Then you should be more explicit about that, bitching about Obama exclusively (and blaming everything on him) makes you sound like a GOP die-hard with no ideas.
I blame everything related to the ACA on Obama and the Democrats because it is exclusively their responsibility. The fault here is with you, grasping at straws like the Heritage foundation or coming up with hypotheticals about Romney. You are the damned partisan; stop making excuses for the incompetent loser in the White House.
Labels are meant to simplify and aggregate. They sacrifice accuracy for the necessary convenience of relating complex topics in rational discourse.
True, but in this case, the label is misleading. The treatment for a broken leg is the same regardless of how you broke it. We are learning that a successful treatment for cancer (uncontrolled cell proliferation) is highly dependent on the specific cause of the cancer. That's why it makes sense to start talking about cancer differently.
We used to consider "fever" and "rashes" diseases in themselves as well, but now consider them just symptoms of unrelated diseases. The meaning of the term "cancer" is changing in the same way.
So you agree that no matter what Obama and the Democrats did, they would have been opposed by the Republicans, regardless.
Probably. Who cares? We aren't talking about whether Republicans are better than Democrats, we are talking about who is responsible for the mess called the ACA, and that's 100% Obama and the Democrats.
Obama and the Democrats have turned out to be incompetent and corrupt, and that's something we should keep in mind come 2014 and 2016. Democrats do not deserve geek or liberal votes automatically anymore. People like Feinstein and Reid should be kicked out of Congress. And Obama should be remembered as the corrupt loser he has turned out to be, and hopefully people won't fall for that kind of utter incompetence and deception again in future presidential candidates.
As opposed to the complete lack of policies from the Republicans?
It would have been far better not to bail out banks or car companies. It would have been far better not to "stimulate" the economy and increase our debt. And it would have been far better not to pass anything than to pass the ACA. So, yes, if Republicans failed to get policies passed, that would indeed be a lot better than what the Democrats actually did, namely pass one piece of bad legislation after another.
So, choosing to take the low road?
Politics has a social dimension. For years, in the geek community, supporting Democrats was the obvious and socially acceptable thing to do. That's changing, People like you need to understand that support for Obama is increasingly viewed with contempt by many of your fellow geeks.
(Note that this is not an either/or choice: holding Obama and the Democrats in contempt is not the same as supporting Republicans.)
I should have been more detailed. Corporations that are owned and operated by self-declared "conservatives" started bitching to rile up the religious base's hatred of Obama.
Who the fuck cares? Conservatives rejected ACA. ACA is exclusively the responsibility of Obama.
The proper transition was away from profit-centric healthcare to single-payer.
Well, if you think that, you only have Obama and the Democrats to blame for not making it happen. After all, single payer couldn't have received more opposition from Republicans than ACA, so the choice between ACA and single payer was entirely up to Obama and the Democrats.
Personally, I think single payer would be a lot better than ACA, because with ACA, Obama simply chose to give a gigantic tax payer handout to insurance companies and drug companies. But that's what the corporate crony in chief in the White House loves to do: hand billions of tax payer dollars to corporations, unions, and other politically influential groups.
By the way, this isn't pure contempt (although I am more than happy to express that). It's a fact that a large fraction of the Democratic party consists of rich people advocating for policies that ostensibly help poor and middle class people but are completely divorced from reality.
No, this is a law that makes it legal to do something that was completely illegal before. Read the full article -- until the law was passed, it was totally illegal in the USA to sell shares in a new company by crowdsourcing.
You're missing the point: it shouldn't have been illegal to begin with, and the way to fix it would have been to deregulate these sales and abolish the law, not craft new, cumbersome regulations.
I assume, armed with this new information, that you'll be cheering for President Obama taking action on this issue.
Choosing the wrong solution to real problems is bad government and requires our condemnation, not cheers.
How about this. Label foods GMO, if they have had genes from another species spliced into their genome (like something from a jellyfish into corn). That's pretty straightforward, no?
No, not really. Genes are transferred between different species naturally all the time, and simply having genes from a different species still tells you nothing about risks.
Except that there are plenty of libertarians who are consistent in not wanting something from the government.
