It's unfair and unjust that you're charging your taxpayers for something without allowing them representative control for how it is spent or imposing conditions for its spending.
And even without that "necessary power", the UK spends roughly half what we do in the US on health care, for better results.
If you have health care, wouldn't you like it to be lots cheaper? If you don't have health care, wouldn't you want it? Our huge bureaucratic middleman layer is not only a gigantic waste of money, but frustrating as hell to deal with.
The large soda ban is silly. I'd be ok with requiring prominent labels though. It preserves the choice to do something unhealthy, while providing information to base the choice on.
The amendment was rejected by a vote of 236 to 184. Of the 184 yea votes only one was from a Republican. For reference, there are 242 Republicans and 190 Democrats in the House.
If you don't look too close, you can call it bipartisan and be pissed at both parties. If you look closer, however, you see the blame falls primarily on one side of the aisle, as with this amendment. Same thing with CISPA, SOPA and PIPA.
They think they have some magic, specific answer to problems in human societies.
Some may, but that's a non-sequitur in this discussion. You seem to be dodging.
Meddling in others' lives is destructive.
Boilerplate libertarian talking points. If you have no idea what you want changed, you probably haven't thought this stuff through very far. You alluded to wanting pot to be legal. Build on that and come up with other things you want to try.
since we haven't tried "smaller" recently
We as in humans or we as in the U.S.? Since I asked what places have a better system, I'm guessing you mean there isn't a better system out there you can point to today. If so, that means a modern society based on libertarian principles would be a big experiment. Perhaps you can tell me how long ago it was that somewhere tried the "smaller" you're after.
I'm not sure why taxing the population of Norway doesn't qualify as an alternate system.
War is an alternate system, but it's a horrible one. Or are you assuming they'll just send checks if we ask nicely? You ignored this (along with most of my reply), so I'll just cut and paste it back in: Because they're a separate, sovereign nation. Throwing out that concept invites chaos and has led to world wars. I don't want to forcefully annex them.
You've made very little distinction
War versus taxation. War is deplorable, as I hope you agree. Taxation is necessary, as even you've admitted.
Smaller government is also "an alternate system".
As far as I can tell, you want to keep a representative democracy. But you want to convince people they don't want many of the things they want today. Others pushing for radical changes are trying to change the system first. For instance, making unlimited anonymous spending on campaigns legal. I think their approach is likely to be more effective.
government should make access to those courtrooms risky and expensive for those who would misuse them
More vague boilerplate, but the above at least has a real example. You're probably in favor of anti-SLAPP statutes (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation), as am I. This is where I originally learned about them. Bully corp tries to silence blogger with a frivolous lawsuit and has to pay blogger $50K in legal fees.
If the results weren't catastrophically bad, then we could conclude that the programs weren't a necessary evil.
Much of what I think you're against (e.g. social security and medicare) were put in place to avoid catastrophically bad situations, as judged by your fellow citizens.
You asked. That's the answer.
Yeah, I was just hoping for something more specific than "smaller". You're not the most radical libertarian I've discussed this with, since you agree to some taxes, but I don't know if, for instance, you want to end public education, fire departments, the EPA and a long list of other things.
"Popular" isn't "good". I don't care how popular they are. If people want stolen money, it's because they've allowed themselves to become corrupt. I'm asking people to please be less corrupt. It's a request.
No, popular isn't necessarily good. But didn't you sort of agree that democracy was better than the alternatives? You wanted to try things and use what works, according to a vote, right? I do too, so I'm not criticizing you for that.
So now you're adding "stealing" and "corruption" to "slavery", "looting" and "oppression" instead of just using the simple word taxation. Name-calling isn't convincing.
Voting to join either changes the morality of one group levying taxes on another, or it doesn't.
Ideally we'd have enough space for everyone to spread out and be unaffected by each other. But as I wrote, that's no longer possible. So I guess it sucks for you to have been born here, but at least you have the freedom to agitate for change (as you're doing in this thread) or to leave (yeah, that gets thrown around way too much on both sides, but at least I put it politely and in an appropriate context).
I think I would have been better off being born other places.
But if you know of places whose systems are better than ours, why not tell us? Why not point to them and say they got it right? Or at least better. And that's the proof that your system works better.
It's either OK to target people or it isn't. We can't target Norwegians. But it's OK to target people in the US. Why?
The national borders we have today seem rather arbitrary, but distinct cultures have formed within them and they're mostly stable, peaceful and prosperous compared to the alternative of countries annexing and plundering each other. Again, I guess it sucks for you to have been effectively signed on to the U.S. social contract at birth, but do you have an alternative system?
Wage earners don't take any monetary risk. You work, you get paid. Investors often lose their entire investment. It's not the same. Why should it be taxed the same?
I say it should be the same. You're making a value judgment. Why should we as a country value having money more than working? You called yourself industrious, but don't seem to value work very highly. And why are you targeting wage earners with your discriminatory tax plan?
They were targeted and demonized.
Who was targeted and how? If you let me know, we might even agree. I'm not so concerned about hurt feelings. For instance, you've been demonizing me as pro-slavery, a looter and so on, but I don't take it personally.
You're repeating a false talking point [powerlineblog.com].
Mr. Hinderaker makes 4 (bad) points: 1. $4B/year to oil and gas, but $21B to alternative energy. But how long was that $21B spread out? And what program or programs is he talking about? It's in the ballpark of the 2005 Energy Policy Act's loan guarantee program. And if we're going to spend any federal dollars on energy, should we give it to unprecedentedly profitable legacy extraction companies or fund those trying to figure out how we cope with dwindling supplies of oil? 2. The dep
I don't have a utopian endpoint in mind, because there are no perfect human institutions and there can never be.
Yep, agree.
But we can start shutting down government departments to see if we can live without them. When we can, we should. When we can't, we should bring them back in pieces until they are at the absolute minimum size we can live with.
