Seriously? The very inclusion of the word "theology" causes all else connected to it to fail? I guess that "All men are created equal" is false because the deceleration of independence makes mention of god in there. There is just as much proof to support "there is a god" as there is to support "there is not a god". Besides that, dozens of great scientists believe in god, Copernicus, Newton, Darwin and may more. Do you now say that their theories and work are invalid because they believed in god?
Here's an idea: take each theory on its own merit and don't let your anti-religious zealotry blind you..
Science is not a consensus. Do you think Newton said "aww shucks, this guy Ptolemy has the consensus for predicting the moment of heavenly bodies."? Did Copernicus say "I guess the consensus is that the sun rotates around us."? Did Lavoisier say "This can't be oxygen because Priestley says it's dephlogisticated air and after the Priestley's idea of phlogiston has the scientific consensus.
Why? Because Newton, Copernicus and Lavoisier saw that there was a crisis of theory. The observable results of experiments were causing anomalies that couldn't be described by the current paradigm that held the scientific consensus (Phlogiston, Ptolemaic astronomy or non-heliocentric orbit ). There were holes in the theories.
The same thing is happening here. There is a paradigm of forcing gasses and radiation that cannot account for the observed effects and cannot, with any accuracy, predict future climate patterns as they claim. There are no experiments to be reproduced. There is no real theory that can be falsified. And then the author's of the 'consensus' global warming theory stretch their paradigm to the breaking point by calming they can predict this incredibly complex system with a computer (named Deus ex machina apparently) and low and behold its because of human activity (but by what percent?) that the climate is warming at the rate is is. People being critical of this usually cry "there is too much entropy in the system! Garbage in garbage out! How can you see anything through the entropic noise?" (ever hear of confirmation bias? Oh ya, we see something!)
But instead of being treated as a valid critique, a real crisis in the paradigm, the 'deniers' (heh, think what Copernicus was called) are met with the idiotic chant: "The FUCkING world is going to END and you're in the pocket of big oil". And really, how many times are AGW proponents going to get it dead wrong before we decide that this paradigm is nothing more than junk science.
I am good enough at math enough to know that the AGW theories are just full of guess work, the models contain too much entropy to be driving decisions about our global economy. Pro "big government" interests have taken up this cause (oh? people cause the problem? That's exactly what we want to control!) in an effort to push more intrusive government controls on everything and confiscate any wealth in the name of "saving the planet".
When so described, how can alarmist be called a pejorative? It really sounds to me like a description of the chicken little show being put on. And the term 'denier' really presupposes that the other side has proven their theory to be a fact , I mean, how can you deny fact? If it were just a theory you may be called skeptical or even overly skeptical but denier really presupposes that AGW is solved scientific fact, when of course, even the biggest proponent will admit under pressure, it is not. And their is nothing "unscientific" about being skeptical.
Please read this: Frederic Bastiat - The Law. It's very short and I think explains my position better than I can. Everything else in this argument is nuance 38, 53, 70, 90, it's all far beyond the needs of the government to preform the duties needed of it. I live in California and the combined tax rate here is >= 53%. If you really need citation for 53 you can do the google search. But don't get hung up on that, just read the Bastiat link and tell me what you think of that.
My mistake, 53%. But it looks like Carter era rates > 70% are back in, and some democrats (remember, the guys who championed slavery about 100 years ago?) don't see anything wrong with taxation as high as 94% as they were in the 1950s, more great democrat ideas. Conservative Republicans (remember the guys who were founded as the abolitionist party?) want to spend less money and tax you and me less.
Conservatives are not the demons here, they want to spend less of our money on bull shit of any kind. On the other hand, the democrats want to spend more, on anything and everything so much more that we need to continuously raise the debit ceiling without explanation. In the opinion of "progressive liberals" nothing is outside of the scope of "things the government should be involved in". Where money can be spent by the government, outside of defending ourselves from foreign invaders of course, spend it!
The government never has enough power! Liberals opine: If only Obama had dictatorial control over the country! Obama isn't against that, indeed, he argues that Obama can do this debit ceiling stuff himself under the 14th amendment. Of course using this liberal reading of the 14h amendment, why, congress really doesn't hold any power over the spending of the executive branch. Similar arguments have been made, for example a liberal interpretation of the commerce clause in Wickard v. Filburn. And of course they're using the same argument to compel everyone to buy health insurance.
Was I wrong? Ya, I'll admit that, but I'm not crazy by any measure, I was just off by 17%.
