But overall, I really dislike this push to make the $15/hr. wage a LEGAL mandated minimum. If a business does it voluntarily? Well, great. That's how things are supposed to work. But here in Maryland, they just pushed the $15/hr. wage law through (although it doesn't take effect immediately, and there are a few exceptions for specific work situations). And already, the feedback I've heard from small business owners is really telling. Either they're starting to look at options to move out of the state and do business elsewhere, or they're trying to find ways to hire fewer people or cutting hours to make up the difference, because they can't stay profitable while paying everyone that as a starting wage.
The problem out here is, it's already very costly and difficult to run a business....
I know this is getting a little off topic, but my point is just to illustrate the kind of challenges that get put in people's way, when they're just trying to run a successful business that employs others.
I suspect that, if anything, you are massively underestimating the scope of the problem. Econometric studies show that 64-73% of the differences in cost of living between US states are caused by government policy decisions (The Importance of the Cost of Living and Policies to Address It - Schlomach, 2017).
Further, I wouldn't be surprised to find a similar percentage of the differences in cost of living not just from place to place, but also from year to year, are also caused by government policy decisions. Many government decisions have impacts that compound across the economy, and there are feedback loops are well (hence society pays many times for a bad policy decision, not just once: the impact compounds over time). Even seemingly small amounts can become impressive when everybody has to pay, and when compounding and feedback are taken into account.
To give an example, the tolerance of government in the USA for ethics problems in the legal system causes almost every business and most individuals to have to pay protection money in form of liability insurance - and sometimes to get that insurance a business has to spend additional money on related items (such as fences, security systems, refraining from entering certain markets or doing certain things or having a presence in certain areas, and so forth).
Hence, government policy increases the cost of doing business, and these costs have to be accounted for in some fashion for the business to survive. The total amounts involved are not trivial: according to a Redja (Risk Management and Insurance), the direct expenditures on tort in the USA in some years equals a 5% income tax on every American - and that's just the direct spending in one of the many areas of law that has problems. Insurance companies have to cover these totals plus overhead and profit - and we also have to consider the others forms of defensive spending that businesses are doing - which means the total amount spent by everybody with respect to this issue is larger then the direct expenditures alone might suggest.
The direct spending on tort in the USA is roughly 2-3x what people are paying in other developed nations (Redja) so the USA clearly has different policies with respect to the issue - and US businesses are paying a far higher price then their counterparts in other nations as a result of these policies.
For another example, economic studies suggest that in most industries (with the pharmaceutical industry being one of the rare exceptions) the money spent on patent lawyers and litigation exceeds the value of the patents - and does nothing to increase innovation rates (see The Captured Economy, Lindsey and Teles for many references on the economics of patent). Here again we have government policy increasing the cost of doing business.
Sales taxes are another area that has some significant hidden overhead. The sales tax rules can be very complex in many jurisdictions, change frequently, are often quite ir
" It's about the state acknowledging that it made a mistake, and punished people that it should not have."
So... it's a mistake for a governing body to punish people for breaking a law that has been on the books since before those people were born?
Yes, if it is an illegal law, which it always was.
James Madison deliberately wrote the Bill of Rights to be open-ended, retaining to the people any individual rights they wanted to assert (9th and 10th Amendments, unspecified rights retained by the people, unspecified rights reserved to the people). This was done to address the objection of the Anti-Federalists that any finite Bill of Rights would necessarily miss rights that turned out to be really important (they certainly called that one correctly!). In response, James Madison made the Bill of Rights open-ended - and hence not finite, thus nullifying the objection.
The fact that multiple states have decided to allow pot is more then sufficient to establish that a right retained by the people is in play. Even one person making a reasonable argument that such a right exists should be sufficient. The Bill of Rights, after all, was a document of the Enlightenment - the Age of Reason - the age when logic and reason and rational thinking became superior to established authority or mere numbers.
Such an argument was made by individuals on many occasions since the 1930's when pot was originally made illegal - which should have led to this situation being corrected long ago. Having the population of multiple states vote overwhelmingly in favor of legalization goes far beyond the minimum standard.
In short, federal and state governments in the USA - by enforcing illegal laws prohibiting the production, sale, and use of pot - violated the Bill of Rights. The government could have put into place some reasonable health and safety requirements regarding pot, but it never had the legal authority to make it entirely illegal.
This situation SHOULD have been corrected a long time ago. Perhaps a legal profession that highly valued legal ethics would have done better, but the USA clearly didn't have one in 1932 when the ABA reviewed the Uniform State Narcotic Drug Act - and there are still major problems in legal ethics today (see Lindsey and Teles, The Captured Economy, for a number of references related to this point).
Every lawyer and every law enforcement officer should be thinking about whether or not any given law (or precedent) is legal before they choose to enforce it (or use it). It's an individual responsibility. This is called having integrity. It is how the system is supposed to work. Those who become lawyers, or accept certain government positions have sworn oaths to recognize these truths and act accordingly. Those who are unwilling to abide by this requirement are welcome to look for work in another country.
If you like, you can think of this as the US equivalent of the Nuremberg Precedent: it comes into US law under the authority of the 9th and 10th Amendments as one of the most important rights retained by the people.
Any law or precedent to the contrary is illegal: rights retained by the people are retained by the people by definition and can not be taken away by ANY entity of government (up to and including the Supreme Court) without introducing a contradiction in the law - and contradictions in the law will always involve unethical practice of law at some level, sooner or later - and hence violate the 9th Amendment right to ethical practice of law (an universal and inalienable right).
Failure to comply with this rule is a violation of the right to ethical practice of law, the oaths various people swear to uphold the law, and the Constitutional requirement of "good behavior" for federal judges. It's impossible to uphold the law by introducing a contradiction into it, and unethical practice of law is certainly not "good behavior".
So it is a good thing that these illegal laws are finally (after so many decades) starting to be corrected. It remains to be seen whether ALL the harm done by illegal government action (and unethical practice of law) in this area will eventually be corrected in some reasonable fashion.
Unfortunately the highest court in the land (who's job it is to decide whether lesser laws violate the highest law in the land) decided in Eldred v. Ashcroft that the US copyright law is in fact constitutional.
Good luck getting the right mix of judges on the bench (and the right case going all the way to the highest court) to get that ruling overturned.
There's a fun game you can play. Pick a random circuit or Supreme Court decision and see if you spot the cases where they ignore the legal ethics issues.
There are many such cases. You can even spot at least one from last year - and it's an important case with substantial economic implications - so this is not a problem that is going away.
That willful blindness is a big part of the reason why the US has such severe problems with ethical practice of law (and why the legal profession collectively makes far more then their counterparts in other developed nations, relative to GDP, some studies suggest roughly 50%).
Legal ethics problems are a cancer in the body of US law.
who's job it is to decide whether lesser laws violate the highest law in the land)
Actually, by definition rights retained by the people are retained by the people and can not be taken away by ANY entity of government - for if they could be taken away by government, they would no longer be retained by the people.
In logic, that's known as a proof by contradiction - and contradiction in the law is always a violation of the right to ethical practice of law (not the mention the 'good behaviour' requirement for being a federal judge).
Thus, as part of the government, the Supreme Court does not have the legal authority to refuse to recognize rights the people choose to assert as being retained by them.
This makes perfect sense if you consider the history. The Bill of Rights was an Enlightenment document, a document from the Age of Reason. Enlightenment thinking accepted the idea that a logical, rational, reasonable argument could and should trump the status quo or established authority. Look at the Declaration of Independence for an example of this.
Here's another consideration: had the Founding Fathers been prepared to trust in entities defined by the original Constitution, then there wouldn't have been any need for a Bill of Rights. The acceptance of the pre-"Bill of Rights" Constitution was in fact conditional, based in large part on promises from men of honour (who were trusted) that a Bill of Rights would be added. Further, any sensible person in that day and age knew full well that it was neither militarily nor politically feasible to try to coerce people to stay in the union if this expectation was not met.
Thus, it follows from the history that the Bill of Rights is supposed to be the highest law in the land, superseding the entities defined by the pre-Bill of Rights Constitution: the Presidency, the Congress, and the Supreme Court. It wouldn't make any sense for the Bill of Rights to be simultaneously intended to limit the power of these entities while having it's meaning also defined by them - that would be another contradiction.
In practice, when you look at decisions like Eldred v. Ashcroft, you'll typically find the lawyers involved completely ignore the legal ethics issues (and almost always act as if the 9th Amendment doesn't exist). The judges get around the problem of not having authority to supersede the rights arising under the 9th Amendment, by simply pretending that the Emperor's new clothes look really nice.
That is a huge problem.
There is no doubt that the legal ethics situation in US law is undermining the perceived legitimacy of government in the USA (and that's a big part of the 'piracy' problem), and doing enormous long term economic and social harm to the USA.
In some years, the estimated direct expenditures on tort have been equal to an additional 5% income tax on every American (Rejda, Risk Management and Insurance) - a
When you challenge most software firms with this kind of logic, they typically turn around and give a lecture on there being a "right and a wrong way" to go about learning their products -- perhaps throwing in the fact that they sell "student versions" much cheaper for students. And you know? That's all true, technically. If you're purely a "letter of the law" and "show no mercy" type, I guess there's your answer?
A strong argument can be made that current US copyright law violates the highest law in the land, and is therefore illegal, which makes the position taken by the "letter of law" folks particularly absurd.
The argument rests on the right to ethical practice of law, certainly an universal and inalienable right in any society based on the rule of law. In the US, this right can be asserted as a right "retained by the people" under the 9th Amendment, and "reserved to the people" under the 10th.
James Madison deliberately made the 9th and 10th Amendments open-ended to allow the assertion of fundamental rights outside the legislative process, to ultimately limit the power of government, in response to the argument posed by the Anti-Federalists that any Bill of Rights would inevitably leave out important rights that government would eventually try to infringe. In other words, he recognized that there needed to be a mechanism outside the normal political process to limit the abuse of fundamental rights by government - and he embedded that mechanism into the highest law of the land (which all senior government officials and all legal professionals swear oaths to uphold).
Under the right to ethical practice of law even the appearance of conflict of interest must be avoided when reasonable alternatives exist.
US copyright law violates this right in several ways. For one, it's too complex - it's very hard to determine whether something is under copyright, who holds the copyright, and when that copyright can be infringed (i.e. ignored) as an exercise of "fair use" rights. For another, the long durations of copyright - under the current implementation where access is governed by contract - create long term artificial demand for the services of lawyers.
Both complex laws and contract related matters generate enormous business for the legal profession, so the conflict of interest is clear here.
There's also a question concerning whether the lawyers have written the law to be too favourable to the groups that tend to hire the most lawyers (such as big corporations), and not the actual content creators. Consider the case of musicians and authors (most of whom make a very small percentage of the gross resulting from their work), for an example of how this plays out.
The government could avoid the first issue by making the law simpler, with some easy way for anybody to freely and easily determine copyright for most works via the Internet - and sensible, clearly stated rules for "fair use" that cover the most common cases. They could avoid the second by either making the duration of copyright shorter, or having some automatic mechanism that avoided contract law after an initial period, perhaps with a percentage of any gross replacing contract for all commercial transactions. The last issue could be fixed by allowing some percentage of the gross to always stay with the people creating the content (or allowing the copyright in whole or part to revert to them after a moderate period of years).
So we have both conflict of interest and reasonable alternatives: the Bill of Rights violation is clear - and that in turn means that the lawyers who have been upholding the current law (creating precedents to support it, or bringing cases under it) are in violation of their oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights.
Apparently the lesson provided by the Nuremberg Precedent hasn't changed the tendency of people to do that kind of thing.
The right thing to do would be to fix the law. We certainly pay legislators (and their staffs) enough that they sho
Valid arguments against basic income are economical, not moral. There is legitimate concern about the inflationary effects of society-wide basic income.
I'm dubious about the validity of these arguments. The classical economic view of inflation - too many dollars chasing too few products - doesn't seem to be all that common in the real world. It happens, but not that often.
The primary drivers of inflation seem to be things like government policy.
There have been econometric studies that show most of the cost of living differences in US states are due to the consequences of government policy decisions. Many of these policies are bad ones. Some are economically unsound overall even if they provide some small benefits. Some come down to what economists refer to as "rent-seeking", which means the policies are entirely unnecessary; they exist only to enrich special interest groups at the expense of everybody else. Not all special interest groups do equal harm: rent-seeking by some (e.g. legal professionals) does far more economic harm (and hence poses an especially important problem for society to solve) then rent-seeking by others.
Another consideration: inflation isn't particularly important when it applies to luxuries. It's inflation applied to necessities that's more of a problem. The poor are already buying food (or someone else is buying on their behalf), so it's not clear that we would have more dollars chasing the same amount of product. Instead, it seems more likely that we would have fewer people going into debt, typically in the form of credit card debt. Such debt lets rich creditors such as credit card companies (and their big shareholders) get even richer at the expense of society as a whole, so a reduction of credit card debt would be an economically good thing.
If the rich keep getting richer while the poor keep getting poorer, that's not a good thing for society. Incentives matter, and there will never be equality of outcome (nor should there be). But the pendulum can swing too far in the direction of concentrated wealth, and throughout human history that's always eventually led to bad results for society, every single time.
With a basic income system, the key would be to prevent it from becoming one of the bad government policies, instead of being one of the good ones.
What I worry about more then inflation is the likelihood that the system will lead to vote-buying by politicians, who will destroy the economy by taking more than a fair or reasonable or even sensible share of productivity. Limiting the growth of the basic income system seems like the hardest part of solving this problem in a rational way. The track record of US politicians is not such as to give anybody confidence that they could ever get this right.
You can have nice things because you don't have to fund your own defense. Military is extremely expensive and America defends Europe for free.
