Economists disagree with you... do you know something they don't?
You're lying about what the paper says. The "Institute for Policy Integrity" isn't an economics organization, it's a political one. ("Policy Integrity" means "Government should be responsive to leftist think tanks and front groups above the actual citizenry.") They asked 18 economists who were appointed to the GAO by Democrats (remember, this is 2009) a multiple choice question that used the label "market based mechanism" to apply to Pigovian taxes. The GAO economists did not call Pigovian taxes market based.
This is a pretend, politicized study intended to push a specific viewpoint. OF COURSE they frame the question in a way that implies that they have more support that they actually do.
Keep blustering all you want. Your last post was a whole lot of blather to conceal the fact that your argument is based on a strawman.
None of this has anything to do with what I originally asserted, which is that we don't need as many mine safety inspectors as in 1980 because there are 90% fewer miners. This applies more broadly to all industrial jobs and OSHA inspectors, although that ratio isn't as stark a contrast as with the miners.
So yeah, people with really horrible things to say are given state money to say it.
All non-tyrannical governments protect the right of the people to freely associate, or to freely withhold their association. (The United States recognizes this, which is why "freedom of association" is explicitly enumerated in the First Amendment to the Constitution.)
Taking what you euphemistically call "state money" but which is really a citizen's tax money and handing it out to people that citizen hates flies in the face of freedom of association.
Meanwhile, under the current system, if a citizen supports a candidate, they can, but are not obliged to, cut a check to the candidate directly. This way, nobody has to give money to someone they hate.
Again, you're assuming facts not in evidence. What is the actual problem with money in politics?
The problem is that dirtbags (and there are plenty in both parties) use money to get elected and then make decisions that intrude on your rights too much. But the problem isn't the money, it's the dirtbag.
A strictly limited government wouldn't attract as many dirtbags, simply because there wouldn't be enough opportunites for graft or potential rewards to hand out to cronies. You'll notice Lessig isn't advocating for that.
The government unclassified system she should of used did not have some in between classification that made it somehow superior for classified information storage. If anything the shared server would be more of a mess to clean up, since it would bring down countless people's work email to do so. If it was contaminated they would likely yank the cord and pull the machine into an appropriate secure area, along with every machine that received the email or had the potential to cache it. Of course they might have an official plan for cleaning up spills on the official server, given that it is almost certainly going to happen from time to time. This is especially true if they are, as it appears, classifying things after the fact. Heck they might even have a procedure where they don't have to yank, fully clean, and reimage the server if it happens often enough. After all, it is probably easier to get the government to agree to the security plan the government wants.
Every single sentence in this quote is false. Everyone who works for the government and has a computer has a non-secure computer. If you have need to know for classified information, you get an additional computer for every classified network you need to be on.
Of course no one is saying that Hillary created any emails that were obviously classified at the time they were created, just that they found something that they classified after the fact. Had she deliberately, knowingly, and in a matter that could be proved sent classified information on an unclassified network, then her clearance would be pulled and she could easily face jail time, but again no one is accusing her of that.
This is false. Things told to the Secretary of State in confidence by other world leaders are at a minimum, either Classified or Secret, depending on the country the other world leader is from. We already know that she sent (and thus created) emails like this over her Clinton Email server.
She is more or less guilty of creating her own email server, likely as a defence against her email being randomly subpoenaed by right wing politicians.
They're not HER emails. They belong to the American people, who have the right to request and inspect them via the Freedom of Information Act. (Obviously, unless they include classified information... but then if she was emailing classified information, she should have been using the Secret servers.)
She did refuse to turn it over to the right wing witch hunt committee, which I can understand, but once the justice department asked, she promptly complied, as she was legally required to do so.
This, too, is a lie. She wiped the server in order to prevent anyone, including the Justice Department, from finding the emails she didn't turn over. Luckily for the American people, she screwed that up and now We The People get to find out the shady stuff the government has been doing behind our backs. I wish Lois Lerner had been this careless with hiding the email trail that shows her malfeasance.
