The Internet is not a thing like the 'winter olympics' or recording industry. The Internet is a series of tubes which allow the transfer of information
I think that if the patent were valid (under the 20 years of non-implementation/non-description standard I described), it wouldn't matter. What bothers people about patent trolls is that they are getting in the way of you doing normal work. It shouldn't matter if someone wants to patent the idea then license it without an implementation, IF the patent is for something genuinely non-obvious. I think that 90% or more of peoples' issues with "patent trolls" are over obvious patents.
Even if you added the "good-faith effort to manufacture" standard, people could get around it pretty trivially by creating a small, failing business, then when it goes out of business they can claim it's because people are infringing.
I do see one advantage of the kind of standard that you're talking about, which is that for a company like IBM or Microsoft, if someone actually is in a legitimate business, it's likely they are infringing on one of MS or IBM's patents, so they can do the horse trade reciprocal licensing thing. But that's a huge waste of lawyer time compared to not actually having any obvious material patented, I think.
Since it's basically impossible to say what would be "surprising to an expert in the art" (or whatever the standard is), and since soooooo many obvious things have been patented that were patently obvious, you adopt a new standard.
A product (or even a business technique) is patentable if and only if:
(a) It has been economically feasible to do for 20 years (b) It has not been publicly described or implemented
The idea is this:
Even a simple idea, which for whatever reason has not been described or implemented, could be brought to market because of this. If you have a simple improvement on, say, the broom, you are just going to sit on it, because (a) you don't know who to talk to at the many many broom manufacturers (b) if it's simple anyone else could copy it, so it's not worth it to start making brooms yourself, etc.
It should prevent the current patenting of obvious things that simply haven't been done because people haven't been doing business over the internet or selling stuff on cell phones or whatever. The obvious stuff that any smart engineer would figure out will get done in that first 20 years, and only the hard (or easy, but hard to think of) stuff will be left.
The justification for granting a patent is that the world has been given time to figure this out, and they haven't. Therefore, it makes sense to give you monopoly for 20 years (short time in the big scheme of things) so that the idea gets out there, which is the whole point of it from the Constitution's perspective.
Another way to do it:
(a) It has been feasible for X years, but not described or produced, you can have patent for X years. That way if you're working in a new field, you can still get protection, but not lock everyone out for 20 years. So, one-click could have gotten protection, but only for four years or whatever.
Obvious flaw: how do you decide when it started to be "feasible"? But I think that's a lot easier to come up with a standard for than "obviousness", which is plagued by the fact that a lot of things seem obvious after you see them.
A similar bug existing in Windows doesn't prove anything and is irrelevant here. After all 'M$ can't code shit'. Linux and FOSS is commonly claimed to be more secure because of it's development model and bug free here in these parts
Can you show me some (high-modded, preferably) comments that claim linux is bug free?
My understanding was that people didn't want to commit to DAT until the legal issues were settled. That didn't happen until 1992, and at that point they had not only added a tax to it (an already expensive technology, surely that didn't help), but they were successful in keeping players from being able to record past a single generation. By this time, cd was ubiquitous, and with the format crippled it had no hope of people being willing to pay the early adopter price. The RIAA had demonstrated that, as I'm sure a lot of people expected, they were going to be able to control the manufacturers. The laws they did get passed were enough.
This isn't from the wikipedia article, just my recollection of a conversation with someone about it a long time ago.
As long as the technology was localized, where they could attack a single format, target manufacturers, etc, they could keep it under their thumb. Things are, I think, fundamentally different now that digital copying and digital redistribution is ubiquitous.
You weren't making anything like the quality of copy that is possible now, and you had no way to anonymously dump a million crappy cassettes for other people to pick up, either.
Although technically you might have called what you were doing piracy, I think the Internet has fundamentally changed the game. He might have needed to say "piracy at this scale" vs. just piracy, but functionally it's just a minor quibble.
