Let me clarify the record on the liar that is Warren Buffet.
He chooses to pay himself dividends, not a salary. This means that his earnings are taxed on both sides, the corporate side and the individual side. As the major stock holder of BH, Buffet pays 35% as a corporation (lower actually, he is fighting IRS on this, he wants to pay only 30% or so, there is a huge legal battle going on there).
His actual tax (just the federal portion, excluding the State tax), is 35% corporate and 15% dividend, which is about 44% total. Again, that's before State and other taxes. So he is a liar.
Now, he pays himself about 60Million in taxes out of about a billion or so that he earns as a corporation (and corporate earnings are his earnings, it doesn't matter what side they are taxed at, it's the money he can't give himself he has to give to the gov't). He was actually asked in a show about this, his response was: "well, I am giving away 99% of my money, so to me it doesn't matter what I pay as a corporation".
Do you not see a problem with that logic? If he gives 99% of money to charity, the fact that he is actually taxed at 35% or so as a corporation doesn't mean anything to him, he is going to give away all of his corporate earnings anyway, but this goes directly against his message that he is paying only 15% tax (pure nonsense).
Also Buffet likes to say that tax rates have no bearing on people making investment decisions.
I have explained this nonsense position in a comment here, the short of it is: if your investments are GUARANTEED to always succeed, that's one thing, but that's not how investments work, so taxes play a huge role in investment decisions, that's by the way why VCs are leaving.
Also don't forget that BH (Buffet's company) profits directly from other companies being shut down, going into bankruptcy and such (which higher taxes help to set up) because BH buys companies in distress at a huge discount, restructures and sells them for parts.
The only reason that the US government has treated Manning the way it did was to break him and to try and get him to sign some fake confession that would help them to accuse Wikileaks and Assange in some form or 'espionage' or even 'treason' (which is pure nonsense, can't charge a foreigner with treason). What they did to Manning is cruel an unusual punishment no doubt.
The wealthy in 1958 paid 3.5% of all income taxes (that's about 8500 people total, who were 0.178% of all income tax filers, and these people paid 35% or more in taxes and only a couple of hundred of them paid the stupid rate of 91%)
Today 2.5Million people pay 35% or more in taxes and this makes 2% of all tax filers and they pay 41.5% of all income taxes.
Aren't people on FB because they want to show off? They all want to be liked, so anything that hinders that is likely to stress them out and this includes having opinions.
Nobody should be paying any income taxes, but certainly the wealthy are paying a hugely disproportionate amount in income taxes, both as a percentage of their earnings and as an absolute dollar amount. 5% of top earners pay 59% of income taxes and 50% of bottom earners pay 3% of income taxes. This is a completely wrong system even before the argument that income taxes are wrong in the first place. Income tax assumes that your income belongs to the government, not to you, and the government allows you to keep a portion of it just to maximise its own revenue.
Obviously there is huge discrimination against the voting minority of the people, who are in the top earner bracket by the huge majority of the bottom earners, and it doesn't matter what the definition of 'rich' is, it is just somebody who is making more than you, that's all, because there is nothing that says: a person making 10 million per year is rich or a person making 1 million dollars a year is rich or a person making 150K per year is rich or a person making 70K per year is rich or a person making 45K per year is rich. This idea is arbitrary and the collectivist mind must keep it arbitrary so that it is easy to re-target the mob to whoever the current subset of the population is that is making more than you.
Your stance here shows exactly what the problem is:
Any "freedom" I can't have I have no trouble with the government keeping from your rich ass....... if I don't have that right, neither should you.
- that's it, that's the gist of it, that's the root of it, there is nothing else, only this. (of-course these rights are stolen from all individuals, not just from the very wealthy, the very wealthy trade on shadow markets regardless of such laws, the people who undoubtedly suffer from such laws are actually the people of more modest means)
If you personally cannot do something then it must not be something that anybody else can have a freedom to do even though they completely earned the ability, they must be prevented.
Here is how it can be extended:
"it doesn't matter what you make in earnings and how you achieved it, if I can't have a yacht, I have no problem with the gov't keeping it away from your rich ass"
"...if I can't have a nice car, I have no problem with the gov't keeping it away from your rich ass"
"...if I can't have a vacation, I have no problem with the gov't keeping it away from your rich ass"
"...if I can't have that certain food, I have no problem with the gov't keeping it away from your rich ass"
"...if I can't have good time with that beautiful super model, I have no problem with the gov't keeping it away from your rich ass"
"...if I can't have anything, I have no problem with the gov't keeping it away from your rich ass"
"...if I can't have more than 200K in earnings per year, I have no problem with the gov't keeping it away from your rich ass"
That's the problem, if the mob can prevent the wealthy from actually being able to use their wealth as they see fit, then there are no reasons to bother working. If Steve Jobs was limited to what he could make beyond a certain amount for example in the year 1985, when he was already a multi-millionaire, then he would stop working, go ahead and just enjoy the remaining years spending his wealth rather than re-investing it, rather than working, rather than creating all the products that he did, expanding the business as he did.
The wealthy enjoy only a tiny portion of their wealth actually, they spend on themselves a tiny amount. Jobs spent maybe 4% of his total earnings on himself over his life time, the rest was always invested and re-invested. It is those wealthy people who actually give the society much more than the society gives them and much more than the middle class and the poor do. The poor and the middle class only make enough to feed themselves, the wealthy generate businesses and products and services that feed millions of people, give
Not exactly, what actually happened was this goat promised people to make a good return on their investments, but they had to give him money right away, throw some into his backpack. They did and eventually the goat collected from everybody in the town and they never saw him again. Thus the story or the escaped goat.
When the pig saw it and tried to repeat the con, the people got wise and before throwing the money in they killed the pig.
Thus the pig bank. Which is much better than the central bank, which apparently started because the people forgot the story about the escaped goat.
Ok, this is good stuff, Issa, can you extend this bill to the real world?
How about a moratorium on all new laws in real world unless the law in question is a repeal of a previous law?
This would do good for everybody, for the economy, for society, for freedoms. All the laws that exist can be used against individuals, how about starting to repeal laws instead of adding them?
Doesn't/. recognise this truth for software code: less is more?
Removing code, refactoring existing code base and cleaning up is an important task if you want your software not to die from bloat eventually. This is just as true for laws and politics.
Shut down the loopholes that people use to reduce their taxes and to avoid various regulations and laws and you will put the final, very tough nail into the America economy. The only reason that USA had an economy during the 40s and the 50s, when the nominal marginal tax rate as stupidly high, over 90% and later over 70% and such, was because there were plenty of ways not to pay the taxes.
Americans at the time when nominal taxes were high didn't pay any of those nominal taxes. They could deduct any of their losses from any of their gains dollar for dollar. You lost on house depreciation or on a stock deal or you lost on a casino bet, you just deducted it from wherever you profited, be it your salary or any type of investment. The businessmen of the time bought the most lavish things, bought memberships in the most exclusive clubs, had yachts and airplanes, all of those things were completely tax deductible.
Think about this: why would you NOT buy something expensive, you are getting it at a 91% discount! If your choices are: out of every 1000 bucks give 910 to the gov't and keep 90 OR spend the 1000 bucks and don't pay any taxes on it, what do you think people would do? Because after all, when they spent the 1000 bucks, it's as if they spent 90 bucks but got 1000 dollars worth of product for it.
So if a fancy chair costs 10,000USD and you could either give gov't 9,100 and keep 900 or buy that fancy chair, you bought the chair! You bought the chair for 10,000USD at the 91% discount, because otherwise you'd still only have 900 bucks in your pocket from that 10,000 and you couldn't buy a 10,000 dollar chair with 900 bucks.
