I read a book called "One Second After" describing an EMP scenario. Very eye opening. One day, all the electronics just quit working. Every vehicle with a computer stopped running. For months nobody had any clue as to what happened. People died like flies, starting with hospital patients and progressing to people dependent on medication. Then the food started running out. By the end of the book, when the power started coming back, the great majority of the population was kaput. It was an interesting read.
Actually the idea that someone knows better than I do about how policy works is the basic idea behind representative Government.
You could not be more wrong about this. Government is your servant, not your master. All power is inherent in the people, not the government. Government officials think they know everything, but in reality they are among the most clueless people on the planet. Except for the military, there is nothing they do better than the private sector. After a politician is elected, his number one goal is to be re-elected. He will pander and lie to anyone to reach that goal. They are *not* looking out for you or the country. This is why *everyone* going to DC needs to be term limited, including supreme court justices.
Nonsense. I grew up lower middle class in Appalachia. Kids on my bus were third generation welfare. I spent six years working my way through college/graduate school with zero family support, living way below the poverty line. Poor people in many cases chose to be poor, and that is not a failure of society or themselves. Poverty is a choice, and people should be allowed to make their own choices.
The amazing thing is that since LBJ we have spent over $22 trillion on transfer payments, and some people are incredulous that the poverty rate is unchanged. Anybody who ever passed a high school econ class can tell you that when something is subsidized you get more of it, and when you tax something you get less of it. Yet people believe that throwing money at poor people will result in fewer poor people. Can you say cognitive dissonance?
Some people don't take advantage of free education because they know that welfare will take care of them. IMHO the state should not be involved in charity. That is for individuals and non-governmental entities like churches. Freely given charity is a positive experience for both the giver and the receiver. Bring a government gun to the party, and the givers are resentful, and the receivers have no gratitude and become dependent, and will always vote for the government that makes the most use of the gun.
Our government *is* being run by morons. The masterminds think they know better than everyone else, or as they put it, "we are the ones we have been waiting for." In fact, the moment I heard this proclamation, I immediately thought of Hayek's book, "The Fatal Conceit." Anyway, Washington is completely incapable of reforming itself, and we the people need to stage an intervention via an Article 5 convention of the states.
I totally agree that infrastructure is critical. Today it is being neglected in favor of social spending that fosters dependency and encourages bad decision making. To me it is buying votes from some citizens with the money provided by other citizens, which I find highly offensive, especially when the vote buyer in chief spends so much time trashing the productive. In terms of spending on higher education, I don't think it makes sense to provide this gratis. People trash public housing because they have no ownership. Look at how many students completely fail to take advantage of "free" K-12 education. "Free" college would be even worse if it were offered to everyone. Not everyone has the IQ to be successful in a competitive university setting. I do like the idea of merit-based scholarships.
I agree with most of your points. But you continue to hand-wave away the largest debt in the history of mankind. If interest rates were to return to historical averages, we could see over half of government receipts going to service the debt.
Until we start to live within our means and stop enslaving our children and grandchildren, I won't support *any* new spending programs. Even Keynes never countenanced debt to GDP levels of over 100% and no plan to stop the growth. When the inevitable collapse happens, I predict Keynes will not be seriously taught in schools for several generations and Hayek will be recognized for the genius he truly was.
You deny all of human economic history when you posit that debt levels don't matter. They most definitely do. Pretty much every economic collapse in the history of mankind has been because governments abuse fiat currencies. Perhaps you are not aware of the history of the denarius, the monetary unit of ancient Rome. It started out as 100% silver. By the time of the collapse, it was down to 0.02%. Here is a good summary of the fates of fiat currencies when they are abused.
Private institutions are no different. The demand for education is definitely elastic. When the price goes up, the quantity demanded goes down. So the private institution may not have people complaining, but they will have fewer applicants, which is actually a more eloquent response than public commentary.
According to the debt clock, the liability per taxpayer is already over $800K. In other words, this represents the net present value of all future taxes paid by the average taxpayer. Assuming 45 years of working, and a cost of capital at 6% (historically low), the average taxpayer would have to contribute around $52.7K in taxes per year.
The median wage for people over 25 is a little over $32K. In other words, if Uncle Sam took the entire paycheck of the median worker, Dear Uncle would still be short around $20.5K per year per taxpayer. Our current financial trajectory will lead to economic collapse, and you think we have $ to give everyone a free college education? Maybe we should start with economics, and not that pablum from Keynes.