(Also, the "right wing witch hunt committee" has the same subpoena power that the FBI has. She's legally obligated to turn the emails over to them too.)
Okay, that's Pigov's argument, but you're missing the point here.
I objected to you calling a Pigovian carbon tax "market based" because it isn't. Like all taxes, it's "regulation based." Most economists either support regulation based solutions most of the time or they support market based solutions most of the time. By falsely claiming that a regulation based solution is market based, you're implying that the market based solutions guys agree with you. Calling Pigovian taxes "market based" is an appeal to a consensus that isn't really there.
I know Global Warming Doomsayers would never intentionally point to a consensus that doesn't really exist.
After I read the studies, I called up the engineer who had done them. He was really enthusiastic about saving lives, and we had a nice conversation. He said that they had done ten studies and stopped. I asked him why they stopped and he said, "Ronald Reagan." As governor of California, Reagan cut the budget for the safety studies.
Wait, hang on. As you tell the story, "the California OSHA" did 10 studies, which all concluded that tools should come with built in GFCIs. Then, the government mandated built in GFCIs in power tools. Then, you talked to some nameless engineer who blamed Ronald Reagan for cutting off the studies..
Did it occur to you that the government found solution to the problem, mandated that solution, and then decided to devote its resources elsewhere? Should they have done more studies to justify mandatory GFCIs AFTER GFCIs were made mandatory?
This is the same issue that I was gettng at with the coal miners and the reduced number of safety inspectors at MSHA. OSHA makes sense in high risk industrial jobs (except coal mining, because they have MSHA instead), but, as you point out (correctly), fewer people work in that kind of job than did in 1980. Since there isn't as much to inspect, there should be fewer inspectors.
You also gloss over the fact that at most construction sites, workers purchase and bring their own tools rather than having the foreman or the company or someone picking them out. Thus, the worker themselves were picking tools without GFCIs, and could presumably picked tools which included them. You also conflate Worker's Comp and product liability lawsuits for some reason, Even though they have nothing to do with each other.
Also, the conservative who says "Government is useless" is a strawman. There are plenty of conservatives who say "Government should do LESS." For example, government should do less mine inspection than they did in 1980 because the number of miners has dropped by 90 percent since then. Or, maybe we should either pick having a federal OSHA or 50 state OSHAs, but we probably don't need both. Or, maybe we can get rid of the bureaucracy of MSHA and just have OSHA inspect mines.
Finally, the problem with Communists isn't mindless sloganeering. Nobody has a monopoly on that. The problem with Communists is that their economic system leads to mass starvation everywhere it's really enacted, and if they're in power, they'll kill you if you point that out.
This isn't actually true. The group's rhetoric assumes that businesses (and buisnessmen) shouldn't be able to fund politics because business (and businessmen) are evil, while government (and so called public interest groups) are righteous.
By and large, that is the argument of the American Left, rather than the Right. If your argument assumes that to be true, you shouldn't expect support from the right. Also, he named his group after a socialist holiday... Because it's a leftist group, and he's lying when he claims it isn't.
(especially since Ronald Reagan) the budget for workplace inspections, and the number of inspectors, has been cut throughout MSHA
In 1980, the year Reagan was elected, the United Mine Workers represented 160,000 miners. In 2005, that number was 16,000. Since there are 10 times fewer coal miners than when Reagan was elected, doesn't it stand to reason that they need fewer safety inspectors?
Nonsense piled on nonsense. Markets are central to this solution... The solutions that are currently being enacted in the U.S. all involve regulation. This is not an efficient solution.
All taxes are a form of regulation. Any plan that requires levying a tax is regulation based, not market based.
Also, the fact that a Pigovian tax is not market based isn't necessarily a reason not to enact one. Clearly, the government needs to fund its legitimate operations, and in the modern system, to do that it needs to enact regulations requiring the payment of some kind of taxation.Those taxes are also an intrusion in the market, but we/all legitimate economists accept that as a necessary evil* because the legitimate functions of government need to be funded.
