Science is the boss and should tell politics what to do, not the other way around.
The danger in that position is that there are people who are anxious to use science as an excuse to take away liberty. Is sociology science? If so, should sociologists be telling politicians what the laws should be? You used the example of the law of gravity, but what about when we get into areas where the science is less clear cut?
What unfunded mandates? What to do about these issues should be decided at the state level, by the individual states. The three examples you listed (CDC, FDA, FAA) were on the list of things that would "go away" if the federal government did not pay for them that OP posted.
The OP said, "No more energy research, no more parks, no more public education, no more low income housing, no more roads & bridges." Those are all things that are already done by the states to one degree or another. Of that list, I happen to think that the Federal government should only be involved in two of them, energy research and parks (National Parks). Of course what the OP missed is that just because you get rid of these Departments, it does not mean that you get rid of all of the programs that are currently under these Departments. Some of the programs that are currently in the Departments that Ron Paul wants to get rid of could very easily be put into another Department.
The excutive branch departments all have regulations that are based on authority given to them by acts of Congress. So, the President cannot order executive departments to issue regulations that comply with ACTA, unless those regulations enforce existing (or newly passed) laws as passed by Congress.
I agree that I would prefer that Presidential candidates talked about reforming the bureaucracies that answer to the President rather than reforms they want that require Congressional action in order to implement.
The Cabinet level Departments are: State, Treasury, Defense, Justice, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Health & Human Services, Housing & Urban Development, Transportation, Energy, Education, Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security.
I may be wrong, but I think that most people would agree that the first four (State, Treasury, Defense, Justice) are essential functions of the Federal Government (perhaps oversized, but in some form a necessary part of the federal government).
Then we get into one's that there can be some debate about. I think that both Interior and Agriculture are outsized, but serve a useful function at the federal level (although if you disagree, I would not argue with you very much).
Commerce and Labor should be one department since from the perspective of the Federal government, labor is just a subcategory of commerce (in any way that it is not, the federal government doesn't really have authority anyway).
Health & Human Services and Housing & Urban Development, in my opinion, do not really belong. Each of them have areas where the federal government may have a constitutional role. Those areas could be moved into either Interior or Commerce & Labor.
Transportation and Energy should have their functions moved back into the Department of the Interior (after the stuff it has picked up that shouldn't be there is eliminated). Some aspects of the Department of Energy should go back into the Defense Department (which I would change the name of back to the Department of War).
Education, the Federal government should only have marginal involvement in education, most education issues are better handled at the state or local level. Whatever functions in the Department of Education that are legitimate for the Federal government can be handled by one of the above departments.
Veterans Affairs are definitely a Federal government issue, but I am not sure why that is a cabinet level department. I would put it in the Department of War with its head answering to the Secretary at the same level as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Finally, Homeland Security, most of its functions should be put back in the Department of Justice with a few going into the Department of War.
Additionally, in a lot of these there should be major downsizing.
The Constitution says that Congress shall have power to regulate interstate and international commerce. It does not say anything about the President (the Commerce Department functions subordinate to the President) regulating commerce.
So, if the Federal government does not do it, the only other choice is for the private sector to do it? You mean the states can't do any of this stuff?
No, you misunderstand the problem. The problem is not the student loan debt. The student loan debt is a symptom of the problem. The problem is that a college education is over-valued (that is, the cost of obtaining a college education is higher than the value that can be obtained by having one). This is not uniformly true (there are college degrees that return value on the cost of obtaining them), merely true on average.
When people say that "little Johnny" should think about what he is going to do in order to pay back that college loan before he takes it out in the first place, they are, at least in part, saying that we in our society need to re-evaluate the emphasis we put on a college education and the price we are willing to pay to get one.
When you combine this story with the one I read the other day about the number of skilled trade jobs that are going unfilled because the employers cannot find anyone qualified to fill them, it really makes you wonder what it is going to take to make people realize that we are putting our emphasis in the wrong place.
The European Union is as much of a country as the U.S., the states within it just don't acknowledge it yet because they have not yet fought a Civil War.
