This is why government should NOT be involved in education on any level. If you want your kid to get a secular education then you can send them to a secular school. If you want your kid to get a Christian education then you can send them to a Christian school. If you want your kid to get an Islamic education then you can send them to an Islamic school etc...
And if your parents can't afford to send you to school, well...you should have thought of that before you were born into a poor family, shouldn't you?
So, now, there you have it. You want privacy for yourself, but not for someone else.
I'm all for government officials having privacy. For themselves. Not their job functions. Their jobs should be done in the open. I don't really care what they do on their own time, but if they're acting in my name with my tax dollars, I want to know who is doing what with relatively few exceptions. Example: I don't care if an elected official is having problems with his wife. It's not my business. I do care if he's secretly using tax dollars to do something illegal. One falls under a reasonable definition of privacy and the other does not. If you can't see the distinction, I don't know what to tell you.
Everything else is just a bullshit rationalization of a power play. You either believe that spying on someone else is wrong, or you don't.
I'll see your "bullshit rationalization" and raise you one "ridiculous sophistry." Really, if I hadn't seen you post relatively rational and well-reasoned posts here from time to time, I might mistake you for an honest to god crazy person.
I tend to take your reasoning further to an extreme: Is it sensible for the country on the receiving end of an invasion to have to fight according to the Geneva Conventions at all? At some point, you're fighting for survival, right? As I see it, if a mugger shows up and starts beating the crap out of you, he has no right to complain if you fight dirty while trying to get away. I can see the practical game theory side of it, but the idea that war has "rules" still simply blows my mind from a purely logical perspective. War is what happens when you can't reach an agreement within the framework set out by The Rules. The "last resort" having rules on top of that seems truly bizarre. "I'm going to invade you and kill your people, but make sure that you don't shoot at my soldiers with any illegal munitions!"
*Ahem.* Simple distinction: We think that private citizens should have reasonable privacy from their government. We think that government should be as transparent as possible to its citizens. Both are necessary ingredients for a healthy democracy, and it scares the shit out of us to see government officials who think it's the other way around. I don't know about you, but I would not like to live in a country where I don't know what the government is doing but they know every detail about what I'm doing. To each his own, I suppose, but I think I'm in the majority among Americans here.
Who says that wikileaks has "facts". They are an organization with international support, and so to some extent, act against the interests of the united states as a sovereign nation.
I'm not sure how your implication follows from that second statement. Are you trying to say that only US sources should be trusted for information that may reflect badly on the US, and that third party sources have more of a reason to misrepresent the facts than the subject of the leaks would?
My guess is that the response would be, "But your behaviors weren't equal. You both committed a crime, but then he helped us by giving evidence against everybody else." Seems pretty straightforward to me.
That is nonsense. As long as it is not decreasing fast enough to cause a breakdown in infrastructure(like in storms), Markets work much better for diminishing resources than any other mechanism I can think of.
I think that depends on your definition of "breakdown" and "better" in this case. If demand starts to quickly outstrip supply, the market will indeed dutifully cause prices to skyrocket, and the oil will be rationed and allocated. The question is, how badly might it catch us with our pants down? Some changes in oil consumption are viable in the short run, but I can't think of very many. For the average American, I would venture that most changes in oil use are very much long-run activities: Moving closer to work, changing jobs, making the investment to buy a different car (by selling a car whose value is plummeting due to high gas prices, no less). The market will certainly work it out in the long run, but short run GDP shrinkage is never fun. Keynes wasn't totally out in the weeds when he said, "In the long run, we're all dead."
To me, it's all a question of risk exposure. That, combined with reducing all of the externalities associated with oil (and I don't just mean the environmental ones) make this a pretty rational move, IMO.
I don't understand why people feel the need to tell other people what to do when it's not hurting anyone.
You may not have noticed this, but all fuel purchases affect equilibrium gas prices, which in turn, affect prices for just about everything. Supply of oil is relatively inelastic, and the world's demand for it is rapidly increasing. That's a recipe for skyrocketing prices that become truly unpleasant a lot faster than The Invisible Hand can fix them. Whether or not you think your car doesn't pollute or your shit doesn't stink, market price for a commodity that keeps our civilization running is a hard reality, and given the way our infrastructure is set up, it's probably a good idea to minimize our exposure to that risk. Incidentally, that's not a variable that the auto market optimizes for.
