(same guy here, second account, maxed out the number of comments per day on the first one).
Where did I say anything about denying any science? As I said: I deny the gov't any authority to dictate to individuals how to live, climate change or not. Should I state it in some other language for you to understand better? Because I can if you want to, 5 more languages I can do it in.
You are going to get fucked. It's a very simple thing: they have your DNA, all they need now is to place it somewhere later on to link you to another unsolved mystery and then somebody gets a bonus and a medal and you get to spend many years in a comfortable jail cell.
He runs his own online radio show, which is the next step after his decade long first show, called 'unspun'. He employs 150 people in his investment company, now has a bank, has a couple foreign companies because of regulatory environment, especially the Patriot Act preventing him from doing business the way he wants to with foreign customers.
He testified in front of Congress on a number of occasions (so did his father, who is a political prisoner in USA, who testified back in 1968 or 69 in front of Congress, being the only voice against going off the gold standard, predicting that prices of gold would skyrocket and so would inflation, nobody cared).
So when it comes who is 'moron' here, it's not him, it's you, I doubt you have achieved even a tiny fraction of what he has, but in today's Internet world everybody is an on-line hero, isn't that so, pnutjam?
Oh yeah? So are you willing to have a tax code that prevents people who became wealthy without 'leg up' by working hard from paying income taxes?
Why are politicians rich? At least early on they had politicians that were rich PRIOR getting to politics, nowadays people go to politics to become rich. Ask Gingrich and Pelosi, etc.
Do you think if a farmer grows a crop that is designed to spoil within 24 hours, his business will thrive once he produces it? Of course not. No one would buy such a crop. No demand.
- why in the world would I be coming up with weird scenarios that are irrelevant to the real world?
A crop that is spoiled within 24 hours? Well, I'll tell you what happens to that farmer then in the free market economy. In the free market economy that farmer goes bankrupt, because he is so stupid that he doesn't realize that growing such a crop doesn't even give him the window of time to move the crop from his barn to the mill.
I don't know why you are talking about crops that spoil in 24 hours though, I have never heard of farmers that stupid and crops that weird, maybe that's because they only exist in your fantasy.
Are you seriously suggesting that any business can just create something and hope that once they create it, that will create demand? You would be laughed out of business school.
- All demand is created by supply. Every business that produces something hopes that there will be a way to generate profit on the sale.
Every businessman takes a risk when he starts a business by investing his time, money and effort into building something. Oh, sure, almost anything can be given away FOR FREE or at least at a price point that is below cost (below production price), but building a successful business where the product is sold with a premium in it that provides profit is always a risk a businessman has to take.
What if somebody else is building the same thing at the same time with that businessman, but the other guy is doing it better? What if by the time this businessman produces his product it's already irrelevant because there is a better substitute on the market? Etc.etc.etc.
The only way YOU would not be laughed out of life if you tried to sell the idea that a business can be built without risk, is by suggesting that the business in question gets a government guarantee for everything: loans, clients.
How about that Solyndra, the loans are guaranteed, so nobody loses but the tax payers. The clients? Well, who gives a shit about clients, the loans are guaranteed.
How about government insurance? The clients are guaranteed, the money is guaranteed, everything is guaranteed. That is exactly how the bubbles are inflated in stock markets (Great Depression, the nineties), housing market, etc. That's how the government is inflating the dollar and bond bubble right now, with the Federal reserve and Bernanke's put for all the debt US Treasury (and other US entities) are creating.
You are taught to find a market. A market is created by demand.
- There is always a market for your amazing widgets, that's not the question. The question is can the people afford your amazing product or not. That's the risk.
As I said: human demand is infinite. Human supply on the other hand is very much limited. If you build a business and you already have a client base, then you can use statistics to account for a possible growth or decline in your market, then you can start looking for efficiencies to decrease your costs and reach bigger markets.
But it doesn't matter that demand is infinite. Demand for personal helicopters may be infinite, but the ability to pay for the personal helicopters is very limited because most people do not produce enough to exchange for the productivity needed to build a personal helicopter.
There are no 'unwanted' goods, there are only people who can't afford goods even though they demand them. Even that silly CueCat was in demand, except the price point was below cost of making those widgets. People wanted the CueCat, except they didn't want it at the price that it was offered at and they wanted to do things with it that the producer disagreed with.
I am done with back and forth 'you have no idea on economy' stuff, it's boring.
Made awesome umbrellas. Very efficient. But they were so efficient, their umbrellas were so good, nobody had to buy more than one umbrella for many many years.
- it's up to the market to decide whether it wants sturdy old umbrellas that never break or cheap flashy new umbrellas every year. Whatever the market decides is by definition what it wants.
And staying in the US, buying up politicians is another way. Don't let the libertarians tell you that it's somehow wrong "ethnically" or "economically". What the hell does that matter to a business? The only thing that matters to a business is profits
- I am not arguing that once the gov't is so big and powerful that it can keep stealing individual liberties it is then beneficial to buy that power from gov't.
Libertarians are correct that this power shouldn't be in the hands of the politicians in the first place, that's what Constitution was set up to do - to prevent politicians from gaining power they weren't supposed to have. This constraint has failed.
- I know that most people don't understand even the most basic concepts of what demand and supply is, what consumption and production is.
As long as there are people or other living creatures, their demand is infinite. Do you have Enterprise spaceship? A submarine? An jet? A yacht? Do you want it?
Most people want those things but they can't afford them. In case of spaceship you can't have it because it doesn't exist.
Same thing with all the other things - they don't exist in quantities enough to meet your price points. The reason for it is that it takes much more productivity to create them than you can offer in return. People don't exchange goods for funny looking pieces of paper, people exchange productivity for productivity.
If you are a wheat farmer and you have no wheat, you have demand, but until you grow that crop your demand is irrelevant, it can't be satisfied, because there is no supply.
Supply always comes first, no exceptions. Supply always comes first. If there is no supply, your demand is irrelevant.
A businessman takes risk when he uses his savings (or even when he takes out a loan, other people's savings) and tries to build production that makes something that didn't exist before. He has to work plenty to create supply and he doesn't know that his productivity will allow him to reach efficiency that is high enough so that he can meet the price points of his potential customers.
When iPads came out nobody had them, nobody thought of them as of something to demand. Apple made them and people realized they wanted them (advertising and all, but people who bought them could afford them because they were productive enough in order to exchange some of their productivity for the productivity of Apple).
You can't buy a 1000 feet yacht (most likely) because you don't produce enough to be able to afford it. But you want it. If you don't want the yacht, then you want something else you can't afford.
Again, consumption is a trivial consequence of production, not the other way around. The Sun existed BEFORE people and every other living creature could appear on this planet, so the productivity of the star existed much before you came alone with your demand, and certainly you want that energy from that star, though you can't actually afford it, but you must have it before you even can exist. That is something that we get for free in this life, otherwise we wouldn't be here. However whatever PEOPLE make, (not nature, like the stars), that you have to pay for by making something back, by producing something in exchange, otherwise you can't have it. You can't demand something from people without producing something back.