In fact, even many of the liberals advocating big government programs are wealthy enough not to have to care; they advocate those programs out of ignorance and stupidity, not self-interest.
And why does the SEC exist? Because of the experience of the Great Crash of 1929 in which many investors were wiped out by Wall Street hucksters selling shares in companies that didn't produce proper accounting records or clear documentation of business plans, making it not even possible to tell if their money was lost through fraud or simple incompetence. That's the actual experience of unregulated capitalism, which makes all the posts complaining "why doesn't the SEC go after the banksters" rather short-sighted.
That's the usual story told about the SEC. But it is questionable whether the '29 crash was actually "due to unregulated capitalism" in the first place. Furthermore, even if it was, it doesn't mean that the SEC has been effective, and it certainly is not a justification for every regulation the SEC dreams up.
Fact is that there is very little proof that the SEC is effective or works as advertised.
If you would read the actual article, it was pointed out this is regulation that is being proposed because of a law which has already been passed by Congress & signed by President Obama that required the SEC to propose new rules for this kind of activity
Yes, another one of President Obama's useless and overly burdensome regulations, intended to fix non-existent problems and creating tons of problems of their own.
So - the money we give the Chinese bolsters their economy, allowing them to grow faster than they would without it, but it *wouldn't* do the same here if we had kept it? I'd like to see that logic.
We don't "give" money to China. They produce goods cheaply and we buy them. And we both benefit from the transaction because they have a large supply of cheap, unskilled labor, something we can take advantage of. By trading and each doing what we do best, we both do better. It's not a zero sum game.
But so long as they're growing partially at our expense we want to be cautious about our own long-term economic health.
They aren't "growing at our expense"; it's not a zero-sum game.
Really? Breathing toxic air and drinking polluted water aren't costs born by society to the benefit of those doing the polluting?
And your evidence that Chinese goods are primarily cheaper due to pollution is... something you pull out of your ass. In fact, the Chinese are primarily manufacturing cheaply because the Chinese have a large number of low skill workers who are willing to work for very little money.
Yes, Americans have fought for and achieved better pay, a healthier environment, and more reasonable working conditions, but unless you're suggesting that we should change back into something more like China in order to be competitive I don't see how that helps your case.
The idea that good working conditions in the US are something we "fought for" and that they are maintained by force and regulation is another fabrication on your part. In fact, we have good working conditions because we have skilled workers who are internationally competitive, can demand such benefits, and can afford to work only 40h/week.
And while we're at it - how exactly are we supposed to earn the money to buy all our cheap stuff from China if we're not making anything ourselves?
We make plenty of stuff ourselves and sell it all over the world: drugs, movies, financial products, software, etc. All stuff that's a whole lot better than the kind of low-skill, low-pay jobs you are so enamored with.
and Chinese competition is gutting our industrial base.
The idea of an "industrial base" is another fiction. Even half a century ago, both Germany and Japan managed to turn from complete destruction and no industrial base into manufacturing powerhouses. Right now, the Chinese are willing to produce lots of stuff for us with cheap manual labor. If we ever needed or wanted to do that manufacturing in the US again, it would take at most a couple of years to gear up for it, most likely making extensive use of robotics.
We can only employ so many people to provide services to them.
Ah, the typical stupid question "where are the jobs going to come from". Variously, our jobs are supposedly threatened by automation and by trade and by the Chinese and by dumping and by whatever fabrication you people can come up with to justify your self-serving trade restrictions and special interest subsidies.
Chinese *citizens* are paying the price, not the Chinese *businesses* that are making the money. It's called external or socialized costs, and it's the reason we have environmental regulations in the US - to keep corporations by making an unfair profit by making the rest of us pay the costs.
You're just pulling these rationalizations out of your ass. The reason the Chinese can produce and sell stuff cheaply is because their workers are willing to work cheaper, harder, and with fewer benefits than American workers. That has nothing to do with "external or socialized costs".
Because who's paying your wages? US companies. And where are they getting their money? Selling stuff to you. They're certainly not selling much to the Chinese.
