Yes, I'm aware that you keep claiming this. If one takes it as axiomatic (or as I see it, dogmatic) that the free market cannot fail on its own- which appears to be the basis of your argument- then *by definition* all such failures must be the fault of political interference.
But I'm not taking it as "axiomatic". As I was saying, highly unusual markets can produce monopolies. Furthermore, free market transactions are well defined: they are transactions that are voluntary and according to conditions entirely set by all participants.
Can't see numerous companies digging up- or being allowed to dig up (either by government or by private landowners) numerous independently-owned water supply routes and sets of pipes just so I can pick and choose one of them.
Well, look, that's just a testament to your inexperience. Many places have just one set of wires and pipes in the ground, yet give people the option to buy from dozens of suppliers, who share the cost for the delivery system. Many other places have tunnels in the ground where it is easy to put in new wires and pipes. And many people need no utilities at all, because they can get water, sewer, and electricity on their property, yet they are still forced to buy from government monopolies.
And if your idea of a free market is that it's free because (e.g.) you can move halfway across the country to change supplier, then we've certainly moved out of the bounds of real world usefulness and into intellectual masturbation.
Well, luckily, that isn't my idea. What I am saying is that I do not like moving halfway across the country to change suppliers, which is the current situation we have with public utilities. I would like that situation to end, which is precisely why I oppose government-granted monopolies.
The point is that, if the bakery had just said "Go away" and left it at that, they would not have been in serious financial trouble.
That is what the bakery did. Then, the lesbian couple filed a complaint with BOLI, that complaint got sent to the bakery. And then the bakery published the complaint letter they received with names. (We don't know what would have happened if they hadn't published the letter with names. You presume that the fine would have been small. I don't believe that based on the judgment and the explanation.)
As they named the would-be customers in question, it became effectively harassment rather than a simple protest.
When the lesbian couple filed the complaint, they had to know that their names would become public. Furthermore, what you are implying is that we should have a system of justice in which the accused is not only not entitled to a jury trial, but can't even publicly talk about the charges against them and who their accuser is. That is absurd. And it is equally absurd that this kind of action helps gay rights.
A lesbian couple filing secret complaints against a bakery for not baking a cake hurts gay rights; a lesbian couple proudly standing up in public and saying something like "we are sorry this bakery feels they need to discriminate, we recommend you go to one of these gay-friendly bakeries" helps gay rights. The Bowman-Cryers did a grave disservice to gay rights and gay recognition.
The bakers were indeed justified in publicizing what happened on First Amendment grounds, but the First doesn't say there aren't consequences for speech.
You're right: exercising your right to free speech can subject you to damages. However, the bakers in this case did nothing unreasonable, either when they told the lesbian couple to go away, or when they published a government document accusing them of wrongdoing.
If you believe in anti-discrimination laws, BOLI should have awarded maybe a $100 fine and left it at that. More is completely unreasonable.
Since you are not from the US and to help you put this into perspective, I pointed out that religion is much less "public policy" in the US than it is in Europe, both according to party platforms and according to spending.
Well this maybe one of those things were the numbers don't tell the full story.
Numbers, party platforms, and laws, however, do tell the full story: government is in bed with Christian churches in much of Europe. You have to be utterly blind not to see that.
I don't know what these countries spend on religion, but having been to most of them, I know it is as not important as some parts of the US if you don't go along with it.
You asked for good places to live in the US and were concerned about religion being "public policy". And I responded that religion is much less "public policy" in the US than in Europe, and that even when Americans are religious, they tend to be quite tolerant.
There have been many Athiest leaders in many countries, but 53% of Americans say they would never vote for one,
You want to talk about Christianity in politics? Note that even on gay marriage, Germany (one of the more "progressive" European countries on gay rights) has always been behind the US.
That is barbaric, and not progressive using any definition of the word.
Well, as a gay man, I'm glad I emigrated from the "sophisticated and progressive" European culture to the "barbaric" American culture.
So you distaste for progressiveness (progressivism?) is based on the 19th century version?
You claimed that my statement that progressivism favored segregation and eugenics was "loony". I recalled the history for you.
Everyone got it wrong in the 19th century, that's the beauty of progress, we all learn from our mistakes.
That is absolutely false: many people strongly opposed progressive policies at the time. Their objection wasn't to the scientific conclusions, their objection was to the idea that majorities have the right to interfere in the private lives of people for the public's benefit. You obviously still haven't learned from those mistakes.
Some people want to take us forward, while others (usually those with the money and power) want to keep us where we are. I prefer to move forward, And I think most people would agree.
You say that as if "forward" were something a large number of people agree on. From your other postings, I would say that it is you who is trying to keep people back and whose idea of "progress" is some stagnant European middle class hell.
Of course it can. Because if you look on those OECD studies done on things like life expectancy, quality of life, access to health and education, social mobility, lowest corruption, most of them always have the same countries at the top of the list (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand). See the pattern there?
