In that video the guy couldn't really come up with a solution to patent trolls because he is looking at the symptoms of the problem, while the root of it is the fact that patents are protected by governments in the first place.
Government shouldn't be authorised to protect monopolies, regardless of who and why believes that people that are protected should be protected for whatever reasons.
Every time government sticks its nose to 'protect' anything you get a disaster. From patents and copyrights to money, housing, medical care, your retirement, anything at all.
Patents are none of governments' business, that's the reality and that's the only way actually to fix the real problem.
- yes, but only private enterprise actually does what is known as 'investment'. Governments only spend, they don't invest. If something is worth an investment it's only because the investor believes he'll be able to generate a profit that will cover the costs and have a decent return on that investment (decent, as in beating the real inflation and then also covering risk costs and taxes obviously and generating some profit that steal beats passive investments and inflation hedges).
Government doesn't do any of that, the entire government structure is set up not to incentivise profitable investments but instead to grow power of government regardless of costs. You see costs do not matter to the government officials, they are not holding the bag, it's not their money, but whatever they can spend increases their power. This is the exact opposite of what an investor has to deal with. An investor has to evaluate risk reward ratio, he has to be as efficient as possible to ensure his input costs are as low as possible so that he can actually access more market to sell more of his productive output.
A government official doesn't need to fight for the market share, he has it by decree. He doesn't need to lower his costs, he is not risking any money of his own or his credit and assets. He doesn't need to generate profit, in fact generating profit is absolutely irrelevant, that's not the point. The point is to spend spend spend, spend as much as possible, to get as much blanket to yourself as possible and then ensure that you can grow grow grow your budget for the next year, not cut it!
I mean government has a function, but that function is not an investment one, it's a protection one. In USA at least the government is there (supposed to be anyway) to protect individuals from tyranny. Be it tyranny of foreign invasion and foreign governments or be it in fact tyranny of domestic attempts to steal the power and use it to curtail individual freedoms. Unfortunately about 124 years into the experiment it failed and tyranny eventually was introduced.
For example democracy is tyranny, it's tyranny of the majority. It doesn't matter WHO is the tyrant, the people who are oppressed are always some form of a minority. Power minority or a voting minority. Setting up income taxes for example, especially progressive income taxes can only be done because of tyranny and mobocracy, but it's a democratic process. It's not like it's impossible to vote your rights away, it happened so many times in history, including history of USA that it shouldn't be a surprise. That's why democracies always actually descent into tyrannies, it's because the majority vote for the politicians who are willing to sell out a minority to give the majority some satisfaction, whatever that is.
As to the entire 'crop' metaphor, well sure, if you see the purpose of government to steal as much from the economy as possible rather than just do its authorised job, ensure that the authorised functions are running and nothing else happens. But that's the problem, you are certain that governments should be doing more all the time, otherwise where would this notion come from, that governments need to 'harvest' economic output?
Capital investment is never a government job, I wrote some other comments on that, I don't like to repeat the same thing, but hey, the same wrong things get thrown around quite often.
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By the way, the OP in this thread is so confused, it should be obvious to everybody but somehow it is not. Look at his statements:
No, a balanced budget is the last freaking thing we or any country needs. National budgets aren't like your personal checkbook, hell they're not even like a companies balance sheet
Because rahrah he's pretty sure he'll never get sick, old or have any kind of misfortune.
- nonsense. It's because I would always rather do my own investment with my own earned money and not have my earnings stolen from me unconstitutionally.
There are corner cases, some people are very misfortunate, that's what private charity is for and it must never be wrapped with a government bureaucracy, the fact that it is charity must never be hidden, it must be always clear. People must know that they get charity, it's not a 'right' to steal from some people with the threat of government violence and give to others, just because 'others' vote as a majority block. That's why USA was never meant to be a democratic state where populist ideas would take over. That's why Senate exists - to prevent popular ideas that may generate in Congress from ever taking place. That's why POTUS must be able to veto new bills and it takes 70% of agreement by Congress to overwrite that veto. That's why SCOTUS has the ability to nullify laws as unconstitutional (which it really doesn't do anymore and it should, but again, now there is consensus between branches of government, which should have never existed).
Because he doesn't think "government" jobs are "real" jobs.
- you are right, most government jobs shouldn't exist, they are not real jobs, they are welfare and also they are impeding on the economy, not ever helping it in any way. They are corruption creating positions.
You heard it. Processing tax forms? Not valuable.
- of-course! There shouldn't be any tax forms (and the excise and direct apportioned taxes don't need that many forms)
Issuing driver's licenses? Not valuable.
- correct! Government isn't authorised to run a highway system actually, all infrastructure must be built privately where it makes sense economically. What happened in USA with highways is an atrocity. Obviously driving licenses are a private matter between private road operators and the drivers. Actually nobody needs to be forced to own a license and government is not supposed to be able to use it as identification either.
It's all the same stuff. Actually 911 shouldn't be federal issue at all. There is plenty of business opportunity there as well.
You are basically correct in your statements, you just don't understand it.
Now I agree with you that government spending is out of control, but why do you consider SS and Medicare as stealing? Aren't they more like repayment of a loan?
- no, of-course it's not a loan. Actually payroll tax and Medicare tax are not different from general income tax and they are just as immoral and unconstitutional as general income taxes. Immoral, because it's taking away from people's productivity. Unconstitutional, because actually income taxes are unconstitutional and are collected unconstitutionally.
However of-course there is another thing that applies to SS, that is that the payroll tax is not actually earmarked for anything, so there is no fund. SCOTUS only allowed it to stay as Constitutional under the general powers of Congress to tax but not as a tax that can be collected from some people and used to pay out benefits to others.
That's Flemming v. Nestor (1960): "no one has an accrued property right to benefits from Social Security".
Actually Congress could modify SS in any way at any time and it can stop paying out SS benefits at any time and all of it is within powers of Congress. There is no fund, it's not an insurance instrument, there is no contract that you sign that forces the benefit payouts. The 'fund' is actually completely fake, the money is spent just like all other income taxes are spent on general expenditures and an IOU (a Treasury bond) is printed, which is supposedly your fund.
But this is done to confuse the issue, you can't write yourself a check and call it an asset. It's an asset but it's also a liability. You see, to raise money from a bond you have to sell it and pay interest on it and then you have to buy it back.
So now think for a second about this: you pay 1 dollar in payroll tax. That dollar gets spent on whatever. A bond is issued for that 1 dollar and to pay a benefit the bond must be sold in the market. The 1 dollar that the bond is sold for (IF it can be sold for 1 dollar by the way, that's not a guarantee either) now has interest associated with it that you have to pay to the bond holder.
So you have to pay interest to the bond holder, then eventually you have to buy the bond back, let's pretend you buy it back for 1 dollar again to pay 1 dollar of benefits. So the dollar that actually is paid in benefits is collected 1 time during the payroll tax, 1 time during the buying back of the bond and then there is interest that has to be paid to the creditor as well.
That's not an income generating asset at all, that's the exact OPPOSITE of an income generating asset, it's a loss generating liability.
People who pay payroll tax are not paying into any fund, if they actually wanted a retirement plan, a pension, they could save the money if the gov't wasn't taxing it. Do you understand? Save your money, not pay the tax, buy an asset that actually generates income, invest into a business or just hold gold or some other inflation hedge. No no, payroll tax has nothing to do with the SS benefits and pension plans.
Originally it was a 'widows and orphans' plan, something like that, which eventually was transformed by the socialist mobocracy (democracy and thus corruption), into this pyramid scam, which it is.
It is a pyramid scam, the earlier on you entered the benefit side of it the less you paid into it and the more you got out of it. The first person paid something around 24 bucks and got out about 23,000 dollars. That's not an investment at all,
and it is not a loan
How can it be a loan? The person that got paid 23,000 USD in benefits while only paying in 24 bucks never repaid anything, it's not a loan, it's a government generated and protected scam, it's a mob rule scam, it's theft from future generations of-course, it's part of the destruction of the economy with the socialist ideology.