Many think it should all be privatized, but this is a fringe view
Sound money is a "fringe view", too. It's too bad more people don't get it.
The problem is that state run or state mandated monopolies easily become a slippery slope to more power grabs by the state.
Let's take your "obvious" case of roads. You know how the federal government forces states to go along with completely unconstitutional things like drug laws? The put into the bill that if you don't do things their way, you don't get highway funds.
It is not obvious that a state monopoly on roads is a good thing. Widely believed, maybe, but not obvious. Again, look at the economy, and all the widely believed assumptions ("real estate will always go up!") that brought it down. The idea that we were in a housing bubble was considered a fringe view, too.
I'm not sure, I'm pretty sure Amendment 3 is still going strong. I've never been forced to quarter troops, in time of war or otherwise.
So the money they take out of your paycheck to house our standing army is a voluntary contribution then?:)
(To be serious, I think war has changed a lot since the 1700s, when a lot, maybe the majority, at least of rural people, had "assault rifles" in their homes. That is to say, they had pretty much state-of-the-art weaponry, and an invading army was not going to be all that better equipped, except possibly with cannon or whatever.
But a lot has changed now. I'm not sure how you would be able to defend your country from invasion by countries with modern warplanes if you don't have them yourselves, and that's a lot for a militia-of-regular-folks to have stored in the garage or out on the back part of the ranch. It would be interesting to know what a defensive force and an efficiently run R&D would actually cost in terms of %gdp or %avg paycheck.)
Just out of curiosity: what barrier was that? I thought it was capitalism that went bankrupt
To anyone who understands anything about economics, this statement, honestly, looks like a troll. It's like reading someone saying "I thought Windows was better? Isn't that what 95% of businesses use?" or something like that. Yes, there are many, many people who thought (and perhaps still think, although OS X and even linux have made tremendous inroads into the public consciousness now), for example, that it was "obvious" which operating system was best. For one thing, there were many, many people in the media who would pontificate about the superiority of Windows over any alternative, and then you could back that up by finding hordes of Windows weenies who would enthusiastically repeat the tired, old, canards in a way that made them sound all sarcastic and superior.
The people talking about the current crisis as a failure of capitalism understand economics in the same way that the people referenced above understand technology. They hear people talk about it, some of them sound like they know what they're talking about, they look around at other people in the crowd and go with what they think of as the consensus of the smart/informed people.
In fact, they know very little, and the people that do know are sharply divided over what is "obvious".
But if you think that you have seen capitalism fail, you just aren't looking hard enough to see past the Democrat's distortion blitz.
I agree wholeheartedly that the novelty of credit default swaps were an artifact of capitalism. A stupid investment which Buffet called a time bomb--but capitalism produces stupid investments, as it reflects the desires of individuals to get something for nothing. That's not all it produces, but because it embraces freedom, it embraces people's freedom to dumb as well as to be smart. And sometimes what one person says is dumb turns out to have been really smart.
But let's get back to the current useful-idiot-producing crisis. Where did the "money" come from that went into the bubble that just burst? It came from "money" (fiat money, meaning you aren't allowed to compete with it like you would in capitalism; political money, meaning it's produced by a quasi-government entity (the Federal Reserve) ) that was "created" when banks sold mortgages. There was a huge influx of "money" into the system. All the dizzying loads of information you can find about what happened after that--the "exotic derivatives" and so forth--is just the result of people trying to cash in on a flood of "money". Basically, yes, if you pour money into a capatilist system, it will figure out all kinds of ways to attempt to drive that money into the pockets of various players. No surprise there, and you can call it capitalism.
Over time, after a source of money shows up, once people figure out what the real nature of that source is and how to value it, the activity around it calms down. There may or may not be a bubble, depending on how risky or cautious people are, whether quality information is available, and a host of other factors. Capitalism does not instantaneously find the value of something new, it tries hundreds of different ways to measure and extract that value.
