As Frank has it, legislators have to act in ideologically inconsistent ways in the short run if they want to advance their larger objectives in the long run, as those larger objectives can only be achieved with teamwork.
What Frank isn't telling you is that "those larger objectives" still have little to do with what voters actually want, but instead with the career and power of each politician.
I used to be a registered Democrat, now an independent.
classify Social Security as "welfare" rather than (a) a decent thing for an extremely wealthy society
I consider a regressive taxation and unsustainable and financially unsound intergenerational transfers to be a rather indecent and immoral thing to do.
(b) an incredibly successful program of alleviating poverty among the elderly
Social Security is a piss-poor way of alleviating poverty, since most of its payments go to people who are not in poverty and because it amounts to regressive taxation and poor return on investment.
(c) a good method of moving people through the employment system and opening slots at the top so young people can get jobs at the bottom
Huh?
To date the hard Radical Right has been successful in using half-truths and dog whistles to imply that they will somehow manage to chop Social Security for the "undeserving" while leaving it in place for the "deserving".
I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. While I think the American Right gets a lot of things wrong, generally they want to cut all government handouts, whether to individuals or corporations.
In fact, crony capitalism is much more of a policy of the American "left", aka, progressives.
(d) one of a basket of preventative measures against a communist revolution [as envisioned by that flaming liberal Bismark and used by Roosevelt and Hopkins for the same purpose]
Yes, and look at how well that worked out for Germany: instead of a communist revolution, it got WWI, the Weimar Republic, and Hitler. And, of course, Hitler's party program was a combination of Bismarck's authoritarianism and US-style progressivism.
But unlike the US, Germans actually have gotten their fiscal act together: they cut welfare in a big way, and their approach to retirement benefits and medical insurance is far more fiscally sound than ours. So, by all means, let's adopt a German style welfare system, including the elimination of all in-kind benefits, as well as the budget and benefit cuts to make it possible while paying down our national debt. You know, like the Germans.
I didn't claim that there were no adverse effects, just that they are not insurmountable and that they are probably compensated for by positive effects. Increases in hurricane strength and frequency are probably more than compensated for by much milder climate in regions that are currently too harsh for human settlement.
You didn't say anything about what you see in your neighborhood.
Also, as a queer, I am not "using gay men like you" at all. Shrug.
But the author of the article is not gay. And as a gay techie who used to live in a gay neighborhood, I can tell you that the problem is not tech companies.
Hoe does your "actual understanding" lead you to conclude that global warming isn't happening?
Of course it is happening. Global average temperatures are increasing, probably as much as the IPCC is predicting, and ice caps are melting. What's your point?
It's a pretty bold assertion to claim that increasing the concentration of one of the atmosphere's most optically active constituents by 30% won't have any significant consequences on temperature.
It does have significant consequences for temperature; global average temperatures will go up by a few degrees (mostly due to increasing temperatures at higher latitudes). The climate across the globe will generally be warmer, wetter, and milder, like it was many millions of years ago. Many species will adapt or migrate, some will die off. Oceans will become more acidic. We may lose coral. Sea levels will also rise, gradually, significant only over the span of centuries. We may lose the ice caps in a few thousand years (good riddance). Humans will have to do some mitigation and migration.
And then you failed to quote the section near the end of the summary describing a notable impact of the declining diversity: increased anti-queer violence.
You're telling me that neighborhoods getting richer because Amazon web developers move in leads to "increased anti-queer violence"? Are you serious?
People need to stop using gay men like me as a pretext to advance their bizarre politics. The article is bullshit, and you are repeating that bullshit uncritically.
"The CPI measures the change in the cost of purchasing a fixed basket of goods and services." Source Australian Bureau of Statistics.
It is supposed to be fixed, but that's a dubious proposition. Products that are nominally the same over time aren't in reality.
I've covered our use of relative poverty (see above).
Everybody uses relative poverty because it's what the UN and OECD use. I'm pointing out that it makes no sense. For example, if everybody in the US had their income and wealth multiplied by 10, the poverty rate would remain the same. On the other hand, eliminating relative poverty can be done quite easily: just make everybody equally poor. Another way of looking at it is that the US federal poverty threshold for a family is about at the median family income in places like Japan, Spain, or Israel.
Raising the level of education could change the number of people who qualify for jobs for which there are few or no candidates.
