I presume you might be just being facetious, but if that's really true then you are not doing it right. Invest. Start a business or help someone else start one. You'll be helping yourself and the economy. That's how the world works, you know. There are more uses for money than spending it on crap.
Firefighting, Roads, Water: this is all debatable and not at all clear cut as you suggest. The reasons to have those specific things run by the government have all to do with practical considerations and not principles. I agree that in some cases it is desirable to have government run things but only as a last resort, i.e when it is either impossible or hopelessly impractical for private businesses to do so and only when having those services is of crucial importance. If a way can be found to have roads, utilities, firefighters run privately while still providing the same or better level of service, I think it should be done.
Pollution: it is pretty clear that the government does have a role in regulating pollution to some extent, but the devil is in the detail.
Safety: I can't find it online now but there was a great article (I think by Alan Greenspan, back in his libertarian days) about how health and safety regulation can reduce health and safety just as well as it can improve it. In a nutshell, the incentive of businesses to compete on their safety record is reduced and the incentive to barely meet the minimum government standards, which are typically written up by the industry itself - who else has the knowledge and incentive (and lobbying money) to write them - is increased.
In any case, those are all minor issues that don't really affect the debate. Ok, I'll let you have those and the disabled benefits and helping the orphans and having a minimal safety net for the hungry etc and still we are talking about a government that is far less than half the size of the one we have now so I'll be happy with that. But please justify every one of these 100s of government agencies http://www.usa.gov/Agencies/Federal/All_Agencies/index.shtml with their employees on average earning more than the equivalent market rate in the private sector, every one of these 100s of government spending programs http://funding-programs.idilogic.aidpage.com/ , 70% of the federal budget that is taken up by entitlements, the insane amount of intrusion into peoples lives by silly regulation that could fill up a football stadium, the fact that nobody in fact can count many laws we have, never mind have any realistic chance of obeying them all, with several tens of thousands of pages of new laws passed each year etc etc. Libertarians are not anarchists. We have a government that is out of control and we need to rein it in, not eliminate it altogether.
It's bad, not because of the mechanism involved in trading the cost of pollution in a market, but because of the underlying, utterly unproven, assumption that imposing those costs in the first place will do any good. There are some things that are not open to doubt though: loss of jobs, mostly in developed countries, raising of prices of everything that is affected by the cost of burning fossil fuels, so pretty much everything, and the only net beneficiary - the government who ultimately receives the payments for the rights to pollute the, now nationalized, atmosphere.
How does the government provide jobs (except government jobs but presumably you don't mean that)? Funny thing you should mention that in the same sentence as the minimum wage, which is one of the most harmful examples of legislation you can think of exactly because it reduces the number of available jobs to the least skilled (typically the poorest). In the USA the minimum wage is generally lower than the market wage anyway, so it doesn't do quite as much harm as it used to when it was higher relative to the market wage. I live in Vegas and there is a blatant example here of the harm it can do. Many casino employees make vast majority of their income from tips. They don't even care about the minimum wage but the casino has to pay it anyway. This clearly limits the number of jobs available if casinos were able to pay less or no wage at all. As a result, we have one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, and plenty of people eager to get those jobs and happily work for less than minimum wage but the government forbids them from doing so, and prefers to pay them unemployment checks from the taxpayers' pockets. The same is true for all kinds of low end unskilled jobs as well especially for the younger people just entering the workforce. The legal minimum wage now is less than even what McDonalds pays to part time kids so it doesn't matter, but try raising it and see how quickly those jobs disappear.
Yes and that's fine. That still in the end comes under the same category of physical force, which can take many forms. Say, as an extreme example, I follow you around and blow poisonous gas into your face. Same thing really with large industrial pollution except that individual harm is harder to measure so rather than a tort case, this becomes an issue for government regulation. If you read or even watch you tube clips of libertarians from Hayek to Milton Friedman and on you will see that they have no problem with government role in reducing pollution. The devil is in the details though and the issue many of us have with things like cap and trade is that "think of the environment" has become new "think of the children" i.e a valid concern used as an excuse to introduce all kinds of big government schemes that have nothing to do with the original problem.
Can you be more specific? What are the weaknesses of the free market where the government should step in? I think pretty standard libertarian beliefs involve government acting only as an umpire, providing laws, police, military, legislature, courts, that sort of thing. Essentially it all boils down to protecting individual liberty by removing the use of physical force from the society. I must be one of those extreme conservatives you speak off because I can't think of too many other valid uses for the government. Can you give me some examples?