By that logic, taxes will eventually reach 100% correct? When is the tax rate too high? We're at 70% in some brackets. Use your own life as an example. If you were spending too much money, and you knew a lot of the stuff you were spending it on was not necessary, would you stop spending so much or try and convince your credit card company to raise your limit so you can borrow more money from them? Would you spend less, especially on things you really didn't need, like infrastructure repair in the name of creating jobs, or would you demand a raise from your boss?
When you copy and paste data into excel a lot of unusual things can happen to the data. This behavior is totally unpredictable because it changes from version to version and IMHO the functionality never had any logical reason to be there in the first place. Who's at MS thought "Oh these number's you've pasted have too much resolution, they should be truncated, not even rounded, but only on alternating Tuesdays." And god help you if you have a damn alpha character. So ya, pasting into excel can really easily manipulate your data in very unexpected ways.
One of the strongest, if still unwritten, rules of scientific life is the prohibition of appeals to heads of state or to the populace at large in matters scientific.
Isn't the CRU constantly breaking "one of the strongest" rules of scientific life: appealing to the state and or populace when your science fails to convince? Science does not require the rule of "Might makes right" to persuade. Logic and strong correlation of data are all that is required. Thus far, in my opinion, CRU has shown themselves to be anything but scientific. They appeal to the head of state and to the public at large! This, more than anything proves that they are not scientists. What other respected branch of science reaches out for a "consensus" in the government or the populace to prove their theories? Science is not the blatant politicizing of science to overpower the paradigm group you disagree with.
I was under the assumption that the public already had this data. Certainly many people have trumpeted "Look at the raw data". Others still have claimed that the "raw data has been deleted" presumably a long time ago. Why wasn't the data released 5 years ago? So many questions, this just creates a dozen or so more.
So in your world view, were "the fed" to have its 16 trillion in secret loans defaulted on the American tax payers would be on the hook for secret loans made by a non-government agency to a foreign bank for thousands of times our GDP? Maybe you should go back and read the law.
I think you're confusing the federal reserve bank and the federal government. "The fed" is no more related to the federal government than federal express. When "the fed" makes money, the U.S. does not somehow also make money. That would be like saying that I make money when my bank makes money off a loan.
How many billions in a trillion? Seven hundred? I thought it was more like one thousand or one million depending on if you use long scale or short scale. To demonstrate how much a more a trillion is than a billion, think of it as time.
When I say I can't recall that doesn't mean I'm "LYING" as you put it, it means I know of no case of this happening, and I'm not sure how accurate your brain map of DWP's coverage area is. As far as private vs. public, I simply asked for an example, if you can provide one, I will be proven wrong.
That's great, except for when it's not:
From gizmodo:
Technology may be a pivot for many of our lives, but it's not exactly infallible. A Massachusetts man learnt that the hard way, after his driver's license was flagged as a fake on the police system, due to a facial-recognition error.
It seems John H. Gass looks rather similar to another Massachusetts driver, causing the system to revoke his license after figuring his must be the fake. Rather than head down to the DVLA to sort out the problem, he was instead banned from driving for two weeks, and only won it back after he managed to prove he was who he said he was. Worse yet, it's estimated another 1,000 drivers faced a similar problem last year.
The facial recognition software that the state of Massachusetts uses is identical to the one 34 other states use, paving the way for many more opportunities of mistaken identity for the future.
I would think that burden of proof lies with the government / communist, not the libertarian. It's enough for the essay to say "it works better without it" which is surely true about any business. Less restriction = more productivity. Ask any business owner, are you better or worse off with the yoke of government?
Sure, we need the government to provide for the common defense and infrastructure, but that's it, and to the extent my taxes pay for infrastructure and defense I will not complain, but when the government decides to become a venture capitalist in order to push "green" technologies and blows huge sums of money on fly-by-night operations I'm going to have a big problem with it. I might even say "what the fuck gives you the right to give my hard earned money to this douche bag?". Of course, they take the money with threat of force, because nobody would have invested money in the douche bag's company without being compelled to do so. This goes for almost all forms of subsidizing too.
I see you're starting to realize my point when you say that the communist pencil factory does not produce better but in fact inferior pencils. Yet in the free society a government mastermind didn't force the workers to go to work, or force any of the other thousands of interactions to occur as they do in a communist society. I never claimed "government is incapable of it" as you suggest, in fact the essay even provides examples of the government doing things (USPS) so I'm not sure where you're coming from with that suggestion.