Wages by themselves are irrelevant; what matters is what you can buy for those wages. And by imposing tariffs, you reduce the amount of stuff we can buy, making us all poorer.
In 2009 China imported $5.8 billion from the US, while the US imported $28 billion from China. That's about $22 billion that's been stripped from our economy and transferred to theirs.
No, that's just $22bn in worthless paper we have given the Chinese, in return for valuable and useful stuff they have sent us. We are benefiting in these exchanges.
Meanwhile the price of Chinese goods keeps climbing as their population becomes more affluent and demands better compensation.(slowly for now I'll grant). Eventually things will stabilize when they can no longer undercut us on production costs, but at that point they'll be about as wealthy as us, and they've got us outnumbered 4 to 1. Do you really want to share your paycheck 5 ways as the wealth gets spread around? Not to mention they'll be the ones with all the existing industrial base.
So your true colors are showing: it bothers you that the Chinese are developing economically and are getting wealthier, and in order to keep that from happening, you want to sabotage their economy and global trade. And you base your dislike of that future on the mistaken assumption that there is a finite amount of wealth going around and that if the Chinese do better, we must be doing poorer.
Yes, in contrast to you, I hope the Chinese will become as wealthy as we are, as soon as possible, because we all end up being better off that way. The global economy is not a zero sum game.
And if, on the way to that future, the Chinese make lots of cheap stuff for us, even that's good for us in the short term.
Technology has eliminated or degraded employment for many more people than it benefitted since 1990 or so. The inequalities are far greater and getting dangerous to the haves as the have-nots wise up to the source of the inequality and lack of opportunity for them, so creating elites is a bad thing
Yeah, you're just blindly repeating Obama's election statements, self-serving lies with no basis in reality.
I think there are many many people who have quite a bit materially who are lost in this culture of shallow consumerism, every time one of those power mongers posts here about the inviolate rule of the profit motive in decisions, he is speaking of his own hole in the heart and his lack of imagination
Contrary to your naive and tired outlook on life, business is not about making money. Free enterprise is about being able to get many people to work together in order to build things greater than what any individual could build. It's free people sharing resources and expertise freely for things they believe in.
But that kind of achievement is what people like you hate. Instead, you whine about inequality and want a world in which government sets shallow goals and redistributes resources to satisfy base consumerist desires. You want a world in which people are kept busy in meaningless jobs just so that they don't have time to think for themselves and complain.
People like you are the primary advocates and promoters of shallow consumerism, and your imagination is so limited that you think that tinkering a little at home is the epitome of creativity and social rebellion. You're not lucky, you're pitiful.
So perhaps we should encourage public shaming of domestic companies that import products with such an unfair advantage?
What "unfair advantage"? The Chinese are paying the cost of their policies, you just pointed that out yourself.
A proper response would be not to weaken local regulations, but to impose tariffs on imported goods manufactured in conditions exploiting such socialized costs.
No, a proper response is to let the Chinese make that stuff and enjoy the low prices we are paying. Imposing tariffs, on the other hand, is just a way in which you let US corporations enrich themselves at the expense of US consumers, hitting us with a double whammy of being uncompetitive and then paying inflated prices. Of course, that's exactly what corporate cronies like you want.
The US has numerous fabs and electronics manufacturing facilities. I suspect this was done to help alleviate the job slaughtering and cost inflation caused by economic uncertainty and the fiscal cliff, related to Congress's inability to pass a budget.
You are completely drunk on Obama's Cool Aid, aren't you?
Unfortunately, in reality, the fiscal cliff was financially a non-event. It will take a lot more interference by Congress even to make a dent in government spending. Let's elect more obstructionist representatives.
Citation, please? Kindly don't forget to count people on food aid.
I have a better idea: you provide data to support your outrageous claims.
Now hold on there, bub. Nowhere did I even hint at interference in markets.
Of course you did: you talked about altering fossil fuel use and controlling overpopulation.
How about agribusiness conglomerates interfering in markets? Like, say, dumping American corn in Mexico at far below the Mexican cost of production? That one thing directly caused economic failure for millions of Mexican farmers, forcing them northward for work. That's heavy-handed, don't you think?
