Put them all out of business and lets work on the actual issues. Browsers should be fixed to treat self signed certificates like normal encrypted channels and not viruses and there is a need for a new form of distributed authentication procedure that doesn't depend on a signing authority.
It doesn't matter what OWS wants, the entire system is moving towards more of a fascist state, not a Communist one, not that the difference is that important, in either case you'll lose all your liberties.
Realize that in the former USSR there were similar controls (and even current Russia has some of these controls still), where people had in their passports. Yes, INTERNAL passports, that had name, birth date, parents' nationality! So in case of USA that would be nationality and religion, have to keep those Muslims on a short leash, right? There was a bunch of personal information there and the PLACE of where they live, so the address basically, and one couldn't really move from place to place without this document and couldn't really move from city to city without a lot of bureaucracy and it was actually designed in the first place to ensure a larger farmer population, to keep people from moving to cities, because living in Russian villages is not exactly wonderful (to say the least), and the gov't wanted to keep people working in these 'collective farms'.
Also this worked well for all the antisemitism in the country. Also USSR (and now Russia) had and still has this document, where they put information about every place of work, it's a 'work-book'. So one didn't need a resume, this was an official document, very important if one wanted to work at all.
Everybody was 'equal', except that some people were MORE equal than others, especially the members of the Communist Party.
People, stop before you completely screw this up for yourselves, it is NOT the right road, you are going the WRONG WAY.
The right way is to STOP the GOVERNMENT from breaking your free market capitalism. You had the most prosperity before federal government politicians figured out how to crack your system by breaking your monetary system (counterfeiting the currency, started in 1913, together with the prohibition, which is not a coincidence, US gov't used to make 50% of revenue from alcohol sales), and they started taxing your income, which is totally wrong. Taxing income is wrong for government, because government is a spending item.
Gov't spending should be PROPORTIONATE to your spending, not to your income, otherwise gov't can consume your entire income and you will have nothing left beyond the bare minimum, you won't have any savings and won't be able to invest into anything on your own.
People, this is NOT about the 'rich' not paying some kind of 'fair share'. In fact the rich are paying much more, both, fractionally and in absolute numbers than anybody below their earning bracket. But it's OK for the rich to bear more cost, but it should not be that with more money, the income is taxed at higher rate. Well, the income shouldn't be taxed, period, but if it is taxed, it cannot be set so that majority can vote to steal more money from a minority. This is pure political BS propaganda, this is how the government takes your eyes off the ball.
The ball is that your economy is screwed, and it's only going to get worse, not better. No more better, it's going to crash and burn and you will with it, and the rich will probably escape that.
What you need is to crash and burn your government before it does it to you and you need to get back to actual sound monetary system and real Constitutional principles of government, where gov't actually only acts on its authority and doesn't grab power, so that it can sell it.
That's why you really need to vote for Ron Paul and support him in every way, because I like America, but I will never do business there again if you turn it into USSR (by stupidity, not even by design.)
All those fucking kids, dying from years of cancer must have been pretty fucking horrible people. All those rape victims, who were killed after the rape, or committed suicide, etc., they just were terrible human beings. Karma after all, right?
How the FUCK is that a 'TROLL' and the original poster NOT?
What about all the people who died before age of 56, did they all deserve it because of "BAD KARMA"? You fucking retards. Every fucking child dying before even the age of 2 deserves it due to KARMA?
Every one killed by anybody deserves it due to KARMA?
First, "at a rate 10 times the previous gold standard" is interesting, but meaningless. What is the actual rate, and how is it measured?
- what they did was they introduced a fiat that was backed by a gold reserve at first, a unit of that currency could be exchanged at a fixed rate, but then they removed the gold reserve from it and now it's just an unbacked security, which means it can be inflated without having to add any value into the system. So while they claim that the rate is 10 times the previous gold standard, what they are failing to mention is that the amount of oxygen that can be split in a single reaction is reduced by 10 times as well. So they can release 10 times as many oxygen atoms but it takes 10 times the amount of energy to do it. The institution responsible for the amount of this fiat is a semi-private corporation now in charge of oxygen supply to the planet and the government has only tangential relationship to it. The securitization of the oxygen catalyst obligation is now underway, the markets are ecstatic as more and more fiat catalist is being pumped into the system allowing the inflation to hide the true rate of oxygen return by private enterprise, and the government guarantees the rate of return and all of the collateral obligations, so it's definitely a very healthy bull market from now on.