Originally people who were good with their money (business owners, independent contractor
No, a balanced budget is the last freaking thing we or any country needs.
- USA used to be a large borrower, but it used to borrow in order to build up production capacity. The borrowing was private, not government, not public.
Eventually over the 19th century so much production was built up that USA became largest manufacturer and exporter and that's why it was able to pay its debts and become largest creditor, and it was creditor even up to Reagan era, when it finally turned around and became a debtor nation. It took almost a century to squander its wealth, that's what it means. It means that USA wealth that was built up during the 19th century was truly staggering, but everything ends, even staggering amounts of wealth.
spent on things that will increase profitability and/or revenue
- aha, but that's not what is happening at all. Private borrowing that leads to increase in productive capacity is basically stopped, it's all government borrowing, which is only done in order to keep consuming.
Half of the money that USA government spends is borrowed money, but this has nothing to do with productivity, it only has to do with consumption. SS, Medicare, Wars and other spending, it's all consumption, there is no 'increase in profitability'.
Nobody is growing profitability in USA except for some energy miners, and they are paying taxes to the uncle Sam through the nose.
Your next few statements show how you completely misunderstand the problem, you think taxes must be high and so must safety net. Here is the thing: safety net must not exist and taxes must not exist either, that's how you get growth, not by stealing from people who can produce (and they can produce anywhere else, which they have conclusively shown) and you can't subsidise people for not working with money you steal from those who produce and call that 'trade'.
That's not trade. If person A produces and person B doesn't, there can be no trade between them. They are not trading anything, if person B consumes on credit the question is: can he produce enough in the future to offset the debt? If we doubt that then why would we give them the credit?
Of-course what is actually happening in USA (and Greece and all these other socialist countries) is that person A is taxedthrough the nose and person B votes for politicians who promise to take from person A and give to person B.
Then they have the gull to tell people that consumption by person B with money that was stolen from person A to redistribute products that person A created to person B constitutes a working economic model.
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None of those things would be solved by a balanced budget amendment.
- you are CORRECT on this one, not for the reasons that you think but for other reasons. Balanced budget amendment doesn't mean anything at all if to 'balance the budget' you decide to tax people even more.
No, the only true way to fix the problem is to cut government, cut government spending, reduce government at the minimum by 50% (which is how much of government today is paid for with borrowing, almost 50% of all money that gov't spends it borrows, so at the minimum 50% of gov't must be cut).
- depends on what you are trying to say here, your statement is ambiguous.
Was the budget crisis totally preventable? Sure, it was totally preventable because growth of government was preventable. Of-course nobody wanted to prevent it. The politicians never want to prevent growth of government, they are scared even of some insignificant delay in increase of growth, never mind actual reduction.
The mob didn't want to prevent anything, the mob was promised free lunch paid for by the top couple of percent, it's a huge heist that the mob is involved in, and the hit men are the politicians. Supposedly the mob justifies the theft with the words: democratic. Well sure, that's why democracy is such a terrible system, it allows the majority to steal from minority, that's why USA wasn't set up as a democracy. That's why different branches of government were not set up to agree with each other.
That's why 'compromise' is supposed to be a dirty word. Gov't is not supposed to work together, it's not supposed to move in one direction.
Why have House, Senate, POTUS, SCOTUS at all if all you are interested in is some form of consensus? No, then you simply have a King and he'll give you consensus. The branches of gov't exist to prevent each other from working, from doing deals, they don't exist to help each other to do deals, again, this was perverted some time back and now it's all consensus.
They have consensus, they all like to spend and they will not cut anything. Even some reductions in proposed increases of spending are not allowed to pass, never mind actual spending cuts.
The USA economy is not recovering, it cannot recover because of the government, because the regulations, taxes, inflation prevent any capital from being formed and invested in USA. There should be drastic reduction of government in order to restructure the economy and actually restart it. Of-course the word 'restructure' means break down first by allowing many companies to fail, allowing many people to fail, all those companies and people that are leveraged, they have to work away their debts, declare bankruptcies, pay their creditors some cents on a dollar. The money has to be freed, the balance sheets need to be balanced again, but this won't be allowed to happen voluntarily. It will be imposed upon the USA involuntarily, because the real debt ceiling is not the one that you set yourself, the real debt ceiling is the one imposed upon you by your creditor.
So was the crisis totally preventable? Sure, the government could be reduced, the Constitution could be followed, the Fed, IRS, FDIC, FHA, HUD, EPA, FBI, DHS, TSA, dep't of energy, commerce, education, interior and many more could be shut down. The dollar would no longer be printed, the banks would no longer be able to borrow at fake 0% interest rates, the Treasury would no longer be able to sell to those banks, so the Fed could no longer monetise the debt via the bank proxies.
That could happen, but it won't happen. Instead there will be a consensus, the spending will not be cut in any meaningful manner, the taxes will be raised upon people who are already disproportionately taxed, which is why they moved production abroad and others failed to continue at all. The taxes are not only the rates, they are regulations such as labour, environmental, 'anti-terrorist' and others.
The reality is that the only way that USA will restart its economy at this point will be through a real collapse. A type of collapse that will make 2009 and the Great Depression (both were created by the Fed and gov't regulations), look like just another sunny day. I am talking about the dollar and the US bond collapse. That's the only way now. Why? Because the US gov't and the mob won't allow a real restructuring, wh
You realize America is trying to run a first-world state with taxes that are around half of what they are almost anywhere else in the developed world?
- that's right, about 50% of population in America are not paying federal income taxes, and the top 2% of the population are paying 41.5% of all the income taxes that are collected. So did you mean that? Probably not, you probably meant to say that the rich are not taxed enough in America?
Of-course the wealthy are taxedmore than ever in USA. The people that are not contributing given the fact how they vote for more and more government, are the majority. Majority votes for this insanely sized government though they clearly are not interested in paying for it, so that's how discrimination is created against a minority. This started with the introduction of the first income taxes in USA and became worse over the years.
Well, 30 years of "the wealth will trickle down" are now coming back to haunt us.
, no what's coming back to haunt you is the big government that you voted for. It's the destruction of the productive capital that the big government caused that is coming back to haunt you, destruction of savings and flight of capital due to inflation, regulations and ever increasing taxes.
The words 'trickle down' are supposed to be pejorative, of-course they are not. The real 'trickle down' economics is the economics of production. Production begets consumption, consumption is a trivial consequence of production. The problem with America is that it is no longer a producer but it is a huge consumer on the basis of its dollar so far being accepted by foreign producers. Ones that stops the music stops.
This area, often referred to as the "pleasure center" of the brain, is the major nucleus of the brain's reward circuit. is it worth being cured of addiction if, losing the addiction, we also lose part of who we are? Is it worth being cured of addiction if, losing the addiction, we also lose part of who we are?"
- if asking that question twice in the summary gave the poster some sense of satisfaction, because nucleus accumbens was involved, then yes. Then yes.
My cotton t-shirt beat the stock market. Most of the non-perishable food items in my pantry beat the stock market. Gold and silver clearly beat the stock market (I am looking at long stretches of time, I never sell). I mean beating the stock market today is not a problem, because the only reason that the stock market is going in the direction that it is going is inflation. People are pushed into the stock market, into the bond market, into housing, all of this is done by the governments today manipulating the currency supply.
Beating these things is easy simply with items that don't make it into the official (reversed engineered to fit the propaganda) inflation calculation formulas.
You are a sick individual. There is no obligation to "pay back" for anything to anybody. Every payment is done at the time of consumption. You are under impression that every payment that an individual makes to others, as he buys their products and services is not enough. You have a sick mind, it's poisoned with collectivism.
Tax avoidance in fact allows the job creators to keep the money that they would otherwise re-invest (since they only consume a tiny portion of what they earn, their consumption levels do not changed due to higher or lower taxes, only their re-investment levels change).
It is investment that creates the products and services, investment is savings and savings come from under-consumption and over-production, not from taxes, not from the printing presses, not from borrowing (though you can borrow somebody else's savings, that's true).
