if you can survive without a paycheck for a couple of years, why not use the time to consult for some business that may be of interest to you at a low enough rate that they won't mind having you around, present yourself as a business analyst/applications architect and offer them to spend time on their business problems and attempt to come up with some solutions to help them?
After all, unless you are going to do theoretical stuff in computing, the only other choice is to do applied computing. If you are looking for a challenge and not necessarily security or pay-check, then looking at something that you never thought you'd be involved with and then coming up with ways to be useful there by creating some form of automation/solution may give you the challenge you are looking for and it also can translate into a future model for you to earn some money while doing more of this risky stuff that's not boring.
It was great time of prosperity and the government was busy trying to find ways to crack the system because they saw opportunity to make much more money from all that prosperity.
Prosperity is private sector creating wealth. Government is a leech of society that turned into a cancer that's going to kill it.
I do not know about specifics of flipping burgers, however they will have to raise their prices at "BurgerFlipping Co" if the wages are say raised by 50% unless they want to start losing money.
This will cause some of the customers to buy less or stop going out to "BurgerFlipping Co" and some burger places would the shut down.
OTOH do you see many grocery stores having people bagging groceries for you? Do you see gas station attendants that would also check your tire pressure/oil level/wipe your windshield? How about all those answering machines, how many people have to sit through answering machines instead of talking to live personnel?
Costs are cut, capital competes with labour and with prices of labour being high enough, capital wins. In many cases the quality of services simply goes down as fewer people are working at a company.
My point can be illustrated as follows: if you can hire somebody and every hour of their employment equals to 5 dollars of revenue, if you pay them 5 dollars/hour, that means you are losing money, because it's not just hourly wage, costs of employing somebody are more than hourly wage, if you employ them at 4 dollars/hour, maybe you are breaking even and if you pay them 3 dollars/hour then you are making 1 dollar/hour from their employment.
So it makes sense to hire somebody at 3 dollars an hour. You can also try and hire somebody for 2 dollars an hour, but the pool of people who will come to your interview maybe so small, maybe nobody would apply. But at 3 dollars an hour maybe you can find someone to do this job.
If the minimum wage is around 8 dollars an hour, by hiring somebody at that wage you are losing 5 dollars out of your pocket.
So the gov't comes in and says: this job, that can provide somebody with 3 dollars/hour and some form of experience/foot into the door of further employment is illegal. You can't create this job, it is not worthy of people to have this particular thing to be done.
So you don't have grocery baggers, you have no gas station attendants, which by the way used to be the gateway into mechanic shops for young people.
At the same time if the gov't taxes people (including borrowing/inflation) in order to provide some form of 'social safety net', that pays an equivalent of say 5 dollars hour, then what happens is that even fewer people want to take the job, not only at minimum wage, but even somewhat above the minimum wage, because you see, leisure costs money. So would transportation. So would extra pair of clothing to go to that job, etc.
By setting minimum wage government prevents some people from ever having a job, especially if there is 'free' money from gov't. Now MAYBE it is a desired situation - indeed, politicians love to have a solid voting block, and who is a better voting block for you than people who depend on you directly for money?
Thus a permanent underclass of people is created, and they will support politicians who promise more hand outs and definitely not politicians who want this to stop.
Of-course some people maybe should be taken care of - the very young and the disabled. I think those are categories where the argument can be made, but for the rest of the population this is just a road to economic destruction.
Yes, the time when the politicians and lawyers and biggest of the businesses figured out how to really corrupt the system.
Break up of Standard Oil was a terrible disaster - allowing gov't to interfere with private property and business and liberty to do business is what really started the growth of gov't and you see the consequences.
1. All subsidies must stop, this includes food stamps, bail outs, stimulus, QE, TARP, everything.
2. Without welfare programs 1865-1913 became the most productive years for USA, making it the top creditor nation, top innovator/inventor nation, with most manufacturing and highest standard of living out of all others, creating the middle class. Not a 'skull bashing class', but a middle class.
