The EPB launched Chattanoogaâ(TM)s project in 2010 and built the network almost entirely with taxpayer funds; EPBâ(TM)s electric customers financed a hefty $160 million loan, while federal taxpayers paid for the other $111 million as part of the 2009 stimulus bill.
On no! The government did something good for the people! We can't have that. The government is undermining your erroneous dialog. The bastards!
"The government" didn't do anything good. Tax payers all across the country paid $111 million dollars so that the good people of Chattanooga could have a new fiber network. And electricity rate payers have to pay for the other $160 million dollars whether they want Internet or not, effectively a highly regressive tax, mostly paid by lower income households, in order to subsidize nerds who want fiber.
If we roll this out nationally, it amounts forcing everybody in the US to pay an average of $2000 in order to get Internet service that is faster than what they need, and more expensive than what they have. Realistically, most people need about 10-20 Mbps, and they can get that for less than $40 in most places.
Which is why Google Fiber is failing everywhere it goes? Is that what you are trying to get people to believe here?
If Google Fiber were actually commercially successful, it would mean that the city of Chattanooga wasted $300 million in subsidies in order to deliver a more expensive Internet service than Google manages to deliver without subsidies. I.e., it would undermine your whole argument. But, in fact, Google Fiber appears to be losing money for Google as well, and Google has already stated that they aren't doing this in response to market demand, but as a test bed to see what people do with higher Internet speeds and to get into the market.
And therein lies the problem. You ingest garbage and believe it without questioning it.
No, that is your problem. You have the numbers in front of you, and instead of thinking through what they mean, you attack the credibility of the sources. The sources don't matter: the numbers are not in question. It should be obvious what $111 million in federal subsidies and $160 million in transfers from electricity rate payers mean for a city of 173000 people, you just refuse to see it.
It's people like you who cause stagnation of middle class incomes in order to get subsidized shit they want from the government, while the same time patting themselves on the back about how magnanimous they are.
2: Learning a bit more and realising that writing a good program for a substantial project is actually hard
He hasn't even figured that out for law or government; he thinks he just decrees things and then they magically happen. When his code doesn't do what he wants, he probably complains that the CPU found "loopholes" in the instruction stream.
If a town doesn't have Internet access and the big ISPs in the area refuse to provide access (because they deem the town "unprofitable") then why shouldn't the town be able to set up their own municipal broadband effort?
If wired Internet in the town is unprofitable, it's either because the costs are too high or the demand is too low (or both). Municipal broadband doesn't fix the lack of profitability, it simply forces tax payers to make up the difference. What possible justification is there to make me pay for something I don't want?
If the city wants to do something to help remedy this situation, it should lower the cost and risk of planning and permitting, because that's usually what keeps ISPs out.
I've actually lived in such a town. It turns out, you really don't need wired Internet access anyway. People who want Internet access can easily get it via wireless point-to-point connections, expanded mobile Internet access, and other technologies, from small, local operators. A lot of more rural towns have those. I actually found it to be a step backwards when national wired operators finally moved in a few years later.
Please tell me how "government action precludes building a private system".
In most places, you simply wouldn't get a permit. A lot of the land is government owned, and the government won't sell it to you for building private roads. Finally, since tax payers are forced at gunpoint to pay for public roads already, the price of private roads is necessarily always uncompetitive no matter how cheap they are.
Maybe you should ask the people of Chattanooga before you make such moronic declarations.