Katrina happened due to a combination of incompetent government at all levels (particularly, the New Orleans government IMHO) and a poorly thought out restructuring of federal emergency response. Higher levees combined with our better knowledge of how the levee failed in the past, will help reduce the occurrence of Katrinas in the future).
Yes, there is no such thing as 'competent government'. You don't get to government by being competent, you get there by making sure that everybody with money who wants to buy favors knows about you.
It does more than that. It also makes the problem happen less frequently. The issue isn't that disasters occur, but how frequently they occur and how effective our response to them is.
- it also makes disasters much bigger in scale when they finally do happen.
This is like attempting to bottle up the Mississippi River. Reducing the frequency of occurrences of Katrina via higher levees and better disaster mitigation doesn't make future disasters worse (to the contrary!). But completely damming the entire Mississippi isn't going to work over the long term. That water will eventually find its way to the sea. The more effort you take, the harder the failure when it occurs.
- my point is that what we do, the way we do it is wrong, not that we must build higher levees or that we must inflate the money more, my point is exactly different, that we are doing the wrong and expedient thing.
- oh, so if everybody was equally smart, then everybody would be a politician?
1. Nobody would be eating. 2. Not every smart person wants to be a politician, as I said - plenty of smart people are interested in things that they ultimately build businesses out of, but their interests may have been other than just making the most money. Maybe making the most money is only a consequence of an interesting hobby somebody has that he finds a way to monetize eventually.
More proof that politicians are smarter than businessmen.
- no it doesn't, not when you look at absolute numbers.
A businessman making 2-10 million a year is better off than a politician who is making maybe 500K-2million a year based on bribes and such, so sure, the millionaire is underpaid, but he is still making more money in dollar amounts while the government worker is overpaid (and belongs in jail likely for all the things he does), but in dollar amounts he is on a different scale.
Of course you can't, because by the time you reach the top, they're one and the same anyway.
- Steve Jobs was running his company but he wasn't running governments, though surely he was making some deals in the process of running his company, probably deals concerning things like tax breaks.
I don't agree that politicians are smarter than businessmen in general, I agree that there are some very smart politicians, but then there are some very smart businessmen.
But my point is that I would rather see smart people in private sector using their intelligence and productivity improving everybody's quality of life by building good products at attractive prices to compete and make money rather than having all these lawyers (most politicians are), come up with more laws so they can sell more privileges, sell more access and make money basically by stealing from all sides and destroying the economy in the process.
However politicians are definitely good at shifting the blame (until they are killed by the crowds, like what we just saw in Libya.)
Many Asian airlines base their entire hiring practice on the looks and age of the girl applying. Some girls very likely have to do things that would get people imprisoned in the west. They are paid very little and are under constant threat of firing. After a few years they are deemed unattractive and are summarily fired, no pension, no severance, and no thank-yous.
In fact maybe that's a much easier to implement solution - a gigantic wall around the volcano before it erupts and a large dome, sort of like a skirt, very thick cloth made of multiple layers of carbon fiber, steel wool, plastics.
Build a few factories nearby that are ready to reprocess the poisonous gases and have pipes running from the walls and from the dome/skirt to the factories to reprocess the poisons. Maybe this is a more viable solution than drilling into the Earth's crust a few million times.
Regulation *can* work, so long as you prevent regulatory capture.
1. Even the regulations with the best intentions end up hurting, not helping. So this 'civil rights act of 1964' caused more unemployment among blacks, not less. Before that time the unemployment among young blacks was 15%, now it's 50%. Why is that? It's because the cost of hiring a minority went through the roof immediately after them getting special privileges (entitlements) and employers got obligations (costs).
2. There is no such thing as a regulation that cannot be captured. Regulation is power and power in itself is worthless, it only means something when it's for sale. A politician or an unelected bureaucrat in some unelected office create all these laws and regulations and lobbyists just swarm them (and they don't have to be lobbyists, in dictatorial environments those are just friends/friends of friends who get special treatment.)
