You missed a more salient point. This guy is a "Time Reporter" and he "Can't Wait" for Julian Assange to be murdered by the USA government for REPORTING.
Gives you a good insight of what the current state of "reporting" is in America. It's all propaganda, there is no reporting in the MSM.
I take it you are not a big proponent of anarcho-capitalism.
However there is no conflict between some of what you are saying and what I am saying. My point is that the USA government is using its power in a way that is unauthorised by the USA Constitution for more than 99% of what it does daily. That's the issue - there is no rule of law.
These numbers are pulled out of asses of those, who pretend to be analysts and prognosticators in this case. 35 billion to 180 billion to infinity, beyond and back. The difference between 35 and 180 is about 500%, that's a fun estimate for anything at all.
How much should we charge for this gizmo? 1 dollar. No, that's too little. OK, 1 trillion dollars. Too much. OK, 2 dollars.
Besides, dollar amounts are a useless measure anyway, what are dollars? What are dollars when they are printed to "pay back" any debt? Nothing at all.
In any case, anything can be called a cloud. I can call my toaster a cloud if I plug CAT5 into it.
So it's not so cloudy after all, it's Sun shine.... Some thought that cloud computing is just a way to fog the issue of expensive software and administration, some saw it as a way to weather the inflation storm in these murky economic waters. The reality of course it is just another way to blow smoke up ones ass.
Individual freedom requires equality under law, lack of government discrimination against any group or any particular individual.
As to your assertion that any person must be able to own land in any meaningful way is completely irrelevant. You don't need to own land, you can lease it, but of-course you CAN buy it if you can afford it in the free market. If you need the land more than another guy who owns it and you have the resources, you can buy it.
In fact in a free market, if you have some savings and a business plan that explains how you can be more efficient with the land than the current owner, you can definitely find a financier interested in making profit based on your idea, who will lend you the money, so that you can pursue your business idea.
If you are successful, you'll make money for yourself and for your investors. However insisting that land ownership is required for individual to have freedom is completely false. Ownership of limited resources in the free market is allocated to those, who are able to use them in the most efficient manner, which is what provides the society with the most benefit.
I don't use annotations and actually any other irrelevant things ("for each", generics, most other things that were added with J2SE5.0) that have been added over time just because... for no reason but to pretend this changes anything for the better in any way and the JVM still runs the code that is written without all that syntactic sugar, etc., so no big deal, if you care you can use it, if you don't, nobody forces you.
better then the old system where you can pay in to plan for years and when you get real sick they drop you or say you hit the max pay out cap
- which wasn't a problem before gov't got involved in health care and insurance in USA, where only 50 years ago some of the most popular plans cost a person 2 dollars a month for 50,000 max payout for a year, with 500 deductible.
So for every routine thing you don't use insurance, in fact today insurance companies are forced to cover child birth, which is nonsense. Covering complications is definitely what insurance can be used for, if the complications go over the deductible, but just the act of childbirth itself, it shouldn't be done with insurance at all, that's a routine procedure.
Using insurance as if it was in fact some type of 'universal health care plan' is the problem, that's what pushes all the prices up, because the client is no longer price sensitive. The moment Medicare was introduced, all prices went up immediately and have never gone down for things covered under Medicare.
On the other hand things that are not covered, be it plastic surgery for example, prices there are competitive and not insane, they have gone down in many cases, not up. All of the technological advances allow the prices to go down, not up.
The Intel and other processors are immensely more complex than what electronics have been before, the prices are not immensely high for what you get, they are immensely LOW. Same thing about all competitive markets and health insurance is not a free competitive market, why can't a person shop for insurance all around the world just like people do for shoes, clothes and electronic trinkets?
Of-course ONCE you have government involvement you MUST regulate whatever it is that is happening, otherwise you get the ever growing prices and lowering quality because of the artificially increased demand beside other things stemming from lack of competitiveness.
So if you said: IF under the current broken system an insurance company was forced to pay out your claim after you made it, as long as you bought the insurance and paid for it for, say, a minimum of 6 months and the company had enough time to research your condition, so it did and did NOT drop your coverage in 6 months because it found no 'pre-existing conditions', then the insurance company cannot even make an argument about any pre-existing condition at all... I would say: yes, that's a meaningful regulation that you can use if the system that you already set up in fact prevents competition with various government intrusions into that market.
But FORCING any insurance company to sell an insurance product to a person so that he can immediately turn around and make a claim, forcing a company to do this destroys the very principle of insurance. Insurance companies cannot stay in business because of that (which is why there is this mandate, which forces everybody supposedly into an insurance plan, but of-course the mandate has no teeth and it's cheaper to drop your insurance and only pick coverage once you need an expensive medical procedure done, because paying the fine, which cannot even be meaningfully collected from you by the gov't is cheaper than paying for an insurance plan).