Consumption is the end consequence of production, production and distribution always come first. Consumption is the most insignificant, destructive, trivial consequence of production. It is production and savings that drive the economy, nothing else.
Leaching class being the politicians and at this point a large bio-mass of voters, who were sold the bill of good, which hit the right buttons, making them believe that their consumption with taxes, borrowed, printed money is some form of an economic key. It's not.
The Chinese are productive, they can afford their own goods. Americans can't afford the Chinese goods, thus 40-50 Billion USD/month trade deficit, the ever growing debt and inflation.
In reality the Chinese goods are not cheap, the Chinese government subsidises the US consumers by destroying their own currency and allowing USA to export most of its inflation to the productive part of society (and this is the real extortion and siphoning off the labour of others).
I don't believe that USA can avoid currency collapse, that is exactly what will happen BECAUSE USA is able to print the USD, not despite that fact.
Greece was forced into the situation by the fact that they could no longer borrow and thus they could no longer afford to buy imports. You think that USA can escape that because USA can print the dollar forever, but you are missing my entire point then. By printing the dollar USA will come to the same conclusion as the Greeks.
You see, Greeks were forced to face their real problem sooner and in reality their debt is much too small to matter to the outside world. This is not the case with USA.
USA will not be forced to face its problem sooner, but rather it will keep doing the same thing that USA is doing (and what the Greeks were doing), living on credit.
But the problem is, you believe that USA can do it indefinitely because it can print money. My point is that the real investment capital left and what is remaining of it is leaving USA and the manufacturing sector left some time ago and now the trade deficit is 40-50Billion USD / month and it cannot be brought down by anything except basically export of raw resources and energy. USA is now delegated to be an energy and raw material exporter to the rest of the world, this is not a good position for a former manufacturing power-house to find itself in.
Here is why USA will be Greece (but without a Germany to bail it out), it's because to fix the problem USA has to cut spending right now. It has to slash government spending so that the government is no longer crowding out private businesses from getting credit, so that the interest rates go up, so that there are real savings accumulated eventually.
However that very fact is politically impossible in USA. You see, there are too many people on the dole and the politicians are not statesmen (the ones that are cannot be allowed to power, because they promise to cut spending, and that's what the USA public does not want, thus it's political suicide to talk about dismantling SS, Medicare but even stopping the wars seems to be impossible at this point, so much of the remaining USA economy depends on the government contracts and thus on all this fake money).
No, it will be a dollar collapse, it will be a dollar collapse and a bond collapse and it will happen BECAUSE USA can print dollars.
What does debt have to do with capitalism? There is nothing about debt that precludes capitalism.
- it's a weird notion. Capitalism is predicated upon accruing savings, which are derived from over-production and under-consumption, it's not fake money that builds businesses. It MAY be credit, but somebody somewhere has to under-consume and over-produce in order to allow for this credit to exist.
What USA (and the rest of the countries today) are doing is creating fake money out of nowhere, that's because since 1971 the world has been moved off of real money (the dollar was tied to gold and the rest of the world was tied to dollar, thus 'reserve currency').
Once the money is completely fake, its amount in the system and its value are only dependent on the confidence in the ability of the system to create enough wealth to offset the creation of the fiat money. Look at it carefully, was USA in debt before? Yes. USA used to borrow money from Europe, in 19th century USA was probably the largest borrower in the world. However in the 19th century USA developed its industry, it was private sector that built the industry, built infrastructure for the industry, built the cities around that infrastructure, around industrial hubs.
Eventually over the 19th century USA became so productive, that it could pay back all of its debts and no longer was a debtor. USA became the largest creditor nation on the planet. Really it was still a creditor up until Reagan time actually, when USA stopped being a creditor and became a debtor.
Actually being a debtor is FINE, it is not against capitalism in any way to borrow. Being debtor to consume is NOT fine. Yes, you can consume on credit somewhat and really you are only limited in your credit consumption by your creditors. If they decide that you cannot pay the debts back, your 'debt ceiling' will not be up to you to raise, it will be imposed upon you by the creditors. Nobody will lend to you (well, they may, if the interest rates go up by a large amount, but then again, that just may mean you cannot borrow anyway).
Consuming on debt is a short term exercise. Using debt to build up production is a useful investment strategy. Guess what, USA is NOT building up production for all that debt that it is collecting. That's because the government is crowding out all of the credit, there is no credit available to the businesses at acceptable interest rates, that's because gov't is getting all the credit for free basically. Actually it's debt monetisation (inflation), the Fed now buys 90% of all newly issued US Treasury debt. The Fed 'loans' to the commercial banks at 0, they buy Treasury debt at 2-3%, the spread is their revenue.
The Fed is lying that they can at any time raise interest rates and exit this downward spiral of currency destruction via debt monetisation, they can't, because the moment they allow interest rates up by no longer buying US Treasuries, the interest rates go up and all the banks are completely bankrupt, because their debt to the Fed is immediately many times what their revenues are from the Treasury, and they can't liquidate any of their holdings.
The Fed is lying that there is an exit strategy. Who is going to buy all those Trillions of dollars worth of US paper? At what price? At what interest rate? Of-course for the last 1.5 years the reality is that all that debt to the Federal reserve is actually on the books of the US Treasury as well.
Beside this, except for the 16Trillion outstanding public debt there is a little issue of 222Trillion of unfunded liabilities towards the pensions, Medicare and such. Then of-course there are all the contingency liabilities, that become real ones when the bubble bursts.
You think a bankrupt bank can pay out its deposits? FDIC has all that liability, student loans, whatever mortgages and other loans..... It's a disaster that will hit ALL AT ONCE. That's going to be USA 'Greek moment', except there is no Germany big enough to bail out USA.
-Good Lord! That's over 5000 atmospheres of pressure! -How many atmospheres can the ship withstand? -Well, it was built for space travel, so anywhere between zero and one.
--- Moments like these are brought to you by Futurama
Oh yeah? From my POV Americans are much more protective of their money than of their children. Did you know that there are ARMED security guards in banks? Wow, did you know that?
But few schools have armed security guards or at least a dedicated teacher or a principle who has a weapon in the office in case he or she must confront a shooter (with bare hands, a guy who may have more than one gun on him, shooting at kids left right and centre).
So looks to me like Americans are screwed up, they don't care about their kids as much as they care about their money in their banks. Of-course it's not like money can be replaced and kids can't, right?
Another strange thing is that school doors apparently are not always locked during school hours, anybody can just waltz in... with guns... who knew.
What they need to ban is knowledge of how to commit violent crimes. They need to remove the words used to describe violence from our language so people can't talk about it and teach each other how to be violent.
- that's for sure. Just look at the animal world, few crimes are committed. Sure, things eat each other, but really, what's the crime rate there? Just turn humans into chimps, that should calm us down. Well, maybe something else rather than chimps, chimps are quite aggressive. Maybe orangutans, yeah, that should work.
As I said a number of times after that catastrophe hit Japan, they need to stop printing money and let their currency appreciate. They'll be doing themselves a huge service, allowing the zombie banks and companies to fail while allowing their natural rate of deflation to work its way through the economy, force people to deleverage and allow the prices to drop.
Japanese have all that production but purchasing power gains from it, because they are on the path to self-destruction with money printing just like the rest of the world. Of-course those who can borrow (like USA) from countries that produce (China, Japan, Germany, even Mexico, etc.), they are getting the better part of the deal. USA prints the money and uses the fake money to 'buy' real goods (it's not actually to buy, it's to take, nobody will get anything back for those dollars).
But the Japanese just elected a government that will print more money and so the cost of all the imports (energy, raw materials) will keep rising for them, which is the exact opposite of what they need. Japan needs to work on its NUCLEAR program more, they need to evaluate their reactors and build new ones and decommission the old ones, now that would be a USEFUL way to spend money (and it shouldn't be done on gov't level anyway, it should private, all parts of it).