A pigovian tax allows the market to reach an efficient outcome by bridging the gap between the marginal social costs and marginal private costs.
You only reach maximal efficient outcome if the government sets the Pigovian tax exactly correctly. No free market economist, not even Pigou himself, trusted the government to do that correctly. More than likely, a Pigovian tax just shifts inefficency from one actor to another, usually adding inefficency in the process. This is my problem with a Pigovian tax on carbon emissions. The Federal government isn't going to set the rates correctly because the people who set the rates are on exactly one side of the argument, and they're going to set up the tax to maximize the pain to their political opponents, not to create an efficient outcome. The rates themselves will be set by bureaucrats, not elected officials, so picking different elected officials will not change the results.
*In the United States, and I assume in most other countries, all the reasonable parties accept the necessity of a tax to fund the legitimate functions of government. Those who argue for cutting the overall level of taxation are nearly always doing so as part of an argument about which functions that government is currently performing are illegitimate when performed by the level of government that they are talking about. (For an example, one could argue that something is legitimately a state function rather than a federal function, and that state rather than federal taxes should be levied to pay for it.)
Also the government email isn't secure and can only be used for non secure communication. Secure communications require usage of an internal distribution server that is secure and is not actually email..
???
Secret email is email. It's on a segregated, airgapped network, but it's still POP3 or IMAP and SMTP. Everyone who works for the government has a regular email address that you can't use for classified communications, and then if you have access to be on a classified network, you have an additional email address on the classified side.
As an aside, Governor Palin used private e-mail for government functions too, actually registering addresses with public mail servers (yahoo if I remember right) after becoming Governor of Alaska, and specifically citing her newly-found position as the account name. There was no prosecution over that either.
There was prosecution over that. The son-of-a-Democrat-state-Congressman who hacked her email was convicted and IIRC, he did jail time. But there was no official business in Palin's emails. Remember, the emails at one point were in the custody of the son of an elected official from the Democratic Party. If there was anything incriminating in that email, you'd think the kid, or his father, or his father's party, would have publicized it better.
here is food for thought: perhaps more conservative organizations were questioned by IRS because proportionally THEY do more bad things?
I think most conservatives would want to fire a police chief who told his deputies to go out and find some N-------- who weren't doing anything and harass them. From what we've seen leak out of Lerner's emails, that's what the IRS was doing.
The fact that externalites EXIST isn't in doubt by anyone. The problem is that market based economics does not offer the tools to deal with them. Economists as diverse as Fredrick von Mises and Robin Hahnel agree that externalities represent unavoidable deficiencies in free markets. The Austrian viewed externalities as arising from "the lack of clear property rights," which are, of course, a fundamental assumption of free markets. Hahnel, a socialist, used externalities to argue against free market economic theory itself in his 2007 paper "The Case Against Markets." See Journal of Economic Issues. Vol. XLI, No. 4
Externalities aside, Arthur Pigou, the guy who first theorized externalities and offsetting them with the kind of Pigouvian Tax you're talking about, thinks your plan is unworkable in practice. In Some Aspects of the Welfare State (1954), Pigou writes, "It must be confessed, however, that we seldom know enough to decide in what fields and to what extent the State, on account of [how the difference between public cost and private cost] could interfere with individual choice." In other words, since the government lacks perfect knowledge of what the rational actors will do, it can't accurately determine the public cost of an externality so it can charge private firms that amount in taxes.
Pigou's argument was that a Pigovian tax was an intrusion in the market, but some externalities are so bad that, when the circumstances merited, governments should be able to enact them anyway. Pigou's tax isn't part of the free market system, it exists to correct a perceived flaw in the free market system.
Economists disagree with you. A revenue neutral tax promotes market efficiencies that are lost when costs are absorbed by third parties (as is the case now). A revenue neutral carbon tax is actually a great way to let the market pick the winners and losers that will move us to the new energy economy.