Based of what metrics? Scored by whom? Voters? I suspect you're not aware of how popular things like Social Security and Medicare are. And how popular single payer health systems are in countries that have them. And those are things that really are life and death, so I didn't even have to interpret "can live with" broadly.
Since taxation and government are probably a necessary evil, we should strive to do only as much taxing and governing as is absolutely necessary.
Since you're for some taxation (e.g. enough for minimal national defense, police and courts), let's not call that slavery. The more common definition is working fine, is pretty well understood and doesn't label you or I as pro-slavery.
I never voted to join the US either. I was born here.
That's a good point. But I didn't claim democracy was perfect. From a combination of population and technology, there's an increasing trend of us affecting and being affected by our neighbors. We're not able to head off over the horizon and try to make a go of it on our own anymore. Barring some massive depopulation here, the next time that'll be possible is when we start colonizing space.
And was there somewhere you'd rather have been born? Is there somewhere closer to your ideal?
That's not a philosophy. Are you saying if it got 51% of the vote and 5 votes on the Supreme Court that it would be OK? Or is it wrong regardless of the vote?
No, it wouldn't be ok. I thought that was assumed and was pointing out that we wouldn't do that.
But it's OK for the President and his party to target and seek to loot and oppress "millionaires and billionaires".
Calling a mildly progressive tax scheme looting and oppression is almost as silly as calling it slavery. You're in favor of some taxation, so I don't know why you want to call your own positions looting, oppression and slavery.
And "bankers" (which is only sometimes a code-word for "Jews", other times it isn't).
Are you in favor of treating capital gains as normal income? Investment bankers and other investors get preferential treatment compared to wage earners.
And health insurers and doctors and folks who make drugs and medical devices. And anyone in the energy business (Obama campaign-donors excepted -- subsidies for them).
I'm missing your point on the health references. Regarding energy, are you in favor of eliminating the preferential treatment (subsidies) given to oil companies?
I think the mention of donors was a reference to Solyndra. That failed company's largest shareholder donated to Obama, but it also has major Republican shareholders. Loans to Solyndra began under Bush. The $500+M was part of a DOE loan guarantee program for risky new energy tech started in 2005 and that failure accounts for around 2% of the total program. China's securing 10x as much in loans each to at least 5 of their solar companies. The U.S. companies have been trying to push efficiency rather than cost of existing tech. Might have been a mistake, but we probably can't compete too well with Chinese labor purely on cost. You can argue that the U.S. as a country should leave its energy future up to the private sector, but do you have evidence of actual corruption?
And people who smoke the wrong plants.
Cool...another piece of common ground.
And tanning salons and their customers. And farmers and ranchers. An
But the point of mentioning slavery is that slavery is 100% compatible with the philosophy you're advocating.
Nope. My philosophy does not allow for slavery. Please stop misrepresenting my position.
Intolerable evils don't become acceptable when they get 51% of the vote. Getting 51% of the vote, in fact, doesn't change whether something is right or wrong at all.
Agreed.
But you're endorsing the idea that election winners can just decide to loot and oppress the election losers.
The strong have always taken from the weak. Part of the reason people have banded together and formed governments throughout history was to be strong enough together to resist that. Now, I'm simply stating that democracy has a good track record of not looting and oppressing and stated that there are no known better alternatives. I've asked you and so far you've declined to offer such an alternative.
Also, the difference between high taxes on a minority and slavery is a matter of degree only.
I doubt that slavery would have been a big deal and precipitated a civil war if slaves could leave anytime they wanted, could decide who to work for and for how much or not to work at all, to pay the same tax rates as everyone else, to vote on how high those taxes are, and so on.
A 100% tax imposed by one group on another group isn't slavery, but it's most of the way there.
Yes, 100% taxation is bad, but democracies don't do that to themselves.
Smaller percentages are better by degrees, but not categorically different. But until the taxes are imposed on everyone equally (or based on usage of government services, like fuel taxes), they're still oppressive and exploitative -- like slavery, only not as bad. If they're not going to be equally imposed on everyone, then they are evil and they should be as absolutely low as possible so you don't do any more evil than is absolutely necessary. (Unless you want to endorse purposefully being evil because it "works".)
You keep stating your ideological aversion to taxation, but I have no idea what you want as a system of government or its funding.
My thought experiment for this is: Why doesn't the US just decide to levy a 70% tax on the citizens of Norway? We have the military might to enforce it. We can take a vote of all US and Norwegian citizens together. Since the Norwegians are vastly outnumbered in this vote, they'll lose. But hey, we held a vote. So the Norwegians can STFU and pay the tax or else. They owe us for [reason to be made up and filled in later -- social contract or something that happened 50 years ago or some other meaningless nonsense]. This seems like a great source of revenue to help the US. So what's wrong with this idea?
Nowhere in that scenario did I see the Norwegian people voting to join the U.S., so that's immoral. And if they did join voluntarily, I suspect the 70% tax rate for the new state of Norway wouldn't get popular support and wouldn't be upheld as constitutional anyway. Our modern democracy resists such targeting of a group based on where they live or their national background. You could just as easily asked why we don't double taxes on Californians, or those of Irish background. We as a country have determined that we shouldn't target people like that.
First, Democrats have had a majority in the Senate since 2007, so 2 Bush years and 3+ Obama years. Second, they had a majority in the House for 4 years, 2 under Bush and 2 under Obama.
So that's 2 years they had majorities in the Senate and House while holding the Presidency. The President of course has a veto, so that's a key ingredient to getting anything through. The House is fairly strictly majority rule. The Senate, by current rules (since the 70's) allows the minority to block bills unless 3/5 of the full Senate (i.e. 60 Senators) vote for cloture. Use of that tactic has risen dramatically since the Democrats retook the majority in 2007. So when you claim that the Republicans didn't block anything, that's just outright false.
See the Senate records on how often cloture votes were held to break a filibuster. See the big jump?
You can still be against the bills in question. Hell, you can be proud of the R's for blocking them. But don't deny it's happening.