The USA spends 3.5% of it's GDP on it's military. Compare this to Britain and France, each at 2.2%. It's not that big of a difference, especially when you consider that the USA has to spend a lot more on naval power then other nations, just to get troops and equipment to Europe and keep them supplied. That's essentially overhead and arguably doesn't count towards military power on the ground. If we take out the naval budget, we get 2.6% for the USA, which gives an even smaller difference.
Remove the portion of the budget needed to support US commitments in Asia (which don't necessarily help put troops and equipment on the ground in Europe, depending upon whether or not you can move those assets: if WW2 is any predictor of how future wars will play out then you can't expect to move those assets) and the budget differences get even smaller.
The USA might be wasting a lot more money in the military budget as well, given the corruption historically associated with US defence spending. But perhaps other countries have similar problems. So I won't count that.
Comparing health care, the USA spends 17-18% of it's GDP on health care (including both private and public funding). Britain spends 9.9%, France 11.6%. That's a much bigger difference: it swamps the difference in military spending.
The conclusion follows that military spending can at most account for a very small portion of the difference in the health care systems.
And yet there is not a single payer system in the world that isn't struggling.
False. Single payer systems are doing much better then the US system. Health care expenses as a percentage of GDP are around 17-18% for the USA, but only 9-11% for other developed nations.
The Swiss system (which is NOT single payer, but instead has highly regulated insurance companies) runs around 11.5% of GDP. It's on the high end as these systems go (but not particularly so, it's pretty much on par with the generally high cost of living in Switzerland).
UK's system is slowly going broke and people are buying private health insurance to cover all sorts of routine service that would otherwise require waits of months if not years to get treated in their single payer system.
The UK is spending less on health care than most developed nations (around 9.9% of GDP, only Italy spends less at 9.1%). In practice, they have plenty of room for growth: they could be spending a lot more if they were willing to throw money at problems.
Roughly 6% of the population of the UK has private health insurance. It's a luxury for the rich so they don't have to wait, but perhaps also useful for people with special situations.
The USA is in far worse financial shape then the UK from a health care perspective: US citizens and government combined are spending far more on health care, and simultaneously government in the US is far deeper in debt (and the picture gets even more dismal when you consider the high levels of US state and local government debt).
Canada has so few doctor's that the wait time to see them (and frequently the them isn't doctor but a PA-C, LPN or RPN ) is so long that you either recover before you can see anyone or if it bad enough and you live close to the US boarder, you cross over to receive immediate treatment.
Also false. Canada has 2.1 physicians per 1000 people, the USA has 2.3 physicians per 1000 people. That's an insignificant difference (and more than compensated by all the US physicians doing cosmetic and other optional work).
The best numbers currently available suggest considerably less than 1% of Canadians (0.15 percent or 1 person for every 600 Canadians) go to the USA for treatment (and some that is cosmetic in nature).
Canadians have a longer life expectancy than US citizens, and lower infant mortality. A comparison of health care by the AARP suggests that the USA would have 56k fewer preventable deaths each year if the USA adopted the Canadian system. Taken collectively, this data suggests Canada is doing better then the USA overall in terms of the health care provided (though other factors can certainly play a role in these statistics and a simple comparison isn't necessarily conclusive).
And finally, shoot all the Lawyers.. estimates run from 20-50% additional overhead caused by frivolous lawsuits.
We can't shoot all the lawyers, but the cost of the ethics problems in US law is definitely a major factor in health care expenses. In some years, estimates place direct expenditures on tort in the USA is being equivalent to a 5% income tax on every American (Risk Management and Insurance - Rejda). Per-capita, it's 2-3x what is spent in other developed nations (and those other nations have their own share of legal ethics problems, so the total is probably 4-5x what it needs to be). That's just the direct expenses, the indirect expenses (such as liability insurance and other forms of defensive overhead that businesses and private citizens have to take to protect themselves) are likely 2x or 3x the direct expenses. These costs compound through the economy, of course. By the time a product gets to the hospital the "lawyer tax" has been paid multiple times, once by every business that had something to do with some aspect of the product - even just finding or processing raw materials in ways that have nothing to do with t
Explain to me how creative works can even be encouraged to exist without copyright.
There's a long history of creative works existing without copyright.
But, all things considered, a good copyright system would probably be beneficial for society.
Unfortunately, we don't have a good copyright system in the USA. Instead, we currently have a bad copyright system (and one that is arguably illegal on multiple levels, as currently implemented).
Copyright encourages competition - but only useful competition. Like encouraging there to be other authors out their writing their own books.
In an ideal world, that would be true. It would likely even be true if we had a good copyright system.
In practice, economic studies suggest that the primary functions of copyright (at least as it is currently implemented) are to create concentration of wealth, and to serve the interests of the legal profession. Admittedly there's some overlap between those two items (the lawyers, as a group, gain benefits from concentration of wealth disproportionate to their education, skills, or numbers).
We have similar problems with the patent system, although the details differ.
See The Captured Economy (Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles) for more information on the specific studies that have been done.
In principle, it would not be that difficult to change the copyright system to better serve the interests of society - and to better reward content creators. The required changes are not that complicated - and most of them flow from recognizing in the current law ethical conflict of interest on the part of the legal profession, then re-working the law to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest.
In the end, this reform actually ends up benefiting content creators, so you no longer - for example - have wealthy middlemen (and their lawyers) taking most of the gross from the creative work of musicians and authors.
In any society based on the rule of law, the right to ethical practice of law should be an universal and inalienable right, with even the appearance of conflict of interest being disallowed when reasonable alternatives exist.
But - just as is the case with other major current problems (for example, health care and tort reform) - deeply entrenched special interest groups have prevented society from fixing things - and in fact have made things even more broken in recent years.
In other jurisdictions like the United States; it was never even a question, really.... Your employer can require you to use their biometric systems for access control or time and attendance;
That's false: such matters are ALWAYS open to question in the USA, because James Madison gave the USA an open-ended Bill of Rights, giving the people the ability to assert ANY rights they desire under the 9th Amendment (unspecified rights retained by the people) and 10th Amendment (unspecified rights to the people).
This was done in response to the criticism of the Anti-Federalists that the pre-Bill of Rights Constitution had no Bill of Rights, and that any finite (closed) Bill of Rights would always leave out critical rights.
Hence, an individual right to privacy can be asserted under the 9th Amendment, and it's ultimately up to be people to decide what that means: government action is only legitimate to the extent that it is consistent with the expectations of the people.
There is nothing in the Bill of Rights that limits the application of such rights to government: they can also be applied to private business.
Further, rights retained by the people are by definition retained by the people and can not be taken away by ANY entity of government.
As the Bill of Rights is the highest law in the land (superseding even the pre-Bill of Rights parts of the Constitution), such rights supersede the authority of government at all levels. The people have the ultimate power: they are the supposed to be the most important check-and-balance on government.
Further, under US federal law, the infringement of fundamental rights "under the colour of law" is both grounds for civil suit, and can be a basis for criminal charges. In theory, this prevents state and local government as well as the federal government from infringing rights the people decide are retained by them.
All Americans have to do is decide to assert their rights, and get them past a frequently unethical legal profession and a frequently corrupt government...
In practice, that's difficult. Even obvious and really basic rights such as the right to ethical practice of law are routinely infringed in US law. There is a huge gap between the law as written and the law as practised.
But this problem might primarily be due to ignorance, and perhaps much can be accomplished if the public starts to care more about their rights. Further, appeal to the authority retained by the people 9th and 10th Amendments may end up being the only possible way to overcome the deeply entrenched corruption in the system without requiring a reboot (another American Revolution).
Sales/income tax are proportional to income and spending. State income tax isn't a big deal at middle income levels. Sales tax exempts food and clothing (necessities).
In practice, sales tax is one of the most regressive forms of taxation in existence. It affects the poor far more than the rich. Having sales taxes is not something to be proud of.
Further, sales tax isn't proportional to spending, because proportional implies a linear relationship, and it's actually not a linear relationship.
ITEP estimates that "low-income families typically spend three-quarters of their income on sales-taxable items, while middle-income families spend about half, and upper-income families spend roughly one sixth."
Some of the tax ends up being hidden in the sales price of an item (or service), with different amounts of impact for different items (or services) - depending upon variables such as the exact sales tax rules in place (which can change from region to region or year to year in most jurisdictions), and the details of the logistics, manufacturing, and labour required to produce the good (or service), plus the nature of regulations affecting the various businesses involved.
For example, the overhead associated with the rules for sales tax raises the cost of doing business (more money has to be spent on lawyers, accountants, software, training, records, audits). Every business is impacted - nobody can enter the market without also having to pay the costs - so the costs get passed on to customers (which may be other businesses downstream in the logistics network, who in turn must raise their prices). It's a lot like compound interest.
This is bad, and it is especially bad for small business (which are more sensitive to overhead), which in turn hurts employment and lowers competition (and sometimes quality).
Since the rules are written in natural language, which is ambiguous, you can't solve the complexity problem with software - human decision making is still needed.
This sort of thing raises the costs of goods and services, and it raises them by different amounts depending upon the exact rules in play (sometimes the rules are easier to easier to understand, other times they aren't). Hence the non-linear relationship. There are lots of other non-linearities in this system, think about it a bit...
It helps a little to exempt food and clothing from the direct tax, but in practice sales taxes create costs that end up compounding through the logistics chains of businesses, so they still end up impacting the price of goods most needed by the poor such as food and clothing.
Those items don't get produced and delivered to the stores by magic - and in practice sales taxes impact the cost of production and delivery even if there are in theory business exemptions. Sales taxes on gas are especially nasty - they immediately raise the cost of labour as well as the cost of business transport.
Further, logistics networks are graphs, not trees. There is feedback present. Raise the cost of farming, and the plumber pays more for food (even if it isn't being taxed directly). Then the plumber charges more when the farmer needs services, so the farmer in turn has to charge more, hence the feedback.
Sales taxes also affect access to tools and education and training needed for social mobility, so they have an additional negative impact on the poor.
In practice, sales taxes are a tax break for the rich, since every dollar that comes into the governments budget from a regressive tax is a dollar that isn't coming into the budget from a progressive tax. This is the major reason sales taxes are as prevalent as they are.
In summary, sales taxes are a primitive solution to the problem of funding government, a solution which contributes to excessive concentration of wealth, and does a lot of harm to the poor (and raising the costs of funding welfare for the middle class, as well as increasing crime). Sales taxes are something that we should be leaving behind us as we move into the modern age, just like the horse and buggy.
I hope that you realise that by dropping the patent system as a whole chances are that America competiveness will get worse, not better. Instead of being copied just by unscrupulous Chinese industries products will be copied by the whole World. I don't think America is ready for this escale and type of globalization.
Actually, there is considerable evidence that the patent system is a net loss for everything other than pharmaceuticals, and foreign countries with highly regulated health care - whether single payer or otherwise - just force the pharmaceutical companies to charge a lot less as part of their regulated health care. The net effect is the US consumer ends up paying for the patent instead of people in the other countries, which can't be good for the USA (17.5% of GDP versus 9-11% - an enormous difference).
The patent system also leads to excessive concentration of wealth.
Like copyright, it occasionally benefits ordinary people, but on the whole does far more harm then good (as currently implemented).
See The Captured Economy by Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles.
Since there are massive legal and governmental ethics problems with the current US patent system (read through prior discussions on Slashdot to understand why), it's also a system that exists (as currently implemented) in violation of the US Bill of Rights. Again, this has been discussed at length previously on this forum.
The dual rights to ethical government and ethical practice of law are universal and inalienable rights in any society based on the rule of law - and thus protected by the 9th and 10th Amendments (rights retained by the people, rights reserved to the people). Those rights are routinely being violated by US government and the US legal profession (and third parties) with respect to patent and copyright.
Having the government and the legal profession routinely violating the highest law in the land can't possibly be good for the economy. Just think about the compounding that happens through business logistics chains to protect businesses from abuse of the system (such as liability insurance, special procedures, special software, and the associated training expenses). This works a lot like compound interest, but the compounding is from one node to the next - and logistics networks are graphs not trees, so there is feedback.
These legal and governmental ethics problems are essentially a hidden regressive tax that makes everything more expensive, and hurts the poor far more than the rich - leading to increased crime and more expensive welfare, plus enormous amounts of human misery. Equality of outcomes is both unattainable and undesirable (incentives matter), but the system we currently have is a huge mess with a lot of room for improvement.
Property Taxes are a tax on unrealized gains. They are probably the most oppressive taxes in the US. They can drive someone out of a home they own outright, merely because the State says your home is worth $X and you need to pay $x * y%, regardless of your income situation.
The solution is to decouple taxes on land and homes from current market values and only use market value when acquiring assets such as land and homes.
A better solution would be to get rid of property taxes entirely.
Let local government be funded from a share of state tax income - and don't let the states tax property.
A lot of problems in the USA can be traced in part to property tax policy - such as having the highest incarceration rate in the world. Many people turn to crime when they don't have other alternatives.
"After the Civil War, separate and racialized tax structures were set up to enable segregated schooling in the South and North. Astonishingly, nearly 150 years later,... these same systems of property tax funding continue in most US school districts, allowing and even facilitating the continuation of... resource inequality" - Camille Walsh, 2018, Racial Taxation.
Why should the rich get the best schools, fire departments, police, emergency planning and disaster preparedness, roads, and so forth?
Property taxes are a curse and a blight on society. Have a reasonable taxes on other things (such as inheritance) and you'll get turnover of property, so there isn't any legitimate justification for having property taxes.
CA did pretty much this with Proposition 13. It stabilized growth and benefited millions of home owners.
It's also done enormous harm, shifting a large share of government tax income from businesses to individuals - and reducing available housing. Two identical properties can pay a 20x difference in property tax. It also infringes the right to travel (a right arising under the 9th Amendment). But, hey, it's only the highest law in the land, why shouldn't government break the law?
