and? Right now Obama is killing people (Americans too) without any trial or any real evidence of any actual guilt. That's FEDERAL power.
Why would you want federal government to have a MONOPOLY on such things? I don't want government to have monopoly on anything, but more importantly, the wars must be stopped and the same applies to most other activities that federal government is involved in.
As to States doing various things - that's why you have 50 of them.
Wouldn't you prefer to move to a State that was closer to what you accept as the law, rather than having to live in a system, that enforces a monopoly law upon you and taxes your income to enforce that?
No no, I'd rather have competition, especially for government power between States than letting ONE system rule it all.
I am former Soviet, Israeli, Canadian, currently in Europe building and selling/deploying software systems that analyze and integrate retail operations within store chain (integrate stores into a chain) and between stores and suppliers/manufacturers. It's hard business to compete with Oracle, SAP, MS in this field as well as with a number of smaller providers, including Russian 1C (1S), which is supported by Russian government, even their owner is a 'comptroller general' for a very large part of Russian Federation. OTOH I don't have Russian citizenship, so:) maybe not precisely what you are asking.
All the assumptions are wrong. There is no free market.
- correct. There is no free market, however there are degrees of freedom to consider and also what needs to be understood is that the market rules never actually stop working.
So even when the market is being manipulated by a third party (government), the rules of market continue working. It's like breathing - you need air and your body tries to inhale, but if there is third party between you and air - water, then you still continue to breath it. So the function of breathing continues to work for some time, of-course the water will flood the lungs and then function will cease, but that's not precisely what happens in case of market. Market functions never cease, they continue responding to the external stimuli by working out the answers. Of-course the outcomes of the answers may not be what people LIKE but the outcomes are consistent.
My point is that market provides consistent outcomes to inputs, this doesn't stop just because a third party is destroying normal market feedback mechanisms.
They are already in the way.
- yes, but again, this is about degrees of being in the way. So while in USA the degree of entanglement of government is very high, it's much lower in Switzerland, it's lower than that in Singapore and it's lower than that in Hong Kong and lower than that in mainland China.
The opposite. That's why I mentioned liquidity as a criteria. Hiding it under the bed is 100% liquidity.
- sure, except that the definition of money needs to be cleared. Gold is money. Fiat is paper that many people consider to be worthless. Many people will lose their shirt being in t-bills/bonds/USD.
There's no such thing as hidden.
- what does that mean, no such thing as hidden? You assume too much.
You either spend it, invest it or save it.
- even when you spend it or invest it, it can be hidden.
The mattress is the worst way to save, as for reactivating the economy depends ENTIRELY on the government spending for them, and that means either more debt or more taxes.
- no no no, no amount of spending by government can EVER reactive the economy:)
That's where we do differ - I do not accept that there is ANY amount of spending that government can be involved in that will actually do anything to improve the economy. This has been tried a number of times, total command economy doesn't produce anything useful at all and it always leads to an economic collapse due to impossibility of actually consuming anything, the demand is huge, it's total. But there is nothing produced and nobody wants your fake money.
Government cannot create economy. Government can appear and become bigger and bigger in a strong economy, but it cannot create one. Economies are created completely privately always. There are individuals that want to live better, but they must produce to do that. Government can only TAKE from economy to spend on programs (hopefully on very small number of agreed upon programs, such as border protection, criminal/contract law and such.)
What I meant by create employment is really that they need to spend it, even to the point of becoming a bit less wealthy, or invest them at a risk.
- government is standing in the way, always trying to remove risk. The problem is that it can never actually remove risk, but it tries and that's what creates the imbalances, as the market never stops working, the imbalances grow and eventually economy is lopsided, credit is somewhere it shouldn't be in, it's all mis-allocated, debts are held by people/corporations/governments that cannot pay it back.
It's all happening because gov't is standing there, saying: you don't have to worry, we are going to protect you.
This is FDIC, FHA, Freddie/Fannie, SS, Medicare, minimum wag
I think there's a simple solution. Make the wealthy responsible for employment. If employment goes below certain threshold, you start taxing their wealth progressively to the amount of risk they take.
- so you just want people to hide their money? Henry Ford hired enough workers to keep the assembly lines going, but he definitely could use thousands more people if he did NOT build the assembly lines.
Of-course he was producing the cheapest, highest quality cars in the world, benefiting the market by providing that type of wealth, and cars are wealth.
The point is that in normal free market you don't need any more incentives for rich to want get richer, they already do. Also the poor want to get rich and the middle class want to get rich, everybody wants to get rich. So in a normal free market economy, where you don't punish people for hiring, there will be more work.
Just left Zurich yesterday and came to Germany, listen, there is only 4% unemployment in Switzerland. It's because there is very little real labor regulations there and the taxes... well, let's put it this way - if you have to pay something and you disagree, you can actually negotiate as to how much you pay this year with your canton, and tax evasion is not an actual criminal offense. REAL unemployment is about 4%, it's very low. That's of-course before they decided to turn Franc into Euro, we'll see what happens now (I bet unemployment will go up and Swiss will not be happy about it.)
Now let's look at what you are proposing:
Take less risks (more liquid position, lower beta positions) such as "hold more cash", "hold more gold", hold more AAA bonds, and you are taxed very swiftly. Invest in start ups, venture capital, etc. and you'll get a larger break. Same with companies.
- so you want to tax the pensioners the hardest then?
How are you going to tax my gold, by the way? I hold the metal, you don't even know how much. Get in line, you won't be able to tax real assets and it makes no sense for me to hold gold if there are better opportunities. Get me a working economy, I'll invest more into production capacity rather than into inflation hedges.
Eg. 2. Invest in foreign assets, or have wealth that is concentrated abroad, you are taxed more. If they want to go live somewhere else, they lose all the protection the country provides.
- how are they going to be taxed more if they are not bringing the money in? People DO leave, I left.
---
Your solutions are no solutions. They are more of government type regulations, but that's just going to modify human behavior and you will always get the opposite results of what you are trying to achieve with that. It's like trying to create a perfect DRM - IT IS GOING TO FAIL. It's because people with money want to make money, but if you punish them for it and create environment that is punishing them for having money and making money, it's in their best interest to find ways around that, and that's good. That's good.
I don't want people, who have money to waste it by giving it to governments, so governments can grow and bail out their preferred monopolies, like AIG, GS, JP Morgan, etc. It makes no sense.
The REAL solution is to get the government in line, to return to individual liberties, allow people to do whatever in business, as long as it does not violate 2 things: 1. Criminal law. 2. Contract law.
Make sure that States do not create barriers to entry. Stop subsidizing monopolies. Stop printing money. Stop setting false money prices (interest rates). Stop regulating industries out of competition. Stop regulating labor out of work.
It's all about modification of human behavior, and as long as government does not stand on the way, people will be hiring people to make money on their ideas and projects.
