No, because the public will never be able to spend as much on bribery/lobbying as most large corporations.
In the case of software patents the lobby in favor of them isn't really the corporations. It's the lawyers.
Think about it: If software patents went away tomorrow, Microsoft et al wouldn't be able to collect patent license fees anymore, but neither would they have to pay them out. For most companies it comes out as a wash, give or take. And if software patents went away, none of those companies would have to continue paying their armies of patent lawyers, which would save them each millions of dollars.
But that would put all of those software patent lawyers out of business, so it is the lawyers who supply the driving force behind the status quo. What confuses people is that they frequently hear corporate lawyers advocating software patents and assume that they take that position in the interest of their employer rather than their occupation.
To be fair, when people talk about torque, they mean the peak torque figure published by the auto manufacturer. The saying comes from the fact that almost all gasoline engines reach peak torque at lower RPM than peak power, and most people operate their engines predominantly at those lower RPM ranges. So an engine with a quoted 200 lb/ft of torque at 2800RPM and 200 hp at 6000RPM will seem faster under normal driving conditions than an engine with 150 lb/ft of torque at 5200RPM and 250HP at 8000RPM. It's a heuristic for approximating the power curve without actually having it available.
Now days the worst you are likely to suffer from civil disobedience in the West is a few years in jail.
Since when is that a small thing to suffer?
Mandela was in prison for TWENTY-SEVEN years.
That's what I'm talking about. Mandela accomplished what he set out to, but it basically took him his whole life to do it. And what happens if the people with his level of dedication are executed rather than imprisoned? What happens if the change sought is time-sensitive, such that whoever wins the day today will capture enough power to keep the balance in their favor going forward?
Civil disobedience doesn't work if you're the only one doing it. In that case the opposition merely has to come down on you hard enough to take you out of the running and deter anyone else from taking your place. It works when people take part on a mass scale. And if there are enough people willing to have an "example" made of them for the cause then great, but in many situations, even for very worthy causes, there are insufficiently many people willing to make that sacrifice. There are, in fact, things worth fighting for that aren't worth dying for.
So anonymity and penalty avoidance allow the process to bootstrap. If people can show that they can break bad laws without being caught, more people will be emboldened to join them. Once enough people are doing it, some of them will do what you want -- step forward, put their heads on the chopping block and dare the oppressors to martyr them. And by that point, when most every citizen is guilty of the crime, no jury will convict.
If a cause isn't worth spending a few years in jail, it isn't worth making a fuss out of at all.
This is nonsense and is the main flaw in your argument. There are undeniably non-frivolous causes worth taking action over that aren't worth going to prison over.
I am all for civil disobedience when it is merited, but don't go crying when you get arrested and charged for that disobedience. Especially don't go trying to distort the reasons for your arrest to try and trick people into supporting you.
The problem with modern civil disobedience is that they don't hold you overnight and then let you go anymore, or even charge you with a crime for which the penalty is a $500 fine or 30 days in the county jail. They trump up some nonsense charges for which the penalty is 5-10 years or more in Federal PMITA Prison so that you have to spend enough on legal fees to bankrupt anyone who isn't a millionaire, because nobody sane is willing to go pro se against the prospect of that sort of excessive, life-ruining penalty. Imagine if Martin Luther King Jr. were arrested in 1955 for his ("illegal") bus boycotts, and then thrown in prison for the next 10 years. Somehow I doubt the 1963 "I have a dream" speech would have been quite as effective standing on a table in the prison cafeteria in front of a dozen inmates as it was in front of a quarter of a million people at the Lincoln Memorial.
So today, prospective young men and women who feel that they have no real political representation are presented with a Sophie's choice. If they want to keep their freedom and have any continued hope of creating change through official channels or by shaping public opinion through open discussion, they have to forgo civil disobedience and are deprived of one of the most effective methods to bring about change in the face of a broken political system. (This is, obviously, by design from the perspective of the broken political system.) Or they can break the law as their predecessors did, but then have to rely on anonymity and whatever criminal defense a person can muster against outrageous penalties in order to retain the freedom to continue the fight and continue to violate unreasonable laws until they are repealed.
Naturally someone will respond that this is a different fight and how dare I compare freedom of information to the civil rights movement etc. But that is just a political perspective -- history is written by the winners. Just because you don't agree with the politics of the accused (whether it be MLK or Julian Assange), that is no excuse to support the suppression of nonviolent political movements through criminal felony prosecutions.
My point, in a nutshell, is government spending creates more jobs than business lack of spending.
My point is that you can't say that in the abstract. It depends on what the corporations being taxed would do with the money and on what the government would do with it instead, and on how much capital flight the increased taxes will cause (which is determined by what and who taxes are increased on), etc. It just isn't as simple as "government spending > private spending" or the reverse.