You can't realistically raise the level of education by government action and spending beyond a certain minimum. The US has tried and failed.
As an example of proposed measures to "solve" the problem (which seem unlikely to work) one proposed plan is: to relocate large numbers of people from a Southern NSW housing estate - to a high density, low income estate in Canberra (yet to be built).
Yes, I remember that kind of planning from East Germany. It sends shivers down my spine that any Western democracy would degrade its citizens to this degree by moving them around like pawns on a chessboard. How would you like people telling you "you must now move to... because that's what government planners think will be best for eliminating poverty"?
Our economic indicator, bizarely, is based on the number of new buildings constructed.
Nothing bizarre about it: politicians love indicators, in particular indicators they can manipulate, to justify their interference in private lives.
Is private education subsidised by the taxpayer in the US? (it is in Australia).
Not really. People are trying to get school voucher programs going in some places.
So this is probably decent research, but unfortunately every right wing nut job out there is going to desperately sink their fingernails into this and deny that rising CO2 is a problem.
Huh? "Right wing nutjobs", as well as anybody who actually understands anything about the history of climate on planet earth, believes that rising CO2 is not a significant problem even without a decrease in solar output.
It's ironic that the loudest whiners complainers it are the tech journalists who move into these cities. Look at GeekWire's article: an article by John Cook, a journalist without a technology background making money off the tech boom and living in Seattle, and he's working for a media company covering technology also located in Seattle. Sorry, John, but real techies tend to be quiet, unobtrusive, and frugal. The people who are wrecking neighborhoods and cities are people like you: tech hangers-on out to make a quick buck with technology, or making a career out of complaining about techies, or both.
The "welfare" programs that were in place from 1934-1996 no long exist, but even taking the succeeding limited programs under as successors "welfare" has been cut continuously from 1981 through to this day,
Krugman's own data shows a rise in 2% of GDP in Social Security between 1965 and 1983; succeeding programs weren't "limited" and they haven't been "cut continuously". In addition, another rise in 1-2% of GDP spending on income security between 1963 and today. But those two programs are only a small part of overall US social welfare spending, which has risen pretty much without interruption since the 1920's, as percentage of GDP, in constant dollars, and in constant dollars per capita. So, your statement is wrong no matter which kind of "welfare" we are talking about, whether Social Security specifically or social welfare programs in general.
Furthermore, instead of accelerating the decline in poverty rates in the US, poverty rates in the US actually stopped declining around 1967, three years after the war on poverty began. Clearly, the War on Poverty was ineffective, and arguably, it was the cause of the stagnation.
In addition, the idea that a "War on Poverty" should show up as steadily increasing spending on Social Security as a percentage of GDP is ludicrous and backwards. A successful War on Poverty should start off with high social welfare spending and high poverty rates, and have both of them decline. What we actually see is that poverty rates stopped declining when the War on Poverty started, while social welfare spending increased.
Anna North writes about "Star Trek'"s "post-economic" system, in which money no longer exists and anything you want can be made in a replicator, essentially for free. [...] "You work to increase your prestige. You want to be the best captain or the best scientist in the entire galaxy. And many other people are working to do that, as well. It's very meritocratic."
We are already pretty much in a post-scarcity economy in places like the US and Europe. Has that gotten rid of money? Of course not. Money is mainly used to keep track of "merit" now. The problem people like Anna North is that she doesn't like how money assigns merit. Most people couldn't care less about "the best captain" or "the best scientist". What they care about is the biggest breasts at the MTV music awards, the shiniest gadgets, and the best people at throwing balls through a hoop.
The kind of "Trekonomic" system people like her usually want is one in which a big bureaucratic hierarchy, let by an intellectual elite, assigns merit and promotions, just like in Star Trek. Even much of Star Trek is about how that system frequently tramples on individual liberty and how it is subject to corruption. And the Federation can probably only survive because people have the freedom to leave it and live outside it and not conform to its rules.
I guess that applies here to - it's pegged to the CPI.
Note that the CPI in reality isn't a constant basket of goods and services, it's an expanding basket. But the US keeps adding on new benefits on top of the basic welfare system: food, health care, housing, phone service, Internet service, etc.
No disagreement there - though I find the late trend of saying that poverty is a choice morally offensive.
In fact, "poverty" in the US (and Australia I imagine) has largely been eliminated. The term "poverty" these days is defined as "relative poverty"; it has little to do with lack of material resources, it's just another measure of the spread of the income distribution.
