I just have to comment on the irony of saying they shouldn't install linux because they won't be able to run Windows software and then suggesting they buy a Mac. Which also don't run Windows software apps.
Except that the Mac has widespread commercial support, and you can still put Microsoft Office on it. Many commercial games have Mac ports, which isn't the case for Linux. Even ID software, long the champion of commercial Linux gaming, is no longer porting their latest games to Linux. Just about every printer you can buy has Mac support. All major websites support the Mac. Apple rules the music world on the Web.
problem solved.. at least until linux malware becomes prevalent
That's really impractical, though, unless the person you're installing it for only wants email and to occasionally surf some websites. We live in a commercial OS world. You think you get lots of calls for computer help from family now? Wipe their drive and install Linux. After they figure out that they can't install games or Microsoft Office, they'll be asking you to put Windows right back on.
Myself, I've come to the point where I simply recommend to family that they buy an Apple, on the security grounds alone. I've pointed a couple of family members to Macbooks, and I get zero calls for help from them after a breaking in period.
Portland, OR is not on the list...but then that's probably because travelers through PDX already enjoy free wi-fi courtesy of the Port of Portland and have for several years now. Now tell me again why other airports don't extend this courtesy already?
As someone that works at an airport (and provides free Wi-Fi), I'll tell you precisely why more don't offer it: money. I work at a smaller airport where the cost of providing the service is low, but at larger airports, the cost of bandwidth and hardware is significant. Pittsburgh and McCarran in Las Vegas offered it as an incentive to pull in fliers, but the cost issue is a double edged sword at airports. With the state of the air travel industry being so bad, not only do airports not want to foot the bill for Wi-Fi, many of them don't want to give up the revenue from the paid Wi-Fi services some have. Airports are pretty desperate for money right now, and there's very little they can do to make it outside of rents and fees. It's not like they can throw an airline ticket sale to attract more fliers. That's up to the airlines. Airports are nothing but landlords, and they're completely dependent upon rent from tenants and fees from things like baggage carts and yes, Wi-Fi.
The problem is that you can't recycle nuclear fuel. There are always residual byproducts that last for long and have a potential to pollute eveything around them.
Well that's funny. France has recycled their fuel for years, and Japan is following suit.
... if we'd use common sense and recycle the fuel, as many other nuclear nations already do. The whole terrorist argument against this was bogus from the start. Recycle the damn fuel, and you can reuse 93 percent of it.
No, the media loves Obama. So much that everyone from Saturday Night Live to Obama himself jokes about it ("A few nights ago, I was up tossing and turning trying to figure out exactly what to say. Finally, when I couldn't get back to sleep, I rolled over and asked Brian Williams what he thought.")
They don't love Palin. Palin makes headlines, but that doesn't mean they love her. Quite the opposite, especially in contrast to Barack Obama.
"The people originating all those half million dollars mortgages to hairdressers and gardeners knew they would eventually implode"
No, they honestly didn't think so. They thought that housing values could never drop, and if they did, Uncle Sugar would take care of things. Fannie and Freddie, despite being privatized years ago, were perfectly comfortably selling the illusion that they were a government-backed agency, because in part they believed Congress would never turn their back in case things went bad. And they were largely right. Uncle Sugar to the rescue.
"There is absolutely NO WAY subprime mortgages to people with either no proof of income, or insufficient income, could ever warrant AAA bond ratings."
In a real free market... where there are consequences to everyone's actions... no, of course not. But like the subprime lenders themselves, the raters assumed that the government would insure that everyone was covered should things go wrong. Politicians wanted to keep a political constituency happy with subprime loans, and banks and rating agencies decided to play along and make money if this is how things were going to be.
This was a politically created mess, more than a market mess. It's not so much that the market failed as that it was corrupted and not allowed to operate as a market.
We should have ignored Bin Laden the same way we ignore Internet Trolls. Don't feed them with a response. Was 9/11 a tragedy? Yes, and so was the challenger disaster, and the New Orleans flooding, and so on. Rather than declare war, we should have just picked up the pieces, secured the border the same way you install a more-solid door on your house after a breakin, and continued to live in peace.
I'm at a loss for words. Would you have advised that we ignored Pearl Harbor? That if we just grieved and then ignored it, that was acceptable policy? That Japan would have went "Oh look, those Americans aren't a threat to our interests after all. Let's give them a wide berth from now on"?