I've heard the "control of congress" tactic be used very misleadingly. If every Republican and barely enough Democrats vote down a bill, you can be technically correct to say that the majority Democrats could have passed the bill. But when you look closer and see 90+% of Democrats and 0% of Republicans voting for it, it's clear which party is more responsible for the bill not passing.
Wondered how long it woud take for someone to get pedantic. Took me moments after clicking submit, but the words are interchangeable in that context anyway, so I stand by it.
CISPA cosponsors (from your link): Republicans: 86 (out of 242, 35%) Democrats: 26 (out of 190, 13%)
SOPA had 16 of each on the list, but had various joining dates and withdrawals. I'd like to see the data for the Patriot reauthorization votes, but don't have time right now.
Don't know if Slashdot ate my reply or if we hit some time limit or thread depth or something.
AFAIK, democracies don't vote for slavery and have a pretty good record of doing the opposite. Or if you mean taxes, calling it slavery is pretty silly.
You don't get to command your fellow men to obey your whims based on being "affected by the economy at large".
Ah, but we do get to. And if we could make some progress on the part that we both dislike, the special interest, detrimental influence, we'd be in really good shape here.
And you want to make it more complex by adding regulations.
You keep misrepresenting my position, which is the opposite. I want regulations to make things simpler, more transparent, fairer and more stable. Look into the Credit Card Act for an example of how regulation can do that. Or look into the CFPB for a whole organization dedicated to that. If you're so locked into your anti-regulation ideology that you can't see that laws can make things more complex or simpler, then we're at an impasse.
Based of what metrics? Scored by whom? Voters?
Based on what works. Trial and error. Scored by voters and their elected representatives. Democracy is far from perfect, but it's better than the alternatives.
Usually the later.
It varies, but I'll agree on that one.
"My fellow citizens as a whole" intentionally screw me over every day
I figured that was coming. But that's not some malicious targeting of you, it's all of us deciding how our society should function. Even with all the special interest crap, it's a bargain. Civilization is priceless and I hope we don't go too far with radical libertarian experiments.
Their intentions are none of my business unless they enlist the government to use force against people. Without government force, the only thing corporations can do to interact with me is by my consent. To get my consent, they have to offer me something good enough for me to want to consenting to. Why should I want those offers to be restricted?
Their intentions are none of your business? You're not affected by the economy at large? I am. You're not affected by pollution? I am.
But let's keep it to finance. Do you use any modern finance? I have bank accounts, credit cards and own stock in private and public companies. Even with regulation, the rules regarding those interactions are impenetrably complex without a huge investment of time and testing of their bounds in court. Without regulation, we'd have no protection at all in those dealings. You seem rather naive to think they'd be more trustworthy if they had no referee making sure they played fair.
The rest of your post can be summed up as "we should keep adding regulations and laws until we reach a utopia where nothing could ever go wrong for anyone".
Well, that's just a BS straw man. We should add regulations that help (e.g. Glass Steagall) and reject or remove regulations that hurt (e.g. SOPA, CISPA).
It ignores the fact that regulations essentially protect big powerful companies with the resources to comply and freeze out smaller competitors -- which leads to more corporate power backed by government.
Regulations can promote competition from small competitors or concentrate power with big companies.
It's based on fears of private-sector criminality but ignores even the possibility of government-sector criminality -- as if humans somehow become infallible the instant they get hired by government.
Obviously the last part of this is another straw man. But the fear of public or private bad actors is an important one. Honest mistakes will happen at roughly the same rate, I expect. But I find it much more likely that an individual or small group of people (e.g. those running a corporation) will decide to screw me over than my fellow citizens as a whole.
Why are you so eager to spend middle class taxpayers' money to try to safeguard millionaires' and billionaires' foreign bond-trading schemes?
I'm not. In fact, I'd like to make the tax system in the U.S. more progressive. And I've got a couple ideas regarding investment fiascos. First, put something like Glass Steagall back in place so that when investment banks gamble big and lose, nobody considers them too big to fail, since they won't be taking down the traditional banking infrastructure with them. Second, if that's not enough to keep those crazy schemes from imperiling the rest of us, create something like the FDIC but for the gamblers instead of traditional banks. The FDIC is insurance, funded by premiums from the banks. It's been so successful there that I think investment banks could use a similar scheme.
Corporations spend a lot of money trying to capture that centralized power to get more regulations enacted that are favorable to them. Should we give them what they want? SOPA anyone?
They do spend money to enact things like SOPA (good common ground...we both hate that), but are you denying that they spend a lot of money trying to avoid regulation too? Should we concede half the fight? (I'd argue that avoiding regulation is much more than half of what they're doing). It seems you don't think corporations always have the best of intentions, but it sounds like you don't want restrictions on them, which seems contradictory.
I am not a lawyer, but I believe the law is...
Thanks for the link. I'm not a lawyer either, but I like the basic idea at the start. It's convoluted enough that I'm not sure that it or the MF case is cut and dry. But let's say it (or a new law) was iron clad. Would you be for or against that restriction on corporations?
Probably not. No. And No....
What makes you so sure? Given the ever increasing complexity in the financial world, how can you be sure it's easy to prove who did what, why, or that their conduct amounted to criminal activity? It seems that complexity is intended both to confuse the customer and to provide plausible deniability if anything goes wrong. That's why I support regulations, reporting and efforts at transparency being pushed by the CFPB. I agree that margin requirements would only delay things if someone is intent on looting accounts, but it was also a critical piece of the swamping of Lehman, among others. So are you for or against margin requirements?
While using customer funds was a serious red flag at MF Global, it was not necessarily illegal. A little known loophole in futures regulations permits firms to spend some money belonging to customers who traded abroad, an exemption that contradicts a cornerstone of the industry to always protect client funds. It also differs from the law policing trading in the United States.
There's no government mechanism for reigning in so-called "corporate power" (actually government power wielded by corporations) that won't result in the further centralization of power. Once power is centralized it can be captured by corporations or a dictator, or anyone.