Actually, it is not unconstitutional for Obama to sign it without the Senate ratifying it. However, it does not matter that he signed it until the Senate ratifies it. For example, Bill Clinton signed the Kyoto Protocol while he was President, yet the U.S. was never, technically, a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol because he never submitted it to the Senate for ratification (and when a bill was presented in the U.S. Senate rejecting the Kyoto Protocol the Senate passed that bill 97-0). The fact that Obama "signed" this treaty is, legally, irrelevant until such a time as the U.S. Senate ratifies it.
Now, Obama has stated that he intends to have the various federal bureaucracies change their regulations in accordance with this treaty. That would be unconstitutional.
My suspicion is that the law would be written so that you would be required to have a log device large enough to hold the log for however long they require the log to be held. If the authorities show up and your logs do not go back as far as the law requires, you would be just as guilty as if you did not have the device in the first place. While it might be possible to have a flood of entries in the log making it harder for the authorities to find which sites you actually visit, the odds are great that in that flood of sites will be one's that are just as, or more, incriminating than the ones you actually visit.
It is not the job, or function, of the police to determine what is illegal. If you have a problem with what is, or is not, illegal, that is not a problem with the police (except insofar as you ignore the fact that it is illegal). Societies do not break down because a woman wears a burka. However, a society may break down because a large number of "women" wear a burka (quotes are there because how do you know that all of the people wearing burkas are women?). Certainly, all of the societies where a majority of women wear burkas appear to me to be broken (although the women wearing burkas appears to be a symptom, not a cause)--women are treated as having fewer rights than men, homosexuals are often summarily killed, freedom of speech is close to non-existent, etc.
Yes and from previous posts you have made your "solution" to this problem is more of what created it, give the government more power. The same government whose intervention allowed speculators to charge exorbitant prices by limiting the ability of other people to compete with them. The same government who encouraged speculators to make bad bets and then bailed them out when those bets went bad. It is people like you who turned to two of the architects of the financial meltdown (Chris Dodd and Barney Frank) to write the law that is supposed to be designed to prevent the next one.
You are correct that it is important not to overreact to such a proposal. This proposal has little chance of going anywhere at this time. However, if people do not react at all to someone in this sort of position making this sort of proposal, it is only a matter of time until a similar proposal gets put forward seriously. And because the idea had been around for awhile, no one really pays attention until after it is enacted.
So, when such a proposal is put forward by someone in a position of power (even as limited as that of a single MEP) it is important to loudly express opposition to the idea. However, yelling about how this is an example of how a particular government infringes on people's rights (when that government has not actually, and will not enact in the near future, the proposal) is going overboard, and probably just as damaging, if not more so, to the cause of individual freedom as the proposal (just the proposal, not the damage if the proposal was made law) itself, in the long run.
This guy's just flying a kite, but any such law would apply the the MEPs too, and you can assume some of them have skeletons in their hard drives. Fuhgeddabouttit.
No, there would be a special exemption for MEPs (and other government officials/bureaucrats).
Stop thinking that the promoters of such laws care at all about pedophilia and fighting it. If they really cared, they would listen to the policemen and non-profits fighting it that censorship would be counter-productive.
You are making a fundamental mistake of logic here. Not all of the promoters of such laws are self serving, corrupt liars, a few of them are just stupid.
NO, because it will be a box attatched to/inside your computer that will log what you do on the Internet that the police can access when they suspect you of supporting the opposition party....I mean, of acessing kiddie porn (of course, we all know that the opposition party websites are havens for kiddie porn).
Of course there is a reason. Some people want to do things that are illegal, the police are there to try and stop them/catch them so that they can be punished. Additionally, the police, also, are a necessary function to maintain the order needed to keep a society function, some people wish to see society to cease to function so that they can seize power (even if only over a small area).
Actually, I have seen several posts already that changed my mind on this ruling. The first is something someone else posted in reply to already: the site was listing the home address of police officers, apparently irrespective of whether or not that officer had abused his authority as a police officer (I am not sure that I would agree with releasing that private info even if the officer had abused his authority, but if he hasn't than there is no business with it being publicized). Second, someone posted above info about the credo of the site and it appears that the site believes that the police are an inherently evil institution (that the very existence of a police force is evil).
