That hasn't stopped Christians from murdering each other over Christianity by the millions.
Furthermore, "new covenant" or not, the God of the New Testament is the same god as the one of the Old Testament, and He is a dictatorial and violent tribal deity. Ultimately, with that kind of violent and intolerant foundation, nothing can ever fix Christianity: it is rotten at its root, just like all other Abrahamic religions.
I'm not sure whether you're complaining that Netflix streaming has less selection that Netflix DVD or what. But almost everything you want is available online, just not through Netflix. Since video distribution has gone online, there are a lot more distribution channels. For example, I believe you could rent a lot of Criterion as DVDs on Netflix, but if you want to stream it, you have to go to Hulu Plus. Ultimately, the people creating the content hold the copyright and they are going to set the prices, and they are not going to compete with themselves by going through too many distribution channels. I still don't see how you think that prevent T-Mobile from streaming certain providers with no caps is going to affect that.
I don't understand what you're getting at. The major streaming services all offer the same content, and that content already has a monopoly based on copyright. How many companies do you need to stream The Walking Dead or Star Trek?
Now - have you ever heard of MangoFlix? No, you haven't, because all these entrenched services have locked up deals with content providers, and now connectivity providers, making it impossibly expensive to start up a competitive service.
These "entrenched services" benefit from efficiencies of scale, both at the contractual and at the technical level. The same thing happens in every maturing industry. It's why Walmart is so much cheaper than your corner convenience market.
The online music and video markets are largely history; maybe someone will still figure out an angle that gives them another shot, but what Netflix, Hulu, T-Mobile, Comcast, and all the other players are doing is basically what we get, and you shouldn't expect any more startups. Now it's just about driving down prices through higher efficiency and competition between them.
Presumably, you'll want to move to somewhere where you can get a job. So... look at job listings, eliminate the ones that are in places you don't want to live, and then look into the places that you might want to live.
The reformations of Christianity/etc incorporated tolerance directly into their belief systems, and once Islam does that
The Reformation killed millions, probably about a third of the population of central and northern Europe, and the fallout from it was a big part of subsequent wars by Prussia and the rise of the Nazi. The Reformation created many millions of religiously persecuted refugees, who then fled to other continents to "colonize" them, often destroying the native cultures in the process. If anything like that happens with Islam, the world is in deep, deep trouble. Anything like the European Reformation simply isn't a feasible solution for Islam.
And it didn't really "fix" Christianity either. The roots of the Abrahamic religions are found in racism, intolerance, and violence, and no reformation is going to fix that. The only reason Christianity gets away with preaching something different today than its holy books actually say is because back when it started, people had much less information available to them, and because today nobody gives a fuck anymore. That's not going to work with Islam. Muslims are going to look at what you want the Quran to say and what it actually says, and they are going to tell you that you are full of it if with your new interpretation.
Religion provides for a number of things: [...] There is a reason why most dominant societies throughout history have had religious infrastructure.
The fact that religion can do those things doesn't mean every religion is good at it, or even that religion is the best way to do it. Even your premise is dubious; in fact, many dominant societies have had nothing like what we call a "religion" in the West. Instead, they have philosophical systems like Taoism, Confucianism, or Buddhism, or they have practices like witchcraft/Shamanism. Those belief systems are radically different from Christianity or Islam to the point that it doesn't really make sense to call them "religions" in the same sense. In particular, those other systems do not demand blind faith or obedience, and they do not generally postulate a paternalistic omnipotent being that messes around in the affairs of individual human tribes, but they instead focus on individual understanding and experience.
In the U.S., mass shootings are often done by atheists and rarely by religious groups.
That's debatable, but it's also irrelevant.
Religions like Islam and Christianity have foundational writings that all followers of that religion accept in one form or another. Those writings describe acts of unspeakable violence and cruelty, in several instances ordered or condoned by God, that all followers of those religions at least acknowledge and usually tacitly condone. That is what religious terrorists who label themselves as belonging to these faiths refer to and use to justify their actions. So, there is a direct connection between the actual religion and the acts of religious terrorists. That's true even if the terrorists are considered "not really" belonging to the religion according to the "mainstream".
Nothing like that is true for atheism. Atheists share nothing other than a non-belief in God. Therefore, the beliefs or actions of one atheist tell you nothing about the beliefs of another atheist.
