It starts to be pretty crowded on the "them" side.
- I completely agree with you and I comment on this very problem here enough, that if necessary I'll give you literally dozens of examples.
Absolutely there shouldn't be any privileges to anybody given out by government, but then the government shouldn't be as powerful and as large as it is, so that nobody would be in a position to pay for such privileges and get them at the expense of the market.
Purchased? Who said anything about purchased? The bond holders were wiped out, their shares were stolen, that's first.
Secondly - in a free market you are not forced into any transaction by the force of government.
Thirdly: the CEO of GM might have been incompetent, in fact Chrysler was already bailed out once before in 1979 by Jimmy Carter. 1.5 Billion USD was given to them by the gov't and then the US military bought who knows how many thousands of Dodge pickup trucks (M-880). This was a bail out and a stimulus package all in one.
The fact is that GM would have been in a much better shape today if the company was allowed to dissolve and assets would have been sold at various auctions to other companies. Nobody would have bought the entire disaster of a company, but none of the factories and equipment would have just been destroyed.
A fire-sale would have occurred, the assets would have been purchased at much lower prices than what GM was valued at the time, bond holders would have lost probably 60-80%.
BUT it wouldn't have been a disaster as it was - with the company being confiscated, the US gov't showing once more that it is really a totalitarian state of men and NOT a state of laws.
The union would have dissolved and the same people who worked for GM would have been hired again by the companies who would have bought the then cheaper assets.
The US tax payer wouldn't have been on the hook for this and the USD wouldn't have been diluted some more by the Fed.
Yes, GM should have absolutely been allowed to go through a normal bankruptcy and restructuring procedure. The US government has shown more of its true colours.
Those societies aren't civilised because the slaves within them are force to pay taxes, those societies become civilised because there are plenty of businesses and people who work and the government robs them of their lives.
I am paying plenty of taxes, but if I didn't do everything in my power to minimise what I pay, I'd be paying probably 3 times more.
Where I live we pay fire insurance to a private company and part of that money goes towards fire department.
By the way, the people who are forced to pay taxes towards fire dep't should absolutely be using that service. Are you telling me that somebody who is paying taxes towards that shouldn't be getting the service? If so, then the gov't shouldn't be upholding a monopoly on fire departments. Do you have half or only 1/3 of a brain?
You know, the thing that actually seems to have saved the company.
- it's a good thing you type this as AC, otherwise we'd see who is really retarded here.
Saving a company by confiscating it from the owners?
Saving a company by CONFISCATING IT from the OWNERS?
Well, if you believe that the company's purpose is to provide jobs and that the purpose of a government is to ensure that owners get shafted, then they 'saved the company'.
You are such an cretin. A company is built and exists only for ONE PURPOSE: to make money for the owners.
If it loses the money for the owners, the company is failing. If it loses all the money for the owners by being confiscated it has failed completely. That company has completely failed, just like your brain.
Who gets hurt now? Not the students but Microsoft.
- stop pretending you want what's best for Microsoft, if you wanted that, you'd be asking for government to stop taxing and regulating the company.
--
The government does not create the infrastructure, because the wealth that is used to build the infrastructure comes out of individual earnings and out of businesses making money. Infrastructure gets created when there is a reason for it - the profit motive. OTOH the gov't builds whatever it wants not because there is a market driven reason for it, but because the money can be stolen from people and divided nicely between the companies and the politicians that are involved in this theft.
The companies AND people would do much better if they weren't forced into this government mandated slavery, and I insist that taxes are theft, taxes are forced labour and what is forced labour if it's not slavery?
Slavery is forced labour, and what we observed here is that democracy leads to slavery very easily, as the mob votes for the bread and circuses politicians, such as Theodore Roosevelt and then the gov't decides it has 'the mandate' to steal ever more freedoms from people, you get Fed, IRS, FDIC, etc., and as the gov't grows, you are forced to pay more and more towards it.
It's slavery, it's nothing but slavery, and the worst part you are still for it as you still don't get it.
Government will eventually be confiscating ever more businesses (GM 'bailout' was a huge confiscation, the bondholders lost everything to the government, which confiscated their property and then redistributed it to the unions).
I mentioned this earlier - the economy is getting so weak due to all of the government intervention into it, that eventually the totalitarian Neanderthals in it will be forcing companies that still make a profit (likely because they have a large foreign customer base) to pay various windfall taxes to US government. Holding USD denominated assets is becoming more and more dangerous.