I don't know of a solution but I suspect that education and integrated public housing may help reduce problems in the future.
I don't think so. Since poverty is defined in relative terms, raising the general level of education doesn't affect poverty rates at all, even if it makes everybody more productive. Public housing has been a failure, and you can't force people to live next to people they don't want to live next to.
Welfare increases are pegged to the CPI. It's financed by an old piece of legislation that takes the money from income taxes. Welfare is soley the domain of the federal government (no food stamps).
Here's an interesting report on social expenditures in the OECD:
The US is pretty middle of the road, and actually a bit more on the side of supporting low income people (a lot of social spending in places like France and Germany goes to people who don't need it).
Anyway, I think empirically, spending more on public education or other programs doesn't work. I think the real problem is massively regressive taxation, combined with massive regulations due to rent seeking, that greatly increase the cost of simply existing as a breathing human being.
I'd be curious to see how much of that money actually gets to the recipients.
That sounds as if you think that somehow invalidates the analysis; actually, it strengthens it: the fact that a lot of that money does not reach the recipients is not only an unavoidable consequence of these programs, it's what drives much of the increase in welfare and its failures in the first place.
Roughly, a lot of the money intended to help people goes into financing government departments and private non-profits. These organizations then create programs that by and large are not very effective or even harmful. But you now have a large number of people whose livelihood depends on this funding, and who have a strong incentive to expand their organizations. Since their programs aren't working well, they then go back to Congress and ask for more funding, and since they are considered the experts, they often get it.
I'm unconvinced by the rising level of people on welfare and welfare as a cause.
Well, notice that "on welfare" is a shifting target: people "on welfare" these days receive a lot more than they did 50 years ago. So the rising level of people on welfare is in part simply due to changes in who we consider needy. If we applied the same criteria as half a century ago (or the same criteria as many others), a lot fewer people would receive welfare, and those that did would get a lot less of it. And, of course, a lot of the people whose work is related to welfare are lobbying for these increases.
The increase in welfare spending has many causes. The harm that welfare spending does to its recipients is only one part, but it is probably the worst of it. As a society, wasting a few percent of our GDP on useless government programs isn't such a big deal; but using those programs to create a permanent underclass is morally wrong and economically destructive.
(If you're asking for an alternative, I think German-style welfare or a basic income would be better choices.)
a corporation that is too big for one government to reign in [...] A corporation that has had their internal communications tapped by the NSA. A corporation that "plays ball" with law enforcement by giving them their own handy web portal to data.
It seems like with you, the witch is guilty whether she floats or drowns. At this point, you can't plead ignorance anymore: you know exactly what Google is doing. If you don't like it, don't buy their phones. And governments are perfectly capable of reigning in Google, as you can see from the fact that they can tap their private networks and force them to set up web portals (Google seems to be offering as much resistance as possible, through using encryption and notifications whenever they can).
However, short of not using a cell phone, you can't avoid this. Every cell phone, even a dumb phone, can be precisely tracked and can be used as a listening device. It's been that way for a while, and there is nothing Google or anybody can do about it, because it's the law.
You and GP are debating different things. The social indicators for black people can be better than today *especially* in a situation of heavy discrimination.
Ending government-mandated discrimination is the right and necessary thing to do. If the civil rights movement had stopped with that, it would have been good.
But what it did instead was to attempt to help African Americans through the creation of large government programs. And what I am pointing out is that those programs didn't work: even with massive government-mandated segregation and discrimination, African Americans were doing better than after half a century of these government programs.
Both the programs to (1) end government-mandated discrimination and the programs to (2) help African Americans through government programs were well intentioned, but only (1) was effective; (2) was harmful.
South Africa is a case in point: a colleague of mine was educated in South Africa by fantastic teachers
South Africa is a completely different situation: it ended government mandated discrimination, but it did not treat blacks as a minority in need of special help, for the simple reason that blacks weren't a minority. It also took a different view of racism and responsibility, with the Truth and Reconciliation commission: people said "these were horrific racist crimes, but we are just going to draw a line under it and start fresh".
Your complete ignorance of history, especially the history of white supremacy, is laughable. Black people weren't allowed to use the same seats, toilets, pools and rooms as black people.
No, you simply are not listening to what I'm saying.
You are absolutely correct that African Americans faced horrible discrimination and were still dealing with a legacy of slavery of only half a century earlier.