You're talking about "externalities," which are called that because they are EXTERNAL to economic considerations. Externalities are a political and social consideration. A model that requires correction for "negative externalites" requires the government to step in and assess the level at which the externalities are caused, and assess specific levels of culpability to each of the actors (both of which will happen imperfectly). There's plenty of economic systems that advocate for the government to have varying levels of interference with the market. But any government interference with the market (other than requiring customers to be offered perfect information and requiring contract enforcement) is a step away from what a free market does.
An actual free market way to cut carbon is how hybrid cars are marketed in the United States. There's currently no federal subsidies for purchasing a hybrid car. Instead, the hybrid auto manufacturer (through advertising) convinces the customer that cutting carbon is important, and that lower emissions is a "feature" that the customer wants. The hybrid has that feature, and the gas burning car does not, so the customer purchases the hybrid.
By the way, "Economists say that..." doesn't mean anything because not all economists are themselves advocates for free markets in the first place. Are there economists who otherwise advocate for free markets who support a carbon tax.
British Columbia has a revenue neutral carbon tax that is working quite well and enjoys popular support because the fees are in fact returned as dividends.
Wait, so if you hand people money and tell them it's free, you'll enjoy popular support? Never would have guessed that.
According to the link you post later on in the conversation, though, the tax was enacted in 2008 and the first money paid back was in 2009. They're still in the honeymoon phase. Give them time, and they'll raise the other taxes again.
My preferred option would be to let the markets pick the winners and losers. The key is to apply a revenue neutral carbon tax that ensures that any fees collected are spent in reducing income tax and sales tax. That way we are taxing behaviours that we want to discourage, and lowering taxes on things we ought to be encouraging.
"The government should use taxation to coerce the citizenry to take the action that government wants" is the exact opposite of "Let the market pick the winners and losers."
Also, there's no such thing as a revenue neutral tax. What will invariably happen (because government is full of crooks) is that they'll re-raise the sales and income taxes without repealing the carbon tax.
Microsoft IS doing a whole bunch of Open Source stuff, though, most of which has been covered on Slashdot. They're working on opening the source to.NET, which is probably the biggest one.
They're also developing a bunch of cross platform stuff that isn't open source, but legitimately runs on other platforms. Like Cortana, one of the big new features they're using to market Windows 10? That's in open beta on Android, and they will be releasing it for iOS as well.
Secret ballots are primarily supposed to be secret from the government.
You realize that the researcher works for the government, right? I get it. "Wichita State" is a confusing name because there isn't a state called Wichita. It's really run by the state of Kansas.
The Windows 8.1/10 OneNote app will only save to your Microsoft OneDrive account. (OneDrive is Microsoft's cloud storage service.)
The desktop versions of OneNote (included with Microsoft Office since at least 2007), like all Office products, can save or load from any accessible storage media, including cloud storage services (like OneDrive or Google Drive.)
Two of the Matthew ones are just critical of divorce.
You don't think that "You're not allowed to divorce your wife for any reason at all, unless she cheats on you" is relevant to a conversation about Ashley Madison?
Lessig is the founder of the MAYDAY Political Action Committee, which is officially nonpartisan, right?
I spent the past two years pointing out that if you're trying to convince someone you're nonpartisan, you shouldn't name your PAC after a communist holiday. Or rail against how money from big corporations is distorting the political system because they give most of their money to one side. (In practice, big business needs to be friends with whoever's in power, so they give money to both sides roughly evenly.) Or rail against money from big corporations, while other big special interest money (i.e. from labor unions), which is actually donated one-sidedly.
Now that he's running for the Democratic Party's nomination... NOW can we agree that he's a leftist and his PAC was leftist?
Government records are records ABOUT the government. FOIA exists so the people can inspect government records to find wrongdoing by the government. Apple's EEO statements have NOTHING to do with the government or potential government wrongdoing.