The US economy of forties, fifties, sixties did well not because of ANYTHING that gov't did but very much despite of EVERYTHING that it did. The Japanese and the rest got a wind of that, the US economy was stagnating because of lack of investment and the Japanese were investing, and I am not talking about government.
The 91% income tax or 70% income tax or 50% income tax or any income taxes modify your behaviour. The higher the taxes are the less likely you are to invest.
Buffet again came out with a nonsense piece of propaganda, stating that investors don't care about taxes, if you see that you can make 10% in profit, but you'll be taxed at 91% of your gains, you'll still take the deal because you'll be ahead of fixed gov't income (which is nothing today).
That's a lot of hooey. There are no risk free investments. If you invest in something and even your odds of making 100% of money back is 50% chance, you are going to be very much wary of the tax situation.
Your loss is 100% of your investment (and that's after tax money) in case it goes sour. But your gain is 9% at 91% tax rate. Well, guess what, this means you are risking your investment too much. If you invest $100,000 (that's after tax money, because that's either your personal income or it's money that corporation records as profit, so that's already post-corporate and possibly post-personal income taxes), if you invest 100,000K and your chances of making 200,000K are 50/50, then at 91% tax rate what you are really saying that you have 50% chance of losing your money (gov't isn't going to backstop it for you, unless you are a big bank of-course, but big banks don't invest in private businesses anymore, they only launder Feds fake credit into gov't Treasuries).
So 50% chance of losing your 100,000K and 50% chance of making 9K. That's very stupid, you compare that to any other less risky thing you can do and you rather do that.
A more real world like situation is that your investment has less than 10% chance of success and 90% chance of failure. That's what happens to VCs in America, that's why they shut down, they expect stupid taxes and they figured out this simple math:
10 people come to you asking for investment money.
You give each one of them 100K for example, that's 1Million.
Now 9 of them lose your money, that's 900K out of the window. IF YOU ARE LUCKY 1 o
USA citizenship used to be similar to having a first class ticket, today....
You can't open a foreign bank account (and they taught you to believe that if you have a foreign bank account you are unamerican). Now you can't be on Intrade? Try and set up your own Intrade in USA, you'll be shut down.
Why is this all happening? As the government gets bigger and bigger, it gets into more and more aspects of people's lives. Individual freedoms are important, I know many here believe that individual freedoms means 'freedom for business to abuse you', however business cannot abuse you if you don't want it to, you can simply not deal with an abusing business, see how it turns out for that kind of business in a free market.
But where are you going to go if your government abuses you? They are certainly now making it harder and harder to drop US citizenship. There are now fees associated with that, not much for now, only about 400 bucks, but that only means they are going to raise it eventually much higher than that, maybe to your portion of public debt? How about your portion of unfunded liabilities? Contingency liabilities? If that's the case, there will be no difference between the iron curtain and the IRS curtain, and IRS already can deny you your passport or even revoke your passport so you can't go outside of country if you owe more than some dollar amount in taxes (25K or so).
Ron Paul was laughed at when he said that the wall at the Mexico border may just be used to hold Americans in.
How do I read this from these Intrade news? It's one step at a time, that's what it is. Prevent you from having a bank account outside, prevent you from dealing with companies outside, eventually prevent you from being able to exchange your currency, have capital and exchange controls; US border patrol is already crazy, it's not a stretch.
"When you find yourself agreeing with the majority, it is time to reform." - that was Samuel Clemens. He was right.
It is a majority idea that government spending is necessary and that cutting it will cause an economic collapse. The reality of-course is the opposite. Cutting government spending will cause an immediate dip in the economy as it will be allowed to restructure, but within a short time period the economy will restructure and start healing.
In 1921 US federal government spending was cut by 70%. That depression was over in 1.5 years.
In 1947 the Great Depression finally stopped once the government cut spending by 64% and overall taxes by 32%.
In 1981 the government cut borrowing (and thus spending) when Volcker brought interest rates up to 21.5%. The economy got out of that 70s stagflation.
The reality is that the US economy, just like European and Japanese economies is already stagflating. The government spending is a stone on the neck of this drowning economy, it's not a floating device. Cutting government spending and thus also cutting taxes will allow people who actually created that money, earned it an opportunity to save it and eventually invest it, and that's the only way for an economy to restructure and to restart.
All attempts by governments of the world to interfere are simply inflation (printing money) and borrowing and possibly higher taxes, but all that does it crowds out private credit and investments and moves more savings out of pockets of the actual earners into the pockets of people who didn't earn it and will waste it on various consumption that shouldn't even be happening, because the economy that is in a depression is the economy that has no savings actually to consume anything, because it doesn't produce anything.
Government is a luxury, it's an expense, you don't grow your expenses on luxuries during recession, you shrink it, take a hit and allow the economy to fix itself. No amount of government based human intervention will work, it will necessarily make things worse.
There has to be a correlation between the price tag on these BI tools and the difficulty of installation, you are just not meant to install it, you are a simple mortal, not a SAP or Oracle certified 'specialist'. By getting those certifications you immediately acquire special knowledge of how it really works. You don't need to click on those seven icons or whatever and you don't actually need to download those GB packages. That stuff is made to look Enterprisy, it's for chumps. Actually SAP is just a few lines of code in your BIOS and Oracle is built into every computer that you buy by default. All you need to do is to have a special key that you hold to the machine at a specific coordinate point near the processor and everything starts working as if it is magic. The 2GB files and the 7 Icons really serve as a decoy, gate keepers, for those with true knowledge can pass the test and the rest will have to pay the ones with the true knowledge whatever the going rates are.
My software OTOH is very simple, I even provide a shell script for installation, and if something doesn't work you can see right in the script which library didn't download or something similarly elementary. The applications themselves are just WAR and JAR files drop them into the configured server and BAM.
'Hoarding' (saving) currency itself is only useful if the interest rates on all investments are so terrible (low, or maybe even negative) that you can't make money by investing in anything. But in a legitimate economy, that is not controlled by central banking and central government this does not happen, because the more money people save, the lower the interest rate becomes, because there are so many savings, their value is going down. USA 1800 to 1917 has conclusively shown that money that is intrinsically valuable and is slightly deflationary is still not 'hoarded' but is used for investments because there is no manipulation by the central government. Central government was basically irrelevant, it wasn't spending much on anything because it wasn't doing much of anything, and so it was cheap and didn't meddle with individuals investing their money in businesses, whichever way they wanted.
There is a huge disconnect today between value of savings (interest rates) and real existing savings. The interest rates are so manipulated by the central banks that it seems like the system is flush with cash (is that the saying?) The interest rates are at historic low, actually they are negative, and the only people who can find yield are banks that borrow at 0% from the Fed and then lend to the Treasury at 2-3%. This means that the government has completely crowded out all private investments while sending an insane fake signal into the market that there are huge savings in the system, but there are none, the system is deep in debt, it has no savings. Whatever meagre savings that individuals manage to collect are irrelevant, because their share of government debt has gone through the stratosphere.
I think that Bitcoins have their use, but they have no intrinsic value at all, they are based on confidence, always were, based on the confidence in the protocol. Bitcoins are valued because people trust the protocol, and surely that protocol is much more trustworthy than any government and any opaque bank. So the interesting part about Bitcoin is will the trust in protocol be enough, because again, there is no intrinsic value?
So when you say: "Bitcoins will perish because people hoard them", the point is that hoarding something without any use that can be used to invest doesn't make sense if the economy allows any investments in the first place (more precisely if the central government doesn't prevent investments, which is the case now).
However hoarding a resource that has no intrinsic value is dangerous. If you want to hoard and not to invest, you do not use Bitcoin, I think people understand that, that's why it will not be a problem in itself. Bitcoin is for circulation, it's not a good safe haven, it has no intrinsic value.