Obviously the rates had to go up and obviously the rates had to go up for people who already DID have insurance before ACA came into effect. Obama told you all this was not going to happen, but to believe in that is like believing that the Earth is a 6000 year old disk, on top of some elephants and turtles, that's how stupid it is.
Here is what I predicted the ACA would cause and it's all coming true, from increased unemployment, due to people being pushed into part time positions from full time and due to people just being laid off to get under the 50 people barrier, to higher prices for the insurance products and to people dropping their insurance because the plan gives them huge monetary incentives to do it, and of-course everybody was yelling: BULLSHIT, IMPOSSIBLE.
Why is it impossible? It's absolutely logical and it is what is happening.
First of all the disparity in wealth is lowest in history today given the fact that 300,000,000 Chinese are now urban dwellers with businesses and jobs, that was probably the biggest single act of wealth creation and distribution in history, totally thanks to the capital that entered the system when it started running away from the socialism of the post-productive Western societies.
Secondly the rule of law was first broken by the politicians with the explicit and the implicit support by the mob, when the politicians declared that the Constitution is a living, breathing document.
That was it, that was the moment that they both: broke their oath to defend and protect the Constitution and they used that to break the law.
Democracies fail because they descend (this time I meant to say descend) into authoritarianism and totalitarianism after they go through a phase of eating through the savings accumulated by the society during its productive phase (USA being a free republic with almost no government to speak of).
Secondly when I say productive, I do mean either being productive by saving and investing or also by working in some form of business that actually produces stuff that reduces the trade deficit (currently USA is importing most of the consumer goods bought by the population within the country). So to be productive you have to make something that pays for imports and of-course if you are providing capital that makes other people productive, then you are super-productive.
As to the situation in USA where people are gambling with money rather than investing it into productive capacity, that's the inevitable result of the Keynesian monetary policy, printing money, inflation, but also various other policies with the expressed goal of growing consumption at the expense of production (so any type of government guaranteed loan, where the guarantee comes as an expense on the productive population and the loans that are given out are only given out due to the guarantee and would never be given out in a competitive free market environment, because those loans have no chance of making a meaningful productive return by creating something of any value to the market place).
As to the mob using its vote as a block to give the government authority to steal from a minority to subsidize itself, well, those are not actually Constitutional powers, that's the exact OPPOSITE of the rule of law. The mob giving the government super-constitutional authority or authority that is in fact NOT granted by the Constitution to the federal government is not lawful even if the courts don't see it that way. You see, the Constitution is not there to give power to the mob, it's there to keep the government honest, keep it from becoming authoritarian, from becoming totalitarian, from becoming discriminatory, it's there to guarantee individual freedoms, not hand out entitlements and impose obligations.
The Roman empire lasted for a long time because it allowed free trade, traders weren't actually ruled by any authority, they made decisions based on the free market principles, they discovered prices and made contracts. It took centuries to destroy what was built by turning good government into a bad one there, so the pace of self-destruction depends on how quickly the corruption takes place.
As to how equality works when "both parties are responsible for paying for lawyers" is a nonsense question. 2 parties suing each other does not have to do with government, however the more laws exist the more reasons there are to sue each other and the current society has an inordinate amount of laws, which can be used for litigation, but those laws are actually mostly UNCONSTITUTIONAL laws, and I mean to say that this includes every type of business related law, labour related law, money related law, any form of subsidy, any form of income taxation (and yes, income taxes are illegal and are collected illegally).
When I talk about equality before law, I talk about equal application of government laws and regulations to all people under all circumstances regardless of their persona and their position in society, I am not talking about civil court cases that are NOT based on various government rules that are unauthorized.
Also, I would add that democracy is by definition a way to disaster, that's why USA wasn't supposed to be a democracy, it was only supposed to have good self governance and it was set up as a democratic republic for that reason, where only one branch of government would be democratically elected.
If the founders were so worried about the people's decisions, why did they bother mentioning things like "we the people" that emphasized a nation made up of free citizens?
- yes, 'we, the people', means all people who want to be free individuals, live free from government oppression, people who fought the American revolution.
I'm not sure who you are saying is being attacked when you say "productive class". Are you saying that only people who own business are productive?
- 2 parts to answer this:
1. In absence of savings, which come from overproduction and underconsumption there is no productivity in the world but what one person produces to feed himself, so it's all subsistence. However once somebody saves enough (and I am not going into specifics how they did it, I am sure everybody is aware that while many did it by being clever and hardworking, many others did it by being violent, stealing, things of that nature) once somebody saved enough, they could now provide capital that was used to multiply productive output that one person is capable of and that's what increased productivity - CAPITAL, capital investment.