Your supply and demand model doesn't account for cost.
Um, cost is one of the major factors in the supply curve. Most rational businesses simply refuse to supply at a price below their fully-loaded cost plus profit margin, as we found out back in the '70's when Nixon and Carter imposed price controls. Anyone else remember queuing up to buy gasoline?
Bernie is promising "free" education. Anyone who seriously believes anything is "free" is an economic illiterate. This includes all self-proclaimed socialists.
I have always maintained that there is a difference between "training" and "education". I had a little of both in my college career, earning a BS in physics with minors in Spanish, math, and chemistry, then an MBA. Most of what I consider to be my "education" has come from studying from the classics on my own. Paying for "training" with debt only makes sense if you are preparing for a career that pays well. "Education" is best done on your own. Unless you have a trust fund.
Comparing "murder" with "reporting the race of Google employees in a way you don't like" is a little hysterical, don't you think?
Sure it is. Why are you doing it?
Do you simply love the smell of straw in the morning? Is there a crow problem where you live? C'mon, give over. Inquiring minds want to know!
Um, *you* did that. Own it. You could have chosen something like "forgetting to brush your teeth", but you didn't. You chose "murder". Stop being so dramatic.
Actually, I would only expect to see layoffs in areas like accounting and operations. The core engineering between a microprocessor and FPGA gates are quite different. The ecosystems are radically different, as are the customer bases. In fact, there is really not much synergy outside of using an FPGA as an accelerator in an enterprise-class server.
The use of the word "denier" shows you to be a true believer in the religion of AGW. You deny that climate has *always* changed. Look, I have a degree in physics and minors in math and chemistry. I read the original research and find lots of least squares curve fitting, cooked computer models, lack of error bars on graphs, massive leaps in logic, and assertions of precision where there is none. Tell me, which paper convinced you beyond any doubt that AGW is "true". And don't waste my time with this "body of work" nonsense.
If people were proposing massive new taxes, etc. based on Darwinism, I would be looking for more evidence. As it stands, who cares? I mean, when Darwin was alive, it was thought that life regularly spontaneously erupted. Pasteur proved that to be not the case, and in fact, mankind has never seen this theorized phenomena. The theory of cellular structure was infantile in Darwin's day; they simply had no concept of the extreme complexity of the simplest of life forms. Now that we know some of his underlying assumptions were pure poppycock, I am sure you can agree we can cast some healthy skepticism Darwin's way.
Models are certainly useful for understanding small systems with few variables, interacting linearly, over relatively short time periods. The math involved in modeling truly complex systems, non-linear partial differential equations, is extremely difficult. In fact, the ones we study in school are a small subset that have closed solutions. The majority don't. I never hear about Nobel prizes in physics going to climate modelers.
Remember back a few decades when you got an ulcer the doctor said you had to take ulcer medication for years? Then some guy in Australia said no, that is an infection you can treat with a round of antibiotics? He was laughed off the stage at several medical conferences. After several years the National Enquirer picked it up and publicized it. Even after independent verification, there were still doctors who continued prescribing ulcer medication for several years. The funniest part was when the pharmaceutical companies who fought this so hard had to reposition their ulcer meds for treating heartburn. Zantac I think.
I think there is are several fundamental issue with applying the scientific method to the question of anthropogenic global warming. First, the gold standard of scientific proof is experimentation. Experiments must be independently reproducible. Given that we only have one earth, this is a problem. Another challenge is multiple variables which interact in unknown ways. The best experiments are when one variable is changed, and everything else held constant. This is simply unattainable on a global scale. The third challenge I see is time. When the delay between cause and effect spans multiple generations of human observers, the probability of getting useful information falls dramatically. In short, the scientific method has its limitations.
Largest budget items:
Medicare/Medicade -- welfare -- $944 billion
Social Security -- not welfare --- $869 billion
Defense -- not welfare -- $593 billion
Income Security - welfare -- $310 billion
None of these are authorized under Article 1, Section 8, which lists the limited powers of congress, except for defense.
Soviet-style sameness should never be our goal. Radical egalitarianism is uniformly destructive to human freedom. People should be free to be janitors or CEOs depending on their natural gifts and level of desire. Not every janitor even wants to be a CEO. Lots of people go to Harvard and are never a CEO. And envy is such an unattractive character trait.