For every brain-dead suggestion by a politician over there, there are probably 10-50 "WTF" suggestions made by politicians here in the US. Some examples:
"Venezuela's gun laws have reduced crime by 1000 times. Lets do a ban here."
"All women who have miscarriages should be tried for murder or negligent homicide."
"Roads are socialist. If you want to drive to work, pay for the road, buy a vehicle that handles potholes, or do without."
The reason there's no links to these statements is because none of them are true.
OK, you're technically correct, which of course is the best kind of correct. Let me rephrase the last sentence.
I hate Apple as much as anyone, but this if these specific elected representatives were to succeed, it would represent the government shaking them down.
Slashdot Mirror
Economists disagree with you... do you know something they don't?
You're lying about what the paper says. The "Institute for Policy Integrity" isn't an economics organization, it's a political one. ("Policy Integrity" means "Government should be responsive to leftist think tanks and front groups above the actual citizenry.") They asked 18 economists who were appointed to the GAO by Democrats (remember, this is 2009) a multiple choice question that used the label "market based mechanism" to apply to Pigovian taxes. The GAO economists did not call Pigovian taxes market based.
This is a pretend, politicized study intended to push a specific viewpoint. OF COURSE they frame the question in a way that implies that they have more support that they actually do.
None of this has anything to do with what I originally asserted, which is that we don't need as many mine safety inspectors as in 1980 because there are 90% fewer miners. This applies more broadly to all industrial jobs and OSHA inspectors, although that ratio isn't as stark a contrast as with the miners.
So yeah, people with really horrible things to say are given state money to say it.
All non-tyrannical governments protect the right of the people to freely associate, or to freely withhold their association. (The United States recognizes this, which is why "freedom of association" is explicitly enumerated in the First Amendment to the Constitution.)
Taking what you euphemistically call "state money" but which is really a citizen's tax money and handing it out to people that citizen hates flies in the face of freedom of association.
Meanwhile, under the current system, if a citizen supports a candidate, they can, but are not obliged to, cut a check to the candidate directly. This way, nobody has to give money to someone they hate.
The problem is that dirtbags (and there are plenty in both parties) use money to get elected and then make decisions that intrude on your rights too much. But the problem isn't the money, it's the dirtbag.
A strictly limited government wouldn't attract as many dirtbags, simply because there wouldn't be enough opportunites for graft or potential rewards to hand out to cronies. You'll notice Lessig isn't advocating for that.
The government unclassified system she should of used did not have some in between classification that made it somehow superior for classified information storage. If anything the shared server would be more of a mess to clean up, since it would bring down countless people's work email to do so. If it was contaminated they would likely yank the cord and pull the machine into an appropriate secure area, along with every machine that received the email or had the potential to cache it. Of course they might have an official plan for cleaning up spills on the official server, given that it is almost certainly going to happen from time to time. This is especially true if they are, as it appears, classifying things after the fact. Heck they might even have a procedure where they don't have to yank, fully clean, and reimage the server if it happens often enough. After all, it is probably easier to get the government to agree to the security plan the government wants.
Every single sentence in this quote is false. Everyone who works for the government and has a computer has a non-secure computer. If you have need to know for classified information, you get an additional computer for every classified network you need to be on.
Of course no one is saying that Hillary created any emails that were obviously classified at the time they were created, just that they found something that they classified after the fact. Had she deliberately, knowingly, and in a matter that could be proved sent classified information on an unclassified network, then her clearance would be pulled and she could easily face jail time, but again no one is accusing her of that.
This is false. Things told to the Secretary of State in confidence by other world leaders are at a minimum, either Classified or Secret, depending on the country the other world leader is from. We already know that she sent (and thus created) emails like this over her Clinton Email server.
She is more or less guilty of creating her own email server, likely as a defence against her email being randomly subpoenaed by right wing politicians.
They're not HER emails. They belong to the American people, who have the right to request and inspect them via the Freedom of Information Act. (Obviously, unless they include classified information... but then if she was emailing classified information, she should have been using the Secret servers.)
