Standard Oil managed to be competitive enough consistently lowering prices from 1969 all the way until it was broken up and in the meanwhile it managed to turn Rockefeller into one of the richest people in history, making modern time billionaires look like poor children.
I don't know what you mean by innovation, but clearly that company was able to innovate better than anybody else, once Standard was broken up prices for their product have never gone down again, only up.
So finally you are explaining what you mean by "lie".
1. You are misconstruing my words, I did not say 'all government', I am very clear that government is a useful instrument, a luxury spending item that people may want to buy as long as they limit what it can do.
2. All government that exists today everywhere with a few almost irrelevant exception cases is doing much more than what it should do to allow the economy (and thus the society) to exist around it without destroying it.
We are obviously observing all of this in action pretty much in every place on this planet except for a very few places, you are unconvinced that it is the case, yet it is happening right in front of our eyes: the governments of the world nations are destroying the economies and societies around them by doing all of these things tied to money, business, welfare that they should not do.
They want the government to give them an advantage by beating up an efficient competitor, same as happened with all anti-trust cases starting with Standard Oil, and moving on to Alcoa Aluminium and everything in between.
They are instances of collectivism, all of them are rooted in Marxism and all of them agree on the basic tenets of anti-individualism, anti-competitive free market capitalism.
They are preventing the majority of people from owning and operating private property, they are not allowing for equal application of law, in fact they are preventing meaningful set of stable laws that are based on rules and are not changing all the time, so there is no real law, the ex post facto 'law' is the rule, not an exception in those systems.
The major difference between fascism and communism makes fascism more efficient than communism, but that doesn't change the fact that the efficiency is gained at the altar of individual being sacrificed to the collective.
No, they are not the same thing, they are just instances of the same thing. I guess it's hard for somebody like you to understand such a concept as 'instance' of a more general concept, though we are on/., it's a bit surprising, people here generally understand inheritance principles.
Yes yes, freedom from the evils of productivity and the joys of having to work for the big communist State (and of-course your actual private property gets taken first and if you disagree you get slaughtered). Surplus value, ha? How about actual added value by people doing the work necessary?
How do you benefit from oil that is still in the ground? However you do benefit from oil that is extracted and then you benefit from it being refined and shipped to you, and all of this is done by investing the capital necessary first. Nobody did this before investment of capital became possible.
As to talking about socialism as a strategy for evolution, well, then hundreds of millions of people who disagreed with the socialists just weren't 'evolved enough' and had to be robbed and slaughtered, I guess they didn't evolve enough of the slave gene necessary to comply with the orders barked at them at the gun point.
I'll tell you what to do with your ideas and links, but what does it matter? You are not literally going to print all that nonsense onto a big stack of cardboard and shove up one of your orifices, where it belongs.
An interview with a guy from today, who did do a bunch of work to improve the infrastructure of his neighbourhood on his own dime, so that there would be no more flooding of houses and the way the government treated him after that (destroyed his property rights, bankrupted him) starts at around 21 minutes, goes to 40 minutes I find it convenient to listen at 1.5 times the speed, saves you some time.
Stalin and Hitler were mortal enemies, not fascism and communism. Fascism and communism are one and the same, with fascism being a slightly more efficient version of communism, because at least fascists recognised that allowing SOME people who supported the regime to own and operate private property (as monopolies of-course) and pay taxes was a more preferable way to run businesses than to run them by a committee of non-owners making meaningless decisions and not having anything personal to gain from any of it as long as the State could keep using free labour (slave labour actually) to run the business.
Now, understand that Marxism was an international idea, and as such it was completely impossible to implement.
Why would a coal mine worker in Britain want to share the output of his work with a farmer in India exactly? Never mind about the logistics of this, but regardless of the logistics, the international property of Marxism is what made the pre-fascist time socialists in Germany fail and be replace with a more dictatorial approach to Marxism, a national vision.
The reality is that it does not matter what we are talking about, socialism, fascism, communism. All of these are songs of one opera: collectivism.
Collectivism is what unites these ideologies, hatred towards individualism, humanism, real private property ownership based on equal application of the law (free market competitive capitalism).