Incidentally, if businesses are for some reason hoarding cash, the government has a much better alternative than tax-and-spend: The government can control the level of inflation by printing more or less money. If businesses are hoarding cash, the government can print more money which a) allows the government to do spending without raising taxes and b) sets a fire under the private interests to keep the cash flowing, because hoarding it will incur a loss of real value as the currency is diluted.
If there exists $2 trillion in cash, somebody has to be "sitting on it" -- it doesn't cease to exist when someone spends it, so at any given time it has to be in the possession of some entity. If the government collects money in taxes from businesses who are holding it and "spends" it so that it ends up in the hands of defense contractors who continue to hold it, it has done nothing for the economy but to transfer money from a company that earned it to a company that knows how to get a no bid contract, thereby creating a disincentive to earn money legitimately and an increased incentive to lobby for government contracts.
The problem with arguing about whether government spending is better for the economy in the abstract than lower taxes is that the details are what determines the answer. If the government provides medical services to the public, the economic effect is basically neutral -- it doesn't make a lot of difference whether the doctor gets paid by a private insurance company that collects premiums or a public agency that collects taxes. However, if you raise taxes on a bunch of doctors who then have to fire their landscapers and the government gives that money to defense contractors who stick the money in their Evil Company Mattresses, the economic consequences are negative: The landscapers lose their jobs and the defense contractors don't create any. And if you increase taxes on the defense contractors so that they have to pay the government with money from the Evil Company Mattresses and then the government gives it to a bunch of highway construction workers who go out and fix potholes, you create those jobs. The details are what matters -- you can't say in the abstract that private spending or government spending is better.
The thing that kills it for government spending is how the government gets the money: Let's say the government decides there should be government single payer healthcare. That requires high taxes, but in theory that isn't a problem, because they just take the money people would otherwise have spent on private insurance. The problem comes when the CEO realizes how much money he can save if he opens a factory offshore where they have much lower taxes because they don't have government healthcare, all while he can still go see the doctor here for free. The high taxes drive capital flight, tax avoidance and off-shoring. Then you have to raise taxes even more in order to continue providing the same services with the smaller tax base. The thing expected to be economically neutral in actuality has caused the local factory to be shut down and shipped off to China and has caused the doctors to have to fire their landscapers in order to pay the higher taxes to cover healthcare for the now-unemployed factory workers (and unemployed landscapers), etc.
More pay for less work. Less work is going to lead to progress?
Where do you think progress comes from? It certainly isn't from huge multinational corporations with entrenched market positions who shoot down any idea that might skewer existing cash cows. It comes from people having enough free time and available capital to develop an idea on their own time that they can start a new company without worrying about the fiscal impact on their previous employer's existing revenue streams or whether they'll still be able to eat in eighteen months if they quit their job to go after something new.
Green tech. Because regular tech never got anyone anywhere.
Green tech is just another way of saying that we have new constraints (reduced energy budgets) which creates a market for new products better adapted to those constraints. It's a thing we need but don't yet have -- necessity is the mother of invention, yes?
Coding for a cause. Feel good about going through the motions. Produce nothing of any particular value.
Idealism never got anyone anywhere. Like those GNU people with their useless GPL that nobody uses.
Hacking. I made this cool bot that does XYZ-super-geeky thing. For hacker cred. What does "productivity" mean?
Socialism is saying it doesn't end at the family, my community should be treated the same way, or why just the community my countrymen should be treated the same way.
In practice, it works fine up to a small community.
Larger than that... well... nobody's got a good solution for that yet.
The problem isn't inherently the scale, it's that once you reach that scale you end up including too many people who are in poverty and you hit a bootstrapping problem: A middle class wage earner can only afford to insure and educate a limited number of impoverished individuals in addition to attending the needs of his own family, and if you exceed that threshold you create a substandard education system that causes a poverty cycle where society's resources go toward paying for prison, unemployment, default and bankruptcy of individuals who the education system failed in Generation 0 instead of going toward educating Generation 1. In almost all cases of poverty that cycle is preexisting before socialism is implemented, and socialism provides no means to break out of it in the absence of sufficient external resources.
The secret to working socialism is to define the scope of society in such a way that you don't include overly many poor people.
Did you intend to imply that having to file a lawsuit was preferable to having to file an insurance claim? Because I know which one I would rather have to do.
That's not the half of it. MS Active Directory uses DNS for its domain names and 90% of companies just make up a TLD that didn't exist at the time. Windows domain names end up being something like apple.private, apple.pri, apple.domain, etc. Or they just use their own company name as the TLD. Now you just wait until Public Radio International wants http://pri/ or some domain name registrar picks up http://domain/ and you break everybody's AD because everything tries the FQDN first. To say nothing of what happens when Apple Records uses 'apple' with no TLD as their AD domain and then Apple Corp gets the.apple TLD.
Importantly, comparisons to factories are generally unwise because manufacturing is 'embarrassingly parallel' -- it doesn't matter if you have to make the whole iPhone in one single step that takes two straight hours and you can't divide it into any constituent part. You can still manufacture as many iPhones a day as you like because you just set up however many manufacturing units which each make one iPhone every two hours, until you have the desired output capacity.