I can think of no worse policy for national security than ignoring a major attack and then going "La La, we don't care, we're just going to keep on living". You just sent a message to every nation in the world that your country can be attacked with impunity, and no consequences will come of it.
They have NO RIGHT to tell me what I can or can't install their OS on.
Well, yes they do, more or less. The license explicitly states that it is only to be used on authorized hardware. If you have a problem with that, then don't use OS X. You don't own the program, they do. You only have a license to use it as they allow.
I like OS X, and think it is, for the most part , an outstanding operating system. But I never understood the pass that Apple got from most Slashdotters just because they made the Mac Unix-based. Apple has more restrictive policies than Microsoft ever did. People here simply bought into the reality distortion field, whether they admit it or not.
Not really. Media outlets are just becoming more honest about their biases. Everyone still does real reporting. It never stopped. They just cover it from a favored angle. If anything, I'd say we're better off now. There's a network (sometimes more) for every point of view now. The British Press... the Times, the Guardian, etc, have been open about their opinions for years. But they still do quality journalism. The American Press is basically adapting that model now.
"Editors, and more importantly their owners (http://www.thenation.com/special/bigten.html) prefer light, cheap puff pieces "
Sometimes. Puff pieces can be profitable too.
"that don't disturb the citizenry"
Oh please. "Disturbing the citizenry" is Job One for the press... all of it. Disturbing headlines sell the most papers and get the biggest ratings. Swine Flu, anyone? If anything, the press has become more hysterical at times like these.
"alert them to little things like the fact that the treasuries of the world are being looted by the worlds wealthy"
Really? Who are these guys that are looting the treasuries? You make it sound like the Gates and Buffetts of the world went in with guns and bags and a note for the teller. Treasuries are being depleted, but I see populations across the world that want more benefits without wanting to pay for them. By far the biggest expenditures in the US are the entitlement programs... social security and medicare. I'd hardly blame that on "the rich".
Because people have made it clear they're not willing to pay for content. They're not willing to pay for online subscriptions fees, and increasingly, they don't even want to look at ads. Look at some threads in this topic... people are mocking the Washington Post because they blocked their ads.
Where's the money going to come from to pay for online journalists? They have to buy the groceries somehow.
"I'm sure it's a pretty niche market these days though:D."
You joke, but newspapers aren't going extinct, because it'll become a niche market too. Lots of big city papers will die off, but a few national papers will survive.
The problem is that big city papers are all trying to be the New York Times, a source of national news. But there's no way a newspaper can do that anymore with the Internet. So what you're going to see left in the market are local papers that concentrate on local stories, the kind that interest the public, but generally don't hit the Internet.
I think the only national paper you'll see grow in the long run is the Wall Street Journal, because no one can replace their in-depth business reporting. Notice they they only lost a fraction of a percent compared to all the others, and have generally been growing a little each period. No other paper can claim that. The WSJ has the ultimate niche market, and the most profitable one.
"In return we get invaluable scientific knowledge and practical experience in living under such conditions."
The problem is that's a fallacy. We wont learn anything new about human habitiation in space. Because even if we go back to the Moon, we won't be spending any considerable amounts of time there. Just like Apollo, it'll be there and back. There's nothing more we can learn unless we send them to the moon for considerably longer periods of time. And that's why this whole thing is going to be canceled.
The whole rationale behind Constellation was to use the Moon as a means to get to Mars. But even NASA admits we don't have the technology to do that. It's simply too far away, and we can't get men there fast enough.
So what's the point of sending men back to the moon? Nostalgia? If we were going to build a real moon base, and keep astronauts there for extended periods of time, hell, I'd be right onboard with that. That would be progress.
But we're not going to do that. No one seriously believes we'll build a moonbase in the near future, nor that we'll send a man to Mars in our lifetimes. Unless we send some dying cancer patient on a one-way trip, it simply isn't going to happen. We still could do pioneering manned space exploration by sending astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid. But no one seems to think that's a glorious enough mission. Which is sad, because it'd be one hell of a first.
As things probably stand, we're better off canning the whole nostalgia trip, and using the money to do real space exploration... sending more robotic probes across the solar system to send back data.
Do you go out of your way to find the way in which you can legally give the government the most possible tax revenue?
""Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands."" - US Federal Court judge Learned Hand
"And Pure Libertarianism must be the answer. *Your* model says so. Note you have the same bias."
