Free market requires strong defense of private property rights, and this immediately ensures liability, you don't know what you are saying or you are being intentionally crass.
- nonsense. Some people are born dumb and some people are born intelligent. We are all born ignorant though, with only instincts to guide us but no information. As we grow we learn things but we also can learn to not use our heads or we can train to use them more, that part is nurture.
You are putting the cart before the horse. Businesses create ALL the public good that exists, governments steal it and redistribute it according to whatever politicians find to be the most profitable at the moment (buying votes and padding up their bank accounts mostly).
There shouldn't be gov't standing between me and any drug manufacturer in the world, today is the age of maximum information proliferation, I don't want gov't telling me what I can and cannot buy as a drug, it's up to me to decide. FDA, EPA are simply extensions of largest corporations, keeping their monopolies intact, stealing private property from others to do it.
Maybe you should pose that 'hazardous material' question to your governments as is, because BP had 75Million dollar liability cap provided by gov't, so what gives? The free market does not provide liability caps, the free market does not provide protection against competition with licenses and permits and special taxes, etc. Free market does not bail out failure at the expense of the public. Free market does not create moral hazard, which inflates bubbles, be it in equities (like the nineties) or housing (like in the last decade and like the Fed is trying to do now) or bonds and dollars (Fed, Treasury).
By the way, you definitely are a victim of your public 'education'.
Once you had no leg to stand on in this argument, you immediately switched to personalities. From the declaration that my comments are a 'troll', to now declaring that I am a "terrible human being" and "uncivilized" (since you believe that I should "leave the civilized world to civilized people").
That's precisely what I am talking about. You don't understand logic, you are irrational as you have shown in this thread, you don't have an argument that is sound, all of your arguments are based on some form of feelings of injustice and nothing else.
You feel that it is unfair that people are not getting something 'free', I am explaining to you that there is no such thing as free, that society pays for 'free' things 'provided' by government with a terrible price, terrible consequences, which start with removal of personal individual freedoms, create discrimination (progressive tax system), which destroys the rule of law.
17000 is expensive, but not excessive for a new piece of technology like that. 17000 today is dramatically less purchasing power than 25000 14 years ago for a medium sized plasma screen and people bought those, probably mostly companies bought them and the wealthier individuals.
This is another case in point for supply side economy (which is what all economy is). A company makes a product, which is expensive because the costs are high and few products are made and the production line is new and it's not fully automated probably. If people buy it at 17000 for a while, the market will signal the company that it is on the right track, as it figures out more efficiencies to push the prices down (and covers some of the upfront capital costs). If it's a good product that people are interested in, the market will provide this information to the manufacturer and prices will come down and more people will be able to buy.
That's what 'trickle down economics' means, not that rich people are supposed to shed money left right and centre and that somehow would make it into the hands of others. Making things and making more things and eventually lowering prices for things because of market buying at current prices and providing information that more of those things are needed, more competition enters the market, prices go down because of competition.
We'll see in 3 years whether this product is a success or not.
- just reopen. That's rich. Where is the capital? Where is the wealth needed to do that? Where is the machinery? It's not only about digging dirt, it's about refining the metals, which is a technological process that requires many various inputs, at the minimum millions of tons of various chemicals, which too, must be produced and stored and delivered.
'just reopen'. That's the problem, isn't it? 'Post-industrial' is the same as 'pre-industrial', there is no such thing as 'service economy' unless you actually can balance the books with it (as in have a balanced trade).
Don't worry, I already left your 'civilized' world, that's the problem. People leaving it who actually can do something.
Money is production, your ability to produce some form of wealth, to create something that you and others are interested in. Money is what is created by people and exchanged for. Money is not paper, and since money is wealth, it is what allows people to do more with their lives, and thus it is freedom.
Of-course you want to steal freedom, you want to steal people's productive output. In a free society, the production has to out-compete other forms of production and that's what brings prices down and brings quality up.
Today anybody can afford a mobile phone, 20 years ago only the wealthy could. Same with health care and education, the only reason they are expensive and cannot be afforded by most is because of government intervention into the free market with regulations, inflation, taxes.
You don't understand such elementary principles and you call others 'idiots'? Curious.
Alright, *your* words, from *your* comment that *you* linked to:
- yes, those are my words, I stand by them and never changed them.
Obviously you went into one of those public schools, because those words are twisted in your irrational mind into something that they are not.
You are building a strawman and then are taking it down, is that what they taught you? Because I never said I am against education, I said I am against public funding for all schools, I am against public schools, I am against all public funding for anything and everything.