Even the sticker price for their Internet (apparently, $58 for 100 Mbps) is more expensive than what I'm getting here, and that isn't counting the massive subsidies:
Chattanooga’s fiber network added to Tennessee’s already staggering municipal network costs. And, as with all publicly-operated networks, the burden on taxpayers forced to pay for this network went undetected. The EPB launched Chattanooga’s project in 2010 and built the network almost entirely with taxpayer funds; EPB’s electric customers financed a hefty $160 million loan, while federal taxpayers paid for the other $111 million as part of the 2009 stimulus bill. EPB’s Internet and cable television customers will pay for the remaining $29 million.
and
High-speed Internet service is great, but there is no real demand for the speeds EPB offers, which reach nearly 200 times faster than the average broadband speed in America. EPB offers a one gigabit-per-second service to all homes and businesses in the region, yet only a handful of residents and 20 odd businesses subscribe to the exorbitant $350 per month gigabit option. Ironically, most taxpayers who paid to build the network cannot themselves afford the service fee.
That is, regular tax payers are forced to pay for massive bandwidth that almost nobody wants or needs; but those high numbers give nerds like you a hard-on although even you can't actually use them. And neither the financials nor the speeds are in dispute; it's simply that the people responsible for this kind of government waste are trying to put a positive spin on it.
Thanks for clarifying exactly how much you know. Usually one has to really reach out to get someone such as yourself show their full range of understanding but in this case you've made it easy.
You're welcome. Thanks for pointing to Chattanooga, presumably the best example you could come up with: it is an excellent illustration of how utterly broken municipal broadband is. Do not want.
Right, because nothing says free market efficiency more than having seven sets of coax cables and fiber running to everyone's home.
In different words, you want a monopoly.
Please be explicit. And who are these people who would be paying for something they don't want or are you so throughly caught up in the stories you've been told that you have no idea how these projects are financed, built, run, or embraced?
I know exactly how municipal broadband is paid for: through taxes and municipal bonds.
Which set of people are you referring to who don't want broadband, TV and telephone delivered to them reliably and for a decent price?
Your error is in assuming that municipal broadband does that. It doesn't.
Oh wait, you mean like how government should allow seven sets of coax cables and fiber running to everyone's home?
Yes, that is exactly what it should allow, just like it should allow us to have 23 choices of deodorants and 18 choices of sneakers. More importantly, government simple doesn't have any right to restrict these choices.
It is infinitely better than the privately-built US Highway System.
That's because government action precludes building a private system. That's why we shouldn't repeat that mistake with other infrastructure.
And yes, private corporations do indeed imprison people and force them into labor camps. [Prison-industrial complex.]
The prison-industrial complex is a creation of government. It is government police and government courts that force people into these systems. The fact that a few corporations that are buddies with corrupt politicians benefit from this abuse of government power doesn't make "corporations" responsible for it.
And most of these large telcos were started with government support... The infrastructure they now make huge profits off was paid for by the tax payers originally.
[Citation needed]
Of course, you won't be able to come up with a citation because it's utter bullshit.
The government does many things better than the free markets. Pretty much in every area where the objective isnt to abuse and wring money out of people.
Absolutely right: the government is great at giving people what they don't want but what lobbyists and politicians decide they ought to have and pay for.
There is a reason why Telcos have a 30% net profit... it is because the free market doesnt work when there are extreme startup costs.
The startup costs are extreme because of government. And AT&T's and Comcast's net profit margin is around 10%.
And... The U.S. has probably the worst human rail transit system in the developed world. The best are all backed by the governments.
True, because they have to be: human rail transport makes little sense. Germany tried to privatize it, but it didn't work out financially. And it doesn't work out financially because people don't actually want to travel by rail if they see the full cost. So the cost gets hidden in taxes.
Note that the US has the world's largest rail system, and it is nearly 100% utilized and extremely efficient. It is used what rail is actually good for: freight.
When you look at public transit use by country, the US comes in last, but that generally simply reflects wealth: people avoid public transit if they can:
I'd like to see how Bain Capital would build an interstate highway system.
The US Interstate Highway System is lousy: it has excess capacity in many places and insufficient capacity in many others. And, of course, it was built for the same reason the German highway system was built: for the military. Countries like the UK used to have private highway systems before they became nationalized.
Call me when a private corporation can get a human into orbit without killing him.
