"than some kkk asshat being able to tell me to move to some other city where my "kind" is tolerated"
Like sheriffs and politicians do?
"to the days where I could be pushed out of a store with a shotgun just for being the wrong skin color."
You really, really need to read some history. You would learn that the bus companies did not want to discriminate, discrimination was the law. You would learn that the US was the only country in the world to eliminate chattel slavery through war, which left some bad feelings. You would learn that the poverty rate was dropping continuously until the Great Society enshrined poverty and ensured that there would always be poor to "care for".
Maybe, just maybe, you've been blaming the wrong people all your life. But don't let facts get in the way of a good "Oh Woe Is Me, Give Me More Money" sob story.
For someone who then talks about enslaved Oompa Loompas, you seem to have a very insincere grasp of Liberty.
If the hippies want to set up a socialist utopia, they are welcome to do so, on their own time and land. Some have.
If the libertarians don't want to pay taxes, then again they are welcome to pay the FULL COSTS of their decisions, no externalizing costs through taxes and regulations.
After all, if the Oompa Loompas can be can be said to be enslaved, then taxation must be recognized as armed robbery.
Another problem is "rings". The rotor has flat barriers at the points of the triangle, and rings around the two faces of the rotor. These wear very quickly, and need to be replaced.
Imagine if you had to have a "ring job" every 50k miles. That's serious $$.
When Mazda introduced the rotary engine in America, the gas milage was better than what is listed here now, but it used an afterburner to reduce emissions rather than a catalytic converter. Just a data point. Even though they use catalytic converters now, and so don't have to run "a little rich" to fuel the afterburner, the milage still sucks?
My "government intervention" detector suggests all those standards and requirements that have been building up over the decades have created a situation where they are trying to do more, and that costs fuel. The MTBE contradiction: It reduces emissions, but burns less efficiently so more fuel is burned thus increasing emissions.
I would be interested to see a tiny rotary compared to a tiny turbine to be connected to the generator of a hybrid. I wonder how those two scale compared to pistons? Hmmm.....
Actually, the US Navy did look into it. However, because the carrier would be so much more efficient in terms of manpower and other resources, the Navy scrapped the idea because even though it would carry equivalent firepower as a sea-borne carrier, it wouldn't rate an Admiral to command the "battle group".
The sea-borne carrier is such a huge bomb- and torpedo-magnet that the support requirements of its "battle group" are remarkably expansive. The carrier is never out as "just the carrier".
Personally, I've loved the idea of an air-borne air-strip since I first heard about the study many years ago. This isn't just the silly airship-with-a-hook idea from around WW1, but a serious modern flat-top.
An antenna is a tuned receiver, but everything and anything capable of carrying a current is a receiver none the less.
It's just that you're not resonant.
Just by being there, the materials of your body are already reacting to the electromagnetic radiation in the space around you. There is indeed coupling between any radiator and your body. It's just that the voltages are so low as to be irrelevant most of the time.
By attaching a coil/cap to your body and tuning it, you can make the combination resonant to your desired frequency and thus have your body be part of the antenna.
A transmit antenna utilizes far higher voltages, and is more sensitive to being resonant, than a receiver. Using ones body as a transmitter would likely not be a "good thing", except that the radiation frequency would most likely be skimming over the surface of your body anyway rather than traveling through it. That's the point of a transmitter, to *radiate* the energy as electro-magnetic waves rather than carry it as current.
Did you ever see the TV show "Law and Order"? They deal with murders, robberies, lots of fights, dramatic stuff. Woopie. They don't even break a sweat.
Then in one episode, a cop is killed. The characters go NUTS! People are not questioned quietly, "Where were you on Thursday, ma'am?". No, people are thrown up against walls first, then the questions are not asked they are demanded. Vast efforts are expended. "One Of Our Own" has been harmed and the criminal WILL be found!
This is a normal evolution of society. Did you know that professional police, in the West anyway, were invented in the early 1800's by Sir Robert Peal in England? "Bobbies" they called them, and they went unarmed. They were servants, they were respected in the scope of their jobs and at the same time they could call out for aid with their voices and their whistles and people would come running to help them. And since England had a tradition of being an armed society, people responded armed and ready to help out in any way.
Then with the 20th century, the police went from "peace keeping" to a new role: Law Enforcement. Instead of waiting for someone to commit a crime, now police go looking for bad guys. The "knock in the middle of the night" is not a phenomenon of bad WW2 movies or TV shows about people with bad eastern-European accents. Now it happens in so-called "free" countries.