Again, this means education would actually be affordable, cheap and of high quality, just like the cheapest mobile phones today, that are sold in the market by businesses that do it for profit.
So what is your problem, lack of logic or lack of argument?
That's not how it's done in America. What you do is get a bunch of them Indians, cut their feet off, tie them end to end with a few dick worth lengths of rope and then lasso that towards your target. To make sure you have at least 100 feet tied in that rope you'll need to catch at least 55 Indians, because sometimes they share a foot.
Your anarcho-capitalist vision of what "freedom" means is essentially "might makes right"
- no, the market is all people making voluntary decisions on every day basis about their own lives. What business to participate in, what product to buy, what to avoid, etc. This has nothing to do with probably criminal behavior that you are talking about.
You are so wrong when you think I am talking about "removing education", it's insane how wrong you are. Education is very important, I am talking about making sure that it stays relevant, that it is not inflated into nothingness like every other bubble that government creates with fake money and ideas of 'fairness' or 'free whatever'.
I wonder, you think that 'freedom' is a 'weasel word', I wonder who 'educated' you this way? Freedom is the concept that USA was founded upon, it's the concept that you are a free individual to run your life to the best of your abilities, without somebody directing and controlling you.
Of-course this doesn't mean you should be hurting people in the process, but to me it seems you are not against the idea of hurting people, as long as it is the government that does it.
Or how providing higher education is the same thing as murder?
- you missed your favorite word in that sentence: free. A government that is big enough to "give" you "free" anything, including "free" education, is the gov't that destroys every individual freedom in the process.
You know, they provide 'free' food (food you don't have to pay for if you are receiving it) in prisons, right?
There is no such thing as 'free tuition'. When you say 'free', what you mean to say is that the consumer of the service (student) doesn't pay for it directly, but nothing is free. The teachers, the profs don't work for free. Neither do any other staff, there are all kinds of costs that must be covered to provide this 'free' education. And as all things that government provides (with loan guarantees or just 'free of charge'), the actual costs are enormous.
When gov't makes anything seemingly 'free', you get unbearable costs.
Actually I was born in USSR, we had 'free education', 'free healthcare', we had 'right to work' (actually more than that, there were times, when people who were caught by cops outside during work hours had to prove that they had jobs and if not, they could spend time in jail, it was called 'tuneyadstvo', and the closest translation I can come up with is parasitism, but it's not it, because there are actual words for 'parasitism' in russian, so I am not sure how to translated it completely.
However you know where I am going with it, right? We had all these 'free' things, what we didn't have was actual freedom and as a consequence we didn't have an economy that provided people with good products and services at good prices, we had none of it, it was a very poor country (from POV of a normal person, not a Party member, not somebody in government).
But it is the same exactly idea in the Western world, there is no difference. When gov't tries to make something free it becomes completely unaffordable.
People were able to buy their own health care, pay for their own education out of pocket. Students without means could work their way through college. I did get my higher education at UofT, worked all the way through it and except for the first semester of the first term never had to take a loan.
But the point is that education is so expensive now because of gov't loan guarantees and all the artificial demand and thus a bubble in education. There should be no gov't, education is very much like cell phones, same with health care, it's very much like any other market, the prices should be going down, but they are not.
And it's not at all because of more complex technologies, everywhere we look the technology is more and more complex, yet where the gov't is not involved the costs are falling.
You have college graduates today working cash register, but these college graduates know less than high school graduates of 50 years ago. 50 years ago a high school graduate would have to know his inventory, would have to be able to calculate, do math in his head, have good memory, do all sorts of things that people today don't have to do at work. Today the machine does it all for them, what is their job really, a glorified data entry, with data often being pictures.
No, you are creating the indentured servants by denying people freedoms today not by not providing free education. Denying people the freedoms and growing government is what creates the indentured servants, just like what we had in the former USSR.
Of-course that country was built on the principle of socialism, Marxism. Lenin wrote: we must install dictatorship of proletariat. And he was right, the rule of proletariat can only be installed via dictatorship.
I mean you have to force people to pay taxes, progressive taxes are theft and people do everything they can to avoid paying them, imagine forcing people to live in a country where everything is under complete governmental control. What do you create, what kind of people? Lenin said: we are going to create the New Man.
Do you know what USSR actually created?
* A class of politically connected, relatively wealthy elite, who held to power with their teeth, murdering and enslaving the rest.
* A class of dependants, incapable of any initiative whatsoever, not people, automatons who wouldn't move a finger unless they were told to (and pushed by threat of violence as well).
yeah, and very short distances are measured in millidicks, microdicks, nanodicks and picodicks. Very short time bursts can even be converted into femtodicks per vag squared.