Once government gets in the way, a lot of the effort goes not into useful market solutions that create wealth, but instead it creates make-shift work for some, like lawyers and tax-accountants, and the economy suffers, because the efforts are not to create products but instead the efforts are spent to avoid government PUNISHMENT for work.
OK, so does your agreement then NOT extend to the points I was making yesterday on what constitutes rights vs entitlements and obligations?
The comments are linked below, and the main premise is that individual 'rights' are meaningful only to define relationship between the individual and the collective (so individual and the government), as opposed to having any role in defining the relationship between 2 individuals or any private entities.
The point is that rights and entitlements are different things, and rights is what you do not want your government to violate, and entitlements is what some are given by the government, forcing obligations on others.
So you do not agree with those comments then, while agreeing with the one I made on this story, because you are saying this is the first agreement on your part? (is there a difference from individual point of view of Universe imploding and a robot drone missile attack that kills that individual?)
So it's not a stretch to say that if POTUS gets to keep the power to kill American citizens without a trial, eventually it will be used to kill American citizens in USA without a trial, who have suspected 'ties' to 'terrorism', and when government gets to decide who is a terrorist, who is a suspected terrorist and who has ties to them, the lines become increasingly blurry as to who can be killed next and where.
Realize that pretty much ANYBODY can eventually be tied to something that has to do with terrorism somehow, after all the 6 degrees of separation separate you from Kevin Bacon as much as they separate you from anybody, including various terrorists. (Now, it's not scientific, but there a point there. Something you said somewhere on the Internet at any point can be linked to something else, even if it is only similar, but not exactly the same, but who gives a shit about nuance, right?) In any case, this is completely illegal, immoral and anti-Constitutional.
I am making this comment right now, and it can be turned against me - it can be declared that this is equivalent to terrorist-sympathizing, because I don't want POTUS to kill Americans on a whim. Is that enough to launch a drone strike after me?
If you don't see me commenting here for over 2 weeks in a row, then that's it (and foes can cheer.)
Yeah, the government designed it in such a way as to profit from both ends of the stick. On one hand it's profiting from the specific monopolies they create, because they get their money for elections and their jobs once they are done with government there. On the other hand they are using the populist moves that in reality hurt the individuals, especially middle/lower income people, but they gain large constituency this way, because poor people who government gives hand outs to are an easy to get voting block. Just talk about all the crutches you give them and they'll vote for you. Promise them better crutches, chrome plated crutches and they'll cheerfully vote for you.
Just make sure they never figure out that you broke their legs. So ensure that the education system never brings this point across.
- in limited space and time this is the only way to demonstrate a point.
You can own property, just not if you retaining it would cause someone else to die of starvation.
- nonsense. "just not"? You can't be a touch pregnant and you can't believe in 'touch' of rights.
Either you have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness or you do not. You cannot have that right unless..... somebody can define a reason why you shouldn't have that right and bring up any argument.
Your individual rights are sovereign, which means the collective cannot abuse them (if that's the government that you set up, where government must protect your individual rights, and where that's the only real function of the government).
, but if somehow it did and by sharing you yourself would not die of starvation then yes, they have a right to your stuff
- nonsense. At the point where this is an accepted ideology you lose your rights. You don't have any rights if the government turns the argument this way, because it means that a good lawyer on the government's side, working with government assigned judges will use this to argue anything - that you must do this and that or other, because that's necessary for somebody to survive, etc. This is the actual reason why in USA there is such a huge loss of liberties and freedoms right now. This very argument, and soon there will be a choice - either to accept that individual rights cannot be violated in any such case, or there will be another USSR created, but probably worse, once US dollar and bond collapse and Western and USD economies go to hell.
No, you do not have a right to survive by robbing me of my rights.
But when it's between 2 individuals, this has nothing to do with rights. Again and again, between any 2 private parties there is only the criminal and contract law.
Rights only are a meaningful expression of relationship between an individual and a collective - the government system. I have explained time and again that your personal individual rights that government must not violate (well, in case of USA it must not violate, your country and the way it set up the government is your business), that these rights have nothing to do when 2 private parties are dealing with each other. There is no such thing as a 'right to free speech' when 2 individual parties are dealing. This is about government not establishing roadblocks for you to speak your mind. This is because the power of government is the ultimate power, which needs to be kept in check.
The only reason even to have such a concept, as a 'right', is to establish the relationship between individual and the collective. When 2 individuals are dealing with each other - this is covered by contract and criminal law, however that's maintained.
2 people come to kill you, they are not denying you a 'right' to live, they are just there to kill you. When they are CHARGED and TRIED for your murder, there is NO ARGUMENT about your right in court.
There is no argument. Nobody will be able to make an argument that you DID NOT HAVE A RIGHT TO LIVE.
The huge difference is that government is a SYSTEM and private individuals are PEOPLE. There needs to be a way to deal with the SYSTEM that does not involve SPECIFIC PEOPLE.
So you are not suing or trying a specific person when you argue that you have a RIGHT to SPEECH or to LIFE. You are arguing against the SYSTEM.
So that's the main purpose of defining what a 'right' is, it's to establish a way for you to deal with the system that has all of these various powers that you do not have.
I see all this people in this thread (and if you look at my comments page, you'll see just how many people are replying, so it's hard), and they would never be able to answer a fairly simple question, which I do have an answer for.
Here is the question:
What's 'fair'? What is the number that you believe people must pay into the system via taxes? (I of-course am completely against all income, corporate, payroll and investment taxes). What's the number?
They will never be able to say what it is.
I know why they can't say it. It's because they don't know what the cost will be, but the one thing is for sure: cost will be going up. There is just NO WAY for cost to go down. The way that gov't deals with the cost and run-away pyramid scheme is by increasing the revenue through higher taxes and lower benefits (the way Reagan did it for SS).
So taxes are sure to go up, not just in absolute numbers but percentage wise. Benefits are sure to go down.
But in the inflationary system and government ran medical system this means that you can NEVER put a finger on the number that you want to collect from people, because you in fact will ALWAYS have to increase that number in a government system. Of-course inflation by gov't is some of it (costs going up), but most of it is gov't ran medical care and insurance, just because it's gov't.
Some people make very little money, maybe 12K USD / year. Well, in extreme cases that's how much ONE DAY of hospital stay may cost in USA!
So that's interesting. Imagine that health care costs go up to 100K/day for some cases. What if they go up to 500K/day?
What is the appropriate taxation then to provide medical care through gov't system and is it even possible?
Well, that would be the reason why nobody will answer the question of: what's fair.
--
Of-course those who actually own businesses and create jobs (cliche, but then again, poor people don't create jobs), those who do create jobs already do more than their fair share before they pay 1 cent in taxes. That's because they increase the wealth of the society by increasing economic production output and they provide jobs, and salaried people pay taxes and they don't have to ask for gov't assistance, etc.