Power is money, it's there to be sold. Politician is there to grab more and more power so he can sell it. It's that simple.
A good deal of Western Europe has tight regulation of industry, along with less economic disparity and better social mobility, than we have.
1. Most of Europe has much fewer regulations than USA. 2. Western Europe is mostly poor. Those are poor people, working for very little money, (those who have jobs), they can't afford much of anything. So they work and they are poor. All that so called 'upward mobility' is not happening. It doesn't happen for just salaried workers.
The trouble is that we've eschewed the responsibility of participating in government;
- true, that's what the problem is. US citizens stopped caring a long time ago, otherwise they wouldn't have allowed the income tax, the Federal reserve, the prohibition, the SS, the Medicare, etc. None of that is authorized to the federal government, but nobody cares.
It's like boiling a frog in water that is heating up slowly, the frog doesn't notice and by the time it notices, it's dead.
Lack of regulation generally *doesn't* work, as corporations (or people for that matter) have absolutely no motivation either to consider externalities or to not just screw people over.
-
Externalities are only irrelevant when there is government there, giving you a pass, because the property is not privately owned. Get rid of public property, force the gov't to sell all property and make sure it enforces individual liberties, private property and contracts and criminal law, all of a sudden externalities become important, because you can't just pollute, too many neighbors, and their private property is important. But in USA the private property protections are as much respected as any other individual liberties (not at all).
But I suppose you consider the derivatives market, Enron, Massey Coal, PG&E, etc. all shining examples of the success of letting industry do whatever the heck it wants.
- I addressed this many many many many many many many many too many times. None of those are free market examples, there haven't been free market examples for a long time. Enron was a gov't created disaster with various regulations, some relaxed, some enforced, creating an environment perfect for corruption. The coal like Massey are subsidized by gov't, they are completely shielded from the REAL costs of doing business, they don't have to buy the land on private auctions and pay the real price for what they are doing, first buying the land, then selling it and then being responsible to the neighbors for destroying things like underground water tables, rivers, lakes, forests. Any of this is only possible due to government market distortion.
Never mind. The fact that you indict Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac without also mentioning CDOs and other ways in which industry also contributed to the crisis means you're drunk on Koo
It doesn't matter, all of those companies would have eventually ended up in the same place - having to interoperate. They would have come to that conclusion eventually on their own, but if gov't wasn't allowed to spend money, how much would have been saved?
How many projects does a government start, that NEVER do anything, never end up with any outcome at all? That's all wasted money and it's all hurting the economy, not helping it, because the failure is not limited to some small private entity, it's distributed to everybody.
I am suggesting that government is protecting the status quo and that oil prices are now down due to depression in real terms, but are up in counterfeit currency due to government creating all that inflation.
My point is that right now the prices are going higher due to government printing money. But you are right, on a decade to decade level, the prices for oil go higher due to higher demand. Government shouldn't be subsidizing any energy company or any other company or any individual, but it also shouldn't be taxing income. All of that non-spent private income is used as savings and then as investment, it should only be taxed when people stop growing the money and start spending it. That's the way to ensure a thriving economy, that has many various businesses going on at the same time, many of them looking at the energy production as well.
The government is going to tax everybody (directly or with inflation) and to spend on something it believes is a good idea (however it arrived at such a conclusion, but it's definitely not a market signal that told them.) I am certain there is an element of corruption there, somebody is going to run a company, pocketing a bunch of money and really producing something or maybe not, it doesn't matter, what matters is that something is being subsidized, while the real economy is being diminished and this will make the energy crisis worse, not better.
ha, you are talking about the current systems, current power plants that have the MORAL HAZARD of government 'insuring' them (which is nonsense, government can't insure anything, it only relies on the ability to tax and then to borrow and to print, gov't doesn't have any interest bearing assets, nor should it.)
The point is that you are looking at the current state of affairs and extrapolating that the private sector would do it the same way, with brutal force that government is able to apply.
I think private enterprise would not go the same way at all, and by the way, so much of the cost of running a plant (and it doesn't have to be anything that is currently operating) is about security of the fissionable materials not making it into the 'wrong hands' - an entire government created problem.