So: You just clearly and succinctly stated that this approach would work to reduce carbon emissions. We agree.
That wasn't the point under discussion. The point under discussion was your justification for taxes as accounting for "externalities". I pointed out that we are already taxing in roughly the amount of the externalities that carbon emissions create, and that there is nothing special about taxing at that amount. From an economic point of view, the only situation that would make a difference is if you tax exactly the amount of externalities you produce and then transfer the money to the people suffering the externalities, but that isn't actually happening in any of the carbon taxes.
Would it work? We actually already know it doesn't because it has been tried. Markets don't react to tax increases like they do to an increase in price of the underlying commodity. Taxes can be avoided by moving production out of the country or by lobbying. Consumers demand for energy and gasoline is fairly inelastic. And tax increases will likely be compensated for by a decrease in the price of the commodity.
However, you seem to be violently agreeing with me on the basic economics, so I'll stop here.
I think you are an excellent example of Dunning-Kruger: you are so ignorant of economics, you don't even realize it.
No. Which the median person hasn't been since the 1950s. Worker compensation has been on a downward trend since, in real dollars.
Not only is that the wrong number to look at, it's not even true. Hourly wages rose significantly between 1947 and 1972 and then largely stagnated (they are slightly higher now than in 1972). They haven't been on a "downward trend". But that is the wrong number to look at anyway, since being "better off" doesn't just mean that your wages go up, it means what kinds of goods and services people can afford. Car ownership has steadily increased, average home sizes have been increasing, people have much better medical care, life expectancy has increased, the percentage of college graduates in the population has gone from 10% to 30%, etc.
Automation eliminates many skilled jobs, and replaces them either with cud-chewing assembly line jobs, or with nothing because the jobs are simply no longer required, or perhaps one or two skilled jobs maintaining the machines. And those aren't necessarily highly skilled jobs, either.
Probably 80-90% of jobs that existed 50 years ago have been replaced with automation by now, yet labor force participation rate has increased, not decreased, as your Luddite reasoning suggests. At the same time, automation has increased worker productivity greatly while not increasing wages, which is one reason why we are better off today: people can buy more and better stuff for less.
The minimum wage has not kept up with inflation in over twenty years. Don't talk shit about increases in minimum wage, you'll only look like a massive idiot.
You need to read more carefully: I said the administration pursued increases in minimum wage (he actually raised it for federal contractors). It shows how economically incompetent the administration is.
Where? All I've seen is bailouts and handouts. Where are these job creation programs?
Well, the Obama administration claims that its bailouts and handouts are job creation programs. Again, it's a sign of either duplicity or economic incompetence on the part of the administration. In fact, the government cannot "create jobs" at all, and any "job creation" program is automatically a fraud.
I don't disagree. I just think that the education system needs some sort of "truth in advertising" and "full disclosure" regulations, so people can be helped to avoid going into debt for decades because "it sounded good."
There is tons of information available and has been for decades. I changed my college major out of economic considerations. I think nobody can complain that they can't get the information they need in order to pick a college major that lets them make a good living afterwards.
These bad choices affect society in several ways. Higher debt levels mean less discretionary consumer spending
There really is no student loan crisis (at least in the US, I can't speak for Canada). Two thirds of US graduates have no student loan debt at all. Only 4% of graduates have student loan debts above $36000 (about the average price of a new car), and those are mostly doctors, lawyers, and MBAs. Most students spend only a few percent of their income on student loan debt repayments.
The only people who are in trouble are those who went to an expensive private school on a student loan and then picked a bad major, like journalism. Of course, those people are also the kind who have the shrillest voice and are driving this insane talk of a "crisis".
Also, petroleum workers isn't that much of an in demand job right now. Lots of layoffs in the oilpatch.
I think their unemployment rate is still fairly low, and they can take jobs internationally as well. Given the political uncertainty surrounding AGW, though, it's probably not a good career choice.
The progressive vision would have incomes rising so that families could afford to go back to single income or 2 part time incomes.
When families go back to single income or 2 part time incomes, their family income obviously drops, and that drags down the middle class family income statistics. You seem to live under the delusion that family incomes should continue to rise even though people work part time or one partner drops out of the workforce, and that, of course, is ridiculous.