Governments do lots of things that private corporations don't do: put a man on the moon, build weapons of mass destruction, bomb other nations,, force people into labor camps, or imprison a large fraction of the population. The reason private corporations don't do these things is because they are not worth doing. Putting a man on the moon was a propaganda feat by one government trying to impress another government; it's in the same category of government action as dropping an atom bomb on Hiroshima: something rational people do not waste their money on.
The real joke* in this is that many of these municipalities aren't being served at all by the big monopolies. They asked for service repeatedly only to be denied.
The reason there isn't more competition is because starting an ISP is really hard, in large part due to government regulations:
A new fiber provider needs a slew of government permits and construction crews to bring fiber to homes and businesses. It needs to buy Internet capacity from transit providers to connect customers to the rest of the Internet. It probably needs investors who are willing to wait years for a profit because the up-front capital costs are huge. If the new entrant can't take a sizable chunk of customers away from the area's incumbent Internet provider, it may never recover the initial costs. And if the newcomer is a real threat to the incumbent, it might need an army of lawyers to fend off frivolous lawsuits designed to put it out of business.
And, what "municipalities aren't being served at all"? Most people have access to at least one DSL provider, one cable provider, and one wireless provider.
Enjoy your shitty internet access, then. Every time you spout this nonsense argument you guarantee the US's internet access will remain cripplingly bad for the vast majority of people for a little bit longer.
You're from the UK, right? Doesn't look like your country (or Europe) is doing significantly better than the US:
Note also that the Internet in Europe only took off after privatization and deregulation, and the UK today doesn't seem significantly different in how it provides Internet access from the US.
Oh, you mean unlike Comcast or any of the other quasi-monopolies we currently enjoy?
To the degree that they are monopolies, they are monopolies created by the government.
And yet, when the people want to band together and do something, you want to remove that freedom?
Municipal broadband isn't about "the people wanting to band together and do something", it is about some people forcing others to pay for something they don't want.
And it is government that currently removes the freedom of people banding together and providing broadband access commercially, by limiting access.
It is clear that the image of a static 1 and 99 percent is largely incorrect. The majority of Americans will experience at least one year of affluence at some point during their working careers. (This is just as true at the bottom of the income distribution scale, where 54 percent of Americans will experience poverty or near poverty at least once between the ages of 25 and 60).
This isn't exactly a secret either; this has generally been known for a long time, Hirschl and Rank just put some recent numbers on it.
If that's true it means they do well when they're young and then everything goes to shit. At least I can't think of any reason why they'd drop out. In other words, after they're used up their quality of life goes down
No, in fact, it's the exact opposite: incomes go up as people get older. It should also be obvious why: as people get older, they gain more experience and advance in their careers, so they get salary raises. You have to be utterly disconnected from economic life not to understand such a basic fact. http://tinyurl.com/pebklkm
Now, the real ruling class is just that: A Class. You don't drop out of that.
True. But the argument progressives and people like Sanders make is that "the 1%" actually constitute "the ruling class", that the problem is money, and that the problem can be fixed by redistribution and taxation. That argument is obviously bullshit given the intragenerational income mobility we see.
The US may or may not have some other form of "ruling class" that isn't rooted in money. You're welcome to make an argument for that. There certainly are such ruling classes in Europe, in countries with much more economic equality and higher relative upward mobility.
Google "Upward Mobility In America" sometime. When the top 3 results stop being about how it's a myth we'll talk.
I did better: I immigrated to the US and experienced upward mobility that people in other countries can only dream of. People like you strike me as whiny, greedy, and ignorant because you simply lack any appreciation of how well the US works.
The statistics that people cite on intergenerational mobility and comparing it between countries are bullshit; they are based on relative mobility, and that's high in countries with government-imposed equality, for all the wrong reasons.
If those morons think that a small increase in temperature is worse than living on a barren empty planet with no air, water, or infrastructure... maybe we should send them there first so they can see what it's like.