The ones in the alpha spectrum go to 11 terradicks.
Also length can be measured in noses, arm lengths, finger phalanges, football fields, soccer fields, WV beetles. The more advanced among us can measure it in male sex organs of-course.
Well, it's Italy in this case, but if that logic applied in USA for example, then the Federal Reserve (and personally Bernanke) could be found guilty in the same exact crime.
I don't know, if you read those quotes, whether you should laugh or cry, because that man is at the head of USA central bank.
He is so wrong on everything that he says, that you can set the clock by him, just take the exact opposite value.
If he was in Italy, could he be sued for the same thing as these scientists? How about the actual Italian politicians, can they be sued now, should they be worried?
(same person, second account, the until it's about a day from now)
It's not a return, it's a cost.
Anything can happen, your building may collapse due to an earthquake or a terrorist attack. What are you supposed to do, live and work in a bunker?
If you buy a hammer and it works for nailing those nails day in and out, why should you be upgrading the handle without it actually breaking?
It's a cost, it's not an investment. Investment means that you have a reasonable expectation of a return on that investment. A cost means that you have to incur it to stay in business, but it doesn't mean you have to incur it before it becomes a problem.
You may need contingency plans in case it becomes a problem, but it doesn't mean you have to immediately address all such things, because running a business and being profitable is hard as is with the normal everyday expenses, having to deal with 'what ifs' is left to be a distant 100th on the list.
If you work for a place where you think this may become a problem, bring it up with your management, if you have an actual argument that shows why the computers will stop working one day (I guess the bits in the DLL files will wear out), it's up to the management to decide whether to spend any money now or wait until it happens or do something to prepare for that problem in the future but not go full ahead with the immediate knee-jerk reaction.
You think your part is the most important part of running a business, the XP windows installation? You are way off on that.
Oh, did I forget to mention that women did not actually go to work for the longest time. Sure, they had to go to work during WWII, that was understandable. But the stagflation of 1970s was 'solved' not only by massive devaluation of the dollar but because women entered workforce.
Not only do the men have to work much more today than 100 years ago and get worse results for it, but their wives have to do the same, and since the economy is so poor, that men have very little to offer women in it, getting married is no longer a way for a woman to be a stay at home mom, so the number of divorces, single parents, single women is about half of all women at this point. All people have to work.
The economy is now so terrible that soon enough children will have to go back to work just like they had to in the beginning of 19th century.
We certainly cannot find common ground, because in your mind the rate of growth of wealth due to production in 19th century is equal to the overall amount of wealth created by foreign producers that you can access today due to fake currency.
The difference between the beginning of 19th century and the beginning of 20th century is nearly infinite. From no infrastructure, use of electricity for communications, telegraph, telephone, radio, lighting, machinery used in factories, sewing machines, refrigerators, access to plentiful and safe food, medical care, clothing, indoor plumbing, I can go on and on. The difference between beginning of 19th and beginning of 20th century is much greater than the difference between 20th and 21st century.
The number of hours that we have to work to provide ourselves with a comparable standard of living did not decrease. In many cases it went up, and that's the exact opposite of progress.
19th century creation of wealth allowed people to reduce their working hours (and it's not because of unions and strikes, that's nonsense. It's because of productivity that allowed the working hours to be decreased. You could strike all you wanted in 18th century, you'd just end up dead because of striking, since you wouldn't produce enough food for yourself to eat). Same with child labour, same with everything that liberals think is the result of bigger government intervention. Bigger government itself could not exist with the productivity of 18th century. The gov't is a bunch of people that do not produce anything, they live off of production of others, and the number of people that can do that grew because of productivity provided by free market capitalism of 19th century.
Today people work many more hours to achieve a much poorer outcome.
The people by the beginning of 20th century didn't have to pay income, payroll taxes, they saved their own money for the future, they paid for their own (and their kids) medical care mostly out of pocket, though there was very accessible catastrophic insurance. They paid for their kids schooling out of pocket, though the best students could get some sponsoring by a school. They borrow to have housing, they paid out of pocket for their living accommodations. They didn't have debt, no government was there to guarantee any.
Today people are completely without savings, cannot afford medical care on their own, cannot afford their own retirement, their kids "learn" who knows what, and they can't afford that without gov't loans either. They don't own their houses, the banks do and now the government does.
Everything that happened over 20th century turned the self reliant into the dependent. Destroyed ability to save and start a business. Stopped natural deflation due to real money and growth of productivity with government inflation, with fake money, with regulations and taxes that destroy productivity.