The whole fucking *point* of the minimum wage is to guarantee a minimum low end for *unskilled* labour, genius.
- it's a case of fiction meeting reality.
Fiction: one can guarantee jobs for unskilled labour by fixing labour prices all while providing 'safety nets' that in real terms are no worse than the fixed labour price.
Reality: Large number of people aren't qualified to do work that generates revenue at minimum wage, and so these people are outlawed from working basically. Another large group of people could in principle work for minimum wage or just above it, but the 'social safety net' is good enough in a sense that for them, the safety net is competitive enough against the minimum wage so that when all things are taken into account (having to work, having to probably own a car and buy fuel and insurance and maintenance, etc.) it makes no sense to work. Sure, people would take a job if it was offered at a much higher amount, say 3 times the minimum wage, but then if they've been out of work for a long time, who is going to hire them? It's not like sitting home improves one's resume and skills.
Working conditions are the same thing, can't be guaranteed by government any more than cheap house prices can be guaranteed by government without destroying the mortgage market or any more than money can be guaranteed by government's printing press.
I have a journal entry, which talks about Henry Ford and the fact that it was the market that pushed him to reduce the working week to 5 days and hours to 8 per day and to double the wages, and he even hired disabled people nobody else wanted to hire at all, but this allowed him to retain workers and raise productivity on the factory floor in a way that he doubled production of cars in one year, which additionally allowed him to drop prices to take more market.
This had nothing to do with the government, as at the time government was not either supporting unions (and Ford didn't allow unions in his factories) nor was gov't collecting income taxes (started in 1913, and it only applied to the top few earners and it was about 1% tax, proves the point about camel's nose under the tent theory). Government wasn't interfering with Ford basically and he could innovate and improve working conditions of the workers while raising efficiency and productivity and lowering prices for the high quality product he was producing.
There is always a natural floor for any sort of job, especially true if the money was real and not fake.
Most people don't work for minimum wage, they earn more because the market values them more than that and they are able to find work that pays better.
Government fixing prices (including price of labor) only creates classes of people who never work again, because they don't have the opportunity to enter the labor force because they are unqualified to be paid the minimum wage and they are not producing revenue for the company that would justify hiring them at the minimum wage.
By outlawing pay below certain price and then by setting up these so called 'social nets' for people who are not disabled or are very young children, all that the government does it it creates permanent unemployment class of people, who are a good voting block of-course, only voting for the government largess just because government subsidizes their lifestyles.
- 100% correct. The reasons for all of these environmental problems is the government in the first place, as it created monopolies, including monopolies in utility sector and the government destroyed liability by protecting limited liability of corporations. The other problem is of-course government owning property, which must not happen in the first place, because government is not an owner and by being this virtual owner, it gives implicit and explicit permissions to the monopolies it creates in various private sectors to do whatever to the environment that the private companies want without retribution by any actual private property owner.
All of these rivers and parks, everything, must be owned privately, and if government was actually doing ONE thing it's supposed to do - protect liberty and private property, this would never be a problem in the first place.
You are correct - the government is evil, that's why it must be shackled from doing evil that people don't want it to do.
corporations would fuck us all over if someone didn't keep an eye on them
- the market keeps an eye on them.
Here is a little something that's happening in Greece right now - drug shortages. Why are there shortages of drugs in Greece? Because they can't pay and because government forces companies to sell at lower prices than they sell elsewhere, which means that wholesellers simply export the drugs back out of Greece and into Eastern Europe and probably other places, where these same drugs sell for more, this creates secondary market in other countries competing against the pharma companies that produce these drugs.
So it's very simple - government will fuck you up completely in the long run. A corporation can screw with you only until you go to the competitor, and if there is no competitor at the moment, you'll find a substitute product.
However once government is involved you are completely fucked, you have to get out of the country to escape that sort of punishment, no company can do that, only government can do that.