Calling what was presented intelligent design could be as accurate as the standard idea of evolution. It is not funny in that regard- there is no difference in what was presented.
To me, that's what's funny about ID. It's so completely vacuous that it could be applied to any observation. Things fall down? Could be gravity, it could be Intelligent Agency, or it could be gravity + Intelligent Agency. It's true for everything we observe. That's why, whenever there's some new or interesting observation in the world of evolutionary biology, somebody will jokingly attribute it to ID and marvel at how well it fits the model that arbitrary undescribed magic runs the world. Is it funny? Only once, really. Is it unfair? Not really.
California is a democrat stronghold. Anyone with a D generally doesn't get voted out. And this old geezer has been there about 25 years.
Not so with congressional districts. The state has two very strongly divided groups, and like all good gerrymandered states, every congressional district is either a D or R stronghold. Seats in the House are like that across the country. That's an interesting result given that the House was supposed to be reflective of the whims of the people due to short election cycles while the Senate was supposedly the more deliberative body with its long election cycles. You can't gerrymander an entire state's border, so it's working out that members of the House have to listen to their constituents a lot less carefully than their counterparts in the Senate do. Funny how things work.
1. Yeah, it can be harder to get free men to do your bidding than slaves. I hear you.
It never ceases to amaze me the number of people who'd rather be "free men" living on voluntary taxation at late 19th century levels of economic development instead of enjoying the economic booms brought to us by railroads, interstate highways, and shipping without fear of piracy. I can see the temptation in that it's so darned philosophically pure, but then again, so is--gasp--communism! What's the old saying, "It works really badly in theory but great in practice"?
Ron Paul is only campaigning to run the Federal government, so those are the only taxes at issue right now. My argument is merely a response to those who suggest that without Federal taxation we would lack basic services.
No, that's certainly true. You can move taxes all over the place and still be OK. Some people would just have to suck it, but that's life. Sure, the USSR probably would have settled in Alaska due to its lack of a decent military, but it would have worked out reasonably well in general.
I do additionally maintain that paying for services should be voluntary (It amazes me how anyone could possibly think otherwise... you do realize you are arguing for involuntary servitude here, don't you? Arguing for it!) and that this is a matter of principle, not expediency. It may indeed be more difficult to support services on a voluntary basis. So be it - what is right and just is rarely the easiest thing.
Don't you dare steal any of the positive externalities from my services, though. We'll have to come up with a good way for those of us who have the services to keep the people who don't have them from reaping any of the benefits. I can think of a few third world nations in Africa that have such systems, but there's usually a pretty high overhead in the number of AK-47s that they use. A police force that's beholden to only a small group of people always results in a healthy outcome, in my experience.
Feel free to argue based on "what's right" in your moral framework. That's the problem I generally see with Libertarians--they start with a great theory (the right to property is an important right and should be respected more than it is now) and turn that into the only important theory. I happen to see a booming economy and the fact that I'm wealthy and safe compared to the people who came before me as a worthwhile consideration as well. In reality, your ideologically pure world works out most closely in reality to map to warlord driven, impoverished nations of the third world, just as in reality, the brilliant purity of communism maps to failed states like North Korea. Enjoy your ideological purity, but don't lose track of your AK-47 while you pump your butter churn.
It looks like several people have gleefully discovered that it would actually take us back to closer to 1995 levels.
I'm having a hard time finding good data that isn't broken somehow. Is that in real dollars? How does it relate to population growth? My guess is that the curves flatten out significantly. I'm not saying that the federal budget can't be cut tremendously. I am pointing out that anybody who thinks that it will be easy or that the Great Leap Forward won't have huge fallout in the real world that most of us inhabit is a crackpot or an ideologue no less dangerous than any number of people whose novel economic systems crashed other societies.
Are you kidding me? Tell me, really, what is the difference between voting Republican and voting Democrat.
I suppose it depends on the candidate. Are you suggesting that if the 2000 elections had gone the other way, we'd be in exactly the same situation we're in now? Really?
If all that stuff is so wonderful, why can't supporting it be voluntary?
Because they don't work nearly as well that way. HTH.