Fascists and communists of the last century have much more traits that are similar than they have disagreements. The only problem for them at the time was that both were dictatorial powers that needed to dominate the region to prevent their own people from being able to compare their situation to other, freer nations and so they both wanted to dominate the rest and 2 huge powers cannot really coexist peacefully side by side with so many other smaller countries that could be used to pump resources from.
It was not about ideology that the fascists and the communists were fighting, it was about resources and influence.
The cool thing about Thatcher was that she actually read and understood Hayek, actually she had a list of his quotes in a notebook that she always had with her.
Let me take another example: do you see class warefare there?
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Universal Declaration on Human Rights, article 1)
What do I see in this?
There are 2 versions of what I see based on the definition of what a 'right' is and what 'equal' means.
AFAIC a right is protection against government abuse of an individual, nothing else. So a right to private property is protection of individual's private property against claims by the collective.
'Equal' means equal before law without the law treating some people differently than others, so equal treatment by government without discrimination.
So if you take my definition of what a right is and what 'equal' means, then that sentence means the following:
All human beings are born as free individuals and cannot be coerced by government or the collective and they have equal rights before law, where the law is defined clearly and is applied equally to all people regardless of their personal circumstances.
The part about 'brotherhood' only means to me: do onto others as you would want others to do to you.
--
If you take the common (majority opinion) misconceptions and apply them to the definitions of 'right', 'equal' and 'brotherhood', then you are going to get a different meaning altogether.
A right then means an entitlement to be provided for by the collective certain goods and services, which forces an obligation on the collective to provide them somehow (so this gives the collective power over the individual to force an individual to give up his labour one way or another, thus the idea of income taxes, which I see as a tax on slaves, not on free individuals. The collective says that it owns the individual and all he can produce and the collective just chooses not to take 100% of what the individual produces and that is only because it's impossible to take 100% and not prevent individual from producing in the first place. This means that an individual doesn't have rights.)
'Equal' in this case means equal outcomes, which necessarily requires discrimination against individuals based on their personal circumstances, so this is where such notions as 'social justice' come from, which are completely Orwellian in nature, obviously there is no justice if it's not applied equally and to achieve equal outcomes the collective must treat people differently based on their different circumstances, thus this is discrimination against some for the benefit of others. Again, this is an approach to slaves, not to free individuals.
'Brotherhood' in this case really means class warfare, 'us vs them', you are either 'with us' or you are 'against us'. It's a common way to use that word around the world, it's a tribal notion, not a notion of abstract idea that you should treat people as you would want them to treat you.
In that case the sentence becomes:
All human beings are born with certain entitlements and the collective has the obligation to provide those by using the threat of collective violence against humans. The discrimination will be applied selectively based on different individual circumstances and the majority belong to a 'brotherhood' of sorts, which ensures that the collective follows this goal of discrimination, theft, slavery and violence to create the subsidy.
--
Is this what you are asking me?
--
As to what a 'nation' is, it's a set of people found in close territorial proximity from each other, probably sharing some common traits, such as language and sharing some form of common government.
I can't fully understand what exactly on that page provoked the government reaction, but apparently there are a number of pages that the Russian gov't is set against (suicide, methamphetamine, bong, amphetamine, The Complete Manual of Suicide - the page on a Japanese book).
In any case, the Russian government is engaged in censorship against Internet sites and other "extremist" materials, which include books, articles, music, images, etc.
Apparently too many people around the world just can't come to grips with the fact that trying to stop proliferation of information on the Net is a stupid idea, but hey, laws don't have to be intelligent. Intelligence is not a prerequisite for survival, apparently it's also not a prerequisite for governing.
If the US really considers China a strategic threat, we can only hope this would be the kind of astonishing boondoggle they would waste their money on.
- no, USA is perfectly happy with China wasting its money to subsidise American consumption, USA doesn't want Chinese to divert resources from that task at all.
Yes, gov't can steal funds from people and misappropriate them and rather than engaging in a function that it should (protection against military occupation, working to protect individual rights, maintaining contract law) instead gov't can do what you are talking about - spending on gov't projects.
None of that should happen. Gov't doesn't have any capital, it gets revenue from capitalists, from people who own and operate private property for their own profit.