I'm not a Libertarian, just sympathetic to a few of their ideas. I'm pretty critical of them as well at times, but I got tired of the Marxist-fest going on in the topic by all of the hypocrites slamming markets when most of them would never stand for a planned economy if it hit them in the wallet.
Legally, if granted copyright by the government, they are for a given period of time. This is why if I publish something, you're breaking the law if you copy it without my permission and compensation.
"An economist is someone who sees something that works in practice and wonders if it would work in theory."
I like libertarian philiosophy myself, but the nuts in the crowd can't understand that markets/politics is a synthesis of human psychology and behaviors perturbed by random events, and doesn't have some underlying grand unified theory like physics. Real life has, and always will be, a muddle.
Do you know anything about free market economic theory? The Austrian school? Von Mises? A central tennent of their ideas was that economies were driven more by human needs, wants, and psychology, than by calculations and economic theories. Guys like Mises and Milton Friedman had such a hard time being heard at first precisely because they de-emphasized things like mathematical theories. An Invisible Hand, after all, is hard to quantify, is it not?
Your Reagan quote in particular is telling, as it was directed at left-leaning economists of the 70's that just couldn't understand how stagflation could exist. After all, Keynesian theory stated that the very concept was impossible. Their models said so.
"Try as you might, you'll never separate libertarianism from racism.
Even if a libertarian isn't personally racist, they see things like the civil rights act and the fair housing act (and the associated enforcement costs) as the government sticking it's nose where it doesn't belong, so at the very least a libertarian world view enables racism."
Try as you might, you'll never separate liberalism from socialism.
Even if a liberal isn't personally socialist, they see things like property rights and individual achievement (and the lack of government power thereof) as unfairness, so at the very least a liberal world view enables socialism.
Copyright is not property, and it is not a right. So no, libertarians are not pro-restrictive copyright.
Bunk. Copyright has been a form of property since before the United States came into existence. You may not like it, but that doesn't change the facts. Its legally recognized as such. How long a copyright should be is another argument, but to argue that copyright isn't property is silly on the merits.
The market has proven itself wholly incapable of regulating itself. What now?
Not even most Libertarians want an economy with no government oversight at all. Even during the Laissez Faire days of the gilded age, there was government authority. So this stupid notion that the current crises erupted from lack of regulation is pure BS. Some regulations were changed and pared back in the late 90's. But the financial sector remained, by far, the most heavily regulated sector of the economy.
The problem wasn't lack of regulation, but of corruption. And that corruption started not with private companies and individuals, but with your beloved government, who decided that banks should be punished for refusing to make housing loans to people that lacked things like a job and a credit history. It just wasn't fair after all. I mean, how racist to deny a home loan to someone that didn't have a way to pay it back, eh?
Free markets have the virtue of being self-correcting (if allowed to, that is... hello, "stimulus" pork). Governments... eh, not always so. The irony is that the conservatives... the mean people that believe in markets... actually tried to fix the housing bubble problem by reigning in Fannie and Freddie, who were giving out mortgages like candy, and then bundling them to so others could sell them as "AAA" securities.
Oh, how tunes change when fortunes change, as the good congressman Barney Frank was trying to kill regulation and oversight of Fannie and Freddie:
''These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ''The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.''- Sep. 11, 2003
After the gravy train stopped:
'The private sector got us into this mess. The government has to get us out of it." - Sep. 28, 2008
You want to know what the markets have proven? The market have proven that, when governments and politicians manipulate it for their own power, markets will crash.
Stop getting your definition of libertarian from Glenn Beck. Those people aren't libertarians, they're just Republicans who don't want to pay taxes.
What an incredibly silly statement. First, all Republicans support taxes at the lowest possible levels. It's the only common denominator about Republicans today. You won't get Jeff Sessions and Olympia Snowe to agree on much, but you will see that they agree on taxes.
Second, please point out a Libertarian that wants higher tax rates. You wont find any, because they wouldn't be Libertarian. Money is property, and Libertarians hold property rights very, very high. They're certainly not for giving more of it to the government.
Isn't that kind of stuff a little hard to measure scientifically when the customer's perceived value is relatively arbitrary and irrational? The same customer can perceive the same item at wildly different values depending on context.
I'll take individuals choosing to overpay for something, over some bureaucrat setting price controls and planning the economy. Any day.
Slashdot Mirror
I just have to comment on the irony of saying they shouldn't install linux because they won't be able to run Windows software and then suggesting they buy a Mac. Which also don't run Windows software apps.