She did refuse to turn it over to the right wing witch hunt committee, which I can understand, but once the justice department asked, she promptly complied, as she was legally required to do so.
This, too, is a lie. She wiped the server in order to prevent anyone, including the Justice Department, from finding the emails she didn't turn over. Luckily for the American people, she screwed that up and now We The People get to find out the shady stuff the government has been doing behind our backs. I wish Lois Lerner had been this careless with hiding the email trail that shows her malfeasance.
(Also, the "right wing witch hunt committee" has the same subpoena power that the FBI has. She's legally obligated to turn the emails over to them too.)
I objected to you calling a Pigovian carbon tax "market based" because it isn't. Like all taxes, it's "regulation based." Most economists either support regulation based solutions most of the time or they support market based solutions most of the time. By falsely claiming that a regulation based solution is market based, you're implying that the market based solutions guys agree with you. Calling Pigovian taxes "market based" is an appeal to a consensus that isn't really there.
I know Global Warming Doomsayers would never intentionally point to a consensus that doesn't really exist.
After I read the studies, I called up the engineer who had done them. He was really enthusiastic about saving lives, and we had a nice conversation. He said that they had done ten studies and stopped. I asked him why they stopped and he said, "Ronald Reagan." As governor of California, Reagan cut the budget for the safety studies.
Wait, hang on. As you tell the story, "the California OSHA" did 10 studies, which all concluded that tools should come with built in GFCIs. Then, the government mandated built in GFCIs in power tools. Then, you talked to some nameless engineer who blamed Ronald Reagan for cutting off the studies..
Did it occur to you that the government found solution to the problem, mandated that solution, and then decided to devote its resources elsewhere? Should they have done more studies to justify mandatory GFCIs AFTER GFCIs were made mandatory?
This is the same issue that I was gettng at with the coal miners and the reduced number of safety inspectors at MSHA. OSHA makes sense in high risk industrial jobs (except coal mining, because they have MSHA instead), but, as you point out (correctly), fewer people work in that kind of job than did in 1980. Since there isn't as much to inspect, there should be fewer inspectors.
You also gloss over the fact that at most construction sites, workers purchase and bring their own tools rather than having the foreman or the company or someone picking them out. Thus, the worker themselves were picking tools without GFCIs, and could presumably picked tools which included them. You also conflate Worker's Comp and product liability lawsuits for some reason, Even though they have nothing to do with each other.
Also, the conservative who says "Government is useless" is a strawman. There are plenty of conservatives who say "Government should do LESS." For example, government should do less mine inspection than they did in 1980 because the number of miners has dropped by 90 percent since then. Or, maybe we should either pick having a federal OSHA or 50 state OSHAs, but we probably don't need both. Or, maybe we can get rid of the bureaucracy of MSHA and just have OSHA inspect mines.
Finally, the problem with Communists isn't mindless sloganeering. Nobody has a monopoly on that. The problem with Communists is that their economic system leads to mass starvation everywhere it's really enacted, and if they're in power, they'll kill you if you point that out.
The original superpac was strictly non-partisan.
This isn't actually true. The group's rhetoric assumes that businesses (and buisnessmen) shouldn't be able to fund politics because business (and businessmen) are evil, while government (and so called public interest groups) are righteous.
By and large, that is the argument of the American Left, rather than the Right. If your argument assumes that to be true, you shouldn't expect support from the right. Also, he named his group after a socialist holiday... Because it's a leftist group, and he's lying when he claims it isn't.
(especially since Ronald Reagan) the budget for workplace inspections, and the number of inspectors, has been cut throughout MSHA
In 1980, the year Reagan was elected, the United Mine Workers represented 160,000 miners. In 2005, that number was 16,000. Since there are 10 times fewer coal miners than when Reagan was elected, doesn't it stand to reason that they need fewer safety inspectors?
Nonsense piled on nonsense. Markets are central to this solution... The solutions that are currently being enacted in the U.S. all involve regulation. This is not an efficient solution.
