at least Obama would have to answer tough questions about bombing the shit out of beige people and their kids somewhere in the east, assassinating the US citizens without any oversight, cracking down on medical marijuana in states where it's legalized (oh look, states did something right and the feds are the oppressors for a change). Debates with Mittens would lack any substance.
if he's ignorant of economics, what would you say about the rest of the politcritters? He's rather well versed in economic theory but he sticks to the oldschool. I bet 90% of capitol hill doesn't know what 'keynesian' means. Same with history, he knows well who started the whole middle east mess with Iran and shit (CIA 1953), i wouldn't be so sure your average D.C. dweller knows that.
gold in the US treasury? most likely not there, loaned out to buddies, with each bar backing 5 different paper assets in the paper gold market. When was the last audit of the reserves?
Dept of Education, the body behind the stellar success of no child left behind? If you can have firemen paid with property taxes, why can't you do the same with schools? why do you need a superficial layer of bureaucrats with fat paychecks? Haven't the 'Murrikan kids started to suck in last few decades, with the DoEd fully operational? What you say is that you want to reward and perpetuate failure by throwing more good money after bad.
gold standard? last time i heard RP suggested competing currencies, as in ability to park your purchasing power in something else than the dollar without being forced to pay sales tax and income tax when the nominal dollar value rises. Monopoly leads to abuse and the Fed does just that when it chooses to sacrifice peons with discretionary income on the altar of the Almighty Economy so the priesthood from the top banks could be fat and happy.
Economy doesn't need to be run, it's not a car. It's like saying that ecosystems need to be run or the weather needs to be run or the water circulation needs to be run. It just happens because there are naturally existing forces that initiate actions. Just look at the track record of human interventions in ecosystems to make it better. Aral Sea nearly gone, Australia is full of nasty foreign species that were to fix an existing problem, but caused greater one, Aswan Dam has its own share of problems. That's how good people are at controlling things they don't understand.
Thanks to decades of debt-heavy "optimization" geared to inflate the holy GDP metric, we have a global economy that is at the brink of collapse.
Some things are worth "being hellbent on". Like eliminating slavery.
only if you are naive and believe such a simplistic bullshit. WMD in Iraq anyone? Omg nukes in Iran? Terrorists and pedophiles coming for your first born? It's all propaganda. Slavery was already on its way out, because slaves have low productivity and trained and motivated workers provided more profits despite wage cost.
I guess it's easy for average Murrican to dismiss criticism of the Civil War as a fringe talk after decades of brainwashing and all those profits reaped thanks to the position of global hegemony. Everybody likes to be the best and the forced unity made that possible. Look at former Soviet union. Bitchslapped baltic states and crushed internal opposition, victor in WW2 and top2 position from then on for few decades to come. It was a horrible country yet many citizens have the nostalgia for the global superpower times. I guess for your average peon it was well worth it to sacrifice millions for greater good. FFF that.
The progress in social matters is slowed down when the political game is played at the top levels. If social issues were handled more locally (eg at the state level) the progressive regions would be long done with gay marriages with child adoption, marijuana and shit, and at the same time people in Backwardsville would be able to enjoy their closemindedness. Yes, it would suck for people with 'problems' born in the wrong part of the country, but with 50 states you would have an option to move to likeminded area. One-size-fits-all solutions forced by the government require every interest group from every corner of the country to weigh in in order not to lose and that leads to gridlock, wartime rhetoric and deep divides across the society. That slows down the progress and makes people feel opressed by 'them' whoever that might be.
true that, i remember seeing windmills for the first time on austrian green plains with bigass mountains on the horizon and shit. Long story short i was not amused. Once beautiful landscape was destroyed by hundreds of them placed in tidy rows. On top of that they looked like a cost generator and a maintenance nightmare, approx 1-2 in every 10 was broken.
when both sides of the deal look after their interests, results tend to be a good bang for the buck spent. Government has no vested interest in getting a good deal and because of that it pretty much asks for being milked dry. On top of that the waste more often than not is rewarded with even more money in next year's budget.
imo you can't really say 2.4 billion years ago. That would make sense only if there was one universal time scale with the necessary requirement of information being broadcasted instantaneously. Considering that it's not possible (hard cap of c), every point has its own time and events happen when information about them, spreading at the speed of light reaches said point. For us on Earth that dark matter stuff is happening right now.