For example storing 1,000,000 USD in Bitcoins for too long is in fact dangerous, you do not want to do that. Either you invest that money or store it in something else (not dollars, not cash, either an investment vehicle or real money, gold or other inflation hedges, property, valuables, etc.) and let people keep trading in Bitcoins.
---- As a side note I heard some people talking about using flash drives to pay in Bitcoins, but this breaks the way that the protocol prevents double spending, if you copy your Bitcoins onto a thousand flash devices and pay with them somehow and they are not verified by the seller, you can doublespend plenty. So a seller will not accept your file unless he can record the transaction in the network, which is only a prudent thing to do, otherwise it's the seller who will be out of money.
That is not a question, we already know that money can exist without central government. First of all people have been using all sorts of things as money without any central government, secondly gold is not declared by central government to be money, it was chosen by people, central governments only adopted it because people chose it (minting coins is really a convenience thing, gold is actually valuable by weight, not by some number on a coin, that's why most gold coins never had any numbers on them). Here is a currency that is used without any State power behind it.
So my point is if Bitcoin fails it does not show that money without central government cannot exist, we already know it can. More interesting question about Bitcoin is can money exist that is based purely on confidence and without central government. Now that is the combination here, not that it is not issued by central gov't but that it is only backed by confidence in the protocol. It is not gold, so it has no intrinsic value, sure, its amount is limited, but even that is not completely true, it can be subdivided into a huge number of smaller units (like micro-bitcoins).
The immediate possible failure of this currency that comes to mind is that if confidence is lost at any point, it will be irrelevant that the number of the coins is limited to a precise amount and cannot be increased. Rarity itself does not guarantee usage as money when it comes to currencies that have no intrinsic value.
Interesting thing about Bitcoins, I spent a few hours looking at Bitcoin protocol, seemed to me it could be used for electronic voting and apparently many people thought the same.
They could also block the rest of the buttons and only have them activate when a certain key sequence is pushed. Email is often used by people without looking at the message, having all of the previous messages in every new reply, sometimes it seems like people really need a wiki like communication system rather than email.
Oh, please, now you are trying weasel out of your own incompetence.
'A politician could start a war' - and without government involvement in regulations of business and money how would he finance it (no money manipulation, because that's a regulation that definitely contradicts freedom of the market, so can't create debt and have the Fed monetise it) and how would he sell the idea of the war to the public? The public that operates in a free market doesn't gain from war, it gains from peaceful coexistence, it has trade relations with domestic and foreign partners. The best way to avoid war is to have free market without government regulations.
Governments start war, politicians start war, but they can only do it if the public doesn't care. In USA the public doesn't care because politicians manipulate money supply and can borrow seemingly without limits, in a free market that's not the case at all! Government can't set fake interest rates, like it does now, so to borrow money during free market for something as unproductive as war is a much more expensive (from POV of public) affair than when the public doesn't care where the money comes from, doesn't care because it is not immediately affected by inflation.
People would be dead set against all wars unless the war is brought to them by an aggressor.
As to 'non-market issues' - sure. A politician can sell his vote on whether to commemorate some person on some day (but since he can't push for market issues, he can't for example declare a new mandatory holiday or some such nonsense).
POTUS can sell pardons? Sure, they do that now. Yeah, it sucks but for what type of crimes? Certainly there wouldn't be many bankers in jail except for those who are caught stealing directly from customers. Without gov't manipulating the markets, rules and taxes and fake money there can't be any widespread fraud going on. Somebody like Madoff can go to jail regardless of whether the market is free or not (less likely to go to jail in a non-free market), but so POTUS would be letting go of murderers and rapists?
Not even POTUS is immune from public opinion. I think a POTUS letting go of some rapist because of moneyed interest may just be impeached himself if it gets out, it's too risky. POTUS sells influence today, but today there is no free market and there are quite a number of other issues on the table that muddy the waters to pay attention to some under the table pardon deals.
A senator can filibuster a nominee and do it for the sake of a contributor/briber.... but so what? AFAIC if the politicians have zero influence in market they can be all bribed, the question becomes: who will waste the money?
Why bother bribing a politician who can't steal individual freedoms from people and sell that power by accepting the contributions? Go ahead, bribe the shit out of him, it's your wasted money. What are you really buying?
Does it matter who the POTUS even is by the way in a non-regulated market? I don't see the difference. Non-regulated market: market without government sticking its nose into business, gov't that doesn't tax production, no income taxes, government that does not manipulate money, no money printing, no interest rate setting, no new departments that would get any executive power to apply fancy rules against anybody in the market.
Who gives a shit who the POTUS is? The POTUS is just a position, they are all there supposed to be protecting and defending the Constitution, if they are not fucking with markets and money then they can spend more time thinking about their actual duties.
CIA director selling access to citizen emails to Rupert Murdoch - that's happening today probably, certainly something similar happened in UK.
The real question is: what is to stop CIA director from selling this to Murdoch regardless of whether the market is free or not? In a free market, why would CIA director even have access to citizens' emails in the first place? So in a free market CIA sells access, are you telling me it works differently in any other market?
You are so reaching for straws and various other floating devices, because you are drowning.
Well, you got an 'insightful' mode for this completely uninsightful comment, so that certainly illustrates something about/. moderation scheme.
Here is why you are not insightful, in fact you put together 2 separate statements that contradict each other, didn't notice it, and thus derived to a completely wrong conclusion.
Here it is:
A free market is a market with zero regulations - zero.
- this is a correct statement. Now, there can be degrees of freedom within a market, the more regulations exist, the less free the market is (and conversely the fewer regulations make the market more free).
Then you put this into your comment:
. In such a market you could buy or sell anything without limitation, certainly including political influence.
Well there you go. Your completely uninsightful and thus wrong conclusion is that free market is 'bad'.
However you just said it: free market has 0 regulations.
Given 0 regulations, what kind of political influence can money buy if there is nothing that a politician can do to manipulate the market since he has no tools to manipulate the market with 0 regulations over it?
This will never go away until it is ingrained in the minds of a large enough segment of the population that copyrights and patents should not be in fact laws, copyright and patent holders should not be able to use government laws to grant themselves any special protections.
I know it is about as popular as my other views on economics or politics for now, but it is just as much the reality: copyrights and patents hurt the economy and society much more than they benefit it.
- I gave enough reference in my comment, are you asking me for more? All greens have socialist demands, they are all talking about 'green jobs' and 'green plan' and they are all talking about price and wage and exchange controls and they are all talking about taxes and regulations. What's wrong with wage controls? Well I wrote plenty on the topic not to have to repeat myself.
In a "free market" nothing changes until prices dictate it. T
- prices that 'dictate it' is people that dictate it. The higher the prices of one product or service the less it will be used or the more alternatives there will be, that's precisely how things change in a free market (no double quotes needed around the term), free market means voluntary market, market free of extraneous regulations, free of coercion forced by threat of violence.
We want the change NOW.
- most people do not want that, if they did, they would be behaving accordingly. People who truly want 'change now' can act upon their desires now, they can go for alternative methods themselves, paying more in the process.
So we have to use political means to do that.
- precisely, you want threat of government violence over everybody now, to get your technocratic goals achieved. But that is precisely my point about the greens being socialists (collectivists, central planners), which I gave references for as well. Greens want totalitarian regime, they want control of other people's lives now, they want all sorts of controls that are not market forced.
Jill Stein is green, I gave enough references to her own words. She says, not I, she says: I want price controls, wage controls, green 'new deal' (job controls via gov't). She says: I want nationalisation of companies, I want draft, I want central planning, I want new taxes. So she is exactly on the path that you are apparently cheering for, what's your question then? I already answered it then, she is a socialist, collectivist, central planner, totalitarian, authoritarian, anti-capitalist, anti-individualist technocrat. I am against every tiny thing she stands for, that's all.