2. Yes, a worker can be productive enough to produce more than for his own consumption, that's what modern technology allows, but all of this technology is based around capital that was invested into making the worker more productive. Without capital investment a worker can only rely on himself, he has no tools, no means to do more than just serve himself. It is capital that is used to create, purchase tools and knowledge and other means and instruments, basically organize land, labour and capital in a way that increases efficiency and produces something of value, which is when sold covers the costs of production and leaves some profit (savings) that can be further used to grow the business and thus the economy.
So yes, workers are also productive people but only when the capitalist puts his savings to work to multiply labour by some amount that would actually make it profitable to run the business, and profit is both: the reward for job well done to the investors and it is an indicator that the company is providing valuable service, product and it's not wasting resources inefficiently (this is why government should never be allowed into any business, the entire point of government is the exact opposite of business. While in business growing efficiency grows profits and increases success in government growing efficiency and success of some program reduces its very raison d'etre, or reason to exist. That's why such things as 'war on poverty' can never be won, because then the war could end and government workers involved in it would lose their jobs, so in reality 'war on poverty' exists to perpetuate and increase poverty, not to eliminate it, that's free market capitalist job).
How do you explain Dept. of Labor reports that say something like 'productivity increased.3% in the last quarter' then
- the numbers that come out of various government agencies are nonsense in both, the meaning, the underlying assumptions and in the actual amounts. In any case, whenever government talks about GDP for example, it is misleading, an increase in prices can grow GDP but decrease overall productivity, because growing prices can be only a response to inflation, people paying more for something reduces their purchasing and saving power and actually can mean a reduction in the economy.
Saying that productivity in USA is growing is the exact opposite of the truth because it is impossible to grow productivity while simultaneously destroy full time manufacturing jobs that actually do produce, while growing part time service sector job numbers and government jobs as well, which are not productive at all, they add to the deficit, they can't be used to export (and whatever some of them export is in the export numbers already and given the huge monthly t
First of all I don't in fact have anything against people over 40, I am almost there myself (time flies). Secondly, it would be strange of me to fire myself from my own business because I reached some magic number, counter-productive too.
As I said, the government creating special entitlements for some people to be paid for by some other people as a form of obligation, which creates an undue business risk, any form of lawsuit, special considerations, etc. I don't need a government to tell me how much to pay my employees, I don't need a government to tell me to put a ramp on a building where I work, if enough people in wheelchairs decide to become customers, I'll find the necessary savings to do it on my own, etc.etc.etc.
However once the government is in my face, telling me how to run the business, that's the moment I must immediately do the exact opposite of what the intent of the obligation is, which is unfortunate for the very people that the law is supposedly designed to protect. Basically minimum wage laws destroy job opportunities, laws that are aimed to reduce discrimination create discrimination, etc., and what is sad in most cases is that there was no problem to start with, the government was 'fixing' some outlier anyway. So if there is actual true discrimination in 1-10% of cases, it doesn't justify a law that hits 100% of people running businesses and creates a huge possibility of being sued, imposes any type of extra costs on a business, etc.
Which is precisely why the government officials that are required to swear into the office are required to uphold and protect the CONSTITUTION.
NOT THE PEOPLE.
Not the government, not the white house, not the justice system but the LAW. The US Founders knew that relying on people making right choices is a terrible idea, democracy doesn't work at all, it quickly dissents into authoritarian nightmare because it promises too everything to everybody for nothing (actually it promises to subsidize the unproductive majority by stealing from the productive minority). Eventually you destroy what you tax and this includes all types of taxes.
From just the tax rates on income and property, to various rules, laws and regulations that government imposes upon business to buy votes (be it minimum wage, various laws that give employees special powers to sue employers for any perceived 'wrongdoing', any kind of entitlement to the employers and customers that end up being obligations upon the employers and producers).
Eventually the mob eats and chases away the part of the society that actually is productive and pays for all of this conspicuous consumption by the mob and then the society is doomed to failure because of the failing economy. So the principles are the same for anything else that concerns rule of law - equal justice under the law, privacy from government intrusion, transparency of government in the first place.
ALL democracies are destined to failure, that is not an option, it's an inevitable consequence of the rule of mob. That's why to keep working the system is supposed to set those types of feelings and desires aside and concentrate on constantly and vigilantly protecting the rule of law, equality before law, equality of opportunity by providing equal application of law, prevention of discrimination by the mob, by the government. Once those concepts are breached, the society is on the path to self destruction and unfortunately I have never found an example in history where the society actually stopped short of destroying itself this way once it became democratic, AFAIC history shows that the destruction is imminent.
It has everything to do with supply and demand, the supply is basically free to produce, but the overall costs are not 0, so when the books and other items are priced by Amazon, they are priced based on your ability and willingness to pay, which is exactly the demand part and it creates the most efficient market. Why shouldn't a book be almost free to somebody who has no interest in it if the cost of production is already factored in? Why should the book be sold at a huge discount to a person who derives enough value from it to pay the full price? Basically this is as perfect a market place as a single store can offer.