What if they built them because of westerners whining about exploited people who have suicide as the only way out, not because there was a problem per se? Does anybody know what was the reason people commited suicide there? There are hundreds of thousands of people working there in factories, were the suicides all work related or maybe some/most were a result of broken heart or bullying in their out-of-work social circles or any other thing people commit suicides because of? Besides, can't people simply walk away instead of killing themselves?
yes, government can make things last longer than they would otherwise have. Participation in this particular ponzi scheme is not voluntary. Besides ponzi schemes don't fail right off the bat, so having enough money up to a given date does not make something not-a-ponzi. There is no fund, there is no money with your name on it. The money is spent as soon as it's collected. That surplus you speak of was raided and pillaged long time ago and these so called assets are all government IOUs which will be paid with shitload of treasuries (borrowed or printed money). The taxpayer is on the hook either way - higher taxation or diluted paycheck.
ok, the US may not look that bad with global reserve currency and fertility rate of 2.1 and shit. It will take a while. Let's take Poland, average country with rather good economic growth - her Social Security is over $20B in the red every single year (38M people) AND on top of that the fertility rate is less than 1.30 TODAY. Good luck being 30 today and expecting anything in 30 years when there are 3 retired old farts for every person in active workforce. It's nothing but a ponzi and the difference between Poland and the US is just few numbers, mechanics are the same.
it's not? It pays oldtimers with money the newcomers bring to the table and promises today's newcomers that their turn will come. It's very sensitive to demographic changes (as in going belly up when numbers of newcomers dwindle) It's a government mandated ponzi scheme at its core, period.
even MS sucks at supporting its own formats between versions, so don't hold your breath hoping that LO people will reverse engineer all the obscure corner cases and quirks where things break.
i just looked at the offer of random online comp shop located in my area (Central Europe) and the differences between linux and windows versions of the same model are approx in $60-120 range, depending on starter/hp/pro and 32/64bit. If you have absolutely no use for windows. that's a lot of money to blow on nothing.
yup, i've read today that Aussies are about to roll out body scanners (following the US) but there will be no opt-out (surpassing the US) U NO SCAN - U NO FLY
first of all, not every libertarian is anarcho-capitalist second: you seem not to have any idea what Ron Pauls stands for. He is a strict constitutionalist and thus believes in government structures. Decentralization is crucial though: limited federal government (courts, military and coordination of interstate matters) and do-what-you-want states (even if they happen to pass crazy ass laws, though personally he is for as much personal freedom as possible). At least he has the US constitution having his back, which can't be said about the rest of 'wipe your ass with the constitution, it's for the greater good' politicians.
and i'd argue that 5000years worth of history support the idea of limited scope government. Governments never provided anything else than the legal system and the military (and maybe occasional whipping), so paying 20-60% in income taxes like it's today in western countries (not to mention other taxes) was unheard of. Out of last 5000 years maybe last 50 are like that. I'd argue that the humanity fared equally well without compulsory taxes for education, healthcare and shit and only today it's controversial. Economic freedom is the most important, without it no amount of benevolent government will do any good.
Governments don't manage money well and that is 100% true. That always happens when you have no vested personal interest in the results of spending other people's money. When the investment is shit, government simply gets more (thanks to the monopoly on violence) and that is what throws economic soundness out the window. Many times in history some batshit insane ruler wanted to immortalize himself no matter the cost and built some beautiful but ungodly expensive temple/palace/garden/whatnot causing a lot of misery to plebes who had to build it and pay for it in taxes.
doesn't matter, Freddie and Fannie were an important part of the perverse incentive structure. Implied government guarantee turns everything upside down. You earn more money when you give loans left and right and peddle them to the government with infinite funds than when you are cautious and prudent. Also if you don't participate in that death race, you lose business; investors leave because the other guys offer better returns. Flooding market with money to stimulate economy didn't help maintain sanity either - it was the root cause of that silly notion that housing can go 10%/year for eternity.