There was a time in Tsarist Russia when men were used rather than horses to haul barges along the Volga. Nobody âoeforcedâ these men to work at hauling barges.
- yeah, that was the time of free market, right?
Wait, NO. In Tsarist Russia there was no free market, there were feudals and there was a tsar, thus TSARIST Russia.
And the people you are speaking of were called 'burlaki'. And since they couldn't find anything else to do, they should have been happy to get jobs that were available at the time.
And then the capitalist system allowed some companies to pool enough savings and invest into motorising those barges and eventually the people who would have otherwise worked as 'burlaki' could work elsewhere, because motorised shipping created enough efficiencies that allowed much more production to take place. Also motorised shipping required a more educated work force and the wealth generated by the capitalist bastards was paying for that education through salaries to the parents of the kids who were educated.
As to why use men rather than horses - well, because in many cases the men were cheaper to use than horses, how is that not clear? Also men can deal with difficult situations that happen on the roads better than horses can.
Was it a 'free market' system? Not at all. Free market means no government intervention in the system, and the government that allowed slavery (and feudals owned entire villages of slaves) has nothing to do with anything that even remotely can be called 'free', you dumb ass.
His 24-year-old sister, Cera Fearing, wanted to give him hers.
- she wanted to give him hers, well, if they could transplant it into another patient, then she should be suing the shit out of them for not transplanting it BACK INTO HER.
Yes, because two media moguls would never twist news coverage to force a government into a war it didn't want just to feed their circulation rivalry.
- there wouldn't even be those media moguls, were it not for government creating all sorts of barriers to entry to help those very 'media moguls' in the first place, and secondly again: without government there are no wars. No person starts a war, a government starts a war. Government steals your money and sends you or others to war to kill other people, while it's really a government fighting against another government with blood and money of people who don't want to be in these wars.
People don't go to wars, governments go to wars. Governments pursue their agenda, governments steal money, governments start the wars and then people are forced to participate and die in them, dear AC.
What you call 'failure to make practical use of the theoretical work' - I call market at the time deciding that the spending on these programs was not worth the effort.
People are free to dissent, I suppose you'd impose your world view on them, forcing them to do as you please rather than what they believed was in their best interest, rightly or wrongly from you POV, from their POV it was their freedom, and freedom trumps anything else, AFAIC.
The wars, by the way, were caused by governments, not by individual entrepreneurs, neither then, nor today. I take my chances with free market, at least it is not going to push the world into another war.
So "the technology of the time" would itself have been different if the Government of the day had grasped just what it had, and made a real push for it.
- it's a good thing they didn't.
So more people would have to pay more taxes just so that government could have another program to run? An extremely difficult to build with the technologies of the time machinery of dubious value to the ordinary people of the time just so that the government could have more war related tools at its disposal? Better navigation and better gun aiming tools I bet.
Thank you Charles Babbage, but thank you also for not being able to convince any government that your work should have been funded by the taxes.
You are ignorant of the fact that business can become anti-capitalist and/or fascist. You imagine that anyone who decries evil that corporations do must be marxist or socialist.
- not at all. You are clearly unfamiliar with the history of my comments.
I absolutely agree with you. But you are looking at the consequence of government selling power to businesses and you believe that's the cause. You are ignorant on the cause and effect in these matters.
The more power that government holds, the more power it can sell. The more power that government holds, means the less power that individuals have.
If government is very powerful, it only means one thing: it is controlling actions of individuals. Individuals run businesses, so a powerful government controls individuals and controls businesses, and it is only NATURAL and MUST HAPPEN that when there is this overpowering overbearing government system, that individuals and their businesses adapt to the circumstances of such power inequality.
It is the the power concentrated in the hands of the politicians that allows businesses to buy access, to rent that power (never buy it, always only rent it). The businesses are NOT inherently evil. They are inherently good, because they give us products we want (and supply us with jobs we unfortunately need).
However when a powerful government exists, it is powerful by definition because it is controlling too much. It wouldn't be powerful if it didn't control too much. A business must adapt, it must try and spend money in a way that would allow it to go around the barriers that the powerful government sets in front of it.
Unfortunately for all of us, once certain businesses buy/rent certain politicians, the power of the state is then sold/rented to the businesses, now THEN you have fascism (and that's what you have now) - government and businesses merging lucratively.