Yes, it is democracy (unfortunately, it shouldn't be, because democracy is tyranny, I explained many times, here is one time I did)
the german economy is thriving... the environment is superb.
- I don't see the German economy thriving, I am in Germany this very moment, I see a huge collectivist hive, I see huge inefficient collectivist self-destructive system that is chocking, especially since the moment of unification, when Eastern Germany was put on welfare basically and since then huge part of the entire Europe was put on welfare and the German tax payer is forced into this insane slavery, subsidising every socialist around him. Germans were robbed the moment Euro was introduced, Germany is on a path to self destruction with this socialist agenda.
Germany has made another dumb move by deciding to stop all of its nuclear power plants. But hey, that's not my life's problem, it's Germany's problem. You are free to do whatever you want, and implement any socialist scheme there can be, I sure don't want any part of it and you are going to end up just like the rest of the socialist states, which all eventually self-destruct their economies.
Chinese are buying German manufacturing already, I was in one event in Baden Baden dedicated exactly to that.
It's not carbon and not nuclear. It needs to be clean. A lot of it has to do with redirecting our economy to less carbon intensive, relocalized versions of the economy.
(never mind the other obvious problems with the 'greens' being that they are in fact socialists, collectivists, central planners pushing for price controls, exchange controls, wage controls, draft, marshal law, nationalisation, all the worst parts of authoritarian, dictatorial, tyrannical, anti-individual, anti-human, anti-free market, anti-capitalist ideology)
So the collective decided that it does not want nuclear, just like the collective decided that it does not want free market competitive capitalism, but instead wants collectivism. It's all complete nonsense and it is destroying the economy as well as the environment.
If that's your goal, then you have to get rid of the psychopaths in government, because without them the private industry cannot do any of the stuff that you are complaining about.
Maybe it's not impossible, but it surely isn't likely for private banks to construct a scheme where they all lend money to people who they know cannot pay the money back, but they lend to them anyway because the government guarantees the loans and passes laws that push banks towards making those types of loans (setting quotas on how many loans must be made in subprime market and guaranteeing those loans with 'free', sorry, public money. Doing all this while the Federal reserve gives out free credit to the banks and destroys the interest rates in the process, pushing bankers to search for yield not in normal business but with extremely risky stuff).
What would you do as a banker if you couldn't find yield no matter where you looked, because the gov't manipulated the money supply and interest rates?
What would you do if the government provided you with enough rope (fake insurance) to hang yourself and your customers in the process? The system is rigged by government to inflate and implode.
You don't need to be a psychopath to do what the bankers did actually, you just have to be desperate for yield in an economy that no longer provided any legitimate economic activity and the only activity that was provided was by the Federal reserve creating and giving you fake money and by government pushing you into specific sectors like stock market and housing (and now government debt, treasuries).
Bernanke came out couple of days ago, telling the government to absolutely not reduce government spending and not to raise taxes (to avoid the so called nonsensical 'fiscal cliff', going over which would actually be a tiny step towards solving the problem of deficit and debt), so he advised the government to create more debt, which he promised to monetise.
He said all that while yapping about 'making sure that the world knows that USA is serious about solving its debt problem'. Ok.
OK, lets abolish the police, because no one has the moral superiority to hinder you from burglaring, robbing and killing someone
- first of all police function to prevent criminal behaviour has nothing to do with government function to ensure individual liberty.
People are perfectly capable setting up private criminal code and private security forces without involving any level of government, but generally they do it on municipal or regional level, but definitely not federal one, of-course USA today has huge number of armed federal agents enforcing all sorts of rules against individuals, but hey, the laws set by the Constitution no longer apply.
What some libertarians constantly forget is that personal freedom does exist solely because there is a society that provides those freedoms to you.
- personal freedoms are very small today, they used to be much greater, they especially increase after large wars that involve large amount of population. It is not society, it is individuals that are willing to fight for freedoms and the longer they allow the periods between such fights, the less freedoms they have. Society is quite happy to deny personal freedoms to individuals, it is not the society, it is individuals that must fight the tyranny that society sets up over some number of years in order to reset the system to a less tyrannical state.
If you go down to the source of each freedom you have, you will see that you only have them because society provides it to you.
- no, the freedoms are not what 'society provides' the freedom are those that society is DENIED FROM TAKING by individuals. It's not other individuals that infringe upon our freedoms, it's the collective.
For instance you only have a right to free speech, because society restricts the freedom of everyone else to hit you in the face for what you say.
- multiple failures in a single sentence.
The freedom is not to be protected from somebody punching me in the face, the freedom is in denying the society the ability to abuse me collectively. If you want to punch me in the face for what I am saying it's between you and I, it's not a freedom that is denied to me, it's just an individual conflict on a very local level.
When the government comes after me for saying what the government doesn't want people to say, that is when the freedoms are denied, and it is the role of the individuals to reset such abusive and tyrannical governments and maximise individuals freedoms.
Unfortunately I couldn't leave the above comment under my actual account, thus the AC. But if you want to put me into a 'foe' list based on my statement, this is the account you are looking for.
Your notion of 'exploiting workers' comes out of misunderstanding of voluntary contract obligations based on mutually beneficial agreement. In a free society any worker that feels that he is not treated right has the absolute right to quit, that's all.
When an employer advertises a job and gov't decides that it will put obligations on the employer to advertise the job in any specific manner (cannot discriminate against anybody, cannot have wage lower than some minimum, cannot do this, cannot do that, cannot pay a woman less than a man, etc.etc.), all of this is destruction of individual freedoms.
An employer is an individual, he should be able to advertise whatever he wants, that's part of his freedoms: right to own and operate private property, freedom of speech, so freedom to speak one's mind without abuse and discrimination by government, not by other individuals.
The right to sign a two party contract is paramount, free people cannot allow any gov't to stand between 2 individuals signing any mutually beneficial agreement.
Of-course there is criminal law (which by the way shouldn't be gov't business either, but there can be criminal law not based on gov't), so this means an employer will be liable for murder for example if he ends up killing the employee (or the other way around), but this in fact has nothing to do with the signed contract.
Can't sign a contract like this: "I, the employee, agree to be murdered by the employer" and expect that the outside forces that look after the criminal conduct will honour the terms.
However minimum wage law for example has nothing to do with criminal code, it's not murder to offer somebody a wage that is for example half of some number that gov't arbitrarily chooses to be the minimum for reasons of trying to hide the real problem in the economy: inflation that is created by gov't.
As to unions, people have the right to free association, this means employees can organise. However they cannot force the employer in fact to negotiate with the union rather than with every employee individually. The employee has the right to quit in search for a better job (better price for selling labour), the employer has the right to fire in search for a better deal (better price for buying labour).
Health care is a private matter completely, it's none of gov't concern, like all other products and services. The history is clear of-course, every gov't attempt to get into the health care, education, housing and credit markets, banking, energy, etc., makes things much worse and more expensive, not better and cheaper. That's because the free market competitive capitalist system is the best system for production (creation) and distribution of products and services, it pushes for competition rather than collusion, and the worst type of collusion is gov't collusion based on power of the accepted gov't authority.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me clarify the record on the liar that is Warren Buffet.
He chooses to pay himself dividends, not a salary. This means that his earnings are taxed on both sides, the corporate side and the individual side. As the major stock holder of BH, Buffet pays 35% as a corporation (lower actually, he is fighting IRS on this, he wants to pay only 30% or so, there is a huge legal battle going on there).
His actual tax (just the federal portion, excluding the State tax), is 35% corporate and 15% dividend, which is about 44% total. Again, that's before State and other taxes. So he is a liar.
