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What If Manning Had Leaked To the New York Times?
New submitter minstrelmike points outs a two-page editorial in the NYTimes "about what would have been different legally, morally, and security-wise," had the military information released through WikiLeaks been published by the Times instead.
"'If Manning had delivered his material to The Times, WikiLeaks would not have been able to post the unedited cables, as it ultimately did, heedless of the risk to human rights advocates, dissidents and informants named therein. In fact, you might not have heard of WikiLeaks. The group has had other middling scoops, but Manning put it on the map.' The writers also discusses what the Times would and would not have done, admitting they probably wouldn't have shared with other news outlets, but also admitting they would definitely have not shared everything."
So then what stops welfare from turning into that?
- the economy that would actually not be as burdened by the government if government stopped stealing all that money from it.
Government should not the economy, but government is becoming a larger and larger size of the economy (from POV of ratio), and of-course gov't doesn't produce anything, so it gets the money from borrowing, taxing and printing.
By the way, there was a reason that SS was turned into welfare, rather than handling people who couldn't take care of themselves with welfare, it's the stigma attached to welfare and the trick that SS supposed 'fund' provides - removes the stigma.
Do not get me wrong: I am against all forms of welfare as well, but as it goes, as the solutions go, as the actual practical solutions require, people who cannot take care of themselves in any way should be placed on welfare. I hope to see in the next 5 years all welfare schemes disappearing. I don't gov't to pretend it's a 'charity', do you understand? Read this comment - that's what I think role of government is.
But as a solution for SS, a way to get people off of it and to get them to save for retirement again, they should be means tested and those who can live without SS should stop getting SS checks.
There shouldn't be a transfer of income from young poor individuals to elderly wealthy ones. There shouldn't be government involved in any ponzi scheme that is designed to extract money from people and to get more power for the politicians by buying votes with other people's money.
As to 'average wage' being too low - that's a problem that the government created. Since 1971, since the moment that Nixon defaulted on the dollar, the businesses started moving production abroad, and this means that USA lost huge amount of productivity and that's why the average wages are falling while top level earnings are going up in the global inflationary environment.
It's the INFLATION that is destroying savings, investments, productivity, inflation is moving investments elsewhere. USA population is fed this nonsense about them being 'more productive than ever'.
How the hell are people in USA 'more productive than ever' if the real unemployment levels are going up all the time (if you take into account people who are discouraged from job searching, who are on disability, because their UI ran out, who are working as part time employees (and more are coming with ACA), you'll find that real unemployment in USA is close to 20%). What is all this 'productivity' nonsense?
The people who are still truly productive in USA live in USA but they produce elsewhere, look at Apple. They are overly productive, they built an extremely productive company. Are they the average American? Not even close. An average American has no savings or is eating through his savings just to stay ahead of the inflation that the Fed is creating.
You want an ACTUAL WELFARE PLAN FOR AMERICA?
End the Fed and IRS.
You can't handle the truth.
Reduces harm. Yes, that's what we are so great at legislating: reduction of harm. What is that really, it means removing risk.
Yes, let's have government trying to remove risk.
Why, we could have a great economy and a great society "that works and reduces harm" if only government reduces our risks. If only government reduced risk to lending money to the banks with FDIC, then the potential bank customers would perceive lending money to the banks as being risk free and wouldn't care how the banks handle the accounts, what's the difference? Government will take care of the losses. And it does.
We could even have medical care for people if government removed risk from having to pay for it outselves. We don't have to bother trying to live a healthier life style, we don't have to bother thinking about our actual budget and expenses and retirement and medical care and a rainy day fund in case we lose employment for some time. It will work great in the long run for government to take care of all of these risks.
We don't have to think, the government will guarantee our student loans, house loans, car loans, any loans. We don't have to think, the government will remove harm and risk. The government will take care of us, it will give us everything risk free. Risk free food and risk free bonds.
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You see, without actual principles, you are bound to spend time thinking how to apply some amount of government in any particular situation. The principles of free market remove all of this uncertainty and moral hazard, which is what you are truly proposing - moral hazard.
You think you are proposing something that 'works most of the time and reduces harm' and in reality you are guaranteeing to achieve the exact opposite: maximum harm.
You know what bonds are? Used to be called: risk free return. With all this inflation that the government is creating and thus killing all investment and business what you really have is: return free risk.
Return free risk is what you get in bonds now and it used to be known as 'risk free return'.
You are proposing: harm free life, what you are going to get is: life free harm.
You can't handle the truth.
So you believe that I 'spew ideology' and your comments have no ideology in them? I profess principles, and you have ideology:
Your words:
Putting your ideology over the lives of actual people just proves your really do need help.
- this is ideology, ideology of taking from a minority and subsidising a majority unless you found a fountain of free wealth to pay for all of your 'help' that you want to administer.
Your type of ideology is exactly what is driving the system, it's at the helm and it's driving at an ever increasing speed towards a real economic and societal cliff. We are going to go over that cliff, and it's not the minor insignificant bump in the road that the government was just crying a couple of weeks ago, it's not the so called 'fiscal cliff', it's the real deal. The one that will destroy the value of US dollars and dollar denominated assets.
When the wagon goes over that cliff, it will take down all of the people you are supposedly interested in helping. You cannot help people by legislating that they should have more of something that they did not work for.
If your ideology takes a non-trivial number of people and puts them in the wagon and then forces those, who are pulling the wagon to pull ever harder, while saying that they are not doing their 'fair share', then you are going to have more and more people in the wagon, and the wagon will go the road of least resistance, and that will be downwards towards the edge of the cliff, and this is happening right now. Your ideology will cause massive suffering as the same type of ideology has already done in the past multiple times. That you can't recognise it and that you are expecting to achieve a different result by doing the same thing again that was done many times before shows that you are the one with a psychiatric problem.
You can't handle the truth.