Your options are screwed up, they assume the same, or increased size of government.
The only correct option: cut government spending (the way they did in 1921's depression), but cut it by 99% this time and repeal the Federal register to 1912 levels.
Abolish all unelected federal offices, repeal all regulations that are created by those offices.
Allow the economy restructure the debt, have all these worthless government jobs disappear as well as all of the jobs depending on government spending (all of these military contractors, all of these 'infrastructure' jobs, everything that has to do with government taxes/subsidies/borrowing/regulations), get rid of the income tax by the way.
That's the only real way to fix the economy - allow it to fix itself, don't stand on its way.
That's not really that interesting. What IS interesting is that all of the serious problem that USA is experiencing at this moment can easily be traced to the start of the Federal reserve (and income taxes), but even more interestingly how many perceived and real problems can be traced back to 1971 Nixon's gold shock.
All of that printing and borrowing by US Treasury cannot happen and government cannot expand and currency cannot inflate if the money is represented by a hard asset that is difficult to inflate and counterfeit, and we know what that asset is.
Democratic government (not a totalitarian or dictatorial or feudal) exists only because people give it the power to exist, so that the government would occupy an important niche role - protecting rights of individuals and looking after the borders, maybe criminal/contract laws, but that's not necessary at all, and it's definitely not a federal job.
Individual rights include property rights and right to keep the fruits of one's labor (pursuit of happiness, etc.)
Using a government force to take from some to give to others definitely goes beyond protecting individual rights and establishing border security. The government that does that become authoritarian/totalitarian/dictatorial in nature, because it can then force some people to subsidize other people. This definitely is against individual rights.
Then by your own definition, the US government owns any land* within it's borders that it chooses to call it's own.
- the government is an organization created by the people to occupy the power vacuum that otherwise would have been filled by various private interests, and I am NOT convinced that setting up a 'public' government is actually the best way to go about it, I like the idea of private interests filling that role more, because it creates competition.
Certainly people should have to protect their property, how exactly the do it - with government structures or private forces is irrelevant. They just have to be able to protect their claim.
They have the power to take it and they have the power to protect it so nobody can take it away from them.
- this shows that you misunderstand the point of having a government. In itself government shouldn't own any property. It exists to protect individual rights, not to own anything by itself.
Property is about power. The concept of "rights" is a system by which the government chooses to use it's power over property and people. No more.
- no, a democratic government does not exist without consent on the people.
I explained much earlier that 'right' is a concept that only applies to individuals and their relationship with a government (the collective). That's the only context in which the concept of 'right' is meaningful. There is no such concept when 2 private individuals or an individual and a private company are dealing with each other (there is criminal and contract law there).
Government does not have any 'right', it's individuals who have rights. Governments have power that is given to the governments by the individuals.
Look at ants, bees, wolves. Plenty can be done without the concept of personal ownership.
- those are not humans and clearly large number of humans do not agree with you because humans like/want/need to own things, and you can't stop that, it's funny that you think you have some sort of a point.
The land belongs to those, who can protect it from it being taken away from them. That's what the government is formed for - protection of rights, which includes property rights.
If you don't have enough POWER to protect your property rights (be it personal power or power of money or power that is agreed upon that whatever form of government gets) there can be no property, there can't be peaceful property transfer, there can't be contracts, but that means there can't be markets and thus there can't be civilization.
The notion that property cannot be owned is contrary to those, who have power to maintain their property. The important thing is to realize that without property rights nothing can ever be done.
Plenty of humor (or satire) is about laughing at yourself in a normal everyday situation, but it works better when it's presented to you in a witty manner. I mean our everyday lives are funny and tragic, anything, from relationships, to work, to leisure, to death even. Tragedy and comedy are just two ends of the same stick.
Answer the question: what is 'just' compensation, who decides it?
Answer the question: When does it happen that the property is taken away not from somebody who is wealthier and given to somebody who is less wealthy, but the other way around? When does it happen that property is taken away without some money interest that lobbies the government for whatever purpose (any kind of contract for so called 'public good')?
There has to be a sensible balance between individual rights and governmental rights
- governments don't have rights, only individuals have rights.
The problem in the US and other Western democracies is that the rights of entities other than individuals have become excessive. That is a natural property of the free market, since corporate rights are cheaper than individual rights and a "free market" implicitly gives 100% of the liberty to the corporate entities.
- where in the "Western democracies" have you seen these 'free markets' exactly? Even Switzerland is not really a free market and to talk about USA as if it has any type of free market is a joke.