Yes, there is no common ground between you and I, that's because you don't understand the reality.
- it's not enjoyed, it's imposed and it's suffered. People do not enjoy seeing prices going up as a consequence of inflation (of money printing), they don't enjoy having to renegotiate their salaries with their bosses or be stuck with lower and lower purchasing power.
The economies that have done pretty well since the Enlightenment?
- USA was the engine of economic growth in the West, and it was that engine under deflation, not inflation. US dollar gained value by factor of 2 in 19th century until the Federal reserve was formed and eventually allowed to monetize government debt (1917), which eventually provided enough rope for the government to hang the economy and default on the dollar (1971).
The same economies which allow you the free time to complain about inflation on Slashdot?
- the economies that led to people having more free time than ever were built in deflation. It's staggering how much wealth was created in the deflationary period, that the following inflationary period took so long to destroy it all.
How much free time would we have on our hands today if we didn't have central banks and inflation caused by them? It is impossible to know for sure, but it definitely would be a much bigger percentage of our lives that we could waste due to crazy growing productivity provided by deflation and freedom from government.
Yes! Thus the incentive to find better work -- a great strength of modern economic management.
- no, this is not the real incentive. The real incentive is gain in experience, the real incentive is to be a worker for hire for some time and then build up savings and start your own business. This is impossible to do with inflation, with income taxes and with various regulations that prevent people from competing with large established enterprises (and the large government that ensures this destruction of competition is grown out of theft by inflation and by income taxes).
Inflation causes there to be fewer businesses and workers?
- inflation destroys savings and savings is the real capital that is used to grow business. Savings are destroyed by inflation and so people with savings search for alternatives, and a good alternative is to move money into other economies, but when so many economies follow the same path towards self-destruction, then the only choice that is left is to buy various assets that cannot be inflated by government.
Buying inflation hedging assets is the exact opposite of investing to grow capital. You can call it 'capital on strike', (which by the way was the entire theme of Atlas Shrugged, and the left doesn't understand this concept because it doesn't understand inflation, so it ridicules the concept while actually factually leaving through capital striking and through the consequences of striking capital).
Just today I went to the business event held in Baden Baden, dedicated to investing in various alternative energy solutions, including the new electrical concept cars presented by BMW mostly (taking off to the related Gala event in a few minutes). It looks like they are aiming at the Asian market with the new electric concepts, they know they have to overcome Toyota Prius and other similar cars, they are hoping for Chinese investment to do this (funny enough, the Chinese investor guy didn't show up for the 500 people event that was basically staged for him). I think you are right, whatever this story calls a 'standard' is irrelevant, there is not even an agreement on what the tech will be. Will it be a hybrid, hydrogen or electrical or something else. They presented all of these possibilities, probably mostly aiming at hybrids, not pure electrical models.
First of all, investing is not the same thing as protecting your investment (savings) against inflation. For 100 years now the Fed is printing currency. Since 1971, the gold link is broken. For more than 40 years now USA is in an inflationary spiral caused by the government creating fake money out of thin air to grow government spending and to try and grow economy, while actually destroying economy with inflation.
Gold, aluminum, etc., these are inflation hedges. You buy these when you do not believe the economy is productive or can be productive based on government actions and you just want to protect yourself against theft.
Gold was about 300 in 2000 and today it's about 1730 or so.
In terms of gold S&P lost plenty, 5-6 times. Same with DOW. Bonds were in a long secular bull market for a few decades, but not anymore. Now it's a bubble, it's irrational, people jump into bonds when they are afraid of inflation as well and that's irrational behavior because bonds are paid in those same dollars. As dollars go so do bonds. The only way to protect your money is either to be in very well positioned equities or other assets, such as commodities, monetary metals, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Free market requires strong defense of private property rights, and this immediately ensures liability, you don't know what you are saying or you are being intentionally crass.
I think everybody is born dumb.
- nonsense. Some people are born dumb and some people are born intelligent. We are all born ignorant though, with only instincts to guide us but no information. As we grow we learn things but we also can learn to not use our heads or we can train to use them more, that part is nurture.
(Same person here, second account)
---
You are putting the cart before the horse. Businesses create ALL the public good that exists, governments steal it and redistribute it according to whatever politicians find to be the most profitable at the moment (buying votes and padding up their bank accounts mostly).