They will end up printing more money to buy US dollars so that what? Who is going to be better off in this case? Well, some people will get a subsidy to build this collider, good for them. What are the average Japanese going to get from this? More inflation, more taxes, higher prices. If they are going to go that road, maybe they should be investing in new types of nuclear reactors instead.
Some will say: do both. Well yeah, in the world of limitless resources you can do whatever it is you want, if you live forever you can do every single thing that can be done eventually. People do not live forever.
Nobody forces any person to register with FB and use it, right? So the reality is that German law prevents its citizens from having a choice. They don't need to sign on with FB, they choose to do it and those who do not like that they have to use a name (or their name) don't have to use it.
So I was correct, the mother of the killer collected the guns and taught the sons how to shoot. So your proposal that the guns were for the kids is wrong, she got the guns legally even though Connecticut is the toughest state in USA to get guns (in terms of laws).
This is not about guns clearly, this is about mental problems. If the guy wanted to kill all those people, all he needed was a ton of fertiliser and some gasoline, which is how others killed more people than 27, though some try to kill with knives and are not as successful in their mission (as in they are not as deadly, but only by luck).
Maybe 4 years back I was driving in Toronto and listening to a US radio talk show channel from Niagara Falls I think (or Buffalo). It was actually around XMas and a lady called the show, she was asking for an advice on what type of rifle to buy to protect her home. She was thinking of some form of semi-automatic, she just wasn't sure about the type and the caliber. She was asking the host whether to buy an AR-15 or a shotgun. She said she was buying a present for herself, not anybody else.
I remember the host suggested a shotgun.
My point is that you are jumping to conclusions, but so do many other people. I mean you go to websites and see what people say, it's ridiculous. So many people are talking about tougher gun controls and things of that nature.
Connecticut has probably the strongest gun control laws out of the entire USA. That 20 y.o. guy wanted to buy another rifle for himself just days before shooting and was denied because of a waiting period. I think this is a better indicator that actually she did not buy the guns for her kid but just wanted the guns.
As to gun control, no, there shouldn't be any gun controls. AFAIC anybody should be able to buy any weapon, nuclear, whatever. As long as governments have weapons of mass destruction, so should individuals. You want to control guns in the hands of individuals, control it in the hands of your tyrannical governments first.
Obama came out with crocodile tears, and I mean alligator-crocodile-diplodoc tears. Why am I saying that? How many people has he personally killed over the last 4 years? How many of them were children? Just in Pakistan he increased drone strikes 10 fold.
He killed thousands of people and it's not clear that even half of them were not children.
- today it does and it's not only labour either. It's resources, it's capital land and labour and it's management of all of the components of production.
What if our society could largely be run by machines and a small percentage of workers who maintain them in exchange for a higher standard of living?
- so what about that? If it can be achieved that everything that we do today is done by machines and machines build machines and machines mine resources and machines provide the energy and machines fix machines, etc.etc.etc.
At that point, once all of the input costs are no longer human related, then the cost of input is 0, cost of distribution is 0 to all humans.
If that happens you will see that everybody can buy those machines with close to no money and the more of them are distributed the closer to 0 the costs are to the future buyers (you can buy a cellphone close to 0 today, I am talking about a simple mobile, not a smart phone, it's almost nothing, everybody has one even in the poorest countries).
Yeah, but that's not what we have today.
Have you considered that we may end up with more people than we have useful work for them to do, or that we might have useful work but it isn't valuable enough to earn a living?
- that's the flaw in the thinking of people who do not in fact consider normal economics but look at it from a broken perspective.
This flaw comes from misunderstanding economics, it comes from over-relying in their thinking on government, which is not a surprise, that's how most people 'see' things, (which is to say that's how bad most people's economic understanding is due to the system that exists that completely broke their understanding starting from the first day at school).
What you consider to be mostly 'useful work' is what somebody, some individual, a human came up with as an idea as to how to profit by providing all other individuals with products. Most of the time people who are truly successful find a problem that they have that they want to solve in their own lives and then they expand it to cover everybody else.
Think about Woz, he wasn't even concerned with selling computers to others, he just wanted to own one. Did he need somebody to create 'useful work' for himself? He created useful work all on his own without waiting for somebody else to give him a 'useful position'.
She didn't need somebody else to come up with 'useful work' for her to do, she did it herself because she had a need and realised others did too. Governments of different States stand on her way, they are forcing her to pay crazy license fees in each State to put tags on those pillows that are designed to tell you what's in every pillow. That's crazy of-course, all the customers are buying those over the Internet and on her site it lists the components, so if you are allergic to them, you can immediately see it and not buy the pillow.
It's a pillow that some woman started selling that she came up with and it's 'useful work' from her customers' perspectives, which is why she can make money off of that idea and work.
Why did I say that your thinking is clouded by government propaganda? Because it is too close, almost indistinguishable from an idea that there has to be some central planning authority in a collective, that tells you what "useful work" is.
What IS "useful work" but what you think IS useful or what other people think IS useful? That's the flaw in this type of thinking.
Let me show you this in another easy to understand example:
We should challenge the economics that says we can't create money and give it to people. In fact we created $16 trillion
- yeah, you can clearly print money, but it doesn't mean you create anything of value when you print money.
Clearly the 16 Trillion dollars printed does not mean that 16 Trillion dollars worth of goods and services was produced and that is the problem, because all you do with printing 16 Trillion new dollars without any economic activity behind them is you dilute the value of all dollars in existence.
Of-course the Fed will now print 45Billion a month to buy bonds forever, and that is just the floor, they'll print much more than that. Oh, and that's in addition to 40 Billion a month to buy mortgages (and that is also just a floor).
Of-course the bubble that is being inflated is in debt, it's a credit bubble and it WILL take down the US dollar as a 'reserve currency' and may end up completely destroying the dollar from point of view of purchasing power.
Since 1971 dollar lost 98% of its purchasing power. Since 1913 dollar lost over 99% of its purchasing power. This means something, it's not just an abstract idea, it means that you need 100x as many dollars to buy something as before. It means that an ounce of gold could be earned by a Ford worker in 1 week in 1914 (an ounce was 19 dollars and Ford made it a 5 day, 8 hour work week to be competitive because of high turnover).
But that means that Ford workers in 1914 had much more purchasing power than today. In 1914 they didn't pay income taxes (only top 1% paid since 1913 and the top rate was 7%). In 1914 there was no payroll or Medicare tax. The government was tiny there was no need to take all these taxes, there was no illegal wars of-course either.
A Ford worker would have to make maybe 4000USD per week today to match his predecessor in the company who worked there 100 years ago, and 100 years ago he would have made 25 dollars but would have been better off for it. Here is the problem, you can't print money and think that you are actually creating any type of wealth, you can and will destroy your currency though and you won't be able to borrow for a long time after that, and since to destroy your currency you had to print all that money, you chased away all that investment capital (savings, that apparently governments hate if you have, but savings is what allows investments).
You are talking about destroying all savings and you are talking about preventing all investments that's what you are talking about when you are talking about 'basic income' and printing money just to give to everybody.
And when you say 'fundamental assumptions of popular economics', where is it popular today, real economics?
You know what you are relying on, when you talk about printing money and giving it away as 'basic income'? You are relying on other people's labour somewhere, that supposedly will keep subsidising you by taking your freshly printed dollars. Well, I think teh 'fundamental assumptions of "popular" economics' will prove you wrong when the people who are still subsidising you will stop it because they'll realise that you can't give them anything back for that money at all.
What I don't understand is why does everybody here thinks that my first comment was 'funny'? I wasn't trying to be funny, actually when I try to be funny it only works half of the time and all of a sudden. I wasn't going for funny, I was going for sad.
Slashdot Mirror
In that video the guy couldn't really come up with a solution to patent trolls because he is looking at the symptoms of the problem, while the root of it is the fact that patents are protected by governments in the first place.
Government shouldn't be authorised to protect monopolies, regardless of who and why believes that people that are protected should be protected for whatever reasons.
