrupt?"
and voted for Ron Paul. Obama is just the same as any other politician, but worse, because he seems intent on seizing more power. His only good points are that he seems to be repudiating some of the nastier policies of the Bush administration, but I doubt he would argue that the executive didn't have the AUTHORITY to do what Bush did (if he did, he sure didn't get that authority from Congress or the Constitution), just that it was a bad policy.
Anonymous Bob - if you did vote libertarian all you did was help elect Obama
That's what the Republicans want you to believe. The fact is that the only thing that helped elect Obama was votes for Obama. There are plenty of issues (more social than economic) where voters might lean Democratic rather than Republican and might end up voting Libertarian because they can't stomach Democratic economic policy, just as they might favor Republicans on economic issues (or might have pre-Bush) but can't stomach their stand on some social issues.
-- Alastair
IP is actually a matter of considerable debate among libertarians -- at least the ones who write for the academic journals. Lately the consensus has been toward a narrower interpretation of intellectual property.
http://blog.mises.org/archives/001771.asp
that is exactly what democratc and republicans want you to do as well.
democrats LOVE when libertarians get all up in arms over the presidency, because the facts are, they steal more republican votes than they do democrat votes.
therefore, if more of the votes are not cast for the republican candidate, but are instead for a third candidate, the democrat candidate has a higher chance of gaining the simple majority needed to win that state and it's electoral votes.
Same thing when Nader was running in the past years, he stole more votes from democrat candidates than republican candidates, and thus had the same effect in reverse order.
The simple fact of the matter is, currently, there aren't enough people in the US who really honestly could give you compelling reasons for WHY they voted for the candidate they did.
Instead most are sheep who vote the way they do because of their upbringing.
Until the average american actually starts thinking about their vote, and using it as something more than a way to fit in with their current social crowd (i'm looking at all the 20 something retards that voted for Obama because their friends did, or their professors told them too, or any of a dozen other reasons, non of which had anything to do with his actual beliefs or stated positions), we will not have an effective government again.
instead we'll get what we have now, people who react to things after they happen, don't have the faintest fucking clue what the real average american thinks, believes all the hype about how great they are and how much they matter, and can live off the fat barrel supported by the acerage american for the rest of their lives.
WHY THE FUCK do we allow someone to sit in a government office for 50 years or more and work on the taxpayers dime, yet we feel the need to limit the President to 10 years?
personally, i think the very next thing that should happen in government is term limits for all legislative, judicial and executive branch employees.
that way, we dont end up with senators like Byrd, Kennedy, and the rest that are so fucking old and obsolete that they wouldn't know real america if it jumped up and grabbed them by their wrinkled old ballsacks and tasered em.
I;m sorry, but the ability of these people to stay in office so long that they BECOME SENILE AND DIE there is just wrong.
the people leading this country should be representative of those that WORK in this country, and until we have that, it doesn't matter what fucking party they belong too.
Libertarians are against laws, except ones that personally suit them.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Who are you to say who's doing it wrong?
If the guy that I voted for wins, and the guy that you voted for loses why should I switch to the way you do it?
This is not the case. Patents and copyrights are government backed monopolies and therefore anathema to any ideologically consistent libertarian.
This country has already been paid off and purchased by special interest groups. I cant find the clip, but it is sad and true.
Yet again, govt represents the people: if the govt is stupid, it is the people who brought it there. if people believe n all that bullshit
they are told...THEN THEY DESERVE THE GOVT THEY HAVE. It is representation of the populous after all...the lowest common denominator. I stopped voting not because i dont care it is because it does not matter. there are more stupid people than smart -- and as arrogant as it sounds, it is true. im always the minority not because i was born as one, as more because im intellectually removed -- i dont buy into bullshit, but the snakeoil salesman will always draw crowds while they smart people will never be heard, because they are not salesman.
In Soviet Russia there used to be a saying: .`
`If you are good in science you become a scientist,
if you are good with hands you become a worker
if you have no skills, you become govt
there will be no real change...never , was, will-- unless it somehow helps the status quo.
Now in a democracy, too, there are drones, but they are more numerous and more dangerous than in the oligarchy; there they are inert and unpractised, here they are full of life and animation; and the keener sort speak and act, while the others buzz about the bema and prevent their opponents from being heard.
And there is another class in democratic States, of respectable, thriving individuals, who can be squeezed when the drones have need of their possessions; there is moreover a third class, who are the labourers and the artisans, and they make up the mass of the people. When the people meet, they are omnipotent, but they cannot be brought together unless they are attracted by a little honey; and the rich are made to supply the honey, of which the demagogues keep the greater part themselves, giving a taste only to the mob.
Their victims attempt to resist; they are driven mad by the stings of the drones, and so become downright oligarchs in self-defence. Then follow informations and convictions for treason. The people have some protector whom they nurse into greatness, and from this root the tree of tyranny springs. The nature of the change is indicated in the old fable of the temple of Zeus Lycaeus, which tells how he who tastes human flesh mixed up with the flesh of other victims will turn into a wolf.
Even so the protector, who tastes human blood, and slays some and exiles others with or without law, who hints at abolition of debts and division of lands, must either perish or become a wolf--that is, a tyrant. Perhaps he is driven out, but he soon comes back from exile; and then if his enemies cannot get rid of him by lawful means, they plot his assassination.
Thereupon the friend of the people makes his well-known request to them for a body-guard, which they readily grant, thinking only of his danger and not of their
own. Now let the rich man make to himself wings, for he will never run away again if he does not do so then. And the Great Protector, having crushed all his rivals, stands proudly erect in the chariot of State, a full-blown tyrant.
Plato, The Republic
Full explanation: How we'll move into tyranny
Great empires like the USA are not conquered. They decay from within. We are corrupt because we have lost social consensus. To understand that, you will have to first realize that not all of the humanities are BS and that politics/philosophy is a discipline as structured as programming. Until you overcome that bias, it will all be Greek (heh heh) to you.
Futurist Traditionalism
When I wrote Saint Wellstone back in the day that I thought it was insane that the DMCA should impose a 5 year/$100,000 fine on playing a legally purchased DVD on a linux machine, his reply was that the DMCA was the right thing to do and he'd do it again.
Actually, I think Democrats are the worst. Republicans love them some oil and gas. Democrats love them some Hollywood.
I think the time for voting is really over at this point. In a few years we'll likely wish we were voting...
Revolution: Last time it helped temporarily. You need committed people with high values. And literally, you need to understand that what was true 200 years ago is not valid in today's world. And you do need to devise a way of keeping moneybags out of perpetual power.
What's so criminal about smoking a bowl in the privacy of my own home, zoning out in my recliner and vegging out on TV after snacking on everything in my fridge? Who gets hurt?
No man is an island, especially in a modern country.
I need you to be as productive as possible, because I share an economy with you. There are taxed to be paid, work to be done, etc.
My taxes helped pay for your education. That's a crummy investment if you turn into a paranoid rambling pothead.
Another thing I'm paying for is the cost of your health problems. When you abuse the emergency room and fail to pay, the costs get passed on to people like me.
No seriously. what CAN you do? Revolutions can't be performed by sheep, which is what most americans tend to be these days.
That would be classified as terrorism in this new america.
If your choices were McCain or Obama ... and they were ... and your preference would have been McCain between those two, but you voted for a third party for some make-yourself-feel-good-for-bitching-in-public purpose, then your vote is as responsible for the result as someone who voted for Obama. This is what our current voting system gives us. I don't like it ... but I don't like going to the dentist either.
1) No, voting 3rd party is not helping *either* major party candidate. It's a voter voting for who they believe in. As a corollary to this, I personally found both main candidates poor, I don't give a crap if people think I "helped" one or the other.
2) No, "As long as we practice one-man-one-vote the system will swing to a two-party system." is not true at all. Plenty of countries have 3, 4, 5 parties or more. The US just has a basically 1-party system right now (both parties want big spending, big government, and hate freedom.. they just quibble over the reasons why.. effectively making them a single party.)
3) The menu analogy falls apart... there are not 2 choices on most ballots, there are more, and I vote for the one that represents me best. I KNEW the libertarian would not win, but it's a waste of a vote to vote for someone I do not want in office. (I was GOING to vote for Obama, but when he voted for telecom immunity, it was OBVIOUS to me he was really no different than his opponent, and was not REALLY going to bring about positive changes.. which has so far played out.)
I think your analogy "rice and chicken, chicken and rice, or don't eat" does explain the US'es low voter turnout though -- if I was convinced I had to vote for the 2 main parties, I would not vote rather than vote Dem or Rep, and I think many, MANY people do take the option of not voting.
I would find it interesting if people had the Nevada option.. after getting sick of being "forced" to vote for like mafia types, they added a choice to all ballots of "none of the above". The person with the most votes still wins, but it sends a message when, in a 2-person race, instead of a vote of 55% to 45%, instead the vote is 33% "winner", 27% "second guy" and 40% "none of the above"... the winner can't pretend the majority wants him then. (This did apparently happen once in the 1980s... usually the "none of the above" vote is more like 10% though.)
I saw this one coming from the Obamma administration. Unfortunately the Democrats have always had strong links to the music / movie / TV industries, so any Democrat White House is gonna be their man on the hot seat. Any assumption otherwise would be like expecting a Republican White House not to appeal to their conservative Evangelical voter base, it's just not gonna happen. Bush made the Republicans unellectable for now, and being a two party state the Democrats were the default choice. Both parties are bought and paid for by corporate America too, which means the music / movie / TV industry have at least four years of fucking their customers even more than they could before.
I think Obamma can be good for the US in general, good for it's relations with other countries where Bush previously fucked them over but was never gonna be good in the whole RIAA / MPAA / DRM issue. At least you still have the courts and lawyers fighting the good fight, even if the asshats have a friend in the top seat. It's not like the President can send someone down to the court to deliver the verdict and bypass the judge.
FUCK OBAMA.
Goddamn marxist shit stain.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
If you actually read the court transcripts, you'd see that the court was strongly on the side of the defendants, and that the RIAA won simply by exploiting the ignorance of the defendants and forcing them into a settlement. From the very start, you can see that the judge is pleading with the defendants to defend themselves in court, rather than settling, and he sees the RIAA's practices as nefarious.
You forgot Navy SEAL.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
You guys believed O when he said his administration would be the transparent and free of conflict of interest? Instead it's the worst ever, but that wouldn't be a surprise if you looked at his past and where he came from instead of listening to his pretty teleprompted speaches. Those who voted for him are going to get exactly what they deserve in the next 3.7 years.
Jeff, is that you?
Go ahead, throw your vote away.
It isn't so much the one-man-one-vote system that's the problem, it's the one-district-one-representative system. In a system where only one office is being filled per election (say, a single representative of a congressional district), any number of parties will eventually coalesce into two, since this will consolidate resources and votes. Countries that have districts that elect multiple representatives at a time are far more likely to have more than two parties. This is referred to in political science as the N+1 theorem, where N is the number of offices that are filled in a particular election, and N+1 is the maximum number of major parties that will exist in that district. So basically, the only solution to the two-party system in this country would be to change the Constitution so that congressional districts elect more than one representative at a time. (While each state does have two senators, the problem still exists since both senators from a single state generally don't run in the same election.)
Typical American attitude at the moment. "Woe me, my country is going to implode and it's the most corrupt and worst place on the planet!" Fucking Americans, try living in some of these other places before whining about how bad your own place is.