Sure, there are people who are feeding at the gov't trough - certain Wall Str. bankers benefit from the collapse by getting hundreds of millions in bonuses - well that just another reason to stop the government from economic participation. It doesn't know what it's doing by bailing out banks. It doesn't know what kind of damage it's causing by messing with the economy this way and by propping up zombie banks at the expense of everybody.
So, what properties do Mercury and the Moon share?
They are both hell holes.
I have evidence for Mercury right here:
Spectrometers also reveal substantially higher abundances of sulfur and potassium than previously predicted.
New data from orbit show a huge expanse of volcanic plains surrounding the north polar region of Mercury. These continuous smooth plains cover more than 6% of the total surface of Mercury.
Scientists have also discovered vents, measuring up to 25 kilometers (km) (15.5 miles) in length, that appear to be the source of some of the tremendous volumes of very hot lava that have rushed out over the surface of Mercury and eroded the substrate, carving valleys and creating teardrop-shaped ridges in the underlying terrain.
Now MESSENGER's orbital mission has provided close-up, targeted views of many of these craters. The bright areas are composed of small, shallow, irregularly shaped depressions that are often found in clusters said David T. Blewett, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and lead author of one of the Science reports. "The science team adopted the term 'hollows' for these features to distinguish them from other types of pits that are found on Mercury."
Hollows have been found over a wide range of latitudes and longitudes, suggesting that they are fairly common across Mercury. Many of the depressions have bright interiors and halos, and Blewett says the ones detected so far have a fresh appearance and have not accumulated small impact craters, indicating that they are relatively young.
They are clearly covered under interstate commerce and ability to establish post roads and offices.
- both a mistake.
Do you think anything such as that could ever have been accomplished without government intervention?
- obviously. It's done all the time. Do I have to enumerate every private road and every private shipment company in the world?
You don't think railroads and interstates are worthwhile?
- only if there is an economic reason for them that puts some private money at risk and does not force public to pay for it. That's why government bailing out banks is wrong for example, it's just it's a more 'in your face' sort of an example rather than interstate. Interstate highways destroy infrastructure, they destroyed private rail roads and they put enormous tax burden upon airline companies to do that.
They gained the economic and political advantage over separate States, which allowed them to pressure the States politically and economically into submission on all sorts of things. They destroyed a better transit system and they created unsustainable infrastructure, which is subsidized and once subsidies end, the infrastructure will come to an end as well.
At the very least they have always required a mandated right of way or eminent domain seizure
- eminent domain - what a terrible violation of private property rights. That's the problem with the people - they don't understand how gov't gets out of control and completely denies them their rights, because they think it's for the 'common good'.
NO. There should be no eminent domain allowed to the government at all. All of those highways that did that shouldn't have existed OR they should have been built privately and they should have negotiated with the private property owners privately. That's the way to have the REAL costs in all of those things, not socialized via various economy destroying taxes and money printing.
I think this is the last comment I am replying to today.
No, there is no individual contract between you and me on what constitutes your or my rights. If I kill you, I am only liable because the criminal code says so, which basically a set of laws that define what criminal offenses are between private parties.
The concept of 'rights' has nothing to do with relationships between individuals.
Does your wife or husband (if you have one, or whatever you may have) have a right to impede on your 'free speech' for example? Well, even he/she/it doesn't have to provide you a forum. Doesn't have to listen to you. Doesn't have to help you with your free speech. You may divorce/dump them, but there is no way for you to go after them for violation of that 'right', because there is no contract between individuals that is about 'rights'.
The contract on 'rights' is between individuals and the government, nothing else.
Nobody owes you anything personally unless you have a personal contract with them and it says that they do.
Wrong again. A few laws passed in the UK have subsequently been ruled in violation of human rights and thus removed from the books
- I don't see how this applies to me or makes me wrong, but hey, UK is a back ass place. Every time I go to London I sort of enjoy it, but I enjoy much more when I leave.
You also cannot give away your human rights via contract.
- I didn't even say you can, YOU ARE THE ONE SAYING THAT YOU CAN.
At point in time that you are talking about government forcing you to give up whatever you make with your life, any amount of your work so that somebody else can have an entitlement, you have just allowed them to take away your right to property and pursuit of happiness, and you did it due to coercion, because otherwise they would come after the other 2 rights that they are supposed to protect of yours: your liberty and your life.
The government cannot oblige you to give up your human rights or to violate the rights of others.
- you are so confused. On one hand you are saying government is there to give you something it takes from somebody else and supposedly it makes it YOUR right, on the other you are saying that government cannot do so, cannot take away your right so that somebody else's 'right' (obligation actually) can be fulfilled.
You can't have rights without any obligation to anyone else.
- Ah, now MAYBE here I can agree with you to the extent that you have to COOPERATE with other people to set up a functioning government. So what you are giving up is part of your sovereignty the moment you say that it is government's job to provide you border security and uphold your criminal law.
Now, if you just said that, I would have agreed. This is because criminal law and border protection will never work without the power of government over you in cases when you VIOLATE the law, so your rights could be then suspended or even taken away - like life and liberty and pursuit of happiness. You could be thrown to jail.
Of-course you are not making a nuanced statement like that, you are just trying to justify entitlements being 'rights' somehow and you want to justify the power of the state to enforce obligations upon others to provide you with those entitlements.
This is all fun and good until you crash your economic system.
For example the right to life is meaningless if others can deny you food, and so they are obliged to share enough to sustain you.
- Let me put it into 3 year old talk:
If I am a good person or I just feel like it I can give you food if you are starving.
If I am a bad person and maybe I don't like you I can refuse giving you food.
Me giving you food or not giving you food has nothing to do with your rights. It has everything to do with my right of property and liberty and pursuit of happiness. Maybe it makes me happy to see you starve, or maybe it makes me happy to see you well fed.
But the point is, if you believe that I am OBLIGED to give you food for some strange reason, then your ideology has nothing to do with rights at all. Your ideology is then that you can force anybody to give you stuff that you want just because you believe you are entitled to it, because you are in a mistaken assumption that your rights trump mine.
Your rights do not trump mine. I could give you food or deny you food and this has nothing to do with your 'right' to life.
However if I take one of my favorite guns or knives and kill you, THEN there is CRIMINAL law. Criminal law is devised to resolve such conflicts, assign blame and punishment, but it's not about rights.
If GOVERNMENT came to you and killed you WITHOUT any reason and WITHOUT any trial, etc., THEN it would be a violation of your rights.
NOBODY OWES YOU FOOD, DUDE.
NOBODY.
Dude, you are completely confused. I have to go to sleep, I have a trip tomorrow.
I am now not sure what your point is any longer. My point remains simple: keep government out of it unless you want it to grow to a point where the system, the entire economic system collapses.
