and the corporate America is correct in doing so, because the collectivist, mobocracy part of America decided to destroy private property rights, the dollar and basically turned the country into a gigantic cesspool of entitlement seekers (regardless of what that means for you, it simply means expecting others to do something for you for nothing on an involuntary basis).
Nate just showed that true inflation is gigantic, much higher than government admits and the mob yells: hack, hack, can't be, government can't be wrong! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
There is no rational reason to not pay for abortions
- except for the law, the Constitution of-course. There is nothing there that allows government to steal money from some people to perform 'free' abortions on others.
No, I cannot interfere with anybody's rights because I am not government. You can free associate and government cannot prevent that (however government does prevent that, when it attacks my right to not associate freely with a union), however on my private property my rules apply, I am not government, thus there is no such concept as me having to maintain your rights there or you having to maintain mine.
I don't have a right to your labor, you don't have a right to my company's job, all we have is a contractual agreement. I am not in the States, by the way.
I treat my employees well enough that they still work here, if they unionize I will not have a problem talking to them, but if they try to use that status to push any level of gov't regulations on me, I will fire them immediately by dissolving the corporation and then hiring other people, you are correct. I am not working for them, I am working for myself. They are not working for me, they are working for themselves. If they try to get an unfair advantage over me by using gov't violence, I will immediately stop that threat, I don't like being threatened, those are my basic individual human rights - not to be threatened by gov't collective into some type of slavery.
Your comment makes 0 sense. You have that problem right now: huge amount of regulations and there is very little freedom in the market due to all this regulations and you have huge unemployment.
Switzerland, Hong Kong, Singapore have no minimum wage, there is much less regulations, there is almost no unemployment and there is no debt and no deficit, quite the opposite, they have surpluses and actual savings.
Tell that to the non-union members that get jailed for working in all-union shops, jailed by the government.
I don't have a problem with people that unionise as long as it does not mean that special privileges would be granted to them at my expense by some government, because they end up lobbying governments and getting themselves such privileges. As things stand, I will not allow any union in my company because I know exactly where it leads to, which is why I structure my company in a way that distances the employees from the actual company that all business contracts are signed with, to be able to dissolve the child corporation, whose parent is a corporation in a different state altogether.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice..... and go see W's quote.
There's such a thing as law and order and equality and no one is above the law.
- oh, is there? So then what is it about this specific law that strips people off their individual human rights the moment they post a job advertising? What exactly do you think the law exists for, give privileges to some and impose obligations upon others, and if that is what you believe, then what interest do I have in your law, because clearly your idea of law is to destroy equality, not to maintain it?
Although such things are the only thing that allow petty Robber Baron wannabees like you to even exist in the first place. Otherwise, you would just get crushed under the heel of a bigger bully.
- absolutely I want to be what you consider a 'robber baron', which simply means a captain of industry, a person who defines industry rather than just following whatever others define it as. As to being 'crushed under the heel', the only 'heel' that is trying to crush business comes from government and the collectivist maniacs such as yourself. The people that I deal with that run companies are actually high quality people, that can deal on a handshake and don't have any need for your oppressive regime, they don't have a use for it and they are happy enough to operate outside of the parameters that you try to set upon them.
Wrong, I consider my private property to be my private property and I treat my employees well enough for them to work for me, clearly offering them conditions better than they could get somewhere else, otherwise they would have been there and not here.
Since you can't comprehend simple things like that, I am not going to expect you to understand anything else beyond that, like what individual freedoms are. Good luck to you and your economy.
Which is why I would nevere allow a union in my company, because there is nothing civilized about government destroying my individual right to own and operate private property the way I see fit and interfere with my hiring and firing decisions. As to TFA, if this ends up in court somehow, it would only strengthen the case against hiring members of government protected groups, including women. They cost the company much more than any value they may bring under such conditions.
So you want communism? Will you abolish the state and thus get rid of all taxes? Marx wrote in his newspaper thatit is duty of every individual to stop paying taxes, he was even brought to court for that, before they threw him out. As to promoting Leninism.... I would give a lot to meet you in a dark alley sometime...