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Union money: you dislike it (abomination?) because they donate to a party you dislike.
- what are you talking about? I dislike government unions because they are an abomination, they shouldn't exist. The tax payers and everybody else who pays for their existence through inflation and diminished standard of living is NOT at the table when they make their demands.
Who is at the table? The politicians. The people who have plenty to gain from union support by giving them money that they steal from people, that is who is 'at the table'. That's not negotiations, that's 2 wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner.
Unions killing business: poor management kills business, not unions. Treat your employees well and you'll be fine. 100+ years of unions in the U.S. World power. Nuff said.
- yeah, it took a long time to squander the wealth that was created by the free market capitalism in USA. As I said earlier, Theodore Roosevelt was really at the beginning of that destruction. Of-course 1971 with Nixon accelerated that destruction by an n'th degree, defaulting on the dollar and allowing the gov't to print to grow - the inflation tax.
Of-course profits must be maximized, and in case when maximizing profits is done by maximizing efficiency, that's what is going to be done, which is what the free market leads to.
The factories in China are hiring people because that's the way to maximize efficiency if you are in China right now. It's to have some amount of capital that is necessary to buy best tools, but also to hire people, because it is STILL efficient to hire people in China unlike in America and most of the other places on this planet. It's inefficient to hire Americans, very inefficient and dangerous. Again, the best advice for any American who is in business is to minimize the number of people he employs, not to hire any new employees at all and to look for other ways of running business.
Not hiring Americans, outsourcing to China is one way to do it.
Not 'Germany', Germans are afraid of inflation. Germany is a concept that really means 'politicians', doesn't it? While Merkel was playing all the lip service to being fiscally responsible, she is now committed to printing all the currency it takes to 'prevent collapse of the Eurozone'. Ironically printing the currency is exactly the opposite of what is needed to prevent a total collapse.
Inflation is money printing, nothing else, all fiat currencies go to 0 over time, none last. While most countries of the world that had either very high inflation or even hyper inflation over the past 100 years went on the 'US dollar standard' (tied their exchange rates to US dollars artificially), once USA in the position that it can no longer borrow except from the Fed, and can no longer buy any products from abroad, USA won't be able to go back to the 'US dollar standard', because it's the dollar itself that will be destroyed.
AFAIC eventually there will be no choice for the people but to use real money. I am not talking about what governments will want, I am saying that people will want to survive and to survive they will have to buy tools and products from those, who still make tools and products, and those who make tools and products will want real money, and that's how people will go towards real money, not because of government.
Governments always take the real money that people choose to use and then screw it up, set up fake money by decree (fiat) and use it to grow the government itself. All governments are mafia, whether 'elected' or whatever. Democracy is only a temporary state, just like Republic is a temporary state. Republic only lasts as long as it produces enough wealth to give birth to the new type of gov't that finds out how to grow itself by using the wealth created by the Republic. Then it's the time of Democracy, and Democracy always leads to tyranny.
This Democracy has led to tyranny already, but wait until the dollar collapses, then you'll find out what real tyranny looks like.
That's why Germans are afraid of inflation, and they are right, they have already gone through this last century.
As I said: private unions have their right to association, but the public unions are an abomination. Union leaders and politicians are not on the opposite sides of that table, the unions help the politicians and the politicians help union, because it's not their money, what do they care? It's an abomination.
As to private sector unions not 'imploding under their own volition' - it doesn't matter how it happens, unions kill businesses, that's all. It's not because businessmen 'hate' unions, it's because unions prevent efficiencies and thus do not allow costs to drop where they must drop. And costs must drop, if the company doesn't find those efficiencies it will be replaced by a competitor who does.
Also there is no such concept as 'reap profits at the expense of employees'. All profits belong to the owners of the company. I build a company not to give anybody a job, I build a company to make money for myself.
Hiring people is an UNFORTUNATE situation that a businessman has to face, it's bad to hire people, so the best advice to any businessman is not to hire people. Automate, do whatever it takes, outsource, buy tools, reduce the number of employees needed to operate your production facilities, that's the way. That's because it's not just unions (who have a MONOPOLY on labour, why isn't the gov't anti-monopoly law being used to brake up unions exactly, ha?)
It's because of all the regulations that governments pass that make hiring people simply dangerous. Taxes, lawsuits, mandates, whatever it is, once you hire somebody, you are a public enemy number 1. Do yourself a favor, don't hire if you can avoid it.
I already have a comment about all your misconceptions as to why people have better working environment today than they had 200 years ago. The real question is, how come during the time of unprecedented government growth and expansion of power over the last 100 years, the working conditions worsened over the same last 100 years? The answer of-course is that very growth of government, it prevents more efficiencies, it prevents capital formation and it prevents people from doing what they really want to do (grow their own capital) and forces them instead to concentrate too much time and effort trying to go around the government that is standing in the way.
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One more time about the government unions: they are an abomination. They are Americans alright, but they are not 'paying the same bills', they are a subclass but they are treated like superclass, they are on a permanent welfare, that's what government salary is - permanent welfare. Every time a government employee gets a pay raise, that's all the private sector employees and employers getting a pay cut.
Whatever gov't workers are paid it's the money extracted, stolen from the private sector. ONLY private sector CREATES, the gov't takes and spends what was taken for whatever purpose, but not to create anything, it's always to spend, to take, to have a program and to skim off top. Gov't workers don't pay taxes, the money they have came from real taxes, their taxes are a ruse, it's just a smaller salary that they are getting. None of that 'tax' money is money that gov't didn't already have, it's an accounting gimmick.
Gov't must exist it has a role, but it has nothing to do with the economy, it must exist to protect people's individual freedoms and secure the borders, there is nothing else, not infrastructure, not health care, not insurance, not education, none of it, that it should be involved with.
Pointing out at other countries as if they are a success while being more socialist mises the point. The free market capitalism created the most prosperous country on the planet in 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, not because of gov't, because of LACK of gov't, that's why people came to USA - to get away from their totalitarian governments. That's why people are leaving USA now and will be leaving in bigger and bigger numbers.
I have spent so much time in Germany over the last 3 years that I can very easily answer all of your questions regarding this topic.
1. Germans are poor. The standard of living is low compared to USA or Canada, that's because people are subsidizing a sizable welfare state, they shouldn't have even done this for the unification of Germany, when the wall fell, but they did. Now they are forced to subsidize huge part of Europe with their productivity and thus destruction of purchasing power.
2. Germans are mostly free of debt, they don't have as much personal debt as Americans do (or people of other countries), they even have savings. Of-course half of their savings were wiped out during the establishment of the Euro zone, Euro stole half of the savings of all Germans just during introduction.
3. German government is not growing compared to US government or governments of other countries. Germany is not subsiding a huge military industrial complex.