All taxes are a form of regulation. Any plan that requires levying a tax is regulation based, not market based.
Also, the fact that a Pigovian tax is not market based isn't necessarily a reason not to enact one. Clearly, the government needs to fund its legitimate operations, and in the modern system, to do that it needs to enact regulations requiring the payment of some kind of taxation.Those taxes are also an intrusion in the market, but we/all legitimate economists accept that as a necessary evil* because the legitimate functions of government need to be funded.
A pigovian tax allows the market to reach an efficient outcome by bridging the gap between the marginal social costs and marginal private costs.
You only reach maximal efficient outcome if the government sets the Pigovian tax exactly correctly. No free market economist, not even Pigou himself, trusted the government to do that correctly. More than likely, a Pigovian tax just shifts inefficency from one actor to another, usually adding inefficency in the process. This is my problem with a Pigovian tax on carbon emissions. The Federal government isn't going to set the rates correctly because the people who set the rates are on exactly one side of the argument, and they're going to set up the tax to maximize the pain to their political opponents, not to create an efficient outcome. The rates themselves will be set by bureaucrats, not elected officials, so picking different elected officials will not change the results.
*In the United States, and I assume in most other countries, all the reasonable parties accept the necessity of a tax to fund the legitimate functions of government. Those who argue for cutting the overall level of taxation are nearly always doing so as part of an argument about which functions that government is currently performing are illegitimate when performed by the level of government that they are talking about. (For an example, one could argue that something is legitimately a state function rather than a federal function, and that state rather than federal taxes should be levied to pay for it.)
Maybe so, but a Pigovian tax is a step away from a market based solution. It's not, itself, market based.
Also the government email isn't secure and can only be used for non secure communication. Secure communications require usage of an internal distribution server that is secure and is not actually email..
???
Secret email is email. It's on a segregated, airgapped network, but it's still POP3 or IMAP and SMTP. Everyone who works for the government has a regular email address that you can't use for classified communications, and then if you have access to be on a classified network, you have an additional email address on the classified side.
As an aside, Governor Palin used private e-mail for government functions too, actually registering addresses with public mail servers (yahoo if I remember right) after becoming Governor of Alaska, and specifically citing her newly-found position as the account name. There was no prosecution over that either.
There was prosecution over that. The son-of-a-Democrat-state-Congressman who hacked her email was convicted and IIRC, he did jail time. But there was no official business in Palin's emails. Remember, the emails at one point were in the custody of the son of an elected official from the Democratic Party. If there was anything incriminating in that email, you'd think the kid, or his father, or his father's party, would have publicized it better.
here is food for thought: perhaps more conservative organizations were questioned by IRS because proportionally THEY do more bad things?
I think most conservatives would want to fire a police chief who told his deputies to go out and find some N-------- who weren't doing anything and harass them. From what we've seen leak out of Lerner's emails, that's what the IRS was doing.
Externalities aside, Arthur Pigou, the guy who first theorized externalities and offsetting them with the kind of Pigouvian Tax you're talking about, thinks your plan is unworkable in practice. In Some Aspects of the Welfare State (1954), Pigou writes, "It must be confessed, however, that we seldom know enough to decide in what fields and to what extent the State, on account of [how the difference between public cost and private cost] could interfere with individual choice." In other words, since the government lacks perfect knowledge of what the rational actors will do, it can't accurately determine the public cost of an externality so it can charge private firms that amount in taxes.
Pigou's argument was that a Pigovian tax was an intrusion in the market, but some externalities are so bad that, when the circumstances merited, governments should be able to enact them anyway. Pigou's tax isn't part of the free market system, it exists to correct a perceived flaw in the free market system.
Economists disagree with you. A revenue neutral tax promotes market efficiencies that are lost when costs are absorbed by third parties (as is the case now). A revenue neutral carbon tax is actually a great way to let the market pick the winners and losers that will move us to the new energy economy.