What, in the case of the current crisis, is the source of the "new money"? Well, we've already talked about the mortgages, buy why did they show up? Was there some kind of twitch in the invisible hand? Some evil capitalist corporation put subliminal messages into advertising convincing people that they should really be buying a house, it's what all the cool people are doing?
No, no, and no. Although things something like that happened once it was shown that there was money there, what started this artificial glut of money was the government. Some politicians, concerned that people that couldn't afford to buy homes by evil capitalist banking standards, well, couldn't afford to buy homes by the evil
Yeah, well, there's gonna be a lot of people writing almost the same thing, but with slight but meaningful variations:
"world--finally the whole thing is up for grabs" "world--mine"
Also, when you're trying to bring about the One World Government you're supposed to do it in secret with Bilderbergers and Rothschildren and stuff.
(Note that I completely left out this version:
"world--thanks, Obama, for bankrupting the last barrier to a crushingly Socialist one-world government where the only group willing to rise up and take back power are the Islamofascists"
That's because I'm dedicated to keeping the discussion dignified and civil.)
No, Hannibal Lecter could not have been conveyed in a PG-13 film. Because, by definition, horror has to be scary, and scary means children don't get to see it.
I don't know if you have children, but if you think that PG-13 movies are "not scary", I would recommend that you screen at least The Ring and Sixth Sense yourself before showing it to your 7-yr-old.
I don't think you are correct about Hannibal Lecter not being portrayable in a PG-13 film. A good filmmaker can make something just as scary (The Ring (opinions vary on that one though) and Sixth Sense being good examples) without depicting the gore graphically. It's not done as often, partly because people like the gore. It's part of the fun of the movie (for people who like that), and you're making something that would scare kids anyway, so what point is there in toning the graphic violence down?
If there was a way to throw down the guantlet and challenge filmmakers to make scary films that fit withing PG-13 guidelines, you would see exactly how terrifying a film can be without on-screen gore or extreme violence. (Although if you did this you might get parents screaming to modify the rating system after those movies came out:).
The price differential exists precisely because the head of Microsoft doesn't understand what it is about Apple software that causes many people to consider an Apple computer to be worth a few hundred bucks more than a similar-spec Windows machine.
Dude! Don't say stuff like that out loud! It's funny to watch them lose and not know why.
Graphene has some pretty interesting electronic properties. Its bandgap (the essential component of all semiconductors) can be manipulated by changing the length of the sheet; as the sheet becomes infinitely long, the bandgap approaches zero
Yeah, in theory. I've actually got an infinitely long sheet and I'm about to test that, just waiting to hear back from the lab assistant I sent to the other end.
Indeed. We seem to be evolving a culture where we try to solve every problem with government force. Sometimes government force is not the answer. Sometimes you have to realise that government force is not curing the problem, it is just solving a symptom. And like most diseases, it will simply evolve around your attempt.
If they do this, they will just ensure that no one ever campaigns in Iowa. Their population is so small that they will be able to be safely ignored as long as you concentrate on large population centers.
Yes, we the people are idiots, and democracy is a terrible idea. Bring back an oligarchy, it works for Russia.
I think he is arguing for a republic, which we actually are. "We the people" may be idiots now, but originally "we the people" delegated a very limited set of powers to the federal government in the Constitution. It was never intended, and is not legal without a change to the constitution, for the people to vote in the same kind of tyranny that we had just fought a war to evict. (Like H.R. 1 which allows the fed gov't dictatorial rights over the practice of medicine.)
If you're like most slashdotters, you think the war in Iraq was a disgrace. Did you like the fact that a majority of the people/their representatives voting in favor of that war meant that *your* tax dollars, which are extracted from you buy force, went to support it?