Perhaps on your side of the community gate people can voluntarily quit their jobs to be with the kids, but most cannot really afford that.
You're right: I live in a gated community, which, coincidentally, is the cheapest form of housing around here. Of course, for "let them eat cake" snobs like you, such economic realities are difficult to understand.
And yet, you completely believe in his Department of Labor's employment numbers.
What reason do I have to doubt them? It's not like those numbers are particularly flattering to the administration. And faking them or manipulating them would be pretty hard. Besides, we're mostly concerned with comparison (relative to the natural unemployment rate and over time), and in those comparisons, any biases cancel out anyway.
Wages are stagnant because the upper class has gotten pretty much all of the new wealth.
That simply doesn't work out numerically.
They typically pay a smaller proportion of their income as taxes than I do,
Sorry, but that's nonsense. In fact, the top 20% are the only ones paying a larger share of income tax than the share they receive in income. Don't take my word for it, take the CBO's data: https://www.cbo.gov/publicatio...
Shuffling around money in the bottom 80% doesn't result in wage stagnation.
It does if the middle class is increasingly footing the bill for benefits to low income and out of work families. It does so even more when cash wages are turned into non-cash benefits by government mandate. And both of those have been happening extensively over the last few decades. In addition, the labor force participation rate is dropping, so as families work less, they make less money; nothing sinister about that.
People stay in university to get a master's because they can't find a job with a bachelor's
Actually, unemployment rates still decrease on average with length of education, so if you can't get a job with your bachelor's degree, you really just made a lousy choice when it comes to your major. Engineering majors have significantly below average unemployment, while social sciences, philosophy, and art majors have far above average unemployment. For people who aren't smart enough to get a good university degree, there are plenty of good and in-demand blue collar jobs: electricians, pipe fitters, petroleum workers, carpenters, etc. They provide good career paths and solid earnings.
Their debt load keeps rising, and all the while there's more of a risk that circumstances will make their degree worth less (offshoring, automation, industrial collapse in their chosen field, etc).
Well, they have chosen the wrong field, and on top of that they are making bad financial choices by getting even more useless education. How is that anybody's problem but their own? Did anybody put a gun to their head and force them to get a useless degree in journalism or social studies?
There are many reasons for why people are unemployed There are some reasons that are "natural", that is, you expect them to occur in any functioning economy, and they are mostly related to people switching jobs. The natural rate of unemployment for the US is about 5%, pretty close to the actual rate of unemployment that we actually have.
Why do we have people who have been unemployed long enough that they've given up on getting a job?
That's measured by the labor force participation rate. There are many reasons. A lot of Baby Boomers are retiring. A lot of couples decide that one partner earns enough money that the other can stay at home, raise kids or pursue hobbies. More people stay at university and in grad school longer. At the low end of the income scale, single mothers may prefer to spend a while outside the labor force to raise their kids. Many people may also simply receive unemployment benefits while working on the side.
Progressives keep talking about a bunch of things as being desirable: more education, less materialism, ability to spend time with kids, support for single parents, more focus on what really matters in life, time to pursue interests and entrepreneurship, etc. All of those necessarily decrease labor force participation rates and cause family incomes to stagnate. So, if you agree with the progressive vision of society, you shouldn't complain about the logically unavoidable outcomes.
Even for those who work, many are already over-qualified [...] So why should an employer hire someone who is, in fact, more educated because they are older (even though they have the same degree) when they can get by with paying less for someone younger?
If you have a university degree and work as a plumber or secretary, not only do you have a worthless degree and wasted four years of your life, you are also underqualified for your job because you actually know next to nothing about the job you're actually doing. In fact, other than university teaching, there are few jobs that a university degree qualifies you for.
The irony is that first Canadian (and to a lesser degree, US politicians) spend billions supporting worthless degrees that nobody in their right mind would or could pay for themselves, and then whine and complain when people with these useless degrees can't find jobs.
The primary function of government is to an entity that can provide Utilities and grant monopolies. Seriously, that is the primary function. Utilities are for cases where [corrupt politicians want to hand out favors to unions and corporations] . Monopolies are useful when [corrupt politicians want to hand out favors to corporations and unions]
There, FTFY.
When governments do something other than offer utilities or monopolies this should be questioned. But those two things are it's purpose.