I was born in one of those countries and have lived in several of them. Yes, I see the pattern, obviously, you don't.
It just happened to be one of many hits on a google search so all I can conclude here is either you are a different type of dishonest partisan hack or arguing against reality as some sort of mass debating game.
Reality is that, based on the very data that EPI uses (namely BLS numbers), manufacturing productivity has doubled between 2000 and 2014, while manufacturing employment has gone down to a lesser degree, so the EPI analysis of that data is clearly false. I gave you the links to the original data and graphs. If you can't understand a simple graph, that's your problem, not mine.
With respect, the model of "free market" you're describe is starting to sound like an idealist intellectual abstraction, not something that would- or could- make sense in the real world.
You envisioned unrealistic Total Recall scenarios. I pointed out that the failures you postulate are not market failures but political failures, such as not accounting for the cost of policing and assuming unlimited enforceability of property rights. It's OK to ignore those factors when discussing existing, real-world markets; but you can't ignore them when you extrapolate to unrealistic Total Recall scenarios.
It's only the (apparently) dogmatic assumption that a "true" free market can't end up in the same monopolistic position that would differentiate this from an abusive, non-democratic government.
I have no idea what you mean by that. Of course, hypothetical free markets can produce monopolies; for example, on an isolated island with just two people on it, all goods are by definition monopolized. As I was saying before, realistically, free markets only operate well in large, educated societies with lots of products. But in those societies, they do operate better than any alternative. Furthermore, when free markets break down, it is through politics, not market mechanisms.
The infrastructure required to support delivery of many of those things isn't, though. *That* is where the problem lies and where the barriers to entry into a market exist, and where barriers to entry exist they can be leveraged to shut out newcomers.
That isn't a "monopoly on an essential good", it's a local monopoly, and almost always an artificial one at that. That is, there are many people you can buy electricity from in the market as a whole, it's just that you may have to move to get it. And most of those local monopolies are artificial anyway. That is, in most places, you could actually have a choice of suppliers, or even supply yourself, if government hadn't granted an artificial local monopoly to some utility, usually due to political lobbying.
Speaking of the air supply, don't you remember that it was a private company that cut it off in Total Recall?:-)
That is my point: your idea about monopolies is as unrealistic as Total Recall; in real societies, monopolies don't operate that way.
If you look at the actual data, the conclusions of the report fall apart. Real output per person in the manufacturing sector has nearly doubled since 2000. Note that the FRED time series come from the same source as what EPI uses, the BLS. All your link shows again is that EPI is an organization of dishonest partisan hacks. What might give you a clue is that Figure A shows you a year-by-year graph of employment, while Figure B shows a bar chart of hand-picked time ranges.
Of course, a more fundamental question to ask is why organizations like the EPI want to condemn Americans to working in menial, low-paying blue-collar jobs in the first place. I guess the answer isn't all that difficult: Democrats and progressives like lots of low wage, dissatisfied, blue collar workers: it keeps them in power.
So you moved the goalposts to pretend that there has not been a decline since 2000? Shame on you!
You first said that "jobs have been moving to China"; wrong. Then you said "The manufacturing sector crashed"; wrong. Now you're clinging like mad to the fact that there has been a reduction in the number of manufacturing jobs in the US since 2000. It's you who keeps moving the goal posts.
What do these number actually mean? While the number of manufacturing jobs has decreased, US manufacturing output has increased since 2000. So, obviously, jobs didn't "move to China", but rather manufacturing has become more automated and more efficient. That's generally a good thing, but it has probably been speeded up by US policies during the same time that increase the cost of labor.
There is more to life than winning arguments by changing the topic.
I'm not trying to "win" arguments. I'm trying to understand how misguided people like you think, since obviously there are a lot of you around.
The only way they can determine whether you used your phone during a crash is to get deep into every single application and look at its logs: the SMS app, chat apps, the web browser, social media apps, etc. And you have to be naive to think that they aren't going to do keywords searches at the same time. And when the keyword searches "alert", they have the justification to dig deeper.
You're saying that you can't see that happening with (e.g.) water, electricity, gas, various forms of staple food (depending upon where one lives) in an entirely unregulated free market?
No, I don't. There are many fungible sources of water, electricity, gas, and staple foods. I mean, get real: how would anybody manage to get a monopoly on potatoes?
Does "some form of dictatorship" automatically include any regime that would impose controls or split up a monopoly in such a situation?
You seem to be misinterpreting what I'm saying. I'm not saying that splitting up a monopoly amounts to a dictatorship, I'm saying that if you were in a situation in which a single party actually is in a position to control an essential good (e.g., air on a lunar colony), you will end up with a bona fide dictatorship of the "lick my boots peasant or suffocate" kind.
I'm really *not* sure what you're trying to suggest here? That the company would be responsible for enforcing its own property rights? Why do you think the costs would rise disproportionately if one company had a monopoly?