I think it's fine if people want to try to help another country throw off tyranny (remember that up to 70% of Iraqis wanted the US to invade when the question was being considered originally), but I don't think they should be forcing you to pay for it if you don't agree. In my opinion, in the long run, we are better off with more free countries in the world, and there is value in us helping fix a mess we created (by supporting Saddam in the first place). But that's my opinion, and it should be up to me and the other people who agree (and anyone who wants to volunteer to fight) to do something about it if we want to.
By naively saying "democracy! majority rules!" you are inviting other people to infringe on your rights. It's a republic, and there are rights you are not allowed to take from me nor I from you by a mere 51% popular vote. Sometimes that means you don't get to force other people to do what you want them to.
Yeah, that's not necessarily the right thing to do, either. What would happen if people voluntarily opted out, for example? I don't know. People have explored possibilities there.
If pressed I could concede jury duty for a few weeks much easier than forcing someone to change careers.
We should draft random people to become politicians.
Ah, yes! Use force! Only by taking away freedom (the freedom not to be a politician) can we protect freedom!
That's my knee-jerk reaction, and it's like that for a reason--just about the only thing anyone ever proposes is more force. Forcing banks to lend money to people that wouldn't have qualified for loans under the bank's own rules, coupled with the creation (again, through force of federal law) things like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which gave institutions a place to unburden themselves of that debt, got us into the mess we have now. And the first thing people think (well, to give them credit, they did stop it the first time, but when the fear mongering set in, they caved) is "the government should do something". And when they say that, they mean "by force".
Every time you think of or hear of a possible government solution to a problem, ask yourself if this is just another scheme to try to use force to make things the way someone thinks they should be. Force is seductive--it looks so easy. End poverty! Take all the rich bastards' money and give it to the poor! Stop the horrors of drug addiction! Make drugs illegal! Prostitution is immoral! Make it illegal! Pornography {feminist: victimizes women!} {religious right:offends God!} It should be illegal!
The alternative is _so_ _much_ _more_ _work_! It staggers the mind to think of what it would take to teach, encourage, get people to choose to do the thing you think is right. Some of them might not ever do it. It would be _so_ _much_ _easier_ to just _make_ them! And that, basically, is what you get from the left and the right. A plan to force others to do things they way they think they should be done.
The thing is, the people that are in positions of power aren't the problem. It's the power that we have conceded to them. The constitution does not give the government the right to do 1/3rd (made that up, I bet it's actually smaller) of what it does. What we should do is work to reign government back to what the constitution says it is. Then you can fret less about who gets elected, because they will have less power to mess up your life.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, calm down. I know where your stapler is, I'll get it to you.
ftfy
I think that if the patent were valid (under the 20 years of non-implementation/non-description standard I described), it wouldn't matter. What bothers people about patent trolls is that they are getting in the way of you doing normal work. It shouldn't matter if someone wants to patent the idea then license it without an implementation, IF the patent is for something genuinely non-obvious. I think that 90% or more of peoples' issues with "patent trolls" are over obvious patents.
Even if you added the "good-faith effort to manufacture" standard, people could get around it pretty trivially by creating a small, failing business, then when it goes out of business they can claim it's because people are infringing.
I do see one advantage of the kind of standard that you're talking about, which is that for a company like IBM or Microsoft, if someone actually is in a legitimate business, it's likely they are infringing on one of MS or IBM's patents, so they can do the horse trade reciprocal licensing thing. But that's a huge waste of lawyer time compared to not actually having any obvious material patented, I think.
Since it's basically impossible to say what would be "surprising to an expert in the art" (or whatever the standard is), and since soooooo many obvious things have been patented that were patently obvious, you adopt a new standard.
A product (or even a business technique) is patentable if and only if:
(a) It has been economically feasible to do for 20 years
(b) It has not been publicly described or implemented
The idea is this:
Even a simple idea, which for whatever reason has not been described or implemented, could be brought to market because of this. If you have a simple improvement on, say, the broom, you are just going to sit on it, because (a) you don't know who to talk to at the many many broom manufacturers (b) if it's simple anyone else could copy it, so it's not worth it to start making brooms yourself, etc.