So because death always wins at the end you want others not to try and not to work towards increasing their own lifespan? Yeah, death always wins, as long as we let it, it wins. We will all die, no question about it. What are you going to do about it, just return to the slime you came out of? You won't even try?
Those who will try, do you know what will happen once (not if, once) they succeed? They will be called 'the rich' (and they may as well be, it will be painfully expensive to achieve those results) and the rest will go to WAR to get a piece of that cake, which they did not bake, which the likes of you are spitting upon in its general direction.
Don't pretend you won't be on this or some other forum should this happen within your life time, yelling and screaming that the rich are the bastards that prevent the rest from having something that they have achieved. Your position right now is most likely in direct contradiction to your future position, should that future materialise, where you will be willing to do just about anything, including murder and theft, anything to get a piece of that.
Guilt for what? Clearly you don't understand why people who are rich are rich in the first place, they are not your 9-5 workers, they are where they are because they always thought outside of your particular box.
They have no guilt, they should have no guilt. If anybody is driven by guilt, it should be those who steal, not those who produce, and the most of those who steal are government and the mob.
Evolution is not more important than individuals, isn't it comparing apples and oranges? I agree with TFA, death is wrong. The author is 27 (I count, since he says in 2045 he'll be 58) and that's much younger than I am and he is thinking about it now, which shows his personal progress, which always a good sign.
In any case, saying that some complex environmental process, like evolution, is more important than lives of individuals that exist strikes me as very foolish. You don't know what will happen in 2 years time, we could have a massive war or disease that would eliminate 90% of population right there, given how interconnected the world is. Should we be waiting for evolution to produce humans that can withstand wars, diseases, environmental changes?
Why?
Who says that humans have any more entitlement to live on this planet than bacteria? And at the end bacteria will win out, and is that a better outcome from our own perspectives? Why should we root for bacteria than for ourselves? You think that evolution will give humans a better chance, I think you don't what you are talking about, evolution could as well lead to our extermination and let jellyfish populate most of the planet. Maybe even ground crawling jellyfish, and from my perspective I prefer to be here rather than having some jellyfish supersede myself.
Anyway, we have brains that allow us to modify our environment and those of us with any sense at all should do everything possible to ensure that our own lifespans are increased. Not lifespans of whatever may or may not come after us, but ourselves. If we don't do that and just disappear into the nothing sooner rather than later, as everything does, then there is no major distinction between us and the rest of the slime out there. As a thinking creature, I refuse to accept that. If we can't figure this out, then too bad for us of-course, but to consciously deny ourselves that very possibility, of extending our own lifespans is nothing but defeatism. The poor of mind and spirit can have that, let them perish. Those who want to reach for more than what we are given by the system that surrounds us must fight to take what we can.
I look for people who are interested in software development, who are willing to take the opportunity to learn on the job and can demonstrate that they can learn, that they are intelligent and that they understand that if they do not possess the skills that allow me to bill my clients for their work, they will not get paid until they acquire those skills. I train my people the way I see fit and within a few weeks they become productive members of the team, at which point they can start commanding a wage.
I have very little interest in their academic achievements, the degree does not matter to me one bit. However I do have a few examples that show that people that drop out of the school that they started are in some cases very flaky. Seriously, I wouldn't have thought that previously, but I have examples where people that were drop outs in computer science also drop off the radar at work! Even the talented can be the most flaky people apparently, it's kind of surprising.
OTOH people who are still students, even if their education has nothing to do with computing, are actually hard working and they show up, which apparently not everybody can do - SHOW UP. It's quite amazing, honestly.
I just read some of the comments on TFA, at this point 219 comments, I read the top 10. Read them. The only thing you will find there will be hate, hate and more hate. Oh, and jealousy, hate, more hate and jealousy, nothing else.
"tax them", "steal from them", "global warming", "infrastructure", "would have been better if they never had that money", etc.etc.etc.