Musk and the like don't think that. They are investing in space exploration and settling Mars because it's a frontier and a challenge, not because it's easy.
It is Kevin Maney, the writer of the Newsweek article, who falsely attributes this belief and motivation to Musk and others. It's what's known as a straw man argument, and in this case one that brands its author as scientifically illiterate and generally a moron.
Incidentally, it is likely that the author, Kevin Maney, himself is a part of "the 1%", given his consulting work with major CEOs and his portfolio of publications. So it's not clear whether his class warfare writing is just a cynical way of getting more coverage or whether he is really is so dumb that he doesn't even understand that he is talking about himself.
The 1% will benefit handsomely from a crashing environment. [...] That's the definition of a ruling class.
To have a "ruling class" and a "the 1%", people actually need to stay in such a class system over time, otherwise the term doesn't make any sense. But, in fact, 12% of Americans will be a member of "the 1%" at one point in their life, and the majority of Americans (56%) will be a member of the top 10% of income earners. So the idea that there is a fixed group of "the 1%" that will escape to Mars is ludicrous.
FWIW, I still think you are ignoring the fact that he didn't even think it worked very well (and wrote a letter to the Navy to that effect).
I don't know where you got that from. TEL obviously does work well, and there actually haven't been that many alternatives. Besides anti-knock, it also protects valves. It took quite a while to come up with good alternatives (some of them are themselves toxic). In addition, TEL was primarily taken off the market because it interferes with catalytic converters; public health was at best a secondary reason (we still don't know whether it ever caused serious public health problems).
but I think in this case, the image is more, well, this kinda works, I'm going to ignore all the warnings I'm receiving and we can patent it and make some money on it.
Your analysis still hinges on the false assumption that there were better alternatives and that there were warnings to ignore. All things considered, TEL was pretty good at what it did and there was little reason to believe that it was dangerous as used in gasoline. So, it certainly didn't take much self-delusion in order to push this as a product.
Maybe that's your image of the "typical" scientist, but I just don't happen to agree that is "typical".
As far as his job as a scientist was concerned, he received no direct financial rewards from his inventions, he received rewards from his employer for making his employer happy. And that's what typical scientists do: they make their employers happy, whether that's a corporation, a national lab, or a university, and whether their employers are made happy by patents, profits, kills, or political advantage.
The idea that free markets and charitable giving, or capitalism and non-profits are somehow opposites is a false dichotomy. The actual choice is, in fact, between free markets and voluntary donations vs. strongly regulated markets and mandatory redistribution. Classical liberals and libertarians favor the former; progressives and socialists favor the latter.
The argument for why voluntary donations and charity are better than mandatory redistribution is the same as for why free markets are better than strongly regulated markets: voluntary, individual choices are better informed and much less subject to corruption or lobbying
This isn't knee jerk reaction, this is reaction to this specific case (where you seem to be assuming a general position that Midgley is "typical").
Yes, Midgley is typical: those are the usual reward systems set up for both corporate and government scientists, and Midgley himself didn't really show much responsibility, nor was he qualified even to evaluate the effects of his invention.
In addition, he received a specific warning from Public heath and the US Surgeon General about TEL being “serious menace to public health.”
If it was a "serious menace to public health", the federal government should have outlawed it. Instead, it convened an expert panel which permitted the use of TEL and effectively immunized the corporations from lawsuits for decades. So, all your comment shows is not that there was anything wrong with Midgley (who wasn't even an expert on public health or toxicology), it shows that the Surgeon General didn't do his job.
We need a little more of an economic failure and plea of desperation from people before she can be so easily Hitlerized into office. That takes time. Time takes money. Wait, now THAT'S an idea! Speed the process up by ruining everyone's finances, then become a "savior!"
I think you have pretty much nailed Bernie Sanders' plan and political ideology.