The 'hard' problems to parallelize are the ones that work like building a house: You can't lay the foundation until you grade the terrain. You can't put in the walls until you lay the foundation. You can't install the electrical until there are walls. And so on. There is no known way to convert an unimproved lot and a truck full of concrete and drywall into into a house in less than 5 minutes, no matter how many construction workers you have available.
There is also the matter of brand. We have all these religious wars about Windows vs. Linux and all that, but the fact of the matter is that there is no fundamental business difference between a webserver that runs Windows and one that runs Linux. Both will do the job, they're effectively fungible, so the choice of one over the other comes down to personal preference. So brand matters.
And the trouble for Microsoft is that they've ruined their brand. IBM is known for making boring, stable, reliable products. Microsoft's reputation is as a monopolist that makes buggy, unstable, incompatible, malware-infested crap with industrial strength vendor lock-in. A large plurality of their potential customers will avoid them out of principle unless it simply can't be avoided. That is a pretty serious disadvantage when you're selling fungible products.
Go counter to the market. Buy during a selloff and sell during a bubble. It isn't difficult.
It sounds easy, the problem is picking the right time. Look at the history of Microsoft: In the two years between 1995 and 1997 their stock price more than tripled from ~$5 to ~$15. Then it went from $15 to more than $50 between 1997 and 1999. And then it quickly fell back to ~$35 the next year. It hasn't materially exceeded that last price at any time since and has in fact slowly lost almost 30% of its value since then.
The trouble is that it's far too easy to see a bubble and sell Microsoft for $15 in 1997 and then buy the same shares for $35 during the sell off in 2000, when anyone with the advantage of hindsight can see that what someone should have done is sell Microsoft for ~$50 in 1999 and then never reinvest in it again.
I honestly don't understand. If it's insurance, it would be like State Farm having extra branches of their business and then telling people "sorry, we can't pay your claims because we spent your premiums on other things."
Nope, that's having it both ways. You want Social Security to be an insurance company. Well, if the government creates a tax on insurance so that State Farm has to pay X% of all premiums to the government, you can sure bet that State Farm is immediately going to announce that for a given premium, people going forward will receive a lower level of insurance coverage. No reason they can't do the same to Social Security if they need money. Heck, people are mad about GE, the Social Security Administration is a trillion dollar company that pays no taxes!
It's damn easy. Just because you are too dumb to do something doesn't mean it isn't doable or even easy.
Give me a break. No one agrees about what pork is in any way whatsoever. Everyone calls their own projects a necessary incident to the operation of the country and everybody else's projects pork. More importantly, the problem with "real" pork (i.e. deadweight inefficiencies) is that they tend to be individually small but numerous and prolific, such that the cost of identifying and removing them approaches or exceeds the cost of the inefficiency itself. There is a reason that this is not a solved problem.
There is no functional difference between insurance from State Farm and Social Security, other than one is mandatory and the other isn't.
Being mandatory is what makes all the difference in the world. Mandatory is the difference between donating to a private school and paying taxes for public schools. It's the difference between hiring a security guard and paying taxes that fund the police department.
The government can't reduce funding to State Farm and use the money to fund the Department of Education or cover the deficit.
Or just put it the other way if you like: Fine, it's an insurance program. Then we can impose an arbitrarily large income or property tax on the Social Security Administration and use that "tax revenue" for something else. Calling it an insurance program or not has nothing to do with whether you can cause it to pay out less money and instead use that money for some other purpose.
Abolishing medicare and the new health care program and implementing a public/private mandatory single-payer insurance like most other industrialized countries would result in better medical coverage at about half the cost.
That's just optimistic speculation. Other countries pay less by having the government set (low) prices for drugs and medical services. The result has been that the US subsidizes worldwide medical R&D by paying higher prices. If the US did the same thing as those countries, R&D would be reduced accordingly with the consequent undesirable results for everyone.
Cut the military by 90% (that's all we need to actually defend the country).
It would not be realistic or responsible to implement that in the short to medium term.
Eliminate 50% of discretionary spending (the pork part, some of it is necessary)
Excellent idea. All we need to do is decide which part is the pork, which should be easy.
The online store also uses those roads, but via a shipper, who pays taxes on... what, exactly?
Fuel, mostly. Also, the shipping company will generally have a local shipping facility where they park their trucks at night and will pay property tax on the facility and the trucks, etc.
There's never any such thing as "fair" taxation.
It's not about "fair," it's about preventing states from implementing protectionism. Which is exactly what they would do if they were allowed to levy taxes on out of state companies.