No, that's a free market, and it's a good thing. If Mexican farmers can't compete with US agribusinesses, they would be better off doing something else.
What about corporations "privatizing" the water supplies of South American countries, charging for what was once free? How is that not interfering in the market?
South American countries tend to be corrupt, so if that causes problems, those are problems due to government corruption, not privatization.
What about building sweatshops in the poorest countries to take advantage of cheap labor,
That's what causes those nations to develop.
as unemployment and poverty grow back home? How many thousands of American unemployed does it take to rate "heavy-handed"?
Absolute poverty isn't growing in the US. And unemployment is due to the kinds of policies you implicitly advocate, not due to low-cost labor from developing nations.
What about forcing Bt cotton into India? Roundup-Ready soybeans into Brazil? Those weren't voluntary actions by peasant farmers; those were forced actions carried out by bribing government officials. That's not market interference?
If government officals force people to buy products, it's obviously not a free market. Most of those nations are run by the same kind of economic incompetence you exhibit: erroneous ideas that foreign competition destroys jobs, erroneous ideas that forcing people to buy anything from specific agricultural products to health insurance is good for them, etc.
However, given a choice, many farmers buy GMO seeds voluntarily, because it maximizes their profits and productivity.
I'm sorry, but you need to unplug from the propaganda mill for a moment. Free markets (a la Adam Smith), and what we know today as capitalism, are not even distant relatives. They're different species. I'm all for free markets. I think a free market would be a great idea, but I don't think any of us have ever seen one.
Given the economic nonsense you are spewing, you don't know what free markets are or what Adam Smith wrote about.
Anyway: the economic growth mantra is not a solution; it's a mantra. Unlimited, perpetual economic growth is no more possible than unlimited, perpetual population growth.
We can worry about limits to economic growth when we find that there are clear and concrete obstacles to further growth. For the foreseeable future, there is no obvious physical limit to economic growth, and we certainly have more than enough room for economic growth to achieve low population growth across most of the world.
The threat to the world economy is the kind of erroneous economic beliefs people like you hold and that people like you attempt to translate into government policies. The anemic growth across Europe and some other nations is the consequence and we don't want that here in the US.
Is this supposed to somehow be different than your earlier argument? It just goes to show you still don't get it. You're not making your point "clearer" by making the example more ridiculous.
I didn't make "an earlier argument". I joined other people in pointing out how stupid your argument was.
People with dollar signs in their eyes grotesquely underestimate the passion that the human animal brings to the subject of what it eats. Don[t fuck with it.
You can eat shit for all I care; that still doesn't give you a right to force others to put arbitrary and non-sensical labels on their food.
What you're saying with your argument is that if people want something YOU consider to be pointless and stupid, then the government should ignore THEM and do what YOU want because YOU know better than they do.
What I am saying is that it isn't the job of government to restrict liberties arbitrarily just because morons like you decide they like the world better that way. The world and democracy need to be protected from people like you.
You're not getting it. It's not about the absolute rightness or wrongness of GMO . It's about the fact that a very significant portion of the people WANT GMO labeling.
So if a significant portion want people to be labeled with yellow stars or pink triangles, they should get that too?
People also want kosher shit because it MEANS something to them.
And people who want "kosher shit" choose brands that voluntarily label themselves that way; they don't band together and force every food manufacturer to label their food as to whether it is kosher or not. If they did, I would certainly object, just like I object to mandatory GMO labeling.
Stop telling people what should and should not be significant to them.
The problem isn't about what's "significant" to people, it's about a group of people trying to impose idiotic and irrational labeling requirements on others.
If you want GMO-free food and some manufacturer chooses not to label their food, don't buy their shit. Simple as that.
So, what's the deal with giving us a label to know if it is GMO or not?
Because "GMO" is not a scientifically meaningful category of food. It's like labeling food for whether it was at one point stored in containers with the number "13" printed on them, or whether it was ever touched by a Mennonite priest.
When is having information about your food ever a bad thing?
When it's not actually information and instead reinforces superstition and irrational fears.
If you are going to have food labeling laws, then make them rational: have the food labeled according to actual content. Of course, a lot of "organic food" would end up with the same content labels as GMO foods.
