The first is draw up an Open Data Bill and pass it into law. This would (where applicable) mandate the use of open standards by firms, and also mandate that all data held about a user is downloadable by that user, in an open standard.
So I guess this is the other side's version of "too big to fail." Instead of thieving billions from the public to support "too big to fail" companies, steal everything from those companies for the public's benefit.
I wonder if it's even possible for a government-based solution to a problem that isn't downright predatory.
Any momentum Syria may have been building as a regional game development hub slowed considerably in 2004, when then-US President George W. Bush levied economic sanctions against the country.
So Bush made the conscious decision to prohibit investment in Syria, but Syria's president is responsible for this. And when a man beats his wife, it's her fault for "making him do it," right?
Without government your freedom is in peril. Then it becomes whoever else has the most power can take what they want.
You just described government itself with that second sentence.
How much freedom do the citizen's of Somalia (other than the warlords) have?
Virtually all of the violence in Somalia is being caused by other states (the U.S., the U.N., the surrounding nation-states) meddling in the country, using the locals to try to take control of Somalia.
Would there violence without states? Sure. But there's plenty of violence with statism. Eliminating statism isn't going to eliminate violence---but it is going to eliminate the centralization of a massive amount of violence under a name arrogantly claims its violence is "legitimate."
If global warming is a factual reality what would your proposed solution be?
If the non-aggression principle is wrong, then it's perfectly okay for me to come over there and settle this debate through violence.
Ownership originates from self-ownership. This article is a pretty good explanation of the concept of self-ownership and its implications.
The free market is only "lazy" in that it lets people solve their own problems and make their own choices without external interference. Sure, you can call it "lazy"---in that people don't meddle in other people's business.
Modern Progressivism & Liberalism: Ideas so good they have to be mandatory.
Nice. Although, i would take issue with using the word "liberalism" like this. Liberalism means people who believe in human liberty. The progressives usurped the term to describe their confiscatory, controlling ideology, in order to dress it up and make it look better. I refuse to use the term to describe progressivism.
DOD and the military services (particularly the Navy) has been saying that climate change is a major national security threat for YEARS. This is NOT NEW, and it's not about the "war on terror", or anything else, "running out of steam".
I know. I think the first I heard about this was when Bush was in office. What's your point? They were making noises about terrorism years before they launched the "War on Terror," too. That doesn't change the fact that the "War on Terror" is a pretext for even more military spending than the Cold War inspired.
The two issues have nothing to do with one another---until the government tries to use climate change to infringe upon people's freedom.
"Reality" is not imposing these rules. It is not "reality" that will be extracting "carbon taxes" from people; that's the government. It is not "reality" that wants to incrementally force people to stop driving gasoline-powered vehicles; that's the government. It is not "reality" that taxes, regulates, forces, and coerces; that's the government. The government is made up of conscious individuals who make choices to act (or not act) in certain ways.
To say otherwise is to deny the reality that human beings are responsible for their own actions, regardless of their excuses and justifications. I have known men who tried to claim that their wife "made me hit her," but those arguments really don't have much credibility with me.:)
Much of the green agenda is about getting rid of bureaucracy and reduce wasted spending.
Hmm? Entire agencies have been created to implement this so-called green agenda, and they're only getting bigger and more well-staffed over time.
As just one tiny example, compare modern "recycling" and "transfer stations" to the "town dumps" of 20-30 years ago. We now have swarms of bureaucrats (or in some cases, rent-seeking private companies you're mandated to do business with) to deal with trash, transfer it elsewhere, recycle it, and so on. And we're expected to sort our garbage into paper, plastic, glass, metal, and so on. My hometown (pop. 1,340) demands that people take the soda bottle caps off and wash our trash before we throw it in the recycling bins. Many towns have "recycling committees" -- appointed boards of bureaucrats -- who oversee this stuff and come up with ways of making it even more complex.
How come everyone respects scientific opinion until it conflicts with their personal beliefs or agenda?
Because when you try to use a "scientific opinion" to threaten people to take their money and regulate and control their lives, they tend to resist, that's why.
One tactic such people try to use is to discredit the science. Discredit the opinion, you discredit the policy, since now there's no need for the policy. I don't support this tactic, because it misses the moral/ethical point about the government pointing guns at people to begin with. The tactic is akin to "fighting the enemy on their own turf," which is usually a losing proposition, from a strategic standpoint. And it very often results in disingenuous arguments or outright falsehoods being spread, which certainly isn't good for science or society in general. But some people use the tactic nonetheless, and it's understandable. When someone's trying to defend themselves against coercion, the truth probably doesn't matter to them.