Maybe you should find a UFO that actually predicted any of the real problems with the economy like those, who actually understand what economics is did in the first place?
The Keynesians love to appeal to the Krugmans of the world, of-course the Krugmans of the world could be replaced with a simple MP3 recording, and all it should say is this:
Lower interest rates. Print money. Buy stuff with printed money. Lower interest rates. Print money. Buy stuff with printed money.
Put it in a loop, you'll get all of your Nobel prize winning 'economists'.
As I say, these are people who predicted the economic collapse decades before it happened and gave precise reasons for their predictions, and those reasons are all tied to government stealing and selling power and nothing else.
Of-course I already see what I am dealing with here, pure demagogue with no arguments at all.
The government creates legal barriers to entry, which are the only barriers to entry that have court, police, military and legal (and often public opinion, no matter how mistaken) power behind them, which makes the government barrier to entry the only type of barrier that cannot be overcome without actually penetrating the government, thus creating further corruption of the political system.
The very fact that government deals with business in the first place, by regulating and taxing it, is corruption, because it takes power away from individuals, wraps this power into legislature wrapper and puts it for sale to those who already have money to buy this power.
That's how monopolies are created, everything else is not a monopoly, because there are no laws protecting it.
The point is, enough of the people who actually understood and predicted all of this economic nonsense that's going on decades before it happened are agreeing on the reasons for it, and they are citing very specific sources for their research, unlike you, who is citing either your ass, or people with no understanding of economics, and no, Krugman is not an economist.
Interview with Vern McKinley, research fellow at the Independent Institute & author of the new book Financing Failure: A Century of Bailouts, on why government interventions have always failed, the governmental propaganda used to expand federal power, and how the feds are covering their tracks.
Vern served as a legal advisor and regulatory policy expert for governments on financial sector issues in US, China and elsewhere, he testified in front of Congress with the board of governments on the Federal reserve, FDIC.
Starting from about 22:30 and going for a few minutes, just more people exposing what FDIC is what about, nothing to do with insuring depositors but had everything to do with bailing out banks.
- starting from about 22:30 and going for a few minutes, just more people exposing what FDIC is what about, nothing to do with insuring depositors but had everything to do with bailing out banks.
You call them 'Robber Barons', I call them successful entrepreneurs. Nobody should be in a position to steal power from the people with the use of the government system, as long as that rule is enforced (and obviously it's not), then we don't have a corruption problem, because with politicians having nothing to sell, nobody would bother buying anything from them.
Monopolies make power easier to maintain so they are the natural result of any unrestricted economic system.
- yeah, again, there are no such things as monopolies unless government is involved, because only government can create LEGAL barriers to entry into any market and that's what it does, legal barriers to entry enforced by the police, FBI, military, whatever. No company can create LEGAL barriers to entry for anybody else into any market, they can only compete and create barriers to entry that have to do with price/quality ratio. As long as the market is satisfied with price/quality ratio there is no problem with the economy that provides that product/service. Once the ratio is such that there is space for another company to make profit there it will.
49:30 to 52 explains how banks benefit from counterfeit money
52:40 - 54 explains how FDIC created the "too big to fail" problem compounded by the counterfeit federal credit system.
54:40 - specifically explains why you are wrong and that FDIC was specifically created to create false confidence in the banks, it's not to insure YOUR money, it's to ensure that banks can take your money and do whatever with it and you won't give a shit.
55:50 - FDR's secretary of Treasury quote, a very telling one.
See, there never has been what you term a truly free market
- I never said there needs to be a 'truly free market', there are degrees of freedom, and not having Patents/Copyrights/DMCA/SOPA/PIPA, etc. is a good enough DEGREE of freedom for innovation and inventions and for a thriving technological culture to exist.
