But what is your proposal, that there shouldn't be thousands of people attempting to start a business? Yes, during Bill Clinton era the credit was cheap, Greenspan's put was obviously the moral hazard that moved the market, he piled on stacks, mountains of cash upon every problem. But removing that part from the equation, what is your objection to thousands of companies trying to succeed while only tens surviving?
Yes, a big wad of cash is a much more efficient way to run a business. You don't have to wait for ridiculous processes, you don't have to run from one government office to another. A big wad of cash in China is no different than what is happening in USA, in USA you also need a big wad of cash, only in USA the actual wad of cash ends up being much bigger while you have to wait and then you end up not with government out of your way in any case, you still have to comply with a million and one regulation. Give me a 'big wad of cash' system any day over that.
You clearly have a negative connotation with the word 'commerce'. Commerce only means trading for things, and at the basis of it is trading for things we need by making things other people need. It's a positive word - we make things we need, and clearly we need things.
Fiat by definition is currency that is declared to be valuable by the decree of government, and governments hate gold, they don't want anybody to use it or to have it, it prevents the owners of it from being taxed by inflation. Thus your entire premise is incorrect, gold cannot be 'fiat', nobody declares gold to be money, people just see it that way.
As to 'magical price', when nobody sets the relative value of goods and money, the market discovers the relative prices, it is what the market does.
As to paying 1.6K for an ounce, the absolute dollar amounts don't matter. I was buying at 250 and at 500 at 800 and at 1200, it didn't matter, many people saw it as high at those prices as well. I still didn't sell any, I see it as money - store of value.
As to people to speculate, I sometimes do too, but speculation is a different topic, it has nothing to do with fundamental understanding, such as understanding of inflation.
Appeal to antiquity? Is 1971 antique now? Do you even realize that the gold standard was repealed 'temporarily'? Nixon took US off the gold standard temporarily. Is yesterday 'antiquity' for you as well?
OK, then how about 10 years ago, 1999-2002, is that 'antique'? Do you know what "Brown's Bottom" is?
Money is not just a measurement, it's a store of value, unit of account and means of exchange. If you want to keep your money in something that doesn't store value, go right ahead, keep it in paper.
As to backing things with steel - even steel has too much value in it today to make US cents out of. Yes, a steel standard is better than nothing. Steel has too many industrial uses and it rusts, so it doesn't keep value as well as gold, but it's definitely better than nothing, which is what fiat currencies of today are.
Of-course there is intrinsic value. Thousands of years of human history prove that physical items have intrinsic value. For example a piece of steel is much more valuable than a piece of paper, not because we 'believe' it to be, but because of what can be made of steel vs paper.
Same with gold vs fiat, all fiat currencies go to 0 over time, every one of them.
Gold is a proven store of value. It takes effort to mine gold, people use gold as jewelry and as money, we even have some industrial uses for it that are definitely impossible with paper. That's intrinsic value.
If you want to argue about it, argue with thousands of years of human history, not with me.
I don't see it as being civilized at all - sending people to prison for 15 years because they copied something off an unsecured server and placed it on some web page.
Is that civilized? I don't think so. It's barbaric. It would make much more sense for the clients of Sony to sue them and get damages if the courts find that damages were caused, but 15 years in prison because Sony is in bed with politicians?
Sure, what's the purpose of him being in jail exactly? What is he going to do there? Why are you, as a tax payer, forced to subsidize his living accommodations? His possessions should be confiscated and sold off, but it's not a gov't problem, it's a private problem. People who lost money with him didn't do due diligence and bought into his scam, so what's your particular problem with him, did you lose money because of him?
"if the price goes up fewer people will have them"
- well yes, that's how every product works, the more it costs, the smaller the market is for it. Think plasma TVs when they just came out and today. The difference is price, and if the gov't sets tariffs for example on plasma TV imports and because of that the TVs become twice as expensive, fewer people will own them. If the prices goes up by a factor of 10, then very few people will buy them.
If OTOH there manufacturers find a way to increase efficiency, minimize costs further and prices fall by a factor of 10, then everybody will have more than 1 plasma screen.
If a 50 inch TV costs 40 bucks, then people will have 5 of them at home.