In a country where most are armed and willing to play the big parties' game, you are likely to get killed before the government controlled army, which incidentally is also the most powerful one in the world, gets to you.
The problem of free democracies is that capitalism has reached into the government and legal systems when it should never have left the market.
Let's just say there is demand for absolute power and "the People" are willing or stupid enough to sell.
10 little-endian boys went out to dine, a big-endian carp ate one, and then there were -246.
democrats LOVE when libertarians get all up in arms over the presidency, because the facts are, they steal more republican votes than they do democrat votes.
That's because to a libertarian, Republicans are 90% evil and Democrats are 95% evil.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
How many days did it take to show that?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
You are an absolute moron. I'm sorry I can't sugar coat that for you.
Do us a favor and keep your mouth shut and your keyboard silent.
I'd happily pay you Tuesday for a biopsy today!
The +3 moderation of the parent comment is one symptom of the fact that people in the U.S. are in severe denial about the corruption of their government. They put forward a lot of excuses and changes of subject.
"The government is killing people? The government is helping banks steal taxpayer money? Oh sure, that's okay, as long as they don't bother me."
You, my unenlightened friend, have missed the point.
You have a vote and you are allowed to vote for whomever you choose. The end.
I may be scary-crazy, but at least I don't have to explain how I voted with some self-rationalizing screwed up logic.
I'd happily pay you Tuesday for a biopsy today!
I voted for the candidate who won't allow corps to continue their reign of terror against me, a citizen.
I don't give a shit about how small the government is or whether all the libertarian ideals come to fruition. I just want my government to start responding to me, a citizen and stop steamrolling me at the behest of these tyrannical organizations that seem hell-bent on destroying our nation.
You voted for a candidate who would happily let the RIAA (or the MPAA or whatever other evil organization is currently terrorizing our society) ruin your life, bankrupt you, and take away your rights. Congratulations you self righteous prick.
I'd happily pay you Tuesday for a biopsy today!
the great depression was caused by completely unregulated margin speculation in equities (i.e., buying stock for 5 cents on the dollar). When the market moved against heavily leveraged positions large holdings were under water in absolute dollar terms, which necessitated selling other equities, which caused their prices to drop, which triggered more selling, etc.
The current economic crap storm was caused by *exactly* the same phenomenon. The only difference is that after the great depression, margin buying of equities became regulated so the genius financial market traders found other vehicles to leverage 20 to one, among them, securitized debt (otherwise known as sub-prime mortgage securities). When the market moved against them, they were under water in absolute dollar terms, so they had to sell, which triggered more selling, etc.
In neither case did the current state of illegality of recreational drugs (alcohol in the 20s, pot, crack, etc. in the 2000s) have much to do with the financial market meltdown. Neither did the existence of the Federal Reserve, which did not cause the en masse speculative margin buying bubble and subsequent catastrophic chain reaction of selling .
But are they anarcho-capitalist or anarcho-syndicalist?
I don't like the word "Libertarian" since it's a blanket term for several groups of people that have very conflicting views.
Is this a tool holder or a Holder tool?
I suppose it is possible the Obama administration is paying off a promise to go after file sharers by filing a less-than-effective brief, which when it is unsuccessful will not piss off the millions and millions of file sharers.
Millions and millions. No politician can ignore millions and millions, be they voters or dollars.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
I'd like to point out that the boom/bust cycles only really started after the Federal Reserve was created. Prior to that the only real influence on the economy was a major war, and I think we're done with those from a global perspective (just incessant minor conflicts, most of them started by us). It's a major Libertarian platform point for the abolition of the Fed.
I don't like the Fed either, but if we give Congress, a body of people who are heavily influenced by the shift in political tides, direct control over interest rates, it would be pretty dangerous. Reform? Definitely. Abolishment? Not so much.
Now, I'm not one to say that a completely free market is the way to go; I think it's a bit of twisted thinking that a society that runs on pure greed will function at all properly - but the Libs do have some good ideas, and giving them a run at the helm for a little while would definitely make for some changes for the better.
Libertarians do have great ideas like, "Stay the hell out of my bedroom, I don't care what gays do. Never have, never will. Neither should you." It's the rest of their wacky, if it's not strictly in the constitution don't do it, ideas that make me worried. No FCC = I'm out of a fucking job.
Also, trying to arrest an economic downturn just draws out the whole thing far longer than it needs to go. Better to let failing businesses fail: propping them up just allows them to continue failing for a longer period of time. It's very similar to the idea of pulling off a band-aid slowly as opposed to just ripping it off - it might hurt more, but it's over sooner. Also, it leaves a reminder for other companies not to screw up so badly, as opposed to leaving them thinking "Oh, it's OK if we completely and abjectly fail: the taxpayers will bail us out".
I think not. Letting failing businesses fail forget that when they go, not only do THEY go but their infrastructure goes too. Jobs, exports, taxes, etc. Not only that, but when money dries up, it's got to come back into the system some how. Spending on infrastructure like schools, roads, etc. brings that kind of money abck into the system as well.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Please. I have met a number of real intellectuals - scholars in relevant fields of study, including economics, philosophy, communication, library science, and law. Not one of them would agree with the grandparent. At one conference session on the topic, a radical professor declared that copyright should be abolished. There was not a word of opposition. Only Friday night I listened to a lecture by a visiting economist (David Levine) saying the same thing from the not-so-radical perspective of neoclassical economics. I have been harshly critical of copyright, yet my professors often suggest I am too soft - that I underemphasize the extent to which copyright favors corporate control over the interests of artists and citizens.
I believe the head of the Swedish Pirate Party has said the brains in this debate are on our side. He is right. The evidence does not support strong copyright. The theory does not support strong copyright. Numerous government studies do not support strong copyright. When activists protest excessive copyright regulation, we find the other side does not even try to engage in rational debate. Often they say nothing at all. When they do respond, they ignore our critiques or they make ignorant claims. Recently a lawyer critiquing the film RiP: A remix manifesto was so ignorant as to suggest that today's Internet would not exist if programmers had not had copyright to ensure they were paid for their work!
I will not say there is no relatively objective scholarly support for strong copyright. There must presumably be some, but I have have not seen it[1]. I have encountered exactly one kind of supporter for radical copyright (other than those with no clue of the issues): people who for whom strong copyright is in their interest, or who believe (often mistakenly) that it is. No disinterested intellectuals, no one representing the public interest. The grandparent makes nothing more than a statement of interest and opinion, with no argument and no significant evidence.
[1] I do want to see contrary arguments - if you know of sound ones (by which I mean honest and competent, whether you think they are correct is another matter), tell me.
Anonymous Bob - if you did vote libertarian all you did was help elect Obama.
That's OK; I didn't use to understand the Electoral College either. In reality, McCain won my state 57% to 42% over Obama, so my vote for Bob Barr did nothing to help Obama except to minutely alter the popular vote - which doesn't matter anyway.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
You realize that if Libertarians get their way, corporate reigns of terror would get *worse* not better?
In a libertarian world, money speaks, and if you've got more money, you speak louder than anyone else. RIAA/MPAA/et al would *love* that. It would mean being able to do things that would be illegal in our current world.
We need rationalism, not this crap.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I don't know if people are intentionally ignorant.. or just plain stupid.
Distributing (what Tannenbaum is charged with) != downloading!!
And so.. in order to calculate the actual damages.. we'd need to know the actual number of times he distributed the files to someone else.. and there really is no way of determining that.
I am the maverick of Slashdot
I thought Libertarians were the private property advocates par excellence. Why would they not support strong IP, other than the fact that the government enforces it?
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
This is excellent advice. The only way to break away from the two party system is to use a voting system that picks the winner that most people want, rather than the one that simply wins a plurality.
While instant runoff voting is a great step in the right direction, a better voting system would be one that satisfies the Condorcet criterion. The Schulze method is one example of such a system. Satisfying the Condorcet criterion guarantees that the candidate who would beat all other candidates in a one on one election is selected as the winner (if such a candidate exists). The implementation of the ballot is the same whether using a Condorcet method or instant runoff voting (the voter simply ranks the candidates). Wikipedia's Tennessee capital selection is a great example of how a Condorcet method selects the winner with the broadest support even when instant runoff voting does not.
Yes, my name is Jeff.
(...?)
Property is theft.
From my POV, I really want C, and equally don't want A or B for various reasons (and I highly suspect most A or B voters feel almost the same but elect to hold their nose and pick A or B and then fall back on the "wishful thinking, this time will be different, lucy will really hold the football for charlie brown *this time*" theory, which seems rather pointless in this day and age given all the verifiable data that historical hindsight provides us now to look at)
It matters naught to me which of A or B gets in, as either will pick my pocket and infringe on some liberty, and between them they pick both pockets and infringe all liberties over time, with the trends always headed towards more thievery and more liberty infringing. (current example, old admin, R, billionaire bailouts for corporate casino gamblers who stiffed each other and millions of innocent "investors" with total made up looney tunes alleged "products", now the new administration, D, the big change! billionaire bailouts for corporate casino gamblers. Both administrations packed with insider casino gamblers, put in charge of the real economy. There's no practical diff I can see.)
Like I said, they, given their criminal priorities, have a facade of some big difference, which is on which pocket to start at, or which liberty to infringe on some list they have, but eventually they'll get around to all of them. So I'll stick with C (or D or E or...) and advocate other folks do the same.
Ya, it sucks rubber donkey dong, obviously dealing with the political soup nazi system we have (to keep with the restaurant analogy o_0 ), but my conscious is clear that I haven't voted for some cretin/political gang who will take not only my loot and freedom, but YOUR loot and freedom (and yours, and yours, and yours, and them folks over there, too), which is just as important to me. Certainly I have my priorities and issues, but chances are they aren't exactly the same as yours, but overall, if we don't look out for each others well being..well...there ya go, we don't. We sink. Buh bye, nice civilization while we had it.
History books are all full of failed empires and civilizations, and they mostly croak from massive greed and the lust for power over other humans, the loss of looking out for your neighbor (even if you and he differ on any number of things), the ceasing of caring for the weaker and more innocent, having megalomaniacs as leaders and criminal gangs trying to pass as official government. Corruption, rot, decay..entropy rules I guess...
How bad is it, how bad can it get? Can't say other than since I have been politically aware and paying some attention (more or less a half century now) it has steadily gone downhill across all the fronts. Not steady, it has spikes of occasional and temporary outbreaks of common sense and honesty and fairness and justice, but it falls under that old saying one step forward, two steps back.
IF we don't do things differently, and get back to the original idea of the individual is the sovereign and government is our employee and not our lord and master and trans national corporations are NOT the government NOR some unelected perpetual class of neo-royal aristocratic rulers (I thought we had that sorted out in the 1700s as a bad idea..) and only are made/kept legal when they follow our social contract of being of benefit to society (the other part of the original corporate charter idea besides "make profits" that the pirates and looters always have collective amnesia over)..then we are screwed. It could and probably will get fairly ugly, history teaches us that as well.
So my bottom line is..I won't vote for them fellers or that sort of system, it is binary for me, yes, no, there is no "maybe, if.." there that has any credible validity.
It works out about as well as my making similar decisions to not be a thief or crook, to not be a predator on other people, to not lie or cheat, etc. And ya, part of it is to feel good with yourself, to stay honest with yourself. I see it as simple normal ethics, nothing really strange or exotic about it.