Can we next debate whether or not smoking tobacco is bad for your lungs?
Another great example of how, regardless of whether or not it be harmful, the government should not be regulating people's consensual decision to purchase tobacco, or to work or dine in environments where other people are using tobacco.
I am amazed that you are so insistent about the "truth" of the extremely complex issue of climate change, yet seem to have trouble grasping the simplistic truth in the assertion that more money and control held by an entity means that entity has more power.
I'm not arguing over the factuality of global warming. I'm arguing over whether not, whatever the truth be, it justifies the government interfering with people's freedoms and liberties. "Just because they can, doesn't mean they should." I've posted enough other comments in this thread to make my point so I won't reiterate it here.
And tell me, how is there "political gain" for the Democrats in raising taxes and creating regulations? How does it help them? Cause from where I stand, they'd be able to win a lot more power if, like the Republicans, they simply denied objective fact and promised tax cuts for everyone. They don't do that. Instead they accept the truth and try to deal with it.
More money for the government. More control over us. More secure jobs for bureaucrats.
Are you trying to say you're unaware of how giving more power, money, and control to an entity is an obvious "gain" for the entity, or are you disputing the idea that an entity having more money and more control doesn't mean the entity has more power? (And if it doesn't, what does "power" mean?)
The Republicans represent big business. The other party, big government. One party's benefactors are in big business, the other's are government employees. The Republicans are therefore all about giving more power to big business: This means cutting taxes (but mostly in ways that benefit big business), reducing regulations (but again, mostly in ways that help big business, not small businesses nor consumers). The Democrats, their power base being in the government itself, do the opposite.
Always look for where the money comes from: That is whom the parties are going to try to give power, wealth, influence, and security to.
Scientists do research, policy makers act on it. Is your argument that policymakers should completely ignore science?
My argument, if you'll look at my other comments, could probably be framed as, "we shouldn't have 'policymakers' to begin with." How many bureaucrats do we have working for government nowadays anyway? Millions? Tens of millions? How many of these people are unelected, essentially unaccountable, and yet have "rulemaking authority" or some other ability to control our lives?
The role of the government was supposed to be to protect people's "lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness." Not regulate every single thing that they can get their grubby hands on or micromanage every, tiny aspect of our economic and private lives, just because they can somehow, in some contorted manner, say it might harm someone.
The "debate" we are having isn't about science. In a less relevant field, on a less relevant topic, a similar weight of evidence as has been presented for AWG would be sufficient to end most debate on a topic until major new research put it in doubt.
Exactly! And this is the point I've been trying to make for years to people about environmentalism.
The difference here is the science has presented a problem that endangers popular conservative ideas about the free market and the evil of government.
Not exactly. The problem is that you have a scientific theory that's being used to justify policies that will infringe more and more on people's fundamental liberties: More taxes; more laws restricting what we can do with our property; more laws licensing and regulating our private business, lives, and livelihoods; and so on.
The fundamental question is whether or not we live in a free society or something else: A utilitarian technocracy where "experts," not citizens, get to decide policy, and anything that's deemed bad or harmful is regulated, taxed, or banned by the government, regardless of how unpopular those policies are.
And if you believe in science, you should be outraged by the fact that we're moving in that direction. If science was kept out of politics, we wouldn't have politically motivated individuals trying to interfere in scientific research. The people who founded this country rightly understood the twofold danger of mixing religion and government: Separation of church and state is not only to protect citizens from someone else's religion, but to protect religion from political interference, too. (Witness the wars and repression in England throughout the 1500-1700s.) Maybe when enough people finally realize we need a separation of science and state, we can move beyond this debate and scientists can get back to doing what they should be doing without meddling by non-scientists.
"It's okay when people agree with me, but it's not when they don't."
Point is, the global-warmers will be citing this bureaucrat's "acknowledgement" that they're right as an authoritative statement, to give weight to their side of the issue in political debates. Yet that's as much of a fallacious "appeal to authority" as citing an economist on climate change might be.
And I don't trust anyone when it's obvious their statements are being used as justification to steal my money and take control of my life, liberty, and property. You should always look at someone's motivations when they're trying to convince you of something. I'm sure you do when you look at the environmental skeptics, right? Try applying the same analysis to the government scientists and regulators on the other side of the debate and see what you find.