You know, they weren't going for a nuclear power plant, they were going for a bomb. In fact they already did destroy 2 Japanese cities in that process and former USSR government destroyed a huge territory as well as many lives with Chernobyl, so much for government insurance.
I have a follow up question - this volcano is a spring that is building up pressure. Just build a space colony on top of it now, and when the volcano explodes, the colony will naturally end up in space. See, my solution just cut out 2 steps: fixing the volcano problem and building a spring.
I'm sure that most dam builders now accept the silting problems and even have solutions for it.
- yet Katrina happened just 6 years ago. Sure, they can raise the levies higher, but that just pushes the problem a little into the future, like the government inflating money supply, pushing the eventual resolution of the depression into the future, in the meanwhile the water is getting higher and inflation is getting bigger and the eventual collapse will bring even more water into the city and inflation may turn into hyper inflation.
But anyway, there may be some sort of a solution that could work, but we have never tried it, we have never witnessed the results of our possible solution working, we have only questions and no answers.
People actually do things not just because of money but because they like to create something. Businesses are always innovating in some ways, trying to make the work cheaper, make the product more attractive, find a way to get more of the market and set the right price. It is a lot of creative work.
AFAIC an average businessman millionaire is NOT paid enough for all the work they do, but an average politician is definitely overpaid, so I can't argue that they are not smart about making their money that way. But top politicians can't compare to top businessman in anything.
However if the politician is a dictator, then it's a completely different story. Sure, in a dictatorship the top guy is the richest and most powerful.
Lunacy is you, thinking that the minimum return that you got on that government investment was worth it, given how much was NOT invested in private sector and was NOT produced based on all the taxes that gov't steals from the people's incomes.
How much money was wasted and how many lives destroyed just in wars? How many government projects went nowhere?
that's not true at all, people worked with nuclear materials for a few decades prior to the WWII, and the market takes steps that are correlated to the market attractiveness of the solution, given the price/value ratio, so it's clearly not true at all that there wouldn't have been nuclear power, because if this is just about cost, realize that costs are relative. The only thing that matters is how much return can an investment generate, and certainly private entities are very much capable of putting billions of dollars on the line. Even when it's just one company - look at Intel and look at every large oil producer.
Large companies make billion dollar decisions all the time, how they use their money and how they don't use it. It's the market that sets the prices, and absolute numbers don't matter when we talk about profit margins.
The gov't intervention into economy actually causes the short term thinking, my journal is filled with thoughts on this exact topic, here is an example.
No, it's not the role of government to finance gigantic projects, because then you'll have non-stop gigantic projects to the detriment of the rest of the economy, and by the end you will have produced nothing, but you would have moved lots of earth around with lots of shovels.
Everything that people believe they can do to solve some problems creates more problems somehow. So when people try to prevent fires in forests, eventually the forests have fires that are extremely devastating because of all the dead wood that wasn't burned off in smaller fires.
When people build dams to prevent floods, they cause other problems, like not getting enough new soil for their farm lands and water being too clean and washing soil off their existing farm lands and preventing new silt from being washed onto the shores, eventually the dams collapse, you have a city flooded or you have a food shortage because the farmlands are destroyed and the water that's too clean doesn't bring in the nutrients that come into the lakes from rivers and fish dies off.
If we think we know what we are doing in such cases, we are nearly always wrong. If you think you can skim some heat off the top of a large volcano and this will not cause something worse later on, you are wrong. Maybe the cooled rock will form too much of a barrier, but below it the pressure will keep rising and eventually the explosion will be much worse and consequences will be much worse. Unless we actually completely understand the phenomena and figure out every way that we can go wrong trying to solve some immediate problem, we are much more likely to cause a bigger disaster later on.
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Sweden is slowly but surely moving away from socialism, don't make me school you here. There is no such thing as good socialism in any proportion.
Put them all out of business and lets work on the actual issues. Browsers should be fixed to treat self signed certificates like normal encrypted channels and not viruses and there is a need for a new form of distributed authentication procedure that doesn't depend on a signing authority.
It doesn't matter what OWS wants, the entire system is moving towards more of a fascist state, not a Communist one, not that the difference is that important, in either case you'll lose all your liberties.