It should prevent the current patenting of obvious things that simply haven't been done because people haven't been doing business over the internet or selling stuff on cell phones or whatever. The obvious stuff that any smart engineer would figure out will get done in that first 20 years, and only the hard (or easy, but hard to think of) stuff will be left.
The justification for granting a patent is that the world has been given time to figure this out, and they haven't. Therefore, it makes sense to give you monopoly for 20 years (short time in the big scheme of things) so that the idea gets out there, which is the whole point of it from the Constitution's perspective.
Another way to do it:
(a) It has been feasible for X years, but not described or produced, you can have patent for X years. That way if you're working in a new field, you can still get protection, but not lock everyone out for 20 years. So, one-click could have gotten protection, but only for four years or whatever.
Obvious flaw: how do you decide when it started to be "feasible"? But I think that's a lot easier to come up with a standard for than "obviousness", which is plagued by the fact that a lot of things seem obvious after you see them.
Stockholm ptsd--when you can't distinguish it from nostalgia.
...not...sing...Iron...Man
Can you show me some (high-modded, preferably) comments that claim linux is bug free?
My understanding was that people didn't want to commit to DAT until the legal issues were settled. That didn't happen until 1992, and at that point they had not only added a tax to it (an already expensive technology, surely that didn't help), but they were successful in keeping players from being able to record past a single generation. By this time, cd was ubiquitous, and with the format crippled it had no hope of people being willing to pay the early adopter price. The RIAA had demonstrated that, as I'm sure a lot of people expected, they were going to be able to control the manufacturers. The laws they did get passed were enough.
This isn't from the wikipedia article, just my recollection of a conversation with someone about it a long time ago.
but you were copying to crap cassette tapes. You didn't have digital audio tape. Why not? Cuz the RIAA won that one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Tape
As long as the technology was localized, where they could attack a single format, target manufacturers, etc, they could keep it under their thumb. Things are, I think, fundamentally different now that digital copying and digital redistribution is ubiquitous.
You weren't making anything like the quality of copy that is possible now, and you had no way to anonymously dump a million crappy cassettes for other people to pick up, either.
Although technically you might have called what you were doing piracy, I think the Internet has fundamentally changed the game. He might have needed to say "piracy at this scale" vs. just piracy, but functionally it's just a minor quibble.
Sound money is a "fringe view", too. It's too bad more people don't get it.
The problem is that state run or state mandated monopolies easily become a slippery slope to more power grabs by the state.
Let's take your "obvious" case of roads. You know how the federal government forces states to go along with completely unconstitutional things like drug laws? The put into the bill that if you don't do things their way, you don't get highway funds.
It is not obvious that a state monopoly on roads is a good thing. Widely believed, maybe, but not obvious. Again, look at the economy, and all the widely believed assumptions ("real estate will always go up!") that brought it down. The idea that we were in a housing bubble was considered a fringe view, too.
So the money they take out of your paycheck to house our standing army is a voluntary contribution then? :)
(To be serious, I think war has changed a lot since the 1700s, when a lot, maybe the majority, at least of rural people, had "assault rifles" in their homes. That is to say, they had pretty much state-of-the-art weaponry, and an invading army was not going to be all that better equipped, except possibly with cannon or whatever.
But a lot has changed now. I'm not sure how you would be able to defend your country from invasion by countries with modern warplanes if you don't have them yourselves, and that's a lot for a militia-of-regular-folks to have stored in the garage or out on the back part of the ranch. It would be interesting to know what a defensive force and an efficiently run R&D would actually cost in terms of %gdp or %avg paycheck.)
That's the funniest assertion I've heard all day.