4. The retirement and medical benefits are slowly being cut, not increased. There is unfortunately for the economy of Germany all these free loaders from the Euro zone, but they also have plenty of their own free loaders, who are not benefiting the productive economy, they are being subsidized. However Germany allows plenty of immigration from Eastern Europe as well as from places like Turkey, which brings plenty of cheap work force into the country, so this helps to lower the wages inside the country instead of outsourcing to lower wage zones.
However, even given all of this, the companies in Germany ARE collapsing. There are more and more companies going under, do you know what happens in many cases? Foreigners buy them and even keep union contracts afloat for a few years. Actually Chinese are buying up failing (and other) German companies.
So while to you it seems that Germany is doing so much better than USA, it's only a matter of degree. What is happening in Germany is similar to what is happening in USA, except in Germany it's happening SLOWER.
The reasons are being that Germans have much less debt, much higher savings and they are not subsidizing massive military effort.
BTW, Germany is cutting its social spending, that's the right way to go, but they are doing it too slow, so they will have their own crisis in the coming years.
What ever happened to the lie about increased productivity and automation, it would seem the benefits only got shared amongst the top psychopathic 1% and the rest simply got screwed over. It's time to start nailing the 1% and teach them a thing or two about being ruthlessly exploited.
- the increase in productivity was absolutely real. The people working 40 hour weeks instead of working all the time in the fields just for subsistence was the increase in productivity due to the capital that was applied to their labour.
You are asking: "what happened?"
If that is a true question, then I have the answer for you. What happened was that the increased productivity due to the free market capitalism was negated by the growing government, which saw the opportunity to steal all that productivity. Politicians want power and in supposed 'democracy' (it should be a Republic, where minority of people get to vote, not majority), bread and circuses mentality allows the worst power hungry liars and con men to be elected into the political offices. They promise everything for nothing and they get elected. When they do get elected, they end up growing the government, at some point the growth of gov't is beyond what the economy can bear. The tipping point was way back in the fifties and sixties, which resulted in the problems that were experienced in the seventies, when Nixon had to default on the dollar to allow the government growth without actually directly increasing taxes, because the economy couldn't afford anymore taxes.
Of-course it started 100 years ago, with that traitor to the Constitution and the Republic, Theodore Roosevelt. Since then pretty much everybody (except for Harding) behaved in the same manner, the government kept growing and the productivity was stolen, negated by the ever growing gov't system, ever growing corruption.
Government is corruption, because it has the power to steal individual liberties and then sell them to the highest bidder. The Constitution was the barrier to that, so they abandoned it and the courts and all branches of gov't participate together in it, it's a well oiled machine of corruption.
To blame 1% is the cop-out, the blame is with the people who again, fell for this bread and circuses promise of so called 'fairness', basically class envy.
Yes, there are people rich and poor, it will always be the case, it will never go away. In the free market capitalist system the rich are those who give people the best product at the lowest price. In the government system it's those, who have the most and the best government connections.
Guess what's better for the 99%, the first system or the second? We had the second system in the USSR, I am grateful that it collapsed. USA is moving that direction, too bad.
As to the 1%, most of the production moved out of USA, so you are left with the 99% producing almost nothing, so what do you care about the 1%? They produce plenty somewhere else, you are still getting the benefit of that production subsidized by foreign governments willing to rob their own people with inflation to prop up US consumer. Eventually this music will stop, you won't have the capital of the 1%, because real capital is production capacity, not paper currency.
If paper currency was the answer, Zimbabwe, USSR, Weimar republic, etc. (100 examples in 150 years), would have prospered. Instead they collapsed.
The capital is the necessary instrument in order to increase productivity, the efficiency of production, because capital buys or makes (or is) the tools that are applied to labour. This is what makes the 99% productive - capital. Capital cannot be stolen, it cannot be printed, it must be saved. If it's stolen, then it's a very temporary infusion. If it's printed, it's the same as st
"Their lives exist solely for someone else's profit" is the working definition of slavery
- nonsense. Nobody forces people to work in any particular place for anybody. In China, less of all, people save their money and start their own businesses easier than in most places.
If the workers end up at a factory, that means that was the best situation they found for themselves, they absolutely should be grateful that the factory exists, so they found the employer who is giving them the most of what they can get.
The employer doesn't force them to work for him, he is making money for himself and in the process he creates jobs that some people decide to bid their labour for. People end up working in places that serve them best.
It's the government that can enslave you, a company cannot. Government forces you to pay income taxes, company pays you money for your labour - a voluntary, equitable exchange.
Which is how we ended child labor and instituted the 40 hour work week in this country, BTW.
- child labour, 40 hour work week, everything, it couldn't be mandated, it couldn't be regulated for, it couldn't be decreed by any government on this planet ever. It only happened as a result of raised productivity of the workers, as the capital was applied to create (acquire) the necessary tools and infrastructure and education for the workers, so that they could be more productive.
Only a productive worker can get more than somebody who is just a subsistence farmer. A subsistence farmer maybe feeds himself. A productive worker is a worker that has the necessary capital applied to his labour, so that he can produce for many more people than just himself. ONLY under those circumstances it is possible to reduce the work hours, to get rid of child labour, etc.
None of if it was ever possible on the face of this Earth without free market capitalism, without capital, without people managing the resources efficiently: land, capital, labour.
A bunch of labourers without capital are only surviving on subsistence level. When somebody saves enough capital and uses it as an investment to make money, uses it to create or acquire tools to make labour more efficient, that's when the workers become more productive, which eventually allows the workers to work much less while producing much more.
The best case scenario of-course is to get rid of all employees and still have production that satisfies the market demand. The best advice to any businessman is NOT to hire people, to get rid of as many employees as possible if it can be done without reducing efficiency.
Efficiency is the key, the goal is not the jobs, the goal is products and services that we want. Maximizing efficiency is the goal so that everything we want could be done without human labour at all. 40 hour work week 100 years ago... if the gov't didn't hack the Constitution and the Republic and didn't start growing the way it did, if it was still constrained by the law (Constitution), if it wasn't allowed to go above its authority with respect to money, interest rates, all the socialist and fascist agenda (health care, insurance, education, energy, business and labour regulations, environmental regulations, everything), then today people maybe could work 3 days a week for just 5 hours a day because their productivity would have been so high, they could produce everything that the market wanted in that time.
Instead the gov't stepped in, took the wealth created by the free market capitalism and destroyed that wealth while destroying the idea of raising efficiency and prevented increase of the standard of living.
The current depression is the market trying to correct all the mistakes that the people, the gov't have done over the last 100 years of activity, taxing income, subsidizing individuals and businesses, creating monopolies, everything that gov't does. The gov't sees this cleansing process as something that must be prevented, and because of it
Politicians don't kill unions, unions kill businesses that are unionised. Unions kill unions.
As to government unions (public sector unions), they shouldn't have never been allowed in the first place.
Private unions are fine, people have the right to associate. However the employer must not be coerced into negotiating with the union collectively, he also has the right to associate.