Now, he pays himself about 60Million in taxes out of about a billion or so that he earns as a corporation (and corporate earnings are his earnings, it doesn't matter what side they are taxed at, it's the money he can't give himself he has to give to the gov't). He was actually asked in a show about this, his response was: "well, I am giving away 99% of my money, so to me it doesn't matter what I pay as a corporation".
Do you not see a problem with that logic? If he gives 99% of money to charity, the fact that he is actually taxed at 35% or so as a corporation doesn't mean anything to him, he is going to give away all of his corporate earnings anyway, but this goes directly against his message that he is paying only 15% tax (pure nonsense).
Also Buffet likes to say that tax rates have no bearing on people making investment decisions.
I have explained this nonsense position in a comment here, the short of it is: if your investments are GUARANTEED to always succeed, that's one thing, but that's not how investments work, so taxes play a huge role in investment decisions, that's by the way why VCs are leaving.
Do you understand the problem with Buffet? AFAIC Buffet is paying back the gov't that bailed him out in 2009 through the AIG bailout with this propaganda. He'd be on the streets today if not for the tax payer money bailing out his company through AIG.
Also don't forget that BH (Buffet's company) profits directly from other companies being shut down, going into bankruptcy and such (which higher taxes help to set up) because BH buys companies in distress at a huge discount, restructures and sells them for parts.
The only reason that the US government has treated Manning the way it did was to break him and to try and get him to sign some fake confession that would help them to accuse Wikileaks and Assange in some form or 'espionage' or even 'treason' (which is pure nonsense, can't charge a foreigner with treason). What they did to Manning is cruel an unusual punishment no doubt.
I guess individual freedoms can go fuck themselves as long as the mob is on the side of the government on all issues surrounding 'taxing the rich', because this is what America is all about today. As long as the government promises to 'tax the rich' (and the rich are paying more taxes now than they have ever paid in America, regardless of the nominal marginal tax rates) then the government can do whatever it wants.
Apparently the real class warfare is waged by the majority upon the wealthy in USA today.
Here are the damning facts about the actual tax rates and payments of 1958 vs 2010 and it's all on the IRS site.
The wealthy in 1958 paid 3.5% of all income taxes (that's about 8500 people total, who were 0.178% of all income tax filers, and these people paid 35% or more in taxes and only a couple of hundred of them paid the stupid rate of 91%)
Today 2.5Million people pay 35% or more in taxes and this makes 2% of all tax filers and they pay 41.5% of all income taxes.
--
The real class warfare is propaganda.
Aren't people on FB because they want to show off? They all want to be liked, so anything that hinders that is likely to stress them out and this includes having opinions.
Nobody should be paying any income taxes, but certainly the wealthy are paying a hugely disproportionate amount in income taxes, both as a percentage of their earnings and as an absolute dollar amount. 5% of top earners pay 59% of income taxes and 50% of bottom earners pay 3% of income taxes. This is a completely wrong system even before the argument that income taxes are wrong in the first place. Income tax assumes that your income belongs to the government, not to you, and the government allows you to keep a portion of it just to maximise its own revenue.
Obviously there is huge discrimination against the voting minority of the people, who are in the top earner bracket by the huge majority of the bottom earners, and it doesn't matter what the definition of 'rich' is, it is just somebody who is making more than you, that's all, because there is nothing that says: a person making 10 million per year is rich or a person making 1 million dollars a year is rich or a person making 150K per year is rich or a person making 70K per year is rich or a person making 45K per year is rich. This idea is arbitrary and the collectivist mind must keep it arbitrary so that it is easy to re-target the mob to whoever the current subset of the population is that is making more than you.
Your stance here shows exactly what the problem is:
Any "freedom" I can't have I have no trouble with the government keeping from your rich ass. ......
if I don't have that right, neither should you.
- that's it, that's the gist of it, that's the root of it, there is nothing else, only this. (of-course these rights are stolen from all individuals, not just from the very wealthy, the very wealthy trade on shadow markets regardless of such laws, the people who undoubtedly suffer from such laws are actually the people of more modest means)
If you personally cannot do something then it must not be something that anybody else can have a freedom to do even though they completely earned the ability, they must be prevented.
Here is how it can be extended:
"it doesn't matter what you make in earnings and how you achieved it, if I can't have a yacht, I have no problem with the gov't keeping it away from your rich ass"
"...if I can't have a nice car, I have no problem with the gov't keeping it away from your rich ass"
"...if I can't have a vacation, I have no problem with the gov't keeping it away from your rich ass"
"...if I can't have that certain food, I have no problem with the gov't keeping it away from your rich ass"
"...if I can't have good time with that beautiful super model, I have no problem with the gov't keeping it away from your rich ass"
"...if I can't have anything, I have no problem with the gov't keeping it away from your rich ass"
"...if I can't have more than 200K in earnings per year, I have no problem with the gov't keeping it away from your rich ass"
That's the problem, if the mob can prevent the wealthy from actually being able to use their wealth as they see fit, then there are no reasons to bother working. If Steve Jobs was limited to what he could make beyond a certain amount for example in the year 1985, when he was already a multi-millionaire, then he would stop working, go ahead and just enjoy the remaining years spending his wealth rather than re-investing it, rather than working, rather than creating all the products that he did, expanding the business as he did.
The wealthy enjoy only a tiny portion of their wealth actually, they spend on themselves a tiny amount. Jobs spent maybe 4% of his total earnings on himself over his life time, the rest was always invested and re-invested. It is those wealthy people who actually give the society much more than the society gives them and much more than the middle class and the poor do. The poor and the middle class only make enough to feed themselves, the wealthy generate businesses and products and services that feed millions of people, give
Not exactly, what actually happened was this goat promised people to make a good return on their investments, but they had to give him money right away, throw some into his backpack. They did and eventually the goat collected from everybody in the town and they never saw him again. Thus the story or the escaped goat.
When the pig saw it and tried to repeat the con, the people got wise and before throwing the money in they killed the pig.
Thus the pig bank. Which is much better than the central bank, which apparently started because the people forgot the story about the escaped goat.
Ok, this is good stuff, Issa, can you extend this bill to the real world?
How about a moratorium on all new laws in real world unless the law in question is a repeal of a previous law?
This would do good for everybody, for the economy, for society, for freedoms. All the laws that exist can be used against individuals, how about starting to repeal laws instead of adding them?
Doesn't /. recognise this truth for software code: less is more?
Removing code, refactoring existing code base and cleaning up is an important task if you want your software not to die from bloat eventually. This is just as true for laws and politics.
Shut down the loopholes that people use to reduce their taxes and to avoid various regulations and laws and you will put the final, very tough nail into the America economy. The only reason that USA had an economy during the 40s and the 50s, when the nominal marginal tax rate as stupidly high, over 90% and later over 70% and such, was because there were plenty of ways not to pay the taxes.
Americans at the time when nominal taxes were high didn't pay any of those nominal taxes. They could deduct any of their losses from any of their gains dollar for dollar. You lost on house depreciation or on a stock deal or you lost on a casino bet, you just deducted it from wherever you profited, be it your salary or any type of investment. The businessmen of the time bought the most lavish things, bought memberships in the most exclusive clubs, had yachts and airplanes, all of those things were completely tax deductible.
Think about this: why would you NOT buy something expensive, you are getting it at a 91% discount! If your choices are: out of every 1000 bucks give 910 to the gov't and keep 90 OR spend the 1000 bucks and don't pay any taxes on it, what do you think people would do? Because after all, when they spent the 1000 bucks, it's as if they spent 90 bucks but got 1000 dollars worth of product for it.
So if a fancy chair costs 10,000USD and you could either give gov't 9,100 and keep 900 or buy that fancy chair, you bought the chair! You bought the chair for 10,000USD at the 91% discount, because otherwise you'd still only have 900 bucks in your pocket from that 10,000 and you couldn't buy a 10,000 dollar chair with 900 bucks.