I should have known that you would use the abuses of a perfectly legitimate market mechanism as evidence that it is evil,
So speculators are the guys who make a buck off other people's pain because we're so dysfunctional as a society that we can't figure out how to get help to people who have suffered a disaster other than stuffing some parasite's pockets full of money so he can charge exorbitant prices to people whose lives have just collapsed.
The thing that you seem to be overlooking is that moving those supplies from an area that did not have a natural disaster to one that did is going to generate some pain in the area where the supplies are moved from. The suppliers in the area without a natural disaster, also, only stock the amount of supplies that ordinarily are used in a certain period of time. If those supplies are moved to the area of natural disaster, now people in the other area who need those supplies are unable to get them. The only way a speculator in this situation will be able to get away with charging a truly exorbitant price is if the government limits who can bring supplies into the area. Without government intervention, some other speculator will recognize that there is room to profit beneath his price and take advantage of it.
I know, you think profit is evil. After all, if people are suffering, why should people who have stuff those suffering need not suffer as well and be forced to give that stuff to the people who are suffering? After all, what's the big deal if, the next time a natural disaster strikes, no one has the excess resources to move supplies from a region not effected to the region where the disaster struck?
The value of liquidity in the market is that there comes a time when an investor will want to turn some portion of their investment into cash. If a market is liquid, the investor can easily get cash for their investment. If a market is not very liquid, there can be significant delay in getting cash in return for assets.
Another example of a way that speculators help the market can be illustrated with natural disasters. In the ordinary course of events there is a limited demand for most building supplies in a particular region. After a natural disaster, there will be a significant increase in the demand for building supplies in that area that cannot be met by the inventory on hand of the regular suppliers. A speculator will buy a large quantity of building supplies in some other region and ship them to the area where the natural disaster occurred, betting that they will be able to sell them for significantly more than they paid for them plus the shipping costs. If you do not have speculators doing this, the amount of time that it would take to recover from a natural disaster would be much greater as it would take longer to get the supplies necessary to rebuild.
What is the message? I can't fault the message because I still don't know what the "Occupy" people want. As to the craigslist ad it was placed by the Working Families Party. The Working Families Party was/is closely associated with ACORN.
All I said was that the "Occupy" movement is no less astroturf than the tea party movement and then gave illustrations to prove the point. I happen to think that there are several groups that have attempted to create the "Occupy" movement, but I do not believe those groups are in control of the "Occupy" movement (although I believe that they think they can control it and harness it).
I believe that the "Occupy" movement is a confluence of several factors. The first is the same thing as motivated and drove the tea party movement but involving people who think being called a conservative is one of the worst possible insults. A second is various groups and organizations(such as the SEIU and several other unions) that are anxious to direct this against the GOP. Finally, there are bunches of people with all sorts of motivations looking to harness this to their own ends (Nazi Party, Communist Party, Lyndon LaRouche followers, various libertarian/anarchist groups, some others).
You really believe that this is a "spontaneous" event? The Alliance of Youth Movements (a corporately funded non-profit) was involved in training a bunch of the people who have cropped up as "leaders" of this protest. The Canadian organization that first suggested the "Occupy Wall Street" protest, and has kept pushing the idea (Adbusters) is funded by George Soros. This doesn't mean that it was a conspiracy, but the "Occupy" protests is no less astroturf than the tea party movement and there is reason to suspect that it is more so (there was no one paying people to take part in the tea party rallies, there have been craigslist ads offering $350-$650 a week to take part in the "Occupy" protests).
So, in your world is 12:00 during the business day in Tokyo? How about Los Angeles? What about Harare?
The reason we need timezones is so that we can easily know whether or not a particular time is a reasonable time to be able to contact someone in a geographically distant location. If you are scheduling a teleconference with people from somewhere distant and I tell it will be 3:00 AM there at the time you are proposing, you know that, except in special edge cases, that is not a reasonable time to expect the workers at that distant location to be available for a teleconference.