I'm saying that even the theoretical possibility of monopolies (e.g. air on a lunar colony) is a result of having replaced parts of the free market with political control; that is, it is a result of assuming that the state will guarantee private property at any cost. In a society fully based on free markets, ownership itself is defined through a web of contractual relationships, with finite, well-defined penalties for breaking those contracts, and even the theoretical possibility vanishes, because if that situation ever arose, people would simply break their contracts and the monopolist would lose their property.
Of course, we have never had that kind of free market system. but even when the state guarantees private property, it can't do so at any cost. At some point, when private property ownership becomes too unbalanced, people "break contracts" and "pay the penalty" in the form of violent revolutions. A free market approach to private property is simply a less violent, less political, and more rational version of that.
I was under the impression that HOAs in the US were frequently petty enforcers of superficial rules. Of course, if people want to freely subject themselves to that, that's one thing, but I can't see the appeal in a local government behaving the same way for someone that appears to dislike anything more than minimal governance.
When human beings live close together, there will always be disputes, conflicts, and "superficial rules". Zoning boards are no different in that regard from HOAs. Where zoning boards and HOAs differ is that zoning boards are subject to political lobbying from people who don't pay the cost of their decisions and don't have to live with them, and that zoning boards are exempt from many of the restrictions on private contracts. So, if an HOA decides that everybody's home must be painted pink, then the people paying for painting and having to live with the pink color every day are the ones voting for it. A zoning board, on the other hand, doesn't have to bear the cost of its decisions and doesn't have to live with the consequences; zoning boards are often hijacked by outside commercial and political interests.
Part of the problem with this is that an arrangement where some corporation is the middleman, censor and thought police for all communication is a system we don't want for other reasons.
It's not "some" corporation, it's thousands of corporations, and if you don't like them, you can add another one that censors your way at next to no cost.
I've had the conversation many times with organizations that think they need to use Facebook groups to communicate with their members because that's what people expect. Then, of course, some fraction of the people object to using Facebook and don't agree with their terms of service.
Yes, welcome to the real world, where different people actually make different choices.
You asked about what good places to live in the US were and wanted a place where "people were not attached to religion"; you then clarified that by saying that what you meant by that is that you don't want religion to be "public policy". Since you are not from the US and to help you put this into perspective, I pointed out that religion is much less "public policy" in the US than it is in Europe, both according to party platforms and according to spending.
You are implying that all the red states should all being doing much better than all the states, [...] Since this is not the case, something must be wrong with your theory?
No, the only thing that is "wrong" is your persistence on thinking in false dichotomies. I'm simply pointing out that "Democratic and progressive policies don't work as promised" without saying anything about Republican policies. To see that Democratic and progressive policies don't work as promised, it is sufficient to look at the promises and the actual outcomes of where those policies have been implemented. San Francisco is an example where Democrats and progressives made big promises, on reducing homelessness, inequality, and poverty, and obviously have failed to deliver.
Progressive just mean to make progress, as in people who look for solutions, and don't fear change.
What you describe might be called a "progressive attitude". An individual progressive attitude is a good thing, just like a socialist attitude ("share with others, generosity") and a Christian attitude ("temperance, compassion and charity") are a good thing.
Progressivism, however, is a political movement. Progressivism isn't just people who value progress, progressivism seeks to achieve progress through political means and majority vote, and that doesn't work. It fails in the same way as socialism and theocracies fail to lead to generous, temperate, compassionate, and charitable societies.
Abraham Lincoln had slaves so all Republicans love slavery. This is the intellectual equivalent of your argument.
No, it isn't at all equivalent. In the late 19th century, scientists had discovered large racial differences in intelligence, abilities, and success between different groups, the heritability of IQ and mental diseases, and large differences in fertility between groups. In particular, they found that whites did a lot better than non-whites, and they were concerned about the US becoming less and less competitive compared to all-white European nations (a bit of Euro-worship, still common among progressives today, played into that). To progressives, eugenics and segregation were the logical and rational policy conclusions. That isn't my interpretation of what happened, that is documented history. Nor have things changed: modern progressive views on race and equality are different, but they are still wrong and destructive.
Progress (like generosity, temperance, charity, and compassion) is an excellent value for individuals to hold, but you can't successfully impose it through government policy. That is, the problem isn't with progressive values (and progressivism doesn't have a monopoly on people who value progress) the problem is with how they are going about to achieve it. In fact, individually, I am strongly "progressive", which is why, politically, I strongly oppose progressivism because it is antithetical to progress.
So, yeah, read up on, and face, your history. Thomas Sowell (I gave a couple of links), an economist who grew up poor and black in the South and started out as a Marxist, is a good place to start, and he has written detailed books on the subject with lots of excellent references and primary sources. I checked many of those sources because I used to be a political progressive myself until I understood its history and the problem with the ideology.
Yep, good plan. Try to "objectively" measure something by using metrics which objectively measure something you're not interested in and can easily game.
(1) People actually are interested in graduation rates, dropout rates, and test scores, that's why these metrics matter.