For your information, solar subsidies in Germany have been a failure http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2010/mar/11/solar-power-germany-feed-in-tariff $1 billion per month cost to the German taxpayer and still barely produces 1% of total electricity used in Germany while actually causing a net loss of jobs. Same with Denmark, the "world leader in wind power" (thanks to subsidies by Danish taxpayers) with the highest electricity costs in Europe to show for it. I'm all for renewable energy when and if it starts making economic sense, but not if it means blowing taxpayers money on something just because it sounds green.
I think liberals feel that we should do nothing, and that Government Jesus will come from the sky and solve all problems in one fell swoop. Free Market Jesus has a hell of a lot better track record than Government Jesus when it comes to solving problems, and without sacrificing liberty too.
Marketing a product to 90% of population might work out better for them than going through a lot of extra expense to get an extra 10%. What's wrong with that?
Not really. If TV stations could create political movements capable of changing the political landscape out of thin air everybody would be doing it. Fox News, much like Sarah Palin, jumped on the bandwagon early but they certainly didn't create it.
Part of the reason is that the ideological battle between capitalism and socialism that characterized the second half of the 20th century is over and capitalism has won decisively. Not just in USA but all over the world (Cuba and North Korea exempted and even Cuba is privatizing). The rest is details and details are not as exciting to fight over as principles.
You mean Democrats (anti-American, communist, traitors...)? Name calling doesn't get you anywhere. How come this president campaigned, and still does, against divisiveness and yet the democrats (from the top) have been leading the way when it comes to the most vicious insults and attacks on their opponents. Also, practically all incidents of violence so far in this election campaign have come from the left.
Who voted against the repeal of DADT? Republicans
DADT was enacted under Clinton.
Who voted against a more comprehensive anti hate crime law? Republicans.
Screw you and your "hate" crimes and special protected classes that want to have different laws apply to them than to the rest of us. Assault is already a crime. Murder is already a crime. Why is it more of a crime if it was committed because what the assailant thought about the victim, as opposed to wanting to take the victims money or whatever?
Who voted against tax breaks for corporations who keep jobs in the U.S. less than a week ago? Republicans.
Democrats talking about tax breaks is laughable. Are you seriously going to argue that Democrats are generally in favor of lower taxes than Republicans?
Who created a $13 TRILLION hole in the government finances? BUSH
Far be it from me to defend Bush but let me just say that Democrats controlled the Congress and it wasn't a normal situation because of the 9/11 and a huge bipartisan support for massive increase in defense spending. Bush may have been a Republican but he didn't act in accordance to the Republican values and that is part of the reason Tea Party protests actually started while he was still in office. Look it up.
As for the last 30 years, actually I beat you, let's do 60 years, under Democrats the income of the middle class has steadily increased by 3%/year and that of the upper class by 2%/year, under Republicans the increase has been around 1% for both.
This is particularly laughable. The overall living standard depend on a lot of things other than who is in office, but on average it has been higher when Republicans were in office.
Safety (from other people, not from oneself) yes, convenience no. Everything government does involves use of physical force against which an individual who disagrees with it has no defense. To quote Alan Greenspan: "At the bottom of the endless pile of paperwork which characterizes all regulation lies a gun". Seems like a huge price to pay for the sake of mere convenience.
Progressive tax structures and safety nets are not unfairly rewarding "unemployed bums" our system of privilege and cronyism is.
We are really a family based society and one of the primary incentives that makes any social system work is the incentive of parents to provide for their children. Take that away and you will destroy a society. That has nothing at all to do with progressive tax structure which does not discriminate based on the reasons for someone's success. If person A and person B have exactly the same job and person A works twice as many hours and makes twice as much money as person B he still has to pay higher percentage of his income in taxes. It is success that is being penalized, whether it comes from hard work (vast majority of cases) or from pure luck or family connections or whatever (minority).
That information is about you but you have no right to have someone else store it for you indefinitely. Download it periodically and store it yourself if it's so important to you. By the way, as far as I know all banks will provide you with sufficient account history information for every normal purpose, such as when buying a house etc.
Modding on slashdot has been a joke for a long time. I don't even pay any attention to it anymore. Maybe give them "I Disagree" option or something so they don't abuse Troll and Flamebait so much on posts that are obviously neither.