Imagine if the government decided to increase your income taxes by 20x for choosing to exercise your freedom of speech.
When you systematically give 30 hours per week to a larger number of part time employees just to avoid having full time employees, you really should be responsible for the fallout. There are very few of these employees that don't want full-time hours. Instead, Wal-Mart can claim that 100% of full-time employees get all these great benefits and they're a great place to work - all while only having a handful of full-time employees.
It seems like there are several better solutions to this problem.
One is to come up with a cost of full time benefits for each geographic area. Employers pay a percentage of that cost to a fund like a 401k, according to hours worked each week (with some defined total being considered "full time"). The money in the fund can only be used for health insurance or health care until retirement, and otherwise accumulates towards retirement.
This forces all business to compete equally, nobody can play games with part-time status and get any advantage. Workers that are part time at one business can take a second job to get the equivalent of full time status.
It has the disadvantage that insurance companies will play games with the rates to maximize their profits - which in turn creates all sorts of complications when the government tries to control this.
Yet another solution would be some sensible form of UBI (reverse income tax), supplemented by either a Swiss or single-payer model for health care. Reforming the tax code would probably be sufficient to pay for this - a lot of loopholes hide in the complexity of the current code, most of which benefit the rich at the expense of everybody else.
The funny part is the rural areas are the most socialist of all. They survive on farm subsidies and public roads built with taxpayer money. But yeah, you guys sure are tough and independent.
You are telling us is that you do NOT understand the true cost of things.
Take away the food and water that rural areas supply to cities and you'll have very rapid social collapse leading to violence, death on a massive scale, and cannibalism.
The money you pay in the market for food - or the money you pay in your utility bill for water - doesn't even begin to cover the cost of providing these goods.
Getting food is not just a matter of spending enough money to hire a farmer, you need roads (or other transportation systems) to move the goods to market (or to a distributor). The farmer also needs some way to get tools and equipment, plus maintenance on the same. Also, the farmer will want to have a family, and that means schools, health care, fire and police protection, emergency planning, and so forth.
All this costs money - a whole lot more money then just the cost of a hiring a farmer. In this case, the overhead swamps the direct expenses.
Similarly, setting up and maintaining the water system costs money. You need to send people out into rural areas to do that, and that means roads, police, motels, and so forth, which in turn leads to the other forms of overhead since you need to get people to be willing to work on, maintain, and operate the infrastructure. Things get even more complicated and expensive when multiple governments are involved.
City dwellers could pay a LOT more for food and water - and let the rural people pay for all of the overhead required to deliver those products - or you could let the government take care of things through taxes and subsidies. It's that simple.
In practice, most people think it's safer to just let government do this stuff then to try to rely on some sort of libertarian system somehow working things out correctly (plus it gives politicians and lawyers the chance to leverage the system for personal gain). There's nothing socialist about this: socialism means the workers control the means of production (Marx, Engels), it has nothing to do with government providing services to reduce the cost of living (or the cost of doing business). Capitalism always depends on some form of government involvement - and the spending in rural areas to reduce the cost of living in the cities is just another example of that involvement.
Rural areas provide important services to city dwellers, and vice-versa. Both benefit from the existence of the other.
Whether or not anyone can get self driving to work, the logistical problems are the real killer. Who is responsible if the car makes a mistake? Not the owner, because they aren't controlling it. Who will insurance companies charge for liability insurance? When there is a construction site, who pays for the time to set it up so that autonomous cars can navigate it? I hope not tax payers. Who is responsible if they make a mistake? How do you stop people from simply walking in front of them whenever they want, knowing they will stop? Lots of things to figure out.
Nothing you mention is that difficult of a hurdle to overcome, certainly not a killer. There are well established legal precedents that will simply be adapted to the self-driving car scenario.
The existing system of human liability is predicated on a high rate of mistakes by human beings - including mistakes before they get into the car, and while driving. It is part of the common law legal tradition that nobody is responsible for Acts of God - but people are responsible for their own actions. This is ultimately what drives liability - and liability protection is the majority of what people are paying for when they get insurance.
With self-driving cars, for all practical purposes that liability will disappear provided the vehicles are properly maintained (this will be established with sensors and automated records, including video). The self-driving cars will make FAR fewer mistakes then human beings. There will probably be some requirement for regular maintenance - but you have to do that anyway today so it won't be a huge change.
An accident involving a self-driving car will be a rare scenario, and will almost always be treated as no-fault. There are already no-fault laws in a number of jurisdictions, with various features (some good, some bad). See Principles of Risk Management and Insurance by Rejda for more details. The new laws would simply represent an evolution of these laws, combining together those features that make sense given the new reality of self-driving cars that don't make nearly as many mistakes as human beings.
All parties involved in an accident will get their health care paid for by insurance (or - perhaps more likely - by a government single party health care system). There won't be any lawsuits for the common accident (for this reason, we can expect a LOT of opposition to the self-driving car concept from less scrupulous members of the legal profession).
Insurance rates will go way down. Insurance companies will probably require maintenance records to be automatically transmitted to them when work is done. It might instead be the government that requires this, and keeps the records. There will probably be some sort of system on vehicles that can be queried by law enforcement to ensure that vehicles are complaint with the rules - an electronic equivalent of the "license plate" with more features.
The software and sensor designs for self-driving cars will probably be subject to public review in some countries, as a condition of removing liability from the manufacturer and as a matter of public interest. In other cases, manufacturers will have to meet standards set by government - not all different from what they have to do today.
A person walking in front of a properly maintained car will be held responsible for their own actions, just as they would be responsible for other stupid actions such as drying their hair in the tub with an electric dryer. In most such cases, the car would be able to stop despite the negligence or stupidity of the pedestrian. The pedestrian can be ticketed for jaywalking if they didn't have the right of way, which will be established by sensor and video records. Just like today, in situations where this sort of thing is likely (such as the vicinity of a college sports stadium), the police will be on scene to make sure (perhaps with electronic overrides of the lights) that everybody gets fair access to the road.
Honest question since I don't live in the US and the states sales tax seems complicated in a 10 second google search: Don't you have any differentiation between essential items (food, water, milk, tissue paper, sanitary products, medical supplies, textbooks, etc) and luxury products for sales taxes?
A lot of countries do this where essential items get 0 or much lower sales tax. That way you can increase sales tax but not make things more difficult for the poor.
Sales tax policy varies enormously across the USA. It's not set at the federal level (not sure about US territories), but rather at state and local level. A few US states have no sales taxes, and some do not allow local modifications to sales tax, but many do allow these modifications. There are over 89,000 local and state governments in the USA (including counties, municipalities, townships and special districts such as school districts). Not all of these can tax independently, but many of them can so there still ends up being a lot of variation in sales taxes from place to place.
Worse, the sales tax rates and rules are not always set by zip code. You can also have multiple counties in a single zip code, each with their own sales tax policy. Or, you can be something like "everyone in the region bounded by the intersections of these n roads" pays this special sales tax for the next k years (in addition to any other state and local tax) as a result of some local referendum.
Sometimes services are taxed, sometimes they are not.
Dealing with sales tax can be a major pain for businesses, especially the ones that involve a lot of travel. For example, consider those businesses that travel to conventions or county fairs and sell goods. Also, there are many forms of work (like construction) that inherently tend to involve going where the work is. Most small business people who travel a lot - in my experience - really hate sales taxes.
In general, the sales tax problem not something that can be easily solved even with software. There are all kinds of special cases and exceptions written into the laws - the rules can get incredibly detailed and complicated. As most technical people know, natural language is ambiguous - and it often requires human judgement to decide what the rules actually say and whether or they are applicable in a given case. The rules often change from year to year, and attempts to simplify often run into opposition from special interest groups.
Many of the rich definitely make up one such special interest group - some are adversely affected by sales tax policy, but many LOVE having sales taxes, because every dollar in the government's budget that comes from a regressive tax is a dollar that doesn't come from a progressive tax - and thus a sales tax is effectively a tax break for the rich. In the USA the rich have a lot of influence, which is part of the reason why state and local taxes have gotten more regressive over the last few decades, which in turn has created problems with concentration of wealth.
Unfortunately, it is a fallacy that you can get "0 or lower sales tax" on "essential items" and "not make things more difficult for the poor". There is a fundamental problem here in defining what constitutes an essential item. For example, if you want social mobility, you need to give the poor access to educational materials, not just textbooks, but tools and other items needed to develop and practice skills (both in and out of school). That includes older-style tools such as carpentry tools or cooking supplies or power tools or welding equipment, and also modern tools such as computers, DVD players, televisions.
Once you start thinking this way, you begin to realize that many things that might be considered luxuries really aren't - something that might be a luxury might be a necessity to another. A boat, for example, can be a luxury to a rich person, or a necessity to a poor fisherman.
Another fundamental problem that you run into is the issue of
That's the problem with private ownership of resources and production. Most if not all resource use decisions actually impact all of us, at least community-wide if not planet-wide (as climate change is producing). And yet we are allowing monarchs and oligarchs make those decisions for our communities and nations without any input.
Here's where we find a couple of big errors in your assumptions:
1. It's not most decisions that are significant in impacting us in a negative way. Many decisions impact us in a positive way, and many others are not significant. The standards of living - and lifespan - for the majority of human beings in developed nations have gone up considerably over the past century or even the past few centuries. This reflects positive impact, much of which comes from a great many private decisions (with some government assistance in some cases, but generally not anything resembling complete government control).
Voting on every decision, or even a majority of decisions, is utterly impractical - and is likely to hurt the decision making that leads to positive results. Even with computers, the world is simply too complex for central decision making to work well. Hence, it isn't practical for the public OR the government to have input in most decisions, and trying to do the impossible always leads to bad results - typically far worse then if no collective action had been taken at all.
20th century history shows that you inevitably end up with special interest groups controlling things in such situations, at considerable harm to society as a whole. This is the true lesson taught by this history.
Even in WW2, where the US economy had some central control, the majority of the production was managed through private techniques developed by people like William S. Knudsen, a former corporate CEO who agreed to set up the wartime production system for a dollar a year out of patriotism. He set up the system to work efficiently given how real world businesses actually work - because he knew that world from the inside, having rising through the ranks from a low level worker to CEO. There was some government oversight in this system - mostly to handle conflicts between the different entities involved (including competing demands from different government entities as well as private ones) - but the majority of the system was handled through traditional capitalist production techniques.
2. There definitely IS input in MANY of the big decisions in capitalist societies - especially the ones that do have the potential to impact people in a negative way. Every developed nation has some form of environmental regulation, for example. Every developed nation has some form of regulation for health care (however limited or flawed it may be, in cases like the USA). These developed nations are all capitalist nations - if they were socialist the workers would control the means of production, and that's not the case. Instead of giving the workers control, high taxes are used to implement socially beneficial policies (in theory, some nations come closer than others, and a lot of bad and counter-productive ideas get implemented along with the good) - but that's not socialism.
Norway in some ways actually comes the closest to being socialist - because of the state owned oil company - but even there some 70% of Norway's GDP is developed through other privately owned business. Europe as a whole has about as many billionaires are the USA - and they control a substantial portion of the means of production. These ARE capitalist nations.
Even as early as 1776 Adam Smith recognized in The Wealth of Nations (the first book on capitalism, though the term itself didn't yet exist) that regulation was an important part of a healthy economy that worked to the long term public benefit. Modern nations have many such regulations. Private ownership does not imply people can do whatever they want - ownership is not an absolute.
As long there is strong regulation behind it keep things honest and upfront. No-small-print capitalism.
True capitalism assumes perfect information in the market to determine a price. Unfortunately, we live in a world of imperfect information.
That's not even remotely true. Capitalism - by definition - means private owners (the capitalists) control the means of production, as opposed to Socialism where -by definition - the workers control the means of production.
Capitalism has nothing to do with the presence or absence of perfect information in markets.
It is a very common strawman to construe capitalism as requiring something impossible in the real world - but such claims are nothing more than propaganda. Both capitalist and socialist businesses have to work in the real world, where imperfect information in markets is the norm.
Further, capitalism requires regulation, since regulations (law, particularly property and contract law) are needed for ownership to exist.
What would be the goal of marketing ethics? In the US the government can't be the enforcer, because Freedom of Speech.
Not strictly true.
The US federal government is limited by the 1st Amendment, which explicitly restricts Congress, which can pass no law infringing freedom of speech or the press.
Extension of the 1st Amendment to state government is handled under the 14th Amendment, but the text is quite vague. This allows laws that restrict speech to exist at this level of government.
For example, libel or slander laws exist at the state level - and these infringe freedom of speech. Ethics laws for various professions - which naturally include an element of restricting speech, also exist at the state level. Lawyers, accountants, and real estate agents are all likely to be affected by state level ethics laws that restrict their speech. Hence, in principle, anti-advertising laws could also exist at this level, and could address the ethics problems so prevalent in marketing.
In practice, even at the federal level, there are many laws passed that in fact do infringe freedom of speech or the press - and not just in the context of inter-state commerce or restricting businesses (so they don't even have that fig leaf of "justification" for an explicit violation of the Bill of Rights).
For example, when Congress or the federal courts coerce you to testify before them, or when you are required to declare items at the border, you are not free in your speech. Hence, in practice, "no law" actually means "as many laws as we can get away with".
For some strange reason (perhaps because they don't want anybody taking too close a look at their own ethics), the US legal profession doesn't see this fundamental contradiction in the law as an ethics problem. Perhaps they should have taken more humanities courses.
If the legal system is unnecessarily confusing, that creates an artificial demand for the services of lawyers. We can think of the legal system as being analogous to a software system which isn't being properly maintained, and where the developers are actively involved in deliberately introducing bugs to create future business for themselves.