Then they take away your right to privacy Then they take away your freedom to speak Then they take away your right to assembly Then they win.
We're so, so close to this happening is not even funny.
My family comes from countries where people actually have lost these rights, and the US isn't "close" at all. That isn't to say that we shouldn't be concerned about political attacks on these rights, but we also shouldn't engage in such ridiculous comparisons.
We're being snookered exactly the same way Imperial Japan and Germany both snookered an entire populace* and turned them against their neighbors, and in Germany's case, against an entire race and religion.
Restrictions of civil liberties are not unique to fascism; they are shared with socialism, progressivism, communism, monarchy, theocracy, US-style liberalism, and most political ideologies other than classical liberalism, minarchy, and anarchy.
Well, give her credit for at least being honest about it. Obama paid lip service to privacy and due process and trampled on both once he got into office.
Slashdot Mirror
"The government" didn't do anything good. Tax payers all across the country paid $111 million dollars so that the good people of Chattanooga could have a new fiber network. And electricity rate payers have to pay for the other $160 million dollars whether they want Internet or not, effectively a highly regressive tax, mostly paid by lower income households, in order to subsidize nerds who want fiber.
If we roll this out nationally, it amounts forcing everybody in the US to pay an average of $2000 in order to get Internet service that is faster than what they need, and more expensive than what they have. Realistically, most people need about 10-20 Mbps, and they can get that for less than $40 in most places.
If Google Fiber were actually commercially successful, it would mean that the city of Chattanooga wasted $300 million in subsidies in order to deliver a more expensive Internet service than Google manages to deliver without subsidies. I.e., it would undermine your whole argument. But, in fact, Google Fiber appears to be losing money for Google as well, and Google has already stated that they aren't doing this in response to market demand, but as a test bed to see what people do with higher Internet speeds and to get into the market.
No, that is your problem. You have the numbers in front of you, and instead of thinking through what they mean, you attack the credibility of the sources. The sources don't matter: the numbers are not in question. It should be obvious what $111 million in federal subsidies and $160 million in transfers from electricity rate payers mean for a city of 173000 people, you just refuse to see it.
It's people like you who cause stagnation of middle class incomes in order to get subsidized shit they want from the government, while the same time patting themselves on the back about how magnanimous they are.
He hasn't even figured that out for law or government; he thinks he just decrees things and then they magically happen. When his code doesn't do what he wants, he probably complains that the CPU found "loopholes" in the instruction stream.
If wired Internet in the town is unprofitable, it's either because the costs are too high or the demand is too low (or both). Municipal broadband doesn't fix the lack of profitability, it simply forces tax payers to make up the difference. What possible justification is there to make me pay for something I don't want?
If the city wants to do something to help remedy this situation, it should lower the cost and risk of planning and permitting, because that's usually what keeps ISPs out.
I've actually lived in such a town. It turns out, you really don't need wired Internet access anyway. People who want Internet access can easily get it via wireless point-to-point connections, expanded mobile Internet access, and other technologies, from small, local operators. A lot of more rural towns have those. I actually found it to be a step backwards when national wired operators finally moved in a few years later.
In most places, you simply wouldn't get a permit. A lot of the land is government owned, and the government won't sell it to you for building private roads. Finally, since tax payers are forced at gunpoint to pay for public roads already, the price of private roads is necessarily always uncompetitive no matter how cheap they are.
Even the sticker price for their Internet (apparently, $58 for 100 Mbps) is more expensive than what I'm getting here, and that isn't counting the massive subsidies:
http://www.americanlegislator....
and
More info:
http://watchdog.org/1019/tn-ch...
http://www.washingtontimes.com...
That is, regular tax payers are forced to pay for massive bandwidth that almost nobody wants or needs; but those high numbers give nerds like you a hard-on although even you can't actually use them. And neither the financials nor the speeds are in dispute; it's simply that the people responsible for this kind of government waste are trying to put a positive spin on it.