Despite the horrible discrimination African Americans faced then, social indicators like drug addiction, illegitimacy, unemployment rates, wage gap, were a lot better than after another half century of government dependency and handouts.
The civil rights movement demanded the end of government-mandated discrimination, and it ended. That was a necessary and good thing. But then it went on to demand government aid and compensation, and well-intentioned as those programs were, they have turned out to cause enormous harm.
You also need to realize that racist policies like eugenics, segregation, and forced sterilizations were policies advocated by progressives, as the application of science to improving society. These are the same progressives that then adopted new policies after the civil rights movement to discriminate based on race in different ways.
[You:] If you mean by corrupting government to avoid regulation of evil behavior, then I agree with you completely. [You again:] So it's not the big, bad gubment enforcing the regulations that's the problem, it's the corruption of those regulations.
No, neither. The problem is that the regulations themselves are corrupt; that is what "regulatory capture" means.
The conversation is about DE-REGULATION.
No, the conversation is about who is responsible for "privatizing profits and socializing risks". It's a simple, obvious fact that private businesses cannot socialize risk by themselves; they simply don't have the legal means for doing it. The only way that tax payer dollars can be used to insure companies against loss (socialize their risk) is through the action of politicians or government bureaucrats.
You tried to turn this into an argument about regulation in general, and you got that wrong too.
I've read your other responses in this thread, and the conclusion that any reasonable person would draw is that you're a fool and/or a shill for the 0.01%, and not worth any further time.
Your delusions are common among a sizable number of Americans, the biggest constituency being progressives. I know exactly where you are coming from because I used to be a progressive myself.
I suggest you look at Mexico or China or pre-USSR-collapse East Germany.
I used to live in pre-USSR-collapse East Germany. It was one of the most highly regulated nations in the world.
Oh noes!!! He "foe"ed me on Slashdot for calling out his bullshit!
Don't flatter yourself. I use the "foe" tag just to mark people with your kind of views, mostly to follow what the latest talking points and delusions are in the progressive political sphere, and to have to stop wondering whether you are being serious or sarcastic.
The notion of having a 'perfect plaintiff' is entirely well established in legal theory.
That's not what TwistedCubic was getting at. The error in SamoanBiscuit's posting was in assuming that it was hard to find such a perfect plaintiff due to illegitimacy, drug/alcohol addiction, and (implied) obesity. What he and you are missing is that social indicators for African Americans were better before the civil rights movement than after half a century of increasing government dependency and handouts. Programs intended to help African Americans were well-intentioned, but they actually have done a lot of harm.
I just finished explaining this to my parents (regarding life insurance). Insurance is for when you can't afford a failure.
Well, good that you understand at least the basics of insurance. As I was saying, though, the point of insurance here is not that the government can't absorb the risk, it is to get accurate pricing:
What it will do is get another private entity to look at the risks of these launches and price them accurately. This will make it clearer in the budget how costly these launches actually are.
That is, if there is a $90 million dollar bid and a $100 million dollar bid, you don't know which bid is the better bid unless you know the risk; for example if the first bid has a 1:5 risk and the second bid has a 1:20 risk, the second bid is better. If you get bids that include insurance, you then can compare the bids.
Furthermore, by getting insurance, you not only have someone who knows what they are doing and is motivated to get it right estimate the risk, you also don't have to worry about what happens if they get it wrong. That is well worth the insurance premium the government ends up paying.
That's nonsense. Welfare spending has increased pretty steadily since the 1920's, from a fraction of 1% of GDP to 5% of GDP. You can also look at it on a per capita basis or in constant dollars, same result.
The Heritage foundation has a pretty good article on the failure of the war on poverty:
As I was saying: If the federal government were a business and made rational business decisions, that would make financial sense, and that's how it's usual justified
You seem to have missed the second part: the federal government isn't a business, NASA expenditures are subject to lobbying and crony capitalism, and hence third party insurance may be worth the cost, because a third party has a compelling interest to safeguard their own money. "Using the processing division" of an insurance company is not the same.
Slashdot Mirror
What Frank isn't telling you is that "those larger objectives" still have little to do with what voters actually want, but instead with the career and power of each politician.
I used to be a registered Democrat, now an independent.
I consider a regressive taxation and unsustainable and financially unsound intergenerational transfers to be a rather indecent and immoral thing to do.