This is my point, it always is my point. Businesses are all people that provide other people with products and services, and exchange of products and services happens voluntarily, and that's why businesses are inherently good - they give us what we want. This is the highest form of democracy - you vote daily on what businesses you support with your money.
Government is a structure that allows few people to gain power without providing anything that the market actually is willing to pay for, it pools power in hands of few, and power that is pooled is power that is used to stifle people and their businesses, and this is the power that can be sold/rented, and this is the power that is inherently evil.
- I was born in and I left the USSR, one of the most despotic countries of 20th century. Despotic. Dictatorial. Totalitarian. Why didn't I stay there? Because I am not masochistic?
both government and business need limitations because they inherently do evil because of lust for money and power.
- I disagree.
Government is the inherent evil, I completely 100% on board with that.
Business is inherent GOOD. Business is what turned the economy around from everybody being subsistence farmers, hunters gatherers into these city dwellers, who are now critiquing the very businesses that provide all the goods and services to billions of people for not doing their 'fair share'. This is hight of hypocrisy.
I know that many socialists and Marxists and statists love to repeat the mantra: taxes buy me the civilisation, but they are completely wrong. They are totally and irrevocably wrong, completely incorrect, completely ignorant on this issue.
It is BUSINESS - people trying to profit that are building civilisation. It's not government, never government, under no circumstances is it government that actually creates wealth. All of the wealth is created by businesses, governments can only steal that wealth. Every government position is position of inherent evil. Some of it we concede to be necessary (not me, I don't see any necessity in government at all, every single thing can and should be done privately), but many people believe that some form of government must exist - necessary evil. For example protection of borders (should be done with private militia of-course), criminal court (should be private), police (should be private security) but even if it's not private security, police should have nothing to do with federal gov't. Fire dep't, medicine, schools, infrastructure, money, interest rates, every single thing only should be done privately, then we'd have much more wealth than what we have today.
But the point is that all things are created by businesses.
Without government there are no monopolies, all monopolies are created by the governments, and those large businesses that are economies of scale provide us with best products at lowest prices - this is not done by governments.
And the answer is: it depends. capitalism helps rich people increasing their wealth, while the poor get poorer.
- wrong.
Capitalism allows people to increase their productivity by reusing their own investment capital.
If you produce something and don't consume all of it, you are now a capitalist, because you are accruing capital investment. Now you can do with it as you wish - you can reuse it in your own business to grow it, you can loan it out for somebody else to use to build their own business and you can rightfully expect a return on that investment based on your contract with the debtor.
You can burn it.
Democracy is an antidote, since the many poor can force some wealth redistribution through taxes.
- capitalism is the tool that decreases poverty. Never in history of humanity has poverty been decreased so much as during capitalism. Capitalism provides the people in the market with the goods and services that are overproduced when a capitalist tries to increase his own wealth.
Wealth of all people is increased by a capitalist, who is underconsuming what he is overproducing and in he is using the savings that are underconsumed as investment to build more products and services.
Poor people are served best by capitalists looking for profit, not by any government of the world.
By the way, democracy is a gateway to tyranny, as the mob is only too happy to give away its freedoms to the government via quite democratic means - voting for bread and circuses totalitarian government means taking steps towards tyranny and it's done very democratically. USA was started as a representative republic so that the mob wouldn't be in a position to vote the individual freedoms away for a promise of bread and circuses taxation based tyranny.
And we should be glad this mechanism exists, since when the poor gets too poor to buy what is produced, the economy collapse.
- if the poor are NOT participating in the production process but are sustained by the taxes applied to those, who produce, then this argument is the most ignorant, the stupidest argument in the world.
So a person works and produces goods, then he is taxed so that some people can be given that tax money and buy his product?
So he is robbed TWICE. First time is when he is taxed and second time when he is paid HIS OWN MONEY for HIS OWN PRODUCTS, so now he gets TWICE THE WORK for no benefit!
And this is the basics of modern economics - Keynesian cretinism.
Telling that taxes should be low is not a natural truth, it is a political opinion, and depending on the economical situation, following that route may be harmful for everyone
- the USA became the world biggest producer and creditor in the world with 0 income taxes.
0 income taxes. 0 payroll taxes. 0 corporate taxes. 0 capital gains taxes. 0 dividend taxes.