The US economy of forties, fifties, sixties did well not because of ANYTHING that gov't did but very much despite of EVERYTHING that it did. The Japanese and the rest got a wind of that, the US economy was stagnating because of lack of investment and the Japanese were investing, and I am not talking about government.
The 91% income tax or 70% income tax or 50% income tax or any income taxes modify your behaviour. The higher the taxes are the less likely you are to invest.
Buffet again came out with a nonsense piece of propaganda, stating that investors don't care about taxes, if you see that you can make 10% in profit, but you'll be taxed at 91% of your gains, you'll still take the deal because you'll be ahead of fixed gov't income (which is nothing today).
That's a lot of hooey. There are no risk free investments. If you invest in something and even your odds of making 100% of money back is 50% chance, you are going to be very much wary of the tax situation.
Your loss is 100% of your investment (and that's after tax money) in case it goes sour. But your gain is 9% at 91% tax rate. Well, guess what, this means you are risking your investment too much. If you invest $100,000 (that's after tax money, because that's either your personal income or it's money that corporation records as profit, so that's already post-corporate and possibly post-personal income taxes), if you invest 100,000K and your chances of making 200,000K are 50/50, then at 91% tax rate what you are really saying that you have 50% chance of losing your money (gov't isn't going to backstop it for you, unless you are a big bank of-course, but big banks don't invest in private businesses anymore, they only launder Feds fake credit into gov't Treasuries).
So 50% chance of losing your 100,000K and 50% chance of making 9K. That's very stupid, you compare that to any other less risky thing you can do and you rather do that.
A more real world like situation is that your investment has less than 10% chance of success and 90% chance of failure. That's what happens to VCs in America, that's why they shut down, they expect stupid taxes and they figured out this simple math:
10 people come to you asking for investment money.
You give each one of them 100K for example, that's 1Million.
Now 9 of them lose your money, that's 900K out of the window. IF YOU ARE LUCKY 1 o
And you, as an individual, accept this violation of your rights because.... why again?
USA citizenship used to be similar to having a first class ticket, today....
You can't open a foreign bank account (and they taught you to believe that if you have a foreign bank account you are unamerican). Now you can't be on Intrade? Try and set up your own Intrade in USA, you'll be shut down.
Why is this all happening? As the government gets bigger and bigger, it gets into more and more aspects of people's lives. Individual freedoms are important, I know many here believe that individual freedoms means 'freedom for business to abuse you', however business cannot abuse you if you don't want it to, you can simply not deal with an abusing business, see how it turns out for that kind of business in a free market.
But where are you going to go if your government abuses you? They are certainly now making it harder and harder to drop US citizenship. There are now fees associated with that, not much for now, only about 400 bucks, but that only means they are going to raise it eventually much higher than that, maybe to your portion of public debt? How about your portion of unfunded liabilities? Contingency liabilities? If that's the case, there will be no difference between the iron curtain and the IRS curtain, and IRS already can deny you your passport or even revoke your passport so you can't go outside of country if you owe more than some dollar amount in taxes (25K or so).
Ron Paul was laughed at when he said that the wall at the Mexico border may just be used to hold Americans in.
How do I read this from these Intrade news? It's one step at a time, that's what it is. Prevent you from having a bank account outside, prevent you from dealing with companies outside, eventually prevent you from being able to exchange your currency, have capital and exchange controls; US border patrol is already crazy, it's not a stretch.
"When you find yourself agreeing with the majority, it is time to reform." - that was Samuel Clemens. He was right.
It is a majority idea that government spending is necessary and that cutting it will cause an economic collapse. The reality of-course is the opposite. Cutting government spending will cause an immediate dip in the economy as it will be allowed to restructure, but within a short time period the economy will restructure and start healing.
In 1921 US federal government spending was cut by 70%. That depression was over in 1.5 years.
In 1947 the Great Depression finally stopped once the government cut spending by 64% and overall taxes by 32%.
In 1981 the government cut borrowing (and thus spending) when Volcker brought interest rates up to 21.5%. The economy got out of that 70s stagflation.
The reality is that the US economy, just like European and Japanese economies is already stagflating. The government spending is a stone on the neck of this drowning economy, it's not a floating device. Cutting government spending and thus also cutting taxes will allow people who actually created that money, earned it an opportunity to save it and eventually invest it, and that's the only way for an economy to restructure and to restart.
All attempts by governments of the world to interfere are simply inflation (printing money) and borrowing and possibly higher taxes, but all that does it crowds out private credit and investments and moves more savings out of pockets of the actual earners into the pockets of people who didn't earn it and will waste it on various consumption that shouldn't even be happening, because the economy that is in a depression is the economy that has no savings actually to consume anything, because it doesn't produce anything.
Government is a luxury, it's an expense, you don't grow your expenses on luxuries during recession, you shrink it, take a hit and allow the economy to fix itself. No amount of government based human intervention will work, it will necessarily make things worse.
There has to be a correlation between the price tag on these BI tools and the difficulty of installation, you are just not meant to install it, you are a simple mortal, not a SAP or Oracle certified 'specialist'. By getting those certifications you immediately acquire special knowledge of how it really works. You don't need to click on those seven icons or whatever and you don't actually need to download those GB packages. That stuff is made to look Enterprisy, it's for chumps. Actually SAP is just a few lines of code in your BIOS and Oracle is built into every computer that you buy by default. All you need to do is to have a special key that you hold to the machine at a specific coordinate point near the processor and everything starts working as if it is magic. The 2GB files and the 7 Icons really serve as a decoy, gate keepers, for those with true knowledge can pass the test and the rest will have to pay the ones with the true knowledge whatever the going rates are.
My software OTOH is very simple, I even provide a shell script for installation, and if something doesn't work you can see right in the script which library didn't download or something similarly elementary. The applications themselves are just WAR and JAR files drop them into the configured server and BAM.
'Hoarding' (saving) currency itself is only useful if the interest rates on all investments are so terrible (low, or maybe even negative) that you can't make money by investing in anything. But in a legitimate economy, that is not controlled by central banking and central government this does not happen, because the more money people save, the lower the interest rate becomes, because there are so many savings, their value is going down. USA 1800 to 1917 has conclusively shown that money that is intrinsically valuable and is slightly deflationary is still not 'hoarded' but is used for investments because there is no manipulation by the central government. Central government was basically irrelevant, it wasn't spending much on anything because it wasn't doing much of anything, and so it was cheap and didn't meddle with individuals investing their money in businesses, whichever way they wanted.
There is a huge disconnect today between value of savings (interest rates) and real existing savings. The interest rates are so manipulated by the central banks that it seems like the system is flush with cash (is that the saying?) The interest rates are at historic low, actually they are negative, and the only people who can find yield are banks that borrow at 0% from the Fed and then lend to the Treasury at 2-3%. This means that the government has completely crowded out all private investments while sending an insane fake signal into the market that there are huge savings in the system, but there are none, the system is deep in debt, it has no savings. Whatever meagre savings that individuals manage to collect are irrelevant, because their share of government debt has gone through the stratosphere.
I think that Bitcoins have their use, but they have no intrinsic value at all, they are based on confidence, always were, based on the confidence in the protocol. Bitcoins are valued because people trust the protocol, and surely that protocol is much more trustworthy than any government and any opaque bank. So the interesting part about Bitcoin is will the trust in protocol be enough, because again, there is no intrinsic value?
So when you say: "Bitcoins will perish because people hoard them", the point is that hoarding something without any use that can be used to invest doesn't make sense if the economy allows any investments in the first place (more precisely if the central government doesn't prevent investments, which is the case now).