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Science is the boss and should tell politics what to do, not the other way around.
The danger in that position is that there are people who are anxious to use science as an excuse to take away liberty. Is sociology science? If so, should sociologists be telling politicians what the laws should be? You used the example of the law of gravity, but what about when we get into areas where the science is less clear cut?
What unfunded mandates? What to do about these issues should be decided at the state level, by the individual states. The three examples you listed (CDC, FDA, FAA) were on the list of things that would "go away" if the federal government did not pay for them that OP posted.
The OP said, "No more energy research, no more parks, no more public education, no more low income housing, no more roads & bridges." Those are all things that are already done by the states to one degree or another. Of that list, I happen to think that the Federal government should only be involved in two of them, energy research and parks (National Parks). Of course what the OP missed is that just because you get rid of these Departments, it does not mean that you get rid of all of the programs that are currently under these Departments. Some of the programs that are currently in the Departments that Ron Paul wants to get rid of could very easily be put into another Department.
The excutive branch departments all have regulations that are based on authority given to them by acts of Congress. So, the President cannot order executive departments to issue regulations that comply with ACTA, unless those regulations enforce existing (or newly passed) laws as passed by Congress.
I agree that I would prefer that Presidential candidates talked about reforming the bureaucracies that answer to the President rather than reforms they want that require Congressional action in order to implement.
The Cabinet level Departments are: State, Treasury, Defense, Justice, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Health & Human Services, Housing & Urban Development, Transportation, Energy, Education, Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security.
I may be wrong, but I think that most people would agree that the first four (State, Treasury, Defense, Justice) are essential functions of the Federal Government (perhaps oversized, but in some form a necessary part of the federal government).
Then we get into one's that there can be some debate about. I think that both Interior and Agriculture are outsized, but serve a useful function at the federal level (although if you disagree, I would not argue with you very much).
Commerce and Labor should be one department since from the perspective of the Federal government, labor is just a subcategory of commerce (in any way that it is not, the federal government doesn't really have authority anyway).
Health & Human Services and Housing & Urban Development, in my opinion, do not really belong. Each of them have areas where the federal government may have a constitutional role. Those areas could be moved into either Interior or Commerce & Labor.
Transportation and Energy should have their functions moved back into the Department of the Interior (after the stuff it has picked up that shouldn't be there is eliminated). Some aspects of the Department of Energy should go back into the Defense Department (which I would change the name of back to the Department of War).
Education, the Federal government should only have marginal involvement in education, most education issues are better handled at the state or local level. Whatever functions in the Department of Education that are legitimate for the Federal government can be handled by one of the above departments.
Veterans Affairs are definitely a Federal government issue, but I am not sure why that is a cabinet level department. I would put it in the Department of War with its head answering to the Secretary at the same level as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Finally, Homeland Security, most of its functions should be put back in the Department of Justice with a few going into the Department of War.
Additionally, in a lot of these there should be major downsizing.
The Constitution says that Congress shall have power to regulate interstate and international commerce. It does not say anything about the President (the Commerce Department functions subordinate to the President) regulating commerce.
So, if the Federal government does not do it, the only other choice is for the private sector to do it? You mean the states can't do any of this stuff?
No, you misunderstand the problem. The problem is not the student loan debt. The student loan debt is a symptom of the problem. The problem is that a college education is over-valued (that is, the cost of obtaining a college education is higher than the value that can be obtained by having one). This is not uniformly true (there are college degrees that return value on the cost of obtaining them), merely true on average.
When people say that "little Johnny" should think about what he is going to do in order to pay back that college loan before he takes it out in the first place, they are, at least in part, saying that we in our society need to re-evaluate the emphasis we put on a college education and the price we are willing to pay to get one.
When you combine this story with the one I read the other day about the number of skilled trade jobs that are going unfilled because the employers cannot find anyone qualified to fill them, it really makes you wonder what it is going to take to make people realize that we are putting our emphasis in the wrong place.
The European Union is as much of a country as the U.S., the states within it just don't acknowledge it yet because they have not yet fought a Civil War.