The only thing our government should do is secure our liberty and defend us against foreign enemies.
I'm curious. If you believe that unemployment is historically low,
I don't believe that. And I didn't say that. I said that the US unemployment rate is "fairly low", not "historically low".
You made the statement that there is a "labor surplus"; explain what you mean by that and provide evidence!
does that mean you're a big supporter of the Obama Administration's handling of the economy?
Not at all. Obama engaged in massive crony capitalism and promised economic outcomes that haven't come true; the man is either a fraud or incompetent. And the economy is far worse than it could be. However, what it doesn't have is a labor surplus.
So, you can say what you want, but if you say the wrong thing then the government will bring down the force of law upon you to punish you?
No, government can't bring down the force of law upon you. In the US, these are civil actions. Only a party with standing can bring action against you, and they can't do so for your speech per se, but only demonstrable damage.
Remember that Russia has criminalised all advocacy of gay rights by declaring that such speech is harmful to society.
Yes, and that is a restriction on free speech because that is criminal law. In general, criminal libel laws (like they exist in Europe) are a restriction on free speech. But civil action based on libel is not. There is an essential difference between criminal law, which penalizes behavior deemed to be generally harmful to society by politicians, and civil law, which adjudicates specific, identifiable harm done by one individual to another.
Note that from a libertarian point of view, it is accidental and undesirable that government is involved in civil actions at all; we'd generally prefer private mechanisms of conflict resolution.
Your 'classical view' of positive and negative rights is simplistic. There are plenty of forces other than government that are eager and able to suppress the rights of others with violence or intimidation - and one function of government is to limit their ability to do so.
It isn't the job of government to ensure that you can speak free of negative consequences from your peers, for the simple reason that government cannot ever achieve that. And the more you try to burden government with that task, the more totalitarian your society becomes. In general, positive rights are frequently in irreconcilable conflict with one another, and those conflicts cause societies to fail since government deteriorates into a simple power struggle.
There are some rights which do not require simply restricting government, but also forcing government to act in certain ways, like the ideal of equality under the law - which can only be achieved if government agents are compelled to set their personal views aside and treat everyone according to the same rules. Without that one you end up with Kim Davis officials
Kim Davis is a government official implementing a positive right and abusing her position in the implementation of that right. The solution to that problem isn't to fabricate additional positive rights. The solution is to fire her sorry ass for violating existing law, and then have a discussion about eliminating her job and the positive rights she was responsible for implementing.
You seem to have fallen into the classic trap of American politics - viewing a complex issue in terms the liberal-conservative divide. It's a very real divide in American political culture,
I grew up in cold war Europe, and have lived in half a dozen countries. I assure you that my political views are not based on simplistic American politics, but rather by observing repeatedly first hand the failures of European-style paternalistic government and European totalitarianism.
Right now, we're dealing with the labor surplus through mass incarceration, disability, and people just leaving the labor market.
That would mean that we would have a historically low labor participation rate, but we don't. Labor force participation rate was climbing for 55 years after WWII, in parallel with massive automation. Since 2008, the labor force participation rate (in the US) has been falling somewhat, but that's due to Baby Boomers retiring.
Because they won't have jobs.
Why wouldn't they have any jobs? Median unemployment is about 10 weeks, and has been since the 1970's.
What people are trying to get across is that if you layoff 50% of your workforce, and reduce your price by 50%, you are creating a net loss, because the remaining 50% pay 50% less, and the other 50% you laid off pay NOTHING, because they now have 0 income, so the cost reduction does not benefit them what so ever.
No, sorry, prices, labor, and production don't behave at all like you imagine them to behave.
Fundamentally, with technology, we keep raising the bar on what is required to even participate in the market. There was a time a child could work and get a wage of some kind, and required almost no training. Now, many jobs require a ton of training and learning on the go just to become productive.
Oh, you're absolutely right. But that's not the fault of automation, that's the fault of progressive workplace regulations, minimum wage, etc. If the cheapest you can hire a worker for is $25000/year, then people won't hire any workers with skills that make them worth less than that.
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All the wars related to the Reformation; the Thirty Years War and the Huguenot Wars, among others.
That hasn't stopped Christians from murdering each other over Christianity by the millions.