I'm not a huge critic of LA DWP but I just did a Google news search for LA DWP, not pretty. This stood out though:
DWP makes list of most hated firms
So to the extent that it can be easily quantified public utilities are lucky if they score half the score a private utility scores in customer satisfaction, so while your admiration may be genuine, it is also rare. Until you can provide any evidence to the contrary I will conclude that private utility is better.
I'm quite sure you're mistaken about the whole "brown out" thing with your neighbors since rolling blackouts and brownouts haven't occurred with a private utility in my living memory, and I do pay attention. The last time we experienced brownouts is after the nationalization of the utilities in CA, then Gov. Gray Davis implemented "price caps" on the private utilities forcing them to go bankrupt or to sell their power to other states. If you made a car for $1000.00 and the government said "You must sell it for $500.00" you probably wouldn't want to sell to those people (Californians) , so the private CA utilities sold their "power credits" to NV, who in turn seeing CA in the "we don't have any power" predicament sold the "power credits" back to CA at a huge markup. So thanks to government interference in the free market, we now pay much more for our electricity than we would have if they had left it alone.
And now they have these insane "green" laws now that try to "encourage" me to use electricity when they feel it is the "wisest" time to use it, as if I didn't know already when it was the best time for me to do the things I need to do. What if I work at night? What if I don't? What if I enjoy doing my laundry at noon? So to sum up the public vs. private utilities:
Private:
Costs a LOT Less.
Better product and service.
Incentive to make products and services better (private competition).
You're not forced to choose this company.
Operators are not compelled by the use of force to operate, but rather they want to and have incentive to do so.
Public
Costs a LOT more.
Worse product and service.
No incentive to make anything better, but plenty to make it worse.
You have no choice but to use this company.
Uses laws to force you to use their product.
The people
It is very debatable, but is de facto legal. I call the whole thing unconstitutional based on the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937. After a more conservative court ruled against FDRs earlier plans he basically fired the court and packed it with judges that would see "his way" and thus the Living Constitution was born. How this man can be allowed to have justices that he just appointed rule on a law without having the newly appointed justices recuse themselves runs contrary to everything I know about law. The law in and of itself is bad enough, but look at the way it was crammed down the throats of the people! "this isn't a tax" then "this is a tax", and now, after generations of being witness, we know it was just a fucking slush fund for the federal government and they never had any intentions of saving it.
Ok. Compare any private industry - say UPS with the U.S. Postal service. Where do you think money is spent more wisely? Even when heavily subsidized by federal and state governments, the UPSP cannot turn a profit, they are in fact 15 billion dollars in debt today, meanwhile UPS and all companies like it turn a profit every year, have better customer service, sell a better product and are not forced by the government to go to work every day but rather they filling the needs of others just like you do when you go to work every day.
Everything can be done, and done better, on every level that "better" has a meaning without the interference of the government. But you seem equally convinced of your doctrine, so please point out an example for me where the government, without the aid of private industry (USPS for example) has been able to do anything better than the private sector. Also, the essay is not saying "government can't do it" it actually mentions and compares USPS, but it does say that what needs to get done will get done without the government and will be better because there are no fetters placed there by the government.
"The feds" don't print money, "the fed" (federal reserve bank) prints money which in turn is borrowed by "the feds" (federal government). The federal reserve bank is no more the federal government than federal express. They are two different entities, one of which ("the fed") was quite unconstitutional. They borrow money from foreign governments and others in the form of t-bills that must be paid back with interest. That goes to 1. devalue the currency because more is in circulation and 2. borrowing on behalf of the public makes the public liable to pay back such funds, and was the unconstitutional bit, along with having a currency that is not backed by gold as it was intended by the framers. How now it is constutional when then is wasn't? The Living Constitution. Duh!
"General welfare" is perverted in numerous ways thanks to the liberal doctrine of the Living Constitution. Now that the flood gates are opened to the free interpretation of the meaning of the words in the constitution welfare can mean just about anything. As James Madison said: " What a metamorphosis would be produced in the code of law if all its ancient phraseology were to be taken in its modern sense." Indeed, that is the key reason why the government today is so alien to the principals of founders. If you can take "the right to bear arms shall not be infringed" to mean " we shall infringe upon the right to bear arms any time we damn well please." what can't you do?
Once again, you fail to read the link I, Pencil which details how this happens in a massive society. That you make arguments that are resolved in "I, Pencil" with perfect clarity proves to me you didn't read it.