But as I said, these demands read more like Communist Manifesto than Mein Kampf.
Realize that in the former USSR there were similar controls (and even current Russia has some of these controls still), where people had in their passports. Yes, INTERNAL passports, that had name, birth date, parents' nationality! So in case of USA that would be nationality and religion, have to keep those Muslims on a short leash, right? There was a bunch of personal information there and the PLACE of where they live, so the address basically, and one couldn't really move from place to place without this document and couldn't really move from city to city without a lot of bureaucracy and it was actually designed in the first place to ensure a larger farmer population, to keep people from moving to cities, because living in Russian villages is not exactly wonderful (to say the least), and the gov't wanted to keep people working in these 'collective farms'.
Also this worked well for all the antisemitism in the country. Also USSR (and now Russia) had and still has this document, where they put information about every place of work, it's a 'work-book'. So one didn't need a resume, this was an official document, very important if one wanted to work at all.
Everybody was 'equal', except that some people were MORE equal than others, especially the members of the Communist Party.
For some reasons I see so many of these OWS protesters saying how they want socialism in USA. They have no idea what that actually means, they truly need to pay attention to people who LIVED in systems like that, here is a funny video about that.
People, stop before you completely screw this up for yourselves, it is NOT the right road, you are going the WRONG WAY.
The right way is to STOP the GOVERNMENT from breaking your free market capitalism. You had the most prosperity before federal government politicians figured out how to crack your system by breaking your monetary system (counterfeiting the currency, started in 1913, together with the prohibition, which is not a coincidence, US gov't used to make 50% of revenue from alcohol sales), and they started taxing your income, which is totally wrong. Taxing income is wrong for government, because government is a spending item.
Gov't spending should be PROPORTIONATE to your spending, not to your income, otherwise gov't can consume your entire income and you will have nothing left beyond the bare minimum, you won't have any savings and won't be able to invest into anything on your own.
Well, they have already achieved that goal. Majority of US citizens don't even have 1000 dollars in savings.
People, this is NOT about the 'rich' not paying some kind of 'fair share'. In fact the rich are paying much more, both, fractionally and in absolute numbers than anybody below their earning bracket. But it's OK for the rich to bear more cost, but it should not be that with more money, the income is taxed at higher rate. Well, the income shouldn't be taxed, period, but if it is taxed, it cannot be set so that majority can vote to steal more money from a minority. This is pure political BS propaganda, this is how the government takes your eyes off the ball.
The ball is that your economy is screwed, and it's only going to get worse, not better. No more better, it's going to crash and burn and you will with it, and the rich will probably escape that.
What you need is to crash and burn your government before it does it to you and you need to get back to actual sound monetary system and real Constitutional principles of government, where gov't actually only acts on its authority and doesn't grab power, so that it can sell it.
That's why you really need to vote for Ron Paul and support him in every way, because I like America, but I will never do business there again if you turn it into USSR (by stupidity, not even by design.)
All those fucking kids, dying from years of cancer must have been pretty fucking horrible people. All those rape victims, who were killed after the rape, or committed suicide, etc., they just were terrible human beings. Karma after all, right?
Waste of skin.
How the FUCK is that a 'TROLL' and the original poster NOT?
What about all the people who died before age of 56, did they all deserve it because of "BAD KARMA"? You fucking retards. Every fucking child dying before even the age of 2 deserves it due to KARMA?
Every one killed by anybody deserves it due to KARMA?
FUCK YOU, RETARDS.
First, "at a rate 10 times the previous gold standard" is interesting, but meaningless. What is the actual rate, and how is it measured?
- what they did was they introduced a fiat that was backed by a gold reserve at first, a unit of that currency could be exchanged at a fixed rate, but then they removed the gold reserve from it and now it's just an unbacked security, which means it can be inflated without having to add any value into the system. So while they claim that the rate is 10 times the previous gold standard, what they are failing to mention is that the amount of oxygen that can be split in a single reaction is reduced by 10 times as well. So they can release 10 times as many oxygen atoms but it takes 10 times the amount of energy to do it. The institution responsible for the amount of this fiat is a semi-private corporation now in charge of oxygen supply to the planet and the government has only tangential relationship to it. The securitization of the oxygen catalyst obligation is now underway, the markets are ecstatic as more and more fiat catalist is being pumped into the system allowing the inflation to hide the true rate of oxygen return by private enterprise, and the government guarantees the rate of return and all of the collateral obligations, so it's definitely a very healthy bull market from now on.