Of-course then there are other things, it would be good for example not to have currency counterfeiting, labor price setting, insane laws and regulations created by unelected, unauthorised offices, various wrong-headed social agenda that creates other barriers to entry and raises cost of doing business, the entire concept of income/payroll/corporate taxes. But you see, USA used to have NONE of this for half a century where it did most of what lifted it from a pre-industrial to a real industrial country with huge productive output that turned it into the largest creditor nation, with very strong domestic economy.
You couldn't do an EPA environmental report in USA in the amount of time it took them to run the entire project. You couldn't get a building permit in that time. You couldn't do anything in USA in that time.
So that's where China is today - where USA used to be 100 years back - they are innovating, they are inventing, they are manufacturing, they are finding new efficiencies and this pushes engineering and basic science and education forward.
USA on the other hand has EPA and FDA and FCC and FAA and FBI and CIA and FDIC and IRS and SS and Medicare and all the union support, and all the other departments and agencies and government officials, with or without guns, all in unions. They wouldn't let you run a building construction that quick if you could.
So you see, that's an example of a DEGREE of FREEDOM, China has more than USA does.
Slashdot Mirror
if you can survive without a paycheck for a couple of years, why not use the time to consult for some business that may be of interest to you at a low enough rate that they won't mind having you around, present yourself as a business analyst/applications architect and offer them to spend time on their business problems and attempt to come up with some solutions to help them?
After all, unless you are going to do theoretical stuff in computing, the only other choice is to do applied computing. If you are looking for a challenge and not necessarily security or pay-check, then looking at something that you never thought you'd be involved with and then coming up with ways to be useful there by creating some form of automation/solution may give you the challenge you are looking for and it also can translate into a future model for you to earn some money while doing more of this risky stuff that's not boring.
It was great time of prosperity and the government was busy trying to find ways to crack the system because they saw opportunity to make much more money from all that prosperity.
Prosperity is private sector creating wealth. Government is a leech of society that turned into a cancer that's going to kill it.
yeah, some people also operate without eyes completely forever, not a problem.
When I do builds, move files around, push updates and run scripts, I prefer the command line.
By the way, you've been operating without a GUI for 2 decades? Well I tried /. in lynx, it blows chunks.
Corruption.
I do not know about specifics of flipping burgers, however they will have to raise their prices at "BurgerFlipping Co" if the wages are say raised by 50% unless they want to start losing money.
This will cause some of the customers to buy less or stop going out to "BurgerFlipping Co" and some burger places would the shut down.
OTOH do you see many grocery stores having people bagging groceries for you? Do you see gas station attendants that would also check your tire pressure/oil level/wipe your windshield? How about all those answering machines, how many people have to sit through answering machines instead of talking to live personnel?
Costs are cut, capital competes with labour and with prices of labour being high enough, capital wins. In many cases the quality of services simply goes down as fewer people are working at a company.
My point can be illustrated as follows: if you can hire somebody and every hour of their employment equals to 5 dollars of revenue, if you pay them 5 dollars/hour, that means you are losing money, because it's not just hourly wage, costs of employing somebody are more than hourly wage, if you employ them at 4 dollars/hour, maybe you are breaking even and if you pay them 3 dollars/hour then you are making 1 dollar /hour from their employment.
So it makes sense to hire somebody at 3 dollars an hour. You can also try and hire somebody for 2 dollars an hour, but the pool of people who will come to your interview maybe so small, maybe nobody would apply. But at 3 dollars an hour maybe you can find someone to do this job.
If the minimum wage is around 8 dollars an hour, by hiring somebody at that wage you are losing 5 dollars out of your pocket.
So the gov't comes in and says: this job, that can provide somebody with 3 dollars/hour and some form of experience/foot into the door of further employment is illegal. You can't create this job, it is not worthy of people to have this particular thing to be done.
So you don't have grocery baggers, you have no gas station attendants, which by the way used to be the gateway into mechanic shops for young people.
At the same time if the gov't taxes people (including borrowing/inflation) in order to provide some form of 'social safety net', that pays an equivalent of say 5 dollars hour, then what happens is that even fewer people want to take the job, not only at minimum wage, but even somewhat above the minimum wage, because you see, leisure costs money. So would transportation. So would extra pair of clothing to go to that job, etc.