The difference between you giving up some of your profit and the government allowing you to have a portion of their profit is profound. Indeed it is the deference between communism and freedom. My objections were not to taxes but to the idea that the government owns all profit. Government, at its best a necessary evil. That is why the founders of this country had the forethought to create enumerated powers, i.e.: "this is the only shit you can do".
Since FDR's illegal and corrupt supreme court issued it's new deal commandments we have been on a slow slide to a soft tyranny. The enumerated powers have been ignored and the power of government has grown exponentially through the doctrine of the living constitution allowing cases like Wickard v. Filburn where the government forced a farmer to pay taxes on grain that he grew and he fed to his chickens and never entered into the market. This set the precedent for thousands of cases where the government now feels as if it owns everything. The fact that some people in the government feel ownership over our current and future labor profits is just a symptom of this problem.
But we wouldn't have those profits without a functioning government.
This is demonstrably false. If I lived on an island with 10 other people, a government would not be necessary, yet we would profit from our labors, therefore your logic is invalid. Please read the link in my post I, Pencil as it further elucidates this point in a more practical and verbose way.
A little is lost on where the tax money came from. A homeless man buying booze. A retired man on a fixed income paying more for his food. People who really cannot afford to give a cent. Taxation in the name of government tampering with the free market is the most insidious device yet conceived by the mind of man.
Forever will these well meaning busy bodies toil in the name of our betterment, because they do so free of guilt, thinking honestly that the strong arm of government is the way to prosperity. How can it be that the wants and desires of the few people elected to office know better than the many individuals and industry from whom they take? How can you tell me you have a better idea for.30 cents on every dollar I make? Look at what the government does with your money! They treat is as if it was theirs to burn! They call steeling less from us a "tax expenditure".
Just think about what that means for a second. Tax expenditure.
For a tax break to be a tax expenditure all profit must first belong to the government. What form of government are we running here? We do not serve at the behest of these temporary politicians. They serve at our will, and we can dismiss any of them any time we desire, and do so in a lawful and peaceful manner. As Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America(1835) said, and I'm paraphrasing: "The difference between the American and European democracies is that in Europe the government cedes a portion of its power to the people while in America the people cedes a portion of its power to the government. " For too long have we imported the top down aristocratic style of rule from Europe. We are a free people and we demand freedom! Government is a necessary evil, the problem, not the solution.
The free market does not need a government solution. Read I, Pencil My Family Tree: written from the point of view of a pencil detailing the process involved in its construction. It talks about the hundreds of processes required for the creation of the simple pencil, and the lack of government control and the harmony created in the absence of such control. The author talks about the "Invisible Hand". This is the invisible force that guides you to get a job, or get a better job, or buy a car, or a candy bar. Basically the desires of society. The government cannot know your desires and cannot want to fulfill them more than you yourself want to. All the government can do is take away from your desires, guide them in new directions you never wanted to go, all the while claiming to do so because they "know better than you" and with the threat of violence if you don't comply. This is a fetter on the invisible hand that can and should be removed!
A free economy is a prosperous one. A happy free people is a prosperous one. The strong arm of government cannot force people to be prosperous and happy, it is the greatest folly that can befall man, destruction in the name of prosperity.
I'm pretty sure the GP was talking about the gate security, not the air marshals, which existed under the FAA long before the TSA was ever even thought of. The TSA guys at the gate don't carry guns, they call the local police if there is a problem and, on average, have the intellect of fly larvae, no insult intended towards fly larvae. So something tells me the casting director for the gate TSA guys didn't hire the plainclothes marshals on the planes.
And nobody has any problem with the air marshals, they don't grope you as you pass by them. Furthermore, air marshals can prevent many types of terrorist threats, and this is true a priori, on the other hand, the TSA's gate screens have only managed to catch a few staff members they accidentally hired that had a criminal history for molesting children. That's right, we hired people who like to molest children to... molest children!! It's the fucking pedophile cream dream! And don't think for a second there wasn't a line a mile long of yet-to-be-identified pedophiles lining up for the "Molest the children" job. No, no terrorist plots uncovered. Nobody wishing harm to the people on the aircraft stopped. Oh, they were there! They just let those guys go by. And as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. They have a 100% failure rate, they piss everyone off, El Al thinks they are a fucking joke and they make 1984 look a lot more like it could really happen. Can someone explain why are we blowing our money on this bullshit!?