Nothing will go wrong.
Katrina happened due to a combination of incompetent government at all levels (particularly, the New Orleans government IMHO) and a poorly thought out restructuring of federal emergency response. Higher levees combined with our better knowledge of how the levee failed in the past, will help reduce the occurrence of Katrinas in the future).
Yes, there is no such thing as 'competent government'. You don't get to government by being competent, you get there by making sure that everybody with money who wants to buy favors knows about you.
It does more than that. It also makes the problem happen less frequently. The issue isn't that disasters occur, but how frequently they occur and how effective our response to them is.
- it also makes disasters much bigger in scale when they finally do happen.
This is like attempting to bottle up the Mississippi River. Reducing the frequency of occurrences of Katrina via higher levees and better disaster mitigation doesn't make future disasters worse (to the contrary!). But completely damming the entire Mississippi isn't going to work over the long term. That water will eventually find its way to the sea. The more effort you take, the harder the failure when it occurs.
- my point is that what we do, the way we do it is wrong, not that we must build higher levees or that we must inflate the money more, my point is exactly different, that we are doing the wrong and expedient thing.
Only if everybody can be equally smart
- oh, so if everybody was equally smart, then everybody would be a politician?
1. Nobody would be eating.
2. Not every smart person wants to be a politician, as I said - plenty of smart people are interested in things that they ultimately build businesses out of, but their interests may have been other than just making the most money. Maybe making the most money is only a consequence of an interesting hobby somebody has that he finds a way to monetize eventually.
More proof that politicians are smarter than businessmen.
- no it doesn't, not when you look at absolute numbers.
A businessman making 2-10 million a year is better off than a politician who is making maybe 500K-2million a year based on bribes and such, so sure, the millionaire is underpaid, but he is still making more money in dollar amounts while the government worker is overpaid (and belongs in jail likely for all the things he does), but in dollar amounts he is on a different scale.
Of course you can't, because by the time you reach the top, they're one and the same anyway.
- Steve Jobs was running his company but he wasn't running governments, though surely he was making some deals in the process of running his company, probably deals concerning things like tax breaks.
I don't agree that politicians are smarter than businessmen in general, I agree that there are some very smart politicians, but then there are some very smart businessmen.
But my point is that I would rather see smart people in private sector using their intelligence and productivity improving everybody's quality of life by building good products at attractive prices to compete and make money rather than having all these lawyers (most politicians are), come up with more laws so they can sell more privileges, sell more access and make money basically by stealing from all sides and destroying the economy in the process.
However politicians are definitely good at shifting the blame (until they are killed by the crowds, like what we just saw in Libya.)
Many Asian airlines base their entire hiring practice on the looks and age of the girl applying. Some girls very likely have to do things that would get people imprisoned in the west. They are paid very little and are under constant threat of firing. After a few years they are deemed unattractive and are summarily fired, no pension, no severance, and no thank-yous.
- at least somebody is doing it right.
but my opinion is that dying from 9 years of cancer at 56 is karma.
- that is just so fucking stupid.
a large skirt around the volcano.
In fact maybe that's a much easier to implement solution - a gigantic wall around the volcano before it erupts and a large dome, sort of like a skirt, very thick cloth made of multiple layers of carbon fiber, steel wool, plastics.
Build a few factories nearby that are ready to reprocess the poisonous gases and have pipes running from the walls and from the dome/skirt to the factories to reprocess the poisons. Maybe this is a more viable solution than drilling into the Earth's crust a few million times.
Regulation *can* work, so long as you prevent regulatory capture.
1. Even the regulations with the best intentions end up hurting, not helping. So this 'civil rights act of 1964' caused more unemployment among blacks, not less. Before that time the unemployment among young blacks was 15%, now it's 50%. Why is that? It's because the cost of hiring a minority went through the roof immediately after them getting special privileges (entitlements) and employers got obligations (costs).