It's hard to say whether marketing or law has worse problems with ethics - there's clearly a lot of room for improvement for both professions.
However, in times of greater oppression, in days early after revolution, during rule of Stalinism and especially WWII and early Cold War, feedback loops were still in place and socialist economy was concurrent with, or even outperforming capitalist one.
That's not even remotely true. Before the war, Stalin imported US engineers and had them build modern factories based on the latest US designs. He paid for this by selling wheat while his own people were starving, and with gold from the mines run by slave labour. Even once they had the factories, there were huge quality problems. The equipment in the factories was first rate, the problems were due to lack of worker training and motivation: Soviet management made the classic blunder of emphasizing meeting quotas over quality - a problem that would continue through the Cold War - and they were very dependent on imports from overseas during WW2.
For example, Soviet made-aircraft during WW2 had serious problems with window quality. For this reason, you'll see pictures from the war of Soviet pilots flying with canopy open for better visibility, in the Soviet Union, in the winter! Under these circumstances, the cold temperatures would have severely impaired pilot efficiency. One Soviet squadron actually refused to switch from their American-made P-39's to Soviet made equipment because the quality problems were so bad with the Soviet equipment - and Soviet units would operate P-39's (a pre-war design) until the end of war (even operating them from the Autobahn in Germany). The long period of Soviet use of this aircraft is the main reason the P-39 ended up having the record for more enemy kills than any other US made aircraft - despite being effectively obsolete in the West and the Pacific by the start of 1943 (see any of the several books on the P-39 for more information).
The Soviets also had serious problems with producing electronics: all US and British tanks and aircraft had radios, but only 1 in 9 or so of their Soviet equivalents did for much of the war. This effectively turned a lot of their vehicles into little more than targets, because they couldn't coordinate effectively without radios. Battlefields are noisy, smoky confusing places - and that's on the ground, air coordination is even harder! It's no accident that the majority of German Luftwaffe losses - especially combat losses - happened in the West. The lack of radios is a big part of the reason the Soviets took such enormous losses, especially in the air - one of the reasons Soviet pilots liked the Lend-Lease aircraft was they came with good quality radios installed.
You'll also see pictures of Soviet tanks leaving the factory with an extra transmission strapped on the back - this was done to provide a spare, because the main unit would fail so quickly due to quality control issues. The quality control problems were so bad at the start of the war that many of their units never made it to the battleground - they broke down before they got there. Things did get better over the course of the war, but quality control was something the Soviet state never fully mastered. Steven Zaloga has a nice discussion of some of these details in his book "Armored Champion: The Top Tanks of World War II".
Individual soviet engineers could be, on occasion, creative and capable - especially in the face of the ever-present threat that their families would be sent to the work camps if they didn't perform. The T-34 and Il-2 designs provide some good examples of this. Even the Soviet system as a whole could be responsive in some ways to real events - witness the improvements made to the T-34 design as a response to the pre-war fighting against the Japanese in Khalkhin Gol, and the improvements made in tank design in response to German developments during the war.
But, overall, this was in no sense a case of a socialist economy outperforming or even equalling a capitalist one. The Soviet state had to import critical resources in huge quantities from the
Right. The rational, fair answer is to scrap fuel economy standards entirely, and just increase the price of gas through taxation.
In other words, you hate the poor, and you want their food to cost more. Plus the services of the electrician, the plumber, and so forth.
Any change to something as fundamental as fuel compounds through the logistics chains of all the businesses in the country, increasing from stage to state like compound interest. To make matters worse, logistics networks are graphs, not trees. If the cost of food goes up because of a gas tax, the plumber has to pay more for food, so every stage in the logistics network that produces food now has to pay more for plumbing, which in turn means the plumber has to charge more, and so forth. It's called feedback.
You could try to hide the effects by not taxing businesses - but that's counter-productive, and it doesn't actually solve the problem. People still need to get to work, and buy food, so the cost of labour goes up. Either businesses have to charge more in response, or people have to be willing to work for less (perhaps working longer hours, or having both spouses work to compensate). You've end up with yet another policy that screws over the poor and the middle class.
In economic system, the changes due to feedback are generally pretty slow (months or years) - compared to, say, electrical systems, but in some ways that means the feedback creates even bigger problems for society because people tend to not notice it happening.
The less money you have, the more a gas tax (or anything that works in a similar manner) affects you. We call this a regressive tax. The rich don't generally notice regressive taxes, in fact such taxes are effectively a tax break on the rich. For every dollar that comes into a government budget via a regressive tax, that's a dollar that isn't being supplied by a progressive tax where the rich have to pay more.
State and local taxes have gotten increasingly regressive over the past 50 years in many places in the USA. Tax policy alone does not account for all the increasing concentration of wealth the US has experienced during that time, but it's definitely one the big factors (other big factors include massive problems with legal ethics, and with rent-seeking).
Gas taxes are a really bad idea and certainly not a fair or rational idea - fuel economy standards on newer cars make a lot more sense. The poor won't be buying those cars - so they won't be directly impacted in a bad way - but they'll get these cars eventually, so over time things will get better for everybody as more and more people will have fuel efficient cars.
All science from the Greeks and Romans was preserved exclusively by the Arab civilization.
First, the knowledge of the ancient Greeks and Romans wasn't really science. Science didn't really start to evolve until the 16th or 17th century.
Second, after the fall of the Western Roman empire, the Eastern Roman empire (often known as Byzantium or the Byzantine Empire) would continue for almost 1000 years longer (the capital city of Constantinople would fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1435).
Huge amounts of earlier knowledge were preserved in Byzantium during this long period. As things started to fall apart (due in part due to Arab pressure), people from this civilization fled back to the West seeking safer lives. Many scholars consider this a primary driving force to the Italian Renaissance.
What you are referring to as the Arab civilizations (a bit of a loose term, depending upon how you define 'Arab') certainly made some unique contributions, and they helped to preserve some knowledge that might otherwise have been lost, but they did not have the sole or exclusive role in preserving ancient knowledge. A case could even be made that the Arab / Ottoman / etc pressure on Byzantium had a net negative effect in the overall preservation of ancient knowledge.
The Arabs were not alone in creating pressure on Byzantine civilization: the first time the city of Constantinople was sacked it would be by Christian crusaders (in 1204).
No other 1st world nation treats it's own citizens as badly as the USA does. Notable areas are health care, education and the private prison system.
The sooner we let go of the idea that America is 1st world, the better. It no longer shares the western liberalism ideals that have driven much of humans forward over the last 200 years. Specifically, it's lost site of "equality" and replaced it with rampant capitalism.
It wasn't always this way. America 1950 - 1970 was decidedly better for it's citizens than the late stage capitalism technological dystopia that is now before us.
Western liberalism over the last 200 years? Are you referring to classical liberalism? This promoted capitalism, freedom, and justice and shunned modern notions of equality.
It's the switch to socialism that's causing so many historically great nations to fade as other formerly minor nations grow and thrive.
There is a lot of confusion on this terminology, because the socialist parties have tried to claim credit for improvements in welfare systems, and have been using the term socialism as synonymous with "improved welfare" - a sneaky and underhanded propaganda tactic. From a "Thought Control" perspective they've been pretty effective at this.
Socialism (Marx,Engels) actually means the workers own the means of production, as opposed to wealthy third parties (who are known as the capitalists), and thus the workers get the lion's share of the benefit from their labour.
In practice, Europe has about as many billionaires as the USA does, so there are plenty of wealthy third parties with ownership of business assets (or providing loans to businesses, either directly or through third parties), so Europe is not socialist.
There have always been some socialist businesses, but at the national level there is NO switch to socialism among developed nations today. Those nations that did try to switch in the 20th century (India, Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe) found it didn't work out, the idea of socialism just doesn't scale. The closest any modern developed nation comes is Norway, due to the nationally owned oil company, but that's something of an economic fluke, and even then it's only 30% of Norway's GDP.
Instead, what we have at the national level are different variants on the capitalist welfare state. Welfare itself is an idea that goes back centuries, if not millennia. Modern welfare systems are characterized by various levels of efficiency and various social side effects: in general those in most developed nations are more efficient than in the USA, though the side effects can vary considerably.
The USA is not fading so much because of socialist influence (which is small, much as the socialist parties in Europe are generally pretty small), but rather because of massive problems with legal ethics and corruption. There is a lot of rent-seeking behaviour on the part of special interest groups that shrinks the pool of available money that can be earned by the public as a whole, and cripples economic growth. See, for some examples, The Captured Economy.
Instead of the classical economic idea that growth leads to a bigger pie that everybody can benefit from, we instead have to make do with the crumbs that are left over after the special interest groups have helped themselves.
Divide and conquer tactics, and a bodyguard of lies, prevent reform. One of the biggest lies is that any form of reform or regulation must be socialist, thus association in the minds of the gullible attempts at reform with the failures of the 20th century socialist states.
In reality, capitalism depends on reform and regulation to even exist, let alone be efficient - a point Adam Smith made in the first book on Capitalism in 1776 (The Wealth of Nations).
To make matters more complicated, in many cases, regulation is actually used by rent-seekers to advance special interest groups at the expense of society, which means we have to differe
If you stand against the right of Americans to bear arms then you're standing against America
If you support a standing military, then you're standing against America. The purpose of the 2nd amendment was to prevent this "instrument of tyranny" by supporting well-regulated militias composed of armed citizens. But now that we have a standing military, the 2nd amendment is kind of obsolete if you think about it.
At the time the Constitution was written, there was a standing military, and there had been since the end of the Revolution:
The first Congress of the United States under the Constitution (March, 1789) found already in existence a "Frontier Corps" of infantry 700 strong, and a battalion of four companies of artillery.
According to Heitman's "Historical Register of the U. S. Army," one of these companies (Doughty's) was retained in service from the Revolutionary army: one (Douglass') was raised under Resolve of Congress of date June 3, 1784; and two were organized under Resolve of Congress of date October 20, 1786, when the four companies were organized into a battalion under Major John Doughty. - The Army of the US, article by William l. Haskin.
The standing army was not only in existence before the Constitution was written, it would continue in existence after the Bill of Rights was ratified. Congress would pass the "Establishment of the Troops" law at the very end of its 1789 session, at which time the standing army was around 800 members.
Further, nothing in the Constitution prohibits a standing military, the only consideration is that appropriations for the Army (not the Navy) have to be renewed every two years.
To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
To provide and maintain a Navy; - Article I, Section 8.
Also, the 3rd Amendment wouldn't make sense if there couldn't be a military in time of peace (and hence a standing army):
No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
If there can't be a standing military, then there wouldn't be any situation in which soldiers could be quartered in a home - without consent - in time of peace.
In other words, the 2nd Amendment was written in a historical context in which there was (and would continue to be) a standing military; hence, the militia was seen as something that existed in addition to the standing military.
In short, you're jumping to conclusions that aren't supported by the historical data.
This topic has come up on a number of prior Slashdot discussions: a lot of different people have had a lot of different things to say about it.
One key issue starts from the idea that the right to ethical practice of law is an universal and inalienable right in any society based on the rule of law. As such, it is protected as a right "retained by" and "reserved to" the people by the highest law in the land: when lessor law comes into conflict with the Bill of Rights, the lessor law must yield or the government is breaking the law. Rights retained by the people are retained by the people by definition, so no entity of government can create or allow any law or precedent that violates these rights.
As is typical with legal and professional codes that embody ethics rules, even the appearance of conflict of interest must be avoided when reasonable alternatives exist.
There are a number of ways in which copyright and patent law violate this right as currently implemented (trademark does as well, so the whole family of "IP Law" has problems).
For example, consider the role of contract in copyright. Contracts are the "bread and butter" of the legal profession: contract related matters are an extremely important source of income for legal professionals. This creates conflict of interest with respect to the nature, scope, duration, and form of contract law: in other words, what is subject to contract, what can be put into contracts, when contracts can be written, how long they last, and how they are enforced.
Thus, the current practice of extending copyright law indefinitely, with copying subject to or depending upon getting a contract with the copyright holder for that duration, in effect creates a substantial amount of long-term business for the legal profession.
This in turn creates conflict of interest for legislators who are lawyers voting on copyright law, for legislators in general who receive campaign contributions from associations of legal professionals, for the legal professionals working on the staff of legislators (who do most of the actual work of writing the law and have influence over the politicians and the final form the law takes), for the prosecutors that bring criminal cases involving copyright, and for the judges that hear all criminal and civil cases involving copyright. In case of the judges, they are often selected for higher office by the same politicians who receive campaign contributions from those associations of legal professionals, and their salaries and benefits are also subject in some ways to the decisions of these politicians, and the politicians are also in a position to potentially decide whether or not the Constitutional requirement of "good behaviour" has been met - leading to multiple potential conflicts of interest (even excluding the extra-legal ones).
In other words, the longer the duration of copyright SUBJECT TO CONTRACT, the more contracts get written, the longer contracts can last, and hence the greater the long-term business created for the legal profession. Current copyright law creates an artificial demand for the services of lawyers, by how the law is implemented. The supply of lawyers is relatively fixed (it changes only slowly over the long term), so the greater the demand, the greater the lifetime income of members of the profession. This creates at least the impression that the legal profession is being unethical - and perhaps the reality - with respect to how copyright law is written and implemented, and there are reasonable alternatives, so the right to ethical practice of law is being violated. Hence, there is a conflict between copyright law and the Bill of Rights, and the lessor law is supposed to yield.