Re:Let us all shed a tear...
on
The Price of Amazon
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· Score: 0, Interesting
Insanely low prices that are wonderful for consumers, because that's what they want and that's what the free market delivers? Higher purchasing power, ability to buy more books for less money? Higher purchasing power left after purchasing books for other things people want? Higher standard of living because of higher purchasing power? Easier access to all the world's knowledge and thoughts?
I don't know, what has the free market capitalism done for you?
My comments are moderated as they are because I predict the collapse of the monetary system, the collapse of the bond market, of the US dollar. I advocate for the free market system to allow the economy to function and against every form of collectivism known.
That's the gist of it, people don't like to hear what they don't want to hear and so they moderate my comments to prevent me from making them.
That would be funny if not for the very last sentence, which tells me you are not actually joking.
I guess you think that in the modern era pussy is the equivalent of 30 pieces of silver. By the way, you can buy more than one pussy for that much money today, and if a girlfriend is out of question (and I doubt that) then they are not worth more than a few bucks anyway.
But I am pretty convinced that this is only a problem in your head, which only tells us something about you and nothing else.
All governments of the world are failing at holding on to trust of whoever was still gullible enough to trust them (and I include citizens of respective countries).
Snowden must be helped but he will not be helped by governments. He must be helped by individuals. Only individuals acting on their own moral code can help Snowden, all governments will fail at this and I mean every one of them.
Google is pretty big, they could have done this years ago, when they were approached by the NSA and whatever other acronym agencies to do this shit in the first place. AFAIC Google's image on this is horrendous, I don't see what they can do for me personally to ever trust the company not to provide gov't with information again. Maybe then can, but that would take something else, not words and assurances, a different approach to technology that would be verifiably secure from government snooping.
The government is the leech, or maybe your point is that it doesn't have enough money to run more NSA snooping programs and kill more brown people around the world?
At what point is the quantity of the evil becomes the actual quality of the evil and you admit that big government is a qualitative problem in itself?
In fact IRS is the government, without IRS government is almost non-existent (well, without IRS and the Fed government drops down to the size of pre-1913) and NSA is not there to fight terrorism, it's to spy on people FOR the IRS.
Both you and the Zimbabwe guy are mistaken but for different reasons. His heart is in the right place, but he just doesn't fully understands how the free market functions, you on the other hand are an evil bastard, who wants to use government violence to steal and create a large police state, because that's the end result of any type of collectivist redistribution.
If in Lima there are slums that government is not providing infrastructure for, that's because the government is unable to STEAL enough to buy votes this way. However like in all cases, when the people save enough money and build up the actual economy, and this problem of slums will be eventually reducing because private companies will be hiring more and more people, providing jobs and giving people opportunity either to move out of slums or have enough income so that other private companies would be able to serve those 'slums' economically, then the government will come to the private enterprise with GUNS and put them to the heads of private individuals BUILDING the economy and will steal their productive input.
The government will sell this to the people living in the 'slums' by promising 'free infrastructure' (on the backs of the people who will be actually BUILDING the economy).
So by the time government will be able to extract enough money out of people's pockets to buy votes with these infrastructure projects, private enterprise would have already BY DEFINITION create enough of an economy to do that exact thing, except do it in a non-violent manner, without money being stolen, without violence that you are a proponent of.
That's what XcepticZP doesn't fully understand when he talks about who "deserves" what. There is no such thing, there is only the question of the economy being big and successful enough to hire enough people to reduce poverty and grow infrastructure privately to solve the problems of poverty that LIFE creates, not 'rich people not paying enough taxes'.
But you, you are a monster. You are a fucking monster that this earth is full of. A person that would take a hard working individual and steal from him under the barrel of a government gun, the kind that eventually leads to destruction of all individual freedoms under the guise of 'fairness'.
There is nothing fair about your ideology, it's monstrous and it has played out so many times over the history of humans on this planet with such terrible consequences that not to see this and be a proponent of it at this point means you are a complete monster, with human blood sucking tentacles and all.
The light blue line on the graphs that on page 2 was marked as "Intel 520 Series (240GB)" on the following page was marked as "OCZ Vertex 3.20 (240GB)" and on the rest of the pages Intel was missing as well.
Slashdot Mirror
You missed a more salient point. This guy is a "Time Reporter" and he "Can't Wait" for Julian Assange to be murdered by the USA government for REPORTING.
Gives you a good insight of what the current state of "reporting" is in America. It's all propaganda, there is no reporting in the MSM.
(same person, backup account)
I take it you are not a big proponent of anarcho-capitalism.
However there is no conflict between some of what you are saying and what I am saying. My point is that the USA government is using its power in a way that is unauthorised by the USA Constitution for more than 99% of what it does daily. That's the issue - there is no rule of law.
These numbers are pulled out of asses of those, who pretend to be analysts and prognosticators in this case. 35 billion to 180 billion to infinity, beyond and back. The difference between 35 and 180 is about 500%, that's a fun estimate for anything at all.