However hoarding a resource that has no intrinsic value is dangerous. If you want to hoard and not to invest, you do not use Bitcoin, I think people understand that, that's why it will not be a problem in itself. Bitcoin is for circulation, it's not a good safe haven, it has no intrinsic value.
For example storing 1,000,000 USD in Bitcoins for too long is in fact dangerous, you do not want to do that. Either you invest that money or store it in something else (not dollars, not cash, either an investment vehicle or real money, gold or other inflation hedges, property, valuables, etc.) and let people keep trading in Bitcoins.
----
As a side note I heard some people talking about using flash drives to pay in Bitcoins, but this breaks the way that the protocol prevents double spending, if you copy your Bitcoins onto a thousand flash devices and pay with them somehow and they are not verified by the seller, you can doublespend plenty. So a seller will not accept your file unless he can record the transaction in the network, which is only a prudent thing to do, otherwise it's the seller who will be out of money.
That is not a question, we already know that money can exist without central government. First of all people have been using all sorts of things as money without any central government, secondly gold is not declared by central government to be money, it was chosen by people, central governments only adopted it because people chose it (minting coins is really a convenience thing, gold is actually valuable by weight, not by some number on a coin, that's why most gold coins never had any numbers on them). Here is a currency that is used without any State power behind it.
So my point is if Bitcoin fails it does not show that money without central government cannot exist, we already know it can. More interesting question about Bitcoin is can money exist that is based purely on confidence and without central government. Now that is the combination here, not that it is not issued by central gov't but that it is only backed by confidence in the protocol. It is not gold, so it has no intrinsic value, sure, its amount is limited, but even that is not completely true, it can be subdivided into a huge number of smaller units (like micro-bitcoins).
The immediate possible failure of this currency that comes to mind is that if confidence is lost at any point, it will be irrelevant that the number of the coins is limited to a precise amount and cannot be increased. Rarity itself does not guarantee usage as money when it comes to currencies that have no intrinsic value.
Interesting thing about Bitcoins, I spent a few hours looking at Bitcoin protocol, seemed to me it could be used for electronic voting and apparently many people thought the same.
They could also block the rest of the buttons and only have them activate when a certain key sequence is pushed. Email is often used by people without looking at the message, having all of the previous messages in every new reply, sometimes it seems like people really need a wiki like communication system rather than email.
Oh, please, now you are trying weasel out of your own incompetence.
'A politician could start a war' - and without government involvement in regulations of business and money how would he finance it (no money manipulation, because that's a regulation that definitely contradicts freedom of the market, so can't create debt and have the Fed monetise it) and how would he sell the idea of the war to the public? The public that operates in a free market doesn't gain from war, it gains from peaceful coexistence, it has trade relations with domestic and foreign partners. The best way to avoid war is to have free market without government regulations.
Governments start war, politicians start war, but they can only do it if the public doesn't care. In USA the public doesn't care because politicians manipulate money supply and can borrow seemingly without limits, in a free market that's not the case at all! Government can't set fake interest rates, like it does now, so to borrow money during free market for something as unproductive as war is a much more expensive (from POV of public) affair than when the public doesn't care where the money comes from, doesn't care because it is not immediately affected by inflation.
People would be dead set against all wars unless the war is brought to them by an aggressor.
As to 'non-market issues' - sure. A politician can sell his vote on whether to commemorate some person on some day (but since he can't push for market issues, he can't for example declare a new mandatory holiday or some such nonsense).
POTUS can sell pardons? Sure, they do that now. Yeah, it sucks but for what type of crimes? Certainly there wouldn't be many bankers in jail except for those who are caught stealing directly from customers. Without gov't manipulating the markets, rules and taxes and fake money there can't be any widespread fraud going on. Somebody like Madoff can go to jail regardless of whether the market is free or not (less likely to go to jail in a non-free market), but so POTUS would be letting go of murderers and rapists?
Not even POTUS is immune from public opinion. I think a POTUS letting go of some rapist because of moneyed interest may just be impeached himself if it gets out, it's too risky. POTUS sells influence today, but today there is no free market and there are quite a number of other issues on the table that muddy the waters to pay attention to some under the table pardon deals.
A senator can filibuster a nominee and do it for the sake of a contributor/briber.... but so what? AFAIC if the politicians have zero influence in market they can be all bribed, the question becomes: who will waste the money?
Why bother bribing a politician who can't steal individual freedoms from people and sell that power by accepting the contributions? Go ahead, bribe the shit out of him, it's your wasted money. What are you really buying?
Does it matter who the POTUS even is by the way in a non-regulated market? I don't see the difference. Non-regulated market: market without government sticking its nose into business, gov't that doesn't tax production, no income taxes, government that does not manipulate money, no money printing, no interest rate setting, no new departments that would get any executive power to apply fancy rules against anybody in the market.
Who gives a shit who the POTUS is? The POTUS is just a position, they are all there supposed to be protecting and defending the Constitution, if they are not fucking with markets and money then they can spend more time thinking about their actual duties.
CIA director selling access to citizen emails to Rupert Murdoch - that's happening today probably, certainly something similar happened in UK.
The real question is: what is to stop CIA director from selling this to Murdoch regardless of whether the market is free or not? In a free market, why would CIA director even have access to citizens' emails in the first place? So in a free market CIA sells access, are you telling me it works differently in any other market?
You are so reaching for straws and various other floating devices, because you are drowning.
Well, you got an 'insightful' mode for this completely uninsightful comment, so that certainly illustrates something about /. moderation scheme.
Here is why you are not insightful, in fact you put together 2 separate statements that contradict each other, didn't notice it, and thus derived to a completely wrong conclusion.
Here it is:
A free market is a market with zero regulations - zero.
- this is a correct statement. Now, there can be degrees of freedom within a market, the more regulations exist, the less free the market is (and conversely the fewer regulations make the market more free).
Then you put this into your comment:
. In such a market you could buy or sell anything without limitation, certainly including political influence.
Well there you go. Your completely uninsightful and thus wrong conclusion is that free market is 'bad'.
However you just said it: free market has 0 regulations.
Given 0 regulations, what kind of political influence can money buy if there is nothing that a politician can do to manipulate the market since he has no tools to manipulate the market with 0 regulations over it?
It's amazing how un-insightful that comment was.
This will never go away until it is ingrained in the minds of a large enough segment of the population that copyrights and patents should not be in fact laws, copyright and patent holders should not be able to use government laws to grant themselves any special protections.
I know it is about as popular as my other views on economics or politics for now, but it is just as much the reality: copyrights and patents hurt the economy and society much more than they benefit it.
Or somebody with a large enough penetrating probe could just use his real exit node..... because after this ruling he deserves it.
Which "greens" are you talking about?
- I gave enough reference in my comment, are you asking me for more? All greens have socialist demands, they are all talking about 'green jobs' and 'green plan' and they are all talking about price and wage and exchange controls and they are all talking about taxes and regulations. What's wrong with wage controls? Well I wrote plenty on the topic not to have to repeat myself.
In a "free market" nothing changes until prices dictate it. T
- prices that 'dictate it' is people that dictate it. The higher the prices of one product or service the less it will be used or the more alternatives there will be, that's precisely how things change in a free market (no double quotes needed around the term), free market means voluntary market, market free of extraneous regulations, free of coercion forced by threat of violence.
We want the change NOW.
- most people do not want that, if they did, they would be behaving accordingly. People who truly want 'change now' can act upon their desires now, they can go for alternative methods themselves, paying more in the process.
So we have to use political means to do that.
- precisely, you want threat of government violence over everybody now, to get your technocratic goals achieved. But that is precisely my point about the greens being socialists (collectivists, central planners), which I gave references for as well. Greens want totalitarian regime, they want control of other people's lives now, they want all sorts of controls that are not market forced.