At the same time, the traditions of the "armed citizen" have come under attack. The more success the prohibition on private ownership of arms, the greater the effect has been: rising crime rates, fear, and a culture of victimhood.
The police are now armed in England, although I've heard that a token "unarmed" policy stays in effect for some number of police until someone calls backup or unlocks the trunk of the cop car. Citizens are no longer asked to come forward with information, they are no longer relied upon for aid, they are told to go home and not get involved.
Police are the armed class. They are the Samurai, whose name means "servant" but who in reality rule because they are armed while everyone else is disarmed. The people live in fear of offending a cop because the cop is always assumed to be in the right when they act against someone.
That is why this videotape was so dangerous. It removed that assumption of innocence from the cop, and it had to be stopped. The police cannot stand to have that assumption challenged, because it will undermine their power: fear.
trespass is not a justification for killing someone.
Yes, it is. Go look it up.
Unless you live in a state which makes self defense itself illegal, such as Massachusetts and New York, if someone breaks into your home that is prime face evidence of intent to do harm. And even in Mass and NY, it is the use of a gun which is illegal, not the self-defense itself. Even there, and I have lived in both those states, someone breaking into your home is legally assumed to already be a violent threat.
Even in "liberal" California, and I see someone has already pointed out that Texas is a very dangerous place to be a criminal.
Even if you think everyone who owns a private firearm is a "trigger-happy nut case", you would be very well served if you took the course required by your state to receive a concealed handgun license.
Not only will you get to meet and talk to people you paint as "trigger-happy nut case"s, which will be good all by itself, you will also find out just what the legal environment is concerning self defense, and the hows and whys of safely handling a firearm.
Just as there is a word for someone who distrusts others who do not look like them, "racism", there is a word for people who distrust others who choose to be armed. It's called "Hoplophobia". It is surprisingly common.
Public schools are still more expensive. That money has to come from somewhere, regardless of whether they are touted as "free".
And the reason for having to bus, having to take all comers, being unable to expel, are all due to the bureaucracy. They all raise the costs even more, wasting resources on irrelevancies. Just because everyone pays the cost doesn't mean it costs less.
Social Security is not an investment at all, it's a ponzi scheme. So?
Let's see. I say that private schools cost less, you tell me they're incomparable. You compare Social Security to an investment, I point out that they are incomparable, and you come back with "So?"?
That's called hypocrisy.
Or would you like to tell me that because of what you think of SS now, that it didn't help the indigent elderly when it was originally implimented?
Gladly. Being a coercive government program, it immediately displaced other alternatives. It immediately began being used as an alternative to private investment, if for no other reason than the wage earner was bringing home that much less money than they otherwise would after SS was taken out.
Working people therefore also had that much less to spend taking care of their own elderly. With medicare and medicaid, just stick the old folks in a home and ignore them. Much cheaper that way.
So yeah, the elderly have been harmed by Social Security, just as everyone has been harmed by Social Security. That's the nature of all coercive government programs.
"If this thing blows up, guess who're going to be blamed for it?"
That's easy: Capitalism and the Free Market.
That's who gets blamed for every government bureaucratic boondoggle.
Slashdot is hardly the place to call for abolishing NASA and repealing all the laws against individual exploitation of space. Too many government run public school "graduates" who have accepted the "government is good" Big Lie hook, line and sinker. Or rather, "lock, stock, and barrel."
The libertarians are really inconsistent on this issue. A number of them really love the idea of property and have been suckered in by the name.
I don't think you are going to find any that support the absurdities that have been made of copyright and patent.
The most inconsistent positions will be 1) Supporting only the explicitly limited time frame of the monopoly grant, as specified in the Constitution, and 2) Abolishing the legal grant of monopoly completely and allowing contract to deal with the issues the same way everything else is done, including everything that was once copyrighten and patentted.
That's not a lot of spread, when compared to "The Mouse Will Never Go Public Domain!"
Don't pay attention to the anarcho-capitalists trying to hijack the party. Not all libertarians want to privatize roads. It is one of the few constitutional functions of government after all.
Actually no, the government is authorized to build "post roads" only.
The private turnpikes were doing quite well until they were expropriated by governments. Bridges, dams, canals, all privately built. Really.
Libertarians need to learn some marketing. From what I can tell, they are the party that supports selling off all roads and sidewalks, essentially abolishing the right to travel.
Indeed, if that's your impression, then marketing certainly isn't working.
So what did people do before the government owned all the highways? They built them themselves. Look up "turnpike" in a history book, and be amazed.
They seem to be inconsistent in some messages (i.e., they are pro-business, when they should be for limitations on corporations based of how they describe liberty).