Someone in Washington realizes that the War on Terror must be running out of steam, and they need a new boogeyman to sic the $684-billion military on. After all, it worked the first time (Cold War ends... "War on Terror" begins), why not do it again?
The quasi-classified defense budget is probably a good place to hide green subsidies and rent-seeking, too. The public embarrassment of Solyndra never would've happened if they were a defense contractor.
I wonder if there's any way to petition our elected officials, to pass legislation banning agencies from having their own police force and weaponry...? I mean, as far as gun play and all, I'd trust the FBI or Secret Service over these other home brewed forces. IF the EPA needs protection going on a raid...they should maybe have to coordinate with the FBI...keep it simple and separate.
And back before the FBI was created, when federal law enforcement was almost exclusively contained within the Treasury department,* whether or not any federal agents should even be armed to begin with, was a controversial political issue.
Now of course the armed FBI (and the IRS, BATFE, ICE, DHS, and...) is accepted as perfectly normal. Shows how far down the drain this country has already gone, doesn't it?
_____
* Because the Federal Government doesn't actually have any constitutionally-granted "police power" to begin with. This power was meant to be retained by the States. Go ahead and try to find it in the enumerated powers clause of the Constitution (Art. I, sec. 8). All the Federal Government can enforce, constitutionally, is tax law. This is why, up until the 1940s, all Federal "law enforcement" was framed as a tax issue. The ATF is actually a tax-enforcement agency, and was part of the Treasury Department until it was moved to the DOJ in 2002 (Pub.L. 107-296, 116 Stat. 2135 (Nov. 25, 2002)). The first federal restrictions on firearms are actually just taxes (72nd Congress, Sess. 2, ch. 757, 48 Stat. 1236 (June 26, 1934)). The first federal marijuana law (Pub. 238, 75th Congress, 50 Stat. 551 (Aug. 2, 1937)) was just a requirement to purchase tax stamps. And so on.
Arguing over the factuality of climate change misses the most important point, though: It bypasses the whole moral/ethical question of whether or not the government should be regulating people's lives and livelihoods to this extent to begin with. You've already accepted the progressives' idea of utilitarianism ("the State should do whatever is good and ban whatever is bad") and technocracy ("political decisions made by experts"), and rejected the principles of liberalism and freedom that our society is supposed to be based upon.
Which side is the one lying about it for political gain? The side that's trying to: Create all sorts of new taxes, laws, and regulations; expand their bureaucracies, create entirely new ones, and massively expand their budgets; hire swarms of new bureaucrats and "experts," who will come up with even more and more reasons for more taxes, regulations, and bureaucrats? You did mean that side of the debate, right?:)
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So I guess this is the other side's version of "too big to fail." Instead of thieving billions from the public to support "too big to fail" companies, steal everything from those companies for the public's benefit.
I wonder if it's even possible for a government-based solution to a problem that isn't downright predatory.
So Bush made the conscious decision to prohibit investment in Syria, but Syria's president is responsible for this. And when a man beats his wife, it's her fault for "making him do it," right?
You just described government itself with that second sentence.
Virtually all of the violence in Somalia is being caused by other states (the U.S., the U.N., the surrounding nation-states) meddling in the country, using the locals to try to take control of Somalia.
Would there violence without states? Sure. But there's plenty of violence with statism. Eliminating statism isn't going to eliminate violence---but it is going to eliminate the centralization of a massive amount of violence under a name arrogantly claims its violence is "legitimate."
There are plenty of solutions.
If the non-aggression principle is wrong, then it's perfectly okay for me to come over there and settle this debate through violence.
Ownership originates from self-ownership. This article is a pretty good explanation of the concept of self-ownership and its implications.
The free market is only "lazy" in that it lets people solve their own problems and make their own choices without external interference. Sure, you can call it "lazy"---in that people don't meddle in other people's business.
I thought science looks for "consensus" nowadays, not "truth."
Nice. Although, i would take issue with using the word "liberalism" like this. Liberalism means people who believe in human liberty. The progressives usurped the term to describe their confiscatory, controlling ideology, in order to dress it up and make it look better. I refuse to use the term to describe progressivism.
I know. I think the first I heard about this was when Bush was in office. What's your point? They were making noises about terrorism years before they launched the "War on Terror," too. That doesn't change the fact that the "War on Terror" is a pretext for even more military spending than the Cold War inspired.