Actually, it is not unconstitutional for Obama to sign it without the Senate ratifying it. However, it does not matter that he signed it until the Senate ratifies it. For example, Bill Clinton signed the Kyoto Protocol while he was President, yet the U.S. was never, technically, a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol because he never submitted it to the Senate for ratification (and when a bill was presented in the U.S. Senate rejecting the Kyoto Protocol the Senate passed that bill 97-0). The fact that Obama "signed" this treaty is, legally, irrelevant until such a time as the U.S. Senate ratifies it.
Now, Obama has stated that he intends to have the various federal bureaucracies change their regulations in accordance with this treaty. That would be unconstitutional.
My suspicion is that the law would be written so that you would be required to have a log device large enough to hold the log for however long they require the log to be held. If the authorities show up and your logs do not go back as far as the law requires, you would be just as guilty as if you did not have the device in the first place. While it might be possible to have a flood of entries in the log making it harder for the authorities to find which sites you actually visit, the odds are great that in that flood of sites will be one's that are just as, or more, incriminating than the ones you actually visit.
It is not the job, or function, of the police to determine what is illegal. If you have a problem with what is, or is not, illegal, that is not a problem with the police (except insofar as you ignore the fact that it is illegal). Societies do not break down because a woman wears a burka. However, a society may break down because a large number of "women" wear a burka (quotes are there because how do you know that all of the people wearing burkas are women?). Certainly, all of the societies where a majority of women wear burkas appear to me to be broken (although the women wearing burkas appears to be a symptom, not a cause)--women are treated as having fewer rights than men, homosexuals are often summarily killed, freedom of speech is close to non-existent, etc.
Yes and from previous posts you have made your "solution" to this problem is more of what created it, give the government more power. The same government whose intervention allowed speculators to charge exorbitant prices by limiting the ability of other people to compete with them. The same government who encouraged speculators to make bad bets and then bailed them out when those bets went bad. It is people like you who turned to two of the architects of the financial meltdown (Chris Dodd and Barney Frank) to write the law that is supposed to be designed to prevent the next one.
You are correct that it is important not to overreact to such a proposal. This proposal has little chance of going anywhere at this time. However, if people do not react at all to someone in this sort of position making this sort of proposal, it is only a matter of time until a similar proposal gets put forward seriously. And because the idea had been around for awhile, no one really pays attention until after it is enacted.
So, when such a proposal is put forward by someone in a position of power (even as limited as that of a single MEP) it is important to loudly express opposition to the idea. However, yelling about how this is an example of how a particular government infringes on people's rights (when that government has not actually, and will not enact in the near future, the proposal) is going overboard, and probably just as damaging, if not more so, to the cause of individual freedom as the proposal (just the proposal, not the damage if the proposal was made law) itself, in the long run.
This guy's just flying a kite, but any such law would apply the the MEPs too, and you can assume some of them have skeletons in their hard drives. Fuhgeddabouttit.
No, there would be a special exemption for MEPs (and other government officials/bureaucrats).
Stop thinking that the promoters of such laws care at all about pedophilia and fighting it. If they really cared, they would listen to the policemen and non-profits fighting it that censorship would be counter-productive.
You are making a fundamental mistake of logic here. Not all of the promoters of such laws are self serving, corrupt liars, a few of them are just stupid.
NO, because it will be a box attatched to/inside your computer that will log what you do on the Internet that the police can access when they suspect you of supporting the opposition party....I mean, of acessing kiddie porn (of course, we all know that the opposition party websites are havens for kiddie porn).
Of course there is a reason. Some people want to do things that are illegal, the police are there to try and stop them/catch them so that they can be punished. Additionally, the police, also, are a necessary function to maintain the order needed to keep a society function, some people wish to see society to cease to function so that they can seize power (even if only over a small area).
Actually, I have seen several posts already that changed my mind on this ruling. The first is something someone else posted in reply to already: the site was listing the home address of police officers, apparently irrespective of whether or not that officer had abused his authority as a police officer (I am not sure that I would agree with releasing that private info even if the officer had abused his authority, but if he hasn't than there is no business with it being publicized). Second, someone posted above info about the credo of the site and it appears that the site believes that the police are an inherently evil institution (that the very existence of a police force is evil).