Furthermore, "new covenant" or not, the God of the New Testament is the same god as the one of the Old Testament, and He is a dictatorial and violent tribal deity. Ultimately, with that kind of violent and intolerant foundation, nothing can ever fix Christianity: it is rotten at its root, just like all other Abrahamic religions.
I'm not sure whether you're complaining that Netflix streaming has less selection that Netflix DVD or what. But almost everything you want is available online, just not through Netflix. Since video distribution has gone online, there are a lot more distribution channels. For example, I believe you could rent a lot of Criterion as DVDs on Netflix, but if you want to stream it, you have to go to Hulu Plus. Ultimately, the people creating the content hold the copyright and they are going to set the prices, and they are not going to compete with themselves by going through too many distribution channels. I still don't see how you think that prevent T-Mobile from streaming certain providers with no caps is going to affect that.
I don't understand what you're getting at. The major streaming services all offer the same content, and that content already has a monopoly based on copyright. How many companies do you need to stream The Walking Dead or Star Trek?
These "entrenched services" benefit from efficiencies of scale, both at the contractual and at the technical level. The same thing happens in every maturing industry. It's why Walmart is so much cheaper than your corner convenience market.
The online music and video markets are largely history; maybe someone will still figure out an angle that gives them another shot, but what Netflix, Hulu, T-Mobile, Comcast, and all the other players are doing is basically what we get, and you shouldn't expect any more startups. Now it's just about driving down prices through higher efficiency and competition between them.
He is pretending to be ignorant and incompetent to give the terrorists a false sense of security.
That, or maybe he is simply Belgian.
Presumably, you'll want to move to somewhere where you can get a job. So... look at job listings, eliminate the ones that are in places you don't want to live, and then look into the places that you might want to live.
The Reformation killed millions, probably about a third of the population of central and northern Europe, and the fallout from it was a big part of subsequent wars by Prussia and the rise of the Nazi. The Reformation created many millions of religiously persecuted refugees, who then fled to other continents to "colonize" them, often destroying the native cultures in the process. If anything like that happens with Islam, the world is in deep, deep trouble. Anything like the European Reformation simply isn't a feasible solution for Islam.
And it didn't really "fix" Christianity either. The roots of the Abrahamic religions are found in racism, intolerance, and violence, and no reformation is going to fix that. The only reason Christianity gets away with preaching something different today than its holy books actually say is because back when it started, people had much less information available to them, and because today nobody gives a fuck anymore. That's not going to work with Islam. Muslims are going to look at what you want the Quran to say and what it actually says, and they are going to tell you that you are full of it if with your new interpretation.
The fact that religion can do those things doesn't mean every religion is good at it, or even that religion is the best way to do it. Even your premise is dubious; in fact, many dominant societies have had nothing like what we call a "religion" in the West. Instead, they have philosophical systems like Taoism, Confucianism, or Buddhism, or they have practices like witchcraft/Shamanism. Those belief systems are radically different from Christianity or Islam to the point that it doesn't really make sense to call them "religions" in the same sense. In particular, those other systems do not demand blind faith or obedience, and they do not generally postulate a paternalistic omnipotent being that messes around in the affairs of individual human tribes, but they instead focus on individual understanding and experience.
That's debatable, but it's also irrelevant.
Religions like Islam and Christianity have foundational writings that all followers of that religion accept in one form or another. Those writings describe acts of unspeakable violence and cruelty, in several instances ordered or condoned by God, that all followers of those religions at least acknowledge and usually tacitly condone. That is what religious terrorists who label themselves as belonging to these faiths refer to and use to justify their actions. So, there is a direct connection between the actual religion and the acts of religious terrorists. That's true even if the terrorists are considered "not really" belonging to the religion according to the "mainstream".
Nothing like that is true for atheism. Atheists share nothing other than a non-belief in God. Therefore, the beliefs or actions of one atheist tell you nothing about the beliefs of another atheist.
That wasn't the point under discussion. The point under discussion was your justification for taxes as accounting for "externalities". I pointed out that we are already taxing in roughly the amount of the externalities that carbon emissions create, and that there is nothing special about taxing at that amount. From an economic point of view, the only situation that would make a difference is if you tax exactly the amount of externalities you produce and then transfer the money to the people suffering the externalities, but that isn't actually happening in any of the carbon taxes.