The commenters are CERTAIN that these guys stole the money that they have, not MADE it, but stole it. They probably believe those guys stole it from them personally, no less. OMFG, I wish I could collect these types of people specifically onto one continent, while the rest could live on another continent and we would have a WALL between us, a wall so tall, they would never have to see the other side again. The problem is, the people on the other side would be coming up with methods to IMPROVE lives of the people on that other continent to try and make more money by GIVING them the fruits of their labour in exchange for something... a promise, I guess, a promise of a fair exchange?
There can be no fair exchange with those people, they produce nothing, they think money is some sort of a limited resource and we are stuck fighting for that one pile, one limited resource. They don't even understand how stupid that is in the article, that explains that people who fund research CREATE NEW STUFF THAT NEVER EXISTED BEFORE. That's how they made their money, that's how they view the world - by changing it and by creating what didn't exist before. Money is MADE, it's not taken from a constant pool. There is no constant pool of money.
When Rockefeller saved the whales by single-handedly growing the kerosene industry into one that could light up the night for everybody pretty much, did he steal something from somebody who already had it? NO. He created the new wealth and others wanted that product, and eventually, as he lowered costs of kerosene over 40 years so much, that others couldn't compete with him, what did they do? Just like these folks, leaving those comments, what did they do?
They got with the government and destroyed an extremely efficient company, because they couldn't compete with it. The prices for kerosene never went down again since that moment in time.
It is very hard to like people, and there is no reason to like people that are that selfish, ignorant, stupid, jealous, thieving, cunning bastards. Very hard to like them indeed and we should not fall for that. Just because they cannot do it themselves does not mean anybody owes anything to them, just because they are incapable of it themselves.
Yet even they get helped by the free market capitalism that allows some people to elevate themselves from the MUD and the slime of the rest and never to stop thinking in terms of creating.
Oh, really, mass psychosis? How about this: USA is trying desperately to maintain perceived value of its dollar, while it's destroying the current value of it every day with more and more money printing, and now that it can't even hold the dollar price of gold up it's trying to ensure that there is yet another 'crisis' somewhere outside of the US. Worked last time with Europe being in crisis due to Greek bankruptcy and later Cyprus disaster, at that time people rushed into the US dollar.
Now even with the Russian / Ukrainian situation people are not flocking into the dollar. However who in fact started this particular movement in Ukraine? It was a combination of European and American political interests.
You think that the rest of the world is oblivious to these machinations, what you are observing is that while people may not have the information, on a visceral level they get it - there is a strategy behind what is happening in the Eastern European block, what happened in Georgia and now in Ukraine.
You think this is 'mass psychosis', I think it is mass rejection of American intervention. Maybe the USA should stop trying to meddle with everything in the world and then people wouldn't be put into this position.
If only there were one simple word for all of that.
- oppression.
The word is oppression. How about this: you have your government regulated banks and I have my banks that are not regulated by anybody, that's the way I prefer it.
forced a reinvention of politics in many countries by enabling constant two-way dialogue between the rulers and the ruled.
- yes, today more people realize that it is better to be free than "the ruled". As an anarcho-capitalist / libertarian / objectivist I welcome the use of technology to let people to get from under the oppression of these rulers.
Good luck with all of that hyper-socialist nonsense that you are preaching, I was born in a country that had it, USSR, I am glad it fell apart and I would never live in another one like that and you are turning USA into one. No amount of pot-hole and bridge repairs will reduce your trade imbalance, which is, by the way, the real indicator of health of your economy in the age of fake GPD and inflation numbers.
Your trade deficit is around 500 Billion / year and has been there for decades now, you are not paying for things you are getting in the US of A, your suggestion will only worsen the trade imbalance, pot-hole repairs cannot be exported in exchange for all those manufactured goods you are importing for FREE (free, because it's all vendor financed, thus the giant debt).
Anyway, as I said, good luck with your ideas. They have been proven completely false and harmful time and again, but I guess they don't actually teach real history any longer (if they ever did).
The government insists (CBO and all other government nonsense propaganda) that there is no inflation. Food prices are going up? There is no inflation. Phone subscriptions are more expensive? There is no inflation. Gas prices rising? No inflation. Stock market prices going up? No inflation. Bond market going up? No inflation. Commodities going up? No inflation. You live in a 'no-inflation' zone, what are you complaining about? Government says you are at a 'risk' of deflation. Don't you feel that deflation is a risk to you?