By setting minimum wage government prevents some people from ever having a job, especially if there is 'free' money from gov't. Now MAYBE it is a desired situation - indeed, politicians love to have a solid voting block, and who is a better voting block for you than people who depend on you directly for money?
Thus a permanent underclass of people is created, and they will support politicians who promise more hand outs and definitely not politicians who want this to stop.
Of-course some people maybe should be taken care of - the very young and the disabled. I think those are categories where the argument can be made, but for the rest of the population this is just a road to economic destruction.
People who learned English as a second or third language get a pass
- why should we get a pass? Fcuk id, no psases for anibady.
Oh boy, never thought of myself as a 'sadomasochist'.
Yes, the time when the politicians and lawyers and biggest of the businesses figured out how to really corrupt the system.
Break up of Standard Oil was a terrible disaster - allowing gov't to interfere with private property and business and liberty to do business is what really started the growth of gov't and you see the consequences.
1. All subsidies must stop, this includes food stamps, bail outs, stimulus, QE, TARP, everything.
2. Without welfare programs 1865-1913 became the most productive years for USA, making it the top creditor nation, top innovator/inventor nation, with most manufacturing and highest standard of living out of all others, creating the middle class. Not a 'skull bashing class', but a middle class.
The whole fucking *point* of the minimum wage is to guarantee a minimum low end for *unskilled* labour, genius.
- it's a case of fiction meeting reality.
Fiction: one can guarantee jobs for unskilled labour by fixing labour prices all while providing 'safety nets' that in real terms are no worse than the fixed labour price.
Reality: Large number of people aren't qualified to do work that generates revenue at minimum wage, and so these people are outlawed from working basically. Another large group of people could in principle work for minimum wage or just above it, but the 'social safety net' is good enough in a sense that for them, the safety net is competitive enough against the minimum wage so that when all things are taken into account (having to work, having to probably own a car and buy fuel and insurance and maintenance, etc.) it makes no sense to work. Sure, people would take a job if it was offered at a much higher amount, say 3 times the minimum wage, but then if they've been out of work for a long time, who is going to hire them? It's not like sitting home improves one's resume and skills.
Working conditions are the same thing, can't be guaranteed by government any more than cheap house prices can be guaranteed by government without destroying the mortgage market or any more than money can be guaranteed by government's printing press.
I have a journal entry, which talks about Henry Ford and the fact that it was the market that pushed him to reduce the working week to 5 days and hours to 8 per day and to double the wages, and he even hired disabled people nobody else wanted to hire at all, but this allowed him to retain workers and raise productivity on the factory floor in a way that he doubled production of cars in one year, which additionally allowed him to drop prices to take more market.
This had nothing to do with the government, as at the time government was not either supporting unions (and Ford didn't allow unions in his factories) nor was gov't collecting income taxes (started in 1913, and it only applied to the top few earners and it was about 1% tax, proves the point about camel's nose under the tent theory). Government wasn't interfering with Ford basically and he could innovate and improve working conditions of the workers while raising efficiency and productivity and lowering prices for the high quality product he was producing.
There is always a natural floor for any sort of job, especially true if the money was real and not fake.
Most people don't work for minimum wage, they earn more because the market values them more than that and they are able to find work that pays better.
Government fixing prices (including price of labor) only creates classes of people who never work again, because they don't have the opportunity to enter the labor force because they are unqualified to be paid the minimum wage and they are not producing revenue for the company that would justify hiring them at the minimum wage.
By outlawing pay below certain price and then by setting up these so called 'social nets' for people who are not disabled or are very young children, all that the government does it it creates permanent unemployment class of people, who are a good voting block of-course, only voting for the government largess just because government subsidizes their lifestyles.
so Bing is the porn search engine of choice?
- don't be so dismissive of the killer application for the entire Internet.