Every time government sticks its nose to 'protect' anything you get a disaster. From patents and copyrights to money, housing, medical care, your retirement, anything at all.
Patents are none of governments' business, that's the reality and that's the only way actually to fix the real problem.
So, however, is capital investment.
- yes, but only private enterprise actually does what is known as 'investment'. Governments only spend, they don't invest. If something is worth an investment it's only because the investor believes he'll be able to generate a profit that will cover the costs and have a decent return on that investment (decent, as in beating the real inflation and then also covering risk costs and taxes obviously and generating some profit that steal beats passive investments and inflation hedges).
Government doesn't do any of that, the entire government structure is set up not to incentivise profitable investments but instead to grow power of government regardless of costs. You see costs do not matter to the government officials, they are not holding the bag, it's not their money, but whatever they can spend increases their power. This is the exact opposite of what an investor has to deal with. An investor has to evaluate risk reward ratio, he has to be as efficient as possible to ensure his input costs are as low as possible so that he can actually access more market to sell more of his productive output.
A government official doesn't need to fight for the market share, he has it by decree. He doesn't need to lower his costs, he is not risking any money of his own or his credit and assets. He doesn't need to generate profit, in fact generating profit is absolutely irrelevant, that's not the point. The point is to spend spend spend, spend as much as possible, to get as much blanket to yourself as possible and then ensure that you can grow grow grow your budget for the next year, not cut it!
I mean government has a function, but that function is not an investment one, it's a protection one. In USA at least the government is there (supposed to be anyway) to protect individuals from tyranny. Be it tyranny of foreign invasion and foreign governments or be it in fact tyranny of domestic attempts to steal the power and use it to curtail individual freedoms. Unfortunately about 124 years into the experiment it failed and tyranny eventually was introduced.
For example democracy is tyranny, it's tyranny of the majority. It doesn't matter WHO is the tyrant, the people who are oppressed are always some form of a minority. Power minority or a voting minority. Setting up income taxes for example, especially progressive income taxes can only be done because of tyranny and mobocracy, but it's a democratic process. It's not like it's impossible to vote your rights away, it happened so many times in history, including history of USA that it shouldn't be a surprise. That's why democracies always actually descent into tyrannies, it's because the majority vote for the politicians who are willing to sell out a minority to give the majority some satisfaction, whatever that is.
As to the entire 'crop' metaphor, well sure, if you see the purpose of government to steal as much from the economy as possible rather than just do its authorised job, ensure that the authorised functions are running and nothing else happens. But that's the problem, you are certain that governments should be doing more all the time, otherwise where would this notion come from, that governments need to 'harvest' economic output?
Capital investment is never a government job, I wrote some other comments on that, I don't like to repeat the same thing, but hey, the same wrong things get thrown around quite often.
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By the way, the OP in this thread is so confused, it should be obvious to everybody but somehow it is not. Look at his statements:
No, a balanced budget is the last freaking thing we or any country needs. National budgets aren't like your personal checkbook, hell they're not even like a companies balance sheet
- look at this. Read it.
Now look at this o
Because rahrah he's pretty sure he'll never get sick, old or have any kind of misfortune.
- nonsense. It's because I would always rather do my own investment with my own earned money and not have my earnings stolen from me unconstitutionally.
There are corner cases, some people are very misfortunate, that's what private charity is for and it must never be wrapped with a government bureaucracy, the fact that it is charity must never be hidden, it must be always clear. People must know that they get charity, it's not a 'right' to steal from some people with the threat of government violence and give to others, just because 'others' vote as a majority block. That's why USA was never meant to be a democratic state where populist ideas would take over. That's why Senate exists - to prevent popular ideas that may generate in Congress from ever taking place. That's why POTUS must be able to veto new bills and it takes 70% of agreement by Congress to overwrite that veto. That's why SCOTUS has the ability to nullify laws as unconstitutional (which it really doesn't do anymore and it should, but again, now there is consensus between branches of government, which should have never existed).
Because he doesn't think "government" jobs are "real" jobs.
- you are right, most government jobs shouldn't exist, they are not real jobs, they are welfare and also they are impeding on the economy, not ever helping it in any way. They are corruption creating positions.
You heard it. Processing tax forms? Not valuable.
- of-course! There shouldn't be any tax forms (and the excise and direct apportioned taxes don't need that many forms)
Issuing driver's licenses? Not valuable.
- correct! Government isn't authorised to run a highway system actually, all infrastructure must be built privately where it makes sense economically. What happened in USA with highways is an atrocity. Obviously driving licenses are a private matter between private road operators and the drivers. Actually nobody needs to be forced to own a license and government is not supposed to be able to use it as identification either.
It's all the same stuff. Actually 911 shouldn't be federal issue at all. There is plenty of business opportunity there as well.
You are basically correct in your statements, you just don't understand it.
Now I agree with you that government spending is out of control, but why do you consider SS and Medicare as stealing? Aren't they more like repayment of a loan?
- no, of-course it's not a loan. Actually payroll tax and Medicare tax are not different from general income tax and they are just as immoral and unconstitutional as general income taxes. Immoral, because it's taking away from people's productivity. Unconstitutional, because actually income taxes are unconstitutional and are collected unconstitutionally.
However of-course there is another thing that applies to SS, that is that the payroll tax is not actually earmarked for anything, so there is no fund. SCOTUS only allowed it to stay as Constitutional under the general powers of Congress to tax but not as a tax that can be collected from some people and used to pay out benefits to others.
That's Flemming v. Nestor (1960): "no one has an accrued property right to benefits from Social Security".
Actually Congress could modify SS in any way at any time and it can stop paying out SS benefits at any time and all of it is within powers of Congress. There is no fund, it's not an insurance instrument, there is no contract that you sign that forces the benefit payouts. The 'fund' is actually completely fake, the money is spent just like all other income taxes are spent on general expenditures and an IOU (a Treasury bond) is printed, which is supposedly your fund.
But this is done to confuse the issue, you can't write yourself a check and call it an asset. It's an asset but it's also a liability. You see, to raise money from a bond you have to sell it and pay interest on it and then you have to buy it back.
So now think for a second about this: you pay 1 dollar in payroll tax. That dollar gets spent on whatever. A bond is issued for that 1 dollar and to pay a benefit the bond must be sold in the market. The 1 dollar that the bond is sold for (IF it can be sold for 1 dollar by the way, that's not a guarantee either) now has interest associated with it that you have to pay to the bond holder.
So you have to pay interest to the bond holder, then eventually you have to buy the bond back, let's pretend you buy it back for 1 dollar again to pay 1 dollar of benefits. So the dollar that actually is paid in benefits is collected 1 time during the payroll tax, 1 time during the buying back of the bond and then there is interest that has to be paid to the creditor as well.
That's not an income generating asset at all, that's the exact OPPOSITE of an income generating asset, it's a loss generating liability.
People who pay payroll tax are not paying into any fund, if they actually wanted a retirement plan, a pension, they could save the money if the gov't wasn't taxing it. Do you understand? Save your money, not pay the tax, buy an asset that actually generates income, invest into a business or just hold gold or some other inflation hedge. No no, payroll tax has nothing to do with the SS benefits and pension plans.
Originally it was a 'widows and orphans' plan, something like that, which eventually was transformed by the socialist mobocracy (democracy and thus corruption), into this pyramid scam, which it is.
It is a pyramid scam, the earlier on you entered the benefit side of it the less you paid into it and the more you got out of it. The first person paid something around 24 bucks and got out about 23,000 dollars. That's not an investment at all,
and it is not a loan
How can it be a loan? The person that got paid 23,000 USD in benefits while only paying in 24 bucks never repaid anything, it's not a loan, it's a government generated and protected scam, it's a mob rule scam, it's theft from future generations of-course, it's part of the destruction of the economy with the socialist ideology.
Originally people who were good with their money (business owners, independent contractor
No, a balanced budget is the last freaking thing we or any country needs.
- USA used to be a large borrower, but it used to borrow in order to build up production capacity. The borrowing was private, not government, not public.