For example, there could a mechanism by which copying is no longer governed by contract after some short period of time (perhaps 5-10 years, it might depend on the work - it should be considerably shorter than the lifespan of a typical legal professional), but instead by some simple compensation scheme. Perhaps
Slashdot Mirror
But overall, I really dislike this push to make the $15/hr. wage a LEGAL mandated minimum. If a business does it voluntarily? Well, great. That's how things are supposed to work. But here in Maryland, they just pushed the $15/hr. wage law through (although it doesn't take effect immediately, and there are a few exceptions for specific work situations). And already, the feedback I've heard from small business owners is really telling. Either they're starting to look at options to move out of the state and do business elsewhere, or they're trying to find ways to hire fewer people or cutting hours to make up the difference, because they can't stay profitable while paying everyone that as a starting wage.
The problem out here is, it's already very costly and difficult to run a business. ...
I know this is getting a little off topic, but my point is just to illustrate the kind of challenges that get put in people's way, when they're just trying to run a successful business that employs others.
I suspect that, if anything, you are massively underestimating the scope of the problem. Econometric studies show that 64-73% of the differences in cost of living between US states are caused by government policy decisions (The Importance of the Cost of Living and Policies to Address It - Schlomach, 2017).
Further, I wouldn't be surprised to find a similar percentage of the differences in cost of living not just from place to place, but also from year to year, are also caused by government policy decisions. Many government decisions have impacts that compound across the economy, and there are feedback loops are well (hence society pays many times for a bad policy decision, not just once: the impact compounds over time). Even seemingly small amounts can become impressive when everybody has to pay, and when compounding and feedback are taken into account.
To give an example, the tolerance of government in the USA for ethics problems in the legal system causes almost every business and most individuals to have to pay protection money in form of liability insurance - and sometimes to get that insurance a business has to spend additional money on related items (such as fences, security systems, refraining from entering certain markets or doing certain things or having a presence in certain areas, and so forth).
Hence, government policy increases the cost of doing business, and these costs have to be accounted for in some fashion for the business to survive. The total amounts involved are not trivial: according to a Redja (Risk Management and Insurance), the direct expenditures on tort in the USA in some years equals a 5% income tax on every American - and that's just the direct spending in one of the many areas of law that has problems. Insurance companies have to cover these totals plus overhead and profit - and we also have to consider the others forms of defensive spending that businesses are doing - which means the total amount spent by everybody with respect to this issue is larger then the direct expenditures alone might suggest.
The direct spending on tort in the USA is roughly 2-3x what people are paying in other developed nations (Redja) so the USA clearly has different policies with respect to the issue - and US businesses are paying a far higher price then their counterparts in other nations as a result of these policies.
For another example, economic studies suggest that in most industries (with the pharmaceutical industry being one of the rare exceptions) the money spent on patent lawyers and litigation exceeds the value of the patents - and does nothing to increase innovation rates (see The Captured Economy, Lindsey and Teles for many references on the economics of patent). Here again we have government policy increasing the cost of doing business.
Sales taxes are another area that has some significant hidden overhead. The sales tax rules can be very complex in many jurisdictions, change frequently, are often quite ir
" It's about the state acknowledging that it made a mistake, and punished people that it should not have."
So... it's a mistake for a governing body to punish people for breaking a law that has been on the books since before those people were born?
Yes, if it is an illegal law, which it always was.
James Madison deliberately wrote the Bill of Rights to be open-ended, retaining to the people any individual rights they wanted to assert (9th and 10th Amendments, unspecified rights retained by the people, unspecified rights reserved to the people). This was done to address the objection of the Anti-Federalists that any finite Bill of Rights would necessarily miss rights that turned out to be really important (they certainly called that one correctly!). In response, James Madison made the Bill of Rights open-ended - and hence not finite, thus nullifying the objection.
The fact that multiple states have decided to allow pot is more then sufficient to establish that a right retained by the people is in play. Even one person making a reasonable argument that such a right exists should be sufficient. The Bill of Rights, after all, was a document of the Enlightenment - the Age of Reason - the age when logic and reason and rational thinking became superior to established authority or mere numbers.
Such an argument was made by individuals on many occasions since the 1930's when pot was originally made illegal - which should have led to this situation being corrected long ago. Having the population of multiple states vote overwhelmingly in favor of legalization goes far beyond the minimum standard.
In short, federal and state governments in the USA - by enforcing illegal laws prohibiting the production, sale, and use of pot - violated the Bill of Rights. The government could have put into place some reasonable health and safety requirements regarding pot, but it never had the legal authority to make it entirely illegal.
This situation SHOULD have been corrected a long time ago. Perhaps a legal profession that highly valued legal ethics would have done better, but the USA clearly didn't have one in 1932 when the ABA reviewed the Uniform State Narcotic Drug Act - and there are still major problems in legal ethics today (see Lindsey and Teles, The Captured Economy, for a number of references related to this point).
Every lawyer and every law enforcement officer should be thinking about whether or not any given law (or precedent) is legal before they choose to enforce it (or use it). It's an individual responsibility. This is called having integrity. It is how the system is supposed to work. Those who become lawyers, or accept certain government positions have sworn oaths to recognize these truths and act accordingly. Those who are unwilling to abide by this requirement are welcome to look for work in another country.
If you like, you can think of this as the US equivalent of the Nuremberg Precedent: it comes into US law under the authority of the 9th and 10th Amendments as one of the most important rights retained by the people.
Any law or precedent to the contrary is illegal: rights retained by the people are retained by the people by definition and can not be taken away by ANY entity of government (up to and including the Supreme Court) without introducing a contradiction in the law - and contradictions in the law will always involve unethical practice of law at some level, sooner or later - and hence violate the 9th Amendment right to ethical practice of law (an universal and inalienable right).
Failure to comply with this rule is a violation of the right to ethical practice of law, the oaths various people swear to uphold the law, and the Constitutional requirement of "good behavior" for federal judges. It's impossible to uphold the law by introducing a contradiction into it, and unethical practice of law is certainly not "good behavior".
So it is a good thing that these illegal laws are finally (after so many decades) starting to be corrected. It remains to be seen whether ALL the harm done by illegal government action (and unethical practice of law) in this area will eventually be corrected in some reasonable fashion.
Unfortunately the highest court in the land (who's job it is to decide whether lesser laws violate the highest law in the land) decided in Eldred v. Ashcroft that the US copyright law is in fact constitutional.
Good luck getting the right mix of judges on the bench (and the right case going all the way to the highest court) to get that ruling overturned.
There's a fun game you can play. Pick a random circuit or Supreme Court decision and see if you spot the cases where they ignore the legal ethics issues.
There are many such cases. You can even spot at least one from last year - and it's an important case with substantial economic implications - so this is not a problem that is going away.
That willful blindness is a big part of the reason why the US has such severe problems with ethical practice of law (and why the legal profession collectively makes far more then their counterparts in other developed nations, relative to GDP, some studies suggest roughly 50%).
Legal ethics problems are a cancer in the body of US law.
who's job it is to decide whether lesser laws violate the highest law in the land)
Actually, by definition rights retained by the people are retained by the people and can not be taken away by ANY entity of government - for if they could be taken away by government, they would no longer be retained by the people.
In logic, that's known as a proof by contradiction - and contradiction in the law is always a violation of the right to ethical practice of law (not the mention the 'good behaviour' requirement for being a federal judge).
Thus, as part of the government, the Supreme Court does not have the legal authority to refuse to recognize rights the people choose to assert as being retained by them.
This makes perfect sense if you consider the history. The Bill of Rights was an Enlightenment document, a document from the Age of Reason. Enlightenment thinking accepted the idea that a logical, rational, reasonable argument could and should trump the status quo or established authority. Look at the Declaration of Independence for an example of this.
Here's another consideration: had the Founding Fathers been prepared to trust in entities defined by the original Constitution, then there wouldn't have been any need for a Bill of Rights. The acceptance of the pre-"Bill of Rights" Constitution was in fact conditional, based in large part on promises from men of honour (who were trusted) that a Bill of Rights would be added. Further, any sensible person in that day and age knew full well that it was neither militarily nor politically feasible to try to coerce people to stay in the union if this expectation was not met.
Thus, it follows from the history that the Bill of Rights is supposed to be the highest law in the land, superseding the entities defined by the pre-Bill of Rights Constitution: the Presidency, the Congress, and the Supreme Court. It wouldn't make any sense for the Bill of Rights to be simultaneously intended to limit the power of these entities while having it's meaning also defined by them - that would be another contradiction.
In practice, when you look at decisions like Eldred v. Ashcroft, you'll typically find the lawyers involved completely ignore the legal ethics issues (and almost always act as if the 9th Amendment doesn't exist). The judges get around the problem of not having authority to supersede the rights arising under the 9th Amendment, by simply pretending that the Emperor's new clothes look really nice.
That is a huge problem.
There is no doubt that the legal ethics situation in US law is undermining the perceived legitimacy of government in the USA (and that's a big part of the 'piracy' problem), and doing enormous long term economic and social harm to the USA.
In some years, the estimated direct expenditures on tort have been equal to an additional 5% income tax on every American (Rejda, Risk Management and Insurance) - a
When you challenge most software firms with this kind of logic, they typically turn around and give a lecture on there being a "right and a wrong way" to go about learning their products -- perhaps throwing in the fact that they sell "student versions" much cheaper for students. And you know? That's all true, technically. If you're purely a "letter of the law" and "show no mercy" type, I guess there's your answer?
A strong argument can be made that current US copyright law violates the highest law in the land, and is therefore illegal, which makes the position taken by the "letter of law" folks particularly absurd.
The argument rests on the right to ethical practice of law, certainly an universal and inalienable right in any society based on the rule of law. In the US, this right can be asserted as a right "retained by the people" under the 9th Amendment, and "reserved to the people" under the 10th.
James Madison deliberately made the 9th and 10th Amendments open-ended to allow the assertion of fundamental rights outside the legislative process, to ultimately limit the power of government, in response to the argument posed by the Anti-Federalists that any Bill of Rights would inevitably leave out important rights that government would eventually try to infringe. In other words, he recognized that there needed to be a mechanism outside the normal political process to limit the abuse of fundamental rights by government - and he embedded that mechanism into the highest law of the land (which all senior government officials and all legal professionals swear oaths to uphold).
Under the right to ethical practice of law even the appearance of conflict of interest must be avoided when reasonable alternatives exist.
US copyright law violates this right in several ways. For one, it's too complex - it's very hard to determine whether something is under copyright, who holds the copyright, and when that copyright can be infringed (i.e. ignored) as an exercise of "fair use" rights. For another, the long durations of copyright - under the current implementation where access is governed by contract - create long term artificial demand for the services of lawyers.
Both complex laws and contract related matters generate enormous business for the legal profession, so the conflict of interest is clear here.
There's also a question concerning whether the lawyers have written the law to be too favourable to the groups that tend to hire the most lawyers (such as big corporations), and not the actual content creators. Consider the case of musicians and authors (most of whom make a very small percentage of the gross resulting from their work), for an example of how this plays out.
The government could avoid the first issue by making the law simpler, with some easy way for anybody to freely and easily determine copyright for most works via the Internet - and sensible, clearly stated rules for "fair use" that cover the most common cases. They could avoid the second by either making the duration of copyright shorter, or having some automatic mechanism that avoided contract law after an initial period, perhaps with a percentage of any gross replacing contract for all commercial transactions. The last issue could be fixed by allowing some percentage of the gross to always stay with the people creating the content (or allowing the copyright in whole or part to revert to them after a moderate period of years).
So we have both conflict of interest and reasonable alternatives: the Bill of Rights violation is clear - and that in turn means that the lawyers who have been upholding the current law (creating precedents to support it, or bringing cases under it) are in violation of their oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights.
Apparently the lesson provided by the Nuremberg Precedent hasn't changed the tendency of people to do that kind of thing.
The right thing to do would be to fix the law. We certainly pay legislators (and their staffs) enough that they sho
Valid arguments against basic income are economical, not moral. There is legitimate concern about the inflationary effects of society-wide basic income.
I'm dubious about the validity of these arguments. The classical economic view of inflation - too many dollars chasing too few products - doesn't seem to be all that common in the real world. It happens, but not that often.
The primary drivers of inflation seem to be things like government policy.
There have been econometric studies that show most of the cost of living differences in US states are due to the consequences of government policy decisions. Many of these policies are bad ones. Some are economically unsound overall even if they provide some small benefits. Some come down to what economists refer to as "rent-seeking", which means the policies are entirely unnecessary; they exist only to enrich special interest groups at the expense of everybody else. Not all special interest groups do equal harm: rent-seeking by some (e.g. legal professionals) does far more economic harm (and hence poses an especially important problem for society to solve) then rent-seeking by others.
Another consideration: inflation isn't particularly important when it applies to luxuries. It's inflation applied to necessities that's more of a problem. The poor are already buying food (or someone else is buying on their behalf), so it's not clear that we would have more dollars chasing the same amount of product. Instead, it seems more likely that we would have fewer people going into debt, typically in the form of credit card debt. Such debt lets rich creditors such as credit card companies (and their big shareholders) get even richer at the expense of society as a whole, so a reduction of credit card debt would be an economically good thing.
If the rich keep getting richer while the poor keep getting poorer, that's not a good thing for society. Incentives matter, and there will never be equality of outcome (nor should there be). But the pendulum can swing too far in the direction of concentrated wealth, and throughout human history that's always eventually led to bad results for society, every single time.
With a basic income system, the key would be to prevent it from becoming one of the bad government policies, instead of being one of the good ones.
What I worry about more then inflation is the likelihood that the system will lead to vote-buying by politicians, who will destroy the economy by taking more than a fair or reasonable or even sensible share of productivity. Limiting the growth of the basic income system seems like the hardest part of solving this problem in a rational way. The track record of US politicians is not such as to give anybody confidence that they could ever get this right.
You can have nice things because you don't have to fund your own defense. Military is extremely expensive and America defends Europe for free.