(2) To the degree that they are "gamed", they can be reasonably assumed to be gamed similarly in different states. That is, while these metrics make for lousy comparison over time, and hence a lousy instrument for managing educational systems, they tell us something about relative performance between states right now.
(3) Citing these metrics in this thread isn't an endorsement of the metrics, it is just to give simpletons like him and you easy to digest facts. If that doesn't satisfy you, you are welcome to read up on the detail.
Remember, the thread started with Daemonik's ludicrous claim that Kansas' educational system was failing relative to California because it wasn't spending too much money. Iffy as test scores may be, they still tell us a lot more about the performance of an educational system than how many dollars we spend per student.
Ignore my naysaying, clearly you are the genius of our age.
Well, thanks for your excellent demonstration of the shortcomings of the UK educational system.
And as an immigrant you quite likely have had far more opportunities for mobility than an average European. Likely free or very cheap college education, probably better schools and better child healthcare. So?
You're guessing and you're wrong.
They quite literally cherry-picked points to get a weak correlation.
In fact, the correlation is quite strong and consistent between many different studies.
You are insane, really. Are you going to sue a coal power plant for damages to your health? How are you going to prove it?
I was born in Russia, lived for many years in Ukraine, moved to work in Germany then founded a startup in the US. I'm now learning Mandarin as I'm flying back and forth between China and the US periodically. I kinda know what over countries are like.
So you made a smooth transition from communism to wealthy globe trotting US progressivist. Congratulations.
From your own link: " our results do not imply that government must shrink for growth to increase." Did you even read it? It doesn't sound like it...
You are quoting out of context. What they are saying, in context, is effectively that there may be ways of achieving higher growth without shrinking government. They are basically hedging their bets, as people tend to do in scientific publications.
Now back to the original point, If liberal policies are so evil, how is Californian and New York among the richest economies in the US?
I'm not sure what you mean by "richest economies". Both states are big, but in terms of per capita GDP, they were 7th and 17th, and in terms of growth, they were 20th and 46th in 2013, pretty dismal performances.
Furthermore, the usual pattern is that countries and states first become rich and then adopt welfare state policies, which then start hurting economic growth. Eventually, they usually pare back the welfare state again.
How is Qatar so wealthy despite an oppressive "unfree" political regime?
I didn't say that political freedom was important for growth, but economic freedom. Qatar has a "mostly free" economy (just behind Norway) according to the Index of Economic Freedom. Qatar's government spending is 16% of GDP (US: 36%), government employment is 11% of the population (US: 16%) and government debt-to-GDP is 32% (US: 104%). So, Qatar is an example of a country with decent amounts of economic freedom and a much smaller government than the US relative to the size of its economy. Add to that the fact that it is massively oil rich and it is not surprising that they are doing so well economically.
Do you think maybe there might be more to it than catch phrase slogans such as Freedom and Small Government for all!?
I didn't use such a "catch phrase". I pointed out that economic freedom is important for sustained, long term economic growth and for political freedoms, not that it is sufficient.
The $135K was not a fine. It was damages. Snopes doesn't do their usual good job here, but they do link to the court findings, and the Findings of Fact show a lot of up-front emotional distress
You said:
The bakers got a small fine for violating the law. However, they started a harassment campaign against the couple who wanted a cake and filed the complaint, and the resulting lawsuit was what cost them big.
That statement is wrong. The issue isn't whether you call it a "fine" or "damages", the issue is that there was no separate lawsuit. The $135000 was imposed as the resolution of the initial complaint; there was no initial "small fine" that then was increased due to subsequent conduct. And what you call a "harassment campaign" consisted of the bakery posting the letter of complaint they received from the commission to their Facebook page and giving interviews to the media. That is entirely reasonable: after all, we don't have a secret system of justice in this country, and cases like this deserve to receive wide publicity.
Cases like this cast gays and lesbians in a very bad light, making us appear to be emotionally unstable, needy, immature dependents of the state. Instead of breaking down crying and filing an anti-discrimination report, the lesbian couple should have shown some backbone, made a cutting remark, and walked out of the bakery. These kinds of anti-discrimination laws need to be abolished because they are harmful.
And if the market ends up in a position where one party dominates to an extent that it is able to dictate terms for an essential supply that the other party has no choice but to accept, does that still count as a "free market"? Or will you claim that a truly "free" market can never end up in that position because...?
I don't know of any "essential supply" with which that could happen, can you give an example? Furthermore, if there were such an "essential supply", politics would immediately kill a free market and you would end up with some form of dictatorship, so the question ceases to be an economic one. Free markets are not realistically possible in societies where people are threatened by essential shortages. However, if politics wouldn't hijack economics and free markets would continue to operate, then there would be a cost with enforcing the property rights that are associated with that monopoly, and those costs become so large that the monopoly would collapse immediately.
No, the "gasoline on the fire" is the self-reinforcing corrupting influence of money on the democratic process.