There shouldn't be gov't standing between me and any drug manufacturer in the world, today is the age of maximum information proliferation, I don't want gov't telling me what I can and cannot buy as a drug, it's up to me to decide. FDA, EPA are simply extensions of largest corporations, keeping their monopolies intact, stealing private property from others to do it.
Maybe you should pose that 'hazardous material' question to your governments as is, because BP had 75Million dollar liability cap provided by gov't, so what gives? The free market does not provide liability caps, the free market does not provide protection against competition with licenses and permits and special taxes, etc. Free market does not bail out failure at the expense of the public. Free market does not create moral hazard, which inflates bubbles, be it in equities (like the nineties) or housing (like in the last decade and like the Fed is trying to do now) or bonds and dollars (Fed, Treasury).
Companies should be able to do what they want and the only limit for them is like for individuals - the criminal code and the contract court. Gov't has a role: protection of individual rights, and the most important right to protect is the right to own and operate private property. All other rights are only an extension and a facilitator of this most fundamental most important right, without which we are only slaves to the system and the largest special interests.
By the way, you definitely are a victim of your public 'education'.
Once you had no leg to stand on in this argument, you immediately switched to personalities. From the declaration that my comments are a 'troll', to now declaring that I am a "terrible human being" and "uncivilized" (since you believe that I should "leave the civilized world to civilized people").
That's precisely what I am talking about. You don't understand logic, you are irrational as you have shown in this thread, you don't have an argument that is sound, all of your arguments are based on some form of feelings of injustice and nothing else.
You feel that it is unfair that people are not getting something 'free', I am explaining to you that there is no such thing as free, that society pays for 'free' things 'provided' by government with a terrible price, terrible consequences, which start with removal of personal individual freedoms, create discrimination (progressive tax system), which destroys the rule of law.
Your reply to it: you are a 'bad person'.
Such a sad display.
17000 is expensive, but not excessive for a new piece of technology like that. 17000 today is dramatically less purchasing power than 25000 14 years ago for a medium sized plasma screen and people bought those, probably mostly companies bought them and the wealthier individuals.
This is another case in point for supply side economy (which is what all economy is). A company makes a product, which is expensive because the costs are high and few products are made and the production line is new and it's not fully automated probably. If people buy it at 17000 for a while, the market will signal the company that it is on the right track, as it figures out more efficiencies to push the prices down (and covers some of the upfront capital costs). If it's a good product that people are interested in, the market will provide this information to the manufacturer and prices will come down and more people will be able to buy.
That's what 'trickle down economics' means, not that rich people are supposed to shed money left right and centre and that somehow would make it into the hands of others. Making things and making more things and eventually lowering prices for things because of market buying at current prices and providing information that more of those things are needed, more competition enters the market, prices go down because of competition.
We'll see in 3 years whether this product is a success or not.
just re-open
- just reopen. That's rich. Where is the capital? Where is the wealth needed to do that? Where is the machinery? It's not only about digging dirt, it's about refining the metals, which is a technological process that requires many various inputs, at the minimum millions of tons of various chemicals, which too, must be produced and stored and delivered.
'just reopen'. That's the problem, isn't it? 'Post-industrial' is the same as 'pre-industrial', there is no such thing as 'service economy' unless you actually can balance the books with it (as in have a balanced trade).
By the way, I just realized something:
yeah, great, thanks for the tip
- touche. Note though that this form of measurement only works if one isn't circumcised.
Don't worry, I already left your 'civilized' world, that's the problem. People leaving it who actually can do something.
Money is production, your ability to produce some form of wealth, to create something that you and others are interested in. Money is what is created by people and exchanged for. Money is not paper, and since money is wealth, it is what allows people to do more with their lives, and thus it is freedom.
Of-course you want to steal freedom, you want to steal people's productive output. In a free society, the production has to out-compete other forms of production and that's what brings prices down and brings quality up.
Today anybody can afford a mobile phone, 20 years ago only the wealthy could. Same with health care and education, the only reason they are expensive and cannot be afforded by most is because of government intervention into the free market with regulations, inflation, taxes.
You don't understand such elementary principles and you call others 'idiots'? Curious.
Oh, and here is a good way to add to my point about 'free' stuff from government, since I already mentioned mobile phones.
The industry competes to provide cheap phones to people, but the government steps in to provide 'free' phones to people, and this ends up costing millions.
Alright, *your* words, from *your* comment that *you* linked to:
- yes, those are my words, I stand by them and never changed them.
Obviously you went into one of those public schools, because those words are twisted in your irrational mind into something that they are not.
You are building a strawman and then are taking it down, is that what they taught you? Because I never said I am against education, I said I am against public funding for all schools, I am against public schools, I am against all public funding for anything and everything.