Would it work? We actually already know it doesn't because it has been tried. Markets don't react to tax increases like they do to an increase in price of the underlying commodity. Taxes can be avoided by moving production out of the country or by lobbying. Consumers demand for energy and gasoline is fairly inelastic. And tax increases will likely be compensated for by a decrease in the price of the commodity.
I think you are an excellent example of Dunning-Kruger: you are so ignorant of economics, you don't even realize it.
Not only is that the wrong number to look at, it's not even true. Hourly wages rose significantly between 1947 and 1972 and then largely stagnated (they are slightly higher now than in 1972). They haven't been on a "downward trend". But that is the wrong number to look at anyway, since being "better off" doesn't just mean that your wages go up, it means what kinds of goods and services people can afford. Car ownership has steadily increased, average home sizes have been increasing, people have much better medical care, life expectancy has increased, the percentage of college graduates in the population has gone from 10% to 30%, etc.
Probably 80-90% of jobs that existed 50 years ago have been replaced with automation by now, yet labor force participation rate has increased, not decreased, as your Luddite reasoning suggests. At the same time, automation has increased worker productivity greatly while not increasing wages, which is one reason why we are better off today: people can buy more and better stuff for less.
You need to read more carefully: I said the administration pursued increases in minimum wage (he actually raised it for federal contractors). It shows how economically incompetent the administration is.
Well, the Obama administration claims that its bailouts and handouts are job creation programs. Again, it's a sign of either duplicity or economic incompetence on the part of the administration. In fact, the government cannot "create jobs" at all, and any "job creation" program is automatically a fraud.
There is tons of information available and has been for decades. I changed my college major out of economic considerations. I think nobody can complain that they can't get the information they need in order to pick a college major that lets them make a good living afterwards.
There really is no student loan crisis (at least in the US, I can't speak for Canada). Two thirds of US graduates have no student loan debt at all. Only 4% of graduates have student loan debts above $36000 (about the average price of a new car), and those are mostly doctors, lawyers, and MBAs. Most students spend only a few percent of their income on student loan debt repayments.
The only people who are in trouble are those who went to an expensive private school on a student loan and then picked a bad major, like journalism. Of course, those people are also the kind who have the shrillest voice and are driving this insane talk of a "crisis".
I think their unemployment rate is still fairly low, and they can take jobs internationally as well. Given the political uncertainty surrounding AGW, though, it's probably not a good career choice.
When families go back to single income or 2 part time incomes, their family income obviously drops, and that drags down the middle class family income statistics. You seem to live under the delusion that family incomes should continue to rise even though people work part time or one partner drops out of the workforce, and that, of course, is ridiculous.
You're right: I live in a gated community, which, coincidentally, is the cheapest form of housing around here. Of course, for "let them eat cake" snobs like you, such economic realities are difficult to understand.
What reason do I have to doubt them? It's not like those numbers are particularly flattering to the administration. And faking them or manipulating them would be pretty hard. Besides, we're mostly concerned with comparison (relative to the natural unemployment rate and over time), and in those comparisons, any biases cancel out anyway.
I would think that it's obvious that stopping people from killing each other falls under "securing our liberty".
Preventing people from killing each other and dispute resolution obviously doesn't fall under "creating monopolies and public utilities".
That simply doesn't work out numerically.
Sorry, but that's nonsense. In fact, the top 20% are the only ones paying a larger share of income tax than the share they receive in income. Don't take my word for it, take the CBO's data: https://www.cbo.gov/publicatio...
It does if the middle class is increasingly footing the bill for benefits to low income and out of work families. It does so even more when cash wages are turned into non-cash benefits by government mandate. And both of those have been happening extensively over the last few decades. In addition, the labor force participation rate is dropping, so as families work less, they make less money; nothing sinister about that.
Actually, unemployment rates still decrease on average with length of education, so if you can't get a job with your bachelor's degree, you really just made a lousy choice when it comes to your major. Engineering majors have significantly below average unemployment, while social sciences, philosophy, and art majors have far above average unemployment. For people who aren't smart enough to get a good university degree, there are plenty of good and in-demand blue collar jobs: electricians, pipe fitters, petroleum workers, carpenters, etc. They provide good career paths and solid earnings.