I think hyperinflation is actually possible in USA, given current inflation levels (11-15% if you look at numbers the way they did during Nixon, who implemented *wrongly* wage and price controls. I count 13% inflation, which means GDP has been going down steady by 10% a year for years now.)
--
I see all this people in this thread (and if you look at my comments page, you'll see just how many people are replying, so it's hard), and they would never be able to answer a fairly simple question, which I do have an answer for.
Here is the question:
What's 'fair'? What is the number that you believe people must pay into the system via taxes? (I of-course am completely against all income, corporate, payroll and investment taxes). What's the number?
They will never be able to say what it is.
I know why they can't say it. It's because they don't know what the cost will be, but the one thing is for sure: cost will be going up. There is just NO WAY for cost to go down. The way that gov't deals with the cost and run-away pyramid scheme is by increasing the revenue through higher taxes and lower benefits (the way Reagan did it for SS).
So taxes are sure to go up, not just in absolute numbers but percentage wise. Benefits are sure to go down.
But in the inflationary system and government ran medical system this means that you can NEVER put a finger on the number that you want to collect from people, because you in fact will ALWAYS have to increase that number in a government system. Of-course inflation by gov't is some of it (costs going up), but most of it is gov't ran medical care and insurance, just because it's gov't.
Some people make very little money, maybe 12K USD / year. Well, in extreme cases that's how much ONE DAY of hospital stay may cost in USA!
So that's interesting. Imagine that health care costs go up to 100K/day for some cases. What if they go up to 500K/day?
What is the appropriate taxation then to provide medical care through gov't system and is it even possible?
Well, that would be the reason why nobody will answer the question of: what's fair.
--
Of-course those who actually own businesses and create jobs (cliche, but then again, poor people don't create jobs), those who do create jobs already do more than their fair share before they pay 1 cent in taxes. That's because they increase the wealth of the society by increasing economic production output and they provide jobs, and salaried people pay taxes and they don't have to ask for gov't assistance, etc.
Sure, there are people who are feeding at the gov't trough - certain Wall Str. bankers benefit from the collapse by getting hundreds of millions in bonuses - well that just another reason to stop the government from economic participation. It doesn't know what it's doing by bailing out banks. It doesn't know what kind of damage it's causing by messing with the economy this way and by propping up zombie banks at the expense of everybody.
Anyway, I gotta write a few more responses and split, it's late and I have a day trip tomorrow. Cheers.
Long ago I said: taxes kill infrastructure - this answers the interstate highway question, and obviously gov't is not authorized to do that and shouldn't be allowed to do that.
As to DOD - this is the part of government that is one of few things that are legitimately authorized, however, giving government ability to regulate business and start wars while giving private contractors ability to gain from those wars is obviously a conflict of interests.
You can't have government that can start wars indiscriminately without any reason, so that contractors would gain from it (*and obviously this leads to insane levels of spending*).
Government needs to abide by the rules, so Congress MUST vote before going to war, a war must be declared, it must have goals, goals must be achievable, wars must be winnable, taxes MUST be raised in order to pay for the war.
All of this MUST happen, otherwise you end up with a system, where money is borrowed and printed, taxes are not raised, so constituents don't care if you have another war, in fact they are happy about the empire building and certain level of employment that the 'semi-private' businesses involved in this enterprise provide.
This is the military industrial complex you've been warned about. Eisenhower? Rings any bells?
yes, it is the correct reason to have the Constitution.
You were talking about all sorts of instruments that are given to government, which obviously impede on human rights, but are understood to be necessary in order to achieve the goal that the Constitution defines that the government exists to fulfill.
There is a difference between the goal and the means to achieve it.
You seem to think it has some existential meaning that cannot be altered from your opinion
- it's not an opinion. "Right" is literally everything that you can do that you are not limited in except by criminal and contract law and except by the obligations that are imposed onto you by the government.
So you better be careful when you give up your rights, as giving it up is easy, getting it back is so hard, people had to go through wars to do that, people had to die to get their rights back.
When you impose an obligation upon somebody in order to provide an entitlement to somebody else, well, if you agree to that, then you are giving up one (or more) of your intrinsic rights (not to be coerced into some form of behavior you would not otherwise engage in).
Right is an artificial construct, but it is a very specific construct. It's like metal. Metal is a word, but it means something and what it means is not wood or plastic.
rather than trying to hijack an existing one.
- you want to call obligations and entitlements 'rights'? Go ahead, who am I to stop you? But you will be met with harsh reality, when you will expect to have those so called 'rights' ( which I am telling you are just entitlements that are only possible to due obligations imposed onto somebody else), when the system collapses due to the financial and economic burden of the welfare state.
I read plenty on the Ponzi scheme, so I know it was even possible due to government in the first place, since it was government exchange of payments that made it possible for him to do arbitrage of postage fees (international reply coupons), this resource imbalance is IMPOSSIBLE without government intervention.
Demand creates jobs, not a "free market economy". And we already know about this so called free society.
- production creates jobs, demand is a trivial consequence of production.
Demand always exists, which is easily proven by the fact that USA has 53Billion USD/month trade deficit and the debt is constantly growing, as almost half of the money spent by US government is borrowed.
Production comes first, it needs savings to be used as legitimate investment and it needs real risk to be present in order to ensure risk aversion and balance and proper capital allocation.
Production comes first, that's why iPads were created first and then they were consumed.
Modern Health Care did not start until 1920, and the odds of doctor involvement giving you a reliably better outcome was at least 10-15 years later, some would argue 30 years later around 1950.
- you are also wrong on this fact. Modern health care can be said to have started in the Mayo clinic in USA, where doctors started sharing information with each others, which allowed them quickly to build a reputation of a hospital that had very high success rates. How did they achieve it? First things first: sanitation - washing things between patients, washing instruments, washing hands, etc. They started using more and more modern instruments, which THEY invented there. This was mid 19 century.
Slashdot Mirror
some well-known terrorist leader
- prove it. Prove that he is a LEADER of terrorists. He wrote various things and he had connections, but PROVE that he is a leader.
--
But your comment reminded me of an old joke (trying to translate):
Stalin is giving out orders:
1. Paint the Kremlin wall yellow.
2. Execute every one of the current 1000000 prisoners.
Question: Comrade Stalin, why are are we painting the wall yellow?
Stalin: As I suspected, there are no questions about the second order.
and? Right now Obama is killing people (Americans too) without any trial or any real evidence of any actual guilt. That's FEDERAL power.
Why would you want federal government to have a MONOPOLY on such things? I don't want government to have monopoly on anything, but more importantly, the wars must be stopped and the same applies to most other activities that federal government is involved in.
As to States doing various things - that's why you have 50 of them.