0 FED, 0 FDIC, 0 EPA, 0 FDA, 0 FHA, 0 HUD, 0 FBI, 0 minimum wage, 0 entitlement and obligation of the so called 'civil rights', 0 dep't of energy, 0 dep't of education, 0 dep't of commerce, 0 dep't of transportation, 0 dep't of interior, 0 SS, 0 Medicare, 0 undeclared wars.
A person might not force you to work for them but circumstances very well might.
- so what? Everybody has 'circumstances'. Just because you have circumstances doesn't mean you get privileges, which require other people to be obliged to you with anything.
Unions came into existence precisely because it was difficult for some people to find alternative employment and some companies took advantage of that face.
- there is no problem with unions, there is a problem with government coming up with laws regarding unions, employers, employees.
When your choice is between your privacy and feeding your family, your privacy is going to lose most of the time.
- it is your choice. You can also find something else to do, nobody owes you anything.
The rest of your comment is just more irrelevant nonsense.
Oh, and by the way, to those, who will reply to me with nonsense like: government must protect us from the evil corporations.
Stop and think for a second: nobody forces you to work for any of those companies and if you actively refused to work for them if they violated your privacy, they'd stop doing it, just the PR alone is going to be a problem for them.
But with a government... how are you going to opt out of that? With a company you can opt out. You can not buy the product, you can avoid being employed with them, but how do you opt out of being targeted by the NSA, TSA, etc? You can't avoid the government.
The government creates the ultimate monopolies and you can't opt out either of paying them or participating in their programs.
How about governments stops meddling with every single business and person out there, introducing all these nonsense laws, while actively snooping on everybody on this planet without any justification, cause and mandate?
Just this NSA data center is a much bigger privacy risk than any number of employees who are dumb enough to ask for FB access of their potential hires and these potential workers being dumb and unprincipled enough to give it to them.
How about NSA stops doing THAT? Never mind the extra-judicial murder the president is involved in.
Shouldn't laws apply to the government first?
Shouldn't the government not be allowed to do things that an individual isn't allowed to do in the first place?
Slashdot Mirror
It starts to be pretty crowded on the "them" side.
- I completely agree with you and I comment on this very problem here enough, that if necessary I'll give you literally dozens of examples.
Absolutely there shouldn't be any privileges to anybody given out by government, but then the government shouldn't be as powerful and as large as it is, so that nobody would be in a position to pay for such privileges and get them at the expense of the market.
They did worse: they destroyed the business and they showed themselves to be again the nation of men, not the nation of laws. I commented in this thread on this already.
Purchased? Who said anything about purchased? The bond holders were wiped out, their shares were stolen, that's first.
Secondly - in a free market you are not forced into any transaction by the force of government.
Thirdly: the CEO of GM might have been incompetent, in fact Chrysler was already bailed out once before in 1979 by Jimmy Carter. 1.5 Billion USD was given to them by the gov't and then the US military bought who knows how many thousands of Dodge pickup trucks (M-880). This was a bail out and a stimulus package all in one.
The fact is that GM would have been in a much better shape today if the company was allowed to dissolve and assets would have been sold at various auctions to other companies. Nobody would have bought the entire disaster of a company, but none of the factories and equipment would have just been destroyed.
A fire-sale would have occurred, the assets would have been purchased at much lower prices than what GM was valued at the time, bond holders would have lost probably 60-80%.
BUT it wouldn't have been a disaster as it was - with the company being confiscated, the US gov't showing once more that it is really a totalitarian state of men and NOT a state of laws.
The union would have dissolved and the same people who worked for GM would have been hired again by the companies who would have bought the then cheaper assets.
The US tax payer wouldn't have been on the hook for this and the USD wouldn't have been diluted some more by the Fed.
Yes, GM should have absolutely been allowed to go through a normal bankruptcy and restructuring procedure. The US government has shown more of its true colours.
Those societies aren't civilised because the slaves within them are force to pay taxes, those societies become civilised because there are plenty of businesses and people who work and the government robs them of their lives.
I am paying plenty of taxes, but if I didn't do everything in my power to minimise what I pay, I'd be paying probably 3 times more.
Where I live we pay fire insurance to a private company and part of that money goes towards fire department.
By the way, the people who are forced to pay taxes towards fire dep't should absolutely be using that service. Are you telling me that somebody who is paying taxes towards that shouldn't be getting the service? If so, then the gov't shouldn't be upholding a monopoly on fire departments. Do you have half or only 1/3 of a brain?
you're saying Hitler wasn't government?
You know, the thing that actually seems to have saved the company.