Even in right to work states, it is actually illegal for an employee to start working in a union shop and then negotiate his terms on his own, the courts have upheld this clearly illegal idea of 'labour peace', where the rights of the individual are destroyed by the union power.
USA is becoming a third world country because of democratic votes cast by the majority who wants free bread and circuses for the politicians that promise it, while in reality stealing individual freedoms from people to run their businesses to the best of their abilities without being hindered by the government power. That's why people move production out of USA, while government ends up growing on printed, taxed, borrowed money, that's the reason for USA becoming the 3rd world country.
Maybe because I actually like a lot of the services that the government provides in exchange for my tax money, and recognize that receiving the benefits of living in a society requires me to pay my share of the social contract?
- that's because you aren't actually paying for services.
You see, if you paid for services, you could just buy them in the free market, you are not looking for that, you are looking for subsidized services, so that you, personally, do not have to pay for them. It is very likely that your tax burden is much smaller than that of people who run their own businesses, thus you live on a subsidy by the government, that's the money stolen from people who make more money than you do.
As to Scandinavia - this is the exact opposite of what USA is, they don't have trade deficit in Scandinavia, they have no debt. That's the opposite of what US government does (and many other European governments) and by the way, Scandinavia went through its own huge recession 20 years ago, to fix it they started moving in the direction of freer market, the opposite direction from the one you are moving towards.
And I don't want to live in Scandinavia, by the way, they export natural resources while they can get them out of the ground, that welfare will end, they will have the same problem that the rest of Europe has then.
Also Somalia isn't a 'libertarian utopia', there is no protection of private property in Somalia, it's a war torn country, first fighting against the British occupation, then suffering under the Communist rule and then having a civil war to get individual freedoms back from the Communist totalitarian regime.
I get the point across though, regardless of the grammar.
I would like to add that the unemployed, the retired, the fake disabled, they are not spotless in this, they have voted for the politicians that promoted the policies that caused the destruction of the economy, caused the exodus of productivity and thus of the jobs elsewhere. You can't get things for free, by forcing somebody to give you stuff for free you are only giving them the reasons to search for a way out. Some find this way out in bribing the political system and becoming part of it, some cannot afford that type of a solution so they end up moving their productivity elsewhere to stay competitive, to stay afloat. With them the jobs leave.
This is a bread and circuses economy and the unemployed, the fake disabled and the retired will not be able to live off of it for much longer. The unemployed will have to find jobs but that cannot happen as long as the government stays this big and powerful. But the power government at this point is on its last legs as is the dollar. The life of the government now is completely tied to the life of the dollar. Once the dollar collapses, so does the government and then finally maybe people will get their freedoms back, only then the economy will restructure and restart.
The moderation system here never worked. The most ridiculous thing about it is that the down moderation of specific accounts prevents posting comments from those accounts. So who does that help? Seriously? How is this supposed to stop a troll from trolling or whatever the purpose is? On a technical forum?
But it does allow a bunch of like minded individuals to minimize, to silence opinions from specific accounts, opinions that they do not agree with. Does it really work? I mean I made this second account to post more than 2 times a day, because I want to make a comment sometimes.
Having a 'like' or 'hate' moderation makes sense, whatever, as long as it doesn't prevent the usage of an account that makes sense. Otherwise it only artificially creates more accounts on this site.
That's nothing. Check thisout. This is my first account, I am limited to 2 or 3 comments a day, and there is a number of 'followers' who are religiously moderating every comment I make down, whatever it is.
No, those problems are everybody's problem, they are not solutions of any kind at all. Those problems destroy businesses and while you may think that this means that your environment may become cleaner without businesses, you are wrong. Poor people without businesses don't have anything, they pollute the environment without any regard just to survive. For reference you can look at the former USSR and its track record of being 'environmentally friendly'.
Well you have a problem, don't you? 50% includes the so called unemployed, disabled, poor, retired. The children also don't pay taxes, I'll exclude them from this, their parents are supposed to be taken care of them.
But you have a problem then, if half of the country cannot pay taxes and are the ward of the government, then you are putting the obligation on the other 50% to care for them for some unimaginable reason. And your plan is to steal from some people to subsidize others and you think this represents a VIABLE strategy for an economy.
Here is the truth, by forcing people who still work to be slaves for the people who don't work you are only doing one thing: creating a bigger and bigger government in order to fulfill this function, because this function requires a lot of processes that include threat of violence. I mean why would anybody pay income, corporate, payroll taxes at all if not paying them did not result IRS and other governmental agents with guns coming after them?
Do you know what slavery is? Using threat of violence (guns) to coerce some people to work for the benefit of some other people, and the factors such as who exactly is who do not matter at all. You want to use government to force a guy who makes 10 million a year to work for a guy who makes 20,000 a year?
Then call a spade a spade, you are turning the 10 million guy into a slave of the 20,000 guy.
But it's not only immoral, as I have shown, it is also stupid economically speaking, it does not work. Eventually with the growth of government you end up in a situation where government is a system that 50% (or more) of people believe must extract wealth from those who actually produce it by any means necessary. Obviously the most well connected to 0.01% escape the threat of violence, they are so well connected, they are NOT subject to any of the laws of the land, just ask Corzine. The guy stole billions and now what? Now he just may become the next Federal reserve chairman.
No, this hits the people under the 0.01% mark and over the 50 something % mark, somewhere in the middle there are a few layers of people who still produce and still have something, so they can be extracted from.
But they eventually will also give up or go bankrupt or they will do the most sensible thing and MOVE their production somewhere else as they absolutely should and have a moral imperative as free individuals to do - save themselves.
The retired can no longer stay retired, they have to rely on themselves.
The unemployed can no longer stay unemployed, they cannot live off the welfare checks, and all the regulations and laws that allow this and create incentives for this must be gone.
The disabled can no longer stay unemployed, and for years now the people who no longer qualified for normal welfare benefits, EI, all that stuff, they just moved into the 'disabled' category. They are not disabled. The truly disabled will have to find private charity.
The students can no longer borrow from the government, they cannot repay their loans anyway, and their education is worthless, all the civil arts education is worthless, sociology majors do not have any skills, all education outside of very narrow few fields is worthless at these prices, which are artificially created by abundance of government loans.
Yes, if people want the services, they must pay for them there cannot be any taxes to provide those services.b
Slashdot Mirror
(same guy here, second account, maxed out the number of comments per day on the first one).
Where did I say anything about denying any science? As I said: I deny the gov't any authority to dictate to individuals how to live, climate change or not. Should I state it in some other language for you to understand better? Because I can if you want to, 5 more languages I can do it in.
Those words are an insult, as they should be. They are an insult to individual freedom and to intellect.
Brought to you by George Torwell.
You are going to get fucked. It's a very simple thing: they have your DNA, all they need now is to place it somewhere later on to link you to another unsolved mystery and then somebody gets a bonus and a medal and you get to spend many years in a comfortable jail cell.