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously? The very inclusion of the word "theology" causes all else connected to it to fail? I guess that "All men are created equal" is false because the deceleration of independence makes mention of god in there. There is just as much proof to support "there is a god" as there is to support "there is not a god". Besides that, dozens of great scientists believe in god, Copernicus, Newton, Darwin and may more. Do you now say that their theories and work are invalid because they believed in god?
Here's an idea: take each theory on its own merit and don't let your anti-religious zealotry blind you..
Did they give you a day off from harassing children passing over the bridge?
Science is not a consensus. Do you think Newton said "aww shucks, this guy Ptolemy has the consensus for predicting the moment of heavenly bodies."? Did Copernicus say "I guess the consensus is that the sun rotates around us."? Did Lavoisier say "This can't be oxygen because Priestley says it's dephlogisticated air and after the Priestley's idea of phlogiston has the scientific consensus.
Why? Because Newton, Copernicus and Lavoisier saw that there was a crisis of theory. The observable results of experiments were causing anomalies that couldn't be described by the current paradigm that held the scientific consensus (Phlogiston, Ptolemaic astronomy or non-heliocentric orbit ). There were holes in the theories.
The same thing is happening here. There is a paradigm of forcing gasses and radiation that cannot account for the observed effects and cannot, with any accuracy, predict future climate patterns as they claim. There are no experiments to be reproduced. There is no real theory that can be falsified. And then the author's of the 'consensus' global warming theory stretch their paradigm to the breaking point by calming they can predict this incredibly complex system with a computer (named Deus ex machina apparently) and low and behold its because of human activity (but by what percent?) that the climate is warming at the rate is is. People being critical of this usually cry "there is too much entropy in the system! Garbage in garbage out! How can you see anything through the entropic noise?" (ever hear of confirmation bias? Oh ya, we see something!)
But instead of being treated as a valid critique, a real crisis in the paradigm, the 'deniers' (heh, think what Copernicus was called) are met with the idiotic chant: "The FUCkING world is going to END and you're in the pocket of big oil". And really, how many times are AGW proponents going to get it dead wrong before we decide that this paradigm is nothing more than junk science.
I am good enough at math enough to know that the AGW theories are just full of guess work, the models contain too much entropy to be driving decisions about our global economy. Pro "big government" interests have taken up this cause (oh? people cause the problem? That's exactly what we want to control!) in an effort to push more intrusive government controls on everything and confiscate any wealth in the name of "saving the planet".
When so described, how can alarmist be called a pejorative? It really sounds to me like a description of the chicken little show being put on. And the term 'denier' really presupposes that the other side has proven their theory to be a fact , I mean, how can you deny fact? If it were just a theory you may be called skeptical or even overly skeptical but denier really presupposes that AGW is solved scientific fact, when of course, even the biggest proponent will admit under pressure, it is not. And their is nothing "unscientific" about being skeptical.
Please read this: Frederic Bastiat - The Law. It's very short and I think explains my position better than I can. Everything else in this argument is nuance 38, 53, 70, 90, it's all far beyond the needs of the government to preform the duties needed of it. I live in California and the combined tax rate here is >= 53%. If you really need citation for 53 you can do the google search. But don't get hung up on that, just read the Bastiat link and tell me what you think of that.
My mistake, 53%. But it looks like Carter era rates > 70% are back in, and some democrats (remember, the guys who championed slavery about 100 years ago?) don't see anything wrong with taxation as high as 94% as they were in the 1950s, more great democrat ideas. Conservative Republicans (remember the guys who were founded as the abolitionist party?) want to spend less money and tax you and me less.
Conservatives are not the demons here, they want to spend less of our money on bull shit of any kind. On the other hand, the democrats want to spend more, on anything and everything so much more that we need to continuously raise the debit ceiling without explanation. In the opinion of "progressive liberals" nothing is outside of the scope of "things the government should be involved in". Where money can be spent by the government, outside of defending ourselves from foreign invaders of course, spend it!
The government never has enough power! Liberals opine: If only Obama had dictatorial control over the country! Obama isn't against that, indeed, he argues that Obama can do this debit ceiling stuff himself under the 14th amendment. Of course using this liberal reading of the 14h amendment, why, congress really doesn't hold any power over the spending of the executive branch. Similar arguments have been made, for example a liberal interpretation of the commerce clause in Wickard v. Filburn. And of course they're using the same argument to compel everyone to buy health insurance.