If the price goes to 10 dollars for a 60inch plasma screen, then people will buy them not just to use as TVs, but just to break them, use them for various reason I can't even think of. Maybe people will build houses out of them.
--
If you can own a fraction of a bitcoin, there is still a smallest unit that you can have, so basically the same rules apply, except now, obviously they even lose the perceived collector value.
As to being general purpose, well, obviously they are not. They have very specific purpose, you need a computer, maybe a computer network to be able to use them. It's not like you can take a Bitcoin, put a hole in it and wear it around your neck, though you may have a Bitcoin USB stick with a Bitcoin on it, but then it's not a Bitcoin, it's a USB stick, which has intrinsic value.
and to sum up your position, not only the victims of theft should be not compensated by the perps, but they should then bear responsibility to pay for imprisoning these thieves both, with their taxes and by having bigger government that is given this function, and thus having less freedoms eventually, because all growth of government leads to fewer individual freedoms.
My position is that the people who have something stolen from them should be in a position to recover what is stolen, this is a private, civil matter, perps should be forced to return the goods, or to work to pay back for what was stolen plus damages (maybe a couple of times the value of the stolen goods) and there shouldn't gov't throwing people to jail for theft, taxes shouldn't be collected and spent on this.
Raynaldo Rivera, aged 20, suspected member of Lulzsec has been arrested....
charged with conspiracy and unauthorized impairment of a protected computer. The Lulzsec member may be facing 15 years in prison if convicted....
accused of hacking Sony Pictureâ(TM)s Web site in June 2011 through use of SQL injection attack and downloading thousands of records containing names, birth dates, addresses, e-mails, phone numbers, and passwords. The hacker after posting all the data onto Pastebin, announced the hack through a tweet.....
"Hey @Sony, you know we're making off with a bunch of your internal stuff right now and you haven't even noticed?"
The hacking collective claimed that they had managed to grab information of more than a million people whereas Sony countered the claims saying that only 37k records were actually stolen.
there is no sense of proportion here, it's not justice. Maybe it is the people, whose records were stolen, that should be outraged, not Sony, Sony as a company should be humble about it and do whatever to mitigate the problem their lack of interest in security may have caused.
But because large corporations like Sony are in bed with large governments, there will be no justice. Sure, send these guys to prison for 15 years because a company is outraged. How about company's clients?
My point is - this is none of government's business, it is up to the market to solve theft crimes. If these guys caused damage to private individuals, private individuals should take them to court (and maybe they should take Sony to court), but this has nothing to do with government, why is government throwing these people to jail?
Bitcoin is a limited resource, as you said, 21 million coins, so there cannot be more than 21 million individual owners of the actual coin.
But there are many different possible scenarios for Bitcoins, I can come up with 2 right now.
1. It is possible to have a derivative product based on Bitcoin, something like a fractional reserve system, where 1 Bitcoin is basically an asset behind an ever increasing debt instrument (think fractional reserve). When this happens, then Bitcoins will be in very few hands, while the debt based on them will be growing and spreading more widely, so more than 21 million people with debt based on the actual coins.
At some point the Bitcoin will enter a bubble stage based on the debt. The reason for it is that people will expect the debt to be paid back with interest, but it cannot be paid with interest in Bitcoins, it has to be interest in other currencies. But this means that Bitcoins have to go up in price because of all this interest that is supposed to be paid to the holders of the coins.
2. If there are no derivative instruments, there is no growing debt based on Bitcoins, but without debt based on Bitcoin, it just becomes a limited edition item, where the price in other fiat currencies is completely subjective. Who can say, if the price goes up, then again, fewer people will have them. If price goes down to 0, then it doesn't matter who has them, you can't use them for anything.
If prices go either very high or very low, it limits the number of people either way, in either case it will be traded on exchanges and number of people trading them will be diminishing. If prices go too far up, most people are priced out of that market. If prices go too far down, everybody will be trying to jump ship, in that case it would actually possible for 1 person to buy up all of them and then maybe sell them as collector items.
It's hard to say precisely, but they are of very limited purpose and so there will be limited number of owners.
While I am not myself in Bitcoin and would not recommend it, it's not because it's a 'ponzi' scam, it's not. It's because there is no intrinsic value behind these electronic means of exchange, they don't store value. Yes, they can act as means of exchange and units of account, but the third property of money is lost - store of value.