baseline is 'you have a right to protect yourself and your property' and courts follow that upgrade that with government intervention to 'you have a right to protect yourself and your property.... unless arbitrary thresholds set by a government agency say otherwise' and courts follow that, dismissing some cases. upgrade that even more and suddenly you are in China with 'you have no rights at all because some bureaucrat feels like it' and judges outright laugh you out of court.
also do you really believe that any of these government agencies setting the rules, like FDA or EPA, manned by the industry insiders, really protects your peasant interests? They are giving absolution to corporations as long as the stink is not big enough to get to the national TV stations.
and the problem with state level EPAs is what exactly? If I am not mistaken many states have their own regulations that are stricter than the federal ones.
RP is pretty much the only guy who plays by the rules written in the constitution. Everybody else bends it to suit his needs because after all it's for the greater good and it's the right thing to do. It's not. Well intentioned ends don't justify the means of wiping the ass with the constitution. If you want federal level EPA, amend the fucking law of the land to be crystal clear and be done with it. Same thing with education, healthcare and whatnot. Don't hide your ass behind the ambiguous general welfare and commerce clauses.
it's all bullshit. The minute they launch any rocket at Israel or Europe they seal their fate and become a glass desert in 1 day. You are accusing them of being suicidal. I live in a Europe and I am not freaked out at them having nukes. Brown people in Pakistan have them already, what's the difference?
Iran never invaded anybody and never toppled any foreign government while the US army and the CIA did, multiple times.
free market works just fine (though it has its share of issues) but there is one major problem - there are these massive bodies bending economic time-space and they are called governments and central banks. They set up rules of the game and they can move the equilibrium if they wish so, other smaller players have no choice but to work within these rules. Gambling in housing market was a perfectly rational thing to do, given the structure of incentives created by the policies - dirt cheap loans and government subsidies and guarantees aggresively promoting home ownership. Who do you blame for the fact that people jump 2m high in moon gravity? People or the gravity? That's what's happened here - masters of the economy artificially lowered economic gravity (because stimulus is good for business), people got high (hurray) only to crash down hard when whole system reached the limits of leverage (fffffuuuu-) Another thing is that people are hypocrites full of shit - they blame greed of bankers for everything but somehow everything was perfectly fine when they felt rich, borrowing against their appreciating homes and blowing money left and right like drunken sailors. It takes two to tango.
While there was plenty of questionable things going on in the banks, without massive stimulation the bubble would pop much earlier (if it ever formed) with much weaker impact. Policy makers didn't like where the equilibrium was and tried to move it despite the resistance of the system. This only added to the destructive power already present in the system. Shit hit the fan in 2008 and all that destructive power was unleashed. The greater the tension is, the more violent the release will be.
it doesn't mean the laws of economics don't apply. When the government runs a deficit (especially when it's not offset by the gdp growth bought that way, eg. everywhere around the world today) it confiscates the purchasing power of its currency holders/users in one way or another because it either has to increase taxes to service the debt or to print money to fill the gap/inflate the debt away. No matter how you slice it, both ways are nothing more than a tax on purchasing power that affects the people who saved their whole lives for a retirement and the people on a fixed income the most. The wealthy will do just fine, it's the bottom that is invariably assraped.
Yes, you can pretend it doesn't work that way, especially when you have that petrodollar thing, but the math is a bitch and you can cheat it only so long.
Ron Paul would never do that? Doesn't he want to close military bases around the world and move freed money to SS to keep it afloat?
You could confiscate the wealth of top n% and it wouldn't make a dent in debt. Total net worth of the richest 1% is what, few hundred billion? a trillion? Currently the US runs deficits to the tune of approx $1.5T - that's every year.