The USA spends 3.5% of it's GDP on it's military. Compare this to Britain and France, each at 2.2%. It's not that big of a difference, especially when you consider that the USA has to spend a lot more on naval power then other nations, just to get troops and equipment to Europe and keep them supplied. That's essentially overhead and arguably doesn't count towards military power on the ground. If we take out the naval budget, we get 2.6% for the USA, which gives an even smaller difference.
Remove the portion of the budget needed to support US commitments in Asia (which don't necessarily help put troops and equipment on the ground in Europe, depending upon whether or not you can move those assets: if WW2 is any predictor of how future wars will play out then you can't expect to move those assets) and the budget differences get even smaller.
The USA might be wasting a lot more money in the military budget as well, given the corruption historically associated with US defence spending. But perhaps other countries have similar problems. So I won't count that.
Comparing health care, the USA spends 17-18% of it's GDP on health care (including both private and public funding). Britain spends 9.9%, France 11.6%. That's a much bigger difference: it swamps the difference in military spending.
The conclusion follows that military spending can at most account for a very small portion of the difference in the health care systems.
And yet there is not a single payer system in the world that isn't struggling.
False. Single payer systems are doing much better then the US system. Health care expenses as a percentage of GDP are around 17-18% for the USA, but only 9-11% for other developed nations.
The Swiss system (which is NOT single payer, but instead has highly regulated insurance companies) runs around 11.5% of GDP. It's on the high end as these systems go (but not particularly so, it's pretty much on par with the generally high cost of living in Switzerland).
UK's system is slowly going broke and people are buying private health insurance to cover all sorts of routine service that would otherwise require waits of months if not years to get treated in their single payer system.
The UK is spending less on health care than most developed nations (around 9.9% of GDP, only Italy spends less at 9.1%). In practice, they have plenty of room for growth: they could be spending a lot more if they were willing to throw money at problems.
Roughly 6% of the population of the UK has private health insurance. It's a luxury for the rich so they don't have to wait, but perhaps also useful for people with special situations.
The USA is in far worse financial shape then the UK from a health care perspective: US citizens and government combined are spending far more on health care, and simultaneously government in the US is far deeper in debt (and the picture gets even more dismal when you consider the high levels of US state and local government debt).
Canada has so few doctor's that the wait time to see them (and frequently the them isn't doctor but a PA-C, LPN or RPN ) is so long that you either recover before you can see anyone or if it bad enough and you live close to the US boarder, you cross over to receive immediate treatment.
Also false. Canada has 2.1 physicians per 1000 people, the USA has 2.3 physicians per 1000 people. That's an insignificant difference (and more than compensated by all the US physicians doing cosmetic and other optional work).
The best numbers currently available suggest considerably less than 1% of Canadians (0.15 percent or 1 person for every 600 Canadians) go to the USA for treatment (and some that is cosmetic in nature).
Canadians have a longer life expectancy than US citizens, and lower infant mortality. A comparison of health care by the AARP suggests that the USA would have 56k fewer preventable deaths each year if the USA adopted the Canadian system. Taken collectively, this data suggests Canada is doing better then the USA overall in terms of the health care provided (though other factors can certainly play a role in these statistics and a simple comparison isn't necessarily conclusive).
And finally, shoot all the Lawyers .. estimates run from 20-50% additional overhead caused by frivolous lawsuits.
We can't shoot all the lawyers, but the cost of the ethics problems in US law is definitely a major factor in health care expenses. In some years, estimates place direct expenditures on tort in the USA is being equivalent to a 5% income tax on every American (Risk Management and Insurance - Rejda). Per-capita, it's 2-3x what is spent in other developed nations (and those other nations have their own share of legal ethics problems, so the total is probably 4-5x what it needs to be). That's just the direct expenses, the indirect expenses (such as liability insurance and other forms of defensive overhead that businesses and private citizens have to take to protect themselves) are likely 2x or 3x the direct expenses. These costs compound through the economy, of course. By the time a product gets to the hospital the "lawyer tax" has been paid multiple times, once by every business that had something to do with some aspect of the product - even just finding or processing raw materials in ways that have nothing to do with t
Explain to me how creative works can even be encouraged to exist without copyright.
There's a long history of creative works existing without copyright.
But, all things considered, a good copyright system would probably be beneficial for society.
Unfortunately, we don't have a good copyright system in the USA. Instead, we currently have a bad copyright system (and one that is arguably illegal on multiple levels, as currently implemented).
Copyright encourages competition - but only useful competition. Like encouraging there to be other authors out their writing their own books.
In an ideal world, that would be true. It would likely even be true if we had a good copyright system.
In practice, economic studies suggest that the primary functions of copyright (at least as it is currently implemented) are to create concentration of wealth, and to serve the interests of the legal profession. Admittedly there's some overlap between those two items (the lawyers, as a group, gain benefits from concentration of wealth disproportionate to their education, skills, or numbers).
We have similar problems with the patent system, although the details differ.
See The Captured Economy (Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles) for more information on the specific studies that have been done.
In principle, it would not be that difficult to change the copyright system to better serve the interests of society - and to better reward content creators. The required changes are not that complicated - and most of them flow from recognizing in the current law ethical conflict of interest on the part of the legal profession, then re-working the law to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest.
In the end, this reform actually ends up benefiting content creators, so you no longer - for example - have wealthy middlemen (and their lawyers) taking most of the gross from the creative work of musicians and authors.
In any society based on the rule of law, the right to ethical practice of law should be an universal and inalienable right, with even the appearance of conflict of interest being disallowed when reasonable alternatives exist.
But - just as is the case with other major current problems (for example, health care and tort reform) - deeply entrenched special interest groups have prevented society from fixing things - and in fact have made things even more broken in recent years.
In other jurisdictions like the United States; it was never even a question, really.... Your employer can require you to use their biometric systems for access control or time and attendance;
That's false: such matters are ALWAYS open to question in the USA, because James Madison gave the USA an open-ended Bill of Rights, giving the people the ability to assert ANY rights they desire under the 9th Amendment (unspecified rights retained by the people) and 10th Amendment (unspecified rights to the people).
This was done in response to the criticism of the Anti-Federalists that the pre-Bill of Rights Constitution had no Bill of Rights, and that any finite (closed) Bill of Rights would always leave out critical rights.
Hence, an individual right to privacy can be asserted under the 9th Amendment, and it's ultimately up to be people to decide what that means: government action is only legitimate to the extent that it is consistent with the expectations of the people.
There is nothing in the Bill of Rights that limits the application of such rights to government: they can also be applied to private business.
Further, rights retained by the people are by definition retained by the people and can not be taken away by ANY entity of government.
As the Bill of Rights is the highest law in the land (superseding even the pre-Bill of Rights parts of the Constitution), such rights supersede the authority of government at all levels. The people have the ultimate power: they are the supposed to be the most important check-and-balance on government.
Further, under US federal law, the infringement of fundamental rights "under the colour of law" is both grounds for civil suit, and can be a basis for criminal charges. In theory, this prevents state and local government as well as the federal government from infringing rights the people decide are retained by them.
All Americans have to do is decide to assert their rights, and get them past a frequently unethical legal profession and a frequently corrupt government ...
In practice, that's difficult. Even obvious and really basic rights such as the right to ethical practice of law are routinely infringed in US law. There is a huge gap between the law as written and the law as practised.
But this problem might primarily be due to ignorance, and perhaps much can be accomplished if the public starts to care more about their rights. Further, appeal to the authority retained by the people 9th and 10th Amendments may end up being the only possible way to overcome the deeply entrenched corruption in the system without requiring a reboot (another American Revolution).
Sales/income tax are proportional to income and spending. State income tax isn't a big deal at middle income levels. Sales tax exempts food and clothing (necessities).
In practice, sales tax is one of the most regressive forms of taxation in existence. It affects the poor far more than the rich. Having sales taxes is not something to be proud of.
Further, sales tax isn't proportional to spending, because proportional implies a linear relationship, and it's actually not a linear relationship.
ITEP estimates that "low-income families typically spend three-quarters of their income on sales-taxable items, while middle-income families spend about half, and upper-income families spend roughly one sixth."
Some of the tax ends up being hidden in the sales price of an item (or service), with different amounts of impact for different items (or services) - depending upon variables such as the exact sales tax rules in place (which can change from region to region or year to year in most jurisdictions), and the details of the logistics, manufacturing, and labour required to produce the good (or service), plus the nature of regulations affecting the various businesses involved.
For example, the overhead associated with the rules for sales tax raises the cost of doing business (more money has to be spent on lawyers, accountants, software, training, records, audits). Every business is impacted - nobody can enter the market without also having to pay the costs - so the costs get passed on to customers (which may be other businesses downstream in the logistics network, who in turn must raise their prices). It's a lot like compound interest.
This is bad, and it is especially bad for small business (which are more sensitive to overhead), which in turn hurts employment and lowers competition (and sometimes quality).
Since the rules are written in natural language, which is ambiguous, you can't solve the complexity problem with software - human decision making is still needed.
This sort of thing raises the costs of goods and services, and it raises them by different amounts depending upon the exact rules in play (sometimes the rules are easier to easier to understand, other times they aren't). Hence the non-linear relationship. There are lots of other non-linearities in this system, think about it a bit ...
It helps a little to exempt food and clothing from the direct tax, but in practice sales taxes create costs that end up compounding through the logistics chains of businesses, so they still end up impacting the price of goods most needed by the poor such as food and clothing.
Those items don't get produced and delivered to the stores by magic - and in practice sales taxes impact the cost of production and delivery even if there are in theory business exemptions. Sales taxes on gas are especially nasty - they immediately raise the cost of labour as well as the cost of business transport.
Further, logistics networks are graphs, not trees. There is feedback present. Raise the cost of farming, and the plumber pays more for food (even if it isn't being taxed directly). Then the plumber charges more when the farmer needs services, so the farmer in turn has to charge more, hence the feedback.
Sales taxes also affect access to tools and education and training needed for social mobility, so they have an additional negative impact on the poor.
In practice, sales taxes are a tax break for the rich, since every dollar that comes into the governments budget from a regressive tax is a dollar that isn't coming into the budget from a progressive tax. This is the major reason sales taxes are as prevalent as they are.
In summary, sales taxes are a primitive solution to the problem of funding government, a solution which contributes to excessive concentration of wealth, and does a lot of harm to the poor (and raising the costs of funding welfare for the middle class, as well as increasing crime). Sales taxes are something that we should be leaving behind us as we move into the modern age, just like the horse and buggy.
I hope that you realise that by dropping the patent system as a whole chances are that America competiveness will get worse, not better. Instead of being copied just by unscrupulous Chinese industries products will be copied by the whole World. I don't think America is ready for this escale and type of globalization.
Actually, there is considerable evidence that the patent system is a net loss for everything other than pharmaceuticals, and foreign countries with highly regulated health care - whether single payer or otherwise - just force the pharmaceutical companies to charge a lot less as part of their regulated health care. The net effect is the US consumer ends up paying for the patent instead of people in the other countries, which can't be good for the USA (17.5% of GDP versus 9-11% - an enormous difference).
The patent system also leads to excessive concentration of wealth.
Like copyright, it occasionally benefits ordinary people, but on the whole does far more harm then good (as currently implemented).
See The Captured Economy by Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles.
Since there are massive legal and governmental ethics problems with the current US patent system (read through prior discussions on Slashdot to understand why), it's also a system that exists (as currently implemented) in violation of the US Bill of Rights. Again, this has been discussed at length previously on this forum.
The dual rights to ethical government and ethical practice of law are universal and inalienable rights in any society based on the rule of law - and thus protected by the 9th and 10th Amendments (rights retained by the people, rights reserved to the people). Those rights are routinely being violated by US government and the US legal profession (and third parties) with respect to patent and copyright.
Having the government and the legal profession routinely violating the highest law in the land can't possibly be good for the economy. Just think about the compounding that happens through business logistics chains to protect businesses from abuse of the system (such as liability insurance, special procedures, special software, and the associated training expenses). This works a lot like compound interest, but the compounding is from one node to the next - and logistics networks are graphs not trees, so there is feedback.
These legal and governmental ethics problems are essentially a hidden regressive tax that makes everything more expensive, and hurts the poor far more than the rich - leading to increased crime and more expensive welfare, plus enormous amounts of human misery. Equality of outcomes is both unattainable and undesirable (incentives matter), but the system we currently have is a huge mess with a lot of room for improvement.
Property Taxes are a tax on unrealized gains. They are probably the most oppressive taxes in the US. They can drive someone out of a home they own outright, merely because the State says your home is worth $X and you need to pay $x * y%, regardless of your income situation.
The solution is to decouple taxes on land and homes from current market values and only use market value when acquiring assets such as land and homes.
A better solution would be to get rid of property taxes entirely.
Let local government be funded from a share of state tax income - and don't let the states tax property.
A lot of problems in the USA can be traced in part to property tax policy - such as having the highest incarceration rate in the world. Many people turn to crime when they don't have other alternatives.
"After the Civil War, separate and racialized tax structures were set up to enable segregated schooling in the South and North. Astonishingly, nearly 150 years later, ... these same systems of property tax funding continue in most US school districts, allowing and even facilitating the continuation of ... resource inequality" - Camille Walsh, 2018, Racial Taxation.
Why should the rich get the best schools, fire departments, police, emergency planning and disaster preparedness, roads, and so forth?
Property taxes are a curse and a blight on society. Have a reasonable taxes on other things (such as inheritance) and you'll get turnover of property, so there isn't any legitimate justification for having property taxes.
CA did pretty much this with Proposition 13. It stabilized growth and benefited millions of home owners.
It's also done enormous harm, shifting a large share of government tax income from businesses to individuals - and reducing available housing. Two identical properties can pay a 20x difference in property tax. It also infringes the right to travel (a right arising under the 9th Amendment). But, hey, it's only the highest law in the land, why shouldn't government break the law?