To anyone who understands anything about economics, this statement, honestly, looks like a troll. It's like reading someone saying "I thought Windows was better? Isn't that what 95% of businesses use?" or something like that. Yes, there are many, many people who thought (and perhaps still think, although OS X and even linux have made tremendous inroads into the public consciousness now), for example, that it was "obvious" which operating system was best. For one thing, there were many, many people in the media who would pontificate about the superiority of Windows over any alternative, and then you could back that up by finding hordes of Windows weenies who would enthusiastically repeat the tired, old, canards in a way that made them sound all sarcastic and superior.
The people talking about the current crisis as a failure of capitalism understand economics in the same way that the people referenced above understand technology. They hear people talk about it, some of them sound like they know what they're talking about, they look around at other people in the crowd and go with what they think of as the consensus of the smart/informed people.
In fact, they know very little, and the people that do know are sharply divided over what is "obvious".
But if you think that you have seen capitalism fail, you just aren't looking hard enough to see past the Democrat's distortion blitz.
I agree wholeheartedly that the novelty of credit default swaps were an artifact of capitalism. A stupid investment which Buffet called a time bomb--but capitalism produces stupid investments, as it reflects the desires of individuals to get something for nothing. That's not all it produces, but because it embraces freedom, it embraces people's freedom to dumb as well as to be smart. And sometimes what one person says is dumb turns out to have been really smart.
But let's get back to the current useful-idiot-producing crisis. Where did the "money" come from that went into the bubble that just burst? It came from "money" (fiat money, meaning you aren't allowed to compete with it like you would in capitalism; political money, meaning it's produced by a quasi-government entity (the Federal Reserve) ) that was "created" when banks sold mortgages. There was a huge influx of "money" into the system. All the dizzying loads of information you can find about what happened after that--the "exotic derivatives" and so forth--is just the result of people trying to cash in on a flood of "money". Basically, yes, if you pour money into a capatilist system, it will figure out all kinds of ways to attempt to drive that money into the pockets of various players. No surprise there, and you can call it capitalism.
Over time, after a source of money shows up, once people figure out what the real nature of that source is and how to value it, the activity around it calms down. There may or may not be a bubble, depending on how risky or cautious people are, whether quality information is available, and a host of other factors. Capitalism does not instantaneously find the value of something new, it tries hundreds of different ways to measure and extract that value.
What, in the case of the current crisis, is the source of the "new money"? Well, we've already talked about the mortgages, buy why did they show up? Was there some kind of twitch in the invisible hand? Some evil capitalist corporation put subliminal messages into advertising convincing people that they should really be buying a house, it's what all the cool people are doing?
No, no, and no. Although things something like that happened once it was shown that there was money there, what started this artificial glut of money was the government. Some politicians, concerned that people that couldn't afford to buy homes by evil capitalist banking standards, well, couldn't afford to buy homes by the evil
Yeah, well, there's gonna be a lot of people writing almost the same thing, but with slight but meaningful variations:
"world--finally the whole thing is up for grabs"
"world--mine"
Also, when you're trying to bring about the One World Government you're supposed to do it in secret with Bilderbergers and Rothschildren and stuff.
(Note that I completely left out this version:
"world--thanks, Obama, for bankrupting the last barrier to a crushingly Socialist one-world government where the only group willing to rise up and take back power are the Islamofascists"
That's because I'm dedicated to keeping the discussion dignified and civil.)
ad hominem
Maybe the judge was just unable to get past this question:
"If you're so smart, Mr. Jordan, why weren't you smart enough to intentionally score low enough to get the job?"
I don't know if you have children, but if you think that PG-13 movies are "not scary", I would recommend that you screen at least The Ring and Sixth Sense yourself before showing it to your 7-yr-old.
I don't think you are correct about Hannibal Lecter not being portrayable in a PG-13 film. A good filmmaker can make something just as scary (The Ring (opinions vary on that one though) and Sixth Sense being good examples) without depicting the gore graphically. It's not done as often, partly because people like the gore. It's part of the fun of the movie (for people who like that), and you're making something that would scare kids anyway, so what point is there in toning the graphic violence down?