Slashdot Mirror
that's your greatest problem? not the dire need of winding down the war machine, overreach of three-letter agencies and shit?
at least Obama would have to answer tough questions about bombing the shit out of beige people and their kids somewhere in the east, assassinating the US citizens without any oversight, cracking down on medical marijuana in states where it's legalized (oh look, states did something right and the feds are the oppressors for a change). Debates with Mittens would lack any substance.
if he's ignorant of economics, what would you say about the rest of the politcritters? He's rather well versed in economic theory but he sticks to the oldschool. I bet 90% of capitol hill doesn't know what 'keynesian' means. Same with history, he knows well who started the whole middle east mess with Iran and shit (CIA 1953), i wouldn't be so sure your average D.C. dweller knows that.
gold in the US treasury? most likely not there, loaned out to buddies, with each bar backing 5 different paper assets in the paper gold market. When was the last audit of the reserves?
Dept of Education, the body behind the stellar success of no child left behind? If you can have firemen paid with property taxes, why can't you do the same with schools? why do you need a superficial layer of bureaucrats with fat paychecks? Haven't the 'Murrikan kids started to suck in last few decades, with the DoEd fully operational? What you say is that you want to reward and perpetuate failure by throwing more good money after bad.
gold standard? last time i heard RP suggested competing currencies, as in ability to park your purchasing power in something else than the dollar without being forced to pay sales tax and income tax when the nominal dollar value rises. Monopoly leads to abuse and the Fed does just that when it chooses to sacrifice peons with discretionary income on the altar of the Almighty Economy so the priesthood from the top banks could be fat and happy.
A properly run economy
Economy doesn't need to be run, it's not a car. It's like saying that ecosystems need to be run or the weather needs to be run or the water circulation needs to be run. It just happens because there are naturally existing forces that initiate actions.
Just look at the track record of human interventions in ecosystems to make it better. Aral Sea nearly gone, Australia is full of nasty foreign species that were to fix an existing problem, but caused greater one, Aswan Dam has its own share of problems. That's how good people are at controlling things they don't understand.
Thanks to decades of debt-heavy "optimization" geared to inflate the holy GDP metric, we have a global economy that is at the brink of collapse.
Some things are worth "being hellbent on".
Like eliminating slavery.
only if you are naive and believe such a simplistic bullshit. WMD in Iraq anyone? Omg nukes in Iran? Terrorists and pedophiles coming for your first born? It's all propaganda.
Slavery was already on its way out, because slaves have low productivity and trained and motivated workers provided more profits despite wage cost.
I guess it's easy for average Murrican to dismiss criticism of the Civil War as a fringe talk after decades of brainwashing and all those profits reaped thanks to the position of global hegemony. Everybody likes to be the best and the forced unity made that possible.
Look at former Soviet union. Bitchslapped baltic states and crushed internal opposition, victor in WW2 and top2 position from then on for few decades to come. It was a horrible country yet many citizens have the nostalgia for the global superpower times. I guess for your average peon it was well worth it to sacrifice millions for greater good. FFF that.
The progress in social matters is slowed down when the political game is played at the top levels. If social issues were handled more locally (eg at the state level) the progressive regions would be long done with gay marriages with child adoption, marijuana and shit, and at the same time people in Backwardsville would be able to enjoy their closemindedness. Yes, it would suck for people with 'problems' born in the wrong part of the country, but with 50 states you would have an option to move to likeminded area.
One-size-fits-all solutions forced by the government require every interest group from every corner of the country to weigh in in order not to lose and that leads to gridlock, wartime rhetoric and deep divides across the society. That slows down the progress and makes people feel opressed by 'them' whoever that might be.
true that, i remember seeing windmills for the first time on austrian green plains with bigass mountains on the horizon and shit. Long story short i was not amused. Once beautiful landscape was destroyed by hundreds of them placed in tidy rows.
On top of that they looked like a cost generator and a maintenance nightmare, approx 1-2 in every 10 was broken.
when both sides of the deal look after their interests, results tend to be a good bang for the buck spent. Government has no vested interest in getting a good deal and because of that it pretty much asks for being milked dry. On top of that the waste more often than not is rewarded with even more money in next year's budget.
imo you can't really say 2.4 billion years ago. That would make sense only if there was one universal time scale with the necessary requirement of information being broadcasted instantaneously. Considering that it's not possible (hard cap of c), every point has its own time and events happen when information about them, spreading at the speed of light reaches said point. For us on Earth that dark matter stuff is happening right now.