I think crooked and corrupt government sucks, so I won't vote for it. Voting is not a very long nor involved process after all, taken as something you only do once a year or two or four, so it is easy enough to just vote the way you really want to and be done with it. As to my life in general, it's OK, I'm fine with myself.
The reality is, there is no compromise with chronic crooks and thieves and liars, they pretty much won't change (certainly not voluntarily,not usually anyway broadly speaking) and voting for them just reinforces their mindset that what they are doing is OK.
In a different field, medicine, with substance abuse and out of control addicts, helping them get a fix is called enabling, and it is usually recommended that people don't do that...because it doesn't work.
If you know someone is a thief and want them to stop being a thief, you don't fence their goods for them and think that will somehow magically change them into honest people. That would be quite illogical and borderline...nuts again. Crazy, stupid and crazy.
It is a very simple concept to grok. And I won't be an enabler of destructive and anti social behavior, which corrupt government can be loosely classed as.
Continued undermining of the social contract is a serious problem. Social collapse often happens when people no longer find the current regime in their interest, and simply stop supporting it. Every time the social contract is violated, as it is in the case of copyright, as it is with the bailouts of the financial sector, people turn away. I don't think the risk is that they will revolt, but that if there is a credible challenge to the existing system they will simply fail to act to preserve it. Most revolutions are the work not of the masses, but of a relatively small group. They are able to succeed when the population lacks the conviction to oppose them. Thus many Romans welcomed in the barbarians. Hitler was allowed to become chancellor even though most Germans did not support him. A minority in the American colonies was able to foment revolution. The Communists became a credible threat in China when the Nationalists failed to act effectively against the Japanese. And so on.
When the change happens, it is a phase change, not a gradual transformation. A dynamic system like a society follows a pattern. It never exactly repeats itself, it is in constant flux, yet it can be bounded. Most perturbations are not sufficient to break the pattern - but when they are, the system leaves the pattern, and stabilizes around a new pattern. Just as an economy can handle a lot of stress and maintain high employment, but with enough of a shock it can stabilize in a new depression pattern of low employment.
This is my relatively uniformed opinion - I haven't read enough in this area - so it may be tainted by superficial pop intellectualism. But it does worry me. Persisting with law that is neither supported not observed by the majority of the population serves to undermine the rule of law. Continued evidence of the deep corruption of the system wears away at support for it. The process may seem quiet, but it does have consequences.
Mind you, the Russian scholar you cite is operating in fantasy land. He thinks the American midwest will join Canada and Alaska will be annexed by Ruassia. I'm Canadian, and I can tell you that's just plain nuts.
You had legal pot?
Why, if true, that's probably the most coherent explanation for the ongoing crisis.
Slashdot readers are NOT LAWYERS!
Yes, pot was legal prior to the 20th century, and just a little afterwards.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
In a libertarian world, money speaks, and if you've got more money, you speak louder than anyone else
[citation needed]
It's really depressing that so many people are this stupid. Every argument against voting third party eventually boils down to "third parties can't win" which completely misses the point. If you're voting against what you really want just so you can brag that you voted for the winner, then you're doing it wrong. Do us all a favor and stay home next election day.
Try this one on for size:
A bipartisan system is absolutely necessary to ensure that the government elected into office is the government that represents the majority of the people (electoral vs. popular vote notwithstanding). Introducing more parties reduces "majority" vote to a fraction beneath 50%+1, meaning that an elected official would no longer represent the wishes of the majority. You might say that this is the price of having more flexibility in representation, but allow me to present a well-cited case study - ever wonder how an Australian government can try so hard to pass a national internet blacklist despite overwhelming popular disapproval? The current elect was elected into office by a well-intentioned minority group that just so happened to be the hegemon. Australia's government is based on the English system of parliament, which is the government that the United States tried to evolve past; it is why our government works more efficiently and better represents the people, because parties are elected by simple majority and not hegemonic representation.
If you want to reduce the effect of corruption in government, fix the corruption in the parties, don't just introduce a new one that's supposedly branded corruption-free. I'm all for voting on principle, I really am, but introducing reality into consideration is not "stupid", and your saying such is nothing but trolling. The reality is that slashdotters represent a very very tiny minority of the American people (those that are American). Yes, everyone here may support Ron Paul, but the nation's not going to. You want to get your issues out there? Run a candidate on the republican or democrat ticket that supports our initiatives and concerns, because as well-intentioned as Ron Paul may be, our nation's not going to support the legalization of marijuana or the switching of our economy to the gold system.
Business as usual includes systematic behavior of the government passing itself off as a democracy, but publicly holds its structure as a republic, and privately runs post-election decisions as a plutocracy.
People see this behavior as corruption, when in reality it's the logical extreme result of individualistic culture in a republic.
Before you reflexively mark me a troll for suggesting such a thing, think this through: The bottle-neck, or choke-point for decision-making in republics lies in the representatives, who in addition to having 'constituents' from their home region, are promoted to those constituents by large profit centers. Should the promotion money dry up, a position of power is now likely under threat, your very livelihood could vanish at the whims of some 'rich' individual(s). In the interest of living life easier rather than harder election year to election year, politicians make sacrifices of their constituents' interests for the profit center's interest, or as they put it in Washington, the 'hard' choices behind legislation. I doubt this is done consciously (in most cases), and certainly it is never articulated like this, but this does happen.
There's ways to fix it, but none (so far) are easy, and nearly all involve subcultures who aren't individualistic in their behavior. The incumbent system is not friendly to such radical change, so either people will put up or get fed up. Hopefully the fed up ones will be smart, and not get arrested for insurrection, but instead start their project outside the US to foster new values.
funny and true. In many other countries, you wouldn't even see this case go to trial - the head of the recording industry would have called the president, had the kid executed by the police, and the state-run media wouldn't be allowed to cover it.
Yeah, don't support instant runoff voting. Support range voting. It's better math.
lost some 20-40 million good people, hell knows exactly how many. "Nahui, nahui".
it's a utopian idea
guess how those usually work out
Fucking Americans...
I guess you aren't worried about the U.S. government killing people because no one in your family has been killed.
I guess you have never seen the photos of George W. Bush kissing a Saudi price.
I guess you have never read the book House of Bush, House of Saud, about how Bush and his friends and family took money to support the Saudis against the best interests of the United States.
In recent years, the U.S. government has carried corruption to levels never seen before: 1) A higher percentage of its people in prison than ever before in the history of the world. 2) More countries invaded or bombed than any other country in the history of the world. (24 since the end of the 2nd world war.) 3) More government debt than any other country in the history of the world. 4) More people killed during undeclared wars than any other country in the history of the world. (11,000,000 killed directly and indirectly in 24 countries.) 5) More money spent on secret surveillance than any country in the history of the world.
But most people don't know about this. Why? Because it's painful to learn, I guess.
At least some of the founders believed that corporations could, if left unchecked, become quasi-governments and similar threats to individual liberty. Thus Thomas Jefferson, for example, expressed the opinion that powerful multi-national corporations should be brought in check. That doesn't seem to be part of the modern libertarian agenda.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'd like to point out that the boom/bust cycles only really started after the Federal Reserve was created.
Demonstrably false. Central banks are absolutely essential in modern states. We have a euphemism for ours, but it exists and we need it.
Some fascinating history: J. P. Morgan was once known as the "Savior of the U.S." He used his own capital to rescue the U.S. Treasury twice, during the Panic of 1893 and the Panic of 1907. Now we have an accountable institution acting as lender of last resort, as opposed to depending on one wealthy (but possibly flawed) human being.
I think Friedman unwittingly started this meme, when he theorized that the Federal Reserve Act led to the specific crisis of the Great Depression (though most economists think he was wrong about even that). There is no evidence (and Friedman did not claim, afaik) that the "boom and bust" cycle (people used to call busts "panics") was smoother before the FRA.
More financial crisis fun:
More...
A case could be made that the Constitutional problems with a central bank simply represent a flaw in the Constitution. Trying to adhere to the Constitution in this regard has caused all kinds of problems. We seemed to have done okay with the nasty hack (the "Reserve" euphemism), though.
There is really no debate outside of the Mises Institute about the need for central banks.
Ron Paul sounded good, and he was a good guy, but he would have destroyed the US and taken the rest of the world with him.
Pro-selfownership does not necessarily mean pro-IP. Don't know where you got that from, but a lot of non-libertarians misunderstand self-ownership, so I'll give you a pass.
Wikipedia sums it up nicely:
Spencer, Herbert "Social Statics", c. XXV, "Poor-Laws"
GP probably meant Social Darwinism, which many /. Libertarians (and LIRLs) apparently embrace (whether or not they accept the term).
Every time you see someone post "Capitalism is Evolution", this is what they're really talking about.
It's toxic stuff, and I wish more Libertarians knew that Saint Mises himself rejected it.
Spencer apologetics don't move me, btw. Whether he was a Lamarckian or Darwinist is totally irrelevant, Hofstadter's analysis wasn't a statist conspiracy to discredit Libertarians, and all of the above have little to do with the facts about the beliefs of most Libertarians.
You just lost 90% of the people. Of course Andrew Jackson cribbed about tihs LONG ago:
In 1835, Jackson payed off the final installment on the national debt. He was the first and only president to ever do this. This debt was necessitated by the banks' issuing currency for government bonds instead of just issuing Treasury notes with such debt.
A few weeks after this, a man by the name of Richard Lawrence tried to shoot Jackson. Both revolvers failed and he was arrested and tried. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and after his release had been known to brag to several friends that wealthy people in Europe had put him up to it and promised to get him released if he had been caught.
"The Bank is trying to kill me, but I will kill it."
In 1836, Andrew Jackson said "By God, you are a den of vipers and theives and I intend to route you out", and he removed all the government deposits in the second Bank of the United States, and it collapsed. To get revenge, England suspended all American paper and caused the first depression in America, called the "Panic of 1837". During this banker instilled "Panic", the Rothschilds bought up American Securities at $.01 on the Dollar. This money was used to get the first "puppet" financiers and "Industrialists" off the ground. This was mainly J.P. Morgan, who was the Rothschilds "secret" agent" in America, as well as the Rockefellers.
Then the bankers went to work to start the civil war. Otto Von Bismark, the chancellor of Germany, who united the German states just a few years later, had this to say : "The division of the United States into federations of equal force was decided long before the civil war by te high financial powers of Europe. These bankers were afraid, that the United States, if they remained as one block, and as one nation, would attain economic and financial independence, which would upset their financial domination over the world". (Whew, quite a statement there!)
Jackson on the bankers:
The simple fact is the average american and even the average Slashdotter is a fucking moron and a tool of a societal marionette. No one thinks for themselves or questions authority. They all invariably seek out a master, be it the church, the democrats or the republicans, or some other stupid shit, they all invariably sign up to be ruled because they think nothing of themselves.
The world has the governments is has because most of the world is a partially educated fucking moron idiot.
You are both stupid and dangerous. Check out the fucking M3, and give me a fucking break.
http://www.nowandfutures.com/key_stats.html
You think that M1 means SHIT compared to M3? In fact, the M3 is so badly underreported and mis-reported (usually on VERY low esitmate side of the spectrum) that the FUCKING FEDERAL RESERVE STOPPED TELLING PEOPLE WHAT THE M3 IS.