The video is of one Peter Schiff, the guy who only predicted and bet against the dot com bubble when everybody was buying into it, the guy who predicted and bet against the housing bubble, when everybody was buying into it, and the guy who is betting against the dollar and bond bubble, and everybody is buying these right now as well. He is an author of multiple books and the founder of a number of companies, which he started alone after working as an investment broker for a large firm for 5 or 6 years after college.
He runs his own online radio show, which is the next step after his decade long first show, called 'unspun'. He employs 150 people in his investment company, now has a bank, has a couple foreign companies because of regulatory environment, especially the Patriot Act preventing him from doing business the way he wants to with foreign customers.
He testified in front of Congress on a number of occasions (so did his father, who is a political prisoner in USA, who testified back in 1968 or 69 in front of Congress, being the only voice against going off the gold standard, predicting that prices of gold would skyrocket and so would inflation, nobody cared).
So when it comes who is 'moron' here, it's not him, it's you, I doubt you have achieved even a tiny fraction of what he has, but in today's Internet world everybody is an on-line hero, isn't that so, pnutjam?
I think you should watch this, it's about 5 minutes.
No, I don't believe that people's incomes should be taxed at all by the way, regardless of how much they make.
Here is something educational for you to watch, I am sure you'll enjoy it.
Oh yeah? So are you willing to have a tax code that prevents people who became wealthy without 'leg up' by working hard from paying income taxes?
Why are politicians rich? At least early on they had politicians that were rich PRIOR getting to politics, nowadays people go to politics to become rich. Ask Gingrich and Pelosi, etc.
Do you think if a farmer grows a crop that is designed to spoil within 24 hours, his business will thrive once he produces it? Of course not. No one would buy such a crop. No demand.
- why in the world would I be coming up with weird scenarios that are irrelevant to the real world?
A crop that is spoiled within 24 hours? Well, I'll tell you what happens to that farmer then in the free market economy. In the free market economy that farmer goes bankrupt, because he is so stupid that he doesn't realize that growing such a crop doesn't even give him the window of time to move the crop from his barn to the mill.
I don't know why you are talking about crops that spoil in 24 hours though, I have never heard of farmers that stupid and crops that weird, maybe that's because they only exist in your fantasy.
Are you seriously suggesting that any business can just create something and hope that once they create it, that will create demand? You would be laughed out of business school.
- All demand is created by supply. Every business that produces something hopes that there will be a way to generate profit on the sale.
Every businessman takes a risk when he starts a business by investing his time, money and effort into building something. Oh, sure, almost anything can be given away FOR FREE or at least at a price point that is below cost (below production price), but building a successful business where the product is sold with a premium in it that provides profit is always a risk a businessman has to take.
What if somebody else is building the same thing at the same time with that businessman, but the other guy is doing it better? What if by the time this businessman produces his product it's already irrelevant because there is a better substitute on the market? Etc.etc.etc.
The only way YOU would not be laughed out of life if you tried to sell the idea that a business can be built without risk, is by suggesting that the business in question gets a government guarantee for everything: loans, clients.
How about that Solyndra, the loans are guaranteed, so nobody loses but the tax payers. The clients? Well, who gives a shit about clients, the loans are guaranteed.
How about government insurance? The clients are guaranteed, the money is guaranteed, everything is guaranteed. That is exactly how the bubbles are inflated in stock markets (Great Depression, the nineties), housing market, etc. That's how the government is inflating the dollar and bond bubble right now, with the Federal reserve and Bernanke's put for all the debt US Treasury (and other US entities) are creating.
You are taught to find a market. A market is created by demand.
- There is always a market for your amazing widgets, that's not the question. The question is can the people afford your amazing product or not. That's the risk.
As I said: human demand is infinite. Human supply on the other hand is very much limited. If you build a business and you already have a client base, then you can use statistics to account for a possible growth or decline in your market, then you can start looking for efficiencies to decrease your costs and reach bigger markets.
But it doesn't matter that demand is infinite. Demand for personal helicopters may be infinite, but the ability to pay for the personal helicopters is very limited because most people do not produce enough to exchange for the productivity needed to build a personal helicopter.
There are no 'unwanted' goods, there are only people who can't afford goods even though they demand them. Even that silly CueCat was in demand, except the price point was below cost of making those widgets. People wanted the CueCat, except they didn't want it at the price that it was offered at and they wanted to do things with it that the producer disagreed with.
I am done with back and forth 'you have no idea on economy' stuff, it's boring.
Made awesome umbrellas. Very efficient. But they were so efficient, their umbrellas were so good, nobody had to buy more than one umbrella for many many years.
- it's up to the market to decide whether it wants sturdy old umbrellas that never break or cheap flashy new umbrellas every year. Whatever the market decides is by definition what it wants.
And staying in the US, buying up politicians is another way. Don't let the libertarians tell you that it's somehow wrong "ethnically" or "economically". What the hell does that matter to a business? The only thing that matters to a business is profits
- I am not arguing that once the gov't is so big and powerful that it can keep stealing individual liberties it is then beneficial to buy that power from gov't.
Libertarians are correct that this power shouldn't be in the hands of the politicians in the first place, that's what Constitution was set up to do - to prevent politicians from gaining power they weren't supposed to have. This constraint has failed.
Demand is not born in a vacuum
- I know that most people don't understand even the most basic concepts of what demand and supply is, what consumption and production is.
As long as there are people or other living creatures, their demand is infinite. Do you have Enterprise spaceship? A submarine? An jet? A yacht? Do you want it?
Most people want those things but they can't afford them. In case of spaceship you can't have it because it doesn't exist.
Same thing with all the other things - they don't exist in quantities enough to meet your price points. The reason for it is that it takes much more productivity to create them than you can offer in return. People don't exchange goods for funny looking pieces of paper, people exchange productivity for productivity.
If you are a wheat farmer and you have no wheat, you have demand, but until you grow that crop your demand is irrelevant, it can't be satisfied, because there is no supply.
Supply always comes first, no exceptions. Supply always comes first. If there is no supply, your demand is irrelevant.
A businessman takes risk when he uses his savings (or even when he takes out a loan, other people's savings) and tries to build production that makes something that didn't exist before. He has to work plenty to create supply and he doesn't know that his productivity will allow him to reach efficiency that is high enough so that he can meet the price points of his potential customers.
When iPads came out nobody had them, nobody thought of them as of something to demand. Apple made them and people realized they wanted them (advertising and all, but people who bought them could afford them because they were productive enough in order to exchange some of their productivity for the productivity of Apple).
You can't buy a 1000 feet yacht (most likely) because you don't produce enough to be able to afford it. But you want it. If you don't want the yacht, then you want something else you can't afford.
Again, consumption is a trivial consequence of production, not the other way around. The Sun existed BEFORE people and every other living creature could appear on this planet, so the productivity of the star existed much before you came alone with your demand, and certainly you want that energy from that star, though you can't actually afford it, but you must have it before you even can exist. That is something that we get for free in this life, otherwise we wouldn't be here. However whatever PEOPLE make, (not nature, like the stars), that you have to pay for by making something back, by producing something in exchange, otherwise you can't have it. You can't demand something from people without producing something back.