Federal laws are by definition centralized power. Surely you're not denying that there are good federal laws. Or are you? Corporations spend a lot of money trying to capture that centralized power to do away with regulations. Should we give them what they want without having to go through that trouble?
What laws could have affected what happened with MF Global? Could something like Glass-Steagall have enforced a separation of customer accounts and MF's own investing? Could tighter leverage ratio requirements have helped (they went too far leading up to the recent financial crisis). Could record-keeping and reporting requirements have made it clearer what exactly happened and where the money went? Could that money be recovered and returned to the customers?
I have bank accounts that are FDIC-insured. Works well. No bank runs. Whatever happens at that bank, I get my money back, guaranteed by the U.S. Government.
If you include other types of accounts and financial institutions, we have the example of MF Global. The MFers literally stole $1.2 Billion from their customers' accounts and it's looking like those customers are SOL and the perpetrators will avoid jail time and keep all those fat bonuses for the great job they did.
Unfortunately, a majority of Slashdotters will proclaim the answer is to increase government power to finally reign in those nasty corporations. Because, obviously, that's super-duper wise when you don't trust the government because it's been captured by corporate interests.
What was your point here? Don't try to reign in corporate power, because they have taken over the government and won't let you? You can still be pessimistic but support that reigning in of corporate power.
For example, support the CFPB. If you're a fan of a free market, you know that informed consumers are a key ingredient, and the CFPB enforces the kind of transparency that makes the consumer financial markets work well.
As an example of what happens without regulation, look into MF Global. It had big losses from its own trading and literally stole $1.2 Billion from its customers' accounts. So far it's not looking like those customers will get their money back. If that stands and you have any money at financial firms that's isn't government insured (e.g. by the FDIC), it could be taken at any time. I have some, and it's troubling. I'm very glad the FDIC is there though. The era of runs on banks didn't sound like much fun.
Re:They have lost all trust, but they retain distr
on
In Nothing We Trust
·
· Score: 1
You claim's there's no real choice, but there is a real difference. You mention:
- Being banker-funded. If you're worried about runaway / unaccountable financial corporations, choose the candidate trying to regulate them instead of free them up even more.
- Bombing / killing. Choose the candidate ending wars and doing less saber rattling about Iran.
I don't like that they're so similar, but there are real differences.
And if you want to balance the budget, look to how it was done last time. It wasn't all that long ago, so it's not like we have to go back to the founders and wonder if it's work in modern times.
I'd be ok with vouchers for private schools as long as they don't drain too much money from public schools. I don't know what the formula should be, but there are a lot of costs a school has that don't disappear proportionally with the number of students. If 50 students leave a school of 1000 students, costs don't go down 5%. You probably can do without 2 teachers, but that's about it. So maybe that's $100K and the vouchers should be worth $2K each.
That brings up a good point that there's a wide spectrum of libertarianism. They're not all anarchists, though some certainly come off that way. Most who've thought things through a bit agree with defense, police and a legal system. These things take tax revenue, so that's a big step toward bridging the divide between libertarians and the rest of us. After that step, there are a lot of issues to be considered, but the basic framework is there.
Roads existed before the Federal government
Can you name any places that have road systems that are not primarily government owned and operated? Do we have any success stories to point to or would privatization be a radical experiment?
so did schools
Any countries without a public school system that you think are a good model or is this an experiment? We certainly have lots of places that don't have public education that don't do so well.
People didn't die of food poisoning in droves before the government stepped in.
Are you suggesting food safety doesn't save lives, or that it's too expensive for the benefit? Back 100 years ago, there seemed to be problems that needed fixing. And today, most of us are much farther removed from our food sources than people were back then. So with the factory farming and processing of food, the benefit has gone up. Surely the cost has too. If you're a fan of the free market, doesn't it only work if consumers have information about their choices?
And there are still some toll roads out there to boot.
Toll roads are not cheaper to operate than non-toll roads since. But there are two attractions I can think of offhand for tolls. One is to reduce congestion, adding a toll to shift traffic patterns. The one I think you'd like is that it's fairer, with those using the road paying for it directly. But there are other cheaper ways to get drivers to pay for their road use, e.g. gas taxes. Nobody uses all government services, but if you use an average amount, you're saving a lot of money compared to paying individually for every little thing. And some things have indirect benefits to you. For myself, I don't directly benefit from public education, but I like having a literate pool of potential employees.
This very morning I heard that the social security taxes I pay every paycheck will be consumed years before I retire.
Last I heard, we've got 26 years of full benefits left, then it's some (high...75?) percentage of benefits. That's if we don't change anything, and likely temporary to get over the baby boomer hump. We could make minor adjustments now to avoid any reduction. The projection was in worse shape in 1983 when a major adjustment was made. If you're upset that the "trust fund" is being used like the general fund, what would you like to do with it? We could keep it in stacks of bills somewhere, or invest it. We probably shouldn't put it in anything risky, so how about the "safest investment on earth", U.S. treasuries? That's what we have today. It's being borrowed by the U.S. government, and paying interest into the Social Security account.
Not really expecting a response on Slashdot, but I really would like to get into details with a libertarian someday. And civil libertarianism is a no-brainer, so we'd have that common ground.
Slashdot Mirror
It's unfair and unjust that you're charging your taxpayers for something without allowing them representative control for how it is spent or imposing conditions for its spending.
And even without that "necessary power", the UK spends roughly half what we do in the US on health care, for better results.
If you have health care, wouldn't you like it to be lots cheaper? If you don't have health care, wouldn't you want it? Our huge bureaucratic middleman layer is not only a gigantic waste of money, but frustrating as hell to deal with.
The large soda ban is silly. I'd be ok with requiring prominent labels though. It preserves the choice to do something unhealthy, while providing information to base the choice on.
Agreed about tangerines and oranges. But 183 is still not equal to 1. Want to try again?
The amendment was rejected by a vote of 236 to 184. Of the 184 yea votes only one was from a Republican. For reference, there are 242 Republicans and 190 Democrats in the House.
I'd love to hear what the Republicans in Congress say on this.