How much of our planet's fossil fuel resources should we continue to mine for large-scale agriculture, before we have the conversation about why there are so many starving third-worlders,
There are fewer and fewer "starving third-worlders" thanks to economic development.
and what we might do to control overpopulation?
We already know what to do to control population growth, namely economic growth.
The enemy of that is people like you, people who threaten to destroy economic growth through heavy-handed and ill thought out interference in markets.
Most divergent of all, he believed that increasing automatization of labor would spawn not inequality or joblessness, but spiritual malaise
Increasing automation did not spawn joblessness. It may be contributing to inequality, by allowing some people to take better advantage of their talents, but that's not a bad thing.
As it so happens, I qualify my statements if qualifiers are relevant, instead of making dumb generalisations,
Oh, those qualifiers are very relevant because they make your statement factually irrelevant.
Again you demonstrate your great intelligence; as my username might hint, I actually was born and live in Europe.
Did I say anything else? You indeed are the typical European: poorly educated and ignorant of both your own continent and the US, but hell-bent on spreading the misery and rotten system that you live under to the rest of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
You couldn't educate anybody if your life depended on it, since that requires an open mind and actual understanding.
I blame everything related to the ACA on Obama and the Democrats because it is exclusively their responsibility. The fault here is with you, grasping at straws like the Heritage foundation or coming up with hypotheticals about Romney. You are the damned partisan; stop making excuses for the incompetent loser in the White House.
True, but in this case, the label is misleading. The treatment for a broken leg is the same regardless of how you broke it. We are learning that a successful treatment for cancer (uncontrolled cell proliferation) is highly dependent on the specific cause of the cancer. That's why it makes sense to start talking about cancer differently.
We used to consider "fever" and "rashes" diseases in themselves as well, but now consider them just symptoms of unrelated diseases. The meaning of the term "cancer" is changing in the same way.
Probably. Who cares? We aren't talking about whether Republicans are better than Democrats, we are talking about who is responsible for the mess called the ACA, and that's 100% Obama and the Democrats.
Obama and the Democrats have turned out to be incompetent and corrupt, and that's something we should keep in mind come 2014 and 2016. Democrats do not deserve geek or liberal votes automatically anymore. People like Feinstein and Reid should be kicked out of Congress. And Obama should be remembered as the corrupt loser he has turned out to be, and hopefully people won't fall for that kind of utter incompetence and deception again in future presidential candidates.
It would have been far better not to bail out banks or car companies. It would have been far better not to "stimulate" the economy and increase our debt. And it would have been far better not to pass anything than to pass the ACA. So, yes, if Republicans failed to get policies passed, that would indeed be a lot better than what the Democrats actually did, namely pass one piece of bad legislation after another.
Politics has a social dimension. For years, in the geek community, supporting Democrats was the obvious and socially acceptable thing to do. That's changing, People like you need to understand that support for Obama is increasingly viewed with contempt by many of your fellow geeks.
(Note that this is not an either/or choice: holding Obama and the Democrats in contempt is not the same as supporting Republicans.)
Who the fuck cares? Conservatives rejected ACA. ACA is exclusively the responsibility of Obama.
Well, if you think that, you only have Obama and the Democrats to blame for not making it happen. After all, single payer couldn't have received more opposition from Republicans than ACA, so the choice between ACA and single payer was entirely up to Obama and the Democrats.
Personally, I think single payer would be a lot better than ACA, because with ACA, Obama simply chose to give a gigantic tax payer handout to insurance companies and drug companies. But that's what the corporate crony in chief in the White House loves to do: hand billions of tax payer dollars to corporations, unions, and other politically influential groups.
By the way, this isn't pure contempt (although I am more than happy to express that). It's a fact that a large fraction of the Democratic party consists of rich people advocating for policies that ostensibly help poor and middle class people but are completely divorced from reality.
You're missing the point: it shouldn't have been illegal to begin with, and the way to fix it would have been to deregulate these sales and abolish the law, not craft new, cumbersome regulations.
Choosing the wrong solution to real problems is bad government and requires our condemnation, not cheers.