The kind of majority-based representative "democracies" we live in are inherently corrupt. In fact, the ancient Greeks referred to our system of government as "oligarchy"; what they called "democracy" was something quite different. What you are advocating is more oligarchy, not more democracy.
BTW, just to clarify, are you in favour of getting rid of government altogether? If not, why?
At the federal level, I want government in the original American sense: a government that guarantees external defense, free trade, and free mobility between states and is financed by money transfers from state governments. At the local level, I want government that operates more like an HOA than state and local government do now. Furthermore, I think the unit of local government should be a few thousand people at most.
Obviously not, since it produces semi-literate nincompoops like you. However, it is still objectively possible to determine that you are a semi-literate nincompoop, even if that determination doesn't fix anything.
Except for those countries which manage. Hell, pretty much every first world country does a better job at secondary level education than the US.
Yes, they are. Otherwise the percentage of the "middle class" would have grown. And BLS has a lot more statistics than weekly income. Anyway, see here: http://www.dailykos.com/story/...
You're just rattling off an endless stream of progressive talking points and apparently can't decide what point you are trying to argue. I can tell you this: as an immigrant, I have had much greater economic mobility in the US than in Europe. And the belly-aching from people like you just strikes me as laughable.
No, and it actually can be proven. There is no correlation between US state GDP and income growth and the amount of regulations.
Actually, there is, and numerous studies have shown that, both at the country and at the state level. http://politicalcalculations.b...
If your goal is to return good old 60-s when rivers were catching fire from deregulated dumping, then I suggest you move to China.
Environmental disasters in the US and elsewhere have been due to government protecting big industries from liability in the past. That kind of environmental protectionism has been reduced over the last few decades, which is a good thing. Unfortunately, environmental regulations still provide cover for industry to harm people.
Except it was the republican governor who overode the democrat council, and replaced it with the city manager who caused the disater!
So? I didn't say "Democrats bad Republicans good". I said economic studies have shown again and again that more economic freedom and smaller government translate into increased growth and wealth. The people of Flint, Michigan, were failed both by their Democratic and Republican governments.
As usual, rethuglicans fans ignore reality for their own fantasy.
As usual, Democrats and progressives engage in blind partisanship to the exclusion of any reason or logic.
Do you mean a market "free" from government interference or one in which supply and demand are "freely" met? I appreciate that some people would say that they're effectively the same and- again- I'd say that was dogma.
A "free market" is, by definition, one in which all transactions are voluntary and according to terms that the participants in each transaction choose.
I have no idea what it means to "meet supply and demand freely". No economy ever "meets" demand, freely or not, because demand is always unlimited and supply is always finite.
It's quite possible- if not probable- for markets free from regulation (the former) to end up in a position where the dominant party is able to abusively engage in what is effectively rent-seeking behaviour (contrary to the latter).
No, it is neither "probable" nor even "possible" for that to happen.
Regardless of what they claim, in practice businesses are not- and never have been- in favour of a level playing field if it's not in their advantage. Given enough power- in this case, financial- they *will* seek to skew things in their favour and this *will* result in influence on government and the democratic process to achieve that.
Yes, they will. And there is only one remedy to that: to reduce the size and power of government; that is the only policy we, as voters, can possibly ever hope to achieve. You, instead, imply that the solution is more regulation and more government power, which is absurd; you are proposing throwing gasoline on the fire.
Slashdot Mirror
But I'm not taking it as "axiomatic". As I was saying, highly unusual markets can produce monopolies. Furthermore, free market transactions are well defined: they are transactions that are voluntary and according to conditions entirely set by all participants.
Well, look, that's just a testament to your inexperience. Many places have just one set of wires and pipes in the ground, yet give people the option to buy from dozens of suppliers, who share the cost for the delivery system. Many other places have tunnels in the ground where it is easy to put in new wires and pipes. And many people need no utilities at all, because they can get water, sewer, and electricity on their property, yet they are still forced to buy from government monopolies.
Well, luckily, that isn't my idea. What I am saying is that I do not like moving halfway across the country to change suppliers, which is the current situation we have with public utilities. I would like that situation to end, which is precisely why I oppose government-granted monopolies.
That is what the bakery did. Then, the lesbian couple filed a complaint with BOLI, that complaint got sent to the bakery. And then the bakery published the complaint letter they received with names. (We don't know what would have happened if they hadn't published the letter with names. You presume that the fine would have been small. I don't believe that based on the judgment and the explanation.)
When the lesbian couple filed the complaint, they had to know that their names would become public. Furthermore, what you are implying is that we should have a system of justice in which the accused is not only not entitled to a jury trial, but can't even publicly talk about the charges against them and who their accuser is. That is absurd. And it is equally absurd that this kind of action helps gay rights.
A lesbian couple filing secret complaints against a bakery for not baking a cake hurts gay rights; a lesbian couple proudly standing up in public and saying something like "we are sorry this bakery feels they need to discriminate, we recommend you go to one of these gay-friendly bakeries" helps gay rights. The Bowman-Cryers did a grave disservice to gay rights and gay recognition.