Go fuck yourself, moron, truth-denying agent of destruction. You are a fucking traitor.
>>>2) If you are voting for the Libertarian, you clearly dont want the republican in office, so how are you peeling a vote from the republican?
You missed point number 4: You are voting to keep-out the Democratic bastard (Gore, Kerry, Obama) who's going to borrow 3000 billion dollars from China for stimulus, bailout, mortgage, and other borrowing bills* like some kind of white trash fool who buys a $400,000 house with just $50,000 a year income. I wasn't so much voting for McCain (although I did like him), as voting against Obama. I wanted to make sure he didn't win Pennsylvania's ~30 electoral votes. That strategy did not work this time, but it did during the previous elections. - Voting R blocked the D from getting into office.
Now when I lived in Maryland, I knew the Democrat was always going to win no matter what I did, so I either voted for Harry Browne (L) or simply did not bother. But when you live in a swing state, you follow the "keep the idiot out of office" strategy.
*
* It's a spending bill if you have money. It's a borrowing bill when you're broke and have to use credit.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Those in power have no reason whatsoever to change the status quo.
High government officials should forfeit their right to possession (ie, all their wealth) to the state as well as their right to privacy for the duration of their office.
In this way they would have only idealistic incentives to run for a seat and it would be extremely hard to corrupt or threaten the officer without making it public.
I disagree. Although runoff voting is okay, the REAL problems are the laws that block minor parties from being on the ballot. Those laws automatically add Reps and Dems to the ticket, but other parties like Communist or Constitution or Libertarian have to waste time collecting signatures in order to prove they're "worthy" of being listed.
That's just plain stupid. There's no reason why a ballot has to be limited - if ten parties exist, list all ten. Paper's cheap. If today's laws had existed in the 1800s, the then-minority Whig-Republican party would have never been allowed on the ballot, and Lincoln would have never been elected. But of course back then we still have freedom of choice.
People with power are smart. They know how to design the laws in order to Keep that power.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
If their ideas are so good they should start a proper party and get people elected in congress first.
Trying once every four years to get the big job without a national presence is simply not going to happen.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
First off, the rights in the Declaration exist above normal law. The U.S. Constitution cannot take-away inalienable rights - it can suppress them through force, such as was done with slavery, but it cannot take them away.
Second the U.S. Supreme Court, in its recent ruling about guns, declared that people have the right to rebel against their government, or overthrow it. After all the government is merely the employee; the People are the boss.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
black, white, yellow, red, purple
I vote purple, the only color that hasn't screwed something up yet, but I'm sure our first purple president will show us that they can do it too.
I hear people quote that line often. I completely agree with it, but it poses some interesting problems. Lets assume the average, middle class American has both the Government and major corporations working against him. Which is pretty true as it is.
First, you'd have to get a significant amount of the population off their asses. You'd have to convince them that Jet Skis, BMW's, and smartphones are not actually necessary. Because, lets face it, if you abolish the US Government.. those commodities will disappear pretty quickly (at least for a short time.)
Then there's the method. Let's say you go with civil disobedience (we should start with non-violence, anyways.) In our hypothetical situation, you get 30% of American workers to stop going to work (I cannot imagine what you would have to do to convince that many people to revolt.) Even then, there are loads of American families living below the poverty line, illegal immigrants, and people looking for part-time second jobs (for the service industry, anything else could be outsourced). What's to stop those companies from hiring those other people? Or changing their market? How do those people who left their jobs feed their families?
How about the violent option? OK, you (somehow!) convince enough Americans to take up arms against the government. The Armed Forces are going to be pretty reluctant to act against American civilians (Remember, the Army is staffed by people whose families/friends are revolting). So EVEN if you assume that the civilians do overthrow the government/corporations, what next? The dollar tanks, other countries and companies start getting rid of their American Dollars like they're bombs about to explode in their hands. The American economy tanks hardcore (worse than any depression America has seen) as the money flees the country.
What next? Does the UN step in to restore balance to the economy? How do we appoint a new government, with a new Constitution (assuming we have one). Whose job is that? Yours, because you led the Revolution? What about that angry mob of americans that want their gasoline and the SUV's to put it in? The ones that want telephone service? Power? Water?
I am not saying it's a bad idea, but it is not nearly as simple as that quote makes it out to be. 300 years ago, a revolution was as simple (ha!) as getting the rid of the armed troops in your country. Now, there are so many global implications (especially for first world countries, like US, the UK, Japan, etc...). The corporations are incredibly powerful, they have all the money, and money can indeed buy almost anything. I want to believe it is possible to change our government... but frankly, I don't know how such a task would even be approached.
Well shoot from reading Slashdot, one could deduce that women are like cars but without mufflers.
You know, you're not going to get very far around here with woman analogies. You're going to end up having to make analogies to explain your analogies.
sigs are hazardous to your health
REGARDLESS of the fact that they may lose. Voting for either Republican or Democrat because "no one else will win" is not only morally bankrupt it is foolish.
I would consider throwing away your vote foolish as well, and voting for who you want rather than who can potentially win, naive at best.
We don't need people to throw away their votes on Nader or Paul, we need our entire election system overhauled to allow at least something like more fair like IRV (yes, I realize that has its flaws, but it works a hell of a lot better than winner-take-all when it comes to exactly my disagreement with your quoted text).
Of course, we also need a drastically weaker federal government - Or as another poster pointed out, a more "distributed" government to make it resilient to DoS attacks by any particular interest group. "We pledge allegiance to the flag of these United States".
Let's keep our eye on the ball here. In my blog post, I discuss the contents of the brief. This brief is a big step forward for the defendants.
The RIAA has been arguing that it is "futile" to raise a defense that the statutory damages are unconstitutionally excessive. The Government's brief directly contradicts that position, and concedes that the statutory damages are subjected to a due process test for excessiveness.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
quoting the great obsfucator
Ask Me About... The 80's!
Even though Libertarians are pro-property (copyrights and patents are in the Constitution iirc)... So this new fangled IP (intellectual property) may not be so cut and dried.
If it's in the Constitution, how can it be so new-fangled?
Plus, formal patents go back at least 600 years to Florence, Italy, and informal patents (grants of exclusive use of an idea) go back more than two thousand years to Greece.
I have a feeling he would have voted against all the copyright extensions and patents back in the day were not so bad when they protected implementations vs. now which is "intellectual property" vs. methods, thoughts, whatever, etc.
When the first patent act was written back in 1790ish, it included "process" as a statutory category.
Intellectual Monopoly is not Property.
I'm a libertarian too, and I don't see that I could endorse any law which restricts someone else what he does with his property.
To quote http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/coffee.htm
"Intellectual property law is not about your right to control your copy of your idea. What intellectual property law is really about is about your right to control my copy of your idea"
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
I don't like the Fed either, but if we give Congress, a body of people who are heavily influenced by the shift in political tides, direct control over interest rates, it would be pretty dangerous. Reform? Definitely. Abolishment? Not so much.
There's this stuff called gold ...
The problem is not interest rates, it is the unfettered creation of fiat money by printing and government backed fractional reserve lending. http://www.relfe.com/plus_5_.html
It's the rest of their wacky, if it's not strictly in the constitution don't do it, ideas that make me worried.
I propose that amending the constitution as necessary is a more reasonable method of getting things done than abandoning the concept of the rule of law.
Not only that, but when money dries up, it's got to come back into the system some how.
Money only "dries up" because it is based on fractional reserve lending rather than being backed by commodities. Real money does not disappear from existence if people don't pay their loans. Only fiat money created through loans does that.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
I thought Libertarians were the private property advocates par excellence. Why would they not support strong IP, other than the fact that the government enforces it?
Speaking just for myself, because when you legally obtain something, it is your property, not any longer the property of the person who produced it.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
"No, I can't say the current US system is the best, but it sure sounds a lot better than most of the other governments out there. With a system like the UK or Israel has the US would tear itself apart in six months."
Umm...the UK is first past the post, just like the USA. You know not of what you speak.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
Well, I'm a (small "L") libertarian who mostly holds his nose and votes for Republicans. I think the LP is an express train to irrelevancy...so I long ago decided to cast my lot with the major parties. I voted for McCain in 2008 and was anything but enthusiastic about it. He's as much of a statist as Obama is. That said (and I'm sure I'll have tomatoes thrown at me around here for this), I agree with the Obama Administration on this.....as I duck for the inevitable incoming fire. Now, I think that the RIAA and similar outfits are fighting a losing battle. I think they'd be smart to take a step back, accept it as a foregone conclusion that their digitizable products are going to be mass replicated and distributed, and figure out how to make a go of it under that paradigm. Like so many others in changing environments, they put all their energies in trying to protect and preserve the old reality. And, like most others who do that, I think they're bound to fail. But property is property. And I couldn't look myself in the mirror if I said that their intellectual property is any less sacred than, say, a man's house or farm, simply because their property can be easily replicated and disseminated. Those of you who, like me, were outraged by the Supreme Court's recent decision that the takings clause of the 5th amendment did not prohibit the state from taking property from a private owner using eminent domain and transferring it to another private party should take some soul-stock here. I'm just as committed a techie as anybody else. But a society that doesn't have an appropriate appreciation for private property rights will, IMO, eventually fail.
You know usually I don't comment to the trolls as feeding them just seems to make them live longer but I can't stand this one...
George W Bush will be remembered as a great president in the future due to him actually make the difficult and further unpopular decision. If we truly were such a terrible imperialist nation that was only after the oil then I would LOVE to know why it is that we are still paying more money for our gas and oil than we should. And further more why it is that we haven't started proceedings to make Iraq the next US territory... no there has always been a plan to restore sovereignty to the Iraqi people it was never about the oil.
It was about the WMDs that were thought to be there and were provide by faulty intelligence that every government in the world had no problem agreeing was correct when presented to them... Yes the bush administration was sooo corrupt that they were completely transparant about where that money was going too..
Sorry, I disagree. And I say that as somebody who is every bit as turned off by both of the major parties as you are.
IMO, voting for any third party has the same political impact as not voting at all. It may be healthier for the soul, but my soul is not why I vote. I vote to have my say about public policy. And, whether you like it or not, it's nothing but absolutely true that 3rd parties don't win.
So the better answer is to gain influence within one (or, better, both) major parties that do have a chance to win. Sure, that means having to accept compromises and breaking bread with people who don't share your principles. But it also means having a very real voice at the table at nut-crunching time. I don't see how anybody's agenda is best served by not having that voice.
Australian view (feel free to tune out now): We have an instant-runoff system in our voting precisely to avoid this issue. Voting for someone unlikely to win is not a wasted vote because once they are eliminated your second preference is then your vote and so on. It's a very good system.
However we still have this exact same problem because people don't understand the system. How our voting system works is so poorly publicised that an inordinately large number of people assume it works like the American first-past-the-post system.
Conservation of angular momentum makes the world go round.
..like not going to war based on manufactured alleged intelligence, having accountability and honest audits at the Fed and Treasury, having a more sane and fair monetary and tax policy, letting capitalistic industries fail when they come up with pseudo products that offer nothing and that no one wants much anymore, letting them fail in the marketplace where it belongs instead of putting everyone in hock to cover their gambling debts, reining in our of control bureaucratic edicts that sidestep the normal legislative process, getting the Federal government out of State government's business, having real security instead of creeping big brother-ism fascist policies disguised as security theater and so on...ya, just too weird, no one would ever want that stuff...