You are saying: private capitalists do not have enough capital to run huge projects. I say: nonsense.
There are millions, billions, even hundreds of billions of dollars in capital that exists in the private sector. If it is a profitable venture then it will be invested into. What you are suggesting is that gov't should just take the money and spend it on unprofitable ventures (and they are either unprofitable by definition, because nobody is investing their own money, OR there is a huge political game, which prevents private money from being used to build infrastructure, just like is the case with the Keystone pipeline in Canada and USA).
The problem is that you believe that gov't should be doing any of these things in principle and I am completely convinced that you are totally wrong.
Kickstarter pledges: 99 bucks. Pebble watch in retail 150 bucks.
Having a watch that will not tell you exact time an instead tell you 'fuzzy' time in 5 minute increments (in words, not numbers) and doing it at 5atm pressure under water?
Send them to a dedicated gmail account. You'll be able to find all of your documents (you can label them, whatever) and they provide online office of some sort and if you forget what you have there you can always just go to Google search and push "I feel lucky" button.
Missile bases on a Moon? To bomb Earth? But will they have a giant LASER? Really, will they hire a bold weird Canadian guy to do the job for ONE. MILLION. DOLLARS?
Farmers should not be subsidised and neither should anybody else, then all relationships become mutually beneficial, then it's symbiosis, not parasitism. If a farmer gains from trading with a shoemaker then it's not a parasitic relationship. In a complex enough society a farmer trades with everybody by trading with only a few people, as long as there are no gov't perversions, then all of these relationships, direct or not are symbiotic.
Sometimes and in some places there's nobody apart from a government with the capital to set up electricity generation,
- friend, gov't doesn't have any capital. Gov't does not have capital, is this something difficult to understand?
Gov't does not have capital. In order to have capital you have to be productive, this means you have to produce something. What does gov't produce to be productive and to have capital? What does it produce except violence?
Sure, you can say that a gov't is productive by producing violence, but that's not a symbiotic relationship, that's a parasitic relationship, after all, a virus or a bacteria can kill its host given enough time, so virus or bacteria is parasitic, it's violent.
Some bacteria are useful as long as it does not dictate its rules to the host, but what we have now is a bacteria that might have been useful at some point and now it took over and it's destroying the host.
Your argument that some gov't can be useful, yes, some gov't can be useful. However not in a business sense, some gov't that protects individual freedoms is useful. A gov't that prevents oppression brought by another gov't for example (like a foreign invasions across nation borders) is useful.
No gov't can produce any wealth, but it can be used for protection against tyranny, that can be a legitimate role and THAT can be tolerated and worth paying for, true.
However that's not what gov'ts are. I lived in so many places, it'd be painful for my wrists to type them up, I only saw a semi-useful gov't once, and it's what is considered one of the least intrusive gov'ts out there, and even that one decided to start destroying the host, the economy by doing some pretty stupid shit and for some reason the people haven't forced it to turn back on that stupid decision just yet (but I think this will happen in the next year or so).
Capital is needed to build infrastructure that is actually profitable to run because it makes sense for it to exist from the POV of society, gov'ts do not do it this way, they are not actually supposed to. The entire idea that gov'ts are based on is completely contrary to being efficient, to investing, all that. Gov't is there to spend to do a certain thing, the less it does the better for the host economy.
Defence is not what USA does, it's not what USA has been doing since the end of WWII. Yes, including what passes for 'defence' nowadays, shutting down all military basis around the world, brining all troops back to America, getting rid of 90% of offence spending. Of-course legitimate defence is what Congress is authorised to collect taxes for in the first place, it's actually an appropriate role for gov't as per the Constitution (which I disagree with, by the way, I don't think central gov't should be running defence!)
... I just have to say pretty bluntly here: Weâ(TM)ve been there before. Buzz has been there. Thereâ(TM)s a lot more of space to explore, and a lot more to learn when we do. So I believe itâ(TM)s more important to ramp up our capabilities to reach -- and operate at -- a series of increasingly demanding targets, while advancing our technological capabilities with each step forward.
1st time ever I agree with Obama, there is no reason for government to spend money on a manned Moon mission. Of-course I would just dismantle all government programs, but that's a different story.