We don't need no stinking gubmint regulation.
- 100% correct. The reasons for all of these environmental problems is the government in the first place, as it created monopolies, including monopolies in utility sector and the government destroyed liability by protecting limited liability of corporations. The other problem is of-course government owning property, which must not happen in the first place, because government is not an owner and by being this virtual owner, it gives implicit and explicit permissions to the monopolies it creates in various private sectors to do whatever to the environment that the private companies want without retribution by any actual private property owner.
All of these rivers and parks, everything, must be owned privately, and if government was actually doing ONE thing it's supposed to do - protect liberty and private property, this would never be a problem in the first place.
You are correct - the government is evil, that's why it must be shackled from doing evil that people don't want it to do.
corporations would fuck us all over if someone didn't keep an eye on them
- the market keeps an eye on them.
Here is a little something that's happening in Greece right now - drug shortages. Why are there shortages of drugs in Greece? Because they can't pay and because government forces companies to sell at lower prices than they sell elsewhere, which means that wholesellers simply export the drugs back out of Greece and into Eastern Europe and probably other places, where these same drugs sell for more, this creates secondary market in other countries competing against the pharma companies that produce these drugs.
So it's very simple - government will fuck you up completely in the long run. A corporation can screw with you only until you go to the competitor, and if there is no competitor at the moment, you'll find a substitute product.
However once government is involved you are completely fucked, you have to get out of the country to escape that sort of punishment, no company can do that, only government can do that.
Maybe you should find a UFO that actually predicted any of the real problems with the economy like those, who actually understand what economics is did in the first place?
The Keynesians love to appeal to the Krugmans of the world, of-course the Krugmans of the world could be replaced with a simple MP3 recording, and all it should say is this:
Lower interest rates.
Print money.
Buy stuff with printed money.
Lower interest rates.
Print money.
Buy stuff with printed money.
Put it in a loop, you'll get all of your Nobel prize winning 'economists'.
Maybe you should read something before starting with more nonsense. There are no monopolies except for government created ones.
As I say, these are people who predicted the economic collapse decades before it happened and gave precise reasons for their predictions, and those reasons are all tied to government stealing and selling power and nothing else.
Of-course I already see what I am dealing with here, pure demagogue with no arguments at all.
The government creates legal barriers to entry, which are the only barriers to entry that have court, police, military and legal (and often public opinion, no matter how mistaken) power behind them, which makes the government barrier to entry the only type of barrier that cannot be overcome without actually penetrating the government, thus creating further corruption of the political system.
The very fact that government deals with business in the first place, by regulating and taxing it, is corruption, because it takes power away from individuals, wraps this power into legislature wrapper and puts it for sale to those who already have money to buy this power.
That's how monopolies are created, everything else is not a monopoly, because there are no laws protecting it.
video in which Ron Paul is making claims
...
Just because Ron Paul says it, doesn't make it true
...
I could show you a vide of Pol Pot of Chairman Mao saying something
--
All this ad-hominem is fine and dandy, except it's NOT Ron Paul that is making any claims.
It's a CONGRESSIONAL TESTIMONY, where EXPERTS are called in to testify.
Thus the people who are making these claims in that testimony are NOT Ron Paul, but are
Dr. Lawrence Parks and at minute 7 of the video you can hear his credentials (which are better than yours).
At 15:45 you can hear Dr. White's credentials, not too bad either.
Of-course I have another comment here, referencing an interview with Vern McKinley on the same topic.
The point is, enough of the people who actually understood and predicted all of this economic nonsense that's going on decades before it happened are agreeing on the reasons for it, and they are citing very specific sources for their research, unlike you, who is citing either your ass, or people with no understanding of economics, and no, Krugman is not an economist.
Interview with Vern McKinley, research fellow at the Independent Institute & author of the new book Financing Failure: A Century of Bailouts, on why government interventions have always failed, the governmental propaganda used to expand federal power, and how the feds are covering their tracks.