I've gotta point out, this is a false dichotomy. In the last election there were several people I would have gladly elected. Unfortunately, I was only permitted to vote for one of them at a time. I chose the one that I felt would have the largest political impact and shock to the group that I didn't like, but I did, in the end, vote for my second or third choice.
It's possible to be willing to elect a set of people.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
Show me a libertarian who has a snowball's chance in hell of winning, and I'll vote for him.
Substitute any third party for 'libertarian' above and your statement makes just as little sense.
What's the point of voting for someone who is going to win anyway? Might as well just stay home.
Reverse that, and it makes just as much sense: What's the point of voting for someone who is going to lose anyway? Might as well just stay home.
Of course, the two major parties would have you believe that if you don't vote for a major party candidate, you're just "wasting your vote" -- which is utter bullshit. You're only wasting your vote if you vote for someone who doesn't support the policies you believe in. Yeah, your guy may not get elected, but at least you did your bit -- and if enough other people feel the same way you do (including rejecting the nonense about "wasting votes"), then your guy might actually make it.
Or at least put a big enough dent in the major parties' vote numbers to make them reconsider their policies.
This two-party bullshit is actually an artifact of the winner-takes-all system we have. If the guy I really want to win takes votes away from the guy who is most likely to win against the guy I really hate, then I strategically don't vote for my favorite. I vote against the guy who I don't like. That's a flawed system.
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
... and plan on sweeping all 50 states in 2012.
George W Bush will be remembered as a great president in the future
Yes I'm sure Osama Bin Laden would agree with you.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Typical American attitude: gather together and complain without fear of reprisals.
This is one of the principles America was founded on. If you don't like it, get out. I, for one, am tired of your whining.
If we all adopted *your* attitude, nothing would be done, and it would be as bad as in Mexico.
Is it really an issue of Americans complaining because they don't know that other places have it worse, or is it more along the lines of, it's Freaking America and things are SUPPOSED TO BE BETTER HERE. Seeing the ideals that your country is founded on, the ideals that are supposed to make your country the grand place that it is, start to decay because of corruption, is what this is about. Sure, there are places out there that are worse. That's why people come to the United States... Maybe we don't have room to complain because it's still better than other places, but then hardly anyone does, because there's always someone worse off. That's what our parents tell us when we are growing up. There's always someone less fortunate. Does that make dealing with the loss of integrity in your government any less painful? Not really.
Funny, I was about to say the same thing about people who didn't vote for Ralph Nader. He's just about as anti-corporate as they get, and got more votes than the Libertarian party. Our problem is that the third parties are splintered, while the Republicrats are frightfully united.
If we truly were such a terrible imperialist nation that was only after the oil then I would LOVE to know why it is that we are still paying more money for our gas and oil than we should.
One might speculate that we are paying more money for our gas and oil than we should to help maintain the profits of the (government subsidized) oil companies that bankrolled Bush into office.
You guys believed O when he said his administration would be the transparent and free of conflict of interest?
Compared to Bush and Cheney? He'd have to be from North Korea to beat that record of secrecy and corruption.
The reson not to vote for the major parties is if they are against your own, or society's, interest. In my case, although I'm against many of their core principles, I usually vote Libertarian, and it's because of their stance against "victimless crime" laws.
Take the drug and prostitution laws, both of which cause the very problems they're suppose to cure, and which both major parties support.
If prostitution were legal you wouldn't have hookers standing on the street corner spreading STDs, they'd be in licensed whorehouses getting tested weekly for STDs.
If drugs were legal you wouldn't be funding gang wars, 1/3 of all prisoners would not be in prison, and you could collect taxes and tarriffs on the drugs. Note that the two most highly addictive and dangerous druges there are are, alcohol and tobacco, are both legal.
Free Martian Whores!
Typical American attitude at the moment. "Woe me, my country is going to implode and it's the most corrupt and worst place on the planet!" Fucking Americans, try living in some of these other places before whining about how bad your own place is.
Leaders raise the bar. Followers run only fast enough to not be last. If that "fucking typical American attitude" is what it takes to demand better from the government that represents them, so be it. Should the only defence for corruption be that it's acceptable elsewhere?
More Twoson than Cupertino
There's this stuff called gold ...
The problem is not interest rates, it is the unfettered creation of fiat money by printing and government backed fractional reserve lending. http://www.relfe.com/plus_5_.html
Here's a shocker.
GOLD HAS NO VALUE. Not like say, iPods, Mazda Miatas, or refridgerators. Gold just sits there and is shiny. It's also rare, AND not radioactive, but that's no excuse at all.
Further more, when tied up with a gold standard, interest rates move much too slowly to respond to crisis situations.
I propose that amending the constitution as necessary is a more reasonable method of getting things done than abandoning the concept of the rule of law.
In our day and age, that process would be ridiculously hard. Further more, you're missing two hundred years of constitutional law that disagrees with you thoroughly.
Money only "dries up" because it is based on fractional reserve lending rather than being backed by commodities. Real money does not disappear from existence if people don't pay their loans. Only fiat money created through loans does that.
Which is better than the supply of shiny rocks permanently drying up because we mined it all out of the ground thus leading us to a fiat money system *anyway.*
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Explain how this can be so?
Explain to me how you think that in a libertarian world, money speaks?
Regardless, I never said anything about a purely libertarian approach anyway. Stop assuming that someone who advocates for *some* libertarian approaches is advocating for *all* libertarian ideas.
I don't agree that all regulation is bad. I just want regulation to occur by the people *not* by the organizations that are supposed to be regulated!
If you desire rationalism, then perhaps you need to start re-examining your statements to find the rationalism in them.
You think that booms, busts, bank failures, and market failures happened independent of regulation and you'd be wrong. Those incidents *all* happened with regulation that was improperly applied.
You think that socialism is some kind of glorious pie in the sky solution just like other wacko anarchists think that pure capitalism is the solution. You're both wrong.
There is no simple answer to how involved a government should be in people's lives and nor should there be. There should *always* exist a conflict between the rights of the populace and the need to have a government that steps in to protect us from bad people and bad organizations.
Just as soon as that government oversteps it's bounds and starts ignoring the people, it's our responsibility to set the government straight. Unfortunately, we've failed to do so for several decades now and, consequently, we now find ourselves stuck with the current quagmire.
We will not return a balance to the rights of the people versus the government's job to protect us by electing someone who thinks that we can solve that issue by asserting the government into more areas of our lives.
Until you awake from your fantasy world where you think that a big government has your best interests at heart, you will never realize that you're living in a cage designed to *protect* you from yourself. Unless you're happy being treated like an invalid or a mental patient, then it's time for a change (*real* change, not lip service change).
I'd happily pay you Tuesday for a biopsy today!
I relied on IP, yes I spoke at conferences, and yes I wrote books. But guess what I don't do that anymore. Yes I realize that I am not the greatest of speakers and book authors.
BUT, and this is the big but. IP theft has made it a situation where I CANNOT make a living with what I used to.
So in other words, IP allows the mediocre to make money at tasks they are incompetent at? You say yourself that you're not very good at it.
Cory Doctorow, otoh, IS very good at it and managed to get Little Brother on the NYT best seller's list despite the fact that he has it posted in its entirety, in may formats, for free, on his website.
If you suck at writing as you admit, I certainly don't want to buy your books. If you suck at speaking, as you say you do, I certainly don't want to hear you speak.
Free Martian Whores!
Holy shit, a comment by NYCL on an RIAA article and it's not modded +5? Someone get me a calendar so I can mark this!
I kid, I kid. I really do appreciate the insight you bring around here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrpRocaEfQE&feature=PlayList&p=F66FB32DFB688EC8&index=3
I vote for the person that closest represents my value system and promises to do the things I would like to see done while they are in the White House.
That is all well and good, but assumes that the politician is actually telling the truth. The past few elections were filled with such an insane amount of double-speak you couldn't tell which statements were actually true. How can someone build the middle class and spend more government money while lowering taxes?
Robin Hood is a good childrens story, not a political platform.
Instead, look at what they have been doing already. You'll get a better idea from what they've voted on in the past, as opposed to what they say they will vote on.
Dude I think you might just be onto somehting
RT
www.online-privacy.pro.tc
I'd like to point out that the boom/bust cycles only really started after the Federal Reserve was created.
That's total bulshit; I see you haven't read much history. The Federal Reserve System (also the Federal Reserve; informally The Fed) is the central banking system of the United States. Created in 1913 by the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act
Before 1913 there were BAD economic busts and GOOD economic booms. Some busts were The Long Depression, known at the time as the "Great Depression", lasted from about 1873 to 1896, and the
Free Martian Whores!
You know, you're not going to get very far around here with woman analogies. You're going to end up having to make analogies to explain your analogies.
Sup, dawg! We heard you like analogies, so we put an analogy in your analogy so you can analogize while you analogize!
Last night I played a blank tape at full volume. The mime next door went nuts.
Huh...
Usually in posts like this someone puts up a link to write your elected representatives. I haven't seen one yet (although I might have missed it). Just in case....
http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml
Bitch about it, it's the American Way. :D
-Tony
Kinda like Bakersfield (California) is like Juarez (Mexico) without the culture?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Typical fascist/redneck response. "Do what I say or get the fuck out!" You do realize the people "whining" have as much right to live in the US as you do, right? We have this little thing called democracy and free speech in America (at least theoretically, since dipshits like you would prefer to get rid of free speech for people you don't like) which allows people to (*gasp*) actually express opinions you may not agree with or even despise. You also have every right to express why you think they are wrong. I guess this particular aspect of democracy is inconvenient to you, but if you really can't stand it, then you are free to move to a country were only the "approved" version is allowed to be expressed.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Typical American attitude at the moment.
"Woe me, my country is going to implode and it's the most corrupt and worst place on the planet!"
Fucking Americans, try living in some of these other places before whining about how bad your own place is.
I don't recall anyone saying they thought America is the "worst place on the planet.". So that is just a complete straw man.
No matter how corrupt America is, you would say that American's should not complain because there is some other place that happens to be worse.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
I think it's been pretty clearly established that in a first-past-the-post plurality-takes-all contest, the maximum number of viable candidates is two. Have you ever seen a ballot for a US election? Communists and Constitution party candidates (and libertarians, and greens) have been on the ballot as long as I can remember, and they've never even come close to winning. It helps to consider that in the US, the Democrats and Republicans aren't actual "political parties" in the European sense, but large political coalitions that combine many political interest groups under two umbrellas. In parliamentary systems, the parties are allocated their voting power by the vote and then must do deals among each other in order to form a coalition of parties large enough to run the parliament. In the US system, the coalitions form before the vote and the vote determines which one of them receives the office.
That's why the drafters of the US Constitution, the most powerful politicians in US history, designed an electoral system that owes more to the Holy Roman Empire than to game theory and an actual understanding of how human beings make decisions.
It's also worth considering how completely upending, in a bad way, it would have been if Barr or Ron Paul won the election in November (or if Ralph Nader had won in 2000). The will of the people would have spoken loudly, but the actual administration would have been a disaster, as the president would have been completely isolated by a congress that is utterly red/blue. All of these smaller parties need to first have a long bench of people in state offices and the federal legislature before they should consider running a president, unless they want to go down in history as the party of yahoos who ran the country into the ground (because, regardless of their candidates performance, that's how the two parties would make it go down.)