Except that the Mac has widespread commercial support, and you can still put Microsoft Office on it. Many commercial games have Mac ports, which isn't the case for Linux. Even ID software, long the champion of commercial Linux gaming, is no longer porting their latest games to Linux. Just about every printer you can buy has Mac support. All major websites support the Mac. Apple rules the music world on the Web.
problem solved.. at least until linux malware becomes prevalent
That's really impractical, though, unless the person you're installing it for only wants email and to occasionally surf some websites. We live in a commercial OS world. You think you get lots of calls for computer help from family now? Wipe their drive and install Linux. After they figure out that they can't install games or Microsoft Office, they'll be asking you to put Windows right back on.
Myself, I've come to the point where I simply recommend to family that they buy an Apple, on the security grounds alone. I've pointed a couple of family members to Macbooks, and I get zero calls for help from them after a breaking in period.
You are either a good person or an asshole, regardless of the time of the year.
So good of you to represent the assholes.
Portland, OR is not on the list...but then that's probably because travelers through PDX already enjoy free wi-fi courtesy of the Port of Portland and have for several years now. Now tell me again why other airports don't extend this courtesy already?
As someone that works at an airport (and provides free Wi-Fi), I'll tell you precisely why more don't offer it: money. I work at a smaller airport where the cost of providing the service is low, but at larger airports, the cost of bandwidth and hardware is significant. Pittsburgh and McCarran in Las Vegas offered it as an incentive to pull in fliers, but the cost issue is a double edged sword at airports. With the state of the air travel industry being so bad, not only do airports not want to foot the bill for Wi-Fi, many of them don't want to give up the revenue from the paid Wi-Fi services some have. Airports are pretty desperate for money right now, and there's very little they can do to make it outside of rents and fees. It's not like they can throw an airline ticket sale to attract more fliers. That's up to the airlines. Airports are nothing but landlords, and they're completely dependent upon rent from tenants and fees from things like baggage carts and yes, Wi-Fi.
The problem is that you can't recycle nuclear fuel. There are always residual byproducts that last for long and have a potential to pollute eveything around them.
Well that's funny. France has recycled their fuel for years, and Japan is following suit.
... if we'd use common sense and recycle the fuel, as many other nuclear nations already do. The whole terrorist argument against this was bogus from the start. Recycle the damn fuel, and you can reuse 93 percent of it.
Capitalism isn't about compassion.
Neither is the Constitution, thankfully. There's still a chance we can kill this monster in its cradle.
The media loved Palin too.
No, the media loves Obama. So much that everyone from Saturday Night Live to Obama himself jokes about it ("A few nights ago, I was up tossing and turning trying to figure out exactly what to say. Finally, when I couldn't get back to sleep, I rolled over and asked Brian Williams what he thought.")
They don't love Palin. Palin makes headlines, but that doesn't mean they love her. Quite the opposite, especially in contrast to Barack Obama.
"The people originating all those half million dollars mortgages to hairdressers and gardeners knew they would eventually implode"
No, they honestly didn't think so. They thought that housing values could never drop, and if they did, Uncle Sugar would take care of things. Fannie and Freddie, despite being privatized years ago, were perfectly comfortably selling the illusion that they were a government-backed agency, because in part they believed Congress would never turn their back in case things went bad. And they were largely right. Uncle Sugar to the rescue.
"There is absolutely NO WAY subprime mortgages to people with either no proof of income, or insufficient income, could ever warrant AAA bond ratings."
In a real free market... where there are consequences to everyone's actions... no, of course not. But like the subprime lenders themselves, the raters assumed that the government would insure that everyone was covered should things go wrong. Politicians wanted to keep a political constituency happy with subprime loans, and banks and rating agencies decided to play along and make money if this is how things were going to be.
This was a politically created mess, more than a market mess. It's not so much that the market failed as that it was corrupted and not allowed to operate as a market.
In my opinion there was no need for war.
We should have ignored Bin Laden the same way we ignore Internet Trolls. Don't feed them with a response. Was 9/11 a tragedy? Yes, and so was the challenger disaster, and the New Orleans flooding, and so on. Rather than declare war, we should have just picked up the pieces, secured the border the same way you install a more-solid door on your house after a breakin, and continued to live in peace.
I'm at a loss for words. Would you have advised that we ignored Pearl Harbor? That if we just grieved and then ignored it, that was acceptable policy? That Japan would have went "Oh look, those Americans aren't a threat to our interests after all. Let's give them a wide berth from now on"?