Vern served as a legal advisor and regulatory policy expert for governments on financial sector issues in US, China and elsewhere, he testified in front of Congress with the board of governments on the Federal reserve, FDIC.
Starting from about 22:30 and going for a few minutes, just more people exposing what FDIC is what about, nothing to do with insuring depositors but had everything to do with bailing out banks.
- starting from about 22:30 and going for a few minutes, just more people exposing what FDIC is what about, nothing to do with insuring depositors but had everything to do with bailing out banks.
You call them 'Robber Barons', I call them successful entrepreneurs. Nobody should be in a position to steal power from the people with the use of the government system, as long as that rule is enforced (and obviously it's not), then we don't have a corruption problem, because with politicians having nothing to sell, nobody would bother buying anything from them.
Monopolies make power easier to maintain so they are the natural result of any unrestricted economic system.
- yeah, again, there are no such things as monopolies unless government is involved, because only government can create LEGAL barriers to entry into any market and that's what it does, legal barriers to entry enforced by the police, FBI, military, whatever. No company can create LEGAL barriers to entry for anybody else into any market, they can only compete and create barriers to entry that have to do with price/quality ratio. As long as the market is satisfied with price/quality ratio there is no problem with the economy that provides that product/service. Once the ratio is such that there is space for another company to make profit there it will.
You need to look at how the government actually creates monopolies and destroys competing markets, it happens all the time, here is a good read.
And your lack of understanding of why FDIC exists in the first place doesn't make you correct.
- no, it's you, who doesn't know better about FDIC.
Here is a Congressional hearing that did look at that question as well, those guys are definitely more knowledgeable about it than you are and they say FDIC was created to ensure that banks didn't have to compete on quality of service, that people would specifically have the moral hazard of not caring which bank to lend their money to. You can either watch the entire thing, it's pretty educational, or you can skip to this specific questions
49:30 to 52 explains how banks benefit from counterfeit money
52:40 - 54 explains how FDIC created the "too big to fail" problem compounded by the counterfeit federal credit system.
54:40 - specifically explains why you are wrong and that FDIC was specifically created to create false confidence in the banks, it's not to insure YOUR money, it's to ensure that banks can take your money and do whatever with it and you won't give a shit.
55:50 - FDR's secretary of Treasury quote, a very telling one.
See, there never has been what you term a truly free market
- I never said there needs to be a 'truly free market', there are degrees of freedom, and not having Patents/Copyrights/DMCA/SOPA/PIPA, etc. is a good enough DEGREE of freedom for innovation and inventions and for a thriving technological culture to exist.
Of-course then there are other things, it would be good for example not to have currency counterfeiting, labor price setting, insane laws and regulations created by unelected, unauthorised offices, various wrong-headed social agenda that creates other barriers to entry and raises cost of doing business, the entire concept of income/payroll/corporate taxes. But you see, USA used to have NONE of this for half a century where it did most of what lifted it from a pre-industrial to a real industrial country with huge productive output that turned it into the largest creditor nation, with very strong domestic economy.
That's not what you have now at all. I just posted a journal entry on a Chinese company constructing a building in 360 hours. They are using innovative technology, they are manufacturing entire floors and panels on factories and are assembling entire building on site by simply putting "lego" like blocks together.
You couldn't do an EPA environmental report in USA in the amount of time it took them to run the entire project. You couldn't get a building permit in that time. You couldn't do anything in USA in that time.
So that's where China is today - where USA used to be 100 years back - they are innovating, they are inventing, they are manufacturing, they are finding new efficiencies and this pushes engineering and basic science and education forward.
USA on the other hand has EPA and FDA and FCC and FAA and FBI and CIA and FDIC and IRS and SS and Medicare and all the union support, and all the other departments and agencies and government officials, with or without guns, all in unions. They wouldn't let you run a building construction that quick if you could.
So you see, that's an example of a DEGREE of FREEDOM, China has more than USA does.