You can see my sig for a pretty good reason why USA cannot afford anything like the Moon program probably for a very very very long time.
I think you miss something by interpreting french republic motto while looking at today's France political situation, while it has to be understood within the context of its inception.
- actually it's not me, you missed something if you are going to use the original idea behind that cry to arms.
If you are talking about the original, then you missed the last part: ou la mort.
I am obviously using the modern understanding of that slogan and that's what the modern understanding is:
Welfare entitlement, discrimination, class warfare. Actually I would return the original part about death as well.
- I know it, I visit France once in a while. This motto can be understood properly if translated from the Orwellian doublespeak into human language this way:
Ummm, is private property enforcement by the government really free market?
- equality under law to have equal rights protected equally for all individuals.
This is the opposite of the class warfare in that French cry to arms.
As to 'restricting my freedom' because of 'single ecosystem', you are wrong to think that you will achieve that goal also. What you are advocating will produce the exact opposite effect, it will hurt the ecosystem more than individual freedom, in fact individual freedom results in wealth creation and it takes wealthy individuals and thus a wealthy society to be able to take care of the ecosystem.
From what I gather, the only 'solutions' that Marxists (collectivists) of all colours are proposing is control over humans, even control over entire populations.
Is life on this planet so important, that we must force people to live through it in chains of the collective?
I argue that liberty and freedom is more important than anything and that it provides the long term solutions to the problems that arise due to increase in population and various technological problems.
Anyway, I am not sure that this was of any use to you.
Slashdot Mirror
Standard Oil managed to be competitive enough consistently lowering prices from 1969 all the way until it was broken up and in the meanwhile it managed to turn Rockefeller into one of the richest people in history, making modern time billionaires look like poor children.
I don't know what you mean by innovation, but clearly that company was able to innovate better than anybody else, once Standard was broken up prices for their product have never gone down again, only up.
So finally you are explaining what you mean by "lie".
1. You are misconstruing my words, I did not say 'all government', I am very clear that government is a useful instrument, a luxury spending item that people may want to buy as long as they limit what it can do.
2. All government that exists today everywhere with a few almost irrelevant exception cases is doing much more than what it should do to allow the economy (and thus the society) to exist around it without destroying it.
We are obviously observing all of this in action pretty much in every place on this planet except for a very few places, you are unconvinced that it is the case, yet it is happening right in front of our eyes: the governments of the world nations are destroying the economies and societies around them by doing all of these things tied to money, business, welfare that they should not do.
They want the government to give them an advantage by beating up an efficient competitor, same as happened with all anti-trust cases starting with Standard Oil, and moving on to Alcoa Aluminium and everything in between.
You know, central planning.
They are instances of collectivism, all of them are rooted in Marxism and all of them agree on the basic tenets of anti-individualism, anti-competitive free market capitalism.
They are preventing the majority of people from owning and operating private property, they are not allowing for equal application of law, in fact they are preventing meaningful set of stable laws that are based on rules and are not changing all the time, so there is no real law, the ex post facto 'law' is the rule, not an exception in those systems.
The major difference between fascism and communism makes fascism more efficient than communism, but that doesn't change the fact that the efficiency is gained at the altar of individual being sacrificed to the collective.
No, they are not the same thing, they are just instances of the same thing. I guess it's hard for somebody like you to understand such a concept as 'instance' of a more general concept, though we are on /., it's a bit surprising, people here generally understand inheritance principles.
Yes yes, freedom from the evils of productivity and the joys of having to work for the big communist State (and of-course your actual private property gets taken first and if you disagree you get slaughtered). Surplus value, ha? How about actual added value by people doing the work necessary?
How do you benefit from oil that is still in the ground? However you do benefit from oil that is extracted and then you benefit from it being refined and shipped to you, and all of this is done by investing the capital necessary first. Nobody did this before investment of capital became possible.
As to talking about socialism as a strategy for evolution, well, then hundreds of millions of people who disagreed with the socialists just weren't 'evolved enough' and had to be robbed and slaughtered, I guess they didn't evolve enough of the slave gene necessary to comply with the orders barked at them at the gun point.