Eventually over the 19th century so much production was built up that USA became largest manufacturer and exporter and that's why it was able to pay its debts and become largest creditor, and it was creditor even up to Reagan era, when it finally turned around and became a debtor nation. It took almost a century to squander its wealth, that's what it means. It means that USA wealth that was built up during the 19th century was truly staggering, but everything ends, even staggering amounts of wealth.
spent on things that will increase profitability and/or revenue
- aha, but that's not what is happening at all. Private borrowing that leads to increase in productive capacity is basically stopped, it's all government borrowing, which is only done in order to keep consuming.
Half of the money that USA government spends is borrowed money, but this has nothing to do with productivity, it only has to do with consumption. SS, Medicare, Wars and other spending, it's all consumption, there is no 'increase in profitability'.
Nobody is growing profitability in USA except for some energy miners, and they are paying taxes to the uncle Sam through the nose.
Your next few statements show how you completely misunderstand the problem, you think taxes must be high and so must safety net. Here is the thing: safety net must not exist and taxes must not exist either, that's how you get growth, not by stealing from people who can produce (and they can produce anywhere else, which they have conclusively shown) and you can't subsidise people for not working with money you steal from those who produce and call that 'trade'.
That's not trade. If person A produces and person B doesn't, there can be no trade between them. They are not trading anything, if person B consumes on credit the question is: can he produce enough in the future to offset the debt? If we doubt that then why would we give them the credit?
Of-course what is actually happening in USA (and Greece and all these other socialist countries) is that person A is taxed through the nose and person B votes for politicians who promise to take from person A and give to person B.
Then they have the gull to tell people that consumption by person B with money that was stolen from person A to redistribute products that person A created to person B constitutes a working economic model.
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None of those things would be solved by a balanced budget amendment.
- you are CORRECT on this one, not for the reasons that you think but for other reasons. Balanced budget amendment doesn't mean anything at all if to 'balance the budget' you decide to tax people even more.
No, the only true way to fix the problem is to cut government, cut government spending, reduce government at the minimum by 50% (which is how much of government today is paid for with borrowing, almost 50% of all money that gov't spends it borrows, so at the minimum 50% of gov't must be cut).
totally preventable budget crisis
- depends on what you are trying to say here, your statement is ambiguous.
Was the budget crisis totally preventable? Sure, it was totally preventable because growth of government was preventable. Of-course nobody wanted to prevent it. The politicians never want to prevent growth of government, they are scared even of some insignificant delay in increase of growth, never mind actual reduction.
The mob didn't want to prevent anything, the mob was promised free lunch paid for by the top couple of percent, it's a huge heist that the mob is involved in, and the hit men are the politicians. Supposedly the mob justifies the theft with the words: democratic. Well sure, that's why democracy is such a terrible system, it allows the majority to steal from minority, that's why USA wasn't set up as a democracy. That's why different branches of government were not set up to agree with each other.
That's why 'compromise' is supposed to be a dirty word. Gov't is not supposed to work together, it's not supposed to move in one direction.
Why have House, Senate, POTUS, SCOTUS at all if all you are interested in is some form of consensus? No, then you simply have a King and he'll give you consensus. The branches of gov't exist to prevent each other from working, from doing deals, they don't exist to help each other to do deals, again, this was perverted some time back and now it's all consensus.
They have consensus, they all like to spend and they will not cut anything. Even some reductions in proposed increases of spending are not allowed to pass, never mind actual spending cuts.
The USA economy is not recovering, it cannot recover because of the government, because the regulations, taxes, inflation prevent any capital from being formed and invested in USA. There should be drastic reduction of government in order to restructure the economy and actually restart it. Of-course the word 'restructure' means break down first by allowing many companies to fail, allowing many people to fail, all those companies and people that are leveraged, they have to work away their debts, declare bankruptcies, pay their creditors some cents on a dollar. The money has to be freed, the balance sheets need to be balanced again, but this won't be allowed to happen voluntarily. It will be imposed upon the USA involuntarily, because the real debt ceiling is not the one that you set yourself, the real debt ceiling is the one imposed upon you by your creditor.
So was the crisis totally preventable? Sure, the government could be reduced, the Constitution could be followed, the Fed, IRS, FDIC, FHA, HUD, EPA, FBI, DHS, TSA, dep't of energy, commerce, education, interior and many more could be shut down. The dollar would no longer be printed, the banks would no longer be able to borrow at fake 0% interest rates, the Treasury would no longer be able to sell to those banks, so the Fed could no longer monetise the debt via the bank proxies.
That could happen, but it won't happen. Instead there will be a consensus, the spending will not be cut in any meaningful manner, the taxes will be raised upon people who are already disproportionately taxed, which is why they moved production abroad and others failed to continue at all. The taxes are not only the rates, they are regulations such as labour, environmental, 'anti-terrorist' and others.
The reality is that the only way that USA will restart its economy at this point will be through a real collapse. A type of collapse that will make 2009 and the Great Depression (both were created by the Fed and gov't regulations), look like just another sunny day. I am talking about the dollar and the US bond collapse. That's the only way now. Why? Because the US gov't and the mob won't allow a real restructuring, wh
You realize America is trying to run a first-world state with taxes that are around half of what they are almost anywhere else in the developed world?
- that's right, about 50% of population in America are not paying federal income taxes, and the top 2% of the population are paying 41.5% of all the income taxes that are collected. So did you mean that? Probably not, you probably meant to say that the rich are not taxed enough in America?
Of-course the wealthy are taxed more than ever in USA. The people that are not contributing given the fact how they vote for more and more government, are the majority. Majority votes for this insanely sized government though they clearly are not interested in paying for it, so that's how discrimination is created against a minority. This started with the introduction of the first income taxes in USA and became worse over the years.
Well, 30 years of "the wealth will trickle down" are now coming back to haunt us.
, no what's coming back to haunt you is the big government that you voted for. It's the destruction of the productive capital that the big government caused that is coming back to haunt you, destruction of savings and flight of capital due to inflation, regulations and ever increasing taxes.
The words 'trickle down' are supposed to be pejorative, of-course they are not. The real 'trickle down' economics is the economics of production. Production begets consumption, consumption is a trivial consequence of production. The problem with America is that it is no longer a producer but it is a huge consumer on the basis of its dollar so far being accepted by foreign producers. Ones that stops the music stops.
This area, often referred to as the "pleasure center" of the brain, is the major nucleus of the brain's reward circuit. is it worth being cured of addiction if, losing the addiction, we also lose part of who we are? Is it worth being cured of addiction if, losing the addiction, we also lose part of who we are?"
- if asking that question twice in the summary gave the poster some sense of satisfaction, because nucleus accumbens was involved, then yes. Then yes.
My cotton t-shirt beat the stock market. Most of the non-perishable food items in my pantry beat the stock market. Gold and silver clearly beat the stock market (I am looking at long stretches of time, I never sell). I mean beating the stock market today is not a problem, because the only reason that the stock market is going in the direction that it is going is inflation. People are pushed into the stock market, into the bond market, into housing, all of this is done by the governments today manipulating the currency supply.
Beating these things is easy simply with items that don't make it into the official (reversed engineered to fit the propaganda) inflation calculation formulas.
You are a sick individual. There is no obligation to "pay back" for anything to anybody. Every payment is done at the time of consumption. You are under impression that every payment that an individual makes to others, as he buys their products and services is not enough. You have a sick mind, it's poisoned with collectivism.
Tax avoidance in fact allows the job creators to keep the money that they would otherwise re-invest (since they only consume a tiny portion of what they earn, their consumption levels do not changed due to higher or lower taxes, only their re-investment levels change).
It is investment that creates the products and services, investment is savings and savings come from under-consumption and over-production, not from taxes, not from the printing presses, not from borrowing (though you can borrow somebody else's savings, that's true).
Consumption is the end consequence of production, production and distribution always come first. Consumption is the most insignificant, destructive, trivial consequence of production. It is production and savings that drive the economy, nothing else.