Was I wrong? Ya, I'll admit that, but I'm not crazy by any measure, I was just off by 17%.
By that logic, taxes will eventually reach 100% correct? When is the tax rate too high? We're at 70% in some brackets. Use your own life as an example. If you were spending too much money, and you knew a lot of the stuff you were spending it on was not necessary, would you stop spending so much or try and convince your credit card company to raise your limit so you can borrow more money from them? Would you spend less, especially on things you really didn't need, like infrastructure repair in the name of creating jobs, or would you demand a raise from your boss?
Simple economics indeed!
Sort of like Nixon was the target of the watergate scandal?
When you copy and paste data into excel a lot of unusual things can happen to the data. This behavior is totally unpredictable because it changes from version to version and IMHO the functionality never had any logical reason to be there in the first place. Who's at MS thought "Oh these number's you've pasted have too much resolution, they should be truncated, not even rounded, but only on alternating Tuesdays." And god help you if you have a damn alpha character. So ya, pasting into excel can really easily manipulate your data in very unexpected ways.
God, I hope the CRU didn't use excel!
There's a name fore people like that.
Isn't the CRU constantly breaking "one of the strongest" rules of scientific life: appealing to the state and or populace when your science fails to convince? Science does not require the rule of "Might makes right" to persuade. Logic and strong correlation of data are all that is required. Thus far, in my opinion, CRU has shown themselves to be anything but scientific. They appeal to the head of state and to the public at large! This, more than anything proves that they are not scientists. What other respected branch of science reaches out for a "consensus" in the government or the populace to prove their theories? Science is not the blatant politicizing of science to overpower the paradigm group you disagree with.
I was under the assumption that the public already had this data. Certainly many people have trumpeted "Look at the raw data". Others still have claimed that the "raw data has been deleted" presumably a long time ago. Why wasn't the data released 5 years ago? So many questions, this just creates a dozen or so more.
So in your world view, were "the fed" to have its 16 trillion in secret loans defaulted on the American tax payers would be on the hook for secret loans made by a non-government agency to a foreign bank for thousands of times our GDP? Maybe you should go back and read the law.
I think you're confusing the federal reserve bank and the federal government. "The fed" is no more related to the federal government than federal express. When "the fed" makes money, the U.S. does not somehow also make money. That would be like saying that I make money when my bank makes money off a loan.
How many billions in a trillion? Seven hundred? I thought it was more like one thousand or one million depending on if you use long scale or short scale. To demonstrate how much a more a trillion is than a billion, think of it as time.
1 million seconds = 11.5 Days (< a fortnight)
1 billion seconds = 31.6 years (a quarter of a life time)
1 trillion seconds = 31,688 years (>8 times the length of recorded history)
Ya, a trillion is a LOT bigger than a billion.
When I say I can't recall that doesn't mean I'm "LYING" as you put it, it means I know of no case of this happening, and I'm not sure how accurate your brain map of DWP's coverage area is. As far as private vs. public, I simply asked for an example, if you can provide one, I will be proven wrong.
From gizmodo:
I would think that burden of proof lies with the government / communist, not the libertarian. It's enough for the essay to say "it works better without it" which is surely true about any business. Less restriction = more productivity. Ask any business owner, are you better or worse off with the yoke of government?
Sure, we need the government to provide for the common defense and infrastructure, but that's it, and to the extent my taxes pay for infrastructure and defense I will not complain, but when the government decides to become a venture capitalist in order to push "green" technologies and blows huge sums of money on fly-by-night operations I'm going to have a big problem with it. I might even say "what the fuck gives you the right to give my hard earned money to this douche bag?". Of course, they take the money with threat of force, because nobody would have invested money in the douche bag's company without being compelled to do so. This goes for almost all forms of subsidizing too.
I see you're starting to realize my point when you say that the communist pencil factory does not produce better but in fact inferior pencils. Yet in the free society a government mastermind didn't force the workers to go to work, or force any of the other thousands of interactions to occur as they do in a communist society. I never claimed "government is incapable of it" as you suggest, in fact the essay even provides examples of the government doing things (USPS) so I'm not sure where you're coming from with that suggestion.
I'm not a huge critic of LA DWP but I just did a Google news search for LA DWP, not pretty. This stood out though: DWP makes list of most hated firms So to the extent that it can be easily quantified public utilities are lucky if they score half the score a private utility scores in customer satisfaction, so while your admiration may be genuine, it is also rare. Until you can provide any evidence to the contrary I will conclude that private utility is better.