What if they built them because of westerners whining about exploited people who have suicide as the only way out, not because there was a problem per se?
Does anybody know what was the reason people commited suicide there? There are hundreds of thousands of people working there in factories, were the suicides all work related or maybe some/most were a result of broken heart or bullying in their out-of-work social circles or any other thing people commit suicides because of?
Besides, can't people simply walk away instead of killing themselves?
yes, government can make things last longer than they would otherwise have. Participation in this particular ponzi scheme is not voluntary. Besides ponzi schemes don't fail right off the bat, so having enough money up to a given date does not make something not-a-ponzi.
There is no fund, there is no money with your name on it. The money is spent as soon as it's collected. That surplus you speak of was raided and pillaged long time ago and these so called assets are all government IOUs which will be paid with shitload of treasuries (borrowed or printed money). The taxpayer is on the hook either way - higher taxation or diluted paycheck.
ok, the US may not look that bad with global reserve currency and fertility rate of 2.1 and shit. It will take a while. Let's take Poland, average country with rather good economic growth - her Social Security is over $20B in the red every single year (38M people) AND on top of that the fertility rate is less than 1.30 TODAY. Good luck being 30 today and expecting anything in 30 years when there are 3 retired old farts for every person in active workforce.
It's nothing but a ponzi and the difference between Poland and the US is just few numbers, mechanics are the same.
it's not? It pays oldtimers with money the newcomers bring to the table and promises today's newcomers that their turn will come. It's very sensitive to demographic changes (as in going belly up when numbers of newcomers dwindle)
It's a government mandated ponzi scheme at its core, period.
even MS sucks at supporting its own formats between versions, so don't hold your breath hoping that LO people will reverse engineer all the obscure corner cases and quirks where things break.
i just looked at the offer of random online comp shop located in my area (Central Europe) and the differences between linux and windows versions of the same model are approx in $60-120 range, depending on starter/hp/pro and 32/64bit. If you have absolutely no use for windows. that's a lot of money to blow on nothing.
yup, i've read today that Aussies are about to roll out body scanners (following the US) but there will be no opt-out (surpassing the US)
U NO SCAN - U NO FLY
first of all, not every libertarian is anarcho-capitalist
second: you seem not to have any idea what Ron Pauls stands for. He is a strict constitutionalist and thus believes in government structures. Decentralization is crucial though: limited federal government (courts, military and coordination of interstate matters) and do-what-you-want states (even if they happen to pass crazy ass laws, though personally he is for as much personal freedom as possible). At least he has the US constitution having his back, which can't be said about the rest of 'wipe your ass with the constitution, it's for the greater good' politicians.
and i'd argue that 5000years worth of history support the idea of limited scope government. Governments never provided anything else than the legal system and the military (and maybe occasional whipping), so paying 20-60% in income taxes like it's today in western countries (not to mention other taxes) was unheard of. Out of last 5000 years maybe last 50 are like that. I'd argue that the humanity fared equally well without compulsory taxes for education, healthcare and shit and only today it's controversial. Economic freedom is the most important, without it no amount of benevolent government will do any good.
Governments don't manage money well and that is 100% true. That always happens when you have no vested personal interest in the results of spending other people's money. When the investment is shit, government simply gets more (thanks to the monopoly on violence) and that is what throws economic soundness out the window. Many times in history some batshit insane ruler wanted to immortalize himself no matter the cost and built some beautiful but ungodly expensive temple/palace/garden/whatnot causing a lot of misery to plebes who had to build it and pay for it in taxes.
care to elaborate on that 'last 5000 years of civilization' part? i am genuinely curious.
doesn't matter, Freddie and Fannie were an important part of the perverse incentive structure. Implied government guarantee turns everything upside down.
You earn more money when you give loans left and right and peddle them to the government with infinite funds than when you are cautious and prudent.