Jill Stein is green, I gave enough references to her own words. She says, not I, she says: I want price controls, wage controls, green 'new deal' (job controls via gov't). She says: I want nationalisation of companies, I want draft, I want central planning, I want new taxes. So she is exactly on the path that you are apparently cheering for, what's your question then? I already answered it then, she is a socialist, collectivist, central planner, totalitarian, authoritarian, anti-capitalist, anti-individualist technocrat. I am against every tiny thing she stands for, that's all.
Yes, it is democracy (unfortunately, it shouldn't be, because democracy is tyranny, I explained many times, here is one time I did)
the german economy is thriving ... the environment is superb.
- I don't see the German economy thriving, I am in Germany this very moment, I see a huge collectivist hive, I see huge inefficient collectivist self-destructive system that is chocking, especially since the moment of unification, when Eastern Germany was put on welfare basically and since then huge part of the entire Europe was put on welfare and the German tax payer is forced into this insane slavery, subsidising every socialist around him. Germans were robbed the moment Euro was introduced, Germany is on a path to self destruction with this socialist agenda.
Germany has made another dumb move by deciding to stop all of its nuclear power plants. But hey, that's not my life's problem, it's Germany's problem. You are free to do whatever you want, and implement any socialist scheme there can be, I sure don't want any part of it and you are going to end up just like the rest of the socialist states, which all eventually self-destruct their economies.
Chinese are buying German manufacturing already, I was in one event in Baden Baden dedicated exactly to that.
The collective has decided that it does not want nuclear.
Greens decided that they are against nuclear.
It's not carbon and not nuclear. It needs to be clean. A lot of it has to do with redirecting our economy to less carbon intensive, relocalized versions of the economy.
(never mind the other obvious problems with the 'greens' being that they are in fact socialists, collectivists, central planners pushing for price controls, exchange controls, wage controls, draft, marshal law, nationalisation, all the worst parts of authoritarian, dictatorial, tyrannical, anti-individual, anti-human, anti-free market, anti-capitalist ideology)
So the collective decided that it does not want nuclear, just like the collective decided that it does not want free market competitive capitalism, but instead wants collectivism. It's all complete nonsense and it is destroying the economy as well as the environment.
If that's your goal, then you have to get rid of the psychopaths in government, because without them the private industry cannot do any of the stuff that you are complaining about.
Maybe it's not impossible, but it surely isn't likely for private banks to construct a scheme where they all lend money to people who they know cannot pay the money back, but they lend to them anyway because the government guarantees the loans and passes laws that push banks towards making those types of loans (setting quotas on how many loans must be made in subprime market and guaranteeing those loans with 'free', sorry, public money. Doing all this while the Federal reserve gives out free credit to the banks and destroys the interest rates in the process, pushing bankers to search for yield not in normal business but with extremely risky stuff).
What would you do as a banker if you couldn't find yield no matter where you looked, because the gov't manipulated the money supply and interest rates?
What would you do if the government provided you with enough rope (fake insurance) to hang yourself and your customers in the process? The system is rigged by government to inflate and implode.
You don't need to be a psychopath to do what the bankers did actually, you just have to be desperate for yield in an economy that no longer provided any legitimate economic activity and the only activity that was provided was by the Federal reserve creating and giving you fake money and by government pushing you into specific sectors like stock market and housing (and now government debt, treasuries).
Bernanke came out couple of days ago, telling the government to absolutely not reduce government spending and not to raise taxes (to avoid the so called nonsensical 'fiscal cliff', going over which would actually be a tiny step towards solving the problem of deficit and debt), so he advised the government to create more debt, which he promised to monetise.
He said all that while yapping about 'making sure that the world knows that USA is serious about solving its debt problem'. Ok.
OK, lets abolish the police, because no one has the moral superiority to hinder you from burglaring, robbing and killing someone
- first of all police function to prevent criminal behaviour has nothing to do with government function to ensure individual liberty.
People are perfectly capable setting up private criminal code and private security forces without involving any level of government, but generally they do it on municipal or regional level, but definitely not federal one, of-course USA today has huge number of armed federal agents enforcing all sorts of rules against individuals, but hey, the laws set by the Constitution no longer apply.
What some libertarians constantly forget is that personal freedom does exist solely because there is a society that provides those freedoms to you.
- personal freedoms are very small today, they used to be much greater, they especially increase after large wars that involve large amount of population. It is not society, it is individuals that are willing to fight for freedoms and the longer they allow the periods between such fights, the less freedoms they have. Society is quite happy to deny personal freedoms to individuals, it is not the society, it is individuals that must fight the tyranny that society sets up over some number of years in order to reset the system to a less tyrannical state.
If you go down to the source of each freedom you have, you will see that you only have them because society provides it to you.
- no, the freedoms are not what 'society provides' the freedom are those that society is DENIED FROM TAKING by individuals. It's not other individuals that infringe upon our freedoms, it's the collective.
For instance you only have a right to free speech, because society restricts the freedom of everyone else to hit you in the face for what you say.
- multiple failures in a single sentence.
The freedom is not to be protected from somebody punching me in the face, the freedom is in denying the society the ability to abuse me collectively. If you want to punch me in the face for what I am saying it's between you and I, it's not a freedom that is denied to me, it's just an individual conflict on a very local level.
When the government comes after me for saying what the government doesn't want people to say, that is when the freedoms are denied, and it is the role of the individuals to reset such abusive and tyrannical governments and maximise individuals freedoms.
Unfortunately I couldn't leave the above comment under my actual account, thus the AC. But if you want to put me into a 'foe' list based on my statement, this is the account you are looking for.
Your notion of 'exploiting workers' comes out of misunderstanding of voluntary contract obligations based on mutually beneficial agreement. In a free society any worker that feels that he is not treated right has the absolute right to quit, that's all.
When an employer advertises a job and gov't decides that it will put obligations on the employer to advertise the job in any specific manner (cannot discriminate against anybody, cannot have wage lower than some minimum, cannot do this, cannot do that, cannot pay a woman less than a man, etc.etc.), all of this is destruction of individual freedoms.
An employer is an individual, he should be able to advertise whatever he wants, that's part of his freedoms: right to own and operate private property, freedom of speech, so freedom to speak one's mind without abuse and discrimination by government, not by other individuals.
The right to sign a two party contract is paramount, free people cannot allow any gov't to stand between 2 individuals signing any mutually beneficial agreement.
Of-course there is criminal law (which by the way shouldn't be gov't business either, but there can be criminal law not based on gov't), so this means an employer will be liable for murder for example if he ends up killing the employee (or the other way around), but this in fact has nothing to do with the signed contract.
Can't sign a contract like this: "I, the employee, agree to be murdered by the employer" and expect that the outside forces that look after the criminal conduct will honour the terms.
However minimum wage law for example has nothing to do with criminal code, it's not murder to offer somebody a wage that is for example half of some number that gov't arbitrarily chooses to be the minimum for reasons of trying to hide the real problem in the economy: inflation that is created by gov't.
As to unions, people have the right to free association, this means employees can organise. However they cannot force the employer in fact to negotiate with the union rather than with every employee individually. The employee has the right to quit in search for a better job (better price for selling labour), the employer has the right to fire in search for a better deal (better price for buying labour).
Health care is a private matter completely, it's none of gov't concern, like all other products and services. The history is clear of-course, every gov't attempt to get into the health care, education, housing and credit markets, banking, energy, etc., makes things much worse and more expensive, not better and cheaper. That's because the free market competitive capitalist system is the best system for production (creation) and distribution of products and services, it pushes for competition rather than collusion, and the worst type of collusion is gov't collusion based on power of the accepted gov't authority.