I'm quite sure you're mistaken about the whole "brown out" thing with your neighbors since rolling blackouts and brownouts haven't occurred with a private utility in my living memory, and I do pay attention. The last time we experienced brownouts is after the nationalization of the utilities in CA, then Gov. Gray Davis implemented "price caps" on the private utilities forcing them to go bankrupt or to sell their power to other states. If you made a car for $1000.00 and the government said "You must sell it for $500.00" you probably wouldn't want to sell to those people (Californians) , so the private CA utilities sold their "power credits" to NV, who in turn seeing CA in the "we don't have any power" predicament sold the "power credits" back to CA at a huge markup. So thanks to government interference in the free market, we now pay much more for our electricity than we would have if they had left it alone.
And now they have these insane "green" laws now that try to "encourage" me to use electricity when they feel it is the "wisest" time to use it, as if I didn't know already when it was the best time for me to do the things I need to do. What if I work at night? What if I don't? What if I enjoy doing my laundry at noon?
So to sum up the public vs. private utilities:
Private:
Costs a LOT Less.
Better product and service.
Incentive to make products and services better (private competition).
You're not forced to choose this company.
Operators are not compelled by the use of force to operate, but rather they want to and have incentive to do so.
Public
Costs a LOT more.
Worse product and service.
No incentive to make anything better, but plenty to make it worse.
You have no choice but to use this company.
Uses laws to force you to use their product.
The people
It is very debatable, but is de facto legal. I call the whole thing unconstitutional based on the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937. After a more conservative court ruled against FDRs earlier plans he basically fired the court and packed it with judges that would see "his way" and thus the Living Constitution was born. How this man can be allowed to have justices that he just appointed rule on a law without having the newly appointed justices recuse themselves runs contrary to everything I know about law. The law in and of itself is bad enough, but look at the way it was crammed down the throats of the people! "this isn't a tax" then "this is a tax", and now, after generations of being witness, we know it was just a fucking slush fund for the federal government and they never had any intentions of saving it.
Ok. Compare any private industry - say UPS with the U.S. Postal service. Where do you think money is spent more wisely? Even when heavily subsidized by federal and state governments, the UPSP cannot turn a profit, they are in fact 15 billion dollars in debt today, meanwhile UPS and all companies like it turn a profit every year, have better customer service, sell a better product and are not forced by the government to go to work every day but rather they filling the needs of others just like you do when you go to work every day.
Everything can be done, and done better, on every level that "better" has a meaning without the interference of the government. But you seem equally convinced of your doctrine, so please point out an example for me where the government, without the aid of private industry (USPS for example) has been able to do anything better than the private sector. Also, the essay is not saying "government can't do it" it actually mentions and compares USPS, but it does say that what needs to get done will get done without the government and will be better because there are no fetters placed there by the government.
Don't make a straw man argument about infrastructure. I'm talking about the billions of dollars in useless federal and state regulation, taxes that are taxes upon taxes. The ponzi scheme that is social security, which just came under threat from the Obama administration of having its funds cut off even though only $.25 on the dollar go to pay current benefit recipients, meanwhile the federal government has been borrowing $.75 of every dollar paid into social security. And they have the audacity to tell us, sorry now we're going to borrow $1.00 of every dollar paid into the already empty fund! You can keep payin' us but we're going to be paying our federal workers and entitlement programs with that money. And what's Obama's solution to the problem? Raise taxes by 1 trillion!
"The feds" don't print money, "the fed" (federal reserve bank) prints money which in turn is borrowed by "the feds" (federal government). The federal reserve bank is no more the federal government than federal express. They are two different entities, one of which ("the fed") was quite unconstitutional. They borrow money from foreign governments and others in the form of t-bills that must be paid back with interest. That goes to 1. devalue the currency because more is in circulation and 2. borrowing on behalf of the public makes the public liable to pay back such funds, and was the unconstitutional bit, along with having a currency that is not backed by gold as it was intended by the framers. How now it is constutional when then is wasn't? The Living Constitution. Duh!
"General welfare" is perverted in numerous ways thanks to the liberal doctrine of the Living Constitution. Now that the flood gates are opened to the free interpretation of the meaning of the words in the constitution welfare can mean just about anything. As James Madison said: " What a metamorphosis would be produced in the code of law if all its ancient phraseology were to be taken in its modern sense." Indeed, that is the key reason why the government today is so alien to the principals of founders. If you can take "the right to bear arms shall not be infringed" to mean " we shall infringe upon the right to bear arms any time we damn well please." what can't you do?