Moreover, the states have an incentive to make things fair for in-state companies and unfair for out of state companies, so all you have to do is prevent them from making things unfair for out of state companies and they'll take care of the rest. For example, a state with a large population which would cause a disincentive for companies to set up shop there if it meant they had to collect sales tax on sales to customers in that state can easily solve the problem it causes for in-state companies simply by collecting revenue through property or income tax instead. Then companies would not be especially discouraged to move there, because although they would have to pay slightly higher property or income taxes, it would mean they wouldn't have to collect sales tax on purchases by customers anywhere, whereas in other states they would have to collect it for the state where they're located.
Security calls itself insurance, acts like insurance, keeps books like insurance, and collects premiums like insurance. Regardless of whether you like it or don't like it, it's mandatory insurance that's currently fully funded.
It is only that on paper. In practice, money is removed from Americans' paychecks in the same way that taxes are removed. That money goes to social security. If social security did not exist, the money could be used by the government for other purposes without causing the government to remove any additional money from anyone's paycheck than they do already. Whether they call it insurance or not on paper doesn't change anything about how it actually works. Moreover, if you want to see why it isn't at all like insurance, make it optional and see how quickly it collapses.
I assert that you couldn't eliminate medicare and keep the medicare tax without political repercussions that could destroy the country. I assert that you couldn't eliminate SS payouts while still collecting the tax without the same issue. It would be cheaper and easier to eliminate all tax deductions and print money equal to the amount of the debt and pay it off with the printed money. So yes, you could theoretically abolish the military, SS, and medicare while keeping taxes where they are. But the government wouldn't be stable after that and the US would be a third world country within 5 years. But yeah, if you want to just talk dollars, sure, cut everything and keep taxes high. The math works, but the economics don't...
So you say. And printing the money is a real alternative -- perhaps the only real alternative. But that has its own problems and would be extremely politically unpopular, to say nothing of the opposition from creditors. So unless you can come up with some alternative other than "we'll just print a trillion dollars every year for a couple decades," some kind of material cuts to the most expensive programs are going to be in order.
Those services are paid for by the delivery company which operates within the state and pays state taxes. And if there is no delivery company because the thing purchased is not something that needs delivery, no services are consumed.
The real problem with the chart is that it blames the deficit on a bunch of stuff that no one can do anything about anymore. The significant majority is attributable to the economic downturn the WoT -- okay great, we'll just get in our time machines and go back and not invade Iraq and prevent the financial and housing crises.
That's not the half of it. The real problem is protectionism. A state wants people to buy locally because it creates local jobs, etc., and an easy way to do that is to create a tariff on goods imported into the state. Of course, that's economically very inefficient because it's a waste of resources for every company to build a separate facility in every state just so they can avoid the tariffs, so we give regulation of interstate commerce to Feds who presumably won't do that.
So what's the problem with sales tax on interstate transactions? The problem is that the state can create raise the sales tax and then give the money to local businesses as subsidies, which has the exact same result as a tariff because the local companies can reduce their prices by the amount of the subsidy (i.e. the amount of the tax) and thereby have that much lower prices than out of state companies. In fact, basically any sales tax collected has essentially this result, because all else equal a higher sales tax will mean either more services/subsidies or lower non-sales taxes, which are both effectively subsidies to local businesses and individuals.
In other words, collecting sales tax on interstate transactions effectively create state-level import tariffs because out of state companies have to collect the tax but they don't receive the benefits from it. It's taxation without representation and protectionism.
Sure, if by "socialism" you mean full blown communism, rather than the stage in Marxist theory between capitalism and communism in which some capitalism is permitted but the government sets economic rules and performs a great deal of social spending with high taxation. The latter is what most people mean by socialism anymore.
No you can't. A capitalist state with no social spending would have no brakes on the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.
Concentration of wealth into the hands of a few is the hallmark of capitalism. It's basic math. Everybody gets X% interest on their capital, then you take out Y fixed amount for living expenses and the rest gets recapitalized and collects more interest. The people with no capital have to labor and go into debt just to cover their living expenses, the people with a lot of capital can cover all their living expenses and then some with the interest, and the and then some becomes more capital which leads to more interest etc.
Socialism doesn't change that. Anyone with five million dollars in capital who invests it conservatively and lives modestly won't need to work another day in their lives and will die with several times more money than they started with. The effect of the high taxes necessary for socialism can actually be regressive, because high taxes stunt upward mobility: The person with $1B can still turn it into $10B because the billionaire has inconsequential living expenses in comparison to his interest income which means that any tax rate that will not cause large-scale capital flight still leads to the recapitalization of almost all interest income, but the person with $1M in capital can now only just barely live on the interest rather than increasing his wealth.
Similarly, the person who makes $60K/year but has no capital will always be a wage slave under socialism because any money that might have otherwise been saved as investment capital is instead paid in higher taxes. The result is that the top 5% grow their personal wealth over time instead of the top 25% and those in the second quartile increase their debt load -- thank you, socialism.
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No, because the public will never be able to spend as much on bribery/lobbying as most large corporations.