What sort of amendment to the First Amendment would you have in mind to prevent collective bargaining by employees with their more powerful employers
That's a silly question. The debate over unions has nothing to do with the first amendment. It's to do with legal protections unions have lobbied for themselves including the National Labor Relations Act and a whole lot of subsequent regulation. In short of course you have the right to assemble and collectively bargain all you want, but your employer shouldn't be forced by law to assist you with that.
By the way, it's pretty amusing that the issue of choice when it comes to union membership is invoked by the same people who think that corporations have to be heavily regulated because, presumably, their customers have no choice but to buy their products. In a heavily unionized industry a worker has no real choice but to join the union, while a diabetes ridden fat slob does have a choice not to eat at McDonalds.
Socialism is an economic system where the ownership of the means of production is public not private, i.e. the opposite of capitalism. That's the definition, look it up. What you are describing is welfare state that some countries have chosen to implement on top of their capitalist economy. Mostly they are moving away from that idea, even in Sweden, not due to the obvious injustice in forcing one man to work for the benefit of another (as I would like them to do) but because it doesn't work in practice. It reduces incentive to produce and innovate without which an advanced country is doomed, and increases the incentive to be passive and lazy and live at others expense.
In a sense you are right. USSR would have collapsed anyway, and for the same reasons that every other socialist (as in state ownership of industry) country in the world has collapsed: lack of incentive to produce and innovate inherent in public ownership of industry, practical impossibility of central management of every detail of something as incredibly complex as a nation's economy and the corruption inherent in the system where bureaucrats rather than market decides who succeeds and who fails etc etc. Socialism produces economic failure. It's obvious both from common sense and from historic experience.
Gee, it's strange that such a string of failures and disasters produced the wealthiest and economically and militarily the most dominant nation in the history of the world. Imagine what would happen if the USA did something right every once in a while.
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I have more money than I know what to do with
I presume you might be just being facetious, but if that's really true then you are not doing it right. Invest. Start a business or help someone else start one. You'll be helping yourself and the economy. That's how the world works, you know. There are more uses for money than spending it on crap.
Yep, that worked out really well for the auto industry. It will work out even better for the IT where the jobs are dead easy to move overseas.
Firefighting, Roads, Water: this is all debatable and not at all clear cut as you suggest. The reasons to have those specific things run by the government have all to do with practical considerations and not principles. I agree that in some cases it is desirable to have government run things but only as a last resort, i.e when it is either impossible or hopelessly impractical for private businesses to do so and only when having those services is of crucial importance. If a way can be found to have roads, utilities, firefighters run privately while still providing the same or better level of service, I think it should be done.
Pollution: it is pretty clear that the government does have a role in regulating pollution to some extent, but the devil is in the detail.
Safety: I can't find it online now but there was a great article (I think by Alan Greenspan, back in his libertarian days) about how health and safety regulation can reduce health and safety just as well as it can improve it. In a nutshell, the incentive of businesses to compete on their safety record is reduced and the incentive to barely meet the minimum government standards, which are typically written up by the industry itself - who else has the knowledge and incentive (and lobbying money) to write them - is increased.
In any case, those are all minor issues that don't really affect the debate. Ok, I'll let you have those and the disabled benefits and helping the orphans and having a minimal safety net for the hungry etc and still we are talking about a government that is far less than half the size of the one we have now so I'll be happy with that. But please justify every one of these 100s of government agencies http://www.usa.gov/Agencies/Federal/All_Agencies/index.shtml with their employees on average earning more than the equivalent market rate in the private sector, every one of these 100s of government spending programs http://funding-programs.idilogic.aidpage.com/ , 70% of the federal budget that is taken up by entitlements, the insane amount of intrusion into peoples lives by silly regulation that could fill up a football stadium, the fact that nobody in fact can count many laws we have, never mind have any realistic chance of obeying them all, with several tens of thousands of pages of new laws passed each year etc etc. Libertarians are not anarchists. We have a government that is out of control and we need to rein it in, not eliminate it altogether.
It's bad, not because of the mechanism involved in trading the cost of pollution in a market, but because of the underlying, utterly unproven, assumption that imposing those costs in the first place will do any good. There are some things that are not open to doubt though: loss of jobs, mostly in developed countries, raising of prices of everything that is affected by the cost of burning fossil fuels, so pretty much everything, and the only net beneficiary - the government who ultimately receives the payments for the rights to pollute the, now nationalized, atmosphere.