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
On the other hand there are *alot* of places that are better. I think comparing yourself to the worst is always self defeating. There is always room for improvement in politics, and if anything the lesson to take from the US situation right now is that civilian populations have to constantly keep watch over their nation-states, and ensure that the governments they put in power or support are up to THEIR standards (the population of Britian should take special note, here). The US population has been asleep at the wheel for quite a while, and is now in a slow motion highway collision. Lets hope there won't be too many casualties, and you can get yourselves back on track. A good place to start: REAL separation of the government from Special Interest Groups, Big Business, and your fun loving Christian right. You'll have to demilitarize to a large extent as well, if only for economic reasons. One of the things any democratic government needs to be to serve its population well is *disinterested* and I mean disinterested in the "Freedom from selfish bias or self-interest; impartiality." sense.
Please reread my comment you replied to.
Property is theft.
And you just did essentially what steelcarress just did. Parent poster never said you didn't have a right to whine, he/she only expressed their opinion of said whining, and suggested that if you hate things here so much, why not leave for someplace else? Suggesting someone should leave is not the same as demanding they leave. Typical overreaction.
You responded in exact kind saying, if you don't like our "whining", why don't you leave; but, as you noted it is also his/her right to voice an opinion.
Regardless of who's right in the entire matter, (I'm no fan of the RIAA either) not only was this hypocritical, but you had to throw in several epithets as well (fascist,redneck, dipshit..). Angry much?
Or did you really expect "change", perhaps?
In matters of Intellectual Property, (as well as the idiotic "War on Drugs"), I'm afraid Democrats are no more progressive than Republicans.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
You my friend, do not understand how the human mind works concerning politics. I would recommend the book "The Political Mind" by George Lakoff to become more aware of what motivates people. Also, I did vote for Obama rather than any of the alternatives (including Green, Socialist, Lib, etc.) because I did think that he was better than the alternatives. That's the only rationale I need. Others may need more. And with your morally chastising and condescending tone, it's really doubtful that you will reach them. This tone is also common in the more radical parties.
That is all.
modern intellectual property is not limited in any sense
Well, patents are still limited with its 20 year monopoly, but as to copyright, well, no, not since they started completely ignoring the Constitution ("they" includes SCOTUS).
Free Martian Whores!
Well shoot from reading Slashdot, one could deduce that women are like cars but without mufflers.
As a formerly married slashdotter, I can tell you that women ARE like cars without mufflers, OR WHEELS!
Free Martian Whores!
Ok.. in reading the PDF.. I find that this brief was written by MICHAEL F. HERTZ .. who appears after a google search to have been assistant attorney general in 2007 .. so is this a Obama thing or a Bush thing ?.. I submit that this is more likely just SLOW government, than some new policy of the new administration.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
Well shoot from reading Slashdot, one could deduce that women are like cars but without mufflers.
No, the car analogy still works. It's like this: In Soviet Russia, you turn them on; in Capitalist America, they turn on you! (that's what the prenup was for)
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Even though Libertarians are pro-property (copyrights and patents are in the Constitution iirc)
Copyrighte and patents do not grant ownership or property rights, they grant a "limited time" monopoly.
Free Martian Whores!
"... a teachable moment."
if the government is too incompetent to tax us, why are they competent enough to grant 17+-year monopolies on ideas?
I'm not sure that's a fair question. Libertarians aren't opposed to taxes because of government incompetence, we are opposed to taxes because we believe that it makes more sense for people to spend more of their own money however they see fit instead of giving it to the government to spend mostly on poorly thought-out legislation, most of which they haven't even read much less carefully considered. It's easy to spend other people's money without taking as much care as you would when spending your own. You can call this "incompetence" if you like, and I suppose many people do, but it's important to realize that it is on the spending side rather than the collecting side and that it is an inherent disadvantage of central planning versus distributed, not necessarily due to incompetent people in positions of power.
Patents are a different beast altogether. Many libertarians believe that patents are necessary to spur innovation, and that makes a lot of sense. There are lots of problems associated with them, but there are even more with trade secrets, especially WRT physical products that competitors can simply disassemble and copy. When it comes to digital IP things just get even murkier. Libertarians don't appear to have a good answer to the problems that plague the patent system, but as you said no politician does. Patents are low on the list of my personal priorities, so a paucity of proposed patches doesn't prevent me from perceiving the party as possessing predominantly positive positions.
-FiloEleven (doesn't want to undo his upmods (and is afraid he might have gotten a little silly with the alliteration))
May actually start to make George W. look good...
Interesting that, now that the Dems are in control with Obama at the lead, it is now "the Government" at large who is the problems. I am pretty sure that if Republicans were running things, it would be those corrupt repunicans, etc, not "the Government".
Also, "Typical fascist/redneck response. 'Do what I say or get the fuck out!'... I guess this particular aspect of democracy is inconvenient to you, but if you really can't stand it, then you are free to move to a country were..."
Pot, meet kettle.
You are right, I would say that a truly competent government would actually represent the people, and so we wouldn't mind paying taxes so much. Clearly this is impossible, but how close we are and can get is the issue. I agree w.r.t. centralization and its downsides, and patents seem to me more horribly centralized than taxes: the so-called intellectual property system cries out for global "harmonization" because it is so easy to cheat on the game otherwise. In contrast, under liberalism countries have some freedom in setting tax rates so as to draw business; this is balanced somewhat by labor unrest and calls for socialization.
Even beyond centralization, bad patents have a punishing effect on "good capitalists" that seems to be greater than taxes. In short, there are such thing as patent trolls, but I couldn't imagine a tax troll. I mean, here we have a system whereby your competitor can game the system against you and get government to stop you by force. I can't say for sure, being a broke student, but I think I'd rather pay 80% taxes than be gutted by a competitor who is superior to me only in having been first to get the government to grant him a monopoly. It's sickening.
I sometimes think we'd be much better off having government just give out money for public-domained innovation, collected from an industrial-tax base. At least this way the costs could be made apparent; they are quite well hidden with the current monopoly system... I know this is anathema to libertarians; but I suspect it's not really any less libertarian than the government-monopolies...
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
most countries have "free speech" you know!
China and middle easter don't, but that doesn't mean others either.
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
If you have good teachers, they will recognize when this is occurring. It is well-documented by professionals as a risk.
If a correspondence theory of truth is correct, and if thus for a sentence to be truth it has to correspond to the world in a way that mirrors the structure and matches parts of the sentence properly with parts of the world, then the structure of a true sentence would have to be mirrored in the world. But if, on the other extreme, a coherence theory of truth is correct then the truth of a sentence does not require a structural correspondence to the world, but merely a coherence with other sentences.
One way to understand logic is as the study of the most general forms of thought or judgment, what we called [a type of logic]. One way to understand ontology is as the study of the most general features of what there is, our [a type of ontology]. Now, there is a striking similarity between the most general forms of thought and the most general features of what there is. Take one example. Many thoughts have a subject of which they predicate something. What there is contains individuals that have properties. It seems that there is the same structure in thought as well as in reality. And similarly for other structural features.
If there is an explanation of this similarity to be given it seems it could go in one of two ways: either the structure of thought explains the structure of reality, or the other way round. An explanation of the latter kind, where the structure of reality explains that of thought, could go as follows: the world has a certain basic structure, being constituted by objects which have properties, which other objects can have as well. To properly represent a world like this the creatures from which we evolved had to develop minds that mirror this structure. Those who developed a different kind of mind died out. Therefore we have a mind whose thoughts have a structure which mirrors the structure of the world.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-ontology/#4.5
I don't think they call it solipsism... yet. The source above is a good place to read about philosophy.
Futurist Traditionalism
It seems like he said that they all are except for politics and philosophy.
Which for the most part I've agreed, I've just disliked Art and Ligature majors.
But it seems to me that modern Philosophy isn't done in the same way. Today it seems like you come up with a solution that you like and use the tools of philosophy to justify it.
The problem with humanities is that because they are based on symbolic communication between humans, it's easy to fool people. For that reason, they attract many people who are good at manipulating symbols but bad at understanding structure (Plato's cave metaphor specifically addresses this problem).
However, I do not think they are all worthless. A good teacher, good examples and classmates who are not oblivious fools all help. In that environment, it's easier to sift the truthful from the solipsistic garbage.
If you're in a Lit course reading Moby-Dick with someone who understands it, that beats a trendy professor teaching you Barbara Kingsolver or Toni Morrison. The goofball versions of humanities classes attract the mentally unstable, holier-than-thou types that made class painful for me.
It helps to read literature as a communication from artist to reader that hopes to express structured thought in the form of experience. When you get into the "the book means whatever you interpret it to me" territory, beware! Unrealistic behavior is not far behind ;)
Futurist Traditionalism
I'd like to suggest that you write your interpretation of this issue and SEND IT TO OBAMA. --- newline --- Or even forward this discussion on to the Obama administration so they can be aware of these issue and their importance to people in the industry who understand the issues on a "deeper than casual" level. We are not involved in the record industry but do understand technology. --- newline --- Certainly the RIAA is pressing as hard as it can to retain its out of date feudal control and (imagine hands choking a throat) influence on the distribution of money. --- newline --- Peace out.
In Alaska, it's legal to do that. Pot is legal, there are no state taxes, they pay you to live here, and the scenery is fantastic...it's almost enough to make up for having to live here.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
GOLD HAS NO VALUE. Not like say, iPods, Mazda Miatas, or refridgerators.
There are these creatures called "women" who like to decorate themselves with it. Think about it for awhile and you will stop making stupid comments like "gold has no value".
You need to find out what value means. Value != utility. Gold has always been valued. People are willing to exchange other goods and services for gold, without the government telling them to. Fiat currency only has value because the government forces it to be accepted as payment of debts.
Further more, when tied up with a gold standard, interest rates move much too slowly to respond to crisis situations.
Oh no, a stable financial system, how could we cope? You think volatile interest rates is a good thing? I know the basing of our economy on debt instead of capital is widely accepted but that doesn't make it a good idea. Debt has been known for thousands of years as a method of bringing people under control. Using it as the basis for currency ought not be accepted by any people who wish to remain free.
I propose that amending the constitution as necessary is a more reasonable method of getting things done than abandoning the concept of the rule of law.
In our day and age, that process would be ridiculously hard. Further more, you're missing two hundred years of constitutional law that disagrees with you thoroughly.
In a free country it is supposed to be hard to expand government power. If you can't convince enough people that your proposed government action is worth a constitutional amendment, then perhaps it isn't. The government's long and inevitable habit of usurping the rights of the people was expected and is not a valid reason to abandon the highest law of the land in favour of arbitrary government expansion.
Money only "dries up" because it is based on fractional reserve lending rather than being backed by commodities. Real money does not disappear from existence if people don't pay their loans. Only fiat money created through loans does that.
Which is better than the supply of shiny rocks permanently drying up because we mined it all out of the ground thus leading us to a fiat money system *anyway.*
Gold is not the only commodity available for exchange you know. The only "value" of a fiat money system is that it allows the spending of wealth before it has been generated on a national scale rather than being restricted to the handful of idiots who can be allowed to go broke. Fiat money allows us all to have the results of idiocy! Hooray!
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
FYI http://libertariannation.org/a/f31l1.html
You need to find out what value means. Value != utility. Gold has always been valued. People are willing to exchange other goods and services for gold, without the government telling them to. Fiat currency only has value because the government forces it to be accepted as payment of debts.