Leaching class being the politicians and at this point a large bio-mass of voters, who were sold the bill of good, which hit the right buttons, making them believe that their consumption with taxes, borrowed, printed money is some form of an economic key. It's not.
The Chinese are productive, they can afford their own goods. Americans can't afford the Chinese goods, thus 40-50 Billion USD/month trade deficit, the ever growing debt and inflation.
In reality the Chinese goods are not cheap, the Chinese government subsidises the US consumers by destroying their own currency and allowing USA to export most of its inflation to the productive part of society (and this is the real extortion and siphoning off the labour of others).
I don't believe that USA can avoid currency collapse, that is exactly what will happen BECAUSE USA is able to print the USD, not despite that fact.
Greece was forced into the situation by the fact that they could no longer borrow and thus they could no longer afford to buy imports. You think that USA can escape that because USA can print the dollar forever, but you are missing my entire point then. By printing the dollar USA will come to the same conclusion as the Greeks.
You see, Greeks were forced to face their real problem sooner and in reality their debt is much too small to matter to the outside world. This is not the case with USA.
USA will not be forced to face its problem sooner, but rather it will keep doing the same thing that USA is doing (and what the Greeks were doing), living on credit.
But the problem is, you believe that USA can do it indefinitely because it can print money. My point is that the real investment capital left and what is remaining of it is leaving USA and the manufacturing sector left some time ago and now the trade deficit is 40-50Billion USD / month and it cannot be brought down by anything except basically export of raw resources and energy. USA is now delegated to be an energy and raw material exporter to the rest of the world, this is not a good position for a former manufacturing power-house to find itself in.
Here is why USA will be Greece (but without a Germany to bail it out), it's because to fix the problem USA has to cut spending right now. It has to slash government spending so that the government is no longer crowding out private businesses from getting credit, so that the interest rates go up, so that there are real savings accumulated eventually.
However that very fact is politically impossible in USA. You see, there are too many people on the dole and the politicians are not statesmen (the ones that are cannot be allowed to power, because they promise to cut spending, and that's what the USA public does not want, thus it's political suicide to talk about dismantling SS, Medicare but even stopping the wars seems to be impossible at this point, so much of the remaining USA economy depends on the government contracts and thus on all this fake money).
No, it will be a dollar collapse, it will be a dollar collapse and a bond collapse and it will happen BECAUSE USA can print dollars.
What does debt have to do with capitalism? There is nothing about debt that precludes capitalism.
- it's a weird notion. Capitalism is predicated upon accruing savings, which are derived from over-production and under-consumption, it's not fake money that builds businesses. It MAY be credit, but somebody somewhere has to under-consume and over-produce in order to allow for this credit to exist.
What USA (and the rest of the countries today) are doing is creating fake money out of nowhere, that's because since 1971 the world has been moved off of real money (the dollar was tied to gold and the rest of the world was tied to dollar, thus 'reserve currency').
Once the money is completely fake, its amount in the system and its value are only dependent on the confidence in the ability of the system to create enough wealth to offset the creation of the fiat money. Look at it carefully, was USA in debt before? Yes. USA used to borrow money from Europe, in 19th century USA was probably the largest borrower in the world. However in the 19th century USA developed its industry, it was private sector that built the industry, built infrastructure for the industry, built the cities around that infrastructure, around industrial hubs.
Eventually over the 19th century USA became so productive, that it could pay back all of its debts and no longer was a debtor. USA became the largest creditor nation on the planet. Really it was still a creditor up until Reagan time actually, when USA stopped being a creditor and became a debtor.
Actually being a debtor is FINE, it is not against capitalism in any way to borrow. Being debtor to consume is NOT fine. Yes, you can consume on credit somewhat and really you are only limited in your credit consumption by your creditors. If they decide that you cannot pay the debts back, your 'debt ceiling' will not be up to you to raise, it will be imposed upon you by the creditors. Nobody will lend to you (well, they may, if the interest rates go up by a large amount, but then again, that just may mean you cannot borrow anyway).
Consuming on debt is a short term exercise. Using debt to build up production is a useful investment strategy. Guess what, USA is NOT building up production for all that debt that it is collecting. That's because the government is crowding out all of the credit, there is no credit available to the businesses at acceptable interest rates, that's because gov't is getting all the credit for free basically. Actually it's debt monetisation (inflation), the Fed now buys 90% of all newly issued US Treasury debt. The Fed 'loans' to the commercial banks at 0, they buy Treasury debt at 2-3%, the spread is their revenue.
The Fed is lying that they can at any time raise interest rates and exit this downward spiral of currency destruction via debt monetisation, they can't, because the moment they allow interest rates up by no longer buying US Treasuries, the interest rates go up and all the banks are completely bankrupt, because their debt to the Fed is immediately many times what their revenues are from the Treasury, and they can't liquidate any of their holdings.
The Fed is lying that there is an exit strategy. Who is going to buy all those Trillions of dollars worth of US paper? At what price? At what interest rate? Of-course for the last 1.5 years the reality is that all that debt to the Federal reserve is actually on the books of the US Treasury as well.
Beside this, except for the 16Trillion outstanding public debt there is a little issue of 222Trillion of unfunded liabilities towards the pensions, Medicare and such. Then of-course there are all the contingency liabilities, that become real ones when the bubble bursts.
You think a bankrupt bank can pay out its deposits? FDIC has all that liability, student loans, whatever mortgages and other loans..... It's a disaster that will hit ALL AT ONCE. That's going to be USA 'Greek moment', except there is no Germany big enough to bail out USA.
Yes,
Actually what it shows that you have never watched Futurama.
-Good Lord! That's over 5000 atmospheres of pressure!
-How many atmospheres can the ship withstand?
-Well, it was built for space travel, so anywhere between zero and one.
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Moments like these are brought to you by Futurama
Oh yeah? From my POV Americans are much more protective of their money than of their children. Did you know that there are ARMED security guards in banks? Wow, did you know that?
But few schools have armed security guards or at least a dedicated teacher or a principle who has a weapon in the office in case he or she must confront a shooter (with bare hands, a guy who may have more than one gun on him, shooting at kids left right and centre).
So looks to me like Americans are screwed up, they don't care about their kids as much as they care about their money in their banks. Of-course it's not like money can be replaced and kids can't, right?
Another strange thing is that school doors apparently are not always locked during school hours, anybody can just waltz in... with guns... who knew.
What they need to ban is knowledge of how to commit violent crimes. They need to remove the words used to describe violence from our language so people can't talk about it and teach each other how to be violent.
- that's for sure. Just look at the animal world, few crimes are committed. Sure, things eat each other, but really, what's the crime rate there? Just turn humans into chimps, that should calm us down. Well, maybe something else rather than chimps, chimps are quite aggressive. Maybe orangutans, yeah, that should work.
As I said a number of times after that catastrophe hit Japan, they need to stop printing money and let their currency appreciate. They'll be doing themselves a huge service, allowing the zombie banks and companies to fail while allowing their natural rate of deflation to work its way through the economy, force people to deleverage and allow the prices to drop.
Japanese have all that production but purchasing power gains from it, because they are on the path to self-destruction with money printing just like the rest of the world. Of-course those who can borrow (like USA) from countries that produce (China, Japan, Germany, even Mexico, etc.), they are getting the better part of the deal. USA prints the money and uses the fake money to 'buy' real goods (it's not actually to buy, it's to take, nobody will get anything back for those dollars).
But the Japanese just elected a government that will print more money and so the cost of all the imports (energy, raw materials) will keep rising for them, which is the exact opposite of what they need. Japan needs to work on its NUCLEAR program more, they need to evaluate their reactors and build new ones and decommission the old ones, now that would be a USEFUL way to spend money (and it shouldn't be done on gov't level anyway, it should private, all parts of it).
They will end up printing more money to buy US dollars so that what? Who is going to be better off in this case? Well, some people will get a subsidy to build this collider, good for them. What are the average Japanese going to get from this? More inflation, more taxes, higher prices. If they are going to go that road, maybe they should be investing in new types of nuclear reactors instead.