In the case of software patents the lobby in favor of them isn't really the corporations. It's the lawyers.
Think about it: If software patents went away tomorrow, Microsoft et al wouldn't be able to collect patent license fees anymore, but neither would they have to pay them out. For most companies it comes out as a wash, give or take. And if software patents went away, none of those companies would have to continue paying their armies of patent lawyers, which would save them each millions of dollars.
But that would put all of those software patent lawyers out of business, so it is the lawyers who supply the driving force behind the status quo. What confuses people is that they frequently hear corporate lawyers advocating software patents and assume that they take that position in the interest of their employer rather than their occupation.
To be fair, when people talk about torque, they mean the peak torque figure published by the auto manufacturer. The saying comes from the fact that almost all gasoline engines reach peak torque at lower RPM than peak power, and most people operate their engines predominantly at those lower RPM ranges. So an engine with a quoted 200 lb/ft of torque at 2800RPM and 200 hp at 6000RPM will seem faster under normal driving conditions than an engine with 150 lb/ft of torque at 5200RPM and 250HP at 8000RPM. It's a heuristic for approximating the power curve without actually having it available.
Now days the worst you are likely to suffer from civil disobedience in the West is a few years in jail.
Since when is that a small thing to suffer?
Mandela was in prison for TWENTY-SEVEN years.
That's what I'm talking about. Mandela accomplished what he set out to, but it basically took him his whole life to do it. And what happens if the people with his level of dedication are executed rather than imprisoned? What happens if the change sought is time-sensitive, such that whoever wins the day today will capture enough power to keep the balance in their favor going forward?
Civil disobedience doesn't work if you're the only one doing it. In that case the opposition merely has to come down on you hard enough to take you out of the running and deter anyone else from taking your place. It works when people take part on a mass scale. And if there are enough people willing to have an "example" made of them for the cause then great, but in many situations, even for very worthy causes, there are insufficiently many people willing to make that sacrifice. There are, in fact, things worth fighting for that aren't worth dying for.
So anonymity and penalty avoidance allow the process to bootstrap. If people can show that they can break bad laws without being caught, more people will be emboldened to join them. Once enough people are doing it, some of them will do what you want -- step forward, put their heads on the chopping block and dare the oppressors to martyr them. And by that point, when most every citizen is guilty of the crime, no jury will convict.
If a cause isn't worth spending a few years in jail, it isn't worth making a fuss out of at all.
This is nonsense and is the main flaw in your argument. There are undeniably non-frivolous causes worth taking action over that aren't worth going to prison over.
I am all for civil disobedience when it is merited, but don't go crying when you get arrested and charged for that disobedience. Especially don't go trying to distort the reasons for your arrest to try and trick people into supporting you.
The problem with modern civil disobedience is that they don't hold you overnight and then let you go anymore, or even charge you with a crime for which the penalty is a $500 fine or 30 days in the county jail. They trump up some nonsense charges for which the penalty is 5-10 years or more in Federal PMITA Prison so that you have to spend enough on legal fees to bankrupt anyone who isn't a millionaire, because nobody sane is willing to go pro se against the prospect of that sort of excessive, life-ruining penalty. Imagine if Martin Luther King Jr. were arrested in 1955 for his ("illegal") bus boycotts, and then thrown in prison for the next 10 years. Somehow I doubt the 1963 "I have a dream" speech would have been quite as effective standing on a table in the prison cafeteria in front of a dozen inmates as it was in front of a quarter of a million people at the Lincoln Memorial.
So today, prospective young men and women who feel that they have no real political representation are presented with a Sophie's choice. If they want to keep their freedom and have any continued hope of creating change through official channels or by shaping public opinion through open discussion, they have to forgo civil disobedience and are deprived of one of the most effective methods to bring about change in the face of a broken political system. (This is, obviously, by design from the perspective of the broken political system.) Or they can break the law as their predecessors did, but then have to rely on anonymity and whatever criminal defense a person can muster against outrageous penalties in order to retain the freedom to continue the fight and continue to violate unreasonable laws until they are repealed.
Naturally someone will respond that this is a different fight and how dare I compare freedom of information to the civil rights movement etc. But that is just a political perspective -- history is written by the winners. Just because you don't agree with the politics of the accused (whether it be MLK or Julian Assange), that is no excuse to support the suppression of nonviolent political movements through criminal felony prosecutions.
My point, in a nutshell, is government spending creates more jobs than business lack of spending.
My point is that you can't say that in the abstract. It depends on what the corporations being taxed would do with the money and on what the government would do with it instead, and on how much capital flight the increased taxes will cause (which is determined by what and who taxes are increased on), etc. It just isn't as simple as "government spending > private spending" or the reverse.
Incidentally, if businesses are for some reason hoarding cash, the government has a much better alternative than tax-and-spend: The government can control the level of inflation by printing more or less money. If businesses are hoarding cash, the government can print more money which a) allows the government to do spending without raising taxes and b) sets a fire under the private interests to keep the cash flowing, because hoarding it will incur a loss of real value as the currency is diluted.