Well, there were 184 votes in favor of the amendment banning this practice. Only 1 vote was from a Republican.
Only one Republican voted for it. 183 Democrats (and Independents?) did. So there's a real difference.
http://www.dailytech.com/Proposed+Amendment+to+Prevent+Employers+from+Asking+for+Facebook+UsernamesPasswords+Fails/article24337.htm
If you don't look too close, you can call it bipartisan and be pissed at both parties. If you look closer, however, you see the blame falls primarily on one side of the aisle, as with this amendment. Same thing with CISPA, SOPA and PIPA.
They think they have some magic, specific answer to problems in human societies.
Some may, but that's a non-sequitur in this discussion. You seem to be dodging.
Meddling in others' lives is destructive.
Boilerplate libertarian talking points. If you have no idea what you want changed, you probably haven't thought this stuff through very far. You alluded to wanting pot to be legal. Build on that and come up with other things you want to try.
since we haven't tried "smaller" recently
We as in humans or we as in the U.S.? Since I asked what places have a better system, I'm guessing you mean there isn't a better system out there you can point to today. If so, that means a modern society based on libertarian principles would be a big experiment. Perhaps you can tell me how long ago it was that somewhere tried the "smaller" you're after.
I'm not sure why taxing the population of Norway doesn't qualify as an alternate system.
War is an alternate system, but it's a horrible one. Or are you assuming they'll just send checks if we ask nicely? You ignored this (along with most of my reply), so I'll just cut and paste it back in:
Because they're a separate, sovereign nation. Throwing out that concept invites chaos and has led to world wars. I don't want to forcefully annex them.
You've made very little distinction
War versus taxation. War is deplorable, as I hope you agree. Taxation is necessary, as even you've admitted.
Smaller government is also "an alternate system".
As far as I can tell, you want to keep a representative democracy. But you want to convince people they don't want many of the things they want today. Others pushing for radical changes are trying to change the system first. For instance, making unlimited anonymous spending on campaigns legal. I think their approach is likely to be more effective.
government should make access to those courtrooms risky and expensive for those who would misuse them
More vague boilerplate, but the above at least has a real example. You're probably in favor of anti-SLAPP statutes (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation), as am I. This is where I originally learned about them. Bully corp tries to silence blogger with a frivolous lawsuit and has to pay blogger $50K in legal fees.
If the results weren't catastrophically bad, then we could conclude that the programs weren't a necessary evil.
Much of what I think you're against (e.g. social security and medicare) were put in place to avoid catastrophically bad situations, as judged by your fellow citizens.
You asked. That's the answer.
Yeah, I was just hoping for something more specific than "smaller". You're not the most radical libertarian I've discussed this with, since you agree to some taxes, but I don't know if, for instance, you want to end public education, fire departments, the EPA and a long list of other things.
"Popular" isn't "good". I don't care how popular they are. If people want stolen money, it's because they've allowed themselves to become corrupt. I'm asking people to please be less corrupt. It's a request.
No, popular isn't necessarily good. But didn't you sort of agree that democracy was better than the alternatives? You wanted to try things and use what works, according to a vote, right? I do too, so I'm not criticizing you for that.
So now you're adding "stealing" and "corruption" to "slavery", "looting" and "oppression" instead of just using the simple word taxation. Name-calling isn't convincing.
Voting to join either changes the morality of one group levying taxes on another, or it doesn't.
Ideally we'd have enough space for everyone to spread out and be unaffected by each other. But as I wrote, that's no longer possible. So I guess it sucks for you to have been born here, but at least you have the freedom to agitate for change (as you're doing in this thread) or to leave (yeah, that gets thrown around way too much on both sides, but at least I put it politely and in an appropriate context).
I think I would have been better off being born other places.
But if you know of places whose systems are better than ours, why not tell us? Why not point to them and say they got it right? Or at least better. And that's the proof that your system works better.
It's either OK to target people or it isn't. We can't target Norwegians. But it's OK to target people in the US. Why?
The national borders we have today seem rather arbitrary, but distinct cultures have formed within them and they're mostly stable, peaceful and prosperous compared to the alternative of countries annexing and plundering each other. Again, I guess it sucks for you to have been effectively signed on to the U.S. social contract at birth, but do you have an alternative system?
Wage earners don't take any monetary risk. You work, you get paid. Investors often lose their entire investment. It's not the same. Why should it be taxed the same?
I say it should be the same. You're making a value judgment. Why should we as a country value having money more than working? You called yourself industrious, but don't seem to value work very highly. And why are you targeting wage earners with your discriminatory tax plan?
They were targeted and demonized.
Who was targeted and how? If you let me know, we might even agree. I'm not so concerned about hurt feelings. For instance, you've been demonizing me as pro-slavery, a looter and so on, but I don't take it personally.
You're repeating a false talking point [powerlineblog.com].
Mr. Hinderaker makes 4 (bad) points:
1. $4B/year to oil and gas, but $21B to alternative energy. But how long was that $21B spread out? And what program or programs is he talking about? It's in the ballpark of the 2005 Energy Policy Act's loan guarantee program. And if we're going to spend any federal dollars on energy, should we give it to unprecedentedly profitable legacy extraction companies or fund those trying to figure out how we cope with dwindling supplies of oil?
2. The dep
I don't have a utopian endpoint in mind, because there are no perfect human institutions and there can never be.
Yep, agree.
But we can start shutting down government departments to see if we can live without them. When we can, we should. When we can't, we should bring them back in pieces until they are at the absolute minimum size we can live with.
Based of what metrics? Scored by whom? Voters? I suspect you're not aware of how popular things like Social Security and Medicare are. And how popular single payer health systems are in countries that have them. And those are things that really are life and death, so I didn't even have to interpret "can live with" broadly.
Since taxation and government are probably a necessary evil, we should strive to do only as much taxing and governing as is absolutely necessary.
Since you're for some taxation (e.g. enough for minimal national defense, police and courts), let's not call that slavery. The more common definition is working fine, is pretty well understood and doesn't label you or I as pro-slavery.