Money is noting more or less than unconsumed production, a store of wealth. When more of it is printed, it dilutes the store of wealth, making each unit worth less, which is theft. I love your use of the passive voice in stating that "money is created as needed" as if it were an act of nature. BS. Governments inflate the currency in order to pay back their debts with less value. Every smidgeon of inflation is the result of an affirmative decision of government. That is not to say that the money supply should be fixed, but that the money supply should be carefully monitored to prevent inflation, not to chase some ephemeral goal like "full employment". BTW, Andrew Jackson eliminated the national debt in 1835. I would vote to go back to sound fiscal practices like that in a heartbeat. What do you think it will look like when our house of cards comes crashing down? I am guessing it will be far worse than most expect.
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I read a book called "One Second After" describing an EMP scenario. Very eye opening. One day, all the electronics just quit working. Every vehicle with a computer stopped running. For months nobody had any clue as to what happened. People died like flies, starting with hospital patients and progressing to people dependent on medication. Then the food started running out. By the end of the book, when the power started coming back, the great majority of the population was kaput. It was an interesting read.
Actually the idea that someone knows better than I do about how policy works is the basic idea behind representative Government.
You could not be more wrong about this. Government is your servant, not your master. All power is inherent in the people, not the government. Government officials think they know everything, but in reality they are among the most clueless people on the planet. Except for the military, there is nothing they do better than the private sector. After a politician is elected, his number one goal is to be re-elected. He will pander and lie to anyone to reach that goal. They are *not* looking out for you or the country. This is why *everyone* going to DC needs to be term limited, including supreme court justices.
The amazing thing is that since LBJ we have spent over $22 trillion on transfer payments, and some people are incredulous that the poverty rate is unchanged. Anybody who ever passed a high school econ class can tell you that when something is subsidized you get more of it, and when you tax something you get less of it. Yet people believe that throwing money at poor people will result in fewer poor people. Can you say cognitive dissonance?
Some people don't take advantage of free education because they know that welfare will take care of them. IMHO the state should not be involved in charity. That is for individuals and non-governmental entities like churches. Freely given charity is a positive experience for both the giver and the receiver. Bring a government gun to the party, and the givers are resentful, and the receivers have no gratitude and become dependent, and will always vote for the government that makes the most use of the gun.
I totally agree that infrastructure is critical. Today it is being neglected in favor of social spending that fosters dependency and encourages bad decision making. To me it is buying votes from some citizens with the money provided by other citizens, which I find highly offensive, especially when the vote buyer in chief spends so much time trashing the productive. In terms of spending on higher education, I don't think it makes sense to provide this gratis. People trash public housing because they have no ownership. Look at how many students completely fail to take advantage of "free" K-12 education. "Free" college would be even worse if it were offered to everyone. Not everyone has the IQ to be successful in a competitive university setting. I do like the idea of merit-based scholarships.
Until we start to live within our means and stop enslaving our children and grandchildren, I won't support *any* new spending programs. Even Keynes never countenanced debt to GDP levels of over 100% and no plan to stop the growth. When the inevitable collapse happens, I predict Keynes will not be seriously taught in schools for several generations and Hayek will be recognized for the genius he truly was.
http://dailyreckoning.com/fiat...
Private institutions are no different. The demand for education is definitely elastic. When the price goes up, the quantity demanded goes down. So the private institution may not have people complaining, but they will have fewer applicants, which is actually a more eloquent response than public commentary.
The median wage for people over 25 is a little over $32K. In other words, if Uncle Sam took the entire paycheck of the median worker, Dear Uncle would still be short around $20.5K per year per taxpayer. Our current financial trajectory will lead to economic collapse, and you think we have $ to give everyone a free college education? Maybe we should start with economics, and not that pablum from Keynes.
Your supply and demand model doesn't account for cost.
Um, cost is one of the major factors in the supply curve. Most rational businesses simply refuse to supply at a price below their fully-loaded cost plus profit margin, as we found out back in the '70's when Nixon and Carter imposed price controls. Anyone else remember queuing up to buy gasoline?
Bernie is promising "free" education. Anyone who seriously believes anything is "free" is an economic illiterate. This includes all self-proclaimed socialists.
I have always maintained that there is a difference between "training" and "education". I had a little of both in my college career, earning a BS in physics with minors in Spanish, math, and chemistry, then an MBA. Most of what I consider to be my "education" has come from studying from the classics on my own. Paying for "training" with debt only makes sense if you are preparing for a career that pays well. "Education" is best done on your own. Unless you have a trust fund.
Of course everybody knows the old cliche that two wrongs don't make a right. Bringing up murder is a drama queen move. Get over yourself.