Yup. That bit of trickery was, I suppose, their last attempt at even appearing to conduct "law enforcement" within the framework of the Constitution.
The likelihood of which is about the same as the likelihood that Vietnam going communist would have led to the whole region falling to communism.
But it's equally as alarmist, so it does make for good copy.
The non-aggression principle.
You can probably find a solution here: Free-market environmentalism, without resorting to the laziness of collective responsibility and coercion.
The two issues have nothing to do with one another---until the government tries to use climate change to infringe upon people's freedom.
"Reality" is not imposing these rules. It is not "reality" that will be extracting "carbon taxes" from people; that's the government. It is not "reality" that wants to incrementally force people to stop driving gasoline-powered vehicles; that's the government. It is not "reality" that taxes, regulates, forces, and coerces; that's the government. The government is made up of conscious individuals who make choices to act (or not act) in certain ways.
To say otherwise is to deny the reality that human beings are responsible for their own actions, regardless of their excuses and justifications. I have known men who tried to claim that their wife "made me hit her," but those arguments really don't have much credibility with me. :)
Hmm? Entire agencies have been created to implement this so-called green agenda, and they're only getting bigger and more well-staffed over time.
As just one tiny example, compare modern "recycling" and "transfer stations" to the "town dumps" of 20-30 years ago. We now have swarms of bureaucrats (or in some cases, rent-seeking private companies you're mandated to do business with) to deal with trash, transfer it elsewhere, recycle it, and so on. And we're expected to sort our garbage into paper, plastic, glass, metal, and so on. My hometown (pop. 1,340) demands that people take the soda bottle caps off and wash our trash before we throw it in the recycling bins. Many towns have "recycling committees" -- appointed boards of bureaucrats -- who oversee this stuff and come up with ways of making it even more complex.
Getting rid of bureaucracy and waste? Hah!
Because when you try to use a "scientific opinion" to threaten people to take their money and regulate and control their lives, they tend to resist, that's why.
One tactic such people try to use is to discredit the science. Discredit the opinion, you discredit the policy, since now there's no need for the policy. I don't support this tactic, because it misses the moral/ethical point about the government pointing guns at people to begin with. The tactic is akin to "fighting the enemy on their own turf," which is usually a losing proposition, from a strategic standpoint. And it very often results in disingenuous arguments or outright falsehoods being spread, which certainly isn't good for science or society in general. But some people use the tactic nonetheless, and it's understandable. When someone's trying to defend themselves against coercion, the truth probably doesn't matter to them.
Another great example of how, regardless of whether or not it be harmful, the government should not be regulating people's consensual decision to purchase tobacco, or to work or dine in environments where other people are using tobacco.
I am amazed that you are so insistent about the "truth" of the extremely complex issue of climate change, yet seem to have trouble grasping the simplistic truth in the assertion that more money and control held by an entity means that entity has more power.
I'm not arguing over the factuality of global warming. I'm arguing over whether not, whatever the truth be, it justifies the government interfering with people's freedoms and liberties. "Just because they can, doesn't mean they should." I've posted enough other comments in this thread to make my point so I won't reiterate it here.
More money for the government. More control over us. More secure jobs for bureaucrats.
Are you trying to say you're unaware of how giving more power, money, and control to an entity is an obvious "gain" for the entity, or are you disputing the idea that an entity having more money and more control doesn't mean the entity has more power? (And if it doesn't, what does "power" mean?)
The Republicans represent big business. The other party, big government. One party's benefactors are in big business, the other's are government employees. The Republicans are therefore all about giving more power to big business: This means cutting taxes (but mostly in ways that benefit big business), reducing regulations (but again, mostly in ways that help big business, not small businesses nor consumers). The Democrats, their power base being in the government itself, do the opposite.
Always look for where the money comes from: That is whom the parties are going to try to give power, wealth, influence, and security to.
My argument, if you'll look at my other comments, could probably be framed as, "we shouldn't have 'policymakers' to begin with." How many bureaucrats do we have working for government nowadays anyway? Millions? Tens of millions? How many of these people are unelected, essentially unaccountable, and yet have "rulemaking authority" or some other ability to control our lives?
The role of the government was supposed to be to protect people's "lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness." Not regulate every single thing that they can get their grubby hands on or micromanage every, tiny aspect of our economic and private lives, just because they can somehow, in some contorted manner, say it might harm someone.