I never voted to join the US either. I was born here.
That's a good point. But I didn't claim democracy was perfect. From a combination of population and technology, there's an increasing trend of us affecting and being affected by our neighbors. We're not able to head off over the horizon and try to make a go of it on our own anymore. Barring some massive depopulation here, the next time that'll be possible is when we start colonizing space.
And was there somewhere you'd rather have been born? Is there somewhere closer to your ideal?
That's not a philosophy. Are you saying if it got 51% of the vote and 5 votes on the Supreme Court that it would be OK? Or is it wrong regardless of the vote?
No, it wouldn't be ok. I thought that was assumed and was pointing out that we wouldn't do that.
But it's OK for the President and his party to target and seek to loot and oppress "millionaires and billionaires".
Calling a mildly progressive tax scheme looting and oppression is almost as silly as calling it slavery. You're in favor of some taxation, so I don't know why you want to call your own positions looting, oppression and slavery.
And "bankers" (which is only sometimes a code-word for "Jews", other times it isn't).
Are you in favor of treating capital gains as normal income? Investment bankers and other investors get preferential treatment compared to wage earners.
And health insurers and doctors and folks who make drugs and medical devices. And anyone in the energy business (Obama campaign-donors excepted -- subsidies for them).
I'm missing your point on the health references. Regarding energy, are you in favor of eliminating the preferential treatment (subsidies) given to oil companies?
I think the mention of donors was a reference to Solyndra. That failed company's largest shareholder donated to Obama, but it also has major Republican shareholders. Loans to Solyndra began under Bush. The $500+M was part of a DOE loan guarantee program for risky new energy tech started in 2005 and that failure accounts for around 2% of the total program. China's securing 10x as much in loans each to at least 5 of their solar companies. The U.S. companies have been trying to push efficiency rather than cost of existing tech. Might have been a mistake, but we probably can't compete too well with Chinese labor purely on cost. You can argue that the U.S. as a country should leave its energy future up to the private sector, but do you have evidence of actual corruption?
And people who smoke the wrong plants.
Cool...another piece of common ground.
And tanning salons and their customers. And farmers and ranchers. An
And CISPA just passed today. Here's how the voting went:
Republicans: 206 ayes, 28 nays, 7 no votes (85%)
Democrats: 42 ayes, 140 nays, 8 no votes (22%)
Bipartisan? Yes. Equal blame? No.
Slavery coexisted for a long time with democracy.
Yeah, too long.
But the point of mentioning slavery is that slavery is 100% compatible with the philosophy you're advocating.
Nope. My philosophy does not allow for slavery. Please stop misrepresenting my position.
Intolerable evils don't become acceptable when they get 51% of the vote. Getting 51% of the vote, in fact, doesn't change whether something is right or wrong at all.
Agreed.
But you're endorsing the idea that election winners can just decide to loot and oppress the election losers.
The strong have always taken from the weak. Part of the reason people have banded together and formed governments throughout history was to be strong enough together to resist that. Now, I'm simply stating that democracy has a good track record of not looting and oppressing and stated that there are no known better alternatives. I've asked you and so far you've declined to offer such an alternative.
Also, the difference between high taxes on a minority and slavery is a matter of degree only.
I doubt that slavery would have been a big deal and precipitated a civil war if slaves could leave anytime they wanted, could decide who to work for and for how much or not to work at all, to pay the same tax rates as everyone else, to vote on how high those taxes are, and so on.
A 100% tax imposed by one group on another group isn't slavery, but it's most of the way there.
Yes, 100% taxation is bad, but democracies don't do that to themselves.
Smaller percentages are better by degrees, but not categorically different. But until the taxes are imposed on everyone equally (or based on usage of government services, like fuel taxes), they're still oppressive and exploitative -- like slavery, only not as bad. If they're not going to be equally imposed on everyone, then they are evil and they should be as absolutely low as possible so you don't do any more evil than is absolutely necessary. (Unless you want to endorse purposefully being evil because it "works".)
You keep stating your ideological aversion to taxation, but I have no idea what you want as a system of government or its funding.
My thought experiment for this is: Why doesn't the US just decide to levy a 70% tax on the citizens of Norway? We have the military might to enforce it. We can take a vote of all US and Norwegian citizens together. Since the Norwegians are vastly outnumbered in this vote, they'll lose. But hey, we held a vote. So the Norwegians can STFU and pay the tax or else. They owe us for [reason to be made up and filled in later -- social contract or something that happened 50 years ago or some other meaningless nonsense]. This seems like a great source of revenue to help the US. So what's wrong with this idea?
Nowhere in that scenario did I see the Norwegian people voting to join the U.S., so that's immoral. And if they did join voluntarily, I suspect the 70% tax rate for the new state of Norway wouldn't get popular support and wouldn't be upheld as constitutional anyway. Our modern democracy resists such targeting of a group based on where they live or their national background. You could just as easily asked why we don't double taxes on Californians, or those of Irish background. We as a country have determined that we shouldn't target people like that.
So much wrong or misleading in a short comment.
First, Democrats have had a majority in the Senate since 2007, so 2 Bush years and 3+ Obama years.
Second, they had a majority in the House for 4 years, 2 under Bush and 2 under Obama.
So that's 2 years they had majorities in the Senate and House while holding the Presidency. The President of course has a veto, so that's a key ingredient to getting anything through. The House is fairly strictly majority rule. The Senate, by current rules (since the 70's) allows the minority to block bills unless 3/5 of the full Senate (i.e. 60 Senators) vote for cloture. Use of that tactic has risen dramatically since the Democrats retook the majority in 2007. So when you claim that the Republicans didn't block anything, that's just outright false.
See the Senate records on how often cloture votes were held to break a filibuster. See the big jump?
2011-now : 48 (D)
2009-2010 : 91 (D)
2007-2008 : 112 (D)
2005-2006 : 54 (R)
2003-2004 : 49 (R)
You can still be against the bills in question. Hell, you can be proud of the R's for blocking them. But don't deny it's happening.