Of-course price changes are not inflation or deflation, just prices going up or down. Inflation is expansion of money supply, the Fed is expanding alright, but guess what: no inflation.
Now, on the topic of why the rich _should_ be paying for that. Well, that's the price of a stable and progressive civilization.
- absolutely. The rich ARE paying for EVERYTHING. The businesses are creating all of the products you use, they pay all of the salaries people get (including government salaries, which is money taken away from businesses and from salaries of private industry workers, who get paid by businesses owned by... not the poor, let's be clear on this.)
The rich are creating all of the products, paying all of the salaries, paying all of the taxes. The difference is: in a free society this happens through normal voluntary market participation.
What you are proposing is use of majority of the crowd, which directs the government violence at the few people that are richer than the rest and you think that this is a way to put a price on "stable and progressive civilisation". Well, you are also factually WRONG on that. Before 1913, before income taxes, before IRS, before 99% of all business regulations, before 99% of all that government is doing today the rich were paying for everything and the USA economy was GROWING.
Today, when the government is 100 times larger, enormously more expensive, where business regulations, income taxes, inflation are incalculable basically, where is the society going? The same drain that the economy is going. And AFAIC this is a RIGHTEOUS THING, a good thing, the correct, though unfortunate thing. I am against violence and those who use government violence to destroy individual freedoms (in order to ROB the rich), they should have to suffer all of the consequences of their actions and I welcome this effect, hopefully this will fix the problem, as this coming level of suffering will eventually either help to fix the problem of this violence or it will annihilate this "progressive" civilisation, and if that happens, then good, that's where that particular civilisation belongs for not being civilised enough not to steal from people, not to oppress individuals.
There is nothing stable about what you are proposing and there is nothing good about that type of 'progressive'.
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and the corporate America is correct in doing so, because the collectivist, mobocracy part of America decided to destroy private property rights, the dollar and basically turned the country into a gigantic cesspool of entitlement seekers (regardless of what that means for you, it simply means expecting others to do something for you for nothing on an involuntary basis).
Nate just showed that true inflation is gigantic, much higher than government admits and the mob yells: hack, hack, can't be, government can't be wrong! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
There is no rational reason to not pay for abortions
- except for the law, the Constitution of-course. There is nothing there that allows government to steal money from some people to perform 'free' abortions on others.
No, I cannot interfere with anybody's rights because I am not government. You can free associate and government cannot prevent that (however government does prevent that, when it attacks my right to not associate freely with a union), however on my private property my rules apply, I am not government, thus there is no such concept as me having to maintain your rights there or you having to maintain mine.
I don't have a right to your labor, you don't have a right to my company's job, all we have is a contractual agreement. I am not in the States, by the way.
I treat my employees well enough that they still work here, if they unionize I will not have a problem talking to them, but if they try to use that status to push any level of gov't regulations on me, I will fire them immediately by dissolving the corporation and then hiring other people, you are correct. I am not working for them, I am working for myself. They are not working for me, they are working for themselves. If they try to get an unfair advantage over me by using gov't violence, I will immediately stop that threat, I don't like being threatened, those are my basic individual human rights - not to be threatened by gov't collective into some type of slavery.
At least they have learned from the past mistakes and put two wheels in the front and one in the back this time.
Your comment makes 0 sense. You have that problem right now: huge amount of regulations and there is very little freedom in the market due to all this regulations and you have huge unemployment.
Switzerland, Hong Kong, Singapore have no minimum wage, there is much less regulations, there is almost no unemployment and there is no debt and no deficit, quite the opposite, they have surpluses and actual savings.
So funny, so funny.
Tell that to the non-union members that get jailed for working in all-union shops, jailed by the government.
I don't have a problem with people that unionise as long as it does not mean that special privileges would be granted to them at my expense by some government, because they end up lobbying governments and getting themselves such privileges. As things stand, I will not allow any union in my company because I know exactly where it leads to, which is why I structure my company in a way that distances the employees from the actual company that all business contracts are signed with, to be able to dissolve the child corporation, whose parent is a corporation in a different state altogether.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice..... and go see W's quote.