If there was a way to throw down the guantlet and challenge filmmakers to make scary films that fit withing PG-13 guidelines, you would see exactly how terrifying a film can be without on-screen gore or extreme violence. (Although if you did this you might get parents screaming to modify the rating system after those movies came out :).
C'mon, you're just grandstanding. We all know that practically every game, movie, song, etc that anyone wants is produced in Canada.
Dude! Don't say stuff like that out loud! It's funny to watch them lose and not know why.
Yeah, in theory. I've actually got an infinitely long sheet and I'm about to test that, just waiting to hear back from the lab assistant I sent to the other end.
Did you mean
? :)
If they do this, they will just ensure that no one ever campaigns in Iowa. Their population is so small that they will be able to be safely ignored as long as you concentrate on large population centers.
I think he is arguing for a republic, which we actually are. "We the people" may be idiots now, but originally "we the people" delegated a very limited set of powers to the federal government in the Constitution. It was never intended, and is not legal without a change to the constitution, for the people to vote in the same kind of tyranny that we had just fought a war to evict. (Like H.R. 1 which allows the fed gov't dictatorial rights over the practice of medicine.)
If you're like most slashdotters, you think the war in Iraq was a disgrace. Did you like the fact that a majority of the people/their representatives voting in favor of that war meant that *your* tax dollars, which are extracted from you buy force, went to support it?
I think it's fine if people want to try to help another country throw off tyranny (remember that up to 70% of Iraqis wanted the US to invade when the question was being considered originally), but I don't think they should be forcing you to pay for it if you don't agree. In my opinion, in the long run, we are better off with more free countries in the world, and there is value in us helping fix a mess we created (by supporting Saddam in the first place). But that's my opinion, and it should be up to me and the other people who agree (and anyone who wants to volunteer to fight) to do something about it if we want to.
By naively saying "democracy! majority rules!" you are inviting other people to infringe on your rights. It's a republic, and there are rights you are not allowed to take from me nor I from you by a mere 51% popular vote. Sometimes that means you don't get to force other people to do what you want them to.
Yeah, that's not necessarily the right thing to do, either. What would happen if people voluntarily opted out, for example? I don't know. People have explored possibilities there.
If pressed I could concede jury duty for a few weeks much easier than forcing someone to change careers.
Ah, yes! Use force! Only by taking away freedom (the freedom not to be a politician) can we protect freedom!
That's my knee-jerk reaction, and it's like that for a reason--just about the only thing anyone ever proposes is more force. Forcing banks to lend money to people that wouldn't have qualified for loans under the bank's own rules, coupled with the creation (again, through force of federal law) things like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which gave institutions a place to unburden themselves of that debt, got us into the mess we have now. And the first thing people think (well, to give them credit, they did stop it the first time, but when the fear mongering set in, they caved) is "the government should do something". And when they say that, they mean "by force".
Every time you think of or hear of a possible government solution to a problem, ask yourself if this is just another scheme to try to use force to make things the way someone thinks they should be. Force is seductive--it looks so easy. End poverty! Take all the rich bastards' money and give it to the poor! Stop the horrors of drug addiction! Make drugs illegal! Prostitution is immoral! Make it illegal! Pornography {feminist: victimizes women!} {religious right:offends God!} It should be illegal!
The alternative is _so_ _much_ _more_ _work_! It staggers the mind to think of what it would take to teach, encourage, get people to choose to do the thing you think is right. Some of them might not ever do it. It would be _so_ _much_ _easier_ to just _make_ them! And that, basically, is what you get from the left and the right. A plan to force others to do things they way they think they should be done.
The thing is, the people that are in positions of power aren't the problem. It's the power that we have conceded to them. The constitution does not give the government the right to do 1/3rd (made that up, I bet it's actually smaller) of what it does. What we should do is work to reign government back to what the constitution says it is. Then you can fret less about who gets elected, because they will have less power to mess up your life.