I've heard the "control of congress" tactic be used very misleadingly. If every Republican and barely enough Democrats vote down a bill, you can be technically correct to say that the majority Democrats could have passed the bill. But when you look closer and see 90+% of Democrats and 0% of Republicans voting for it, it's clear which party is more responsible for the bill not passing.
Though it wasn't made official by law, "Land of the free and the home of the brave" is a motto of ours.
Wondered how long it woud take for someone to get pedantic. Took me moments after clicking submit, but the words are interchangeable in that context anyway, so I stand by it.
Yes, please do call your reps. If if you're like me and "bipartisan" isn't granular enough, here's the break down so we know who to blame:
The Patriot Act - 2001 (Yeas / Nays / Not Voting):
House of Representatives:
Republicans: 211 / 3 / 5 (96%)
Democrats: 145 / 62 / 4 (68%)
Independents: 1 / 1 / 0 (50%)
Senate:
Republicans: 49 / 49 / 0 (100%)
Democrats: 48 / 1 / 1 (96%) - Hooray for Russ Feingold
Independents: 1 / 0 / 0 (100%)
CISPA cosponsors (from your link):
Republicans: 86 (out of 242, 35%)
Democrats: 26 (out of 190, 13%)
SOPA had 16 of each on the list, but had various joining dates and withdrawals. I'd like to see the data for the Patriot reauthorization votes, but don't have time right now.
How does surrendering our freedom out of fear match up with our motto?
Don't know if Slashdot ate my reply or if we hit some time limit or thread depth or something.
AFAIK, democracies don't vote for slavery and have a pretty good record of doing the opposite. Or if you mean taxes, calling it slavery is pretty silly.
You don't get to command your fellow men to obey your whims based on being "affected by the economy at large".
Ah, but we do get to. And if we could make some progress on the part that we both dislike, the special interest, detrimental influence, we'd be in really good shape here.
And you want to make it more complex by adding regulations.
You keep misrepresenting my position, which is the opposite. I want regulations to make things simpler, more transparent, fairer and more stable. Look into the Credit Card Act for an example of how regulation can do that. Or look into the CFPB for a whole organization dedicated to that. If you're so locked into your anti-regulation ideology that you can't see that laws can make things more complex or simpler, then we're at an impasse.
Based of what metrics? Scored by whom? Voters?
Based on what works. Trial and error. Scored by voters and their elected representatives. Democracy is far from perfect, but it's better than the alternatives.
Usually the later.
It varies, but I'll agree on that one.
"My fellow citizens as a whole" intentionally screw me over every day
I figured that was coming. But that's not some malicious targeting of you, it's all of us deciding how our society should function. Even with all the special interest crap, it's a bargain. Civilization is priceless and I hope we don't go too far with radical libertarian experiments.
Their intentions are none of my business unless they enlist the government to use force against people. Without government force, the only thing corporations can do to interact with me is by my consent. To get my consent, they have to offer me something good enough for me to want to consenting to. Why should I want those offers to be restricted?
Their intentions are none of your business? You're not affected by the economy at large? I am. You're not affected by pollution? I am.
But let's keep it to finance. Do you use any modern finance? I have bank accounts, credit cards and own stock in private and public companies. Even with regulation, the rules regarding those interactions are impenetrably complex without a huge investment of time and testing of their bounds in court. Without regulation, we'd have no protection at all in those dealings. You seem rather naive to think they'd be more trustworthy if they had no referee making sure they played fair.
The rest of your post can be summed up as "we should keep adding regulations and laws until we reach a utopia where nothing could ever go wrong for anyone".
Well, that's just a BS straw man. We should add regulations that help (e.g. Glass Steagall) and reject or remove regulations that hurt (e.g. SOPA, CISPA).
It ignores the fact that regulations essentially protect big powerful companies with the resources to comply and freeze out smaller competitors -- which leads to more corporate power backed by government.
Regulations can promote competition from small competitors or concentrate power with big companies.
It's based on fears of private-sector criminality but ignores even the possibility of government-sector criminality -- as if humans somehow become infallible the instant they get hired by government.
Obviously the last part of this is another straw man. But the fear of public or private bad actors is an important one. Honest mistakes will happen at roughly the same rate, I expect. But I find it much more likely that an individual or small group of people (e.g. those running a corporation) will decide to screw me over than my fellow citizens as a whole.
Why are you so eager to spend middle class taxpayers' money to try to safeguard millionaires' and billionaires' foreign bond-trading schemes?
I'm not. In fact, I'd like to make the tax system in the U.S. more progressive. And I've got a couple ideas regarding investment fiascos. First, put something like Glass Steagall back in place so that when investment banks gamble big and lose, nobody considers them too big to fail, since they won't be taking down the traditional banking infrastructure with them. Second, if that's not enough to keep those crazy schemes from imperiling the rest of us, create something like the FDIC but for the gamblers instead of traditional banks. The FDIC is insurance, funded by premiums from the banks. It's been so successful there that I think investment banks could use a similar scheme.
Corporations spend a lot of money trying to capture that centralized power to get more regulations enacted that are favorable to them. Should we give them what they want? SOPA anyone?
They do spend money to enact things like SOPA (good common ground...we both hate that), but are you denying that they spend a lot of money trying to avoid regulation too? Should we concede half the fight? (I'd argue that avoiding regulation is much more than half of what they're doing). It seems you don't think corporations always have the best of intentions, but it sounds like you don't want restrictions on them, which seems contradictory.
I am not a lawyer, but I believe the law is...
Thanks for the link. I'm not a lawyer either, but I like the basic idea at the start. It's convoluted enough that I'm not sure that it or the MF case is cut and dry. But let's say it (or a new law) was iron clad. Would you be for or against that restriction on corporations?
Probably not. No. And No. ...