You're right: exercising your right to free speech can subject you to damages. However, the bakers in this case did nothing unreasonable, either when they told the lesbian couple to go away, or when they published a government document accusing them of wrongdoing.
If you believe in anti-discrimination laws, BOLI should have awarded maybe a $100 fine and left it at that. More is completely unreasonable.
Numbers, party platforms, and laws, however, do tell the full story: government is in bed with Christian churches in much of Europe. You have to be utterly blind not to see that.
You asked for good places to live in the US and were concerned about religion being "public policy". And I responded that religion is much less "public policy" in the US than in Europe, and that even when Americans are religious, they tend to be quite tolerant.
You want to talk about Christianity in politics? Note that even on gay marriage, Germany (one of the more "progressive" European countries on gay rights) has always been behind the US.
Well, as a gay man, I'm glad I emigrated from the "sophisticated and progressive" European culture to the "barbaric" American culture.
You claimed that my statement that progressivism favored segregation and eugenics was "loony". I recalled the history for you.
That is absolutely false: many people strongly opposed progressive policies at the time. Their objection wasn't to the scientific conclusions, their objection was to the idea that majorities have the right to interfere in the private lives of people for the public's benefit. You obviously still haven't learned from those mistakes.
You say that as if "forward" were something a large number of people agree on. From your other postings, I would say that it is you who is trying to keep people back and whose idea of "progress" is some stagnant European middle class hell.
I was born in one of those countries and have lived in several of them. Yes, I see the pattern, obviously, you don't.
Reality is that, based on the very data that EPI uses (namely BLS numbers), manufacturing productivity has doubled between 2000 and 2014, while manufacturing employment has gone down to a lesser degree, so the EPI analysis of that data is clearly false. I gave you the links to the original data and graphs. If you can't understand a simple graph, that's your problem, not mine.
You envisioned unrealistic Total Recall scenarios. I pointed out that the failures you postulate are not market failures but political failures, such as not accounting for the cost of policing and assuming unlimited enforceability of property rights. It's OK to ignore those factors when discussing existing, real-world markets; but you can't ignore them when you extrapolate to unrealistic Total Recall scenarios.
I have no idea what you mean by that. Of course, hypothetical free markets can produce monopolies; for example, on an isolated island with just two people on it, all goods are by definition monopolized. As I was saying before, realistically, free markets only operate well in large, educated societies with lots of products. But in those societies, they do operate better than any alternative. Furthermore, when free markets break down, it is through politics, not market mechanisms.
That isn't a "monopoly on an essential good", it's a local monopoly, and almost always an artificial one at that. That is, there are many people you can buy electricity from in the market as a whole, it's just that you may have to move to get it. And most of those local monopolies are artificial anyway. That is, in most places, you could actually have a choice of suppliers, or even supply yourself, if government hadn't granted an artificial local monopoly to some utility, usually due to political lobbying.
That is my point: your idea about monopolies is as unrealistic as Total Recall; in real societies, monopolies don't operate that way.
If you look at the actual data, the conclusions of the report fall apart. Real output per person in the manufacturing sector has nearly doubled since 2000. Note that the FRED time series come from the same source as what EPI uses, the BLS. All your link shows again is that EPI is an organization of dishonest partisan hacks. What might give you a clue is that Figure A shows you a year-by-year graph of employment, while Figure B shows a bar chart of hand-picked time ranges.
Of course, a more fundamental question to ask is why organizations like the EPI want to condemn Americans to working in menial, low-paying blue-collar jobs in the first place. I guess the answer isn't all that difficult: Democrats and progressives like lots of low wage, dissatisfied, blue collar workers: it keeps them in power.
You first said that "jobs have been moving to China"; wrong. Then you said "The manufacturing sector crashed"; wrong. Now you're clinging like mad to the fact that there has been a reduction in the number of manufacturing jobs in the US since 2000. It's you who keeps moving the goal posts.
What do these number actually mean? While the number of manufacturing jobs has decreased, US manufacturing output has increased since 2000. So, obviously, jobs didn't "move to China", but rather manufacturing has become more automated and more efficient. That's generally a good thing, but it has probably been speeded up by US policies during the same time that increase the cost of labor.
I'm not trying to "win" arguments. I'm trying to understand how misguided people like you think, since obviously there are a lot of you around.
The only way they can determine whether you used your phone during a crash is to get deep into every single application and look at its logs: the SMS app, chat apps, the web browser, social media apps, etc. And you have to be naive to think that they aren't going to do keywords searches at the same time. And when the keyword searches "alert", they have the justification to dig deeper.
No, I don't. There are many fungible sources of water, electricity, gas, and staple foods. I mean, get real: how would anybody manage to get a monopoly on potatoes?
You seem to be misinterpreting what I'm saying. I'm not saying that splitting up a monopoly amounts to a dictatorship, I'm saying that if you were in a situation in which a single party actually is in a position to control an essential good (e.g., air on a lunar colony), you will end up with a bona fide dictatorship of the "lick my boots peasant or suffocate" kind.