If there exists $2 trillion in cash, somebody has to be "sitting on it" -- it doesn't cease to exist when someone spends it, so at any given time it has to be in the possession of some entity. If the government collects money in taxes from businesses who are holding it and "spends" it so that it ends up in the hands of defense contractors who continue to hold it, it has done nothing for the economy but to transfer money from a company that earned it to a company that knows how to get a no bid contract, thereby creating a disincentive to earn money legitimately and an increased incentive to lobby for government contracts.
The problem with arguing about whether government spending is better for the economy in the abstract than lower taxes is that the details are what determines the answer. If the government provides medical services to the public, the economic effect is basically neutral -- it doesn't make a lot of difference whether the doctor gets paid by a private insurance company that collects premiums or a public agency that collects taxes. However, if you raise taxes on a bunch of doctors who then have to fire their landscapers and the government gives that money to defense contractors who stick the money in their Evil Company Mattresses, the economic consequences are negative: The landscapers lose their jobs and the defense contractors don't create any. And if you increase taxes on the defense contractors so that they have to pay the government with money from the Evil Company Mattresses and then the government gives it to a bunch of highway construction workers who go out and fix potholes, you create those jobs. The details are what matters -- you can't say in the abstract that private spending or government spending is better.
The thing that kills it for government spending is how the government gets the money: Let's say the government decides there should be government single payer healthcare. That requires high taxes, but in theory that isn't a problem, because they just take the money people would otherwise have spent on private insurance. The problem comes when the CEO realizes how much money he can save if he opens a factory offshore where they have much lower taxes because they don't have government healthcare, all while he can still go see the doctor here for free. The high taxes drive capital flight, tax avoidance and off-shoring. Then you have to raise taxes even more in order to continue providing the same services with the smaller tax base. The thing expected to be economically neutral in actuality has caused the local factory to be shut down and shipped off to China and has caused the doctors to have to fire their landscapers in order to pay the higher taxes to cover healthcare for the now-unemployed factory workers (and unemployed landscapers), etc.
More pay for less work. Less work is going to lead to progress?
Where do you think progress comes from? It certainly isn't from huge multinational corporations with entrenched market positions who shoot down any idea that might skewer existing cash cows. It comes from people having enough free time and available capital to develop an idea on their own time that they can start a new company without worrying about the fiscal impact on their previous employer's existing revenue streams or whether they'll still be able to eat in eighteen months if they quit their job to go after something new.
Green tech. Because regular tech never got anyone anywhere.
Green tech is just another way of saying that we have new constraints (reduced energy budgets) which creates a market for new products better adapted to those constraints. It's a thing we need but don't yet have -- necessity is the mother of invention, yes?
Coding for a cause. Feel good about going through the motions. Produce nothing of any particular value.
Idealism never got anyone anywhere. Like those GNU people with their useless GPL that nobody uses.
Hacking. I made this cool bot that does XYZ-super-geeky thing. For hacker cred. What does "productivity" mean?
Fail.
Socialism is saying it doesn't end at the family, my community should be treated the same way, or why just the community my countrymen should be treated the same way.
In practice, it works fine up to a small community.
Larger than that... well... nobody's got a good solution for that yet.
The problem isn't inherently the scale, it's that once you reach that scale you end up including too many people who are in poverty and you hit a bootstrapping problem: A middle class wage earner can only afford to insure and educate a limited number of impoverished individuals in addition to attending the needs of his own family, and if you exceed that threshold you create a substandard education system that causes a poverty cycle where society's resources go toward paying for prison, unemployment, default and bankruptcy of individuals who the education system failed in Generation 0 instead of going toward educating Generation 1. In almost all cases of poverty that cycle is preexisting before socialism is implemented, and socialism provides no means to break out of it in the absence of sufficient external resources.
The secret to working socialism is to define the scope of society in such a way that you don't include overly many poor people.
Did you intend to imply that having to file a lawsuit was preferable to having to file an insurance claim? Because I know which one I would rather have to do.
That's not the half of it. MS Active Directory uses DNS for its domain names and 90% of companies just make up a TLD that didn't exist at the time. Windows domain names end up being something like apple.private, apple.pri, apple.domain, etc. Or they just use their own company name as the TLD. Now you just wait until Public Radio International wants http://pri/ or some domain name registrar picks up http://domain/ and you break everybody's AD because everything tries the FQDN first. To say nothing of what happens when Apple Records uses 'apple' with no TLD as their AD domain and then Apple Corp gets the .apple TLD.
Importantly, comparisons to factories are generally unwise because manufacturing is 'embarrassingly parallel' -- it doesn't matter if you have to make the whole iPhone in one single step that takes two straight hours and you can't divide it into any constituent part. You can still manufacture as many iPhones a day as you like because you just set up however many manufacturing units which each make one iPhone every two hours, until you have the desired output capacity.