I'll tell you what to do with your ideas and links, but what does it matter? You are not literally going to print all that nonsense onto a big stack of cardboard and shove up one of your orifices, where it belongs.
An interview with a guy from today, who did do a bunch of work to improve the infrastructure of his neighbourhood on his own dime, so that there would be no more flooding of houses and the way the government treated him after that (destroyed his property rights, bankrupted him) starts at around 21 minutes, goes to 40 minutes I find it convenient to listen at 1.5 times the speed, saves you some time.
Fascism and communism were mortal enemies
- no, you are mistaken.
Stalin and Hitler were mortal enemies, not fascism and communism. Fascism and communism are one and the same, with fascism being a slightly more efficient version of communism, because at least fascists recognised that allowing SOME people who supported the regime to own and operate private property (as monopolies of-course) and pay taxes was a more preferable way to run businesses than to run them by a committee of non-owners making meaningless decisions and not having anything personal to gain from any of it as long as the State could keep using free labour (slave labour actually) to run the business.
Now, understand that Marxism was an international idea, and as such it was completely impossible to implement.
Why would a coal mine worker in Britain want to share the output of his work with a farmer in India exactly? Never mind about the logistics of this, but regardless of the logistics, the international property of Marxism is what made the pre-fascist time socialists in Germany fail and be replace with a more dictatorial approach to Marxism, a national vision.
The reality is that it does not matter what we are talking about, socialism, fascism, communism. All of these are songs of one opera: collectivism.
Collectivism is what unites these ideologies, hatred towards individualism, humanism, real private property ownership based on equal application of the law (free market competitive capitalism).
Fascists and communists of the last century have much more traits that are similar than they have disagreements. The only problem for them at the time was that both were dictatorial powers that needed to dominate the region to prevent their own people from being able to compare their situation to other, freer nations and so they both wanted to dominate the rest and 2 huge powers cannot really coexist peacefully side by side with so many other smaller countries that could be used to pump resources from.
It was not about ideology that the fascists and the communists were fighting, it was about resources and influence.
High 5.
The cool thing about Thatcher was that she actually read and understood Hayek, actually she had a list of his quotes in a notebook that she always had with her.
I don't understand what you are talking about, what lie?
Are you talking about this:
Let me take another example: do you see class warefare there?
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Universal Declaration on Human Rights, article 1)
What do I see in this?
There are 2 versions of what I see based on the definition of what a 'right' is and what 'equal' means.
AFAIC a right is protection against government abuse of an individual, nothing else. So a right to private property is protection of individual's private property against claims by the collective.
'Equal' means equal before law without the law treating some people differently than others, so equal treatment by government without discrimination.
So if you take my definition of what a right is and what 'equal' means, then that sentence means the following:
All human beings are born as free individuals and cannot be coerced by government or the collective and they have equal rights before law, where the law is defined clearly and is applied equally to all people regardless of their personal circumstances.
The part about 'brotherhood' only means to me: do onto others as you would want others to do to you.
--
If you take the common (majority opinion) misconceptions and apply them to the definitions of 'right', 'equal' and 'brotherhood', then you are going to get a different meaning altogether.
A right then means an entitlement to be provided for by the collective certain goods and services, which forces an obligation on the collective to provide them somehow (so this gives the collective power over the individual to force an individual to give up his labour one way or another, thus the idea of income taxes, which I see as a tax on slaves, not on free individuals. The collective says that it owns the individual and all he can produce and the collective just chooses not to take 100% of what the individual produces and that is only because it's impossible to take 100% and not prevent individual from producing in the first place. This means that an individual doesn't have rights.)
'Equal' in this case means equal outcomes, which necessarily requires discrimination against individuals based on their personal circumstances, so this is where such notions as 'social justice' come from, which are completely Orwellian in nature, obviously there is no justice if it's not applied equally and to achieve equal outcomes the collective must treat people differently based on their different circumstances, thus this is discrimination against some for the benefit of others. Again, this is an approach to slaves, not to free individuals.
'Brotherhood' in this case really means class warfare, 'us vs them', you are either 'with us' or you are 'against us'. It's a common way to use that word around the world, it's a tribal notion, not a notion of abstract idea that you should treat people as you would want them to treat you.