Limitations of what? Do you really mean, allowing the people who own and run organizations to be held responsible for their "organization's" actions? That isn't pro- or anti-business, that's anti government-granted-limited-liability.
Why should I change if public roads work so good?
They do? As someone stuck in traffic on the only road between A and B some time.
Yes, public schools are cheaper than private.
Actually, they're not. The public schools spend more than $10,000 per student, per year, every year, and it's only going up. Private schools charge far less than that, and get better academic performance on every measurement. Homeschoolers spend a fraction of that and beat public and private schools.
If you like video instead of reading, try doing a little bit of piracy and finding "ABC's 20/20 Stupid In America". While John Stossel comes down hard in favor of vouchers, the reasons why are what will shock you to your boots if you are paying attention.
Social Security is run with a lot less overhead than Wall Street funds doing the same T-bill investments.
Social Security is not an investment at all, it's a ponzi scheme. Present beneficiaries are being paid out of present donations. There is no trust fund, there is no set-aside, the money goes into and comes out of the general fund.
The only reason SS is said to "cost less" is because the government doesn't include sallaries of government employees or costs of the buildings and facilities in their "cost" estimates.
When the Libertarian message gets me benefits (and I think those that run can manage to impliment their ideas), I might consider them.
If the only information you are listening to comes from government, as your statements of "fact" indicates, then no wonder you have a bad impression of "libertarians".
Until then, they are the party for government-hating gun nuts (and no, people that support the 2nd Amendment aren't gun nuts, the people that get upset they can't have their Desert Eagle strapped to their hip wandering around their children's kindergarden are gun nuts).
When someone comes to the school your child is in and starts killing them (even though murder is illegal) with whatever weapon they choose to use (regardless of any law to the contrary), you'd better pray that some principled gun owner who chose not to be disarmed by law is there to stop them....like what happened in Pearl, Mississippi, when a killer decided to visit a "gun free zone". Oh, you didn't hear about that? Then may I suggest http://www.johnrlott.com/ _The Bias Against Guns_ by John R. Lott?
I wish the Pirate party far better success than the Libertarians have had. It is surprising that the message of Liberty does not resonate in the United States.
There's the shotgun approach for you. I hope you can learn something about both economics and "risk". The problem being that government never risks itself, and private ventures "bet the farm" many times. That is why private efforts always out-perform government ones, be it "dollars to orbit", crossing the South Pole, finding the North West Passage, or delivering fresh strawberries to my grocery store in January cheap enough that even I can afford them.
Oh no, such an effort for mere strawberries would be a waste of taxpayer money. It's too risky.
The problem is assuming that it can be controlled. Just like socialism, the problem is the assumption that it is possible to plan at all.
Without government interference, as soon as a medium of exchange becomes unstable it is abandoned. I am not going to trust something that is subject to "uncontrolled", by which you mean rampant, inflation or deflation. Neither would you.
The source of what problems there are is the legal mandate, the monopoly, "legal tender for all debts public and private". That is a legally forced monopoly, and monopolies cause problems.
Manipulations by private interests, again, can only happen when those interests, such as the Federal Reserve, operate by government fiat. Withtout that fiat, if it becomes unstable it is abandoned for a more stable commodity or whatever. That's why banks that try those funny games used to fail. But that again was before government stepped in and prevented such failures so that there are no limits to the corruption possible.
The reason so much of the world went to dollars, is because it was better than using the fiat currency that the local government(s) had printed into oblivion. Now the dollar has competition with the Euro, and sure enough as soon as someone like Iraq makes noises about selling their products in Euros the government backing the dollar sends in the marines.
Government ruins everything it touches. There is no measure by which I can tell you how much I prefer private freedom to the enslavement to evil which is government.
By any measure the bank runs, recessions and "instability" of the hundreds of years under the universal gold standard pale to nothing compared to just the 17 years of the "Great Depression" that happened, and could only have happened, once the government took hold of the money supply in 1913.
I believe the problem is that you are accustomed to government control of the money supply, and the thought of a commodity, rather than fiat, currency makes you uncomfortable because it would be different. That's the only way I can reconcile the difference between the historical record of events and the concerns you have about "manipulation by private interests."
"So long as "In God We Trust" is enough for people to accept dollar bills then there is no need for backing."
I couldn't agree more. Government and money are a toxic mix and need to be abolished ASAP.
Once that's done, I don't really care what the denominations, materials, commodities or "shares of Microsoft" are utilized as money, since any such transaction is a voluntary interaction between two parties and none of my business. I expect that what will happen is what has happened in the past, a particular commodity will become the "generally agreed upon" standard against which everything else is measured.