Again, this means education would actually be affordable, cheap and of high quality, just like the cheapest mobile phones today, that are sold in the market by businesses that do it for profit.
So what is your problem, lack of logic or lack of argument?
That's not how it's done in America. What you do is get a bunch of them Indians, cut their feet off, tie them end to end with a few dick worth lengths of rope and then lasso that towards your target. To make sure you have at least 100 feet tied in that rope you'll need to catch at least 55 Indians, because sometimes they share a foot.
Your anarcho-capitalist vision of what "freedom" means is essentially "might makes right"
- no, the market is all people making voluntary decisions on every day basis about their own lives. What business to participate in, what product to buy, what to avoid, etc. This has nothing to do with probably criminal behavior that you are talking about.
You are so wrong when you think I am talking about "removing education", it's insane how wrong you are. Education is very important, I am talking about making sure that it stays relevant, that it is not inflated into nothingness like every other bubble that government creates with fake money and ideas of 'fairness' or 'free whatever'.
I wonder, you think that 'freedom' is a 'weasel word', I wonder who 'educated' you this way? Freedom is the concept that USA was founded upon, it's the concept that you are a free individual to run your life to the best of your abilities, without somebody directing and controlling you.
Of-course this doesn't mean you should be hurting people in the process, but to me it seems you are not against the idea of hurting people, as long as it is the government that does it.
tell me how it helps people to have to go $60k into debt to get a degree required for the kind of job that would provide a living wage
- I never said it helps, quite the opposite, read this comment, do you think I believe it helps?
Of-course when something is 'free' the quality also suffers, even when it's just highschool (or the wasted 'educational' process before it).
Or how providing higher education is the same thing as murder?
- you missed your favorite word in that sentence: free. A government that is big enough to "give" you "free" anything, including "free" education, is the gov't that destroys every individual freedom in the process.
You know, they provide 'free' food (food you don't have to pay for if you are receiving it) in prisons, right?
There is no such thing as 'free tuition'. When you say 'free', what you mean to say is that the consumer of the service (student) doesn't pay for it directly, but nothing is free. The teachers, the profs don't work for free. Neither do any other staff, there are all kinds of costs that must be covered to provide this 'free' education. And as all things that government provides (with loan guarantees or just 'free of charge'), the actual costs are enormous.
When gov't makes anything seemingly 'free', you get unbearable costs.
Actually I was born in USSR, we had 'free education', 'free healthcare', we had 'right to work' (actually more than that, there were times, when people who were caught by cops outside during work hours had to prove that they had jobs and if not, they could spend time in jail, it was called 'tuneyadstvo', and the closest translation I can come up with is parasitism, but it's not it, because there are actual words for 'parasitism' in russian, so I am not sure how to translated it completely.
However you know where I am going with it, right? We had all these 'free' things, what we didn't have was actual freedom and as a consequence we didn't have an economy that provided people with good products and services at good prices, we had none of it, it was a very poor country (from POV of a normal person, not a Party member, not somebody in government).
But it is the same exactly idea in the Western world, there is no difference. When gov't tries to make something free it becomes completely unaffordable.
People were able to buy their own health care, pay for their own education out of pocket. Students without means could work their way through college. I did get my higher education at UofT, worked all the way through it and except for the first semester of the first term never had to take a loan.
But the point is that education is so expensive now because of gov't loan guarantees and all the artificial demand and thus a bubble in education. There should be no gov't, education is very much like cell phones, same with health care, it's very much like any other market, the prices should be going down, but they are not.
And it's not at all because of more complex technologies, everywhere we look the technology is more and more complex, yet where the gov't is not involved the costs are falling.
You have college graduates today working cash register, but these college graduates know less than high school graduates of 50 years ago. 50 years ago a high school graduate would have to know his inventory, would have to be able to calculate, do math in his head, have good memory, do all sorts of things that people today don't have to do at work. Today the machine does it all for them, what is their job really, a glorified data entry, with data often being pictures.
No, you are creating the indentured servants by denying people freedoms today not by not providing free education. Denying people the freedoms and growing government is what creates the indentured servants, just like what we had in the former USSR.
Of-course that country was built on the principle of socialism, Marxism. Lenin wrote: we must install dictatorship of proletariat. And he was right, the rule of proletariat can only be installed via dictatorship.
I mean you have to force people to pay taxes, progressive taxes are theft and people do everything they can to avoid paying them, imagine forcing people to live in a country where everything is under complete governmental control. What do you create, what kind of people? Lenin said: we are going to create the New Man.