Wouldn't you prefer to move to a State that was closer to what you accept as the law, rather than having to live in a system, that enforces a monopoly law upon you and taxes your income to enforce that?
No no, I'd rather have competition, especially for government power between States than letting ONE system rule it all.
I am former Soviet, Israeli, Canadian, currently in Europe building and selling/deploying software systems that analyze and integrate retail operations within store chain (integrate stores into a chain) and between stores and suppliers/manufacturers. It's hard business to compete with Oracle, SAP, MS in this field as well as with a number of smaller providers, including Russian 1C (1S), which is supported by Russian government, even their owner is a 'comptroller general' for a very large part of Russian Federation. OTOH I don't have Russian citizenship, so :) maybe not precisely what you are asking.
All the assumptions are wrong. There is no free market.
- correct. There is no free market, however there are degrees of freedom to consider and also what needs to be understood is that the market rules never actually stop working.
So even when the market is being manipulated by a third party (government), the rules of market continue working. It's like breathing - you need air and your body tries to inhale, but if there is third party between you and air - water, then you still continue to breath it. So the function of breathing continues to work for some time, of-course the water will flood the lungs and then function will cease, but that's not precisely what happens in case of market. Market functions never cease, they continue responding to the external stimuli by working out the answers. Of-course the outcomes of the answers may not be what people LIKE but the outcomes are consistent.
My point is that market provides consistent outcomes to inputs, this doesn't stop just because a third party is destroying normal market feedback mechanisms.
They are already in the way.
- yes, but again, this is about degrees of being in the way. So while in USA the degree of entanglement of government is very high, it's much lower in Switzerland, it's lower than that in Singapore and it's lower than that in Hong Kong and lower than that in mainland China.
The opposite. That's why I mentioned liquidity as a criteria. Hiding it under the bed is 100% liquidity.
- sure, except that the definition of money needs to be cleared. Gold is money. Fiat is paper that many people consider to be worthless. Many people will lose their shirt being in t-bills/bonds/USD.
There's no such thing as hidden.
- what does that mean, no such thing as hidden? You assume too much.
You either spend it, invest it or save it.
- even when you spend it or invest it, it can be hidden.
The mattress is the worst way to save, as for reactivating the economy depends ENTIRELY on the government spending for them, and that means either more debt or more taxes.
- no no no, no amount of spending by government can EVER reactive the economy :)
That's where we do differ - I do not accept that there is ANY amount of spending that government can be involved in that will actually do anything to improve the economy. This has been tried a number of times, total command economy doesn't produce anything useful at all and it always leads to an economic collapse due to impossibility of actually consuming anything, the demand is huge, it's total. But there is nothing produced and nobody wants your fake money.
Government cannot create economy. Government can appear and become bigger and bigger in a strong economy, but it cannot create one. Economies are created completely privately always. There are individuals that want to live better, but they must produce to do that. Government can only TAKE from economy to spend on programs (hopefully on very small number of agreed upon programs, such as border protection, criminal/contract law and such.)
What I meant by create employment is really that they need to spend it, even to the point of becoming a bit less wealthy, or invest them at a risk.
- government is standing in the way, always trying to remove risk. The problem is that it can never actually remove risk, but it tries and that's what creates the imbalances, as the market never stops working, the imbalances grow and eventually economy is lopsided, credit is somewhere it shouldn't be in, it's all mis-allocated, debts are held by people/corporations/governments that cannot pay it back.
It's all happening because gov't is standing there, saying: you don't have to worry, we are going to protect you.
This is FDIC, FHA, Freddie/Fannie, SS, Medicare, minimum wag
Aaah, so exercising the first amendment rights is now punishable by death. Is that a Constitutional position or only a personal one?
I think there's a simple solution. Make the wealthy responsible for employment. If employment goes below certain threshold, you start taxing their wealth progressively to the amount of risk they take.
- so you just want people to hide their money? Henry Ford hired enough workers to keep the assembly lines going, but he definitely could use thousands more people if he did NOT build the assembly lines.
Of-course he was producing the cheapest, highest quality cars in the world, benefiting the market by providing that type of wealth, and cars are wealth.
The point is that in normal free market you don't need any more incentives for rich to want get richer, they already do. Also the poor want to get rich and the middle class want to get rich, everybody wants to get rich. So in a normal free market economy, where you don't punish people for hiring, there will be more work.
Just left Zurich yesterday and came to Germany, listen, there is only 4% unemployment in Switzerland. It's because there is very little real labor regulations there and the taxes... well, let's put it this way - if you have to pay something and you disagree, you can actually negotiate as to how much you pay this year with your canton, and tax evasion is not an actual criminal offense. REAL unemployment is about 4%, it's very low. That's of-course before they decided to turn Franc into Euro, we'll see what happens now (I bet unemployment will go up and Swiss will not be happy about it.)
Now let's look at what you are proposing:
Take less risks (more liquid position, lower beta positions) such as "hold more cash", "hold more gold", hold more AAA bonds, and you are taxed very swiftly. Invest in start ups, venture capital, etc. and you'll get a larger break. Same with companies.
- so you want to tax the pensioners the hardest then?
How are you going to tax my gold, by the way? I hold the metal, you don't even know how much. Get in line, you won't be able to tax real assets and it makes no sense for me to hold gold if there are better opportunities. Get me a working economy, I'll invest more into production capacity rather than into inflation hedges.
Eg. 2. Invest in foreign assets, or have wealth that is concentrated abroad, you are taxed more. If they want to go live somewhere else, they lose all the protection the country provides.
- how are they going to be taxed more if they are not bringing the money in? People DO leave, I left.
---
Your solutions are no solutions. They are more of government type regulations, but that's just going to modify human behavior and you will always get the opposite results of what you are trying to achieve with that. It's like trying to create a perfect DRM - IT IS GOING TO FAIL. It's because people with money want to make money, but if you punish them for it and create environment that is punishing them for having money and making money, it's in their best interest to find ways around that, and that's good. That's good.
I don't want people, who have money to waste it by giving it to governments, so governments can grow and bail out their preferred monopolies, like AIG, GS, JP Morgan, etc. It makes no sense.
The REAL solution is to get the government in line, to return to individual liberties, allow people to do whatever in business, as long as it does not violate 2 things:
1. Criminal law.
2. Contract law.
Make sure that States do not create barriers to entry. Stop subsidizing monopolies. Stop printing money. Stop setting false money prices (interest rates). Stop regulating industries out of competition. Stop regulating labor out of work.
It's all about modification of human behavior, and as long as government does not stand on the way, people will be hiring people to make money on their ideas and projects.
Once government gets in the way, a lot of the effort goes not into useful market solutions that create wealth, but instead it creates make-shift work for some, like lawyers and tax-accountants, and the economy suffers, because the efforts are not to create products but instead the efforts are spent to avoid government PUNISHMENT for work.