So speculators are the guys who make a buck off other people's pain because we're so dysfunctional as a society that we can't figure out how to get help to people who have suffered a disaster other than stuffing some parasite's pockets full of money so he can charge exorbitant prices to people whose lives have just collapsed.
The thing that you seem to be overlooking is that moving those supplies from an area that did not have a natural disaster to one that did is going to generate some pain in the area where the supplies are moved from. The suppliers in the area without a natural disaster, also, only stock the amount of supplies that ordinarily are used in a certain period of time. If those supplies are moved to the area of natural disaster, now people in the other area who need those supplies are unable to get them. The only way a speculator in this situation will be able to get away with charging a truly exorbitant price is if the government limits who can bring supplies into the area. Without government intervention, some other speculator will recognize that there is room to profit beneath his price and take advantage of it.
I know, you think profit is evil. After all, if people are suffering, why should people who have stuff those suffering need not suffer as well and be forced to give that stuff to the people who are suffering? After all, what's the big deal if, the next time a natural disaster strikes, no one has the excess resources to move supplies from a region not effected to the region where the disaster struck?
The value of liquidity in the market is that there comes a time when an investor will want to turn some portion of their investment into cash. If a market is liquid, the investor can easily get cash for their investment. If a market is not very liquid, there can be significant delay in getting cash in return for assets.
Another example of a way that speculators help the market can be illustrated with natural disasters. In the ordinary course of events there is a limited demand for most building supplies in a particular region. After a natural disaster, there will be a significant increase in the demand for building supplies in that area that cannot be met by the inventory on hand of the regular suppliers. A speculator will buy a large quantity of building supplies in some other region and ship them to the area where the natural disaster occurred, betting that they will be able to sell them for significantly more than they paid for them plus the shipping costs. If you do not have speculators doing this, the amount of time that it would take to recover from a natural disaster would be much greater as it would take longer to get the supplies necessary to rebuild.
Well, nothing except the fact that Amazon controls the entire distribution chain, which none of the other publishers do.
What is the message? I can't fault the message because I still don't know what the "Occupy" people want. As to the craigslist ad it was placed by the Working Families Party. The Working Families Party was/is closely associated with ACORN.
All I said was that the "Occupy" movement is no less astroturf than the tea party movement and then gave illustrations to prove the point. I happen to think that there are several groups that have attempted to create the "Occupy" movement, but I do not believe those groups are in control of the "Occupy" movement (although I believe that they think they can control it and harness it).
I believe that the "Occupy" movement is a confluence of several factors. The first is the same thing as motivated and drove the tea party movement but involving people who think being called a conservative is one of the worst possible insults. A second is various groups and organizations(such as the SEIU and several other unions) that are anxious to direct this against the GOP. Finally, there are bunches of people with all sorts of motivations looking to harness this to their own ends (Nazi Party, Communist Party, Lyndon LaRouche followers, various libertarian/anarchist groups, some others).
The question is, do you really want Amazon to be the only place you can get books?
You really believe that this is a "spontaneous" event? The Alliance of Youth Movements (a corporately funded non-profit) was involved in training a bunch of the people who have cropped up as "leaders" of this protest. The Canadian organization that first suggested the "Occupy Wall Street" protest, and has kept pushing the idea (Adbusters) is funded by George Soros. This doesn't mean that it was a conspiracy, but the "Occupy" protests is no less astroturf than the tea party movement and there is reason to suspect that it is more so (there was no one paying people to take part in the tea party rallies, there have been craigslist ads offering $350-$650 a week to take part in the "Occupy" protests).
So, in your world is 12:00 during the business day in Tokyo? How about Los Angeles? What about Harare?
The reason we need timezones is so that we can easily know whether or not a particular time is a reasonable time to be able to contact someone in a geographically distant location. If you are scheduling a teleconference with people from somewhere distant and I tell it will be 3:00 AM there at the time you are proposing, you know that, except in special edge cases, that is not a reasonable time to expect the workers at that distant location to be available for a teleconference.