You're welcome. Thanks for pointing to Chattanooga, presumably the best example you could come up with: it is an excellent illustration of how utterly broken municipal broadband is. Do not want.
In different words, you want a monopoly.
I know exactly how municipal broadband is paid for: through taxes and municipal bonds.
Your error is in assuming that municipal broadband does that. It doesn't.
Yes, that is exactly what it should allow, just like it should allow us to have 23 choices of deodorants and 18 choices of sneakers. More importantly, government simple doesn't have any right to restrict these choices.
That's because government action precludes building a private system. That's why we shouldn't repeat that mistake with other infrastructure.
The prison-industrial complex is a creation of government. It is government police and government courts that force people into these systems. The fact that a few corporations that are buddies with corrupt politicians benefit from this abuse of government power doesn't make "corporations" responsible for it.
No, we should privatize most of those functions.
So your solution to lobbying and monopolies is... to make lobbyists and monopolists even more powerful: that's what you are advocating.
[Citation needed]
Of course, you won't be able to come up with a citation because it's utter bullshit.
Absolutely right: the government is great at giving people what they don't want but what lobbyists and politicians decide they ought to have and pay for.
The startup costs are extreme because of government. And AT&T's and Comcast's net profit margin is around 10%.
True, because they have to be: human rail transport makes little sense. Germany tried to privatize it, but it didn't work out financially. And it doesn't work out financially because people don't actually want to travel by rail if they see the full cost. So the cost gets hidden in taxes.
Note that the US has the world's largest rail system, and it is nearly 100% utilized and extremely efficient. It is used what rail is actually good for: freight.
When you look at public transit use by country, the US comes in last, but that generally simply reflects wealth: people avoid public transit if they can:
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/bl...
The US Interstate Highway System is lousy: it has excess capacity in many places and insufficient capacity in many others. And, of course, it was built for the same reason the German highway system was built: for the military. Countries like the UK used to have private highway systems before they became nationalized.
Governments do lots of things that private corporations don't do: put a man on the moon, build weapons of mass destruction, bomb other nations,, force people into labor camps, or imprison a large fraction of the population. The reason private corporations don't do these things is because they are not worth doing. Putting a man on the moon was a propaganda feat by one government trying to impress another government; it's in the same category of government action as dropping an atom bomb on Hiroshima: something rational people do not waste their money on.
The reason there isn't more competition is because starting an ISP is really hard, in large part due to government regulations:
http://arstechnica.com/busines...
And, what "municipalities aren't being served at all"? Most people have access to at least one DSL provider, one cable provider, and one wireless provider.
You're from the UK, right? Doesn't look like your country (or Europe) is doing significantly better than the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.techinsider.io/akam...
http://data.worldbank.org/indi...
Note also that the Internet in Europe only took off after privatization and deregulation, and the UK today doesn't seem significantly different in how it provides Internet access from the US.
To the degree that they are monopolies, they are monopolies created by the government.
Municipal broadband isn't about "the people wanting to band together and do something", it is about some people forcing others to pay for something they don't want.
And it is government that currently removes the freedom of people banding together and providing broadband access commercially, by limiting access.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04...
http://www.npr.org/sections/mo...
This isn't exactly a secret either; this has generally been known for a long time, Hirschl and Rank just put some recent numbers on it.
No, in fact, it's the exact opposite: incomes go up as people get older. It should also be obvious why: as people get older, they gain more experience and advance in their careers, so they get salary raises. You have to be utterly disconnected from economic life not to understand such a basic fact. http://tinyurl.com/pebklkm
True. But the argument progressives and people like Sanders make is that "the 1%" actually constitute "the ruling class", that the problem is money, and that the problem can be fixed by redistribution and taxation. That argument is obviously bullshit given the intragenerational income mobility we see.
The US may or may not have some other form of "ruling class" that isn't rooted in money. You're welcome to make an argument for that. There certainly are such ruling classes in Europe, in countries with much more economic equality and higher relative upward mobility.