OK, so does your agreement then NOT extend to the points I was making yesterday on what constitutes rights vs entitlements and obligations?
The comments are linked below, and the main premise is that individual 'rights' are meaningful only to define relationship between the individual and the collective (so individual and the government), as opposed to having any role in defining the relationship between 2 individuals or any private entities.
The point is that rights and entitlements are different things, and rights is what you do not want your government to violate, and entitlements is what some are given by the government, forcing obligations on others.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2450838&cid=37575982
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2450838&cid=37554214
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2450838&cid=37558726
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2450838&cid=37558814
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2450838&cid=37558814
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2450838&cid=37556278
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2450838&cid=37554214
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2450838&cid=37553622
So you do not agree with those comments then, while agreeing with the one I made on this story, because you are saying this is the first agreement on your part? (is there a difference from individual point of view of Universe imploding and a robot drone missile attack that kills that individual?)
That's why you vote for Ron Paul.
Realize that just a little while ago, FBI argued that there is significant terrorist threat within USA coming from various militias (remember Oklahoma?)
So it's not a stretch to say that if POTUS gets to keep the power to kill American citizens without a trial, eventually it will be used to kill American citizens in USA without a trial, who have suspected 'ties' to 'terrorism', and when government gets to decide who is a terrorist, who is a suspected terrorist and who has ties to them, the lines become increasingly blurry as to who can be killed next and where.
Realize that pretty much ANYBODY can eventually be tied to something that has to do with terrorism somehow, after all the 6 degrees of separation separate you from Kevin Bacon as much as they separate you from anybody, including various terrorists. (Now, it's not scientific, but there a point there. Something you said somewhere on the Internet at any point can be linked to something else, even if it is only similar, but not exactly the same, but who gives a shit about nuance, right?) In any case, this is completely illegal, immoral and anti-Constitutional.
I am making this comment right now, and it can be turned against me - it can be declared that this is equivalent to terrorist-sympathizing, because I don't want POTUS to kill Americans on a whim. Is that enough to launch a drone strike after me?
If you don't see me commenting here for over 2 weeks in a row, then that's it (and foes can cheer.)
Yeah, the government designed it in such a way as to profit from both ends of the stick. On one hand it's profiting from the specific monopolies they create, because they get their money for elections and their jobs once they are done with government there. On the other hand they are using the populist moves that in reality hurt the individuals, especially middle/lower income people, but they gain large constituency this way, because poor people who government gives hand outs to are an easy to get voting block. Just talk about all the crutches you give them and they'll vote for you. Promise them better crutches, chrome plated crutches and they'll cheerfully vote for you.
Just make sure they never figure out that you broke their legs. So ensure that the education system never brings this point across.
You only seem capable of thinking in extremes.
- in limited space and time this is the only way to demonstrate a point.
You can own property, just not if you retaining it would cause someone else to die of starvation.
- nonsense. "just not"? You can't be a touch pregnant and you can't believe in 'touch' of rights.
Either you have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness or you do not. You cannot have that right unless..... somebody can define a reason why you shouldn't have that right and bring up any argument.
Your individual rights are sovereign, which means the collective cannot abuse them (if that's the government that you set up, where government must protect your individual rights, and where that's the only real function of the government).
, but if somehow it did and by sharing you yourself would not die of starvation then yes, they have a right to your stuff
- nonsense. At the point where this is an accepted ideology you lose your rights. You don't have any rights if the government turns the argument this way, because it means that a good lawyer on the government's side, working with government assigned judges will use this to argue anything - that you must do this and that or other, because that's necessary for somebody to survive, etc. This is the actual reason why in USA there is such a huge loss of liberties and freedoms right now. This very argument, and soon there will be a choice - either to accept that individual rights cannot be violated in any such case, or there will be another USSR created, but probably worse, once US dollar and bond collapse and Western and USD economies go to hell.
No, you do not have a right to survive by robbing me of my rights.
But when it's between 2 individuals, this has nothing to do with rights. Again and again, between any 2 private parties there is only the criminal and contract law.
Rights only are a meaningful expression of relationship between an individual and a collective - the government system. I have explained time and again that your personal individual rights that government must not violate (well, in case of USA it must not violate, your country and the way it set up the government is your business), that these rights have nothing to do when 2 private parties are dealing with each other. There is no such thing as a 'right to free speech' when 2 individual parties are dealing. This is about government not establishing roadblocks for you to speak your mind. This is because the power of government is the ultimate power, which needs to be kept in check.
The only reason even to have such a concept, as a 'right', is to establish the relationship between individual and the collective. When 2 individuals are dealing with each other - this is covered by contract and criminal law, however that's maintained.
2 people come to kill you, they are not denying you a 'right' to live, they are just there to kill you. When they are CHARGED and TRIED for your murder, there is NO ARGUMENT about your right in court.
There is no argument. Nobody will be able to make an argument that you DID NOT HAVE A RIGHT TO LIVE.
However when GOVERNMENT takes you to court (or when the president just kills you with his order, which obviously goes against the Constitution), they are making that exact argument.
The huge difference is that government is a SYSTEM and private individuals are PEOPLE. There needs to be a way to deal with the SYSTEM that does not involve SPECIFIC PEOPLE.
So you are not suing or trying a specific person when you argue that you have a RIGHT to SPEECH or to LIFE. You are arguing against the SYSTEM.
So that's the main purpose of defining what a 'right' is, it's to establish a way for you to deal with the system that has all of these various powers that you do not have.
what are girls?
Just a day ago I wrote this question and the ansewr in a thread, but I give an explanation as to why the progressives cannot answer this question.
Here it is again:
I see all this people in this thread (and if you look at my comments page, you'll see just how many people are replying, so it's hard), and they would never be able to answer a fairly simple question, which I do have an answer for.
Here is the question:
What's 'fair'? What is the number that you believe people must pay into the system via taxes? (I of-course am completely against all income, corporate, payroll and investment taxes). What's the number?
They will never be able to say what it is.
I know why they can't say it. It's because they don't know what the cost will be, but the one thing is for sure: cost will be going up. There is just NO WAY for cost to go down. The way that gov't deals with the cost and run-away pyramid scheme is by increasing the revenue through higher taxes and lower benefits (the way Reagan did it for SS).
So taxes are sure to go up, not just in absolute numbers but percentage wise. Benefits are sure to go down.
But in the inflationary system and government ran medical system this means that you can NEVER put a finger on the number that you want to collect from people, because you in fact will ALWAYS have to increase that number in a government system. Of-course inflation by gov't is some of it (costs going up), but most of it is gov't ran medical care and insurance, just because it's gov't.
Some people make very little money, maybe 12K USD / year. Well, in extreme cases that's how much ONE DAY of hospital stay may cost in USA!