The 'hard' problems to parallelize are the ones that work like building a house: You can't lay the foundation until you grade the terrain. You can't put in the walls until you lay the foundation. You can't install the electrical until there are walls. And so on. There is no known way to convert an unimproved lot and a truck full of concrete and drywall into into a house in less than 5 minutes, no matter how many construction workers you have available.
Naturally this follows from the indisputable fact that no one other than a major studio can produce a major motion picture.
No actual users care anything about whether the movie industry is happy.
There is also the matter of brand. We have all these religious wars about Windows vs. Linux and all that, but the fact of the matter is that there is no fundamental business difference between a webserver that runs Windows and one that runs Linux. Both will do the job, they're effectively fungible, so the choice of one over the other comes down to personal preference. So brand matters.
And the trouble for Microsoft is that they've ruined their brand. IBM is known for making boring, stable, reliable products. Microsoft's reputation is as a monopolist that makes buggy, unstable, incompatible, malware-infested crap with industrial strength vendor lock-in. A large plurality of their potential customers will avoid them out of principle unless it simply can't be avoided. That is a pretty serious disadvantage when you're selling fungible products.
Go counter to the market. Buy during a selloff and sell during a bubble. It isn't difficult.
It sounds easy, the problem is picking the right time. Look at the history of Microsoft: In the two years between 1995 and 1997 their stock price more than tripled from ~$5 to ~$15. Then it went from $15 to more than $50 between 1997 and 1999. And then it quickly fell back to ~$35 the next year. It hasn't materially exceeded that last price at any time since and has in fact slowly lost almost 30% of its value since then.
The trouble is that it's far too easy to see a bubble and sell Microsoft for $15 in 1997 and then buy the same shares for $35 during the sell off in 2000, when anyone with the advantage of hindsight can see that what someone should have done is sell Microsoft for ~$50 in 1999 and then never reinvest in it again.
I honestly don't understand. If it's insurance, it would be like State Farm having extra branches of their business and then telling people "sorry, we can't pay your claims because we spent your premiums on other things."
Nope, that's having it both ways. You want Social Security to be an insurance company. Well, if the government creates a tax on insurance so that State Farm has to pay X% of all premiums to the government, you can sure bet that State Farm is immediately going to announce that for a given premium, people going forward will receive a lower level of insurance coverage. No reason they can't do the same to Social Security if they need money. Heck, people are mad about GE, the Social Security Administration is a trillion dollar company that pays no taxes!
It's damn easy. Just because you are too dumb to do something doesn't mean it isn't doable or even easy.
Give me a break. No one agrees about what pork is in any way whatsoever. Everyone calls their own projects a necessary incident to the operation of the country and everybody else's projects pork. More importantly, the problem with "real" pork (i.e. deadweight inefficiencies) is that they tend to be individually small but numerous and prolific, such that the cost of identifying and removing them approaches or exceeds the cost of the inefficiency itself. There is a reason that this is not a solved problem.
There is no functional difference between insurance from State Farm and Social Security, other than one is mandatory and the other isn't.
Being mandatory is what makes all the difference in the world. Mandatory is the difference between donating to a private school and paying taxes for public schools. It's the difference between hiring a security guard and paying taxes that fund the police department.
The government can't reduce funding to State Farm and use the money to fund the Department of Education or cover the deficit.
Or just put it the other way if you like: Fine, it's an insurance program. Then we can impose an arbitrarily large income or property tax on the Social Security Administration and use that "tax revenue" for something else. Calling it an insurance program or not has nothing to do with whether you can cause it to pay out less money and instead use that money for some other purpose.
Abolishing medicare and the new health care program and implementing a public/private mandatory single-payer insurance like most other industrialized countries would result in better medical coverage at about half the cost.
That's just optimistic speculation. Other countries pay less by having the government set (low) prices for drugs and medical services. The result has been that the US subsidizes worldwide medical R&D by paying higher prices. If the US did the same thing as those countries, R&D would be reduced accordingly with the consequent undesirable results for everyone.
Cut the military by 90% (that's all we need to actually defend the country).
It would not be realistic or responsible to implement that in the short to medium term.
Eliminate 50% of discretionary spending (the pork part, some of it is necessary)
Excellent idea. All we need to do is decide which part is the pork, which should be easy.
The online store also uses those roads, but via a shipper, who pays taxes on... what, exactly?
Fuel, mostly. Also, the shipping company will generally have a local shipping facility where they park their trucks at night and will pay property tax on the facility and the trucks, etc.
There's never any such thing as "fair" taxation.
It's not about "fair," it's about preventing states from implementing protectionism. Which is exactly what they would do if they were allowed to levy taxes on out of state companies.