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Union money: you dislike it (abomination?) because they donate to a party you dislike.
- what are you talking about? I dislike government unions because they are an abomination, they shouldn't exist. The tax payers and everybody else who pays for their existence through inflation and diminished standard of living is NOT at the table when they make their demands.
Who is at the table? The politicians. The people who have plenty to gain from union support by giving them money that they steal from people, that is who is 'at the table'. That's not negotiations, that's 2 wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner.
Unions killing business: poor management kills business, not unions. Treat your employees well and you'll be fine. 100+ years of unions in the U.S. World power. Nuff said.
- yeah, it took a long time to squander the wealth that was created by the free market capitalism in USA. As I said earlier, Theodore Roosevelt was really at the beginning of that destruction. Of-course 1971 with Nixon accelerated that destruction by an n'th degree, defaulting on the dollar and allowing the gov't to print to grow - the inflation tax.
Profits and hiring employ
Of-course profits must be maximized, and in case when maximizing profits is done by maximizing efficiency, that's what is going to be done, which is what the free market leads to.
The factories in China are hiring people because that's the way to maximize efficiency if you are in China right now. It's to have some amount of capital that is necessary to buy best tools, but also to hire people, because it is STILL efficient to hire people in China unlike in America and most of the other places on this planet. It's inefficient to hire Americans, very inefficient and dangerous. Again, the best advice for any American who is in business is to minimize the number of people he employs, not to hire any new employees at all and to look for other ways of running business.
Not hiring Americans, outsourcing to China is one way to do it.
Not 'Germany', Germans are afraid of inflation. Germany is a concept that really means 'politicians', doesn't it? While Merkel was playing all the lip service to being fiscally responsible, she is now committed to printing all the currency it takes to 'prevent collapse of the Eurozone'. Ironically printing the currency is exactly the opposite of what is needed to prevent a total collapse.
Inflation is money printing, nothing else, all fiat currencies go to 0 over time, none last. While most countries of the world that had either very high inflation or even hyper inflation over the past 100 years went on the 'US dollar standard' (tied their exchange rates to US dollars artificially), once USA in the position that it can no longer borrow except from the Fed, and can no longer buy any products from abroad, USA won't be able to go back to the 'US dollar standard', because it's the dollar itself that will be destroyed.
AFAIC eventually there will be no choice for the people but to use real money. I am not talking about what governments will want, I am saying that people will want to survive and to survive they will have to buy tools and products from those, who still make tools and products, and those who make tools and products will want real money, and that's how people will go towards real money, not because of government.
Governments always take the real money that people choose to use and then screw it up, set up fake money by decree (fiat) and use it to grow the government itself. All governments are mafia, whether 'elected' or whatever. Democracy is only a temporary state, just like Republic is a temporary state. Republic only lasts as long as it produces enough wealth to give birth to the new type of gov't that finds out how to grow itself by using the wealth created by the Republic. Then it's the time of Democracy, and Democracy always leads to tyranny.
This Democracy has led to tyranny already, but wait until the dollar collapses, then you'll find out what real tyranny looks like.
That's why Germans are afraid of inflation, and they are right, they have already gone through this last century.
As I said: private unions have their right to association, but the public unions are an abomination. Union leaders and politicians are not on the opposite sides of that table, the unions help the politicians and the politicians help union, because it's not their money, what do they care? It's an abomination.
As to private sector unions not 'imploding under their own volition' - it doesn't matter how it happens, unions kill businesses, that's all. It's not because businessmen 'hate' unions, it's because unions prevent efficiencies and thus do not allow costs to drop where they must drop. And costs must drop, if the company doesn't find those efficiencies it will be replaced by a competitor who does.
Also there is no such concept as 'reap profits at the expense of employees'. All profits belong to the owners of the company. I build a company not to give anybody a job, I build a company to make money for myself.
Hiring people is an UNFORTUNATE situation that a businessman has to face, it's bad to hire people, so the best advice to any businessman is not to hire people. Automate, do whatever it takes, outsource, buy tools, reduce the number of employees needed to operate your production facilities, that's the way. That's because it's not just unions (who have a MONOPOLY on labour, why isn't the gov't anti-monopoly law being used to brake up unions exactly, ha?)
It's because of all the regulations that governments pass that make hiring people simply dangerous. Taxes, lawsuits, mandates, whatever it is, once you hire somebody, you are a public enemy number 1. Do yourself a favor, don't hire if you can avoid it.
I already have a comment about all your misconceptions as to why people have better working environment today than they had 200 years ago. The real question is, how come during the time of unprecedented government growth and expansion of power over the last 100 years, the working conditions worsened over the same last 100 years? The answer of-course is that very growth of government, it prevents more efficiencies, it prevents capital formation and it prevents people from doing what they really want to do (grow their own capital) and forces them instead to concentrate too much time and effort trying to go around the government that is standing in the way.
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One more time about the government unions: they are an abomination. They are Americans alright, but they are not 'paying the same bills', they are a subclass but they are treated like superclass, they are on a permanent welfare, that's what government salary is - permanent welfare. Every time a government employee gets a pay raise, that's all the private sector employees and employers getting a pay cut.
Whatever gov't workers are paid it's the money extracted, stolen from the private sector. ONLY private sector CREATES, the gov't takes and spends what was taken for whatever purpose, but not to create anything, it's always to spend, to take, to have a program and to skim off top. Gov't workers don't pay taxes, the money they have came from real taxes, their taxes are a ruse, it's just a smaller salary that they are getting. None of that 'tax' money is money that gov't didn't already have, it's an accounting gimmick.
Gov't must exist it has a role, but it has nothing to do with the economy, it must exist to protect people's individual freedoms and secure the borders, there is nothing else, not infrastructure, not health care, not insurance, not education, none of it, that it should be involved with.
Pointing out at other countries as if they are a success while being more socialist mises the point. The free market capitalism created the most prosperous country on the planet in 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, not because of gov't, because of LACK of gov't, that's why people came to USA - to get away from their totalitarian governments. That's why people are leaving USA now and will be leaving in bigger and bigger numbers.
I have spent so much time in Germany over the last 3 years that I can very easily answer all of your questions regarding this topic.
1. Germans are poor. The standard of living is low compared to USA or Canada, that's because people are subsidizing a sizable welfare state, they shouldn't have even done this for the unification of Germany, when the wall fell, but they did. Now they are forced to subsidize huge part of Europe with their productivity and thus destruction of purchasing power.
2. Germans are mostly free of debt, they don't have as much personal debt as Americans do (or people of other countries), they even have savings. Of-course half of their savings were wiped out during the establishment of the Euro zone, Euro stole half of the savings of all Germans just during introduction.
3. German government is not growing compared to US government or governments of other countries. Germany is not subsiding a huge military industrial complex.