Social Security is a piss-poor way of alleviating poverty, since most of its payments go to people who are not in poverty and because it amounts to regressive taxation and poor return on investment.
Huh?
I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. While I think the American Right gets a lot of things wrong, generally they want to cut all government handouts, whether to individuals or corporations.
http://www.heritage.org/resear...
In fact, crony capitalism is much more of a policy of the American "left", aka, progressives.
Yes, and look at how well that worked out for Germany: instead of a communist revolution, it got WWI, the Weimar Republic, and Hitler. And, of course, Hitler's party program was a combination of Bismarck's authoritarianism and US-style progressivism.
But unlike the US, Germans actually have gotten their fiscal act together: they cut welfare in a big way, and their approach to retirement benefits and medical insurance is far more fiscally sound than ours. So, by all means, let's adopt a German style welfare system, including the elimination of all in-kind benefits, as well as the budget and benefit cuts to make it possible while paying down our national debt. You know, like the Germans.
http://static.quest-trendmagaz...
I didn't claim that there were no adverse effects, just that they are not insurmountable and that they are probably compensated for by positive effects. Increases in hurricane strength and frequency are probably more than compensated for by much milder climate in regions that are currently too harsh for human settlement.
You didn't say anything about what you see in your neighborhood.
But the author of the article is not gay. And as a gay techie who used to live in a gay neighborhood, I can tell you that the problem is not tech companies.
Isn't it clear enough?
Of course it is happening. Global average temperatures are increasing, probably as much as the IPCC is predicting, and ice caps are melting. What's your point?
It does have significant consequences for temperature; global average temperatures will go up by a few degrees (mostly due to increasing temperatures at higher latitudes). The climate across the globe will generally be warmer, wetter, and milder, like it was many millions of years ago. Many species will adapt or migrate, some will die off. Oceans will become more acidic. We may lose coral. Sea levels will also rise, gradually, significant only over the span of centuries. We may lose the ice caps in a few thousand years (good riddance). Humans will have to do some mitigation and migration.
I.e., it's not a problem.
You're telling me that neighborhoods getting richer because Amazon web developers move in leads to "increased anti-queer violence"? Are you serious?
People need to stop using gay men like me as a pretext to advance their bizarre politics. The article is bullshit, and you are repeating that bullshit uncritically.
It is supposed to be fixed, but that's a dubious proposition. Products that are nominally the same over time aren't in reality.
Everybody uses relative poverty because it's what the UN and OECD use. I'm pointing out that it makes no sense. For example, if everybody in the US had their income and wealth multiplied by 10, the poverty rate would remain the same. On the other hand, eliminating relative poverty can be done quite easily: just make everybody equally poor. Another way of looking at it is that the US federal poverty threshold for a family is about at the median family income in places like Japan, Spain, or Israel.
You can't realistically raise the level of education by government action and spending beyond a certain minimum. The US has tried and failed.
Yes, I remember that kind of planning from East Germany. It sends shivers down my spine that any Western democracy would degrade its citizens to this degree by moving them around like pawns on a chessboard. How would you like people telling you "you must now move to ... because that's what government planners think will be best for eliminating poverty"?
Nothing bizarre about it: politicians love indicators, in particular indicators they can manipulate, to justify their interference in private lives.
Not really. People are trying to get school voucher programs going in some places.
Huh? "Right wing nutjobs", as well as anybody who actually understands anything about the history of climate on planet earth, believes that rising CO2 is not a significant problem even without a decrease in solar output.
It's ironic that the loudest whiners complainers it are the tech journalists who move into these cities. Look at GeekWire's article: an article by John Cook, a journalist without a technology background making money off the tech boom and living in Seattle, and he's working for a media company covering technology also located in Seattle. Sorry, John, but real techies tend to be quiet, unobtrusive, and frugal. The people who are wrecking neighborhoods and cities are people like you: tech hangers-on out to make a quick buck with technology, or making a career out of complaining about techies, or both.
You wrote:
Krugman's own data shows a rise in 2% of GDP in Social Security between 1965 and 1983; succeeding programs weren't "limited" and they haven't been "cut continuously". In addition, another rise in 1-2% of GDP spending on income security between 1963 and today. But those two programs are only a small part of overall US social welfare spending, which has risen pretty much without interruption since the 1920's, as percentage of GDP, in constant dollars, and in constant dollars per capita. So, your statement is wrong no matter which kind of "welfare" we are talking about, whether Social Security specifically or social welfare programs in general.