So that's interesting. Imagine that health care costs go up to 100K/day for some cases. What if they go up to 500K/day?
What is the appropriate taxation then to provide medical care through gov't system and is it even possible?
Well, that would be the reason why nobody will answer the question of: what's fair.
--
Of-course those who actually own businesses and create jobs (cliche, but then again, poor people don't create jobs), those who do create jobs already do more than their fair share before they pay 1 cent in taxes. That's because they increase the wealth of the society by increasing economic production output and they provide jobs, and salaried people pay taxes and they don't have to ask for gov't assistance, etc.
Sure, there are people who are feeding at the gov't trough - certain Wall Str. bankers benefit from the collapse by getting hundreds of millions in bonuses - well that just another reason to stop the government from economic participation. It doesn't know what it's doing by bailing out banks. It doesn't know what kind of damage it's causing by messing with the economy this way and by propping up zombie banks at the expense of everybody.
So, what properties do Mercury and the Moon share?
They are both hell holes.
I have evidence for Mercury right here:
Spectrometers also reveal substantially higher abundances of sulfur and potassium than previously predicted.
New data from orbit show a huge expanse of volcanic plains surrounding the north polar region of Mercury. These continuous smooth plains cover more than 6% of the total surface of Mercury.
Scientists have also discovered vents, measuring up to 25 kilometers (km) (15.5 miles) in length, that appear to be the source of some of the tremendous volumes of very hot lava that have rushed out over the surface of Mercury and eroded the substrate, carving valleys and creating teardrop-shaped ridges in the underlying terrain.
Now MESSENGER's orbital mission has provided close-up, targeted views of many of these craters. The bright areas are composed of small, shallow, irregularly shaped depressions that are often found in clusters said David T. Blewett, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and lead author of one of the Science reports. "The science team adopted the term 'hollows' for these features to distinguish them from other types of pits that are found on Mercury."
Hollows have been found over a wide range of latitudes and longitudes, suggesting that they are fairly common across Mercury. Many of the depressions have bright interiors and halos, and Blewett says the ones detected so far have a fresh appearance and have not accumulated small impact craters, indicating that they are relatively young.
Actually, that stuff is also done with plenty of Chinese money. Some is borrowed and some is stolen from China (and everybody) via inflation.
So Chinese are doing quite a lot in the world via their US proxy :)
They are clearly covered under interstate commerce and ability to establish post roads and offices.
- both a mistake.
Do you think anything such as that could ever have been accomplished without government intervention?
- obviously. It's done all the time. Do I have to enumerate every private road and every private shipment company in the world?
You don't think railroads and interstates are worthwhile?
- only if there is an economic reason for them that puts some private money at risk and does not force public to pay for it. That's why government bailing out banks is wrong for example, it's just it's a more 'in your face' sort of an example rather than interstate. Interstate highways destroy infrastructure, they destroyed private rail roads and they put enormous tax burden upon airline companies to do that.
They gained the economic and political advantage over separate States, which allowed them to pressure the States politically and economically into submission on all sorts of things. They destroyed a better transit system and they created unsustainable infrastructure, which is subsidized and once subsidies end, the infrastructure will come to an end as well.
At the very least they have always required a mandated right of way or eminent domain seizure
- eminent domain - what a terrible violation of private property rights. That's the problem with the people - they don't understand how gov't gets out of control and completely denies them their rights, because they think it's for the 'common good'.
NO. There should be no eminent domain allowed to the government at all. All of those highways that did that shouldn't have existed OR they should have been built privately and they should have negotiated with the private property owners privately. That's the way to have the REAL costs in all of those things, not socialized via various economy destroying taxes and money printing.
I think this is the last comment I am replying to today.
Bye.
No, there is no individual contract between you and me on what constitutes your or my rights. If I kill you, I am only liable because the criminal code says so, which basically a set of laws that define what criminal offenses are between private parties.
The concept of 'rights' has nothing to do with relationships between individuals.
Does your wife or husband (if you have one, or whatever you may have) have a right to impede on your 'free speech' for example? Well, even he/she/it doesn't have to provide you a forum. Doesn't have to listen to you. Doesn't have to help you with your free speech. You may divorce/dump them, but there is no way for you to go after them for violation of that 'right', because there is no contract between individuals that is about 'rights'.
The contract on 'rights' is between individuals and the government, nothing else.
Nobody owes you anything personally unless you have a personal contract with them and it says that they do.
Cheers.
Wrong again. A few laws passed in the UK have subsequently been ruled in violation of human rights and thus removed from the books
- I don't see how this applies to me or makes me wrong, but hey, UK is a back ass place. Every time I go to London I sort of enjoy it, but I enjoy much more when I leave.
You also cannot give away your human rights via contract.
- I didn't even say you can, YOU ARE THE ONE SAYING THAT YOU CAN.
At point in time that you are talking about government forcing you to give up whatever you make with your life, any amount of your work so that somebody else can have an entitlement, you have just allowed them to take away your right to property and pursuit of happiness, and you did it due to coercion, because otherwise they would come after the other 2 rights that they are supposed to protect of yours: your liberty and your life.
The government cannot oblige you to give up your human rights or to violate the rights of others.
- you are so confused. On one hand you are saying government is there to give you something it takes from somebody else and supposedly it makes it YOUR right, on the other you are saying that government cannot do so, cannot take away your right so that somebody else's 'right' (obligation actually) can be fulfilled.
You can't have rights without any obligation to anyone else.
- Ah, now MAYBE here I can agree with you to the extent that you have to COOPERATE with other people to set up a functioning government. So what you are giving up is part of your sovereignty the moment you say that it is government's job to provide you border security and uphold your criminal law.
Now, if you just said that, I would have agreed. This is because criminal law and border protection will never work without the power of government over you in cases when you VIOLATE the law, so your rights could be then suspended or even taken away - like life and liberty and pursuit of happiness. You could be thrown to jail.
Of-course you are not making a nuanced statement like that, you are just trying to justify entitlements being 'rights' somehow and you want to justify the power of the state to enforce obligations upon others to provide you with those entitlements.
This is all fun and good until you crash your economic system.
For example the right to life is meaningless if others can deny you food, and so they are obliged to share enough to sustain you.
- Let me put it into 3 year old talk:
If I am a good person or I just feel like it I can give you food if you are starving.
If I am a bad person and maybe I don't like you I can refuse giving you food.
Me giving you food or not giving you food has nothing to do with your rights. It has everything to do with my right of property and liberty and pursuit of happiness. Maybe it makes me happy to see you starve, or maybe it makes me happy to see you well fed.
But the point is, if you believe that I am OBLIGED to give you food for some strange reason, then your ideology has nothing to do with rights at all. Your ideology is then that you can force anybody to give you stuff that you want just because you believe you are entitled to it, because you are in a mistaken assumption that your rights trump mine.