Once again, you fail to read the link I, Pencil which details how this happens in a massive society. That you make arguments that are resolved in "I, Pencil" with perfect clarity proves to me you didn't read it.
Since FDR's illegal and corrupt supreme court issued it's new deal commandments we have been on a slow slide to a soft tyranny. The enumerated powers have been ignored and the power of government has grown exponentially through the doctrine of the living constitution allowing cases like Wickard v. Filburn where the government forced a farmer to pay taxes on grain that he grew and he fed to his chickens and never entered into the market. This set the precedent for thousands of cases where the government now feels as if it owns everything. The fact that some people in the government feel ownership over our current and future labor profits is just a symptom of this problem.
This is demonstrably false. If I lived on an island with 10 other people, a government would not be necessary, yet we would profit from our labors, therefore your logic is invalid. Please read the link in my post I, Pencil as it further elucidates this point in a more practical and verbose way.
A little is lost on where the tax money came from. A homeless man buying booze. A retired man on a fixed income paying more for his food. People who really cannot afford to give a cent. Taxation in the name of government tampering with the free market is the most insidious device yet conceived by the mind of man.
Forever will these well meaning busy bodies toil in the name of our betterment, because they do so free of guilt, thinking honestly that the strong arm of government is the way to prosperity. How can it be that the wants and desires of the few people elected to office know better than the many individuals and industry from whom they take? How can you tell me you have a better idea for .30 cents on every dollar I make? Look at what the government does with your money! They treat is as if it was theirs to burn! They call steeling less from us a "tax expenditure".
Just think about what that means for a second. Tax expenditure.
For a tax break to be a tax expenditure all profit must first belong to the government. What form of government are we running here? We do not serve at the behest of these temporary politicians. They serve at our will, and we can dismiss any of them any time we desire, and do so in a lawful and peaceful manner. As Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America(1835) said, and I'm paraphrasing: "The difference between the American and European democracies is that in Europe the government cedes a portion of its power to the people while in America the people cedes a portion of its power to the government. " For too long have we imported the top down aristocratic style of rule from Europe. We are a free people and we demand freedom! Government is a necessary evil, the problem, not the solution.
The free market does not need a government solution. Read I, Pencil My Family Tree: written from the point of view of a pencil detailing the process involved in its construction. It talks about the hundreds of processes required for the creation of the simple pencil, and the lack of government control and the harmony created in the absence of such control. The author talks about the "Invisible Hand". This is the invisible force that guides you to get a job, or get a better job, or buy a car, or a candy bar. Basically the desires of society. The government cannot know your desires and cannot want to fulfill them more than you yourself want to. All the government can do is take away from your desires, guide them in new directions you never wanted to go, all the while claiming to do so because they "know better than you" and with the threat of violence if you don't comply. This is a fetter on the invisible hand that can and should be removed!
A free economy is a prosperous one. A happy free people is a prosperous one. The strong arm of government cannot force people to be prosperous and happy, it is the greatest folly that can befall man, destruction in the name of prosperity.
Not true. Do a little more research. You'll find that they "paid back" what "Bush loaned them" but not what Obama did. It's a damn lie.
I'm pretty sure the GP was talking about the gate security, not the air marshals, which existed under the FAA long before the TSA was ever even thought of. The TSA guys at the gate don't carry guns, they call the local police if there is a problem and, on average, have the intellect of fly larvae, no insult intended towards fly larvae. So something tells me the casting director for the gate TSA guys didn't hire the plainclothes marshals on the planes.
... molest children! ! It's the fucking pedophile cream dream! And don't think for a second there wasn't a line a mile long of yet-to-be-identified pedophiles lining up for the "Molest the children" job. No, no terrorist plots uncovered. Nobody wishing harm to the people on the aircraft stopped. Oh, they were there! They just let those guys go by. And as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. They have a 100% failure rate, they piss everyone off, El Al thinks they are a fucking joke and they make 1984 look a lot more like it could really happen. Can someone explain why are we blowing our money on this bullshit!?
And nobody has any problem with the air marshals, they don't grope you as you pass by them. Furthermore, air marshals can prevent many types of terrorist threats, and this is true a priori, on the other hand, the TSA's gate screens have only managed to catch a few staff members they accidentally hired that had a criminal history for molesting children. That's right, we hired people who like to molest children to