Furthermore, instead of accelerating the decline in poverty rates in the US, poverty rates in the US actually stopped declining around 1967, three years after the war on poverty began. Clearly, the War on Poverty was ineffective, and arguably, it was the cause of the stagnation.
In addition, the idea that a "War on Poverty" should show up as steadily increasing spending on Social Security as a percentage of GDP is ludicrous and backwards. A successful War on Poverty should start off with high social welfare spending and high poverty rates, and have both of them decline. What we actually see is that poverty rates stopped declining when the War on Poverty started, while social welfare spending increased.
We are already pretty much in a post-scarcity economy in places like the US and Europe. Has that gotten rid of money? Of course not. Money is mainly used to keep track of "merit" now. The problem people like Anna North is that she doesn't like how money assigns merit. Most people couldn't care less about "the best captain" or "the best scientist". What they care about is the biggest breasts at the MTV music awards, the shiniest gadgets, and the best people at throwing balls through a hoop.
The kind of "Trekonomic" system people like her usually want is one in which a big bureaucratic hierarchy, let by an intellectual elite, assigns merit and promotions, just like in Star Trek. Even much of Star Trek is about how that system frequently tramples on individual liberty and how it is subject to corruption. And the Federation can probably only survive because people have the freedom to leave it and live outside it and not conform to its rules.
Note that the CPI in reality isn't a constant basket of goods and services, it's an expanding basket. But the US keeps adding on new benefits on top of the basic welfare system: food, health care, housing, phone service, Internet service, etc.
The problem is that welfare isn't poverty:
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics...
In fact, "poverty" in the US (and Australia I imagine) has largely been eliminated. The term "poverty" these days is defined as "relative poverty"; it has little to do with lack of material resources, it's just another measure of the spread of the income distribution.
I don't think so. Since poverty is defined in relative terms, raising the general level of education doesn't affect poverty rates at all, even if it makes everybody more productive. Public housing has been a failure, and you can't force people to live next to people they don't want to live next to.
Here's an interesting report on social expenditures in the OECD:
http://www.oecd.org/els/soc/OE...
The US is pretty middle of the road, and actually a bit more on the side of supporting low income people (a lot of social spending in places like France and Germany goes to people who don't need it).
Anyway, I think empirically, spending more on public education or other programs doesn't work. I think the real problem is massively regressive taxation, combined with massive regulations due to rent seeking, that greatly increase the cost of simply existing as a breathing human being.
It's more like removing the back seat and wondering why the car still drives.
You don't think that having sync and privacy settings all in one place makes sense?
That sounds as if you think that somehow invalidates the analysis; actually, it strengthens it: the fact that a lot of that money does not reach the recipients is not only an unavoidable consequence of these programs, it's what drives much of the increase in welfare and its failures in the first place.
Roughly, a lot of the money intended to help people goes into financing government departments and private non-profits. These organizations then create programs that by and large are not very effective or even harmful. But you now have a large number of people whose livelihood depends on this funding, and who have a strong incentive to expand their organizations. Since their programs aren't working well, they then go back to Congress and ask for more funding, and since they are considered the experts, they often get it.
Well, notice that "on welfare" is a shifting target: people "on welfare" these days receive a lot more than they did 50 years ago. So the rising level of people on welfare is in part simply due to changes in who we consider needy. If we applied the same criteria as half a century ago (or the same criteria as many others), a lot fewer people would receive welfare, and those that did would get a lot less of it. And, of course, a lot of the people whose work is related to welfare are lobbying for these increases.
The increase in welfare spending has many causes. The harm that welfare spending does to its recipients is only one part, but it is probably the worst of it. As a society, wasting a few percent of our GDP on useless government programs isn't such a big deal; but using those programs to create a permanent underclass is morally wrong and economically destructive.
(If you're asking for an alternative, I think German-style welfare or a basic income would be better choices.)
It seems like with you, the witch is guilty whether she floats or drowns. At this point, you can't plead ignorance anymore: you know exactly what Google is doing. If you don't like it, don't buy their phones. And governments are perfectly capable of reigning in Google, as you can see from the fact that they can tap their private networks and force them to set up web portals (Google seems to be offering as much resistance as possible, through using encryption and notifications whenever they can).