Governments must not be allowed to change the laws at all actually, laws must be followed and they must remain stable, otherwise the economy and society will be destroyed.
Thinking that governments must be allowed to pass new laws and expecting the economy and society to be able to survive this is like thinking that having a Universe with laws of physics that are changing all the time is somehow conducive to creation of life.
You can't have life created in a Universe if the laws of physics are being constantly modified, because the basics are changing all the time. If the basic thing like F=ma cannot be trusted upon not to change year to year, then you can't have anything non-primitive built upon that.
this is a money sink program that will make some connected people richer and it will create worthless jobs, like any make shift jobs program, it will not benefit the economy in any way.
Creating work for the sake of work does not benefit the economy, these jobs don't produce anything of value to trade with for with those, who trade with you. Any project like this only makes sense when the economy needs it and then the private forces must step in and do it and if they don't, it means the economy does not need this.
Of-course this breaks down when the wrong alternatives are subsidized by the government intervention (roads, cars, bank loans, various insurance frauds perpetrated by the government, all of the moral hazards).
The government destroys the incentives for the market to search for profitable ways to go forward by providing large amounts of "free" money to various preferred monopolies, and this does end up destroying the economy.
What I am saying is that this is a WRONG WAY TO GO - have government do any project like this. What I am saying is that the New Deal stuff was the WRONG WAY TO GO.
It only worsens the depression, doesn't solve anything, creates work but no real economic value and misplaces the capital, land and labor into unproductive part of the economy.
Eminent domain is confiscation of private property, which is one of the people's rights. This is clearly unconstitutional (same with federal government doing everything it did with the Fed and the New Deal for example).
The real costs of running rail must include buying out land or paying rent to those, whose lands are not bought out, and in cases when people completely disagree and don't want to sell or rent their land out, then there have to be other ways to run the rail - below ground if it takes.
The real costs of building the rail must include all such cases and without the violation of peoples' rights.
What we should do is provide a basic income to everyone who wants one, and hold challenges to stimulate innovation and the advance of knowledge.
- no we should not do such an insane thing.
1. You subsidize something you want more of, so you want more people on welfare? 2. Where is the money going to come from, exactly to do this? You are going to tax people who PRODUCE so that others, who do not produce can consume? What's the point of producing wealth (goods/services) AND paying for somebody who does not work to consume goods/services you produce?
This makes absolutely no sense.
Imagine a bunch of people on welfare and a bunch of working individuals. The ones who work produce all the wealth. They also end up paying all the taxes, so that what? The people on welfare can take the money from these workers to "buy" the products they created?
Do you know the reason why people TRADE in the first place? It's called comparative advantage. You don't trade for nominal dollar signs, you trade with others so that you can exchange with them the FRUITS OF YOUR LABOR.
If the exchange goes like this: I produce and I pay to you so that you can take from me what I produced, then it makes absolutely no sense for me to trade with you. It's pure productivity transfer, it has a name.
Isn't this a bit outdated? Who actually 'hates' the IT department? Some clarification is in order please, because there are large companies that have huge IT departments, where the entire company may actually be dependent on IT department for its main business case (things like telcos and even banks, especially trading, mutual funds and insurance).
Then there are IT firms, and unless they are in business of hating themselves, then this does not apply.
Then there are businesses that just need a few applications to run smoothly, that's all. Maybe it's these businesses? Well, then the answer is obvious - it's not their core competency and they hate everything that they have to do that is not their core competency and does not directly generate the revenues/profits, even if it helps to do that.
the point is that people shouldn't be subsidized for any purpose, including education (and banking for that matter or health), it all creates misallocation of resources.
Those college graduates should be paying out of pocket (and in many cases they are in China, just as people don't have SS or Medicare there, they are saving their own money for this), and if somebody takes a loans it should be a private loan that has nothing to do with government guarantees.
When government guarantees any loans or gives them out directly, all it does it creates a demand bubble in where-ever the money is going to. That demand bubble eventually bursts and there is then a recession in that economic sector. All of the government distortions are corrected by the markets somehow, and the corrections are reallocations of resources, which means some people must lose their jobs and investments.
Let the private market take care of this and at least then the bubbles are much smaller, because the private market cannot allocate resources as huge as governments can, and then the taxes don't have to go up and money don't have to be debased, the people who pay the prices are those, participating in whatever temporary local bubble that exists, and the rest of the economy only gets better when bubbles burst.
This is true for every government, not just China.