I did better: I immigrated to the US and experienced upward mobility that people in other countries can only dream of. People like you strike me as whiny, greedy, and ignorant because you simply lack any appreciation of how well the US works.
The statistics that people cite on intergenerational mobility and comparing it between countries are bullshit; they are based on relative mobility, and that's high in countries with government-imposed equality, for all the wrong reasons.
Musk and the like don't think that. They are investing in space exploration and settling Mars because it's a frontier and a challenge, not because it's easy.
It is Kevin Maney, the writer of the Newsweek article, who falsely attributes this belief and motivation to Musk and others. It's what's known as a straw man argument, and in this case one that brands its author as scientifically illiterate and generally a moron.
Incidentally, it is likely that the author, Kevin Maney, himself is a part of "the 1%", given his consulting work with major CEOs and his portfolio of publications. So it's not clear whether his class warfare writing is just a cynical way of getting more coverage or whether he is really is so dumb that he doesn't even understand that he is talking about himself.
To have a "ruling class" and a "the 1%", people actually need to stay in such a class system over time, otherwise the term doesn't make any sense. But, in fact, 12% of Americans will be a member of "the 1%" at one point in their life, and the majority of Americans (56%) will be a member of the top 10% of income earners. So the idea that there is a fixed group of "the 1%" that will escape to Mars is ludicrous.
I don't know where you got that from. TEL obviously does work well, and there actually haven't been that many alternatives. Besides anti-knock, it also protects valves. It took quite a while to come up with good alternatives (some of them are themselves toxic). In addition, TEL was primarily taken off the market because it interferes with catalytic converters; public health was at best a secondary reason (we still don't know whether it ever caused serious public health problems).
Your analysis still hinges on the false assumption that there were better alternatives and that there were warnings to ignore. All things considered, TEL was pretty good at what it did and there was little reason to believe that it was dangerous as used in gasoline. So, it certainly didn't take much self-delusion in order to push this as a product.
As far as his job as a scientist was concerned, he received no direct financial rewards from his inventions, he received rewards from his employer for making his employer happy. And that's what typical scientists do: they make their employers happy, whether that's a corporation, a national lab, or a university, and whether their employers are made happy by patents, profits, kills, or political advantage.
The idea that free markets and charitable giving, or capitalism and non-profits are somehow opposites is a false dichotomy. The actual choice is, in fact, between free markets and voluntary donations vs. strongly regulated markets and mandatory redistribution. Classical liberals and libertarians favor the former; progressives and socialists favor the latter.
The argument for why voluntary donations and charity are better than mandatory redistribution is the same as for why free markets are better than strongly regulated markets: voluntary, individual choices are better informed and much less subject to corruption or lobbying
Yes, Midgley is typical: those are the usual reward systems set up for both corporate and government scientists, and Midgley himself didn't really show much responsibility, nor was he qualified even to evaluate the effects of his invention.
If it was a "serious menace to public health", the federal government should have outlawed it. Instead, it convened an expert panel which permitted the use of TEL and effectively immunized the corporations from lawsuits for decades. So, all your comment shows is not that there was anything wrong with Midgley (who wasn't even an expert on public health or toxicology), it shows that the Surgeon General didn't do his job.
I think you have pretty much nailed Bernie Sanders' plan and political ideology.
My family comes from countries where people actually have lost these rights, and the US isn't "close" at all. That isn't to say that we shouldn't be concerned about political attacks on these rights, but we also shouldn't engage in such ridiculous comparisons.
Restrictions of civil liberties are not unique to fascism; they are shared with socialism, progressivism, communism, monarchy, theocracy, US-style liberalism, and most political ideologies other than classical liberalism, minarchy, and anarchy.
Well, give her credit for at least being honest about it. Obama paid lip service to privacy and due process and trampled on both once he got into office.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...