Imagine if the government decided to increase your income taxes by 20x for choosing to exercise your freedom of speech.
When you systematically give 30 hours per week to a larger number of part time employees just to avoid having full time employees, you really should be responsible for the fallout. There are very few of these employees that don't want full-time hours. Instead, Wal-Mart can claim that 100% of full-time employees get all these great benefits and they're a great place to work - all while only having a handful of full-time employees.
It seems like there are several better solutions to this problem.
One is to come up with a cost of full time benefits for each geographic area. Employers pay a percentage of that cost to a fund like a 401k, according to hours worked each week (with some defined total being considered "full time"). The money in the fund can only be used for health insurance or health care until retirement, and otherwise accumulates towards retirement.
This forces all business to compete equally, nobody can play games with part-time status and get any advantage. Workers that are part time at one business can take a second job to get the equivalent of full time status.
It has the disadvantage that insurance companies will play games with the rates to maximize their profits - which in turn creates all sorts of complications when the government tries to control this.
Yet another solution would be some sensible form of UBI (reverse income tax), supplemented by either a Swiss or single-payer model for health care. Reforming the tax code would probably be sufficient to pay for this - a lot of loopholes hide in the complexity of the current code, most of which benefit the rich at the expense of everybody else.
The funny part is the rural areas are the most socialist of all. They survive on farm subsidies and public roads built with taxpayer money. But yeah, you guys sure are tough and independent.
You are telling us is that you do NOT understand the true cost of things.
Take away the food and water that rural areas supply to cities and you'll have very rapid social collapse leading to violence, death on a massive scale, and cannibalism.
The money you pay in the market for food - or the money you pay in your utility bill for water - doesn't even begin to cover the cost of providing these goods.
Getting food is not just a matter of spending enough money to hire a farmer, you need roads (or other transportation systems) to move the goods to market (or to a distributor). The farmer also needs some way to get tools and equipment, plus maintenance on the same. Also, the farmer will want to have a family, and that means schools, health care, fire and police protection, emergency planning, and so forth.
All this costs money - a whole lot more money then just the cost of a hiring a farmer. In this case, the overhead swamps the direct expenses.
Similarly, setting up and maintaining the water system costs money. You need to send people out into rural areas to do that, and that means roads, police, motels, and so forth, which in turn leads to the other forms of overhead since you need to get people to be willing to work on, maintain, and operate the infrastructure. Things get even more complicated and expensive when multiple governments are involved.
City dwellers could pay a LOT more for food and water - and let the rural people pay for all of the overhead required to deliver those products - or you could let the government take care of things through taxes and subsidies. It's that simple.
In practice, most people think it's safer to just let government do this stuff then to try to rely on some sort of libertarian system somehow working things out correctly (plus it gives politicians and lawyers the chance to leverage the system for personal gain). There's nothing socialist about this: socialism means the workers control the means of production (Marx, Engels), it has nothing to do with government providing services to reduce the cost of living (or the cost of doing business). Capitalism always depends on some form of government involvement - and the spending in rural areas to reduce the cost of living in the cities is just another example of that involvement.
Rural areas provide important services to city dwellers, and vice-versa. Both benefit from the existence of the other.
Whether or not anyone can get self driving to work, the logistical problems are the real killer. Who is responsible if the car makes a mistake? Not the owner, because they aren't controlling it. Who will insurance companies charge for liability insurance? When there is a construction site, who pays for the time to set it up so that autonomous cars can navigate it? I hope not tax payers. Who is responsible if they make a mistake? How do you stop people from simply walking in front of them whenever they want, knowing they will stop? Lots of things to figure out.
Nothing you mention is that difficult of a hurdle to overcome, certainly not a killer. There are well established legal precedents that will simply be adapted to the self-driving car scenario.
The existing system of human liability is predicated on a high rate of mistakes by human beings - including mistakes before they get into the car, and while driving. It is part of the common law legal tradition that nobody is responsible for Acts of God - but people are responsible for their own actions. This is ultimately what drives liability - and liability protection is the majority of what people are paying for when they get insurance.
With self-driving cars, for all practical purposes that liability will disappear provided the vehicles are properly maintained (this will be established with sensors and automated records, including video). The self-driving cars will make FAR fewer mistakes then human beings. There will probably be some requirement for regular maintenance - but you have to do that anyway today so it won't be a huge change.
An accident involving a self-driving car will be a rare scenario, and will almost always be treated as no-fault. There are already no-fault laws in a number of jurisdictions, with various features (some good, some bad). See Principles of Risk Management and Insurance by Rejda for more details. The new laws would simply represent an evolution of these laws, combining together those features that make sense given the new reality of self-driving cars that don't make nearly as many mistakes as human beings.
All parties involved in an accident will get their health care paid for by insurance (or - perhaps more likely - by a government single party health care system). There won't be any lawsuits for the common accident (for this reason, we can expect a LOT of opposition to the self-driving car concept from less scrupulous members of the legal profession).
Insurance rates will go way down. Insurance companies will probably require maintenance records to be automatically transmitted to them when work is done. It might instead be the government that requires this, and keeps the records. There will probably be some sort of system on vehicles that can be queried by law enforcement to ensure that vehicles are complaint with the rules - an electronic equivalent of the "license plate" with more features.
The software and sensor designs for self-driving cars will probably be subject to public review in some countries, as a condition of removing liability from the manufacturer and as a matter of public interest. In other cases, manufacturers will have to meet standards set by government - not all different from what they have to do today.
A person walking in front of a properly maintained car will be held responsible for their own actions, just as they would be responsible for other stupid actions such as drying their hair in the tub with an electric dryer. In most such cases, the car would be able to stop despite the negligence or stupidity of the pedestrian. The pedestrian can be ticketed for jaywalking if they didn't have the right of way, which will be established by sensor and video records. Just like today, in situations where this sort of thing is likely (such as the vicinity of a college sports stadium), the police will be on scene to make sure (perhaps with electronic overrides of the lights) that everybody gets fair access to the road.
Constru
Honest question since I don't live in the US and the states sales tax seems complicated in a 10 second google search: Don't you have any differentiation between essential items (food, water, milk, tissue paper, sanitary products, medical supplies, textbooks, etc) and luxury products for sales taxes?
A lot of countries do this where essential items get 0 or much lower sales tax. That way you can increase sales tax but not make things more difficult for the poor.
Sales tax policy varies enormously across the USA. It's not set at the federal level (not sure about US territories), but rather at state and local level. A few US states have no sales taxes, and some do not allow local modifications to sales tax, but many do allow these modifications. There are over 89,000 local and state governments in the USA (including counties, municipalities, townships and special districts such as school districts). Not all of these can tax independently, but many of them can so there still ends up being a lot of variation in sales taxes from place to place.
Worse, the sales tax rates and rules are not always set by zip code. You can also have multiple counties in a single zip code, each with their own sales tax policy. Or, you can be something like "everyone in the region bounded by the intersections of these n roads" pays this special sales tax for the next k years (in addition to any other state and local tax) as a result of some local referendum.
Sometimes services are taxed, sometimes they are not.
Dealing with sales tax can be a major pain for businesses, especially the ones that involve a lot of travel. For example, consider those businesses that travel to conventions or county fairs and sell goods. Also, there are many forms of work (like construction) that inherently tend to involve going where the work is. Most small business people who travel a lot - in my experience - really hate sales taxes.
In general, the sales tax problem not something that can be easily solved even with software. There are all kinds of special cases and exceptions written into the laws - the rules can get incredibly detailed and complicated. As most technical people know, natural language is ambiguous - and it often requires human judgement to decide what the rules actually say and whether or they are applicable in a given case. The rules often change from year to year, and attempts to simplify often run into opposition from special interest groups.
Many of the rich definitely make up one such special interest group - some are adversely affected by sales tax policy, but many LOVE having sales taxes, because every dollar in the government's budget that comes from a regressive tax is a dollar that doesn't come from a progressive tax - and thus a sales tax is effectively a tax break for the rich. In the USA the rich have a lot of influence, which is part of the reason why state and local taxes have gotten more regressive over the last few decades, which in turn has created problems with concentration of wealth.
Unfortunately, it is a fallacy that you can get "0 or lower sales tax" on "essential items" and "not make things more difficult for the poor". There is a fundamental problem here in defining what constitutes an essential item. For example, if you want social mobility, you need to give the poor access to educational materials, not just textbooks, but tools and other items needed to develop and practice skills (both in and out of school). That includes older-style tools such as carpentry tools or cooking supplies or power tools or welding equipment, and also modern tools such as computers, DVD players, televisions.
Once you start thinking this way, you begin to realize that many things that might be considered luxuries really aren't - something that might be a luxury might be a necessity to another. A boat, for example, can be a luxury to a rich person, or a necessity to a poor fisherman.
Another fundamental problem that you run into is the issue of
That's the problem with private ownership of resources and production. Most if not all resource use decisions actually impact all of us, at least community-wide if not planet-wide (as climate change is producing). And yet we are allowing monarchs and oligarchs make those decisions for our communities and nations without any input.
Here's where we find a couple of big errors in your assumptions:
1. It's not most decisions that are significant in impacting us in a negative way. Many decisions impact us in a positive way, and many others are not significant. The standards of living - and lifespan - for the majority of human beings in developed nations have gone up considerably over the past century or even the past few centuries. This reflects positive impact, much of which comes from a great many private decisions (with some government assistance in some cases, but generally not anything resembling complete government control).
Voting on every decision, or even a majority of decisions, is utterly impractical - and is likely to hurt the decision making that leads to positive results. Even with computers, the world is simply too complex for central decision making to work well. Hence, it isn't practical for the public OR the government to have input in most decisions, and trying to do the impossible always leads to bad results - typically far worse then if no collective action had been taken at all.
20th century history shows that you inevitably end up with special interest groups controlling things in such situations, at considerable harm to society as a whole. This is the true lesson taught by this history.
Even in WW2, where the US economy had some central control, the majority of the production was managed through private techniques developed by people like William S. Knudsen, a former corporate CEO who agreed to set up the wartime production system for a dollar a year out of patriotism. He set up the system to work efficiently given how real world businesses actually work - because he knew that world from the inside, having rising through the ranks from a low level worker to CEO. There was some government oversight in this system - mostly to handle conflicts between the different entities involved (including competing demands from different government entities as well as private ones) - but the majority of the system was handled through traditional capitalist production techniques.
2. There definitely IS input in MANY of the big decisions in capitalist societies - especially the ones that do have the potential to impact people in a negative way. Every developed nation has some form of environmental regulation, for example. Every developed nation has some form of regulation for health care (however limited or flawed it may be, in cases like the USA). These developed nations are all capitalist nations - if they were socialist the workers would control the means of production, and that's not the case. Instead of giving the workers control, high taxes are used to implement socially beneficial policies (in theory, some nations come closer than others, and a lot of bad and counter-productive ideas get implemented along with the good) - but that's not socialism.
Norway in some ways actually comes the closest to being socialist - because of the state owned oil company - but even there some 70% of Norway's GDP is developed through other privately owned business. Europe as a whole has about as many billionaires are the USA - and they control a substantial portion of the means of production. These ARE capitalist nations.
Even as early as 1776 Adam Smith recognized in The Wealth of Nations (the first book on capitalism, though the term itself didn't yet exist) that regulation was an important part of a healthy economy that worked to the long term public benefit. Modern nations have many such regulations. Private ownership does not imply people can do whatever they want - ownership is not an absolute.
In practice, these regulations
As long there is strong regulation behind it keep things honest and upfront. No-small-print capitalism.
True capitalism assumes perfect information in the market to determine a price. Unfortunately, we live in a world of imperfect information.
That's not even remotely true. Capitalism - by definition - means private owners (the capitalists) control the means of production, as opposed to Socialism where -by definition - the workers control the means of production.
Capitalism has nothing to do with the presence or absence of perfect information in markets.
It is a very common strawman to construe capitalism as requiring something impossible in the real world - but such claims are nothing more than propaganda. Both capitalist and socialist businesses have to work in the real world, where imperfect information in markets is the norm.
Further, capitalism requires regulation, since regulations (law, particularly property and contract law) are needed for ownership to exist.
What would be the goal of marketing ethics? In the US the government can't be the enforcer, because Freedom of Speech.
Not strictly true.
The US federal government is limited by the 1st Amendment, which explicitly restricts Congress, which can pass no law infringing freedom of speech or the press.
Extension of the 1st Amendment to state government is handled under the 14th Amendment, but the text is quite vague. This allows laws that restrict speech to exist at this level of government.
For example, libel or slander laws exist at the state level - and these infringe freedom of speech. Ethics laws for various professions - which naturally include an element of restricting speech, also exist at the state level. Lawyers, accountants, and real estate agents are all likely to be affected by state level ethics laws that restrict their speech. Hence, in principle, anti-advertising laws could also exist at this level, and could address the ethics problems so prevalent in marketing.
In practice, even at the federal level, there are many laws passed that in fact do infringe freedom of speech or the press - and not just in the context of inter-state commerce or restricting businesses (so they don't even have that fig leaf of "justification" for an explicit violation of the Bill of Rights).
For example, when Congress or the federal courts coerce you to testify before them, or when you are required to declare items at the border, you are not free in your speech. Hence, in practice, "no law" actually means "as many laws as we can get away with".
For some strange reason (perhaps because they don't want anybody taking too close a look at their own ethics), the US legal profession doesn't see this fundamental contradiction in the law as an ethics problem. Perhaps they should have taken more humanities courses.
If the legal system is unnecessarily confusing, that creates an artificial demand for the services of lawyers. We can think of the legal system as being analogous to a software system which isn't being properly maintained, and where the developers are actively involved in deliberately introducing bugs to create future business for themselves.