2. There is no such thing as a regulation that cannot be captured. Regulation is power and power in itself is worthless, it only means something when it's for sale. A politician or an unelected bureaucrat in some unelected office create all these laws and regulations and lobbyists just swarm them (and they don't have to be lobbyists, in dictatorial environments those are just friends/friends of friends who get special treatment.)
Power is money, it's there to be sold. Politician is there to grab more and more power so he can sell it. It's that simple.
A good deal of Western Europe has tight regulation of industry, along with less economic disparity and better social mobility, than we have.
1. Most of Europe has much fewer regulations than USA.
2. Western Europe is mostly poor. Those are poor people, working for very little money, (those who have jobs), they can't afford much of anything. So they work and they are poor. All that so called 'upward mobility' is not happening. It doesn't happen for just salaried workers.
The trouble is that we've eschewed the responsibility of participating in government;
- true, that's what the problem is. US citizens stopped caring a long time ago, otherwise they wouldn't have allowed the income tax, the Federal reserve, the prohibition, the SS, the Medicare, etc. None of that is authorized to the federal government, but nobody cares.
It's like boiling a frog in water that is heating up slowly, the frog doesn't notice and by the time it notices, it's dead.
Lack of regulation generally *doesn't* work, as corporations (or people for that matter) have absolutely no motivation either to consider externalities or to not just screw people over.
-
Externalities are only irrelevant when there is government there, giving you a pass, because the property is not privately owned. Get rid of public property, force the gov't to sell all property and make sure it enforces individual liberties, private property and contracts and criminal law, all of a sudden externalities become important, because you can't just pollute, too many neighbors, and their private property is important. But in USA the private property protections are as much respected as any other individual liberties (not at all).
But I suppose you consider the derivatives market, Enron, Massey Coal, PG&E, etc. all shining examples of the success of letting industry do whatever the heck it wants.
- I addressed this many many many many many many many many too many times. None of those are free market examples, there haven't been free market examples for a long time. Enron was a gov't created disaster with various regulations, some relaxed, some enforced, creating an environment perfect for corruption. The coal like Massey are subsidized by gov't, they are completely shielded from the REAL costs of doing business, they don't have to buy the land on private auctions and pay the real price for what they are doing, first buying the land, then selling it and then being responsible to the neighbors for destroying things like underground water tables, rivers, lakes, forests. Any of this is only possible due to government market distortion.
Never mind. The fact that you indict Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac without also mentioning CDOs and other ways in which industry also contributed to the crisis means you're drunk on Koo
It doesn't matter, all of those companies would have eventually ended up in the same place - having to interoperate. They would have come to that conclusion eventually on their own, but if gov't wasn't allowed to spend money, how much would have been saved?
How many projects does a government start, that NEVER do anything, never end up with any outcome at all? That's all wasted money and it's all hurting the economy, not helping it, because the failure is not limited to some small private entity, it's distributed to everybody.
I am suggesting that government is protecting the status quo and that oil prices are now down due to depression in real terms, but are up in counterfeit currency due to government creating all that inflation.
My point is that right now the prices are going higher due to government printing money. But you are right, on a decade to decade level, the prices for oil go higher due to higher demand. Government shouldn't be subsidizing any energy company or any other company or any individual, but it also shouldn't be taxing income. All of that non-spent private income is used as savings and then as investment, it should only be taxed when people stop growing the money and start spending it. That's the way to ensure a thriving economy, that has many various businesses going on at the same time, many of them looking at the energy production as well.
The government is going to tax everybody (directly or with inflation) and to spend on something it believes is a good idea (however it arrived at such a conclusion, but it's definitely not a market signal that told them.) I am certain there is an element of corruption there, somebody is going to run a company, pocketing a bunch of money and really producing something or maybe not, it doesn't matter, what matters is that something is being subsidized, while the real economy is being diminished and this will make the energy crisis worse, not better.
ha, you are talking about the current systems, current power plants that have the MORAL HAZARD of government 'insuring' them (which is nonsense, government can't insure anything, it only relies on the ability to tax and then to borrow and to print, gov't doesn't have any interest bearing assets, nor should it.)