Neither "inflation" nor "deflation" are the hazard where money is concerned. The hazard is manipulation.
"This requires the addition of silver (or alternate an alternate currency such as Microsoft stock) to increase the liquid assests in circulation for use. That is by definition inflation, that the original poster is against."
I disagree only in the particular that substituting the medium of exchange isn't inflation, because the explicit "money supply" is still fixed in terms of whatever the standard is. Other commodities don't change the availability of a gold standard, for example, they merely allow greater fungability of the currency. Hmmm.... how to word this.....
Inflation is changing the supply of money, it is noticed as an increase in the "price" of goods due to the greater supply of currency compared to the supply of those goods. The unit of money is cheapened because there are more of those units of money in circulation. The German "Great Inflation" is a good example, so is the substantial devaluation of the Federal Reserve Note that even I can see in the last few years of my own experience.
In a commodity money environment, as deflationary pressure exists, something like the dime, nickle and penny are utilized. They are used in place of the standard, let's say gold for the sake of historic argument. Having silver available doesn't change the value of gold, having copper available doesn't change silver, having nickel available doesn't change copper. They may fluxuate compared to each other, which fuels speculation when some government tries to set a legal fixed exchange rate. But then we're right back where we stared with governments causing interference in the use of money and such speculation has nothing to do with "free market money" at all. When cheaper than their face value, they're currency. When more expensive, they are commodity. That's why silver forks were melted down like mad when the Hunt brothers tried to corner the Silver market in the early 80s.
Actual inflation, the changing in the value of money itself, can only occur when, for instance, today there are more "dollars" in circulation than there were yesterday. The central banks talk about simply matching the increasing supply with the rate of what-would-have-been deflation, but in reality they give lots of new money to the governments to spend, who get to spend it at the old rate, and by the time it filters down through the contractors and sub-contractors to use common citizens, prices have adjusted to the new supply and you and I experience "inflation".
Commodity money is far, far less subject to such creation of money from nowhere. In every example of inflation some government (or central bank, same thing) was behind it. From Roman coin-clipping to fractional reserve banking, it's all just fraud.
At least with a complete separation of government from money, the flim-flam artists could be prosecuted instead of enshrined by law.
Abolish NASA, get the laws restricting space travel repealed. Let the same profit motive that explored the planet explore the other planets.
Yes, it is easier to say than do. Doing is what entrepreneurs do best. If moon rocks could be sold, there would be more moon exploration looking for interesting rocks than Congress could fund in 100 years!
And then there are asteroids, just floating there waiting for someone to go grab one...
"If this thing blows up, guess who're going to be blamed for it?"
That's easy: Capitalism and the Free Market.
That's who gets blamed for every government bureaucratic boondoggle.
Slashdot is hardly the place to call for abolishing NASA and repealing all the laws against individual exploitation of space. Too many government run public school "graduates" who have accepted the "government is good" Big Lie hook, line and sinker. Or rather, "lock, stock, and barrel."
"If this thing blows up, guess who're going to be blamed for it?"
That's easy: Capitalism and the Free Market.
That's who gets blamed for every government bureaucratic boondoggle.
Slashdot is hardly the place to call for abolishing NASA and repealing all the laws against individual exploitation of space. Too many government run public school "graduates" who have accepted the "government is good" Big Lie hook, line and sinker. Or rather, "lock, stock, and barrel."
"we haven't seen deflation in America in quite a while"
Not since 1912 and the establishment of the Federal Reserve.
The "price of money" graph shows a slow, steady increase in the value of money, "deflation" as it were, because of improvements in technology and distribution making it possible to do "do more with less".
Then the Fed started printing money. Then inflation takes off like a rocket. There is a small leveling around 1934-6 when the price controlls were in full force, but other than that it's been a continuous debasement of the dollar.
"Yes because what we really need is only the rich being able to readily access liquid assets."
Interesting. Can you tell me why not having the government printing money would prevent anyone else from doing the same?
Just as an exercise, I asked a group of people to consider shares of Microsoft. Would they take them as currency? I was not surprised to have them universally positive about the idea.
The problem with this theory you have about money, is that money is fungable. That means it can be divided infinitely. 10,000 pennies is just another way of saying $100. That's why money has existed in many different forms over time, including mills. Remember mills? You can still calculate your taxes in mills, being 1/1000 of a dollar, even though the printing of worthless fiat currency has made the mill non-existant in common American currency.