Yeah but utility really does help us determine how viable a market is for a particular commodity in the long term. Yes, Gold can be drawn into wiring, plating, and all sorts of really useful stuff, but most of our Gold supply isn't being used for that, it's going towards jewelry. Let's say that A HUGE lode of gold is discovered and the supply of gold shoots out of the stratosphere. Under a theoretical Gold standard, the value of the dollar would shit itself as there would be an abundance of Gold. Under a fiat system, the value of the dollar wouldn't move much under this kind of discovery. Not in the same way it would be if we base our monetary policy on shiny ass yellow rocks.
Oh no, a stable financial system, how could we cope? You think volatile interest rates is a good thing? I know the basing of our economy on debt instead of capital is widely accepted but that doesn't make it a good idea. Debt has been known for thousands of years as a method of bringing people under control. Using it as the basis for currency ought not be accepted by any people who wish to remain free.
Stable like a dead canary. Sure, it's not moving much but it's stable! We're not basing it on debt per se, we're basing it on our ability pay back said debt. Basing it on this rather than scarce resources means that the supply of dollars into our system is more flexible. It's not a matter of "control"(which puts us dangerously in the realm of Alex Jones kookery), it's a matter of flexible monetary supply.
Gold is not the only commodity available for exchange you know. The only "value" of a fiat money system is that it allows the spending of wealth before it has been generated on a national scale rather than being restricted to the handful of idiots who can be allowed to go broke. Fiat money allows us all to have the results of idiocy! Hooray!
So replace shiny rocks with flammable black goo or any other commodity. Basing our currency on a unit that is determined by what we have is dangerous. It doesn't give a great idea of what's actually going on in our market place and our interactions in the international scene. Fiat currencies are our future. I don't know of any modern gold or other commodity backed currency. Period.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
That's what I was trying to express to him. I love America, don't want to live anywhere else, and want to try to improve my country.
The person I was replying to apparently didn't think that way. If he's tired of the complaining, then he can either (A) work to improve the way things are or (B) leave or (C) bitch about other people bitching. It's not a command, it's the way things are.
BTW, call me a redneck again and I'll drop a 400 lb Bubba on your house! LOL
Personally I can't stand rednecks. I live in a state full of them and I'll be glad when I get out. They've adopted a plan of statewide sterilization by teaching "abstinence only" sex ed. Works for me. The less of them there are, the better.
"libertarian" approaches to economics are what brought our economy to this state.
Capitalism is not some perfect, immutable, and self sustaining system. Checks and balances must be put into place to prevent the many from becoming serfs, and the few from becoming tyrants.
For all its flaws, government is the only other entity with enough centralized power to reign in corporate abuse.
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Things will not change as long as the people with the gold are able to make the rules by buying lawmakers.
The fix is that candidates should only be permitted to accept campaign funds from people who are allowed to vote for them.
People should lose their right to vote once their income exceeds 99% of the rest of their nation.
This is not so bad as it seems. There will still be hangers on who will parlay for their interests, they will just, themselves, be unable to vote, and by doing so they will be disallowed from disbursing assets from any of their holdings toward political parties.
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This guy may be right about serious tension which will result in transformation, but transformation does not necessarily indicate secession.
His predictions are clearly ludicrous if you look at the map at the bottom.
all those republican bloc states siding with new england? That's like photoshopping KKK Members into an NAACP meeting!
The Orrin Hatch republic of utah siding with california? HAH!
I can, however, see michigan seeking to join canada rather than fall in with all the red states which surround it. It would be a harper province in canada, which is still more liberal than the prevailing attitude in the territories surrounding it.
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*claps* I voted who I wanted in the White House, even if I knew there wasn't a chance in hell they'd get there. I've heard both Repubs & Dems go "you're throwing your vote away" but at the end of the day, I can smile and say that if they really wanted to end the system they'd stop thinking that way. The only way to end the influence of something in your life is to quit putting value in it. Then it is meaningless & can be gotten away of easily. It's very much "monster in the dark" "superstition" kind of thing. The more people put value & belief into something the more "it is true" or appears to be "hard" or "impossible" because more people pump it up with a whole lot more meaning than it actually contains. The less more people value something, the easier it is to get rid of a corrupt idea.
~Salamon2
That's a fair point.
In our current system you cannot really say that voting for one guy means you dont want another guy. I would still like for voting for one guy to mean that you do want that guy, though. Even if he'd be your second choice, at least it is someone you would want to have the office.
Allowing people to weight each candidate and then maybe having a run-off election with the top two (assuming none of them got a clear majority) or something like that would give people the opportunity to better represent their actual feelings about the candidates in general and help remove the illusion that exists today that a vote for a candidate means the voter fully endorses that candidate and all of his policies.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
What do you mean "without mufflers?" I wear mufflers all the time. It's cold here in Texas!
Patents are a different beast altogether. Many libertarians believe that patents are necessary to spur innovation, and that makes a lot of sense. There are lots of problems associated with them, but there are even more with trade secrets, especially WRT physical products that competitors can simply disassemble and copy.
What is the harm here? It takes several months before your competitors can have a new version of their product out to market, featuring your new idea. If the sales and market momentum you built up in that time-frame did not exceed the research costs, then something has gone wrong.
The government-enforced monopoly of the patent system is exactly the type of regulation that libertarians claim to be against. An infiniately high barrier to entry in a market (or submarket) is far worse than the barrier to entry regulations the libertarians complain about.
Libertarians need to decide: Does the free market work? If so, then patents are not needed. If not, then don't complain about government regulation.
Yeah but utility really does help us determine how viable a market is for a particular commodity in the long term.
So why don't you do your best to examine the gold market for, say, the last four thousand years, and tell me if you think it's going to be viable long term. You could even compare the value of gold to paper dollars since 1913. I suppose the dollar has kept it's value very well compared to gold, hasn't it? I mean, since you assert that gold has no value and that fiat currency is better, that would mean that people pay less dollars for gold now than then, right? Right?
Let's say that A HUGE lode of gold is discovered and the supply of gold shoots out of the stratosphere. Under a theoretical Gold standard, the value of the dollar would shit itself as there would be an abundance of Gold. Under a fiat system, the value of the dollar wouldn't move much under this kind of discovery. Not in the same way it would be if we base our monetary policy on shiny ass yellow rocks.
An increased supply of gold would not oblige the government to mint more money. The price of gold coins is generally about double the value of the gold in them as they are valued as a product manufactured from gold. Nevertheless, even given the possibility of a rapid increase in gold supply devaluing money, if you look at how the value of the (fiat) dollar has been devalued over time you will see that you haven't been protected from that by fiat money at all anyway.
We're not basing it on debt per se, we're basing it on our ability pay back said debt.
Have you been paying attention to the news much for the last six months? How's that working out? Political and corporate manipulation of that system (which won't stop, regardless of new regulation, because it is human nature) is what has caused the current financial services meltdown.
It's not a matter of "control"(which puts us dangerously in the realm of Alex Jones kookery), it's a matter of flexible monetary supply.
History shows that there is always a group of people intent on dominating nations. If they succeed they are written into the history books as empires, if not, as conspirators. The idea that there is not a group of people intent on controlling our financial and political systems doesn't stand up to scrutiny. There always will be, and the maintenance of civil liberties will always depend on understanding the methods used and countering them as much as possible. Any market can be manipulated, including gold, but fiat currency much more easily.
Basing our currency on a unit that is determined by what we have is dangerous. It doesn't give a great idea of what's actually going on in our market place and our interactions in the international scene.
It tells you exactly what's been happening because it is determined by production. Fiat currency is based on what we hope happens, which may or may not work out at any particular time.
I don't know of any modern gold or other commodity backed currency. Period.
You also don't know of any country unaffected by the money supply crash in the US due to unpaid loans. What's your point?
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First, you'd have to get a significant amount of the population off their asses
It pains me to say that would be a revolution in and of itself. Case in point: voter turnout in the US
In our hypothetical situation, you get 30% of American workers to stop going to work
In the Great Depression, unemployment was approximately 29%, so another depression could leave us in a similar state (this would also injure the corporations, decreasing their power and influence).
and money can indeed buy almost anything
How about Happiness? Loyalty? Obedience?
As we've seen numerous times (American Revolution, Indian Independence, Viet Nam, Afghanistan, and now Iraq), the underdog (both in terms of money and technology) can often give the "superior" faction a run for their money.
I'm not a historian, but I think when a group of people initiate a revolution, it is because the current state of affairs is unacceptable to them, and they are willing to do *anything* to change it. When that happens, the majority of long-term concern goes out the window.
So? Statutes creating and courts enforcing copyright is a delegation of power by the citizenry of whatever democratic country, for the purposes of improving the lives of all citizens by (among other things) encouraging the production of more worthy or useful art. In fact, in the USA, that is precisely what the first few words of Art I Sec 8 Cl 8 of the Constitution says.
If The People or the citizens of whatever democratic country decide that the statutory framework or court enforcement of copyright does not serve their interests, independent of the question of whether or not it serves a useful purpose, then in a democratic society, those statutes should be repealed or ignored (or reinterpreted) by the courts.
The enforcement of copyright has never been a fundamental right; you had to bring a lawsuit to try to enforce your exclusive rights to make and distribute copies, and bringing a lawsuit has never been free.
The value inherent in exclusive copyrights granted by the people is a deliberate economic policy that contributes to the welfare of artists (and publishers and so forth).
Directly funding for artists, and allowing market forces and new technology to make publishers obsolete, may be a smarter pair of economic policies. The later is happening anyway.
His writing is not as bad as your sententious drivel.
You have no grasp of tone or the utility of using only as much formality as is needed for the intended audience. Maybe you have Asperger's Syndrome? I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
You said the reason not to vote for major parties is because they'll win anyway. That's not a good reason; that's simply a good reason not to vote at all. A good reason is because they neither represent my interests nor the country's. If either one represented my interests I'd vote for them, despite who was going to win or lose. Since they don't, I'll vote for a loser every time.
Free Martian Whores!
So why don't you do your best to examine the gold market for, say, the last four thousand years, and tell me if you think it's going to be viable long term. You could even compare the value of gold to paper dollars since 1913. I suppose the dollar has kept it's value very well compared to gold, hasn't it? I mean, since you assert that gold has no value and that fiat currency is better, that would mean that people pay less dollars for gold now than then, right? Right?
When you look at the dollar versus Gold over the last 100 years, when we've kept track of the value of Gold versus the buying power of the dollar, there has been atleast one period where an ounce of Gold in constant dollars was worth half of what an ounce of gold would traditionally buy. It was called the 90's. The value of Gold really did shit itself then. Thanks to eight years of Bush, no one trusts dollars anymore and the buying power of gold shot right back up.
An increased supply of gold would not oblige the government to mint more money. The price of gold coins is generally about double the value of the gold in them as they are valued as a product manufactured from gold. Nevertheless, even given the possibility of a rapid increase in gold supply devaluing money, if you look at how the value of the (fiat) dollar has been devalued over time you will see that you haven't been protected from that by fiat money at all anyway.