I'm saying that even the theoretical possibility of monopolies (e.g. air on a lunar colony) is a result of having replaced parts of the free market with political control; that is, it is a result of assuming that the state will guarantee private property at any cost. In a society fully based on free markets, ownership itself is defined through a web of contractual relationships, with finite, well-defined penalties for breaking those contracts, and even the theoretical possibility vanishes, because if that situation ever arose, people would simply break their contracts and the monopolist would lose their property.
Of course, we have never had that kind of free market system. but even when the state guarantees private property, it can't do so at any cost. At some point, when private property ownership becomes too unbalanced, people "break contracts" and "pay the penalty" in the form of violent revolutions. A free market approach to private property is simply a less violent, less political, and more rational version of that.
When human beings live close together, there will always be disputes, conflicts, and "superficial rules". Zoning boards are no different in that regard from HOAs. Where zoning boards and HOAs differ is that zoning boards are subject to political lobbying from people who don't pay the cost of their decisions and don't have to live with them, and that zoning boards are exempt from many of the restrictions on private contracts. So, if an HOA decides that everybody's home must be painted pink, then the people paying for painting and having to live with the pink color every day are the ones voting for it. A zoning board, on the other hand, doesn't have to bear the cost of its decisions and doesn't have to live with the consequences; zoning boards are often hijacked by outside commercial and political interests.
Oh, I haven't had my coffee yet, so sorry about the lack of editing.
It's not "some" corporation, it's thousands of corporations, and if you don't like them, you can add another one that censors your way at next to no cost.
Yes, welcome to the real world, where different people actually make different choices.
You asked about what good places to live in the US were and wanted a place where "people were not attached to religion"; you then clarified that by saying that what you meant by that is that you don't want religion to be "public policy". Since you are not from the US and to help you put this into perspective, I pointed out that religion is much less "public policy" in the US than it is in Europe, both according to party platforms and according to spending.
No, the only thing that is "wrong" is your persistence on thinking in false dichotomies. I'm simply pointing out that "Democratic and progressive policies don't work as promised" without saying anything about Republican policies. To see that Democratic and progressive policies don't work as promised, it is sufficient to look at the promises and the actual outcomes of where those policies have been implemented. San Francisco is an example where Democrats and progressives made big promises, on reducing homelessness, inequality, and poverty, and obviously have failed to deliver.
What you describe might be called a "progressive attitude". An individual progressive attitude is a good thing, just like a socialist attitude ("share with others, generosity") and a Christian attitude ("temperance, compassion and charity") are a good thing.
Progressivism, however, is a political movement. Progressivism isn't just people who value progress, progressivism seeks to achieve progress through political means and majority vote, and that doesn't work. It fails in the same way as socialism and theocracies fail to lead to generous, temperate, compassionate, and charitable societies.
No, it isn't at all equivalent. In the late 19th century, scientists had discovered large racial differences in intelligence, abilities, and success between different groups, the heritability of IQ and mental diseases, and large differences in fertility between groups. In particular, they found that whites did a lot better than non-whites, and they were concerned about the US becoming less and less competitive compared to all-white European nations (a bit of Euro-worship, still common among progressives today, played into that). To progressives, eugenics and segregation were the logical and rational policy conclusions. That isn't my interpretation of what happened, that is documented history. Nor have things changed: modern progressive views on race and equality are different, but they are still wrong and destructive.
Progress (like generosity, temperance, charity, and compassion) is an excellent value for individuals to hold, but you can't successfully impose it through government policy. That is, the problem isn't with progressive values (and progressivism doesn't have a monopoly on people who value progress) the problem is with how they are going about to achieve it. In fact, individually, I am strongly "progressive", which is why, politically, I strongly oppose progressivism because it is antithetical to progress.
So, yeah, read up on, and face, your history. Thomas Sowell (I gave a couple of links), an economist who grew up poor and black in the South and started out as a Marxist, is a good place to start, and he has written detailed books on the subject with lots of excellent references and primary sources. I checked many of those sources because I used to be a political progressive myself until I understood its history and the problem with the ideology.
(1) People actually are interested in graduation rates, dropout rates, and test scores, that's why these metrics matter.
(2) To the degree that they are "gamed", they can be reasonably assumed to be gamed similarly in different states. That is, while these metrics make for lousy comparison over time, and hence a lousy instrument for managing educational systems, they tell us something about relative performance between states right now.
(3) Citing these metrics in this thread isn't an endorsement of the metrics, it is just to give simpletons like him and you easy to digest facts. If that doesn't satisfy you, you are welcome to read up on the detail.
Remember, the thread started with Daemonik's ludicrous claim that Kansas' educational system was failing relative to California because it wasn't spending too much money. Iffy as test scores may be, they still tell us a lot more about the performance of an educational system than how many dollars we spend per student.
Well, thanks for your excellent demonstration of the shortcomings of the UK educational system.