There's such a thing as law and order and equality and no one is above the law.
- oh, is there? So then what is it about this specific law that strips people off their individual human rights the moment they post a job advertising? What exactly do you think the law exists for, give privileges to some and impose obligations upon others, and if that is what you believe, then what interest do I have in your law, because clearly your idea of law is to destroy equality, not to maintain it?
Although such things are the only thing that allow petty Robber Baron wannabees like you to even exist in the first place. Otherwise, you would just get crushed under the heel of a bigger bully.
- absolutely I want to be what you consider a 'robber baron', which simply means a captain of industry, a person who defines industry rather than just following whatever others define it as. As to being 'crushed under the heel', the only 'heel' that is trying to crush business comes from government and the collectivist maniacs such as yourself. The people that I deal with that run companies are actually high quality people, that can deal on a handshake and don't have any need for your oppressive regime, they don't have a use for it and they are happy enough to operate outside of the parameters that you try to set upon them.
Wrong, I consider my private property to be my private property and I treat my employees well enough for them to work for me, clearly offering them conditions better than they could get somewhere else, otherwise they would have been there and not here.
Since you can't comprehend simple things like that, I am not going to expect you to understand anything else beyond that, like what individual freedoms are. Good luck to you and your economy.
Which is why I would nevere allow a union in my company, because there is nothing civilized about government destroying my individual right to own and operate private property the way I see fit and interfere with my hiring and firing decisions. As to TFA, if this ends up in court somehow, it would only strengthen the case against hiring members of government protected groups, including women. They cost the company much more than any value they may bring under such conditions.
So you want communism? Will you abolish the state and thus get rid of all taxes? Marx wrote in his newspaper thatit is duty of every individual to stop paying taxes, he was even brought to court for that, before they threw him out. As to promoting Leninism.... I would give a lot to meet you in a dark alley sometime...
So because death always wins at the end you want others not to try and not to work towards increasing their own lifespan? Yeah, death always wins, as long as we let it, it wins. We will all die, no question about it. What are you going to do about it, just return to the slime you came out of? You won't even try?
Those who will try, do you know what will happen once (not if, once) they succeed? They will be called 'the rich' (and they may as well be, it will be painfully expensive to achieve those results) and the rest will go to WAR to get a piece of that cake, which they did not bake, which the likes of you are spitting upon in its general direction.
Don't pretend you won't be on this or some other forum should this happen within your life time, yelling and screaming that the rich are the bastards that prevent the rest from having something that they have achieved. Your position right now is most likely in direct contradiction to your future position, should that future materialise, where you will be willing to do just about anything, including murder and theft, anything to get a piece of that.
Guilt for what? Clearly you don't understand why people who are rich are rich in the first place, they are not your 9-5 workers, they are where they are because they always thought outside of your particular box.
They have no guilt, they should have no guilt. If anybody is driven by guilt, it should be those who steal, not those who produce, and the most of those who steal are government and the mob.
Evolution is not more important than individuals, isn't it comparing apples and oranges? I agree with TFA, death is wrong. The author is 27 (I count, since he says in 2045 he'll be 58) and that's much younger than I am and he is thinking about it now, which shows his personal progress, which always a good sign.
In any case, saying that some complex environmental process, like evolution, is more important than lives of individuals that exist strikes me as very foolish. You don't know what will happen in 2 years time, we could have a massive war or disease that would eliminate 90% of population right there, given how interconnected the world is. Should we be waiting for evolution to produce humans that can withstand wars, diseases, environmental changes?
Why?
Who says that humans have any more entitlement to live on this planet than bacteria? And at the end bacteria will win out, and is that a better outcome from our own perspectives? Why should we root for bacteria than for ourselves? You think that evolution will give humans a better chance, I think you don't what you are talking about, evolution could as well lead to our extermination and let jellyfish populate most of the planet. Maybe even ground crawling jellyfish, and from my perspective I prefer to be here rather than having some jellyfish supersede myself.