4. The retirement and medical benefits are slowly being cut, not increased. There is unfortunately for the economy of Germany all these free loaders from the Euro zone, but they also have plenty of their own free loaders, who are not benefiting the productive economy, they are being subsidized. However Germany allows plenty of immigration from Eastern Europe as well as from places like Turkey, which brings plenty of cheap work force into the country, so this helps to lower the wages inside the country instead of outsourcing to lower wage zones.
However, even given all of this, the companies in Germany ARE collapsing. There are more and more companies going under, do you know what happens in many cases? Foreigners buy them and even keep union contracts afloat for a few years. Actually Chinese are buying up failing (and other) German companies.
So while to you it seems that Germany is doing so much better than USA, it's only a matter of degree. What is happening in Germany is similar to what is happening in USA, except in Germany it's happening SLOWER.
The reasons are being that Germans have much less debt, much higher savings and they are not subsidizing massive military effort.
BTW, Germany is cutting its social spending, that's the right way to go, but they are doing it too slow, so they will have their own crisis in the coming years.
I have made a comment that is contrary to yours, I don't want to repeat what I said there.
Here I'll just add something on this:
What ever happened to the lie about increased productivity and automation, it would seem the benefits only got shared amongst the top psychopathic 1% and the rest simply got screwed over. It's time to start nailing the 1% and teach them a thing or two about being ruthlessly exploited.
- the increase in productivity was absolutely real. The people working 40 hour weeks instead of working all the time in the fields just for subsistence was the increase in productivity due to the capital that was applied to their labour.
You are asking: "what happened?"
If that is a true question, then I have the answer for you. What happened was that the increased productivity due to the free market capitalism was negated by the growing government, which saw the opportunity to steal all that productivity. Politicians want power and in supposed 'democracy' (it should be a Republic, where minority of people get to vote, not majority), bread and circuses mentality allows the worst power hungry liars and con men to be elected into the political offices. They promise everything for nothing and they get elected. When they do get elected, they end up growing the government, at some point the growth of gov't is beyond what the economy can bear. The tipping point was way back in the fifties and sixties, which resulted in the problems that were experienced in the seventies, when Nixon had to default on the dollar to allow the government growth without actually directly increasing taxes, because the economy couldn't afford anymore taxes.
Of-course it started 100 years ago, with that traitor to the Constitution and the Republic, Theodore Roosevelt. Since then pretty much everybody (except for Harding) behaved in the same manner, the government kept growing and the productivity was stolen, negated by the ever growing gov't system, ever growing corruption.
Government is corruption, because it has the power to steal individual liberties and then sell them to the highest bidder. The Constitution was the barrier to that, so they abandoned it and the courts and all branches of gov't participate together in it, it's a well oiled machine of corruption.
To blame 1% is the cop-out, the blame is with the people who again, fell for this bread and circuses promise of so called 'fairness', basically class envy.
Yes, there are people rich and poor, it will always be the case, it will never go away. In the free market capitalist system the rich are those who give people the best product at the lowest price. In the government system it's those, who have the most and the best government connections.
Guess what's better for the 99%, the first system or the second? We had the second system in the USSR, I am grateful that it collapsed. USA is moving that direction, too bad.
As to the 1%, most of the production moved out of USA, so you are left with the 99% producing almost nothing, so what do you care about the 1%? They produce plenty somewhere else, you are still getting the benefit of that production subsidized by foreign governments willing to rob their own people with inflation to prop up US consumer. Eventually this music will stop, you won't have the capital of the 1%, because real capital is production capacity, not paper currency.
If paper currency was the answer, Zimbabwe, USSR, Weimar republic, etc. (100 examples in 150 years), would have prospered. Instead they collapsed.
The capital is the necessary instrument in order to increase productivity, the efficiency of production, because capital buys or makes (or is) the tools that are applied to labour. This is what makes the 99% productive - capital. Capital cannot be stolen, it cannot be printed, it must be saved. If it's stolen, then it's a very temporary infusion. If it's printed, it's the same as st
"Their lives exist solely for someone else's profit" is the working definition of slavery
- nonsense. Nobody forces people to work in any particular place for anybody. In China, less of all, people save their money and start their own businesses easier than in most places.
If the workers end up at a factory, that means that was the best situation they found for themselves, they absolutely should be grateful that the factory exists, so they found the employer who is giving them the most of what they can get.
The employer doesn't force them to work for him, he is making money for himself and in the process he creates jobs that some people decide to bid their labour for. People end up working in places that serve them best.
It's the government that can enslave you, a company cannot. Government forces you to pay income taxes, company pays you money for your labour - a voluntary, equitable exchange.
Which is how we ended child labor and instituted the 40 hour work week in this country, BTW.
- child labour, 40 hour work week, everything, it couldn't be mandated, it couldn't be regulated for, it couldn't be decreed by any government on this planet ever. It only happened as a result of raised productivity of the workers, as the capital was applied to create (acquire) the necessary tools and infrastructure and education for the workers, so that they could be more productive.
Only a productive worker can get more than somebody who is just a subsistence farmer. A subsistence farmer maybe feeds himself. A productive worker is a worker that has the necessary capital applied to his labour, so that he can produce for many more people than just himself. ONLY under those circumstances it is possible to reduce the work hours, to get rid of child labour, etc.
None of if it was ever possible on the face of this Earth without free market capitalism, without capital, without people managing the resources efficiently: land, capital, labour.
A bunch of labourers without capital are only surviving on subsistence level. When somebody saves enough capital and uses it as an investment to make money, uses it to create or acquire tools to make labour more efficient, that's when the workers become more productive, which eventually allows the workers to work much less while producing much more.
The best case scenario of-course is to get rid of all employees and still have production that satisfies the market demand. The best advice to any businessman is NOT to hire people, to get rid of as many employees as possible if it can be done without reducing efficiency.
Efficiency is the key, the goal is not the jobs, the goal is products and services that we want. Maximizing efficiency is the goal so that everything we want could be done without human labour at all. 40 hour work week 100 years ago... if the gov't didn't hack the Constitution and the Republic and didn't start growing the way it did, if it was still constrained by the law (Constitution), if it wasn't allowed to go above its authority with respect to money, interest rates, all the socialist and fascist agenda (health care, insurance, education, energy, business and labour regulations, environmental regulations, everything), then today people maybe could work 3 days a week for just 5 hours a day because their productivity would have been so high, they could produce everything that the market wanted in that time.
Instead the gov't stepped in, took the wealth created by the free market capitalism and destroyed that wealth while destroying the idea of raising efficiency and prevented increase of the standard of living.
The current depression is the market trying to correct all the mistakes that the people, the gov't have done over the last 100 years of activity, taxing income, subsidizing individuals and businesses, creating monopolies, everything that gov't does. The gov't sees this cleansing process as something that must be prevented, and because of it
Politicians don't kill unions, unions kill businesses that are unionised. Unions kill unions.
As to government unions (public sector unions), they shouldn't have never been allowed in the first place.
Private unions are fine, people have the right to associate. However the employer must not be coerced into negotiating with the union collectively, he also has the right to associate.