Given the contempt and vitriol liberals and Democrats heap on anybody who doesn't agree with them, it only seems fair and necessary to reciprocate.
No, not really. Genes are transferred between different species naturally all the time, and simply having genes from a different species still tells you nothing about risks.
Except that there are plenty of libertarians who are consistent in not wanting something from the government.
In fact, even many of the liberals advocating big government programs are wealthy enough not to have to care; they advocate those programs out of ignorance and stupidity, not self-interest.
That's the usual story told about the SEC. But it is questionable whether the '29 crash was actually "due to unregulated capitalism" in the first place. Furthermore, even if it was, it doesn't mean that the SEC has been effective, and it certainly is not a justification for every regulation the SEC dreams up.
Fact is that there is very little proof that the SEC is effective or works as advertised.
Yes, another one of President Obama's useless and overly burdensome regulations, intended to fix non-existent problems and creating tons of problems of their own.
We don't "give" money to China. They produce goods cheaply and we buy them. And we both benefit from the transaction because they have a large supply of cheap, unskilled labor, something we can take advantage of. By trading and each doing what we do best, we both do better. It's not a zero sum game.
They aren't "growing at our expense"; it's not a zero-sum game.
And your evidence that Chinese goods are primarily cheaper due to pollution is... something you pull out of your ass. In fact, the Chinese are primarily manufacturing cheaply because the Chinese have a large number of low skill workers who are willing to work for very little money.
The idea that good working conditions in the US are something we "fought for" and that they are maintained by force and regulation is another fabrication on your part. In fact, we have good working conditions because we have skilled workers who are internationally competitive, can demand such benefits, and can afford to work only 40h/week.
We make plenty of stuff ourselves and sell it all over the world: drugs, movies, financial products, software, etc. All stuff that's a whole lot better than the kind of low-skill, low-pay jobs you are so enamored with.
The idea of an "industrial base" is another fiction. Even half a century ago, both Germany and Japan managed to turn from complete destruction and no industrial base into manufacturing powerhouses. Right now, the Chinese are willing to produce lots of stuff for us with cheap manual labor. If we ever needed or wanted to do that manufacturing in the US again, it would take at most a couple of years to gear up for it, most likely making extensive use of robotics.
Ah, the typical stupid question "where are the jobs going to come from". Variously, our jobs are supposedly threatened by automation and by trade and by the Chinese and by dumping and by whatever fabrication you people can come up with to justify your self-serving trade restrictions and special interest subsidies.
You're just pulling these rationalizations out of your ass. The reason the Chinese can produce and sell stuff cheaply is because their workers are willing to work cheaper, harder, and with fewer benefits than American workers. That has nothing to do with "external or socialized costs".
Wages by themselves are irrelevant; what matters is what you can buy for those wages. And by imposing tariffs, you reduce the amount of stuff we can buy, making us all poorer.
No, that's just $22bn in worthless paper we have given the Chinese, in return for valuable and useful stuff they have sent us. We are benefiting in these exchanges.
So your true colors are showing: it bothers you that the Chinese are developing economically and are getting wealthier, and in order to keep that from happening, you want to sabotage their economy and global trade. And you base your dislike of that future on the mistaken assumption that there is a finite amount of wealth going around and that if the Chinese do better, we must be doing poorer.
Yes, in contrast to you, I hope the Chinese will become as wealthy as we are, as soon as possible, because we all end up being better off that way. The global economy is not a zero sum game.
And if, on the way to that future, the Chinese make lots of cheap stuff for us, even that's good for us in the short term.
Yeah, you're just blindly repeating Obama's election statements, self-serving lies with no basis in reality.
Contrary to your naive and tired outlook on life, business is not about making money. Free enterprise is about being able to get many people to work together in order to build things greater than what any individual could build. It's free people sharing resources and expertise freely for things they believe in.
But that kind of achievement is what people like you hate. Instead, you whine about inequality and want a world in which government sets shallow goals and redistributes resources to satisfy base consumerist desires. You want a world in which people are kept busy in meaningless jobs just so that they don't have time to think for themselves and complain.