Exactly! And this is the point I've been trying to make for years to people about environmentalism.
Not exactly. The problem is that you have a scientific theory that's being used to justify policies that will infringe more and more on people's fundamental liberties: More taxes; more laws restricting what we can do with our property; more laws licensing and regulating our private business, lives, and livelihoods; and so on.
The fundamental question is whether or not we live in a free society or something else: A utilitarian technocracy where "experts," not citizens, get to decide policy, and anything that's deemed bad or harmful is regulated, taxed, or banned by the government, regardless of how unpopular those policies are.
And if you believe in science, you should be outraged by the fact that we're moving in that direction. If science was kept out of politics, we wouldn't have politically motivated individuals trying to interfere in scientific research. The people who founded this country rightly understood the twofold danger of mixing religion and government: Separation of church and state is not only to protect citizens from someone else's religion, but to protect religion from political interference, too. (Witness the wars and repression in England throughout the 1500-1700s.) Maybe when enough people finally realize we need a separation of science and state, we can move beyond this debate and scientists can get back to doing what they should be doing without meddling by non-scientists.
"It's okay when people agree with me, but it's not when they don't."
Point is, the global-warmers will be citing this bureaucrat's "acknowledgement" that they're right as an authoritative statement, to give weight to their side of the issue in political debates. Yet that's as much of a fallacious "appeal to authority" as citing an economist on climate change might be.
And I don't trust anyone when it's obvious their statements are being used as justification to steal my money and take control of my life, liberty, and property. You should always look at someone's motivations when they're trying to convince you of something. I'm sure you do when you look at the environmental skeptics, right? Try applying the same analysis to the government scientists and regulators on the other side of the debate and see what you find.
Someone in Washington realizes that the War on Terror must be running out of steam, and they need a new boogeyman to sic the $684-billion military on. After all, it worked the first time (Cold War ends... "War on Terror" begins), why not do it again?
The quasi-classified defense budget is probably a good place to hide green subsidies and rent-seeking, too. The public embarrassment of Solyndra never would've happened if they were a defense contractor.
And back before the FBI was created, when federal law enforcement was almost exclusively contained within the Treasury department,* whether or not any federal agents should even be armed to begin with, was a controversial political issue.
Now of course the armed FBI (and the IRS, BATFE, ICE, DHS, and...) is accepted as perfectly normal. Shows how far down the drain this country has already gone, doesn't it?
_____
* Because the Federal Government doesn't actually have any constitutionally-granted "police power" to begin with. This power was meant to be retained by the States. Go ahead and try to find it in the enumerated powers clause of the Constitution (Art. I, sec. 8). All the Federal Government can enforce, constitutionally, is tax law. This is why, up until the 1940s, all Federal "law enforcement" was framed as a tax issue. The ATF is actually a tax-enforcement agency, and was part of the Treasury Department until it was moved to the DOJ in 2002 (Pub.L. 107-296, 116 Stat. 2135 (Nov. 25, 2002)). The first federal restrictions on firearms are actually just taxes (72nd Congress, Sess. 2, ch. 757, 48 Stat. 1236 (June 26, 1934)). The first federal marijuana law (Pub. 238, 75th Congress, 50 Stat. 551 (Aug. 2, 1937)) was just a requirement to purchase tax stamps. And so on.
Arguing over the factuality of climate change misses the most important point, though: It bypasses the whole moral/ethical question of whether or not the government should be regulating people's lives and livelihoods to this extent to begin with. You've already accepted the progressives' idea of utilitarianism ("the State should do whatever is good and ban whatever is bad") and technocracy ("political decisions made by experts"), and rejected the principles of liberalism and freedom that our society is supposed to be based upon.
Which side is the one lying about it for political gain? The side that's trying to: Create all sorts of new taxes, laws, and regulations; expand their bureaucracies, create entirely new ones, and massively expand their budgets; hire swarms of new bureaucrats and "experts," who will come up with even more and more reasons for more taxes, regulations, and bureaucrats? You did mean that side of the debate, right? :)
The EPA has a SWAT team. Plenty more examples come up if you search for "EPA SWAT team," too.
How do you get a conservative to jump on the environmentalism bandwagon? Call climate change a "national security threat."
How do you get a progressive to start lavishing praise on the U.S. Military? Get the military to tackle "climate change."
It's a win-win for the political establishment.