Well, they have chosen the wrong field, and on top of that they are making bad financial choices by getting even more useless education. How is that anybody's problem but their own? Did anybody put a gun to their head and force them to get a useless degree in journalism or social studies?
There are many reasons for why people are unemployed There are some reasons that are "natural", that is, you expect them to occur in any functioning economy, and they are mostly related to people switching jobs. The natural rate of unemployment for the US is about 5%, pretty close to the actual rate of unemployment that we actually have.
That's measured by the labor force participation rate. There are many reasons. A lot of Baby Boomers are retiring. A lot of couples decide that one partner earns enough money that the other can stay at home, raise kids or pursue hobbies. More people stay at university and in grad school longer. At the low end of the income scale, single mothers may prefer to spend a while outside the labor force to raise their kids. Many people may also simply receive unemployment benefits while working on the side.
Progressives keep talking about a bunch of things as being desirable: more education, less materialism, ability to spend time with kids, support for single parents, more focus on what really matters in life, time to pursue interests and entrepreneurship, etc. All of those necessarily decrease labor force participation rates and cause family incomes to stagnate. So, if you agree with the progressive vision of society, you shouldn't complain about the logically unavoidable outcomes.
If you have a university degree and work as a plumber or secretary, not only do you have a worthless degree and wasted four years of your life, you are also underqualified for your job because you actually know next to nothing about the job you're actually doing. In fact, other than university teaching, there are few jobs that a university degree qualifies you for.
The irony is that first Canadian (and to a lesser degree, US politicians) spend billions supporting worthless degrees that nobody in their right mind would or could pay for themselves, and then whine and complain when people with these useless degrees can't find jobs.
There, FTFY.
The only thing our government should do is secure our liberty and defend us against foreign enemies.
Or you can just unplug your encrypted drive, or set it to power down.
I don't believe that. And I didn't say that. I said that the US unemployment rate is "fairly low", not "historically low".
You made the statement that there is a "labor surplus"; explain what you mean by that and provide evidence!
Not at all. Obama engaged in massive crony capitalism and promised economic outcomes that haven't come true; the man is either a fraud or incompetent. And the economy is far worse than it could be. However, what it doesn't have is a labor surplus.
No, government can't bring down the force of law upon you. In the US, these are civil actions. Only a party with standing can bring action against you, and they can't do so for your speech per se, but only demonstrable damage.
Yes, and that is a restriction on free speech because that is criminal law. In general, criminal libel laws (like they exist in Europe) are a restriction on free speech. But civil action based on libel is not. There is an essential difference between criminal law, which penalizes behavior deemed to be generally harmful to society by politicians, and civil law, which adjudicates specific, identifiable harm done by one individual to another.
Note that from a libertarian point of view, it is accidental and undesirable that government is involved in civil actions at all; we'd generally prefer private mechanisms of conflict resolution.
It isn't the job of government to ensure that you can speak free of negative consequences from your peers, for the simple reason that government cannot ever achieve that. And the more you try to burden government with that task, the more totalitarian your society becomes. In general, positive rights are frequently in irreconcilable conflict with one another, and those conflicts cause societies to fail since government deteriorates into a simple power struggle.
Kim Davis is a government official implementing a positive right and abusing her position in the implementation of that right. The solution to that problem isn't to fabricate additional positive rights. The solution is to fire her sorry ass for violating existing law, and then have a discussion about eliminating her job and the positive rights she was responsible for implementing.
I grew up in cold war Europe, and have lived in half a dozen countries. I assure you that my political views are not based on simplistic American politics, but rather by observing repeatedly first hand the failures of European-style paternalistic government and European totalitarianism.
That would mean that we would have a historically low labor participation rate, but we don't. Labor force participation rate was climbing for 55 years after WWII, in parallel with massive automation. Since 2008, the labor force participation rate (in the US) has been falling somewhat, but that's due to Baby Boomers retiring.
Why wouldn't they have any jobs? Median unemployment is about 10 weeks, and has been since the 1970's.
No, sorry, prices, labor, and production don't behave at all like you imagine them to behave.
Oh, you're absolutely right. But that's not the fault of automation, that's the fault of progressive workplace regulations, minimum wage, etc. If the cheapest you can hire a worker for is $25000/year, then people won't hire any workers with skills that make them worth less than that.