Same exact problem is with fiat money in terms of store of value - they don't have that property, specifically because the interest rates are manipulated by the government (or pseudo-government agency, like the Fed), and the money is created out of thin air. That's the reason gov't hates real money, it wants fiat, because it allows the gov't to give promises that it doesn't have to pay for by raising taxes, instead it prints and destroys the very value of money.
But Bitcoins are not a ponzi scam it's the opposite, there is no exponential growth of Bitcoins, it's the reversed pyramid, the number of people with Bitcoins diminishes over time, so that is an unfair qualification for it.
The free market that USA used to have provided it with the standard of living that Americans had because they were productive. The laws that were passed, the departments that were created, all the government that grew on that wealth that was stolen by the politicians from the productive people, all that it has done, it destroyed the manufacturing and productivity in USA. Inflation is a huge part of it, you can trace the beginning of this downfall directly to the US defaulting on the dollar, when Nixon removed the gold standard (temporarily, by the way, it was done 'temporarily').
The government started stealing from people on an unprecedented scale when that was done, the savers, the investors became the milking cows for the government just with the inflation tax, the public loved the spending, the public deserved this government.
As to this guy who runs his business and builds the fans in USA, with one component being imported, you are saying - fuck this guy. So what, you want to prevent a business from existing in USA based on the fact that he gets one component from China? As I said - the public deserves this government.
I also said it for years now that USA is moving in the direction of USSR. That's why I did move already, moved my business to Asia and moved out of America as well, I can't take another USSR in a different form, that's enough for me, I had enough of that. I am not going to pay for the stupidity of people once more.
- yes, and society has always paid for this by destroying its economy because it destroyed individual freedoms.
because people wouldn't choose to do stupid things
- there is no such thing as 'ideal universe', we live only once, it's our prerogative to go through life as we see fit, it's nobody else's business.
Alchohol is different, of course, because it doesn't tend to have lasting effects even if you drink some every day
- alcohol is much worse than pot, drunk drivers kill more people in a year because they are drunk than all refer addicts on this planet throughout the history of humanity because they are high.
I do think the government should have the power to deny women abortions, because I think abortion is murder
- I didn't realize the depth of what I was dealing here with, so never mind.
Obama has already won, Romney just doesn't understand it yet.
The reason for it is that the dialog now is not about being fiscally conservative and pro-individual freedom vs big government, it is now about who is the bigger Democrat: Obama or Romney?
Obviously Obama IS the bigger Democrat than Romney, thus Romney has already lost.
The moment Romney said for the first time that Obama is 'hurting Medicare by cutting it', that was the moment Romney lost. Why? Who believes Romney that he is going to out-Obama Obama?
--
But it doesn't matter who wins, Romney or Obama, the end result will be exactly the same, there is no difference. Actually it doesn't matter who wins right now, even if it could be Ron Paul or Garry Johnson, the coming collapse of the US dollar and bonds is unavoidable. The difference would have been what would happen AFTER the collapse, and with Obama or Romney (doesn't matter) after the collapse either of them would attempt to grow the government even more by completely finishing off the private sector and free market economy, whatever is left of it in USA.
For reference you can see a couple of comments that give a little more perspective.
I don't care about your parties, I don't even live in your country anymore (assuming you are in USA), so why don't you come up with a more meaningful argument than ridiculous ad-hominem.
It changes a lot: it means I can pay security guards to stop you getting back into the house you thought was yours. Government's not involved, so good luck raising your own army.
- good. Majority of people are not exactly richest on the planet, they'll have to come up with a solution to this that is market based. The solution may involve an occasional lynching of silly people, but that's alright.
Lynching of course is not the only way, people have set up competing, market based court and jail systems on their own many times, even in America.
I have no problem with the socialisation of losses. My issue is with the capitalisation of profit.
- talk about mental illness.
So, like I said, when I get drunk and hit you with a car, good luck stopping me before I do it again to your family.
- let me put it this way - I am not exactly without resources, you are not the only one with ability to raise hell.
You think you are going to 'help the herd' by reducing individual liberties? So you are going to allow government to tell people what to do with themselves, how to live and allow it throw people to jail for doing things to themselves that government denies them, and this is somehow going to help society?