How much should we charge for this gizmo?
1 dollar.
No, that's too little.
OK, 1 trillion dollars.
Too much.
OK, 2 dollars.
Besides, dollar amounts are a useless measure anyway, what are dollars? What are dollars when they are printed to "pay back" any debt? Nothing at all.
In any case, anything can be called a cloud. I can call my toaster a cloud if I plug CAT5 into it.
So it's not so cloudy after all, it's Sun shine.... Some thought that cloud computing is just a way to fog the issue of expensive software and administration, some saw it as a way to weather the inflation storm in these murky economic waters. The reality of course it is just another way to blow smoke up ones ass.
Well, you can use my addon as a starting point if you wish.
I do include AES and DES encryption there, so both sides need a password, but it can be modified to add other forms of encryption fairly easily.
(same person, backup account)
Individual freedom requires equality under law, lack of government discrimination against any group or any particular individual.
As to your assertion that any person must be able to own land in any meaningful way is completely irrelevant. You don't need to own land, you can lease it, but of-course you CAN buy it if you can afford it in the free market. If you need the land more than another guy who owns it and you have the resources, you can buy it.
In fact in a free market, if you have some savings and a business plan that explains how you can be more efficient with the land than the current owner, you can definitely find a financier interested in making profit based on your idea, who will lend you the money, so that you can pursue your business idea.
If you are successful, you'll make money for yourself and for your investors. However insisting that land ownership is required for individual to have freedom is completely false. Ownership of limited resources in the free market is allocated to those, who are able to use them in the most efficient manner, which is what provides the society with the most benefit.
I don't use annotations and actually any other irrelevant things ("for each", generics, most other things that were added with J2SE5.0) that have been added over time just because... for no reason but to pretend this changes anything for the better in any way and the JVM still runs the code that is written without all that syntactic sugar, etc., so no big deal, if you care you can use it, if you don't, nobody forces you.
On the contrary, it's so complex that that fact makes it simple.
You just implement a random function that is applied to a few static tables. Done.
Who is to say what's right and what's wrong there anyway? IRS can't, so how can anybody?
better then the old system where you can pay in to plan for years and when you get real sick they drop you or say you hit the max pay out cap
- which wasn't a problem before gov't got involved in health care and insurance in USA, where only 50 years ago some of the most popular plans cost a person 2 dollars a month for 50,000 max payout for a year, with 500 deductible.
So for every routine thing you don't use insurance, in fact today insurance companies are forced to cover child birth, which is nonsense. Covering complications is definitely what insurance can be used for, if the complications go over the deductible, but just the act of childbirth itself, it shouldn't be done with insurance at all, that's a routine procedure.
Using insurance as if it was in fact some type of 'universal health care plan' is the problem, that's what pushes all the prices up, because the client is no longer price sensitive. The moment Medicare was introduced, all prices went up immediately and have never gone down for things covered under Medicare.
On the other hand things that are not covered, be it plastic surgery for example, prices there are competitive and not insane, they have gone down in many cases, not up. All of the technological advances allow the prices to go down, not up.
The Intel and other processors are immensely more complex than what electronics have been before, the prices are not immensely high for what you get, they are immensely LOW. Same thing about all competitive markets and health insurance is not a free competitive market, why can't a person shop for insurance all around the world just like people do for shoes, clothes and electronic trinkets?
Of-course ONCE you have government involvement you MUST regulate whatever it is that is happening, otherwise you get the ever growing prices and lowering quality because of the artificially increased demand beside other things stemming from lack of competitiveness.
So if you said: IF under the current broken system an insurance company was forced to pay out your claim after you made it, as long as you bought the insurance and paid for it for, say, a minimum of 6 months and the company had enough time to research your condition, so it did and did NOT drop your coverage in 6 months because it found no 'pre-existing conditions', then the insurance company cannot even make an argument about any pre-existing condition at all... I would say: yes, that's a meaningful regulation that you can use if the system that you already set up in fact prevents competition with various government intrusions into that market.
But FORCING any insurance company to sell an insurance product to a person so that he can immediately turn around and make a claim, forcing a company to do this destroys the very principle of insurance. Insurance companies cannot stay in business because of that (which is why there is this mandate, which forces everybody supposedly into an insurance plan, but of-course the mandate has no teeth and it's cheaper to drop your insurance and only pick coverage once you need an expensive medical procedure done, because paying the fine, which cannot even be meaningfully collected from you by the gov't is cheaper than paying for an insurance plan).
Obviously the rates had to go up and obviously the rates had to go up for people who already DID have insurance before ACA came into effect. Obama told you all this was not going to happen, but to believe in that is like believing that the Earth is a 6000 year old disk, on top of some elephants and turtles, that's how stupid it is.