This is the reverse situation to a new product hitting the market. When LCDs or Plasma screens first came out, they were basically unaffordable by anybody except the richest people and companies, now everybody has one.
This is the same situation in reverse - the production capacity fell and the demand needs to recalibrate the prices.
Of-course don't forget that there is a fixed cost associated with rebuilding the factories and all the new equipment and tools now are more expensive, given so few harddrive manufacturers even exist and all of the inflation that's rampant in the world.
If the price holds, it sends a message to rebuild the production and maybe add even more, clearly there is unfulfilled demand at lower prices.
It's wrong to force people to give up their money it taxes for whatever socialist health insurance/care system they are running there if they are then not allowed to use it.
My question: is there a 2 tier health care / insurance system in Australia? At least a 2 tier system is a step in the right direction from a single government dictated tier system.
Is it possible to opt out of other government programs there and can one reduce the taxes by opting out?
The idea is correct: people should have the option and not to be forced into anything like a vaccination, and then the system shouldn't be responsible for the people who opt out. But they shouldn't be forced to pay into that system either.
We should be switching to nuclear anyway, it's not about global warming, it's about the eventuality of the end of the age of oil. It will happen so it's better to be thinking about it now.
This proposed system would ensure that I would only ever be behind her once, because when the high-speed train and moving tram were not able to un-dock because she was still toddling along in the gap between them, they would either end up crashing and killing everyone, or they would separate anyways and either tear her in half, or drop her between the tracks and grind her into paste on the ground.
Brilliant. This solves so many problems (except for the problem of why is this even proposed in the first place.)
This is not a good idea at all. This increases the complexity of an already complicated enough system, and the ways in which catastrophic failures will happen (and they will happen).
Anybody probably could come up with a hundred ways things could go wrong without ever even seeing a system like that in action. Also what the hell is the gain here?
Slashdot Mirror
Your options are screwed up, they assume the same, or increased size of government.
The only correct option: cut government spending (the way they did in 1921's depression), but cut it by 99% this time and repeal the Federal register to 1912 levels.
Abolish all unelected federal offices, repeal all regulations that are created by those offices.
Allow the economy restructure the debt, have all these worthless government jobs disappear as well as all of the jobs depending on government spending (all of these military contractors, all of these 'infrastructure' jobs, everything that has to do with government taxes/subsidies/borrowing/regulations), get rid of the income tax by the way.
That's the only real way to fix the economy - allow it to fix itself, don't stand on its way.
That's not really that interesting. What IS interesting is that all of the serious problem that USA is experiencing at this moment can easily be traced to the start of the Federal reserve (and income taxes), but even more interestingly how many perceived and real problems can be traced back to 1971 Nixon's gold shock.
All of that printing and borrowing by US Treasury cannot happen and government cannot expand and currency cannot inflate if the money is represented by a hard asset that is difficult to inflate and counterfeit, and we know what that asset is.
Democratic government (not a totalitarian or dictatorial or feudal) exists only because people give it the power to exist, so that the government would occupy an important niche role - protecting rights of individuals and looking after the borders, maybe criminal/contract laws, but that's not necessary at all, and it's definitely not a federal job.
Individual rights include property rights and right to keep the fruits of one's labor (pursuit of happiness, etc.)
Using a government force to take from some to give to others definitely goes beyond protecting individual rights and establishing border security. The government that does that become authoritarian/totalitarian/dictatorial in nature, because it can then force some people to subsidize other people. This definitely is against individual rights.
Then by your own definition, the US government owns any land* within it's borders that it chooses to call it's own.
- the government is an organization created by the people to occupy the power vacuum that otherwise would have been filled by various private interests, and I am NOT convinced that setting up a 'public' government is actually the best way to go about it, I like the idea of private interests filling that role more, because it creates competition.
Certainly people should have to protect their property, how exactly the do it - with government structures or private forces is irrelevant. They just have to be able to protect their claim.
They have the power to take it and they have the power to protect it so nobody can take it away from them.
- this shows that you misunderstand the point of having a government. In itself government shouldn't own any property. It exists to protect individual rights, not to own anything by itself.
Property is about power. The concept of "rights" is a system by which the government chooses to use it's power over property and people. No more.
- no, a democratic government does not exist without consent on the people.
I explained much earlier that 'right' is a concept that only applies to individuals and their relationship with a government (the collective). That's the only context in which the concept of 'right' is meaningful. There is no such concept when 2 private individuals or an individual and a private company are dealing with each other (there is criminal and contract law there).