You're guessing and you're wrong.
In fact, the correlation is quite strong and consistent between many different studies.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=coal+poll...
So you made a smooth transition from communism to wealthy globe trotting US progressivist. Congratulations.
No, you can't make this shit up because it happens to be true.
https://www.creators.com/read/...
https://www.creators.com/read/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Of course, it's not a history that Democrats and progressives are fond of, which is why they have been trying hard to rewrite history.
You are quoting out of context. What they are saying, in context, is effectively that there may be ways of achieving higher growth without shrinking government. They are basically hedging their bets, as people tend to do in scientific publications.
I'm not sure what you mean by "richest economies". Both states are big, but in terms of per capita GDP, they were 7th and 17th, and in terms of growth, they were 20th and 46th in 2013, pretty dismal performances.
Furthermore, the usual pattern is that countries and states first become rich and then adopt welfare state policies, which then start hurting economic growth. Eventually, they usually pare back the welfare state again.
I didn't say that political freedom was important for growth, but economic freedom. Qatar has a "mostly free" economy (just behind Norway) according to the Index of Economic Freedom. Qatar's government spending is 16% of GDP (US: 36%), government employment is 11% of the population (US: 16%) and government debt-to-GDP is 32% (US: 104%). So, Qatar is an example of a country with decent amounts of economic freedom and a much smaller government than the US relative to the size of its economy. Add to that the fact that it is massively oil rich and it is not surprising that they are doing so well economically.
I didn't use such a "catch phrase". I pointed out that economic freedom is important for sustained, long term economic growth and for political freedoms, not that it is sufficient.
You said:
That statement is wrong. The issue isn't whether you call it a "fine" or "damages", the issue is that there was no separate lawsuit. The $135000 was imposed as the resolution of the initial complaint; there was no initial "small fine" that then was increased due to subsequent conduct. And what you call a "harassment campaign" consisted of the bakery posting the letter of complaint they received from the commission to their Facebook page and giving interviews to the media. That is entirely reasonable: after all, we don't have a secret system of justice in this country, and cases like this deserve to receive wide publicity.
Cases like this cast gays and lesbians in a very bad light, making us appear to be emotionally unstable, needy, immature dependents of the state. Instead of breaking down crying and filing an anti-discrimination report, the lesbian couple should have shown some backbone, made a cutting remark, and walked out of the bakery. These kinds of anti-discrimination laws need to be abolished because they are harmful.
I don't know of any "essential supply" with which that could happen, can you give an example? Furthermore, if there were such an "essential supply", politics would immediately kill a free market and you would end up with some form of dictatorship, so the question ceases to be an economic one. Free markets are not realistically possible in societies where people are threatened by essential shortages. However, if politics wouldn't hijack economics and free markets would continue to operate, then there would be a cost with enforcing the property rights that are associated with that monopoly, and those costs become so large that the monopoly would collapse immediately.
The kind of majority-based representative "democracies" we live in are inherently corrupt. In fact, the ancient Greeks referred to our system of government as "oligarchy"; what they called "democracy" was something quite different. What you are advocating is more oligarchy, not more democracy.
At the federal level, I want government in the original American sense: a government that guarantees external defense, free trade, and free mobility between states and is financed by money transfers from state governments. At the local level, I want government that operates more like an HOA than state and local government do now. Furthermore, I think the unit of local government should be a few thousand people at most.
Obviously not, since it produces semi-literate nincompoops like you. However, it is still objectively possible to determine that you are a semi-literate nincompoop, even if that determination doesn't fix anything.
Coming from you, that is ironic.
You're just rattling off an endless stream of progressive talking points and apparently can't decide what point you are trying to argue. I can tell you this: as an immigrant, I have had much greater economic mobility in the US than in Europe. And the belly-aching from people like you just strikes me as laughable.
Actually, there is, and numerous studies have shown that, both at the country and at the state level. http://politicalcalculations.b...
Environmental disasters in the US and elsewhere have been due to government protecting big industries from liability in the past. That kind of environmental protectionism has been reduced over the last few decades, which is a good thing. Unfortunately, environmental regulations still provide cover for industry to harm people.
So? I didn't say "Democrats bad Republicans good". I said economic studies have shown again and again that more economic freedom and smaller government translate into increased growth and wealth. The people of Flint, Michigan, were failed both by their Democratic and Republican governments.
As usual, Democrats and progressives engage in blind partisanship to the exclusion of any reason or logic.
A "free market" is, by definition, one in which all transactions are voluntary and according to terms that the participants in each transaction choose.
I have no idea what it means to "meet supply and demand freely". No economy ever "meets" demand, freely or not, because demand is always unlimited and supply is always finite.
No, it is neither "probable" nor even "possible" for that to happen.
Yes, they will. And there is only one remedy to that: to reduce the size and power of government; that is the only policy we, as voters, can possibly ever hope to achieve. You, instead, imply that the solution is more regulation and more government power, which is absurd; you are proposing throwing gasoline on the fire.