AFAIC that is the path to devastation, not allowing people to live their lives the way they choose, but allowing government to step in with such amazing powers over individuals. Yes, there always will be some people who will kill their brain cells.
Or do you think that alcohol improves cognitive functions somehow?
People will find a way to deny reality, your way of denying realty is to think that you can truly change people's desire to deny their reality in their preferred way and you think this is a good thing for the economy and society, to have such a powerful government that can do this.
What's the difference between government having this power and government having power to deny women abortions? What's the difference? There is no difference.
(same guy here, my first account is limited because of trolls, like you)
That's good, because I come from a fairly rich family and - since it's not a governmental issue - I can just take over the land I want.
- it's not a government issue, it's a private matter. Just because 'you come from a rich family' doesn't change that fact that government shouldn't be involved in private disputes of this type.
That's good, because without group responsibility there is no government, and see above.
- quite the contrary, there is no such thing as 'group responsibility', there is only individual responsibility. The very idea of 'group responsibility' should be immediately taken with all sorts of prejudice. Should you pay a fine for somebody else's transgressions? Should you be thrown to jail for somebody else's crime?
Are not everybody paying for the other people's mistakes because of this ridiculous idea of 'group responsibility' at the very moment when the government steals from everybody to bail out the failed companies, like banks? What about all the subsidies that are given to corporations to do whatever they do, just because they have good access to the power in the government, isn't everybody made responsible 'as a group' for their behavior? You are a troll, though the moderators don't understand it.
If you hit somebody with a car, it's a private matter. People don't need government to have working competing criminal and judicial systems.
As to mass transit - the very concept of it was destroyed in USA with the government subsidizing the auto, gas and road building companies, when they stepped in to create that giant network of unprofitable (and thus unsustainable and unmaintainable in the long run) system of highways, that in reality was just a power grab and a huge heist.
Slashdot Mirror
But what is your proposal, that there shouldn't be thousands of people attempting to start a business? Yes, during Bill Clinton era the credit was cheap, Greenspan's put was obviously the moral hazard that moved the market, he piled on stacks, mountains of cash upon every problem. But removing that part from the equation, what is your objection to thousands of companies trying to succeed while only tens surviving?
Yes, a big wad of cash is a much more efficient way to run a business. You don't have to wait for ridiculous processes, you don't have to run from one government office to another. A big wad of cash in China is no different than what is happening in USA, in USA you also need a big wad of cash, only in USA the actual wad of cash ends up being much bigger while you have to wait and then you end up not with government out of your way in any case, you still have to comply with a million and one regulation. Give me a 'big wad of cash' system any day over that.
no government ever gives up power on its own.
the UK government hopes to grow East London so that we can benefit from the same sort of success that has been seen in California;
- DOA, just like Russian version of Silicon Valley (Skolkovo).
That is unless the government in UK is planning to get rid of regulations, taxes, labour laws and inflation of-course.
Alternatively you can reword this finding like so: overeating causes health problems, so don't.
You clearly have a negative connotation with the word 'commerce'. Commerce only means trading for things, and at the basis of it is trading for things we need by making things other people need. It's a positive word - we make things we need, and clearly we need things.
Fiat by definition is currency that is declared to be valuable by the decree of government, and governments hate gold, they don't want anybody to use it or to have it, it prevents the owners of it from being taxed by inflation. Thus your entire premise is incorrect, gold cannot be 'fiat', nobody declares gold to be money, people just see it that way.
As to 'magical price', when nobody sets the relative value of goods and money, the market discovers the relative prices, it is what the market does.
As to paying 1.6K for an ounce, the absolute dollar amounts don't matter. I was buying at 250 and at 500 at 800 and at 1200, it didn't matter, many people saw it as high at those prices as well. I still didn't sell any, I see it as money - store of value.
As to people to speculate, I sometimes do too, but speculation is a different topic, it has nothing to do with fundamental understanding, such as understanding of inflation.
too late.
Appeal to antiquity? Is 1971 antique now? Do you even realize that the gold standard was repealed 'temporarily'? Nixon took US off the gold standard temporarily. Is yesterday 'antiquity' for you as well?
OK, then how about 10 years ago, 1999-2002, is that 'antique'? Do you know what "Brown's Bottom" is?