Government does not have any 'right', it's individuals who have rights. Governments have power that is given to the governments by the individuals.
Look at ants, bees, wolves. Plenty can be done without the concept of personal ownership.
- those are not humans and clearly large number of humans do not agree with you because humans like/want/need to own things, and you can't stop that, it's funny that you think you have some sort of a point.
Say, when did you come to realization that your nick is appropriate?
The land belongs to those, who can protect it from it being taken away from them. That's what the government is formed for - protection of rights, which includes property rights.
If you don't have enough POWER to protect your property rights (be it personal power or power of money or power that is agreed upon that whatever form of government gets) there can be no property, there can't be peaceful property transfer, there can't be contracts, but that means there can't be markets and thus there can't be civilization.
The notion that property cannot be owned is contrary to those, who have power to maintain their property. The important thing is to realize that without property rights nothing can ever be done.
Plenty of humor (or satire) is about laughing at yourself in a normal everyday situation, but it works better when it's presented to you in a witty manner. I mean our everyday lives are funny and tragic, anything, from relationships, to work, to leisure, to death even. Tragedy and comedy are just two ends of the same stick.
That's not a RIGHT. They have the POWER to do it.
It's the power that they have, but government cannot have a right.
I have debated the concept of what a 'right' is here enough, but I think it's a first time somebody says that governments have rights.
Property is theft? That's interesting. Say, do you know anybody with a house that is paid out? Did they steal the house?
Do you know anybody with a car they paid out? Did they steal it?
Do you know anybody with a toaster oven they own? Dirty thieves.
Answer the question: what is 'just' compensation, who decides it?
Answer the question: When does it happen that the property is taken away not from somebody who is wealthier and given to somebody who is less wealthy, but the other way around? When does it happen that property is taken away without some money interest that lobbies the government for whatever purpose (any kind of contract for so called 'public good')?
This is all decided by the courts.
There has to be a sensible balance between individual rights and governmental rights
- governments don't have rights, only individuals have rights.
The problem in the US and other Western democracies is that the rights of entities other than individuals have become excessive. That is a natural property of the free market, since corporate rights are cheaper than individual rights and a "free market" implicitly gives 100% of the liberty to the corporate entities.
- where in the "Western democracies" have you seen these 'free markets' exactly? Even Switzerland is not really a free market and to talk about USA as if it has any type of free market is a joke.
Governments must not be allowed to change the laws at all actually, laws must be followed and they must remain stable, otherwise the economy and society will be destroyed.
Thinking that governments must be allowed to pass new laws and expecting the economy and society to be able to survive this is like thinking that having a Universe with laws of physics that are changing all the time is somehow conducive to creation of life.
You can't have life created in a Universe if the laws of physics are being constantly modified, because the basics are changing all the time. If the basic thing like F=ma cannot be trusted upon not to change year to year, then you can't have anything non-primitive built upon that.
this is a money sink program that will make some connected people richer and it will create worthless jobs, like any make shift jobs program, it will not benefit the economy in any way.
Creating work for the sake of work does not benefit the economy, these jobs don't produce anything of value to trade with for with those, who trade with you. Any project like this only makes sense when the economy needs it and then the private forces must step in and do it and if they don't, it means the economy does not need this.
Of-course this breaks down when the wrong alternatives are subsidized by the government intervention (roads, cars, bank loans, various insurance frauds perpetrated by the government, all of the moral hazards).
The government destroys the incentives for the market to search for profitable ways to go forward by providing large amounts of "free" money to various preferred monopolies, and this does end up destroying the economy.
What I am saying is that this is a WRONG WAY TO GO - have government do any project like this. What I am saying is that the New Deal stuff was the WRONG WAY TO GO.
It only worsens the depression, doesn't solve anything, creates work but no real economic value and misplaces the capital, land and labor into unproductive part of the economy.
Legislation by the judicial branch? Yes, it is unconstitutional.
The Constitution has been violated more than enough times by the court system.
Eminent domain is unconstitutional, but when was the last time the governments cared about that?
Eminent domain is confiscation of private property, which is one of the people's rights. This is clearly unconstitutional (same with federal government doing everything it did with the Fed and the New Deal for example).
The real costs of running rail must include buying out land or paying rent to those, whose lands are not bought out, and in cases when people completely disagree and don't want to sell or rent their land out, then there have to be other ways to run the rail - below ground if it takes.
The real costs of building the rail must include all such cases and without the violation of peoples' rights.