Here is what I predicted the ACA would cause and it's all coming true, from increased unemployment, due to people being pushed into part time positions from full time and due to people just being laid off to get under the 50 people barrier, to higher prices for the insurance products and to people dropping their insurance because the plan gives them huge monetary incentives to do it, and of-course everybody was yelling: BULLSHIT, IMPOSSIBLE.
Why is it impossible? It's absolutely logical and it is what is happening.
First of all the disparity in wealth is lowest in history today given the fact that 300,000,000 Chinese are now urban dwellers with businesses and jobs, that was probably the biggest single act of wealth creation and distribution in history, totally thanks to the capital that entered the system when it started running away from the socialism of the post-productive Western societies.
Secondly the rule of law was first broken by the politicians with the explicit and the implicit support by the mob, when the politicians declared that the Constitution is a living, breathing document.
That was it, that was the moment that they both: broke their oath to defend and protect the Constitution and they used that to break the law.
Democracies fail because they descend (this time I meant to say descend) into authoritarianism and totalitarianism after they go through a phase of eating through the savings accumulated by the society during its productive phase (USA being a free republic with almost no government to speak of).
First of all, I addressed many of your complaints here, in this thread.
Secondly when I say productive, I do mean either being productive by saving and investing or also by working in some form of business that actually produces stuff that reduces the trade deficit (currently USA is importing most of the consumer goods bought by the population within the country). So to be productive you have to make something that pays for imports and of-course if you are providing capital that makes other people productive, then you are super-productive.
As to the situation in USA where people are gambling with money rather than investing it into productive capacity, that's the inevitable result of the Keynesian monetary policy, printing money, inflation, but also various other policies with the expressed goal of growing consumption at the expense of production (so any type of government guaranteed loan, where the guarantee comes as an expense on the productive population and the loans that are given out are only given out due to the guarantee and would never be given out in a competitive free market environment, because those loans have no chance of making a meaningful productive return by creating something of any value to the market place).
As to the mob using its vote as a block to give the government authority to steal from a minority to subsidize itself, well, those are not actually Constitutional powers, that's the exact OPPOSITE of the rule of law. The mob giving the government super-constitutional authority or authority that is in fact NOT granted by the Constitution to the federal government is not lawful even if the courts don't see it that way. You see, the Constitution is not there to give power to the mob, it's there to keep the government honest, keep it from becoming authoritarian, from becoming totalitarian, from becoming discriminatory, it's there to guarantee individual freedoms, not hand out entitlements and impose obligations.
The Roman empire lasted for a long time because it allowed free trade, traders weren't actually ruled by any authority, they made decisions based on the free market principles, they discovered prices and made contracts. It took centuries to destroy what was built by turning good government into a bad one there, so the pace of self-destruction depends on how quickly the corruption takes place.
As to how equality works when "both parties are responsible for paying for lawyers" is a nonsense question. 2 parties suing each other does not have to do with government, however the more laws exist the more reasons there are to sue each other and the current society has an inordinate amount of laws, which can be used for litigation, but those laws are actually mostly UNCONSTITUTIONAL laws, and I mean to say that this includes every type of business related law, labour related law, money related law, any form of subsidy, any form of income taxation (and yes, income taxes are illegal and are collected illegally).
When I talk about equality before law, I talk about equal application of government laws and regulations to all people under all circumstances regardless of their persona and their position in society, I am not talking about civil court cases that are NOT based on various government rules that are unauthorized.
I am pretty sure I am answering most of whatever it is you are complaining about here, in this same thread above your comment.
Also, I would add that democracy is by definition a way to disaster, that's why USA wasn't supposed to be a democracy, it was only supposed to have good self governance and it was set up as a democratic republic for that reason, where only one branch of government would be democratically elected.
If you are finishing first with only being smart, then you are the fittest.
If the founders were so worried about the people's decisions, why did they bother mentioning things like "we the people" that emphasized a nation made up of free citizens?
- yes, 'we, the people', means all people who want to be free individuals, live free from government oppression, people who fought the American revolution.
I'm not sure who you are saying is being attacked when you say "productive class". Are you saying that only people who own business are productive?
- 2 parts to answer this:
1. In absence of savings, which come from overproduction and underconsumption there is no productivity in the world but what one person produces to feed himself, so it's all subsistence. However once somebody saves enough (and I am not going into specifics how they did it, I am sure everybody is aware that while many did it by being clever and hardworking, many others did it by being violent, stealing, things of that nature) once somebody saved enough, they could now provide capital that was used to multiply productive output that one person is capable of and that's what increased productivity - CAPITAL, capital investment.
2. Yes, a worker can be productive enough to produce more than for his own consumption, that's what modern technology allows, but all of this technology is based around capital that was invested into making the worker more productive. Without capital investment a worker can only rely on himself, he has no tools, no means to do more than just serve himself. It is capital that is used to create, purchase tools and knowledge and other means and instruments, basically organize land, labour and capital in a way that increases efficiency and produces something of value, which is when sold covers the costs of production and leaves some profit (savings) that can be further used to grow the business and thus the economy.