- it's a good thing you type this as AC, otherwise we'd see who is really retarded here.
Saving a company by confiscating it from the owners?
Saving a company by CONFISCATING IT from the OWNERS?
Well, if you believe that the company's purpose is to provide jobs and that the purpose of a government is to ensure that owners get shafted, then they 'saved the company'.
You are such an cretin. A company is built and exists only for ONE PURPOSE: to make money for the owners.
If it loses the money for the owners, the company is failing. If it loses all the money for the owners by being confiscated it has failed completely. That company has completely failed, just like your brain.
Who gets hurt now? Not the students but Microsoft.
- stop pretending you want what's best for Microsoft, if you wanted that, you'd be asking for government to stop taxing and regulating the company.
--
The government does not create the infrastructure, because the wealth that is used to build the infrastructure comes out of individual earnings and out of businesses making money. Infrastructure gets created when there is a reason for it - the profit motive. OTOH the gov't builds whatever it wants not because there is a market driven reason for it, but because the money can be stolen from people and divided nicely between the companies and the politicians that are involved in this theft.
The companies AND people would do much better if they weren't forced into this government mandated slavery, and I insist that taxes are theft, taxes are forced labour and what is forced labour if it's not slavery?
Slavery is forced labour, and what we observed here is that democracy leads to slavery very easily, as the mob votes for the bread and circuses politicians, such as Theodore Roosevelt and then the gov't decides it has 'the mandate' to steal ever more freedoms from people, you get Fed, IRS, FDIC, etc., and as the gov't grows, you are forced to pay more and more towards it.
It's slavery, it's nothing but slavery, and the worst part you are still for it as you still don't get it.
As long as teachers are paid with tax and/or fake inflation money, the people who pay these taxes should be against them.
Government will eventually be confiscating ever more businesses (GM 'bailout' was a huge confiscation, the bondholders lost everything to the government, which confiscated their property and then redistributed it to the unions).
I mentioned this earlier - the economy is getting so weak due to all of the government intervention into it, that eventually the totalitarian Neanderthals in it will be forcing companies that still make a profit (likely because they have a large foreign customer base) to pay various windfall taxes to US government. Holding USD denominated assets is becoming more and more dangerous.
There was a time in Tsarist Russia when men were used rather than horses to haul barges along the Volga. Nobody âoeforcedâ these men to work at hauling barges.
- yeah, that was the time of free market, right?
Wait, NO. In Tsarist Russia there was no free market, there were feudals and there was a tsar, thus TSARIST Russia.
And the people you are speaking of were called 'burlaki'. And since they couldn't find anything else to do, they should have been happy to get jobs that were available at the time.
And then the capitalist system allowed some companies to pool enough savings and invest into motorising those barges and eventually the people who would have otherwise worked as 'burlaki' could work elsewhere, because motorised shipping created enough efficiencies that allowed much more production to take place. Also motorised shipping required a more educated work force and the wealth generated by the capitalist bastards was paying for that education through salaries to the parents of the kids who were educated.
As to why use men rather than horses - well, because in many cases the men were cheaper to use than horses, how is that not clear? Also men can deal with difficult situations that happen on the roads better than horses can.
Was it a 'free market' system? Not at all. Free market means no government intervention in the system, and the government that allowed slavery (and feudals owned entire villages of slaves) has nothing to do with anything that even remotely can be called 'free', you dumb ass.
His 24-year-old sister, Cera Fearing, wanted to give him hers.
- she wanted to give him hers, well, if they could transplant it into another patient, then she should be suing the shit out of them for not transplanting it BACK INTO HER.
And this still doesn't explain why I pee with my left hand and masturbate with my right hand.
- It definitely doesn't explain any of THAT! I believe most people don't pee with their hands.
Yes, because two media moguls would never twist news coverage to force a government into a war it didn't want just to feed their circulation rivalry.
- there wouldn't even be those media moguls, were it not for government creating all sorts of barriers to entry to help those very 'media moguls' in the first place, and secondly again: without government there are no wars. No person starts a war, a government starts a war. Government steals your money and sends you or others to war to kill other people, while it's really a government fighting against another government with blood and money of people who don't want to be in these wars.
People don't go to wars, governments go to wars. Governments pursue their agenda, governments steal money, governments start the wars and then people are forced to participate and die in them, dear AC.
What you call 'failure to make practical use of the theoretical work' - I call market at the time deciding that the spending on these programs was not worth the effort.