What we should do is provide a basic income to everyone who wants one, and hold challenges to stimulate innovation and the advance of knowledge.
- no we should not do such an insane thing.
1. You subsidize something you want more of, so you want more people on welfare?
2. Where is the money going to come from, exactly to do this? You are going to tax people who PRODUCE so that others, who do not produce can consume? What's the point of producing wealth (goods/services) AND paying for somebody who does not work to consume goods/services you produce?
This makes absolutely no sense.
Imagine a bunch of people on welfare and a bunch of working individuals. The ones who work produce all the wealth. They also end up paying all the taxes, so that what? The people on welfare can take the money from these workers to "buy" the products they created?
Do you know the reason why people TRADE in the first place? It's called comparative advantage. You don't trade for nominal dollar signs, you trade with others so that you can exchange with them the FRUITS OF YOUR LABOR.
If the exchange goes like this: I produce and I pay to you so that you can take from me what I produced, then it makes absolutely no sense for me to trade with you. It's pure productivity transfer, it has a name.
It's called slavery.
Isn't this a bit outdated? Who actually 'hates' the IT department? Some clarification is in order please, because there are large companies that have huge IT departments, where the entire company may actually be dependent on IT department for its main business case (things like telcos and even banks, especially trading, mutual funds and insurance).
Then there are IT firms, and unless they are in business of hating themselves, then this does not apply.
Then there are businesses that just need a few applications to run smoothly, that's all. Maybe it's these businesses? Well, then the answer is obvious - it's not their core competency and they hate everything that they have to do that is not their core competency and does not directly generate the revenues/profits, even if it helps to do that.
the point is that people shouldn't be subsidized for any purpose, including education (and banking for that matter or health), it all creates misallocation of resources.
Those college graduates should be paying out of pocket (and in many cases they are in China, just as people don't have SS or Medicare there, they are saving their own money for this), and if somebody takes a loans it should be a private loan that has nothing to do with government guarantees.
When government guarantees any loans or gives them out directly, all it does it creates a demand bubble in where-ever the money is going to. That demand bubble eventually bursts and there is then a recession in that economic sector. All of the government distortions are corrected by the markets somehow, and the corrections are reallocations of resources, which means some people must lose their jobs and investments.
Let the private market take care of this and at least then the bubbles are much smaller, because the private market cannot allocate resources as huge as governments can, and then the taxes don't have to go up and money don't have to be debased, the people who pay the prices are those, participating in whatever temporary local bubble that exists, and the rest of the economy only gets better when bubbles burst.
This is true for every government, not just China.
I am sure not ALL Australians see it that way and I am not an American.
This is the reverse situation to a new product hitting the market. When LCDs or Plasma screens first came out, they were basically unaffordable by anybody except the richest people and companies, now everybody has one.
This is the same situation in reverse - the production capacity fell and the demand needs to recalibrate the prices.
Of-course don't forget that there is a fixed cost associated with rebuilding the factories and all the new equipment and tools now are more expensive, given so few harddrive manufacturers even exist and all of the inflation that's rampant in the world.
If the price holds, it sends a message to rebuild the production and maybe add even more, clearly there is unfulfilled demand at lower prices.
It's wrong to force people to give up their money it taxes for whatever socialist health insurance/care system they are running there if they are then not allowed to use it.
My question: is there a 2 tier health care / insurance system in Australia? At least a 2 tier system is a step in the right direction from a single government dictated tier system.
Is it possible to opt out of other government programs there and can one reduce the taxes by opting out?
The idea is correct: people should have the option and not to be forced into anything like a vaccination, and then the system shouldn't be responsible for the people who opt out. But they shouldn't be forced to pay into that system either.
We should be switching to nuclear anyway, it's not about global warming, it's about the eventuality of the end of the age of oil. It will happen so it's better to be thinking about it now.
This proposed system would ensure that I would only ever be behind her once, because when the high-speed train and moving tram were not able to un-dock because she was still toddling along in the gap between them, they would either end up crashing and killing everyone, or they would separate anyways and either tear her in half, or drop her between the tracks and grind her into paste on the ground.
Brilliant. This solves so many problems (except for the problem of why is this even proposed in the first place.)
Yeah, but with the doors between the trains you couldn't hop from one to another to slow down or speed up.
This is not a good idea at all. This increases the complexity of an already complicated enough system, and the ways in which catastrophic failures will happen (and they will happen).
Anybody probably could come up with a hundred ways things could go wrong without ever even seeing a system like that in action. Also what the hell is the gain here?