Money is not just a measurement, it's a store of value, unit of account and means of exchange. If you want to keep your money in something that doesn't store value, go right ahead, keep it in paper.
As to backing things with steel - even steel has too much value in it today to make US cents out of. Yes, a steel standard is better than nothing. Steel has too many industrial uses and it rusts, so it doesn't keep value as well as gold, but it's definitely better than nothing, which is what fiat currencies of today are.
Of-course there is intrinsic value. Thousands of years of human history prove that physical items have intrinsic value. For example a piece of steel is much more valuable than a piece of paper, not because we 'believe' it to be, but because of what can be made of steel vs paper.
Same with gold vs fiat, all fiat currencies go to 0 over time, every one of them.
Gold is a proven store of value. It takes effort to mine gold, people use gold as jewelry and as money, we even have some industrial uses for it that are definitely impossible with paper. That's intrinsic value.
If you want to argue about it, argue with thousands of years of human history, not with me.
I don't see it as being civilized at all - sending people to prison for 15 years because they copied something off an unsecured server and placed it on some web page.
Is that civilized? I don't think so. It's barbaric. It would make much more sense for the clients of Sony to sue them and get damages if the courts find that damages were caused, but 15 years in prison because Sony is in bed with politicians?
Sure, what's the purpose of him being in jail exactly? What is he going to do there? Why are you, as a tax payer, forced to subsidize his living accommodations? His possessions should be confiscated and sold off, but it's not a gov't problem, it's a private problem. People who lost money with him didn't do due diligence and bought into his scam, so what's your particular problem with him, did you lose money because of him?
"if the price goes up fewer people will have them"
- well yes, that's how every product works, the more it costs, the smaller the market is for it. Think plasma TVs when they just came out and today. The difference is price, and if the gov't sets tariffs for example on plasma TV imports and because of that the TVs become twice as expensive, fewer people will own them. If the prices goes up by a factor of 10, then very few people will buy them.
If OTOH there manufacturers find a way to increase efficiency, minimize costs further and prices fall by a factor of 10, then everybody will have more than 1 plasma screen.
If a 50 inch TV costs 40 bucks, then people will have 5 of them at home.
If the price goes to 10 dollars for a 60inch plasma screen, then people will buy them not just to use as TVs, but just to break them, use them for various reason I can't even think of. Maybe people will build houses out of them.
--
If you can own a fraction of a bitcoin, there is still a smallest unit that you can have, so basically the same rules apply, except now, obviously they even lose the perceived collector value.
As to being general purpose, well, obviously they are not. They have very specific purpose, you need a computer, maybe a computer network to be able to use them. It's not like you can take a Bitcoin, put a hole in it and wear it around your neck, though you may have a Bitcoin USB stick with a Bitcoin on it, but then it's not a Bitcoin, it's a USB stick, which has intrinsic value.
and to sum up your position, not only the victims of theft should be not compensated by the perps, but they should then bear responsibility to pay for imprisoning these thieves both, with their taxes and by having bigger government that is given this function, and thus having less freedoms eventually, because all growth of government leads to fewer individual freedoms.
My position is that the people who have something stolen from them should be in a position to recover what is stolen, this is a private, civil matter, perps should be forced to return the goods, or to work to pay back for what was stolen plus damages (maybe a couple of times the value of the stolen goods) and there shouldn't gov't throwing people to jail for theft, taxes shouldn't be collected and spent on this.
Raynaldo Rivera, aged 20, suspected member of Lulzsec has been arrested ....
charged with conspiracy and unauthorized impairment of a protected computer. The Lulzsec member may be facing 15 years in prison if convicted....
accused of hacking Sony Pictureâ(TM)s Web site in June 2011 through use of SQL injection attack and downloading thousands of records containing names, birth dates, addresses, e-mails, phone numbers, and passwords. The hacker after posting all the data onto Pastebin, announced the hack through a tweet.....
"Hey @Sony, you know we're making off with a bunch of your internal stuff right now and you haven't even noticed?"
The hacking collective claimed that they had managed to grab information of more than a million people whereas Sony countered the claims saying that only 37k records were actually stolen.
there is no sense of proportion here, it's not justice. Maybe it is the people, whose records were stolen, that should be outraged, not Sony, Sony as a company should be humble about it and do whatever to mitigate the problem their lack of interest in security may have caused.