So yes, workers are also productive people but only when the capitalist puts his savings to work to multiply labour by some amount that would actually make it profitable to run the business, and profit is both: the reward for job well done to the investors and it is an indicator that the company is providing valuable service, product and it's not wasting resources inefficiently (this is why government should never be allowed into any business, the entire point of government is the exact opposite of business. While in business growing efficiency grows profits and increases success in government growing efficiency and success of some program reduces its very raison d'etre, or reason to exist. That's why such things as 'war on poverty' can never be won, because then the war could end and government workers involved in it would lose their jobs, so in reality 'war on poverty' exists to perpetuate and increase poverty, not to eliminate it, that's free market capitalist job).
How do you explain Dept. of Labor reports that say something like 'productivity increased .3% in the last quarter' then
- the numbers that come out of various government agencies are nonsense in both, the meaning, the underlying assumptions and in the actual amounts. In any case, whenever government talks about GDP for example, it is misleading, an increase in prices can grow GDP but decrease overall productivity, because growing prices can be only a response to inflation, people paying more for something reduces their purchasing and saving power and actually can mean a reduction in the economy.
Saying that productivity in USA is growing is the exact opposite of the truth because it is impossible to grow productivity while simultaneously destroy full time manufacturing jobs that actually do produce, while growing part time service sector job numbers and government jobs as well, which are not productive at all, they add to the deficit, they can't be used to export (and whatever some of them export is in the export numbers already and given the huge monthly t
(same guy, backup account)
First of all I don't in fact have anything against people over 40, I am almost there myself (time flies). Secondly, it would be strange of me to fire myself from my own business because I reached some magic number, counter-productive too.
As I said, the government creating special entitlements for some people to be paid for by some other people as a form of obligation, which creates an undue business risk, any form of lawsuit, special considerations, etc. I don't need a government to tell me how much to pay my employees, I don't need a government to tell me to put a ramp on a building where I work, if enough people in wheelchairs decide to become customers, I'll find the necessary savings to do it on my own, etc.etc.etc.
However once the government is in my face, telling me how to run the business, that's the moment I must immediately do the exact opposite of what the intent of the obligation is, which is unfortunate for the very people that the law is supposedly designed to protect. Basically minimum wage laws destroy job opportunities, laws that are aimed to reduce discrimination create discrimination, etc., and what is sad in most cases is that there was no problem to start with, the government was 'fixing' some outlier anyway. So if there is actual true discrimination in 1-10% of cases, it doesn't justify a law that hits 100% of people running businesses and creates a huge possibility of being sued, imposes any type of extra costs on a business, etc.
You shouldn't be treated differently just because you hire people, if you hire people, you shouldn't lose rights and people you hire shouldn't get any special privileges. There is a market to solve all of these issues, be it pay or whatever. But the government meddles and businesses start looking for ways to rectify the risks and it ends up backfiring always. You can read my journal, there is a post there on the ACA passing and what that would do to the employment and businesses, I wrote that a few days after the thing passed SCOTUS and now it actually can be observed.
You think I am prescient? No, just logical.
P.S. look at the funny moderation of my original comment (or most of my comments) you think I am actually flamebaiting somebody? Trolling? Ha!
Which is precisely why the government officials that are required to swear into the office are required to uphold and protect the CONSTITUTION.
NOT THE PEOPLE.
Not the government, not the white house, not the justice system but the LAW. The US Founders knew that relying on people making right choices is a terrible idea, democracy doesn't work at all, it quickly dissents into authoritarian nightmare because it promises too everything to everybody for nothing (actually it promises to subsidize the unproductive majority by stealing from the productive minority). Eventually you destroy what you tax and this includes all types of taxes.
From just the tax rates on income and property, to various rules, laws and regulations that government imposes upon business to buy votes (be it minimum wage, various laws that give employees special powers to sue employers for any perceived 'wrongdoing', any kind of entitlement to the employers and customers that end up being obligations upon the employers and producers).
This eventually ends up destroying the productive class of people and destroys incentives for people even trying to become productive, here is a good satirical overview of the problem.
Eventually the mob eats and chases away the part of the society that actually is productive and pays for all of this conspicuous consumption by the mob and then the society is doomed to failure because of the failing economy. So the principles are the same for anything else that concerns rule of law - equal justice under the law, privacy from government intrusion, transparency of government in the first place.
ALL democracies are destined to failure, that is not an option, it's an inevitable consequence of the rule of mob. That's why to keep working the system is supposed to set those types of feelings and desires aside and concentrate on constantly and vigilantly protecting the rule of law, equality before law, equality of opportunity by providing equal application of law, prevention of discrimination by the mob, by the government. Once those concepts are breached, the society is on the path to self destruction and unfortunately I have never found an example in history where the society actually stopped short of destroying itself this way once it became democratic, AFAIC history shows that the destruction is imminent.