Some will say: do both. Well yeah, in the world of limitless resources you can do whatever it is you want, if you live forever you can do every single thing that can be done eventually. People do not live forever.
Nobody forces any person to register with FB and use it, right? So the reality is that German law prevents its citizens from having a choice. They don't need to sign on with FB, they choose to do it and those who do not like that they have to use a name (or their name) don't have to use it.
So I was correct, the mother of the killer collected the guns and taught the sons how to shoot. So your proposal that the guns were for the kids is wrong, she got the guns legally even though Connecticut is the toughest state in USA to get guns (in terms of laws).
This is not about guns clearly, this is about mental problems. If the guy wanted to kill all those people, all he needed was a ton of fertiliser and some gasoline, which is how others killed more people than 27, though some try to kill with knives and are not as successful in their mission (as in they are not as deadly, but only by luck).
Maybe 4 years back I was driving in Toronto and listening to a US radio talk show channel from Niagara Falls I think (or Buffalo). It was actually around XMas and a lady called the show, she was asking for an advice on what type of rifle to buy to protect her home. She was thinking of some form of semi-automatic, she just wasn't sure about the type and the caliber. She was asking the host whether to buy an AR-15 or a shotgun. She said she was buying a present for herself, not anybody else.
I remember the host suggested a shotgun.
My point is that you are jumping to conclusions, but so do many other people. I mean you go to websites and see what people say, it's ridiculous. So many people are talking about tougher gun controls and things of that nature.
Connecticut has probably the strongest gun control laws out of the entire USA. That 20 y.o. guy wanted to buy another rifle for himself just days before shooting and was denied because of a waiting period. I think this is a better indicator that actually she did not buy the guns for her kid but just wanted the guns.
As to gun control, no, there shouldn't be any gun controls. AFAIC anybody should be able to buy any weapon, nuclear, whatever. As long as governments have weapons of mass destruction, so should individuals. You want to control guns in the hands of individuals, control it in the hands of your tyrannical governments first.
Obama came out with crocodile tears, and I mean alligator-crocodile-diplodoc tears. Why am I saying that? How many people has he personally killed over the last 4 years? How many of them were children? Just in Pakistan he increased drone strikes 10 fold.
He killed thousands of people and it's not clear that even half of them were not children.
He is a crocodile, he'll come for your guns, but he has much bigger guns, they are installed on fire-breathing, air-born dragons, he isn't crying for any of those children, even when they are American.
Does it have to be someone's labor?
- today it does and it's not only labour either. It's resources, it's capital land and labour and it's management of all of the components of production.
What if our society could largely be run by machines and a small percentage of workers who maintain them in exchange for a higher standard of living?
- so what about that? If it can be achieved that everything that we do today is done by machines and machines build machines and machines mine resources and machines provide the energy and machines fix machines, etc.etc.etc.
At that point, once all of the input costs are no longer human related, then the cost of input is 0, cost of distribution is 0 to all humans.
If that happens you will see that everybody can buy those machines with close to no money and the more of them are distributed the closer to 0 the costs are to the future buyers (you can buy a cellphone close to 0 today, I am talking about a simple mobile, not a smart phone, it's almost nothing, everybody has one even in the poorest countries).
Yeah, but that's not what we have today.
Have you considered that we may end up with more people than we have useful work for them to do, or that we might have useful work but it isn't valuable enough to earn a living?
- that's the flaw in the thinking of people who do not in fact consider normal economics but look at it from a broken perspective.
This flaw comes from misunderstanding economics, it comes from over-relying in their thinking on government, which is not a surprise, that's how most people 'see' things, (which is to say that's how bad most people's economic understanding is due to the system that exists that completely broke their understanding starting from the first day at school).
What you consider to be mostly 'useful work' is what somebody, some individual, a human came up with as an idea as to how to profit by providing all other individuals with products. Most of the time people who are truly successful find a problem that they have that they want to solve in their own lives and then they expand it to cover everybody else.
Think about Woz, he wasn't even concerned with selling computers to others, he just wanted to own one. Did he need somebody to create 'useful work' for himself? He created useful work all on his own without waiting for somebody else to give him a 'useful position'.
Now, I am not saying that everybody is Woz. Here is a much more trivial example, much simpler than a guy building his own personal computer from microchips and here is her advertising on youtube.
She didn't need somebody else to come up with 'useful work' for her to do, she did it herself because she had a need and realised others did too. Governments of different States stand on her way, they are forcing her to pay crazy license fees in each State to put tags on those pillows that are designed to tell you what's in every pillow. That's crazy of-course, all the customers are buying those over the Internet and on her site it lists the components, so if you are allergic to them, you can immediately see it and not buy the pillow.
It's a pillow that some woman started selling that she came up with and it's 'useful work' from her customers' perspectives, which is why she can make money off of that idea and work.
Why did I say that your thinking is clouded by government propaganda? Because it is too close, almost indistinguishable from an idea that there has to be some central planning authority in a collective, that tells you what "useful work" is.
What IS "useful work" but what you think IS useful or what other people think IS useful? That's the flaw in this type of thinking.
Let me show you this in another easy to understand example:
Do you have everything you ever wanted to posse
We should challenge the economics that says we can't create money and give it to people. In fact we created $16 trillion
- yeah, you can clearly print money, but it doesn't mean you create anything of value when you print money.
Clearly the 16 Trillion dollars printed does not mean that 16 Trillion dollars worth of goods and services was produced and that is the problem, because all you do with printing 16 Trillion new dollars without any economic activity behind them is you dilute the value of all dollars in existence.
Of-course the Fed will now print 45Billion a month to buy bonds forever, and that is just the floor, they'll print much more than that. Oh, and that's in addition to 40 Billion a month to buy mortgages (and that is also just a floor).
Of-course the bubble that is being inflated is in debt, it's a credit bubble and it WILL take down the US dollar as a 'reserve currency' and may end up completely destroying the dollar from point of view of purchasing power.
Since 1971 dollar lost 98% of its purchasing power. Since 1913 dollar lost over 99% of its purchasing power. This means something, it's not just an abstract idea, it means that you need 100x as many dollars to buy something as before. It means that an ounce of gold could be earned by a Ford worker in 1 week in 1914 (an ounce was 19 dollars and Ford made it a 5 day, 8 hour work week to be competitive because of high turnover).
But that means that Ford workers in 1914 had much more purchasing power than today. In 1914 they didn't pay income taxes (only top 1% paid since 1913 and the top rate was 7%). In 1914 there was no payroll or Medicare tax. The government was tiny there was no need to take all these taxes, there was no illegal wars of-course either.
A Ford worker would have to make maybe 4000USD per week today to match his predecessor in the company who worked there 100 years ago, and 100 years ago he would have made 25 dollars but would have been better off for it. Here is the problem, you can't print money and think that you are actually creating any type of wealth, you can and will destroy your currency though and you won't be able to borrow for a long time after that, and since to destroy your currency you had to print all that money, you chased away all that investment capital (savings, that apparently governments hate if you have, but savings is what allows investments).
You are talking about destroying all savings and you are talking about preventing all investments that's what you are talking about when you are talking about 'basic income' and printing money just to give to everybody.
And when you say 'fundamental assumptions of popular economics', where is it popular today, real economics?
You know what you are relying on, when you talk about printing money and giving it away as 'basic income'? You are relying on other people's labour somewhere, that supposedly will keep subsidising you by taking your freshly printed dollars. Well, I think teh 'fundamental assumptions of "popular" economics' will prove you wrong when the people who are still subsidising you will stop it because they'll realise that you can't give them anything back for that money at all.
What I don't understand is why does everybody here thinks that my first comment was 'funny'? I wasn't trying to be funny, actually when I try to be funny it only works half of the time and all of a sudden. I wasn't going for funny, I was going for sad.
He is guilty. Clearly guilty of embarrassing some government officials with his so called 'evidence'. Lock him up.