However, short of not using a cell phone, you can't avoid this. Every cell phone, even a dumb phone, can be precisely tracked and can be used as a listening device. It's been that way for a while, and there is nothing Google or anybody can do about it, because it's the law.
Ending government-mandated discrimination is the right and necessary thing to do. If the civil rights movement had stopped with that, it would have been good.
But what it did instead was to attempt to help African Americans through the creation of large government programs. And what I am pointing out is that those programs didn't work: even with massive government-mandated segregation and discrimination, African Americans were doing better than after half a century of these government programs.
Both the programs to (1) end government-mandated discrimination and the programs to (2) help African Americans through government programs were well intentioned, but only (1) was effective; (2) was harmful.
South Africa is a completely different situation: it ended government mandated discrimination, but it did not treat blacks as a minority in need of special help, for the simple reason that blacks weren't a minority. It also took a different view of racism and responsibility, with the Truth and Reconciliation commission: people said "these were horrific racist crimes, but we are just going to draw a line under it and start fresh".
No, you simply are not listening to what I'm saying.
You are absolutely correct that African Americans faced horrible discrimination and were still dealing with a legacy of slavery of only half a century earlier.
Despite the horrible discrimination African Americans faced then, social indicators like drug addiction, illegitimacy, unemployment rates, wage gap, were a lot better than after another half century of government dependency and handouts.
The civil rights movement demanded the end of government-mandated discrimination, and it ended. That was a necessary and good thing. But then it went on to demand government aid and compensation, and well-intentioned as those programs were, they have turned out to cause enormous harm.
You also need to realize that racist policies like eugenics, segregation, and forced sterilizations were policies advocated by progressives, as the application of science to improving society. These are the same progressives that then adopted new policies after the civil rights movement to discriminate based on race in different ways.
No, neither. The problem is that the regulations themselves are corrupt; that is what "regulatory capture" means.
No, the conversation is about who is responsible for "privatizing profits and socializing risks". It's a simple, obvious fact that private businesses cannot socialize risk by themselves; they simply don't have the legal means for doing it. The only way that tax payer dollars can be used to insure companies against loss (socialize their risk) is through the action of politicians or government bureaucrats.
You tried to turn this into an argument about regulation in general, and you got that wrong too.
Your delusions are common among a sizable number of Americans, the biggest constituency being progressives. I know exactly where you are coming from because I used to be a progressive myself.
I used to live in pre-USSR-collapse East Germany. It was one of the most highly regulated nations in the world.
Don't flatter yourself. I use the "foe" tag just to mark people with your kind of views, mostly to follow what the latest talking points and delusions are in the progressive political sphere, and to have to stop wondering whether you are being serious or sarcastic.
That's not what TwistedCubic was getting at. The error in SamoanBiscuit's posting was in assuming that it was hard to find such a perfect plaintiff due to illegitimacy, drug/alcohol addiction, and (implied) obesity. What he and you are missing is that social indicators for African Americans were better before the civil rights movement than after half a century of increasing government dependency and handouts. Programs intended to help African Americans were well-intentioned, but they actually have done a lot of harm.
Well, good that you understand at least the basics of insurance. As I was saying, though, the point of insurance here is not that the government can't absorb the risk, it is to get accurate pricing:
That is, if there is a $90 million dollar bid and a $100 million dollar bid, you don't know which bid is the better bid unless you know the risk; for example if the first bid has a 1:5 risk and the second bid has a 1:20 risk, the second bid is better. If you get bids that include insurance, you then can compare the bids.
Furthermore, by getting insurance, you not only have someone who knows what they are doing and is motivated to get it right estimate the risk, you also don't have to worry about what happens if they get it wrong. That is well worth the insurance premium the government ends up paying.
That's nonsense. Welfare spending has increased pretty steadily since the 1920's, from a fraction of 1% of GDP to 5% of GDP. You can also look at it on a per capita basis or in constant dollars, same result.
The Heritage foundation has a pretty good article on the failure of the war on poverty:
http://www.heritage.org/resear...
As I was saying: If the federal government were a business and made rational business decisions, that would make financial sense, and that's how it's usual justified
You seem to have missed the second part: the federal government isn't a business, NASA expenditures are subject to lobbying and crony capitalism, and hence third party insurance may be worth the cost, because a third party has a compelling interest to safeguard their own money. "Using the processing division" of an insurance company is not the same.