But because large corporations like Sony are in bed with large governments, there will be no justice. Sure, send these guys to prison for 15 years because a company is outraged. How about company's clients?
My point is - this is none of government's business, it is up to the market to solve theft crimes. If these guys caused damage to private individuals, private individuals should take them to court (and maybe they should take Sony to court), but this has nothing to do with government, why is government throwing these people to jail?
Bitcoin is a limited resource, as you said, 21 million coins, so there cannot be more than 21 million individual owners of the actual coin.
But there are many different possible scenarios for Bitcoins, I can come up with 2 right now.
1. It is possible to have a derivative product based on Bitcoin, something like a fractional reserve system, where 1 Bitcoin is basically an asset behind an ever increasing debt instrument (think fractional reserve). When this happens, then Bitcoins will be in very few hands, while the debt based on them will be growing and spreading more widely, so more than 21 million people with debt based on the actual coins.
At some point the Bitcoin will enter a bubble stage based on the debt. The reason for it is that people will expect the debt to be paid back with interest, but it cannot be paid with interest in Bitcoins, it has to be interest in other currencies. But this means that Bitcoins have to go up in price because of all this interest that is supposed to be paid to the holders of the coins.
2. If there are no derivative instruments, there is no growing debt based on Bitcoins, but without debt based on Bitcoin, it just becomes a limited edition item, where the price in other fiat currencies is completely subjective. Who can say, if the price goes up, then again, fewer people will have them. If price goes down to 0, then it doesn't matter who has them, you can't use them for anything.
If prices go either very high or very low, it limits the number of people either way, in either case it will be traded on exchanges and number of people trading them will be diminishing. If prices go too far up, most people are priced out of that market. If prices go too far down, everybody will be trying to jump ship, in that case it would actually possible for 1 person to buy up all of them and then maybe sell them as collector items.
It's hard to say precisely, but they are of very limited purpose and so there will be limited number of owners.
While I am not myself in Bitcoin and would not recommend it, it's not because it's a 'ponzi' scam, it's not. It's because there is no intrinsic value behind these electronic means of exchange, they don't store value. Yes, they can act as means of exchange and units of account, but the third property of money is lost - store of value.
Same exact problem is with fiat money in terms of store of value - they don't have that property, specifically because the interest rates are manipulated by the government (or pseudo-government agency, like the Fed), and the money is created out of thin air. That's the reason gov't hates real money, it wants fiat, because it allows the gov't to give promises that it doesn't have to pay for by raising taxes, instead it prints and destroys the very value of money.
But Bitcoins are not a ponzi scam it's the opposite, there is no exponential growth of Bitcoins, it's the reversed pyramid, the number of people with Bitcoins diminishes over time, so that is an unfair qualification for it.
--
American problems and solutions in 24 minutes.
Here is the prescription for America that would actually fix the economy by returning it to being a productive nation.
No, you don't understand a word of it.
The free market that USA used to have provided it with the standard of living that Americans had because they were productive. The laws that were passed, the departments that were created, all the government that grew on that wealth that was stolen by the politicians from the productive people, all that it has done, it destroyed the manufacturing and productivity in USA. Inflation is a huge part of it, you can trace the beginning of this downfall directly to the US defaulting on the dollar, when Nixon removed the gold standard (temporarily, by the way, it was done 'temporarily').
The government started stealing from people on an unprecedented scale when that was done, the savers, the investors became the milking cows for the government just with the inflation tax, the public loved the spending, the public deserved this government.
As to this guy who runs his business and builds the fans in USA, with one component being imported, you are saying - fuck this guy. So what, you want to prevent a business from existing in USA based on the fact that he gets one component from China? As I said - the public deserves this government.
I also said it for years now that USA is moving in the direction of USSR. That's why I did move already, moved my business to Asia and moved out of America as well, I can't take another USSR in a different form, that's enough for me, I had enough of that. I am not going to pay for the stupidity of people once more.
Yes. Society has always done this.
- yes, and society has always paid for this by destroying its economy because it destroyed individual freedoms.
because people wouldn't choose to do stupid things
- there is no such thing as 'ideal universe', we live only once, it's our prerogative to go through life as we see fit, it's nobody else's business.