Do you know what USSR actually created?
* A class of politically connected, relatively wealthy elite, who held to power with their teeth, murdering and enslaving the rest.
* A class of dependants, incapable of any initiative whatsoever, not people, automatons who wouldn't move a finger unless they were told to (and pushed by threat of violence as well).
* Millions of murdered and millio
yeah, and very short distances are measured in millidicks, microdicks, nanodicks and picodicks. Very short time bursts can even be converted into femtodicks per vag squared.
The ones in the alpha spectrum go to 11 terradicks.
don't you have feet? How do you manage to walk?
Also length can be measured in noses, arm lengths, finger phalanges, football fields, soccer fields, WV beetles. The more advanced among us can measure it in male sex organs of-course.
Next time somebody breaks the door and steals a bunch of patient paper records or there is a flood, don't complain then.
It's the same nonsense argument.
Well, it's Italy in this case, but if that logic applied in USA for example, then the Federal Reserve (and personally Bernanke) could be found guilty in the same exact crime.
I don't know, if you read those quotes, whether you should laugh or cry, because that man is at the head of USA central bank.
He is so wrong on everything that he says, that you can set the clock by him, just take the exact opposite value.
If he was in Italy, could he be sued for the same thing as these scientists? How about the actual Italian politicians, can they be sued now, should they be worried?
(same person, second account, the until it's about a day from now)
It's not a return, it's a cost.
Anything can happen, your building may collapse due to an earthquake or a terrorist attack. What are you supposed to do, live and work in a bunker?
If you buy a hammer and it works for nailing those nails day in and out, why should you be upgrading the handle without it actually breaking?
It's a cost, it's not an investment. Investment means that you have a reasonable expectation of a return on that investment. A cost means that you have to incur it to stay in business, but it doesn't mean you have to incur it before it becomes a problem.
You may need contingency plans in case it becomes a problem, but it doesn't mean you have to immediately address all such things, because running a business and being profitable is hard as is with the normal everyday expenses, having to deal with 'what ifs' is left to be a distant 100th on the list.
If you work for a place where you think this may become a problem, bring it up with your management, if you have an actual argument that shows why the computers will stop working one day (I guess the bits in the DLL files will wear out), it's up to the management to decide whether to spend any money now or wait until it happens or do something to prepare for that problem in the future but not go full ahead with the immediate knee-jerk reaction.
You think your part is the most important part of running a business, the XP windows installation? You are way off on that.
Oh, did I forget to mention that women did not actually go to work for the longest time. Sure, they had to go to work during WWII, that was understandable. But the stagflation of 1970s was 'solved' not only by massive devaluation of the dollar but because women entered workforce.
Not only do the men have to work much more today than 100 years ago and get worse results for it, but their wives have to do the same, and since the economy is so poor, that men have very little to offer women in it, getting married is no longer a way for a woman to be a stay at home mom, so the number of divorces, single parents, single women is about half of all women at this point. All people have to work.
The economy is now so terrible that soon enough children will have to go back to work just like they had to in the beginning of 19th century.
We certainly cannot find common ground, because in your mind the rate of growth of wealth due to production in 19th century is equal to the overall amount of wealth created by foreign producers that you can access today due to fake currency.
The difference between the beginning of 19th century and the beginning of 20th century is nearly infinite. From no infrastructure, use of electricity for communications, telegraph, telephone, radio, lighting, machinery used in factories, sewing machines, refrigerators, access to plentiful and safe food, medical care, clothing, indoor plumbing, I can go on and on. The difference between beginning of 19th and beginning of 20th century is much greater than the difference between 20th and 21st century.
The number of hours that we have to work to provide ourselves with a comparable standard of living did not decrease. In many cases it went up, and that's the exact opposite of progress.
19th century creation of wealth allowed people to reduce their working hours (and it's not because of unions and strikes, that's nonsense. It's because of productivity that allowed the working hours to be decreased. You could strike all you wanted in 18th century, you'd just end up dead because of striking, since you wouldn't produce enough food for yourself to eat). Same with child labour, same with everything that liberals think is the result of bigger government intervention. Bigger government itself could not exist with the productivity of 18th century. The gov't is a bunch of people that do not produce anything, they live off of production of others, and the number of people that can do that grew because of productivity provided by free market capitalism of 19th century.
Today people work many more hours to achieve a much poorer outcome.