The point is that you are looking at the current state of affairs and extrapolating that the private sector would do it the same way, with brutal force that government is able to apply.
I think private enterprise would not go the same way at all, and by the way, so much of the cost of running a plant (and it doesn't have to be anything that is currently operating) is about security of the fissionable materials not making it into the 'wrong hands' - an entire government created problem.
You know, they weren't going for a nuclear power plant, they were going for a bomb. In fact they already did destroy 2 Japanese cities in that process and former USSR government destroyed a huge territory as well as many lives with Chernobyl, so much for government insurance.
I have a follow up question - this volcano is a spring that is building up pressure. Just build a space colony on top of it now, and when the volcano explodes, the colony will naturally end up in space. See, my solution just cut out 2 steps: fixing the volcano problem and building a spring.
I'm sure that most dam builders now accept the silting problems and even have solutions for it.
- yet Katrina happened just 6 years ago. Sure, they can raise the levies higher, but that just pushes the problem a little into the future, like the government inflating money supply, pushing the eventual resolution of the depression into the future, in the meanwhile the water is getting higher and inflation is getting bigger and the eventual collapse will bring even more water into the city and inflation may turn into hyper inflation.
But anyway, there may be some sort of a solution that could work, but we have never tried it, we have never witnessed the results of our possible solution working, we have only questions and no answers.
Maybe everybody should be a politician then?
People actually do things not just because of money but because they like to create something. Businesses are always innovating in some ways, trying to make the work cheaper, make the product more attractive, find a way to get more of the market and set the right price. It is a lot of creative work.
AFAIC an average businessman millionaire is NOT paid enough for all the work they do, but an average politician is definitely overpaid, so I can't argue that they are not smart about making their money that way. But top politicians can't compare to top businessman in anything.
However if the politician is a dictator, then it's a completely different story. Sure, in a dictatorship the top guy is the richest and most powerful.
Lunacy is you, thinking that the minimum return that you got on that government investment was worth it, given how much was NOT invested in private sector and was NOT produced based on all the taxes that gov't steals from the people's incomes.
How much money was wasted and how many lives destroyed just in wars? How many government projects went nowhere?
that's not true at all, people worked with nuclear materials for a few decades prior to the WWII, and the market takes steps that are correlated to the market attractiveness of the solution, given the price/value ratio, so it's clearly not true at all that there wouldn't have been nuclear power, because if this is just about cost, realize that costs are relative. The only thing that matters is how much return can an investment generate, and certainly private entities are very much capable of putting billions of dollars on the line. Even when it's just one company - look at Intel and look at every large oil producer.
Large companies make billion dollar decisions all the time, how they use their money and how they don't use it. It's the market that sets the prices, and absolute numbers don't matter when we talk about profit margins.
yes, and beyond that fact, how much money that gov't spends actually doesn't grow anything, ends up wasted?
All the wars?
The gov't intervention into economy actually causes the short term thinking, my journal is filled with thoughts on this exact topic, here is an example.
No, it's not the role of government to finance gigantic projects, because then you'll have non-stop gigantic projects to the detriment of the rest of the economy, and by the end you will have produced nothing, but you would have moved lots of earth around with lots of shovels.
Everything that people believe they can do to solve some problems creates more problems somehow. So when people try to prevent fires in forests, eventually the forests have fires that are extremely devastating because of all the dead wood that wasn't burned off in smaller fires.
When people build dams to prevent floods, they cause other problems, like not getting enough new soil for their farm lands and water being too clean and washing soil off their existing farm lands and preventing new silt from being washed onto the shores, eventually the dams collapse, you have a city flooded or you have a food shortage because the farmlands are destroyed and the water that's too clean doesn't bring in the nutrients that come into the lakes from rivers and fish dies off.
If we think we know what we are doing in such cases, we are nearly always wrong. If you think you can skim some heat off the top of a large volcano and this will not cause something worse later on, you are wrong. Maybe the cooled rock will form too much of a barrier, but below it the pressure will keep rising and eventually the explosion will be much worse and consequences will be much worse. Unless we actually completely understand the phenomena and figure out every way that we can go wrong trying to solve some immediate problem, we are much more likely to cause a bigger disaster later on.
Nuke it from the orbit.