Even in right to work states, it is actually illegal for an employee to start working in a union shop and then negotiate his terms on his own, the courts have upheld this clearly illegal idea of 'labour peace', where the rights of the individual are destroyed by the union power.
Some info on this in an interview with Mark Mix, president of National Right to Work. This is on unions (minutes 0:40 - 0:49 of that audio interview).
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USA is becoming a third world country because of democratic votes cast by the majority who wants free bread and circuses for the politicians that promise it, while in reality stealing individual freedoms from people to run their businesses to the best of their abilities without being hindered by the government power. That's why people move production out of USA, while government ends up growing on printed, taxed, borrowed money, that's the reason for USA becoming the 3rd world country.
Yeah, but you don't have a robotic suit to crash whoever stood you up. She, on the other hand, does.
Maybe because I actually like a lot of the services that the government provides in exchange for my tax money, and recognize that receiving the benefits of living in a society requires me to pay my share of the social contract?
- that's because you aren't actually paying for services.
You see, if you paid for services, you could just buy them in the free market, you are not looking for that, you are looking for subsidized services, so that you, personally, do not have to pay for them. It is very likely that your tax burden is much smaller than that of people who run their own businesses, thus you live on a subsidy by the government, that's the money stolen from people who make more money than you do.
As to Scandinavia - this is the exact opposite of what USA is, they don't have trade deficit in Scandinavia, they have no debt. That's the opposite of what US government does (and many other European governments) and by the way, Scandinavia went through its own huge recession 20 years ago, to fix it they started moving in the direction of freer market, the opposite direction from the one you are moving towards.
And I don't want to live in Scandinavia, by the way, they export natural resources while they can get them out of the ground, that welfare will end, they will have the same problem that the rest of Europe has then.
Also Somalia isn't a 'libertarian utopia', there is no protection of private property in Somalia, it's a war torn country, first fighting against the British occupation, then suffering under the Communist rule and then having a civil war to get individual freedoms back from the Communist totalitarian regime.
I get the point across though, regardless of the grammar.
I would like to add that the unemployed, the retired, the fake disabled, they are not spotless in this, they have voted for the politicians that promoted the policies that caused the destruction of the economy, caused the exodus of productivity and thus of the jobs elsewhere. You can't get things for free, by forcing somebody to give you stuff for free you are only giving them the reasons to search for a way out. Some find this way out in bribing the political system and becoming part of it, some cannot afford that type of a solution so they end up moving their productivity elsewhere to stay competitive, to stay afloat. With them the jobs leave.
This is a bread and circuses economy and the unemployed, the fake disabled and the retired will not be able to live off of it for much longer. The unemployed will have to find jobs but that cannot happen as long as the government stays this big and powerful. But the power government at this point is on its last legs as is the dollar. The life of the government now is completely tied to the life of the dollar. Once the dollar collapses, so does the government and then finally maybe people will get their freedoms back, only then the economy will restructure and restart.
The moderation system here never worked. The most ridiculous thing about it is that the down moderation of specific accounts prevents posting comments from those accounts. So who does that help? Seriously? How is this supposed to stop a troll from trolling or whatever the purpose is? On a technical forum?
But it does allow a bunch of like minded individuals to minimize, to silence opinions from specific accounts, opinions that they do not agree with. Does it really work? I mean I made this second account to post more than 2 times a day, because I want to make a comment sometimes.
Having a 'like' or 'hate' moderation makes sense, whatever, as long as it doesn't prevent the usage of an account that makes sense. Otherwise it only artificially creates more accounts on this site.
That's nothing. Check this out. This is my first account, I am limited to 2 or 3 comments a day, and there is a number of 'followers' who are religiously moderating every comment I make down, whatever it is.
No, those problems are everybody's problem, they are not solutions of any kind at all. Those problems destroy businesses and while you may think that this means that your environment may become cleaner without businesses, you are wrong. Poor people without businesses don't have anything, they pollute the environment without any regard just to survive. For reference you can look at the former USSR and its track record of being 'environmentally friendly'.
Well you have a problem, don't you? 50% includes the so called unemployed, disabled, poor, retired. The children also don't pay taxes, I'll exclude them from this, their parents are supposed to be taken care of them.
But you have a problem then, if half of the country cannot pay taxes and are the ward of the government, then you are putting the obligation on the other 50% to care for them for some unimaginable reason. And your plan is to steal from some people to subsidize others and you think this represents a VIABLE strategy for an economy.
Here is the truth, by forcing people who still work to be slaves for the people who don't work you are only doing one thing: creating a bigger and bigger government in order to fulfill this function, because this function requires a lot of processes that include threat of violence. I mean why would anybody pay income, corporate, payroll taxes at all if not paying them did not result IRS and other governmental agents with guns coming after them?
Do you know what slavery is? Using threat of violence (guns) to coerce some people to work for the benefit of some other people, and the factors such as who exactly is who do not matter at all. You want to use government to force a guy who makes 10 million a year to work for a guy who makes 20,000 a year?
Then call a spade a spade, you are turning the 10 million guy into a slave of the 20,000 guy.
But it's not only immoral, as I have shown, it is also stupid economically speaking, it does not work. Eventually with the growth of government you end up in a situation where government is a system that 50% (or more) of people believe must extract wealth from those who actually produce it by any means necessary. Obviously the most well connected to 0.01% escape the threat of violence, they are so well connected, they are NOT subject to any of the laws of the land, just ask Corzine. The guy stole billions and now what? Now he just may become the next Federal reserve chairman.
No, this hits the people under the 0.01% mark and over the 50 something % mark, somewhere in the middle there are a few layers of people who still produce and still have something, so they can be extracted from.
But they eventually will also give up or go bankrupt or they will do the most sensible thing and MOVE their production somewhere else as they absolutely should and have a moral imperative as free individuals to do - save themselves.
With the ever growing dependent class and with the ever growing elite class - politicians, the very top bankers, who are de-facto politicians, you are ending up with a completely unsustainable situation, you can't recover from it without a huge crash, and at this point this huge crash is imminent. It is unavoidable, the system must crash because it can never pay its debts and it must restructure the debts and allow people who lent money to the system to go bankrupt. The system must allow the government to shrink by crazy number, maybe 99% of government force must lose jobs.
The retired can no longer stay retired, they have to rely on themselves.
The unemployed can no longer stay unemployed, they cannot live off the welfare checks, and all the regulations and laws that allow this and create incentives for this must be gone.
The disabled can no longer stay unemployed, and for years now the people who no longer qualified for normal welfare benefits, EI, all that stuff, they just moved into the 'disabled' category. They are not disabled. The truly disabled will have to find private charity.
The students can no longer borrow from the government, they cannot repay their loans anyway, and their education is worthless, all the civil arts education is worthless, sociology majors do not have any skills, all education outside of very narrow few fields is worthless at these prices, which are artificially created by abundance of government loans.
Yes, if people want the services, they must pay for them there cannot be any taxes to provide those services.b