It has everything to do with supply and demand, the supply is basically free to produce, but the overall costs are not 0, so when the books and other items are priced by Amazon, they are priced based on your ability and willingness to pay, which is exactly the demand part and it creates the most efficient market. Why shouldn't a book be almost free to somebody who has no interest in it if the cost of production is already factored in? Why should the book be sold at a huge discount to a person who derives enough value from it to pay the full price? Basically this is as perfect a market place as a single store can offer.
Insanely low prices that are wonderful for consumers, because that's what they want and that's what the free market delivers? Higher purchasing power, ability to buy more books for less money? Higher purchasing power left after purchasing books for other things people want? Higher standard of living because of higher purchasing power? Easier access to all the world's knowledge and thoughts?
I don't know, what has the free market capitalism done for you?
(same user, backup account)
My comments are moderated as they are because I predict the collapse of the monetary system, the collapse of the bond market, of the US dollar. I advocate for the free market system to allow the economy to function and against every form of collectivism known.
That's the gist of it, people don't like to hear what they don't want to hear and so they moderate my comments to prevent me from making them.
That would be funny if not for the very last sentence, which tells me you are not actually joking.
I guess you think that in the modern era pussy is the equivalent of 30 pieces of silver. By the way, you can buy more than one pussy for that much money today, and if a girlfriend is out of question (and I doubt that) then they are not worth more than a few bucks anyway.
But I am pretty convinced that this is only a problem in your head, which only tells us something about you and nothing else.
All governments of the world are failing at holding on to trust of whoever was still gullible enough to trust them (and I include citizens of respective countries).
Snowden must be helped but he will not be helped by governments. He must be helped by individuals. Only individuals acting on their own moral code can help Snowden, all governments will fail at this and I mean every one of them.
Google is pretty big, they could have done this years ago, when they were approached by the NSA and whatever other acronym agencies to do this shit in the first place. AFAIC Google's image on this is horrendous, I don't see what they can do for me personally to ever trust the company not to provide gov't with information again. Maybe then can, but that would take something else, not words and assurances, a different approach to technology that would be verifiably secure from government snooping.
Nice doubleplusgoodspeak over there.
The government is the leech, or maybe your point is that it doesn't have enough money to run more NSA snooping programs and kill more brown people around the world?
At what point is the quantity of the evil becomes the actual quality of the evil and you admit that big government is a qualitative problem in itself?
In fact IRS is the government, without IRS government is almost non-existent (well, without IRS and the Fed government drops down to the size of pre-1913) and NSA is not there to fight terrorism, it's to spy on people FOR the IRS.
Both you and the Zimbabwe guy are mistaken but for different reasons. His heart is in the right place, but he just doesn't fully understands how the free market functions, you on the other hand are an evil bastard, who wants to use government violence to steal and create a large police state, because that's the end result of any type of collectivist redistribution.
If in Lima there are slums that government is not providing infrastructure for, that's because the government is unable to STEAL enough to buy votes this way. However like in all cases, when the people save enough money and build up the actual economy, and this problem of slums will be eventually reducing because private companies will be hiring more and more people, providing jobs and giving people opportunity either to move out of slums or have enough income so that other private companies would be able to serve those 'slums' economically, then the government will come to the private enterprise with GUNS and put them to the heads of private individuals BUILDING the economy and will steal their productive input.
The government will sell this to the people living in the 'slums' by promising 'free infrastructure' (on the backs of the people who will be actually BUILDING the economy).
So by the time government will be able to extract enough money out of people's pockets to buy votes with these infrastructure projects, private enterprise would have already BY DEFINITION create enough of an economy to do that exact thing, except do it in a non-violent manner, without money being stolen, without violence that you are a proponent of.
That's what XcepticZP doesn't fully understand when he talks about who "deserves" what. There is no such thing, there is only the question of the economy being big and successful enough to hire enough people to reduce poverty and grow infrastructure privately to solve the problems of poverty that LIFE creates, not 'rich people not paying enough taxes'.
But you, you are a monster. You are a fucking monster that this earth is full of. A person that would take a hard working individual and steal from him under the barrel of a government gun, the kind that eventually leads to destruction of all individual freedoms under the guise of 'fairness'.
There is nothing fair about your ideology, it's monstrous and it has played out so many times over the history of humans on this planet with such terrible consequences that not to see this and be a proponent of it at this point means you are a complete monster, with human blood sucking tentacles and all.
The light blue line on the graphs that on page 2 was marked as "Intel 520 Series (240GB)" on the following page was marked as "OCZ Vertex 3.20 (240GB)" and on the rest of the pages Intel was missing as well.
Was that an error in editing or what?