Also if you don't participate in that death race, you lose business; investors leave because the other guys offer better returns.
Flooding market with money to stimulate economy didn't help maintain sanity either - it was the root cause of that silly notion that housing can go 10%/year for eternity.
it is not contradictory.
baseline is 'you have a right to protect yourself and your property' and courts follow that
upgrade that with government intervention to 'you have a right to protect yourself and your property.... unless arbitrary thresholds set by a government agency say otherwise' and courts follow that, dismissing some cases.
upgrade that even more and suddenly you are in China with 'you have no rights at all because some bureaucrat feels like it' and judges outright laugh you out of court.
also do you really believe that any of these government agencies setting the rules, like FDA or EPA, manned by the industry insiders, really protects your peasant interests? They are giving absolution to corporations as long as the stink is not big enough to get to the national TV stations.
and the problem with state level EPAs is what exactly? If I am not mistaken many states have their own regulations that are stricter than the federal ones.
RP is pretty much the only guy who plays by the rules written in the constitution. Everybody else bends it to suit his needs because after all it's for the greater good and it's the right thing to do. It's not. Well intentioned ends don't justify the means of wiping the ass with the constitution.
If you want federal level EPA, amend the fucking law of the land to be crystal clear and be done with it. Same thing with education, healthcare and whatnot. Don't hide your ass behind the ambiguous general welfare and commerce clauses.
it's all bullshit. The minute they launch any rocket at Israel or Europe they seal their fate and become a glass desert in 1 day.
You are accusing them of being suicidal.
I live in a Europe and I am not freaked out at them having nukes. Brown people in Pakistan have them already, what's the difference?
Iran never invaded anybody and never toppled any foreign government while the US army and the CIA did, multiple times.
free market works just fine (though it has its share of issues) but there is one major problem - there are these massive bodies bending economic time-space and they are called governments and central banks.
They set up rules of the game and they can move the equilibrium if they wish so, other smaller players have no choice but to work within these rules. Gambling in housing market was a perfectly rational thing to do, given the structure of incentives created by the policies - dirt cheap loans and government subsidies and guarantees aggresively promoting home ownership.
Who do you blame for the fact that people jump 2m high in moon gravity? People or the gravity? That's what's happened here - masters of the economy artificially lowered economic gravity (because stimulus is good for business), people got high (hurray) only to crash down hard when whole system reached the limits of leverage (fffffuuuu-)
Another thing is that people are hypocrites full of shit - they blame greed of bankers for everything but somehow everything was perfectly fine when they felt rich, borrowing against their appreciating homes and blowing money left and right like drunken sailors. It takes two to tango.
While there was plenty of questionable things going on in the banks, without massive stimulation the bubble would pop much earlier (if it ever formed) with much weaker impact. Policy makers didn't like where the equilibrium was and tried to move it despite the resistance of the system. This only added to the destructive power already present in the system. Shit hit the fan in 2008 and all that destructive power was unleashed. The greater the tension is, the more violent the release will be.
it doesn't mean the laws of economics don't apply. When the government runs a deficit (especially when it's not offset by the gdp growth bought that way, eg. everywhere around the world today) it confiscates the purchasing power of its currency holders/users in one way or another because it either has to increase taxes to service the debt or to print money to fill the gap/inflate the debt away. No matter how you slice it, both ways are nothing more than a tax on purchasing power that affects the people who saved their whole lives for a retirement and the people on a fixed income the most. The wealthy will do just fine, it's the bottom that is invariably assraped.
Yes, you can pretend it doesn't work that way, especially when you have that petrodollar thing, but the math is a bitch and you can cheat it only so long.
Ron Paul would never do that? Doesn't he want to close military bases around the world and move freed money to SS to keep it afloat?
You could confiscate the wealth of top n% and it wouldn't make a dent in debt. Total net worth of the richest 1% is what, few hundred billion? a trillion? Currently the US runs deficits to the tune of approx $1.5T - that's every year.
subsidies were so generous that some solar plants actually burned oil in generators to produce energy at night to get more money.