We had a military, a police force, fire-fighting services and an education system before there was a penny of Federal income tax in this country
You've made a leap from "services were paid for by other types of taxes" to "paying for services should be voluntary." I'm not sure I see the connection.
As Ron Paul likes to point out, abolishing the income tax today would leave the government with as much money as it received in the year 2000. Hardly crippling.
A quick glance at sources of federal tax revenues puts individual income tax at roughly 50% of total receipts. I have a hard time believing that total federal tax receipts have doubled (in real terms) since 2000, so I have no idea where Congressman Paul gets that idea.
I think that the fundamental question is, "Who was too loose with credit?" Certainly, the Fed lowered interest rates, and there was a lot of money sloshing around, but that, in and of itself, can't explain what happened. The fact that we're seeing fallout with only a minimal change in interest rates (look how close we are to the historically low rates that peopl blame this mess on) indicates to me that it was a banking industry that was extremely short sighted that caused the real problem. A more likely explanation for me is the sudden popularity of strange financial instruments like negative amortization mortgages and how they affected mortgage backed securities.
Seriously, the lending industry has been dealing with fluctuating interest rates forever (and don't think for a moment that doing away with the Fed would change that a bit). I find it a lot harder to believe that lenders couldn't see a 1-2% increase over historically low interest rates coming than that the mortgage backed securities market underestimated the impact of the sudden ridiculous relaxation of loan standards. By lowering loan standards and speculating that they'd be able to get a chunk of the yield on an obvious home bubble, the private industry loosened up the credit purse strings far more than the Fed did. The fact that a cottage lending industry that specialized in putting out and selling crappy loans existed at all tells me that the market for high risk debt was more than enough to sustain itself.
Your explanation only makes sense to me if all of those bad loans were marginal investments that were made after the good investments were made. By all appearances, there were plenty of people making these high risk loans instead of sensible investments. That screams "market preference" and "speculative bubble" to me.
To some extent, you're right. The Federal Reserve banks are technically privately held corporations. The structure is more complicated than most public / private partnerships, but at the end of the day, the agenda is set by government appointees. So I guess my question to you is, so what?
Just to repeat an important point, the study he pointed to is widely dismissed as the transparently bad work of a crank trying to scare people. I'd love for the debate over abortion to move from an emotion driven one to a data driven one, but trying to do so with bad science is unconscionable. The fact is that the principal investigator threw out a number of known causes of breast cancer in order to create an over simplified regression model that fit his desired conclusion. Torturing the data until it talks is not a good thing, even if the data tells you want you want to hear. This study needs to be nipped in the bud.
You need to read my comment closer. I said "Now that it is SCIENTIFICALLY proven that Abortions INCREASE the risk of cancer". People having abortions are indeed at higher risk for cancer. It doesn't prove causality, but that it is likely to be a contributing factor at minimum.
So you're drawing a distinction between "increasing the risk of" and being a cause? If that were the case, I'd recommend rephrasing it as "abortion and cancer are correlated" in which case you'd only be factually wrong rather than factually wrong and statistically misleading.
Actually, it was a new study released this last week, if you cared to read the article.
Speaking of not caring to read the article, the link that I provided did refer to exactly the study that your article referred to. The difference is that the oncologist whose site I linked to read and shredded the article before newsmax.com credulously regurgitated its conclusions. For starters:
1) I'd be hesitant to call The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons a widely respected peer reviewed journal. Aside from anti-vaccination articles and bad mercury/autism link articles that couldn't hack it in mainstream journals, it published the piece of junk you referred to. A good discussion starting point for this journal is on the same blog here.
2) The article makes some truly amusing uses of statistics as discussed here and here. Discarding data that has a weak linear correlation as uncorrelated based on his data set? Bad dog.
3) Ignoring a bunch of known risk factors when coming up with your model? Doubly bad dog.
Basically, we have a fringe journal (seriously... you have a "medical" journal publishing anti-global warming papers that's linked to a conservative advocacy organization and they're trying to sell themselves as an unbiased journal with no political leanings?) publishing what appears to be a very weak study on one hand. On the other hand, we have a number of major studies being unable to find the link that this study finds. I have a hard time attributing the bad statistics and modeling to incompetence over dishonesty (especially given the journal's), but even if I do, I have a very hard time calling anything "scientifically proven" by any stretch. I'd tend to believe that this is more likely a piece of bad, agenda-driven science published in a bad, agenda-driven journal to create something that the anti-abortion movement can cite and sound like there's scientific data to back up what is fundamentally still a philosophical position.