I can think of no worse policy for national security than ignoring a major attack and then going "La La, we don't care, we're just going to keep on living". You just sent a message to every nation in the world that your country can be attacked with impunity, and no consequences will come of it.
They have NO RIGHT to tell me what I can or can't install their OS on.
Well, yes they do, more or less. The license explicitly states that it is only to be used on authorized hardware. If you have a problem with that, then don't use OS X. You don't own the program, they do. You only have a license to use it as they allow.
I like OS X, and think it is, for the most part , an outstanding operating system. But I never understood the pass that Apple got from most Slashdotters just because they made the Mac Unix-based. Apple has more restrictive policies than Microsoft ever did. People here simply bought into the reality distortion field, whether they admit it or not.
"This is dying and has been for years."
Not really. Media outlets are just becoming more honest about their biases. Everyone still does real reporting. It never stopped. They just cover it from a favored angle. If anything, I'd say we're better off now. There's a network (sometimes more) for every point of view now. The British Press... the Times, the Guardian, etc, have been open about their opinions for years. But they still do quality journalism. The American Press is basically adapting that model now.
"Editors, and more importantly their owners (http://www.thenation.com/special/bigten.html) prefer light, cheap puff pieces "
Sometimes. Puff pieces can be profitable too.
"that don't disturb the citizenry"
Oh please. "Disturbing the citizenry" is Job One for the press... all of it. Disturbing headlines sell the most papers and get the biggest ratings. Swine Flu, anyone? If anything, the press has become more hysterical at times like these.
"alert them to little things like the fact that the treasuries of the world are being looted by the worlds wealthy"
Really? Who are these guys that are looting the treasuries? You make it sound like the Gates and Buffetts of the world went in with guns and bags and a note for the teller. Treasuries are being depleted, but I see populations across the world that want more benefits without wanting to pay for them. By far the biggest expenditures in the US are the entitlement programs... social security and medicare. I'd hardly blame that on "the rich".
At least we'll still have BBC news.
So? The quality of their work is about the same as most of the other major media news outlets.
Why can't the internet have Salaried journalists?
Because people have made it clear they're not willing to pay for content. They're not willing to pay for online subscriptions fees, and increasingly, they don't even want to look at ads. Look at some threads in this topic... people are mocking the Washington Post because they blocked their ads.
Where's the money going to come from to pay for online journalists? They have to buy the groceries somehow.
"I'm sure it's a pretty niche market these days though :D."
You joke, but newspapers aren't going extinct, because it'll become a niche market too. Lots of big city papers will die off, but a few national papers will survive.
The problem is that big city papers are all trying to be the New York Times, a source of national news. But there's no way a newspaper can do that anymore with the Internet. So what you're going to see left in the market are local papers that concentrate on local stories, the kind that interest the public, but generally don't hit the Internet.
I think the only national paper you'll see grow in the long run is the Wall Street Journal, because no one can replace their in-depth business reporting. Notice they they only lost a fraction of a percent compared to all the others, and have generally been growing a little each period. No other paper can claim that. The WSJ has the ultimate niche market, and the most profitable one.
"In return we get invaluable scientific knowledge and practical experience in living under such conditions."
The problem is that's a fallacy. We wont learn anything new about human habitiation in space. Because even if we go back to the Moon, we won't be spending any considerable amounts of time there. Just like Apollo, it'll be there and back. There's nothing more we can learn unless we send them to the moon for considerably longer periods of time. And that's why this whole thing is going to be canceled.
The whole rationale behind Constellation was to use the Moon as a means to get to Mars. But even NASA admits we don't have the technology to do that. It's simply too far away, and we can't get men there fast enough.
So what's the point of sending men back to the moon? Nostalgia? If we were going to build a real moon base, and keep astronauts there for extended periods of time, hell, I'd be right onboard with that. That would be progress.
But we're not going to do that. No one seriously believes we'll build a moonbase in the near future, nor that we'll send a man to Mars in our lifetimes. Unless we send some dying cancer patient on a one-way trip, it simply isn't going to happen. We still could do pioneering manned space exploration by sending astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid. But no one seems to think that's a glorious enough mission. Which is sad, because it'd be one hell of a first.
As things probably stand, we're better off canning the whole nostalgia trip, and using the money to do real space exploration... sending more robotic probes across the solar system to send back data.
Do you go out of your way to find the way in which you can legally give the government the most possible tax revenue?
""Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as
possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the
treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes.
Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister
in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone
does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any
public duty to pay more than the law demands."" - US Federal Court judge Learned Hand
"And Pure Libertarianism must be the answer. *Your* model says so. Note you have the same bias."
I'm not a Libertarian, just sympathetic to a few of their ideas. I'm pretty critical of them as well at times, but I got tired of the Marxist-fest going on in the topic by all of the hypocrites slamming markets when most of them would never stand for a planned economy if it hit them in the wallet.
"Ideas are not property"
Legally, if granted copyright by the government, they are for a given period of time. This is why if I publish something, you're breaking the law if you copy it without my permission and compensation.
"An economist is someone who sees something that works in practice and wonders if it would work in theory."
I like libertarian philiosophy myself, but the nuts in the crowd can't understand that markets/politics is a synthesis of human psychology and behaviors perturbed by random events, and doesn't have some underlying grand unified theory like physics. Real life has, and always will be, a muddle.
Do you know anything about free market economic theory? The Austrian school? Von Mises?
A central tennent of their ideas was that economies were driven more by human needs, wants, and psychology, than by calculations and economic theories. Guys like Mises and Milton Friedman had such a hard time being heard at first precisely because they de-emphasized things like mathematical theories. An Invisible Hand, after all, is hard to quantify, is it not?
Your Reagan quote in particular is telling, as it was directed at left-leaning economists of the 70's that just couldn't understand how stagflation could exist. After all, Keynesian theory stated that the very concept was impossible. Their models said so.
"Try as you might, you'll never separate libertarianism from racism.
Even if a libertarian isn't personally racist, they see things like the civil rights act and the fair housing act (and the associated enforcement costs) as the government sticking it's nose where it doesn't belong, so at the very least a libertarian world view enables racism."
Try as you might, you'll never separate liberalism from socialism.
Even if a liberal isn't personally socialist, they see things like property rights and individual achievement (and the lack of government power thereof) as unfairness, so at the very least a liberal world view enables socialism.
Copyright is not property, and it is not a right. So no, libertarians are not pro-restrictive copyright.
Bunk. Copyright has been a form of property since before the United States came into existence. You may not like it, but that doesn't change the facts. Its legally recognized as such. How long a copyright should be is another argument, but to argue that copyright isn't property is silly on the merits.
The market has proven itself wholly incapable of regulating itself. What now?
Not even most Libertarians want an economy with no government oversight at all. Even during the Laissez Faire days of the gilded age, there was government authority. So this stupid notion that the current crises erupted from lack of regulation is pure BS. Some regulations were changed and pared back in the late 90's. But the financial sector remained, by far, the most heavily regulated sector of the economy.
The problem wasn't lack of regulation, but of corruption. And that corruption started not with private companies and individuals, but with your beloved government, who decided that banks should be punished for refusing to make housing loans to people that lacked things like a job and a credit history. It just wasn't fair after all. I mean, how racist to deny a home loan to someone that didn't have a way to pay it back, eh?
Free markets have the virtue of being self-correcting (if allowed to, that is... hello, "stimulus" pork). Governments... eh, not always so. The irony is that the conservatives... the mean people that believe in markets... actually tried to fix the housing bubble problem by reigning in Fannie and Freddie, who were giving out mortgages like candy, and then bundling them to so others could sell them as "AAA" securities.
Oh, how tunes change when fortunes change, as the good congressman Barney Frank was trying to kill regulation and oversight of Fannie and Freddie:
After the gravy train stopped:
You want to know what the markets have proven? The market have proven that, when governments and politicians manipulate it for their own power, markets will crash.
Stop getting your definition of libertarian from Glenn Beck. Those people aren't libertarians, they're just Republicans who don't want to pay taxes.
What an incredibly silly statement. First, all Republicans support taxes at the lowest possible levels. It's the only common denominator about Republicans today. You won't get Jeff Sessions and Olympia Snowe to agree on much, but you will see that they agree on taxes.
Second, please point out a Libertarian that wants higher tax rates. You wont find any, because they wouldn't be Libertarian. Money is property, and Libertarians hold property rights very, very high. They're certainly not for giving more of it to the government.
Isn't that kind of stuff a little hard to measure scientifically when the customer's perceived value is relatively arbitrary and irrational? The same customer can perceive the same item at wildly different values depending on context.
I'll take individuals choosing to overpay for something, over some bureaucrat setting price controls and planning the economy. Any day.