People are free to dissent, I suppose you'd impose your world view on them, forcing them to do as you please rather than what they believed was in their best interest, rightly or wrongly from you POV, from their POV it was their freedom, and freedom trumps anything else, AFAIC.
The wars, by the way, were caused by governments, not by individual entrepreneurs, neither then, nor today. I take my chances with free market, at least it is not going to push the world into another war.
So "the technology of the time" would itself have been different if the Government of the day had grasped just what it had, and made a real push for it.
- it's a good thing they didn't.
So more people would have to pay more taxes just so that government could have another program to run? An extremely difficult to build with the technologies of the time machinery of dubious value to the ordinary people of the time just so that the government could have more war related tools at its disposal? Better navigation and better gun aiming tools I bet.
Thank you Charles Babbage, but thank you also for not being able to convince any government that your work should have been funded by the taxes.
You are ignorant of the fact that business can become anti-capitalist and/or fascist. You imagine that anyone who decries evil that corporations do must be marxist or socialist.
- not at all. You are clearly unfamiliar with the history of my comments.
I absolutely agree with you. But you are looking at the consequence of government selling power to businesses and you believe that's the cause. You are ignorant on the cause and effect in these matters.
The more power that government holds, the more power it can sell. The more power that government holds, means the less power that individuals have.
If government is very powerful, it only means one thing: it is controlling actions of individuals. Individuals run businesses, so a powerful government controls individuals and controls businesses, and it is only NATURAL and MUST HAPPEN that when there is this overpowering overbearing government system, that individuals and their businesses adapt to the circumstances of such power inequality.
It is the the power concentrated in the hands of the politicians that allows businesses to buy access, to rent that power (never buy it, always only rent it). The businesses are NOT inherently evil. They are inherently good, because they give us products we want (and supply us with jobs we unfortunately need).
However when a powerful government exists, it is powerful by definition because it is controlling too much. It wouldn't be powerful if it didn't control too much. A business must adapt, it must try and spend money in a way that would allow it to go around the barriers that the powerful government sets in front of it.
Unfortunately for all of us, once certain businesses buy/rent certain politicians, the power of the state is then sold/rented to the businesses, now THEN you have fascism (and that's what you have now) - government and businesses merging lucratively.
This is my point, it always is my point. Businesses are all people that provide other people with products and services, and exchange of products and services happens voluntarily, and that's why businesses are inherently good - they give us what we want. This is the highest form of democracy - you vote daily on what businesses you support with your money.
Government is a structure that allows few people to gain power without providing anything that the market actually is willing to pay for, it pools power in hands of few, and power that is pooled is power that is used to stifle people and their businesses, and this is the power that can be sold/rented, and this is the power that is inherently evil.
Why didn't you stay in Russia?
- I was born in and I left the USSR, one of the most despotic countries of 20th century. Despotic. Dictatorial. Totalitarian. Why didn't I stay there? Because I am not masochistic?
both government and business need limitations because they inherently do evil because of lust for money and power.
- I disagree.
Government is the inherent evil, I completely 100% on board with that.
Business is inherent GOOD. Business is what turned the economy around from everybody being subsistence farmers, hunters gatherers into these city dwellers, who are now critiquing the very businesses that provide all the goods and services to billions of people for not doing their 'fair share'. This is hight of hypocrisy.
I know that many socialists and Marxists and statists love to repeat the mantra: taxes buy me the civilisation, but they are completely wrong. They are totally and irrevocably wrong, completely incorrect, completely ignorant on this issue.
It is BUSINESS - people trying to profit that are building civilisation. It's not government, never government, under no circumstances is it government that actually creates wealth. All of the wealth is created by businesses, governments can only steal that wealth. Every government position is position of inherent evil. Some of it we concede to be necessary (not me, I don't see any necessity in government at all, every single thing can and should be done privately), but many people believe that some form of government must exist - necessary evil. For example protection of borders (should be done with private militia of-course), criminal court (should be private), police (should be private security) but even if it's not private security, police should have nothing to do with federal gov't. Fire dep't, medicine, schools, infrastructure, money, interest rates, every single thing only should be done privately, then we'd have much more wealth than what we have today.
But the point is that all things are created by businesses.
Without government there are no monopolies, all monopolies are created by the governments, and those large businesses that are economies of scale provide us with best products at lowest prices - this is not done by governments.