In that case the sentence becomes:
All human beings are born with certain entitlements and the collective has the obligation to provide those by using the threat of collective violence against humans. The discrimination will be applied selectively based on different individual circumstances and the majority belong to a 'brotherhood' of sorts, which ensures that the collective follows this goal of discrimination, theft, slavery and violence to create the subsidy.
--
Is this what you are asking me?
--
As to what a 'nation' is, it's a set of people found in close territorial proximity from each other, probably sharing some common traits, such as language and sharing some form of common government.
In Russia Wikipedia is giving up to the political pressure to remove or edit a page on Cannabis smoking (Russian version of the page).
I can't fully understand what exactly on that page provoked the government reaction, but apparently there are a number of pages that the Russian gov't is set against (suicide, methamphetamine, bong, amphetamine, The Complete Manual of Suicide - the page on a Japanese book).
In any case, the Russian government is engaged in censorship against Internet sites and other "extremist" materials, which include books, articles, music, images, etc.
Apparently too many people around the world just can't come to grips with the fact that trying to stop proliferation of information on the Net is a stupid idea, but hey, laws don't have to be intelligent. Intelligence is not a prerequisite for survival, apparently it's also not a prerequisite for governing.
If the US really considers China a strategic threat, we can only hope this would be the kind of astonishing boondoggle they would waste their money on.
- no, USA is perfectly happy with China wasting its money to subsidise American consumption, USA doesn't want Chinese to divert resources from that task at all.
Yes, gov't can steal funds from people and misappropriate them and rather than engaging in a function that it should (protection against military occupation, working to protect individual rights, maintaining contract law) instead gov't can do what you are talking about - spending on gov't projects.
None of that should happen. Gov't doesn't have any capital, it gets revenue from capitalists, from people who own and operate private property for their own profit.
You are saying: private capitalists do not have enough capital to run huge projects. I say: nonsense.
There are millions, billions, even hundreds of billions of dollars in capital that exists in the private sector. If it is a profitable venture then it will be invested into. What you are suggesting is that gov't should just take the money and spend it on unprofitable ventures (and they are either unprofitable by definition, because nobody is investing their own money, OR there is a huge political game, which prevents private money from being used to build infrastructure, just like is the case with the Keystone pipeline in Canada and USA).
The problem is that you believe that gov't should be doing any of these things in principle and I am completely convinced that you are totally wrong.
Kickstarter pledges: 99 bucks.
Pebble watch in retail 150 bucks.
Having a watch that will not tell you exact time an instead tell you 'fuzzy' time in 5 minute increments (in words, not numbers) and doing it at 5atm pressure under water?
You see where I am going with this.
Absolutely, no question about it. Some documents are not that important, but the important ones shouldn't go there.
Send them to a dedicated gmail account. You'll be able to find all of your documents (you can label them, whatever) and they provide online office of some sort and if you forget what you have there you can always just go to Google search and push "I feel lucky" button.
Missile bases on a Moon? To bomb Earth? But will they have a giant LASER? Really, will they hire a bold weird Canadian guy to do the job for ONE. MILLION. DOLLARS?
Next headline will read:
TSA: How To Eliminate Researcher Evan Booth While Pretending To Be In Line With The Constitution
Farmers should not be subsidised and neither should anybody else, then all relationships become mutually beneficial, then it's symbiosis, not parasitism. If a farmer gains from trading with a shoemaker then it's not a parasitic relationship. In a complex enough society a farmer trades with everybody by trading with only a few people, as long as there are no gov't perversions, then all of these relationships, direct or not are symbiotic.
Sometimes and in some places there's nobody apart from a government with the capital to set up electricity generation,
- friend, gov't doesn't have any capital. Gov't does not have capital, is this something difficult to understand?
Gov't does not have capital. In order to have capital you have to be productive, this means you have to produce something. What does gov't produce to be productive and to have capital? What does it produce except violence?
Sure, you can say that a gov't is productive by producing violence, but that's not a symbiotic relationship, that's a parasitic relationship, after all, a virus or a bacteria can kill its host given enough time, so virus or bacteria is parasitic, it's violent.