Yes you would. Rising wages, rising minimum wages, and lowered prices really do balance all of that out. Sure the dollar's worth less than it was in the eighties, but anyone in a given field except maybe burger flipping, has seen a rise, and in many segments of the market, not by much but it is a rise, in wages. So the dollar I own now is worth less but I sure do own more of them and it takes less of them to buy the products I own now. The NES for instance, cost 600 bucks in constant dollars in the 80's. For that much I can buy a PS3, a DualShock 3 and Metal Gear Solid 4 and a nice dinner.
History shows that there is always a group of people intent on dominating nations. If they succeed they are written into the history books as empires, if not, as conspirators. The idea that there is not a group of people intent on controlling our financial and political systems doesn't stand up to scrutiny. There always will be, and the maintenance of civil liberties will always depend on understanding the methods used and countering them as much as possible. Any market can be manipulated, including gold, but fiat currency much more easily.
By history you mean, cranks like Alex Jones? We've never intended to dominate France, Germany or the UK. We always assumed they'd be on our side. Otherwise, wouldn't you have imagined that when the French elected the American unfriendly Nicholas Sarkozy or when the Germans did the same with Angela Merkel that something would've happened to them? It didn't. Obviously. They're still around, and so are their economies. The failure of their economies has nothing to do with how well liked we are in the world, it has everything to do with how well regulated things were between now and then.
It tells you exactly what's been happening because it is determined by production. Fiat currency is based on what we hope happens, which may or may not work out at any particular time.
But it's production of a particular commodity, which could shit itself at any time. Fiat currency is pretty similar but we're putting our hopes in to our own competency, hard work and ability to produce something into the market that's viable. When you've got shitheads in the Federal Reserve who think that lending at %1 and now less than %1 is a great idea and federal regulators who believe that banks and the economic system can do no wrong, then competency and hard work go right out the window and the fiat currency is based on nothing, and as such, eventually takes a huge shit.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
The Obama DOJ has now filed a similar brief in another RIAA case.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
When you look at the dollar versus Gold over the last 100 years, when we've kept track of the value of Gold versus the buying power of the dollar, there has been atleast one period where an ounce of Gold in constant dollars was worth half of what an ounce of gold would traditionally buy. It was called the 90's.
So from a hundred years, about 10 are in favour of fiat money. Great.
Yes you would. Rising wages, rising minimum wages, and lowered prices really do balance all of that out.
And yet a working man's wage used to be enough to support the family and now it isn't, most families require two income earners.
History shows that there is always a group of people intent on dominating nations. ...
By history you mean, cranks like Alex Jones?
No, not the foaming at the mouth type history, the Persian Empire, Greek Empire, Roman Empire, British Empire, Ottoman Empire, Genghis Khan, Catholic Church + various protestant churches, Islam, Communism, Nazism, etc, etc type history.
There seems to be always at least one group at a time, usually more. Sometimes working relatively openly, sometimes more secretly. When what we see now was warned about by Thomas Jefferson, doesn't that make you at least a little suspicious?
When you've got shitheads in the Federal Reserve who think that lending at %1 and now less than %1 is a great idea and federal regulators who believe that banks and the economic system can do no wrong, then competency and hard work go right out the window and the fiat currency is based on nothing, and as such, eventually takes a huge shit.
So we are in basic agreement about the flaws of the fiat money system, but you think we can mitigate the effects of the shitheats but I think they will always be more of a problem than the issues to be had from gold/silver etc.
The crash has nothing to do with money supply
You'd better call the President and let him know then.
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So from a hundred years, about 10 are in favour of fiat money. Great.
In the terms of THIRTY years of being on a fiat currency, ten of that favors fiat currencies. When we had Keynesian economists running things.
And yet a working man's wage used to be enough to support the family and now it isn't, most families require two income earners.
Blame business. not just big business. Small business, big business, medium business, serious business... Strangely enough, comedy's been one field where wages have been growing, so funny business has been good for wages(I dont' know if this is actually the case but it makes a great zinger). Businesses all try to maximize profits and expenditures by ignoring the bulk of their workforce and instead worry about shareholders and owners of business.
No, not the foaming at the mouth type history, the Persian Empire, Greek Empire, Roman Empire, British Empire, Ottoman Empire, Genghis Khan, Catholic Church + various protestant churches, Islam, Communism, Nazism, etc, etc type history.
These were always at the tip of a sword or the barrel of a gun. That's how you control people, by threatening them with *death* not controlling the gold supply.
There seems to be always at least one group at a time, usually more. Sometimes working relatively openly, sometimes more secretly. When what we see now was warned about by Thomas Jefferson, doesn't that make you at least a little suspicious?
That's a fallacy, appeal to a higher authority. Further more, further investigating the nature of that quote reveals that he called into question the ability for our nation to keep a steady stream of competent economists to keep the thing afloat. I argue with out competent economists our economy is dead in the water anyway.
source: http://books.google.com/books?id=ZTIoAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA70&lpg=PA70&dq=%22most+deadly+hostility+existing+against+the+Principles+and+form+of+our+Constitution%22+origin&source=web&ots=v9jeoT6aW6&sig=POGVM6QY7Qj3W_GuWVBseO0CygI&hl=en&ei=p-KZSYWXJITcNN7jsYkM&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA71,M1
You'd better call the President and let him know then.
You took me out of context you dick. The crash of foreign markets has everything to do with their tie ins with our really REALLY lousy investment system. When that fell, so did places like Iceland, which was and still is a Libertarian with a big L paradise. Which is going to suffer even worse BECAUSE OF it.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
In the terms of THIRTY years of being on a fiat currency, ten of that favors fiat currencies.
It is still a losing score.
Blame business. not just big business. Small business, big business, medium business, serious business
Business was already there, the difference is fiat money.
No, not the foaming at the mouth type history, the Persian Empire, Greek Empire, Roman Empire, British Empire, Ottoman Empire, Genghis Khan, Catholic Church + various protestant churches, Islam, Communism, Nazism, etc, etc type history.
These were always at the tip of a sword or the barrel of a gun. That's how you control people, by threatening them with *death* not controlling the gold supply.
It is said that war is politics by other means. All empires seek to control the money supply and most of those were based on a desire to control trade. Even today, war is intimately tied to finance anyway, so your point doesn't make any sense.
When what we see now was warned about by Thomas Jefferson, doesn't that make you at least a little suspicious?
That's a fallacy, appeal to a higher authority.
No, it's saying that if the process of taking the people's wealth through a cycle of inflation and deflation was predicted as a scam 200 years ago, when it now happens it is extremely naive to put it down to incompetence rather than malice.
Further more, further investigating the nature of that quote reveals that he called into question the ability for our nation to keep a steady stream of competent economists to keep the thing afloat.
Well, I didn't quote him, but here are a few: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff1325.htm
"That paper money has some advantages is admitted. But that its abuses also are inevitable and, by breaking up the measure of value, makes a lottery of all private property, cannot be denied. --Thomas Jefferson to Josephus B. Stuart, 1817. ME 15:113
"Private fortunes, in the present state of our circulation, are at the mercy of those self-created money lenders, and are prostrated by the floods of nominal money with which their avarice deluges us." --Thomas Jefferson to John W. Eppes, 1813. ME 13:276
"It is said that our paper is as good as silver, because we may have silver for it at the bank where it issues. This is not true. One, two, or three persons might have it; but a general application would soon exhaust their vaults, and leave a ruinous proportion of their paper in its intrinsic worthless form." --Thomas Jefferson to John W. Eppes, 1813. ME 13:426
You took me out of context
There is no context in which your statement "The crash has nothing to do with money supply" is correct.
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It is still a losing score.
No it's not. It's not a matter of score in terms of years, it's a matter of whether or not a certain political and economic ideology has any sort of efficacy over the state of affairs in a nation. Clearly liberalism tied with Keynesian economics and a fiat money system work compared to more hands off conservative politics. The further you go from that, the worse it'll be. Libertarianism with a gold standard would most certainly destroy this country.
(Even worse would be if competing currencies were allowed to compete. *shudder*)
Business was already there, the difference is fiat money.
But this is the point, the wage gap between the rich and the poor tends to GROW no matter what backs our currency(again unless we're discussing liberal Keynesian economics), Shiny ass rocks or the strength of our economic engine to produce products. At that point it becomes a matter of fiscal policy on the Federal Government.
It is said that war is politics by other means. All empires seek to control the money supply and most of those were based on a desire to control trade. Even today, war is intimately tied to finance anyway, so your point doesn't make any sense.
Neither does yours. You're trying to argue a fiat money system is an attempt to control the country through backroom deals and to support this you cite it's been this way historically. I conclude it's Alex Jones style conspiracy theorist kookery(Albeit with no proof, but this point...) and you then cite ancient armies who controlled population using swords, not paper money systems. I point this out, and this somehow makes no sense? You libertarians are like a fraking cult. Except there's no cult leader.
No, it's saying that if the process of taking the people's wealth through a cycle of inflation and deflation was predicted as a scam 200 years ago, when it now happens it is extremely naive to put it down to incompetence rather than malice.
But our system isn't taking wealth away. Nor is it creating wealth. That's really for us to decide. Central banking just removes the ability to control the money system from a politically motivated body, the Congress, to a theoretical apolitical body, a Central Bank. It's not that the concept doesn't work, we've just filled it with idiots who thought that Ayn Rand should have been taken seriously. Besides, you just sort of cited Jefferson but never really gave any of his predictions. Now that you have though, time to tackle -those-.
"That paper money has some advantages is admitted. But that its abuses also are inevitable and, by breaking up the measure of value, makes a lottery of all private property, cannot be denied. --Thomas Jefferson to Josephus B. Stuart, 1817. ME 15:113
But no where in this piece does he actually cite what these abuses are, nor does he acknowledge the abuses of a gold based currency. His claim that it would make a lottery out of private property is laughable. Of course your property is still yours. Fiat or Gold backed bills doesn't matter. Your land, crops, houses, horse drawn buggies, slaves, and spirographs are yours.
"Private fortunes, in the present state of our circulation, are at the mercy of those self-created money lenders, and are prostrated by the floods of nominal money with which their avarice deluges us." --Thomas Jefferson to John W. Eppes, 1813. ME 13:276
Jefferson doesn't seem to like the idea that maybe, just maybe, the market wouldn't be a constant deluge of dollars into the market(Yes, right now that's exactly what's happening, but we're not talking a constant deluge since the founding of the Federal Reserve).
"It is said that our paper is as good as silver, because we may have silver for it at the bank where it issues. This is not true. One, two, or three persons might have it; but a
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
You mean all except the painfully small minority?
Wow, that's democracy in action right there.
Although I agree that the larger parties are corrupt and far worse than many independent candidates, it's not worth wasting a vote, especially when you hurt the second best candidate's chances at winning an election at the same time.
The primary goal of voting is to make your opinion known to the people representing you. The candidate that happens to win is almost irrelevant.
When everybody votes for the candidate they most agree with, it gives a better picture of what the people actually want.
For example, if I vote Republican solely because I agree with their economic policies, the fact that I completely disagree with them on social issues is completely lost - as far as the politicians can tell, I completely agree with the Republicans on everything.
On the other hand, if I vote for a party that agrees with the Republicans on economic issues, but holds a different stance on social issues, it sends the message that I only partially agree with the Republicans. Even if they win, they know that at least some people disagree with them on that.
As it stands now, politicians see that 50% of the population completely agrees with them, while 49% of the population completely disagrees with them. There's very little data for them to actually make decisions with.
Maybe not