Jobs with a livable minimum wage
How does the government provide jobs (except government jobs but presumably you don't mean that)? Funny thing you should mention that in the same sentence as the minimum wage, which is one of the most harmful examples of legislation you can think of exactly because it reduces the number of available jobs to the least skilled (typically the poorest). In the USA the minimum wage is generally lower than the market wage anyway, so it doesn't do quite as much harm as it used to when it was higher relative to the market wage. I live in Vegas and there is a blatant example here of the harm it can do. Many casino employees make vast majority of their income from tips. They don't even care about the minimum wage but the casino has to pay it anyway. This clearly limits the number of jobs available if casinos were able to pay less or no wage at all. As a result, we have one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, and plenty of people eager to get those jobs and happily work for less than minimum wage but the government forbids them from doing so, and prefers to pay them unemployment checks from the taxpayers' pockets. The same is true for all kinds of low end unskilled jobs as well especially for the younger people just entering the workforce. The legal minimum wage now is less than even what McDonalds pays to part time kids so it doesn't matter, but try raising it and see how quickly those jobs disappear.
Yes and that's fine. That still in the end comes under the same category of physical force, which can take many forms. Say, as an extreme example, I follow you around and blow poisonous gas into your face. Same thing really with large industrial pollution except that individual harm is harder to measure so rather than a tort case, this becomes an issue for government regulation. If you read or even watch you tube clips of libertarians from Hayek to Milton Friedman and on you will see that they have no problem with government role in reducing pollution. The devil is in the details though and the issue many of us have with things like cap and trade is that "think of the environment" has become new "think of the children" i.e a valid concern used as an excuse to introduce all kinds of big government schemes that have nothing to do with the original problem.
Can you be more specific? What are the weaknesses of the free market where the government should step in? I think pretty standard libertarian beliefs involve government acting only as an umpire, providing laws, police, military, legislature, courts, that sort of thing. Essentially it all boils down to protecting individual liberty by removing the use of physical force from the society. I must be one of those extreme conservatives you speak off because I can't think of too many other valid uses for the government. Can you give me some examples?
For your information, solar subsidies in Germany have been a failure http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2010/mar/11/solar-power-germany-feed-in-tariff $1 billion per month cost to the German taxpayer and still barely produces 1% of total electricity used in Germany while actually causing a net loss of jobs. Same with Denmark, the "world leader in wind power" (thanks to subsidies by Danish taxpayers) with the highest electricity costs in Europe to show for it. I'm all for renewable energy when and if it starts making economic sense, but not if it means blowing taxpayers money on something just because it sounds green.
I think liberals feel that we should do nothing, and that Government Jesus will come from the sky and solve all problems in one fell swoop. Free Market Jesus has a hell of a lot better track record than Government Jesus when it comes to solving problems, and without sacrificing liberty too.
This is fail for 10% of the population.
Marketing a product to 90% of population might work out better for them than going through a lot of extra expense to get an extra 10%. What's wrong with that?
Not really. If TV stations could create political movements capable of changing the political landscape out of thin air everybody would be doing it. Fox News, much like Sarah Palin, jumped on the bandwagon early but they certainly didn't create it.
They are not, and your post was still flamebait. You don't have to drag politics into every subject.
Part of the reason is that the ideological battle between capitalism and socialism that characterized the second half of the 20th century is over and capitalism has won decisively. Not just in USA but all over the world (Cuba and North Korea exempted and even Cuba is privatizing). The rest is details and details are not as exciting to fight over as principles.
Because protests actually affect anything in the slightest anymore?
Tea Party is having quite an impact I would say. Or do you not count is as a protest unless windows get broken and cars burned?
Scrap all the other pointless programs and it would add up pretty quickly.
Republicans (homophobic, racist, anti-middle class...)
You mean Democrats (anti-American, communist, traitors...)? Name calling doesn't get you anywhere. How come this president campaigned, and still does, against divisiveness and yet the democrats (from the top) have been leading the way when it comes to the most vicious insults and attacks on their opponents. Also, practically all incidents of violence so far in this election campaign have come from the left.
Who voted against the repeal of DADT? Republicans
DADT was enacted under Clinton.
Who voted against a more comprehensive anti hate crime law? Republicans.