Note that while I don't take an anti-abortion position, I certainly don't think that the people who do are irrational. We're working with a different set of basic premises. What I object to is the abuse of science going on here in an attempt to shape public policy.
Even better, the major news outlets would show both videos and make it look like both sides are equally viable and that the experts just agree to disagree rather than pointing out that one position is batshit insane.
Next up, Abortions. Now that it is SCIENTIFICALLY proven that Abortions INCREASE the risk of cancer, I wonder if you'll bring the Bible thumpers as a means to dismiss this evidence....
Actually, no, it's far from proven. I'm not surprised that people are still kicking that POS study around, though.
Who is to say that I wouldn't have gained the same immunities if everyone wasn't vaccinated?
Well, there's the fact that before people were vaccinated for a lot of terrible diseases, those diseases tore through populations like wildfire. It's one thing to have a "strong immune system" and not end up with the flu when it's inconvenient. It's another thing to tip your hat to the population of people who took that tiny vaccination risk to help insure that you were never exposed to polio.
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I'll see your "bullshit rationalization" and raise you one "ridiculous sophistry." Really, if I hadn't seen you post relatively rational and well-reasoned posts here from time to time, I might mistake you for an honest to god crazy person.
I tend to take your reasoning further to an extreme: Is it sensible for the country on the receiving end of an invasion to have to fight according to the Geneva Conventions at all? At some point, you're fighting for survival, right? As I see it, if a mugger shows up and starts beating the crap out of you, he has no right to complain if you fight dirty while trying to get away. I can see the practical game theory side of it, but the idea that war has "rules" still simply blows my mind from a purely logical perspective. War is what happens when you can't reach an agreement within the framework set out by The Rules. The "last resort" having rules on top of that seems truly bizarre. "I'm going to invade you and kill your people, but make sure that you don't shoot at my soldiers with any illegal munitions!"
*Ahem.* Simple distinction: We think that private citizens should have reasonable privacy from their government. We think that government should be as transparent as possible to its citizens. Both are necessary ingredients for a healthy democracy, and it scares the shit out of us to see government officials who think it's the other way around. I don't know about you, but I would not like to live in a country where I don't know what the government is doing but they know every detail about what I'm doing. To each his own, I suppose, but I think I'm in the majority among Americans here.
My guess is that the response would be, "But your behaviors weren't equal. You both committed a crime, but then he helped us by giving evidence against everybody else." Seems pretty straightforward to me.
To me, it's all a question of risk exposure. That, combined with reducing all of the externalities associated with oil (and I don't just mean the environmental ones) make this a pretty rational move, IMO.
No, that's certainly true. You can move taxes all over the place and still be OK. Some people would just have to suck it, but that's life. Sure, the USSR probably would have settled in Alaska due to its lack of a decent military, but it would have worked out reasonably well in general.
Don't you dare steal any of the positive externalities from my services, though. We'll have to come up with a good way for those of us who have the services to keep the people who don't have them from reaping any of the benefits. I can think of a few third world nations in Africa that have such systems, but there's usually a pretty high overhead in the number of AK-47s that they use. A police force that's beholden to only a small group of people always results in a healthy outcome, in my experience.
Feel free to argue based on "what's right" in your moral framework. That's the problem I generally see with Libertarians--they start with a great theory (the right to property is an important right and should be respected more than it is now) and turn that into the only important theory. I happen to see a booming economy and the fact that I'm wealthy and safe compared to the people who came before me as a worthwhile consideration as well. In reality, your ideologically pure world works out most closely in reality to map to warlord driven, impoverished nations of the third world, just as in reality, the brilliant purity of communism maps to failed states like North Korea. Enjoy your ideological purity, but don't lose track of your AK-47 while you pump your butter churn.
I'm having a hard time finding good data that isn't broken somehow. Is that in real dollars? How does it relate to population growth? My guess is that the curves flatten out significantly. I'm not saying that the federal budget can't be cut tremendously. I am pointing out that anybody who thinks that it will be easy or that the Great Leap Forward won't have huge fallout in the real world that most of us inhabit is a crackpot or an ideologue no less dangerous than any number of people whose novel economic systems crashed other societies.