Alchohol is different, of course, because it doesn't tend to have lasting effects even if you drink some every day
- alcohol is much worse than pot, drunk drivers kill more people in a year because they are drunk than all refer addicts on this planet throughout the history of humanity because they are high.
I do think the government should have the power to deny women abortions, because I think abortion is murder
- I didn't realize the depth of what I was dealing here with, so never mind.
Obama has already won, Romney just doesn't understand it yet.
The reason for it is that the dialog now is not about being fiscally conservative and pro-individual freedom vs big government, it is now about who is the bigger Democrat: Obama or Romney?
Obviously Obama IS the bigger Democrat than Romney, thus Romney has already lost.
The moment Romney said for the first time that Obama is 'hurting Medicare by cutting it', that was the moment Romney lost. Why? Who believes Romney that he is going to out-Obama Obama?
--
But it doesn't matter who wins, Romney or Obama, the end result will be exactly the same, there is no difference. Actually it doesn't matter who wins right now, even if it could be Ron Paul or Garry Johnson, the coming collapse of the US dollar and bonds is unavoidable. The difference would have been what would happen AFTER the collapse, and with Obama or Romney (doesn't matter) after the collapse either of them would attempt to grow the government even more by completely finishing off the private sector and free market economy, whatever is left of it in USA.
For reference you can see a couple of comments that give a little more perspective.
I don't care about your parties, I don't even live in your country anymore (assuming you are in USA), so why don't you come up with a more meaningful argument than ridiculous ad-hominem.
It changes a lot: it means I can pay security guards to stop you getting back into the house you thought was yours. Government's not involved, so good luck raising your own army.
- good. Majority of people are not exactly richest on the planet, they'll have to come up with a solution to this that is market based. The solution may involve an occasional lynching of silly people, but that's alright.
Lynching of course is not the only way, people have set up competing, market based court and jail systems on their own many times, even in America.
I have no problem with the socialisation of losses. My issue is with the capitalisation of profit.
- talk about mental illness.
So, like I said, when I get drunk and hit you with a car, good luck stopping me before I do it again to your family.
- let me put it this way - I am not exactly without resources, you are not the only one with ability to raise hell.
You think you are going to 'help the herd' by reducing individual liberties? So you are going to allow government to tell people what to do with themselves, how to live and allow it throw people to jail for doing things to themselves that government denies them, and this is somehow going to help society?
AFAIC that is the path to devastation, not allowing people to live their lives the way they choose, but allowing government to step in with such amazing powers over individuals. Yes, there always will be some people who will kill their brain cells.
Or do you think that alcohol improves cognitive functions somehow?
People will find a way to deny reality, your way of denying realty is to think that you can truly change people's desire to deny their reality in their preferred way and you think this is a good thing for the economy and society, to have such a powerful government that can do this.
What's the difference between government having this power and government having power to deny women abortions? What's the difference? There is no difference.
(same guy here, my first account is limited because of trolls, like you)
That's good, because I come from a fairly rich family and - since it's not a governmental issue - I can just take over the land I want.
- it's not a government issue, it's a private matter. Just because 'you come from a rich family' doesn't change that fact that government shouldn't be involved in private disputes of this type.
That's good, because without group responsibility there is no government, and see above.
- quite the contrary, there is no such thing as 'group responsibility', there is only individual responsibility. The very idea of 'group responsibility' should be immediately taken with all sorts of prejudice. Should you pay a fine for somebody else's transgressions? Should you be thrown to jail for somebody else's crime?
Are not everybody paying for the other people's mistakes because of this ridiculous idea of 'group responsibility' at the very moment when the government steals from everybody to bail out the failed companies, like banks? What about all the subsidies that are given to corporations to do whatever they do, just because they have good access to the power in the government, isn't everybody made responsible 'as a group' for their behavior? You are a troll, though the moderators don't understand it.
If you hit somebody with a car, it's a private matter. People don't need government to have working competing criminal and judicial systems.
As to mass transit - the very concept of it was destroyed in USA with the government subsidizing the auto, gas and road building companies, when they stepped in to create that giant network of unprofitable (and thus unsustainable and unmaintainable in the long run) system of highways, that in reality was just a power grab and a huge heist.