Some bacteria are useful as long as it does not dictate its rules to the host, but what we have now is a bacteria that might have been useful at some point and now it took over and it's destroying the host.
Your argument that some gov't can be useful, yes, some gov't can be useful. However not in a business sense, some gov't that protects individual freedoms is useful. A gov't that prevents oppression brought by another gov't for example (like a foreign invasions across nation borders) is useful.
No gov't can produce any wealth, but it can be used for protection against tyranny, that can be a legitimate role and THAT can be tolerated and worth paying for, true.
However that's not what gov'ts are. I lived in so many places, it'd be painful for my wrists to type them up, I only saw a semi-useful gov't once, and it's what is considered one of the least intrusive gov'ts out there, and even that one decided to start destroying the host, the economy by doing some pretty stupid shit and for some reason the people haven't forced it to turn back on that stupid decision just yet (but I think this will happen in the next year or so).
Capital is needed to build infrastructure that is actually profitable to run because it makes sense for it to exist from the POV of society, gov'ts do not do it this way, they are not actually supposed to. The entire idea that gov'ts are based on is completely contrary to being efficient, to investing, all that. Gov't is there to spend to do a certain thing, the less it does the better for the host economy.
The way I see it if the first 12 letters don't do it, nothing will. It should be enough for everybody.
Defence is not what USA does, it's not what USA has been doing since the end of WWII. Yes, including what passes for 'defence' nowadays, shutting down all military basis around the world, brining all troops back to America, getting rid of 90% of offence spending. Of-course legitimate defence is what Congress is authorised to collect taxes for in the first place, it's actually an appropriate role for gov't as per the Constitution (which I disagree with, by the way, I don't think central gov't should be running defence!)
Obama said it:
... I just have to say pretty bluntly here: Weâ(TM)ve been there before. Buzz has been there. Thereâ(TM)s a lot more of space to explore, and a lot more to learn when we do. So I believe itâ(TM)s more important to ramp up our capabilities to reach -- and operate at -- a series of increasingly demanding targets, while advancing our technological capabilities with each step forward.
1st time ever I agree with Obama, there is no reason for government to spend money on a manned Moon mission. Of-course I would just dismantle all government programs, but that's a different story.
You can see my sig for a pretty good reason why USA cannot afford anything like the Moon program probably for a very very very long time.
I think you miss something by interpreting french republic motto while looking at today's France political situation, while it has to be understood within the context of its inception.
- actually it's not me, you missed something if you are going to use the original idea behind that cry to arms.
If you are talking about the original, then you missed the last part: ou la mort.
I am obviously using the modern understanding of that slogan and that's what the modern understanding is:
Welfare entitlement, discrimination, class warfare. Actually I would return the original part about death as well.
Do you now French Republic motto
- I know it, I visit France once in a while. This motto can be understood properly if translated from the Orwellian doublespeak into human language this way:
Liberté - entitlement to products and services that others are forced to provide to the mob. This really means entitlement for some and legalised theft with the violence of the State to provide this subsidy.
Egalité - discrimination against some to achieve supposed 'equality' for others. You can't achieve equality of outcomes if you don't discriminate against specific individuals in specific ways. You can't have equality of outcomes because you start with unequal premises, even the basics, like human physiology is unequal, never mind other properties.
Fraternité - class warfare, which is the justification for State legalised violence to achieve the discrimination to provide the entitlement.
Ummm, is private property enforcement by the government really free market?
- equality under law to have equal rights protected equally for all individuals.
This is the opposite of the class warfare in that French cry to arms.
As to 'restricting my freedom' because of 'single ecosystem', you are wrong to think that you will achieve that goal also. What you are advocating will produce the exact opposite effect, it will hurt the ecosystem more than individual freedom, in fact individual freedom results in wealth creation and it takes wealthy individuals and thus a wealthy society to be able to take care of the ecosystem.
From what I gather, the only 'solutions' that Marxists (collectivists) of all colours are proposing is control over humans, even control over entire populations.
Is life on this planet so important, that we must force people to live through it in chains of the collective?
I argue that liberty and freedom is more important than anything and that it provides the long term solutions to the problems that arise due to increase in population and various technological problems.
Anyway, I am not sure that this was of any use to you.
Cheers.