The people by the beginning of 20th century didn't have to pay income, payroll taxes, they saved their own money for the future, they paid for their own (and their kids) medical care mostly out of pocket, though there was very accessible catastrophic insurance. They paid for their kids schooling out of pocket, though the best students could get some sponsoring by a school. They borrow to have housing, they paid out of pocket for their living accommodations. They didn't have debt, no government was there to guarantee any.
Today people are completely without savings, cannot afford medical care on their own, cannot afford their own retirement, their kids "learn" who knows what, and they can't afford that without gov't loans either. They don't own their houses, the banks do and now the government does.
Everything that happened over 20th century turned the self reliant into the dependent. Destroyed ability to save and start a business. Stopped natural deflation due to real money and growth of productivity with government inflation, with fake money, with regulations and taxes that destroy productivity.
Yes, there is no common ground between you and I, that's because you don't understand the reality.
low inflation enjoyed in most modern economies
- it's not enjoyed, it's imposed and it's suffered. People do not enjoy seeing prices going up as a consequence of inflation (of money printing), they don't enjoy having to renegotiate their salaries with their bosses or be stuck with lower and lower purchasing power.
The economies that have done pretty well since the Enlightenment?
- USA was the engine of economic growth in the West, and it was that engine under deflation, not inflation. US dollar gained value by factor of 2 in 19th century until the Federal reserve was formed and eventually allowed to monetize government debt (1917), which eventually provided enough rope for the government to hang the economy and default on the dollar (1971).
The same economies which allow you the free time to complain about inflation on Slashdot?
- the economies that led to people having more free time than ever were built in deflation. It's staggering how much wealth was created in the deflationary period, that the following inflationary period took so long to destroy it all.
How much free time would we have on our hands today if we didn't have central banks and inflation caused by them? It is impossible to know for sure, but it definitely would be a much bigger percentage of our lives that we could waste due to crazy growing productivity provided by deflation and freedom from government.
Yes! Thus the incentive to find better work -- a great strength of modern economic management.
- no, this is not the real incentive. The real incentive is gain in experience, the real incentive is to be a worker for hire for some time and then build up savings and start your own business. This is impossible to do with inflation, with income taxes and with various regulations that prevent people from competing with large established enterprises (and the large government that ensures this destruction of competition is grown out of theft by inflation and by income taxes).
Inflation causes there to be fewer businesses and workers?
- inflation destroys savings and savings is the real capital that is used to grow business. Savings are destroyed by inflation and so people with savings search for alternatives, and a good alternative is to move money into other economies, but when so many economies follow the same path towards self-destruction, then the only choice that is left is to buy various assets that cannot be inflated by government.
Buying inflation hedging assets is the exact opposite of investing to grow capital. You can call it 'capital on strike', (which by the way was the entire theme of Atlas Shrugged, and the left doesn't understand this concept because it doesn't understand inflation, so it ridicules the concept while actually factually leaving through capital striking and through the consequences of striking capital).
Just today I went to the business event held in Baden Baden, dedicated to investing in various alternative energy solutions, including the new electrical concept cars presented by BMW mostly (taking off to the related Gala event in a few minutes). It looks like they are aiming at the Asian market with the new electric concepts, they know they have to overcome Toyota Prius and other similar cars, they are hoping for Chinese investment to do this (funny enough, the Chinese investor guy didn't show up for the 500 people event that was basically staged for him). I think you are right, whatever this story calls a 'standard' is irrelevant, there is not even an agreement on what the tech will be. Will it be a hybrid, hydrogen or electrical or something else. They presented all of these possibilities, probably mostly aiming at hybrids, not pure electrical models.
196 years?
First of all, investing is not the same thing as protecting your investment (savings) against inflation. For 100 years now the Fed is printing currency. Since 1971, the gold link is broken. For more than 40 years now USA is in an inflationary spiral caused by the government creating fake money out of thin air to grow government spending and to try and grow economy, while actually destroying economy with inflation.
Gold, aluminum, etc., these are inflation hedges. You buy these when you do not believe the economy is productive or can be productive based on government actions and you just want to protect yourself against theft.
In 2000 S&P500 was about 13000-14000 and today it's somewhere there as well, same level (set chart to max).
Gold was about 300 in 2000 and today it's about 1730 or so.
In terms of gold S&P lost plenty, 5-6 times. Same with DOW. Bonds were in a long secular bull market for a few decades, but not anymore. Now it's a bubble, it's irrational, people jump into bonds when they are afraid of inflation as well and that's irrational behavior because bonds are paid in those same dollars. As dollars go so do bonds. The only way to protect your money is either to be in very well positioned equities or other assets, such as commodities, monetary metals, etc.
Did he have a long form birth certificate?