You've made a leap from "services were paid for by other types of taxes" to "paying for services should be voluntary." I'm not sure I see the connection.
A quick glance at sources of federal tax revenues puts individual income tax at roughly 50% of total receipts. I have a hard time believing that total federal tax receipts have doubled (in real terms) since 2000, so I have no idea where Congressman Paul gets that idea.
I think that the fundamental question is, "Who was too loose with credit?" Certainly, the Fed lowered interest rates, and there was a lot of money sloshing around, but that, in and of itself, can't explain what happened. The fact that we're seeing fallout with only a minimal change in interest rates (look how close we are to the historically low rates that peopl blame this mess on) indicates to me that it was a banking industry that was extremely short sighted that caused the real problem. A more likely explanation for me is the sudden popularity of strange financial instruments like negative amortization mortgages and how they affected mortgage backed securities.
Seriously, the lending industry has been dealing with fluctuating interest rates forever (and don't think for a moment that doing away with the Fed would change that a bit). I find it a lot harder to believe that lenders couldn't see a 1-2% increase over historically low interest rates coming than that the mortgage backed securities market underestimated the impact of the sudden ridiculous relaxation of loan standards. By lowering loan standards and speculating that they'd be able to get a chunk of the yield on an obvious home bubble, the private industry loosened up the credit purse strings far more than the Fed did. The fact that a cottage lending industry that specialized in putting out and selling crappy loans existed at all tells me that the market for high risk debt was more than enough to sustain itself.
Your explanation only makes sense to me if all of those bad loans were marginal investments that were made after the good investments were made. By all appearances, there were plenty of people making these high risk loans instead of sensible investments. That screams "market preference" and "speculative bubble" to me.
To some extent, you're right. The Federal Reserve banks are technically privately held corporations. The structure is more complicated than most public / private partnerships, but at the end of the day, the agenda is set by government appointees. So I guess my question to you is, so what?
Just to repeat an important point, the study he pointed to is widely dismissed as the transparently bad work of a crank trying to scare people. I'd love for the debate over abortion to move from an emotion driven one to a data driven one, but trying to do so with bad science is unconscionable. The fact is that the principal investigator threw out a number of known causes of breast cancer in order to create an over simplified regression model that fit his desired conclusion. Torturing the data until it talks is not a good thing, even if the data tells you want you want to hear. This study needs to be nipped in the bud.
Speaking of not caring to read the article, the link that I provided did refer to exactly the study that your article referred to. The difference is that the oncologist whose site I linked to read and shredded the article before newsmax.com credulously regurgitated its conclusions. For starters:
1) I'd be hesitant to call The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons a widely respected peer reviewed journal. Aside from anti-vaccination articles and bad mercury/autism link articles that couldn't hack it in mainstream journals, it published the piece of junk you referred to. A good discussion starting point for this journal is on the same blog here.
2) The article makes some truly amusing uses of statistics as discussed here and here. Discarding data that has a weak linear correlation as uncorrelated based on his data set? Bad dog.
3) Ignoring a bunch of known risk factors when coming up with your model? Doubly bad dog.
Basically, we have a fringe journal (seriously... you have a "medical" journal publishing anti-global warming papers that's linked to a conservative advocacy organization and they're trying to sell themselves as an unbiased journal with no political leanings?) publishing what appears to be a very weak study on one hand. On the other hand, we have a number of major studies being unable to find the link that this study finds. I have a hard time attributing the bad statistics and modeling to incompetence over dishonesty (especially given the journal's), but even if I do, I have a very hard time calling anything "scientifically proven" by any stretch. I'd tend to believe that this is more likely a piece of bad, agenda-driven science published in a bad, agenda-driven journal to create something that the anti-abortion movement can cite and sound like there's scientific data to back up what is fundamentally still a philosophical position.
Note that while I don't take an anti-abortion position, I certainly don't think that the people who do are irrational. We're working with a different set of basic premises. What I object to is the abuse of science going on here in an attempt to shape public policy.
You must be too young to remember polio in the US. Lucky you.
Even better, the major news outlets would show both videos and make it look like both sides are equally viable and that the experts just agree to disagree rather than pointing out that one position is batshit insane.