Screw you and your "hate" crimes and special protected classes that want to have different laws apply to them than to the rest of us. Assault is already a crime. Murder is already a crime. Why is it more of a crime if it was committed because what the assailant thought about the victim, as opposed to wanting to take the victims money or whatever?
Who voted against tax breaks for corporations who keep jobs in the U.S. less than a week ago? Republicans.
Democrats talking about tax breaks is laughable. Are you seriously going to argue that Democrats are generally in favor of lower taxes than Republicans?
Who created a $13 TRILLION hole in the government finances? BUSH
Far be it from me to defend Bush but let me just say that Democrats controlled the Congress and it wasn't a normal situation because of the 9/11 and a huge bipartisan support for massive increase in defense spending. Bush may have been a Republican but he didn't act in accordance to the Republican values and that is part of the reason Tea Party protests actually started while he was still in office. Look it up.
As for the last 30 years, actually I beat you, let's do 60 years, under Democrats the income of the middle class has steadily increased by 3%/year and that of the upper class by 2%/year, under Republicans the increase has been around 1% for both.
This is particularly laughable. The overall living standard depend on a lot of things other than who is in office, but on average it has been higher when Republicans were in office.
Safety (from other people, not from oneself) yes, convenience no. Everything government does involves use of physical force against which an individual who disagrees with it has no defense. To quote Alan Greenspan: "At the bottom of the endless pile of paperwork which characterizes all regulation lies a gun". Seems like a huge price to pay for the sake of mere convenience.
Progressive tax structures and safety nets are not unfairly rewarding "unemployed bums" our system of privilege and cronyism is.
We are really a family based society and one of the primary incentives that makes any social system work is the incentive of parents to provide for their children. Take that away and you will destroy a society. That has nothing at all to do with progressive tax structure which does not discriminate based on the reasons for someone's success. If person A and person B have exactly the same job and person A works twice as many hours and makes twice as much money as person B he still has to pay higher percentage of his income in taxes. It is success that is being penalized, whether it comes from hard work (vast majority of cases) or from pure luck or family connections or whatever (minority).
That information is about you but you have no right to have someone else store it for you indefinitely. Download it periodically and store it yourself if it's so important to you. By the way, as far as I know all banks will provide you with sufficient account history information for every normal purpose, such as when buying a house etc.
What about the freedom to not hire, or to fire, workers who join a union? Oh yeah, that's illegal.
Modding on slashdot has been a joke for a long time. I don't even pay any attention to it anymore. Maybe give them "I Disagree" option or something so they don't abuse Troll and Flamebait so much on posts that are obviously neither.
What sort of amendment to the First Amendment would you have in mind to prevent collective bargaining by employees with their more powerful employers
That's a silly question. The debate over unions has nothing to do with the first amendment. It's to do with legal protections unions have lobbied for themselves including the National Labor Relations Act and a whole lot of subsequent regulation. In short of course you have the right to assemble and collectively bargain all you want, but your employer shouldn't be forced by law to assist you with that.
By the way, it's pretty amusing that the issue of choice when it comes to union membership is invoked by the same people who think that corporations have to be heavily regulated because, presumably, their customers have no choice but to buy their products. In a heavily unionized industry a worker has no real choice but to join the union, while a diabetes ridden fat slob does have a choice not to eat at McDonalds.
Socialism is an economic system where the ownership of the means of production is public not private, i.e. the opposite of capitalism. That's the definition, look it up. What you are describing is welfare state that some countries have chosen to implement on top of their capitalist economy. Mostly they are moving away from that idea, even in Sweden, not due to the obvious injustice in forcing one man to work for the benefit of another (as I would like them to do) but because it doesn't work in practice. It reduces incentive to produce and innovate without which an advanced country is doomed, and increases the incentive to be passive and lazy and live at others expense.
In a sense you are right. USSR would have collapsed anyway, and for the same reasons that every other socialist (as in state ownership of industry) country in the world has collapsed: lack of incentive to produce and innovate inherent in public ownership of industry, practical impossibility of central management of every detail of something as incredibly complex as a nation's economy and the corruption inherent in the system where bureaucrats rather than market decides who succeeds and who fails etc etc. Socialism produces economic failure. It's obvious both from common sense and from historic experience.
Gee, it's strange that such a string of failures and disasters produced the wealthiest and economically and militarily the most dominant nation in the history of the world. Imagine what would happen if the USA did something right every once in a while.