Moreover, the states have an incentive to make things fair for in-state companies and unfair for out of state companies, so all you have to do is prevent them from making things unfair for out of state companies and they'll take care of the rest. For example, a state with a large population which would cause a disincentive for companies to set up shop there if it meant they had to collect sales tax on sales to customers in that state can easily solve the problem it causes for in-state companies simply by collecting revenue through property or income tax instead. Then companies would not be especially discouraged to move there, because although they would have to pay slightly higher property or income taxes, it would mean they wouldn't have to collect sales tax on purchases by customers anywhere, whereas in other states they would have to collect it for the state where they're located.
Security calls itself insurance, acts like insurance, keeps books like insurance, and collects premiums like insurance. Regardless of whether you like it or don't like it, it's mandatory insurance that's currently fully funded.
It is only that on paper. In practice, money is removed from Americans' paychecks in the same way that taxes are removed. That money goes to social security. If social security did not exist, the money could be used by the government for other purposes without causing the government to remove any additional money from anyone's paycheck than they do already. Whether they call it insurance or not on paper doesn't change anything about how it actually works. Moreover, if you want to see why it isn't at all like insurance, make it optional and see how quickly it collapses.
I assert that you couldn't eliminate medicare and keep the medicare tax without political repercussions that could destroy the country. I assert that you couldn't eliminate SS payouts while still collecting the tax without the same issue. It would be cheaper and easier to eliminate all tax deductions and print money equal to the amount of the debt and pay it off with the printed money. So yes, you could theoretically abolish the military, SS, and medicare while keeping taxes where they are. But the government wouldn't be stable after that and the US would be a third world country within 5 years. But yeah, if you want to just talk dollars, sure, cut everything and keep taxes high. The math works, but the economics don't...
So you say. And printing the money is a real alternative -- perhaps the only real alternative. But that has its own problems and would be extremely politically unpopular, to say nothing of the opposition from creditors. So unless you can come up with some alternative other than "we'll just print a trillion dollars every year for a couple decades," some kind of material cuts to the most expensive programs are going to be in order.
http://www.brynosaurus.com/pub/net/p2pnat/
Those services are paid for by the delivery company which operates within the state and pays state taxes. And if there is no delivery company because the thing purchased is not something that needs delivery, no services are consumed.
The real problem with the chart is that it blames the deficit on a bunch of stuff that no one can do anything about anymore. The significant majority is attributable to the economic downturn the WoT -- okay great, we'll just get in our time machines and go back and not invade Iraq and prevent the financial and housing crises.
taxation without representation
That's not the half of it. The real problem is protectionism. A state wants people to buy locally because it creates local jobs, etc., and an easy way to do that is to create a tariff on goods imported into the state. Of course, that's economically very inefficient because it's a waste of resources for every company to build a separate facility in every state just so they can avoid the tariffs, so we give regulation of interstate commerce to Feds who presumably won't do that.
So what's the problem with sales tax on interstate transactions? The problem is that the state can create raise the sales tax and then give the money to local businesses as subsidies, which has the exact same result as a tariff because the local companies can reduce their prices by the amount of the subsidy (i.e. the amount of the tax) and thereby have that much lower prices than out of state companies. In fact, basically any sales tax collected has essentially this result, because all else equal a higher sales tax will mean either more services/subsidies or lower non-sales taxes, which are both effectively subsidies to local businesses and individuals.
In other words, collecting sales tax on interstate transactions effectively create state-level import tariffs because out of state companies have to collect the tax but they don't receive the benefits from it. It's taxation without representation and protectionism.
Sure, if by "socialism" you mean full blown communism, rather than the stage in Marxist theory between capitalism and communism in which some capitalism is permitted but the government sets economic rules and performs a great deal of social spending with high taxation. The latter is what most people mean by socialism anymore.
No you can't. A capitalist state with no social spending would have no brakes on the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.
Concentration of wealth into the hands of a few is the hallmark of capitalism. It's basic math. Everybody gets X% interest on their capital, then you take out Y fixed amount for living expenses and the rest gets recapitalized and collects more interest. The people with no capital have to labor and go into debt just to cover their living expenses, the people with a lot of capital can cover all their living expenses and then some with the interest, and the and then some becomes more capital which leads to more interest etc.
Socialism doesn't change that. Anyone with five million dollars in capital who invests it conservatively and lives modestly won't need to work another day in their lives and will die with several times more money than they started with. The effect of the high taxes necessary for socialism can actually be regressive, because high taxes stunt upward mobility: The person with $1B can still turn it into $10B because the billionaire has inconsequential living expenses in comparison to his interest income which means that any tax rate that will not cause large-scale capital flight still leads to the recapitalization of almost all interest income, but the person with $1M in capital can now only just barely live on the interest rather than increasing his wealth.
Similarly, the person who makes $60K/year but has no capital will always be a wage slave under socialism because any money that might have otherwise been saved as investment capital is instead paid in higher taxes. The result is that the top 5% grow their personal wealth over time instead of the top 25% and those in the second quartile increase their debt load -- thank you, socialism.