Isn't blackmail a crime? Any word on the status of prosecution for that crime?
Sure it is. Why are you doing it?
Do you simply love the smell of straw in the morning? Is there a crow problem where you live? C'mon, give over. Inquiring minds want to know!
Um, *you* did that. Own it. You could have chosen something like "forgetting to brush your teeth", but you didn't. You chose "murder". Stop being so dramatic.
Comparing "murder" with "reporting the race of Google employees in a way you don't like" is a little hysterical, don't you think?
Actually, I would only expect to see layoffs in areas like accounting and operations. The core engineering between a microprocessor and FPGA gates are quite different. The ecosystems are radically different, as are the customer bases. In fact, there is really not much synergy outside of using an FPGA as an accelerator in an enterprise-class server.
The use of the word "denier" shows you to be a true believer in the religion of AGW. You deny that climate has *always* changed. Look, I have a degree in physics and minors in math and chemistry. I read the original research and find lots of least squares curve fitting, cooked computer models, lack of error bars on graphs, massive leaps in logic, and assertions of precision where there is none. Tell me, which paper convinced you beyond any doubt that AGW is "true". And don't waste my time with this "body of work" nonsense.
If people were proposing massive new taxes, etc. based on Darwinism, I would be looking for more evidence. As it stands, who cares? I mean, when Darwin was alive, it was thought that life regularly spontaneously erupted. Pasteur proved that to be not the case, and in fact, mankind has never seen this theorized phenomena. The theory of cellular structure was infantile in Darwin's day; they simply had no concept of the extreme complexity of the simplest of life forms. Now that we know some of his underlying assumptions were pure poppycock, I am sure you can agree we can cast some healthy skepticism Darwin's way.
What surrogate could possibly serve as an analog to the earth? That would be like testing a drug on amino acids instead of living cells.
Models are certainly useful for understanding small systems with few variables, interacting linearly, over relatively short time periods. The math involved in modeling truly complex systems, non-linear partial differential equations, is extremely difficult. In fact, the ones we study in school are a small subset that have closed solutions. The majority don't. I never hear about Nobel prizes in physics going to climate modelers.
Remember back a few decades when you got an ulcer the doctor said you had to take ulcer medication for years? Then some guy in Australia said no, that is an infection you can treat with a round of antibiotics? He was laughed off the stage at several medical conferences. After several years the National Enquirer picked it up and publicized it. Even after independent verification, there were still doctors who continued prescribing ulcer medication for several years. The funniest part was when the pharmaceutical companies who fought this so hard had to reposition their ulcer meds for treating heartburn. Zantac I think.
I think there is are several fundamental issue with applying the scientific method to the question of anthropogenic global warming. First, the gold standard of scientific proof is experimentation. Experiments must be independently reproducible. Given that we only have one earth, this is a problem. Another challenge is multiple variables which interact in unknown ways. The best experiments are when one variable is changed, and everything else held constant. This is simply unattainable on a global scale. The third challenge I see is time. When the delay between cause and effect spans multiple generations of human observers, the probability of getting useful information falls dramatically. In short, the scientific method has its limitations.
Largest budget items: Medicare/Medicade -- welfare -- $944 billion Social Security -- not welfare --- $869 billion Defense -- not welfare -- $593 billion Income Security - welfare -- $310 billion None of these are authorized under Article 1, Section 8, which lists the limited powers of congress, except for defense.
Soviet-style sameness should never be our goal. Radical egalitarianism is uniformly destructive to human freedom. People should be free to be janitors or CEOs depending on their natural gifts and level of desire. Not every janitor even wants to be a CEO. Lots of people go to Harvard and are never a CEO. And envy is such an unattractive character trait.
Money is noting more or less than unconsumed production, a store of wealth. When more of it is printed, it dilutes the store of wealth, making each unit worth less, which is theft. I love your use of the passive voice in stating that "money is created as needed" as if it were an act of nature. BS. Governments inflate the currency in order to pay back their debts with less value. Every smidgeon of inflation is the result of an affirmative decision of government. That is not to say that the money supply should be fixed, but that the money supply should be carefully monitored to prevent inflation, not to chase some ephemeral goal like "full employment". BTW, Andrew Jackson eliminated the national debt in 1835. I would vote to go back to sound fiscal practices like that in a heartbeat. What do you think it will look like when our house of cards comes crashing down? I am guessing it will be far worse than most expect.