And the answer is: it depends. capitalism helps rich people increasing their wealth, while the poor get poorer.
- wrong.
Capitalism allows people to increase their productivity by reusing their own investment capital.
If you produce something and don't consume all of it, you are now a capitalist, because you are accruing capital investment. Now you can do with it as you wish - you can reuse it in your own business to grow it, you can loan it out for somebody else to use to build their own business and you can rightfully expect a return on that investment based on your contract with the debtor.
You can burn it.
Democracy is an antidote, since the many poor can force some wealth redistribution through taxes.
- capitalism is the tool that decreases poverty. Never in history of humanity has poverty been decreased so much as during capitalism. Capitalism provides the people in the market with the goods and services that are overproduced when a capitalist tries to increase his own wealth.
Wealth of all people is increased by a capitalist, who is underconsuming what he is overproducing and in he is using the savings that are underconsumed as investment to build more products and services.
Poor people are served best by capitalists looking for profit, not by any government of the world.
By the way, democracy is a gateway to tyranny, as the mob is only too happy to give away its freedoms to the government via quite democratic means - voting for bread and circuses totalitarian government means taking steps towards tyranny and it's done very democratically. USA was started as a representative republic so that the mob wouldn't be in a position to vote the individual freedoms away for a promise of bread and circuses taxation based tyranny.
And we should be glad this mechanism exists, since when the poor gets too poor to buy what is produced, the economy collapse.
- if the poor are NOT participating in the production process but are sustained by the taxes applied to those, who produce, then this argument is the most ignorant, the stupidest argument in the world.
So a person works and produces goods, then he is taxed so that some people can be given that tax money and buy his product?
So he is robbed TWICE. First time is when he is taxed and second time when he is paid HIS OWN MONEY for HIS OWN PRODUCTS, so now he gets TWICE THE WORK for no benefit!
And this is the basics of modern economics - Keynesian cretinism.
Telling that taxes should be low is not a natural truth, it is a political opinion, and depending on the economical situation, following that route may be harmful for everyone
- the USA became the world biggest producer and creditor in the world with 0 income taxes.
0 income taxes.
0 payroll taxes.
0 corporate taxes.
0 capital gains taxes.
0 dividend taxes.
0 FED, 0 FDIC, 0 EPA, 0 FDA, 0 FHA, 0 HUD, 0 FBI, 0 minimum wage, 0 entitlement and obligation of the so called 'civil rights', 0 dep't of energy, 0 dep't of education, 0 dep't of commerce, 0 dep't of transportation, 0 dep't of interior, 0 SS, 0 Medicare, 0 undeclared wars.
Taxes = Theft. What is unclear about it?
Taxes = Theft. There are no buts and ifs about it.
Taxes = Theft. Theft of life. It's forced labour.
A person might not force you to work for them but circumstances very well might.
- so what? Everybody has 'circumstances'. Just because you have circumstances doesn't mean you get privileges, which require other people to be obliged to you with anything.
Unions came into existence precisely because it was difficult for some people to find alternative employment and some companies took advantage of that face.
- there is no problem with unions, there is a problem with government coming up with laws regarding unions, employers, employees.
When your choice is between your privacy and feeding your family, your privacy is going to lose most of the time.
- it is your choice. You can also find something else to do, nobody owes you anything.
The rest of your comment is just more irrelevant nonsense.
Oh, and by the way, to those, who will reply to me with nonsense like: government must protect us from the evil corporations.
Stop and think for a second: nobody forces you to work for any of those companies and if you actively refused to work for them if they violated your privacy, they'd stop doing it, just the PR alone is going to be a problem for them.
But with a government... how are you going to opt out of that? With a company you can opt out. You can not buy the product, you can avoid being employed with them, but how do you opt out of being targeted by the NSA, TSA, etc? You can't avoid the government.
The government creates the ultimate monopolies and you can't opt out either of paying them or participating in their programs.
How about governments stops meddling with every single business and person out there, introducing all these nonsense laws, while actively snooping on everybody on this planet without any justification, cause and mandate?
Just this NSA data center is a much bigger privacy risk than any number of employees who are dumb enough to ask for FB access of their potential hires and these potential workers being dumb and unprincipled enough to give it to them.
How about NSA stops doing THAT? Never mind the extra-judicial murder the president is involved in.
Shouldn't laws apply to the government first?
Shouldn't the government not be allowed to do things that an individual isn't allowed to do in the first place?