What makes you so sure? Given the ever increasing complexity in the financial world, how can you be sure it's easy to prove who did what, why, or that their conduct amounted to criminal activity? It seems that complexity is intended both to confuse the customer and to provide plausible deniability if anything goes wrong. That's why I support regulations, reporting and efforts at transparency being pushed by the CFPB. I agree that margin requirements would only delay things if someone is intent on looting accounts, but it was also a critical piece of the swamping of Lehman, among others. So are you for or against margin requirements?
According to the NYTimes:
While using customer funds was a serious red flag at MF Global, it was not necessarily illegal.
A little known loophole in futures regulations permits firms to spend some money belonging to customers who traded abroad, an exemption that contradicts a cornerstone of the industry to always protect client funds. It also differs from the law policing trading in the United States.
Shouldn't that loophole be closed, by law?
Hey, someone's replying. Thanks.
There's no government mechanism for reigning in so-called "corporate power" (actually government power wielded by corporations) that won't result in the further centralization of power. Once power is centralized it can be captured by corporations or a dictator, or anyone.
Federal laws are by definition centralized power. Surely you're not denying that there are good federal laws. Or are you? Corporations spend a lot of money trying to capture that centralized power to do away with regulations. Should we give them what they want without having to go through that trouble?
What laws could have affected what happened with MF Global? Could something like Glass-Steagall have enforced a separation of customer accounts and MF's own investing? Could tighter leverage ratio requirements have helped (they went too far leading up to the recent financial crisis). Could record-keeping and reporting requirements have made it clearer what exactly happened and where the money went? Could that money be recovered and returned to the customers?
I have bank accounts that are FDIC-insured. Works well. No bank runs. Whatever happens at that bank, I get my money back, guaranteed by the U.S. Government.
If you include other types of accounts and financial institutions, we have the example of MF Global. The MFers literally stole $1.2 Billion from their customers' accounts and it's looking like those customers are SOL and the perpetrators will avoid jail time and keep all those fat bonuses for the great job they did.
Unfortunately, a majority of Slashdotters will proclaim the answer is to increase government power to finally reign in those nasty corporations. Because, obviously, that's super-duper wise when you don't trust the government because it's been captured by corporate interests.
What was your point here? Don't try to reign in corporate power, because they have taken over the government and won't let you? You can still be pessimistic but support that reigning in of corporate power.
For example, support the CFPB. If you're a fan of a free market, you know that informed consumers are a key ingredient, and the CFPB enforces the kind of transparency that makes the consumer financial markets work well.
As an example of what happens without regulation, look into MF Global. It had big losses from its own trading and literally stole $1.2 Billion from its customers' accounts. So far it's not looking like those customers will get their money back. If that stands and you have any money at financial firms that's isn't government insured (e.g. by the FDIC), it could be taken at any time. I have some, and it's troubling. I'm very glad the FDIC is there though. The era of runs on banks didn't sound like much fun.
You claim's there's no real choice, but there is a real difference. You mention:
- Being banker-funded. If you're worried about runaway / unaccountable financial corporations, choose the candidate trying to regulate them instead of free them up even more.
- Bombing / killing. Choose the candidate ending wars and doing less saber rattling about Iran.
I don't like that they're so similar, but there are real differences.
And if you want to balance the budget, look to how it was done last time. It wasn't all that long ago, so it's not like we have to go back to the founders and wonder if it's work in modern times.
I'd be ok with vouchers for private schools as long as they don't drain too much money from public schools. I don't know what the formula should be, but there are a lot of costs a school has that don't disappear proportionally with the number of students. If 50 students leave a school of 1000 students, costs don't go down 5%. You probably can do without 2 teachers, but that's about it. So maybe that's $100K and the vouchers should be worth $2K each.
All but the most anarchic of libertarians believe
That brings up a good point that there's a wide spectrum of libertarianism. They're not all anarchists, though some certainly come off that way. Most who've thought things through a bit agree with defense, police and a legal system. These things take tax revenue, so that's a big step toward bridging the divide between libertarians and the rest of us. After that step, there are a lot of issues to be considered, but the basic framework is there.
Roads existed before the Federal government
Can you name any places that have road systems that are not primarily government owned and operated? Do we have any success stories to point to or would privatization be a radical experiment?
so did schools
Any countries without a public school system that you think are a good model or is this an experiment? We certainly have lots of places that don't have public education that don't do so well.
People didn't die of food poisoning in droves before the government stepped in.
Are you suggesting food safety doesn't save lives, or that it's too expensive for the benefit? Back 100 years ago, there seemed to be problems that needed fixing. And today, most of us are much farther removed from our food sources than people were back then. So with the factory farming and processing of food, the benefit has gone up. Surely the cost has too. If you're a fan of the free market, doesn't it only work if consumers have information about their choices?
And there are still some toll roads out there to boot.
Toll roads are not cheaper to operate than non-toll roads since. But there are two attractions I can think of offhand for tolls. One is to reduce congestion, adding a toll to shift traffic patterns. The one I think you'd like is that it's fairer, with those using the road paying for it directly. But there are other cheaper ways to get drivers to pay for their road use, e.g. gas taxes. Nobody uses all government services, but if you use an average amount, you're saving a lot of money compared to paying individually for every little thing. And some things have indirect benefits to you. For myself, I don't directly benefit from public education, but I like having a literate pool of potential employees.
This very morning I heard that the social security taxes I pay every paycheck will be consumed years before I retire.
Last I heard, we've got 26 years of full benefits left, then it's some (high...75?) percentage of benefits. That's if we don't change anything, and likely temporary to get over the baby boomer hump. We could make minor adjustments now to avoid any reduction. The projection was in worse shape in 1983 when a major adjustment was made. If you're upset that the "trust fund" is being used like the general fund, what would you like to do with it? We could keep it in stacks of bills somewhere, or invest it. We probably shouldn't put it in anything risky, so how about the "safest investment on earth", U.S. treasuries? That's what we have today. It's being borrowed by the U.S. government, and paying interest into the Social Security account.
Not really expecting a response on Slashdot, but I really would like to get into details with a libertarian someday. And civil libertarianism is a no-brainer, so we'd have that common ground.