People like you are the primary advocates and promoters of shallow consumerism, and your imagination is so limited that you think that tinkering a little at home is the epitome of creativity and social rebellion. You're not lucky, you're pitiful.
What "unfair advantage"? The Chinese are paying the cost of their policies, you just pointed that out yourself.
No, a proper response is to let the Chinese make that stuff and enjoy the low prices we are paying. Imposing tariffs, on the other hand, is just a way in which you let US corporations enrich themselves at the expense of US consumers, hitting us with a double whammy of being uncompetitive and then paying inflated prices. Of course, that's exactly what corporate cronies like you want.
You are completely drunk on Obama's Cool Aid, aren't you?
Unfortunately, in reality, the fiscal cliff was financially a non-event. It will take a lot more interference by Congress even to make a dent in government spending. Let's elect more obstructionist representatives.
I have a better idea: you provide data to support your outrageous claims.
Of course you did: you talked about altering fossil fuel use and controlling overpopulation.
No, that's a free market, and it's a good thing. If Mexican farmers can't compete with US agribusinesses, they would be better off doing something else.
South American countries tend to be corrupt, so if that causes problems, those are problems due to government corruption, not privatization.
That's what causes those nations to develop.
Absolute poverty isn't growing in the US. And unemployment is due to the kinds of policies you implicitly advocate, not due to low-cost labor from developing nations.
If government officals force people to buy products, it's obviously not a free market. Most of those nations are run by the same kind of economic incompetence you exhibit: erroneous ideas that foreign competition destroys jobs, erroneous ideas that forcing people to buy anything from specific agricultural products to health insurance is good for them, etc.
However, given a choice, many farmers buy GMO seeds voluntarily, because it maximizes their profits and productivity.
Given the economic nonsense you are spewing, you don't know what free markets are or what Adam Smith wrote about.
We can worry about limits to economic growth when we find that there are clear and concrete obstacles to further growth. For the foreseeable future, there is no obvious physical limit to economic growth, and we certainly have more than enough room for economic growth to achieve low population growth across most of the world.
The threat to the world economy is the kind of erroneous economic beliefs people like you hold and that people like you attempt to translate into government policies. The anemic growth across Europe and some other nations is the consequence and we don't want that here in the US.
I didn't make "an earlier argument". I joined other people in pointing out how stupid your argument was.
You can eat shit for all I care; that still doesn't give you a right to force others to put arbitrary and non-sensical labels on their food.
What I am saying is that it isn't the job of government to restrict liberties arbitrarily just because morons like you decide they like the world better that way. The world and democracy need to be protected from people like you.
So if a significant portion want people to be labeled with yellow stars or pink triangles, they should get that too?
And people who want "kosher shit" choose brands that voluntarily label themselves that way; they don't band together and force every food manufacturer to label their food as to whether it is kosher or not. If they did, I would certainly object, just like I object to mandatory GMO labeling.
The problem isn't about what's "significant" to people, it's about a group of people trying to impose idiotic and irrational labeling requirements on others.
If you want GMO-free food and some manufacturer chooses not to label their food, don't buy their shit. Simple as that.
Because "GMO" is not a scientifically meaningful category of food. It's like labeling food for whether it was at one point stored in containers with the number "13" printed on them, or whether it was ever touched by a Mennonite priest.
When it's not actually information and instead reinforces superstition and irrational fears.
If you are going to have food labeling laws, then make them rational: have the food labeled according to actual content. Of course, a lot of "organic food" would end up with the same content labels as GMO foods.
There are fewer and fewer "starving third-worlders" thanks to economic development.
We already know what to do to control population growth, namely economic growth.
The enemy of that is people like you, people who threaten to destroy economic growth through heavy-handed and ill thought out interference in markets.
Increasing automation did not spawn joblessness. It may be contributing to inequality, by allowing some people to take better advantage of their talents, but that's not a bad thing.
Oh, those qualifiers are very relevant because they make your statement factually irrelevant.
Did I say anything else? You indeed are the typical European: poorly educated and ignorant of both your own continent and the US, but hell-bent on spreading the misery and rotten system that you live under to the rest of the world.