Anyway, we have brains that allow us to modify our environment and those of us with any sense at all should do everything possible to ensure that our own lifespans are increased. Not lifespans of whatever may or may not come after us, but ourselves. If we don't do that and just disappear into the nothing sooner rather than later, as everything does, then there is no major distinction between us and the rest of the slime out there. As a thinking creature, I refuse to accept that. If we can't figure this out, then too bad for us of-course, but to consciously deny ourselves that very possibility, of extending our own lifespans is nothing but defeatism. The poor of mind and spirit can have that, let them perish. Those who want to reach for more than what we are given by the system that surrounds us must fight to take what we can.
I look for people who are interested in software development, who are willing to take the opportunity to learn on the job and can demonstrate that they can learn, that they are intelligent and that they understand that if they do not possess the skills that allow me to bill my clients for their work, they will not get paid until they acquire those skills. I train my people the way I see fit and within a few weeks they become productive members of the team, at which point they can start commanding a wage.
I have very little interest in their academic achievements, the degree does not matter to me one bit. However I do have a few examples that show that people that drop out of the school that they started are in some cases very flaky. Seriously, I wouldn't have thought that previously, but I have examples where people that were drop outs in computer science also drop off the radar at work! Even the talented can be the most flaky people apparently, it's kind of surprising.
OTOH people who are still students, even if their education has nothing to do with computing, are actually hard working and they show up, which apparently not everybody can do - SHOW UP. It's quite amazing, honestly.
"What they are really afraid of" ....
I just read some of the comments on TFA, at this point 219 comments, I read the top 10. Read them. The only thing you will find there will be hate, hate and more hate. Oh, and jealousy, hate, more hate and jealousy, nothing else.
"tax them", "steal from them", "global warming", "infrastructure", "would have been better if they never had that money", etc.etc.etc.
The commenters are CERTAIN that these guys stole the money that they have, not MADE it, but stole it. They probably believe those guys stole it from them personally, no less. OMFG, I wish I could collect these types of people specifically onto one continent, while the rest could live on another continent and we would have a WALL between us, a wall so tall, they would never have to see the other side again. The problem is, the people on the other side would be coming up with methods to IMPROVE lives of the people on that other continent to try and make more money by GIVING them the fruits of their labour in exchange for something... a promise, I guess, a promise of a fair exchange?
There can be no fair exchange with those people, they produce nothing, they think money is some sort of a limited resource and we are stuck fighting for that one pile, one limited resource. They don't even understand how stupid that is in the article, that explains that people who fund research CREATE NEW STUFF THAT NEVER EXISTED BEFORE. That's how they made their money, that's how they view the world - by changing it and by creating what didn't exist before. Money is MADE, it's not taken from a constant pool. There is no constant pool of money.
When Rockefeller saved the whales by single-handedly growing the kerosene industry into one that could light up the night for everybody pretty much, did he steal something from somebody who already had it? NO. He created the new wealth and others wanted that product, and eventually, as he lowered costs of kerosene over 40 years so much, that others couldn't compete with him, what did they do? Just like these folks, leaving those comments, what did they do?
They got with the government and destroyed an extremely efficient company, because they couldn't compete with it. The prices for kerosene never went down again since that moment in time.
It is very hard to like people, and there is no reason to like people that are that selfish, ignorant, stupid, jealous, thieving, cunning bastards. Very hard to like them indeed and we should not fall for that. Just because they cannot do it themselves does not mean anybody owes anything to them, just because they are incapable of it themselves.
Yet even they get helped by the free market capitalism that allows some people to elevate themselves from the MUD and the slime of the rest and never to stop thinking in terms of creating.
I wonder what effect if any mouthwash (with and without alcohol in it) has on this type of fungus.
Oh, really, mass psychosis? How about this: USA is trying desperately to maintain perceived value of its dollar, while it's destroying the current value of it every day with more and more money printing, and now that it can't even hold the dollar price of gold up it's trying to ensure that there is yet another 'crisis' somewhere outside of the US. Worked last time with Europe being in crisis due to Greek bankruptcy and later Cyprus disaster, at that time people rushed into the US dollar.