Your rights do not trump mine. I could give you food or deny you food and this has nothing to do with your 'right' to life.
However if I take one of my favorite guns or knives and kill you, THEN there is CRIMINAL law. Criminal law is devised to resolve such conflicts, assign blame and punishment, but it's not about rights.
If GOVERNMENT came to you and killed you WITHOUT any reason and WITHOUT any trial, etc., THEN it would be a violation of your rights.
NOBODY OWES YOU FOOD, DUDE.
NOBODY.
Dude, you are completely confused. I have to go to sleep, I have a trip tomorrow.
I am now not sure what your point is any longer. My point remains simple: keep government out of it unless you want it to grow to a point where the system, the entire economic system collapses.
I think hyperinflation is actually possible in USA, given current inflation levels (11-15% if you look at numbers the way they did during Nixon, who implemented *wrongly* wage and price controls. I count 13% inflation, which means GDP has been going down steady by 10% a year for years now.)
--
I see all this people in this thread (and if you look at my comments page, you'll see just how many people are replying, so it's hard), and they would never be able to answer a fairly simple question, which I do have an answer for.
Here is the question:
What's 'fair'? What is the number that you believe people must pay into the system via taxes? (I of-course am completely against all income, corporate, payroll and investment taxes). What's the number?
They will never be able to say what it is.
I know why they can't say it. It's because they don't know what the cost will be, but the one thing is for sure: cost will be going up. There is just NO WAY for cost to go down. The way that gov't deals with the cost and run-away pyramid scheme is by increasing the revenue through higher taxes and lower benefits (the way Reagan did it for SS).
So taxes are sure to go up, not just in absolute numbers but percentage wise. Benefits are sure to go down.
But in the inflationary system and government ran medical system this means that you can NEVER put a finger on the number that you want to collect from people, because you in fact will ALWAYS have to increase that number in a government system. Of-course inflation by gov't is some of it (costs going up), but most of it is gov't ran medical care and insurance, just because it's gov't.
Some people make very little money, maybe 12K USD / year. Well, in extreme cases that's how much ONE DAY of hospital stay may cost in USA!
So that's interesting. Imagine that health care costs go up to 100K/day for some cases. What if they go up to 500K/day?
What is the appropriate taxation then to provide medical care through gov't system and is it even possible?
Well, that would be the reason why nobody will answer the question of: what's fair.
--
Of-course those who actually own businesses and create jobs (cliche, but then again, poor people don't create jobs), those who do create jobs already do more than their fair share before they pay 1 cent in taxes. That's because they increase the wealth of the society by increasing economic production output and they provide jobs, and salaried people pay taxes and they don't have to ask for gov't assistance, etc.
Sure, there are people who are feeding at the gov't trough - certain Wall Str. bankers benefit from the collapse by getting hundreds of millions in bonuses - well that just another reason to stop the government from economic participation. It doesn't know what it's doing by bailing out banks. It doesn't know what kind of damage it's causing by messing with the economy this way and by propping up zombie banks at the expense of everybody.
Anyway, I gotta write a few more responses and split, it's late and I have a day trip tomorrow. Cheers.
Long ago I said: taxes kill infrastructure - this answers the interstate highway question, and obviously gov't is not authorized to do that and shouldn't be allowed to do that.
As to DOD - this is the part of government that is one of few things that are legitimately authorized, however, giving government ability to regulate business and start wars while giving private contractors ability to gain from those wars is obviously a conflict of interests.
You can't have government that can start wars indiscriminately without any reason, so that contractors would gain from it (*and obviously this leads to insane levels of spending*).
Government needs to abide by the rules, so Congress MUST vote before going to war, a war must be declared, it must have goals, goals must be achievable, wars must be winnable, taxes MUST be raised in order to pay for the war.
All of this MUST happen, otherwise you end up with a system, where money is borrowed and printed, taxes are not raised, so constituents don't care if you have another war, in fact they are happy about the empire building and certain level of employment that the 'semi-private' businesses involved in this enterprise provide.
This is the military industrial complex you've been warned about. Eisenhower? Rings any bells?
yes, it is the correct reason to have the Constitution.
You were talking about all sorts of instruments that are given to government, which obviously impede on human rights, but are understood to be necessary in order to achieve the goal that the Constitution defines that the government exists to fulfill.
There is a difference between the goal and the means to achieve it.
You seem to think it has some existential meaning that cannot be altered from your opinion
- it's not an opinion. "Right" is literally everything that you can do that you are not limited in except by criminal and contract law and except by the obligations that are imposed onto you by the government.
So you better be careful when you give up your rights, as giving it up is easy, getting it back is so hard, people had to go through wars to do that, people had to die to get their rights back.
When you impose an obligation upon somebody in order to provide an entitlement to somebody else, well, if you agree to that, then you are giving up one (or more) of your intrinsic rights (not to be coerced into some form of behavior you would not otherwise engage in).
Right is an artificial construct, but it is a very specific construct. It's like metal. Metal is a word, but it means something and what it means is not wood or plastic.
rather than trying to hijack an existing one.
- you want to call obligations and entitlements 'rights'? Go ahead, who am I to stop you? But you will be met with harsh reality, when you will expect to have those so called 'rights' ( which I am telling you are just entitlements that are only possible to due obligations imposed onto somebody else), when the system collapses due to the financial and economic burden of the welfare state.
I read plenty on the Ponzi scheme, so I know it was even possible due to government in the first place, since it was government exchange of payments that made it possible for him to do arbitrage of postage fees (international reply coupons), this resource imbalance is IMPOSSIBLE without government intervention.
Ponzi scheme was eventually found and eliminated but SS scam cannot be eliminated that easily because it is government mandated.
Demand creates jobs, not a "free market economy". And we already know about this so called free society.
- production creates jobs, demand is a trivial consequence of production.
Demand always exists, which is easily proven by the fact that USA has 53Billion USD /month trade deficit and the debt is constantly growing, as almost half of the money spent by US government is borrowed.
Production comes first, it needs savings to be used as legitimate investment and it needs real risk to be present in order to ensure risk aversion and balance and proper capital allocation.
Production comes first, that's why iPads were created first and then they were consumed.
You are oblivious. The point is that metals have other uses than food.
Browsers have other uses than static documents.
God, who reads this forum here at this point?
Modern Health Care did not start until 1920, and the odds of doctor involvement giving you a reliably better outcome was at least 10-15 years later, some would argue 30 years later around 1950.
- you are also wrong on this fact. Modern health care can be said to have started in the Mayo clinic in USA, where doctors started sharing information with each others, which allowed them quickly to build a reputation of a hospital that had very high success rates. How did they achieve it? First things first: sanitation - washing things between patients, washing instruments, washing hands, etc. They started using more and more modern instruments, which THEY invented there. This was mid 19 century.