It's hard to say whether marketing or law has worse problems with ethics - there's clearly a lot of room for improvement for both professions.
However, in times of greater oppression, in days early after revolution, during rule of Stalinism and especially WWII and early Cold War, feedback loops were still in place and socialist economy was concurrent with, or even outperforming capitalist one.
That's not even remotely true. Before the war, Stalin imported US engineers and had them build modern factories based on the latest US designs. He paid for this by selling wheat while his own people were starving, and with gold from the mines run by slave labour. Even once they had the factories, there were huge quality problems. The equipment in the factories was first rate, the problems were due to lack of worker training and motivation: Soviet management made the classic blunder of emphasizing meeting quotas over quality - a problem that would continue through the Cold War - and they were very dependent on imports from overseas during WW2.
For example, Soviet made-aircraft during WW2 had serious problems with window quality. For this reason, you'll see pictures from the war of Soviet pilots flying with canopy open for better visibility, in the Soviet Union, in the winter! Under these circumstances, the cold temperatures would have severely impaired pilot efficiency. One Soviet squadron actually refused to switch from their American-made P-39's to Soviet made equipment because the quality problems were so bad with the Soviet equipment - and Soviet units would operate P-39's (a pre-war design) until the end of war (even operating them from the Autobahn in Germany). The long period of Soviet use of this aircraft is the main reason the P-39 ended up having the record for more enemy kills than any other US made aircraft - despite being effectively obsolete in the West and the Pacific by the start of 1943 (see any of the several books on the P-39 for more information).
The Soviets also had serious problems with producing electronics: all US and British tanks and aircraft had radios, but only 1 in 9 or so of their Soviet equivalents did for much of the war. This effectively turned a lot of their vehicles into little more than targets, because they couldn't coordinate effectively without radios. Battlefields are noisy, smoky confusing places - and that's on the ground, air coordination is even harder! It's no accident that the majority of German Luftwaffe losses - especially combat losses - happened in the West. The lack of radios is a big part of the reason the Soviets took such enormous losses, especially in the air - one of the reasons Soviet pilots liked the Lend-Lease aircraft was they came with good quality radios installed.
You'll also see pictures of Soviet tanks leaving the factory with an extra transmission strapped on the back - this was done to provide a spare, because the main unit would fail so quickly due to quality control issues. The quality control problems were so bad at the start of the war that many of their units never made it to the battleground - they broke down before they got there. Things did get better over the course of the war, but quality control was something the Soviet state never fully mastered. Steven Zaloga has a nice discussion of some of these details in his book "Armored Champion: The Top Tanks of World War II".
Individual soviet engineers could be, on occasion, creative and capable - especially in the face of the ever-present threat that their families would be sent to the work camps if they didn't perform. The T-34 and Il-2 designs provide some good examples of this. Even the Soviet system as a whole could be responsive in some ways to real events - witness the improvements made to the T-34 design as a response to the pre-war fighting against the Japanese in Khalkhin Gol, and the improvements made in tank design in response to German developments during the war.
But, overall, this was in no sense a case of a socialist economy outperforming or even equalling a capitalist one. The Soviet state had to import critical resources in huge quantities from the
Right. The rational, fair answer is to scrap fuel economy standards entirely, and just increase the price of gas through taxation.
In other words, you hate the poor, and you want their food to cost more. Plus the services of the electrician, the plumber, and so forth.
Any change to something as fundamental as fuel compounds through the logistics chains of all the businesses in the country, increasing from stage to state like compound interest. To make matters worse, logistics networks are graphs, not trees. If the cost of food goes up because of a gas tax, the plumber has to pay more for food, so every stage in the logistics network that produces food now has to pay more for plumbing, which in turn means the plumber has to charge more, and so forth. It's called feedback.
You could try to hide the effects by not taxing businesses - but that's counter-productive, and it doesn't actually solve the problem. People still need to get to work, and buy food, so the cost of labour goes up. Either businesses have to charge more in response, or people have to be willing to work for less (perhaps working longer hours, or having both spouses work to compensate). You've end up with yet another policy that screws over the poor and the middle class.
In economic system, the changes due to feedback are generally pretty slow (months or years) - compared to, say, electrical systems, but in some ways that means the feedback creates even bigger problems for society because people tend to not notice it happening.
The less money you have, the more a gas tax (or anything that works in a similar manner) affects you. We call this a regressive tax. The rich don't generally notice regressive taxes, in fact such taxes are effectively a tax break on the rich. For every dollar that comes into a government budget via a regressive tax, that's a dollar that isn't being supplied by a progressive tax where the rich have to pay more.
State and local taxes have gotten increasingly regressive over the past 50 years in many places in the USA. Tax policy alone does not account for all the increasing concentration of wealth the US has experienced during that time, but it's definitely one the big factors (other big factors include massive problems with legal ethics, and with rent-seeking).
Gas taxes are a really bad idea and certainly not a fair or rational idea - fuel economy standards on newer cars make a lot more sense. The poor won't be buying those cars - so they won't be directly impacted in a bad way - but they'll get these cars eventually, so over time things will get better for everybody as more and more people will have fuel efficient cars.
All science from the Greeks and Romans was preserved exclusively by the Arab civilization.
First, the knowledge of the ancient Greeks and Romans wasn't really science. Science didn't really start to evolve until the 16th or 17th century.
Second, after the fall of the Western Roman empire, the Eastern Roman empire (often known as Byzantium or the Byzantine Empire) would continue for almost 1000 years longer (the capital city of Constantinople would fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1435).
Huge amounts of earlier knowledge were preserved in Byzantium during this long period. As things started to fall apart (due in part due to Arab pressure), people from this civilization fled back to the West seeking safer lives. Many scholars consider this a primary driving force to the Italian Renaissance.
What you are referring to as the Arab civilizations (a bit of a loose term, depending upon how you define 'Arab') certainly made some unique contributions, and they helped to preserve some knowledge that might otherwise have been lost, but they did not have the sole or exclusive role in preserving ancient knowledge. A case could even be made that the Arab / Ottoman / etc pressure on Byzantium had a net negative effect in the overall preservation of ancient knowledge.
The Arabs were not alone in creating pressure on Byzantine civilization: the first time the city of Constantinople was sacked it would be by Christian crusaders (in 1204).
No other 1st world nation treats it's own citizens as badly as the USA does. Notable areas are health care, education and the private prison system.
The sooner we let go of the idea that America is 1st world, the better. It no longer shares the western liberalism ideals that have driven much of humans forward over the last 200 years. Specifically, it's lost site of "equality" and replaced it with rampant capitalism.
It wasn't always this way. America 1950 - 1970 was decidedly better for it's citizens than the late stage capitalism technological dystopia that is now before us.
Western liberalism over the last 200 years? Are you referring to classical liberalism? This promoted capitalism, freedom, and justice and shunned modern notions of equality.
It's the switch to socialism that's causing so many historically great nations to fade as other formerly minor nations grow and thrive.
There is a lot of confusion on this terminology, because the socialist parties have tried to claim credit for improvements in welfare systems, and have been using the term socialism as synonymous with "improved welfare" - a sneaky and underhanded propaganda tactic. From a "Thought Control" perspective they've been pretty effective at this.
Socialism (Marx,Engels) actually means the workers own the means of production, as opposed to wealthy third parties (who are known as the capitalists), and thus the workers get the lion's share of the benefit from their labour.
In practice, Europe has about as many billionaires as the USA does, so there are plenty of wealthy third parties with ownership of business assets (or providing loans to businesses, either directly or through third parties), so Europe is not socialist.
There have always been some socialist businesses, but at the national level there is NO switch to socialism among developed nations today. Those nations that did try to switch in the 20th century (India, Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe) found it didn't work out, the idea of socialism just doesn't scale. The closest any modern developed nation comes is Norway, due to the nationally owned oil company, but that's something of an economic fluke, and even then it's only 30% of Norway's GDP.
Instead, what we have at the national level are different variants on the capitalist welfare state. Welfare itself is an idea that goes back centuries, if not millennia. Modern welfare systems are characterized by various levels of efficiency and various social side effects: in general those in most developed nations are more efficient than in the USA, though the side effects can vary considerably.
The USA is not fading so much because of socialist influence (which is small, much as the socialist parties in Europe are generally pretty small), but rather because of massive problems with legal ethics and corruption. There is a lot of rent-seeking behaviour on the part of special interest groups that shrinks the pool of available money that can be earned by the public as a whole, and cripples economic growth. See, for some examples, The Captured Economy.
Instead of the classical economic idea that growth leads to a bigger pie that everybody can benefit from, we instead have to make do with the crumbs that are left over after the special interest groups have helped themselves.
Divide and conquer tactics, and a bodyguard of lies, prevent reform. One of the biggest lies is that any form of reform or regulation must be socialist, thus association in the minds of the gullible attempts at reform with the failures of the 20th century socialist states.
In reality, capitalism depends on reform and regulation to even exist, let alone be efficient - a point Adam Smith made in the first book on Capitalism in 1776 (The Wealth of Nations).
To make matters more complicated, in many cases, regulation is actually used by rent-seekers to advance special interest groups at the expense of society, which means we have to differe
If you stand against the right of Americans to bear arms then you're standing against America
If you support a standing military, then you're standing against America. The purpose of the 2nd amendment was to prevent this "instrument of tyranny" by supporting well-regulated militias composed of armed citizens. But now that we have a standing military, the 2nd amendment is kind of obsolete if you think about it.
At the time the Constitution was written, there was a standing military, and there had been since the end of the Revolution:
The first Congress of the United States under the Constitution (March, 1789) found already in existence a "Frontier Corps" of infantry 700 strong, and a battalion of four companies of artillery.
According to Heitman's "Historical Register of the U. S. Army," one of these companies (Doughty's) was retained in service from the Revolutionary army: one (Douglass') was raised under Resolve of Congress of date June 3, 1784; and two were organized under Resolve of Congress of date October 20, 1786, when the four companies were organized into a battalion under Major John Doughty. - The Army of the US, article by William l. Haskin.
The standing army was not only in existence before the Constitution was written, it would continue in existence after the Bill of Rights was ratified. Congress would pass the "Establishment of the Troops" law at the very end of its 1789 session, at which time the standing army was around 800 members.
Further, nothing in the Constitution prohibits a standing military, the only consideration is that appropriations for the Army (not the Navy) have to be renewed every two years.
To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
To provide and maintain a Navy; - Article I, Section 8.
Also, the 3rd Amendment wouldn't make sense if there couldn't be a military in time of peace (and hence a standing army):
No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
If there can't be a standing military, then there wouldn't be any situation in which soldiers could be quartered in a home - without consent - in time of peace.
In other words, the 2nd Amendment was written in a historical context in which there was (and would continue to be) a standing military; hence, the militia was seen as something that existed in addition to the standing military.
In short, you're jumping to conclusions that aren't supported by the historical data.
This topic has come up on a number of prior Slashdot discussions: a lot of different people have had a lot of different things to say about it.
One key issue starts from the idea that the right to ethical practice of law is an universal and inalienable right in any society based on the rule of law. As such, it is protected as a right "retained by" and "reserved to" the people by the highest law in the land: when lessor law comes into conflict with the Bill of Rights, the lessor law must yield or the government is breaking the law. Rights retained by the people are retained by the people by definition, so no entity of government can create or allow any law or precedent that violates these rights.
As is typical with legal and professional codes that embody ethics rules, even the appearance of conflict of interest must be avoided when reasonable alternatives exist.
There are a number of ways in which copyright and patent law violate this right as currently implemented (trademark does as well, so the whole family of "IP Law" has problems).
For example, consider the role of contract in copyright. Contracts are the "bread and butter" of the legal profession: contract related matters are an extremely important source of income for legal professionals. This creates conflict of interest with respect to the nature, scope, duration, and form of contract law: in other words, what is subject to contract, what can be put into contracts, when contracts can be written, how long they last, and how they are enforced.
Thus, the current practice of extending copyright law indefinitely, with copying subject to or depending upon getting a contract with the copyright holder for that duration, in effect creates a substantial amount of long-term business for the legal profession.
This in turn creates conflict of interest for legislators who are lawyers voting on copyright law, for legislators in general who receive campaign contributions from associations of legal professionals, for the legal professionals working on the staff of legislators (who do most of the actual work of writing the law and have influence over the politicians and the final form the law takes), for the prosecutors that bring criminal cases involving copyright, and for the judges that hear all criminal and civil cases involving copyright. In case of the judges, they are often selected for higher office by the same politicians who receive campaign contributions from those associations of legal professionals, and their salaries and benefits are also subject in some ways to the decisions of these politicians, and the politicians are also in a position to potentially decide whether or not the Constitutional requirement of "good behaviour" has been met - leading to multiple potential conflicts of interest (even excluding the extra-legal ones).
In other words, the longer the duration of copyright SUBJECT TO CONTRACT, the more contracts get written, the longer contracts can last, and hence the greater the long-term business created for the legal profession. Current copyright law creates an artificial demand for the services of lawyers, by how the law is implemented. The supply of lawyers is relatively fixed (it changes only slowly over the long term), so the greater the demand, the greater the lifetime income of members of the profession. This creates at least the impression that the legal profession is being unethical - and perhaps the reality - with respect to how copyright law is written and implemented, and there are reasonable alternatives, so the right to ethical practice of law is being violated. Hence, there is a conflict between copyright law and the Bill of Rights, and the lessor law is supposed to yield.
For example, there could a mechanism by which copying is no longer governed by contract after some short period of time (perhaps 5-10 years, it might depend on the work - it should be considerably shorter than the lifespan of a typical legal professional), but instead by some simple compensation scheme. Perhaps