Now even with the Russian / Ukrainian situation people are not flocking into the dollar. However who in fact started this particular movement in Ukraine? It was a combination of European and American political interests.
You think that the rest of the world is oblivious to these machinations, what you are observing is that while people may not have the information, on a visceral level they get it - there is a strategy behind what is happening in the Eastern European block, what happened in Georgia and now in Ukraine.
You think this is 'mass psychosis', I think it is mass rejection of American intervention. Maybe the USA should stop trying to meddle with everything in the world and then people wouldn't be put into this position.
If only there were one simple word for all of that.
- oppression.
The word is oppression. How about this: you have your government regulated banks and I have my banks that are not regulated by anybody, that's the way I prefer it.
I say you are wrong, but this guy said it better.
forced a reinvention of politics in many countries by enabling constant two-way dialogue between the rulers and the ruled.
- yes, today more people realize that it is better to be free than "the ruled". As an anarcho-capitalist / libertarian / objectivist I welcome the use of technology to let people to get from under the oppression of these rulers.
Good luck with all of that hyper-socialist nonsense that you are preaching, I was born in a country that had it, USSR, I am glad it fell apart and I would never live in another one like that and you are turning USA into one. No amount of pot-hole and bridge repairs will reduce your trade imbalance, which is, by the way, the real indicator of health of your economy in the age of fake GPD and inflation numbers.
Your trade deficit is around 500 Billion / year and has been there for decades now, you are not paying for things you are getting in the US of A, your suggestion will only worsen the trade imbalance, pot-hole repairs cannot be exported in exchange for all those manufactured goods you are importing for FREE (free, because it's all vendor financed, thus the giant debt).
Anyway, as I said, good luck with your ideas. They have been proven completely false and harmful time and again, but I guess they don't actually teach real history any longer (if they ever did).
The government insists (CBO and all other government nonsense propaganda) that there is no inflation. Food prices are going up? There is no inflation. Phone subscriptions are more expensive? There is no inflation. Gas prices rising? No inflation. Stock market prices going up? No inflation. Bond market going up? No inflation. Commodities going up? No inflation. You live in a 'no-inflation' zone, what are you complaining about? Government says you are at a 'risk' of deflation. Don't you feel that deflation is a risk to you?
Of-course price changes are not inflation or deflation, just prices going up or down. Inflation is expansion of money supply, the Fed is expanding alright, but guess what: no inflation.
Now, on the topic of why the rich _should_ be paying for that. Well, that's the price of a stable and progressive civilization.
- absolutely. The rich ARE paying for EVERYTHING. The businesses are creating all of the products you use, they pay all of the salaries people get (including government salaries, which is money taken away from businesses and from salaries of private industry workers, who get paid by businesses owned by... not the poor, let's be clear on this.)
The rich are creating all of the products, paying all of the salaries, paying all of the taxes. The difference is: in a free society this happens through normal voluntary market participation.
What you are proposing is use of majority of the crowd, which directs the government violence at the few people that are richer than the rest and you think that this is a way to put a price on "stable and progressive civilisation". Well, you are also factually WRONG on that. Before 1913, before income taxes, before IRS, before 99% of all business regulations, before 99% of all that government is doing today the rich were paying for everything and the USA economy was GROWING.
Today, when the government is 100 times larger, enormously more expensive, where business regulations, income taxes, inflation are incalculable basically, where is the society going? The same drain that the economy is going. And AFAIC this is a RIGHTEOUS THING, a good thing, the correct, though unfortunate thing. I am against violence and those who use government violence to destroy individual freedoms (in order to ROB the rich), they should have to suffer all of the consequences of their actions and I welcome this effect, hopefully this will fix the problem, as this coming level of suffering will eventually either help to fix the problem of this violence or it will annihilate this "progressive" civilisation, and if that happens, then good, that's where that particular civilisation belongs for not being civilised enough not to steal from people, not to oppress individuals.
There is nothing stable about what you are proposing and there is nothing good about that type of 'progressive'.