You're talking about "externalities," which are called that because they are EXTERNAL to economic considerations. Externalities are a political and social consideration. A model that requires correction for "negative externalites" requires the government to step in and assess the level at which the externalities are caused, and assess specific levels of culpability to each of the actors (both of which will happen imperfectly). There's plenty of economic systems that advocate for the government to have varying levels of interference with the market. But any government interference with the market (other than requiring customers to be offered perfect information and requiring contract enforcement) is a step away from what a free market does.
An actual free market way to cut carbon is how hybrid cars are marketed in the United States. There's currently no federal subsidies for purchasing a hybrid car. Instead, the hybrid auto manufacturer (through advertising) convinces the customer that cutting carbon is important, and that lower emissions is a "feature" that the customer wants. The hybrid has that feature, and the gas burning car does not, so the customer purchases the hybrid.
By the way, "Economists say that..." doesn't mean anything because not all economists are themselves advocates for free markets in the first place. Are there economists who otherwise advocate for free markets who support a carbon tax.
British Columbia has a revenue neutral carbon tax that is working quite well and enjoys popular support because the fees are in fact returned as dividends.
Wait, so if you hand people money and tell them it's free, you'll enjoy popular support? Never would have guessed that.
According to the link you post later on in the conversation, though, the tax was enacted in 2008 and the first money paid back was in 2009. They're still in the honeymoon phase. Give them time, and they'll raise the other taxes again.
My preferred option would be to let the markets pick the winners and losers. The key is to apply a revenue neutral carbon tax that ensures that any fees collected are spent in reducing income tax and sales tax. That way we are taxing behaviours that we want to discourage, and lowering taxes on things we ought to be encouraging.
"The government should use taxation to coerce the citizenry to take the action that government wants" is the exact opposite of "Let the market pick the winners and losers."
Also, there's no such thing as a revenue neutral tax. What will invariably happen (because government is full of crooks) is that they'll re-raise the sales and income taxes without repealing the carbon tax.
They're also developing a bunch of cross platform stuff that isn't open source, but legitimately runs on other platforms. Like Cortana, one of the big new features they're using to market Windows 10? That's in open beta on Android, and they will be releasing it for iOS as well.
Secret ballots are primarily supposed to be secret from the government.
You realize that the researcher works for the government, right? I get it. "Wichita State" is a confusing name because there isn't a state called Wichita. It's really run by the state of Kansas.
The desktop versions of OneNote (included with Microsoft Office since at least 2007), like all Office products, can save or load from any accessible storage media, including cloud storage services (like OneDrive or Google Drive.)
Two of the Matthew ones are just critical of divorce.
You don't think that "You're not allowed to divorce your wife for any reason at all, unless she cheats on you" is relevant to a conversation about Ashley Madison?
I spent the past two years pointing out that if you're trying to convince someone you're nonpartisan, you shouldn't name your PAC after a communist holiday. Or rail against how money from big corporations is distorting the political system because they give most of their money to one side. (In practice, big business needs to be friends with whoever's in power, so they give money to both sides roughly evenly.) Or rail against money from big corporations, while other big special interest money (i.e. from labor unions), which is actually donated one-sidedly.
Now that he's running for the Democratic Party's nomination... NOW can we agree that he's a leftist and his PAC was leftist?
The EEO-1 data is a government record.
Government records are records ABOUT the government. FOIA exists so the people can inspect government records to find wrongdoing by the government. Apple's EEO statements have NOTHING to do with the government or potential government wrongdoing.
For every brain-dead suggestion by a politician over there, there are probably 10-50 "WTF" suggestions made by politicians here in the US. Some examples:
"Venezuela's gun laws have reduced crime by 1000 times. Lets do a ban here."
"All women who have miscarriages should be tried for murder or negligent homicide."
"Roads are socialist. If you want to drive to work, pay for the road, buy a vehicle that handles potholes, or do without."
The reason there's no links to these statements is because none of them are true.
I hate Apple as much as anyone, but this if these specific elected representatives were to succeed, it would represent the government shaking them down.