If all currency had to be gold, as you seem to be implying, then yes gold would have a very high value. But gold has _always_ had a very high value, that's why silver and copper were used as currency with a lower unit value as reflects the greater quantity available for circulation.
Would you care to elaborate on your assertion that assets would be difficult to liquidate if the government didn't print paper money? Have I completely missed your mark?
Slashdot Mirror
"where segregated lunch counters don't exist"
Segregated by law. Look it up.
"than some kkk asshat being able to tell me to move to some other city where my "kind" is tolerated"
Like sheriffs and politicians do?
"to the days where I could be pushed out of a store with a shotgun just for being the wrong skin color."
You really, really need to read some history. You would learn that the bus companies did not want to discriminate, discrimination was the law. You would learn that the US was the only country in the world to eliminate chattel slavery through war, which left some bad feelings. You would learn that the poverty rate was dropping continuously until the Great Society enshrined poverty and ensured that there would always be poor to "care for".
Maybe, just maybe, you've been blaming the wrong people all your life. But don't let facts get in the way of a good "Oh Woe Is Me, Give Me More Money" sob story.
For someone who then talks about enslaved Oompa Loompas, you seem to have a very insincere grasp of Liberty.
If the hippies want to set up a socialist utopia, they are welcome to do so, on their own time and land. Some have.
If the libertarians don't want to pay taxes, then again they are welcome to pay the FULL COSTS of their decisions, no externalizing costs through taxes and regulations.
After all, if the Oompa Loompas can be can be said to be enslaved, then taxation must be recognized as armed robbery.
Indeed, my experience was with the RX-3 in ~1971, first car I ever drove. Thanks for bringing me up 30 years in development!
But how cool, "It's got no valves and uses an afterburner!" I'm sure you can see why that image sticks in my mind.
Another problem is "rings". The rotor has flat barriers at the points of the triangle, and rings around the two faces of the rotor. These wear very quickly, and need to be replaced.
Imagine if you had to have a "ring job" every 50k miles. That's serious $$.
When Mazda introduced the rotary engine in America, the gas milage was better than what is listed here now, but it used an afterburner to reduce emissions rather than a catalytic converter. Just a data point. Even though they use catalytic converters now, and so don't have to run "a little rich" to fuel the afterburner, the milage still sucks?
My "government intervention" detector suggests all those standards and requirements that have been building up over the decades have created a situation where they are trying to do more, and that costs fuel. The MTBE contradiction: It reduces emissions, but burns less efficiently so more fuel is burned thus increasing emissions.
I would be interested to see a tiny rotary compared to a tiny turbine to be connected to the generator of a hybrid. I wonder how those two scale compared to pistons? Hmmm.....
Bob-
Actually, the US Navy did look into it. However, because the carrier would be so much more efficient in terms of manpower and other resources, the Navy scrapped the idea because even though it would carry equivalent firepower as a sea-borne carrier, it wouldn't rate an Admiral to command the "battle group".
The sea-borne carrier is such a huge bomb- and torpedo-magnet that the support requirements of its "battle group" are remarkably expansive. The carrier is never out as "just the carrier".
Personally, I've loved the idea of an air-borne air-strip since I first heard about the study many years ago. This isn't just the silly airship-with-a-hook idea from around WW1, but a serious modern flat-top.
Hmmm, I wonder what Google might yield....
Bob-
An antenna is a tuned receiver, but everything and anything capable of carrying a current is a receiver none the less.
It's just that you're not resonant.
Just by being there, the materials of your body are already reacting to the electromagnetic radiation in the space around you. There is indeed coupling between any radiator and your body. It's just that the voltages are so low as to be irrelevant most of the time.
By attaching a coil/cap to your body and tuning it, you can make the combination resonant to your desired frequency and thus have your body be part of the antenna.
A transmit antenna utilizes far higher voltages, and is more sensitive to being resonant, than a receiver. Using ones body as a transmitter would likely not be a "good thing", except that the radiation frequency would most likely be skimming over the surface of your body anyway rather than traveling through it. That's the point of a transmitter, to *radiate* the energy as electro-magnetic waves rather than carry it as current.
Bob-
Funny. XINE opened the stream perfectly.
...until reverse engineering is made illegal, that is.
That's the problem with standards. Stick with one long enough, it gets reverse engineered.
Be aware, the "Kerberos" that Microsoft supports is Microsoft Kerberos.
Any resemblance to the Kerberos prior to their "embrace, extend, extinguish" effort is entirely coincidental.
That said, I agree with the thrust of your argument.
Bob-
Did you ever see the TV show "Law and Order"? They deal with murders, robberies, lots of fights, dramatic stuff. Woopie. They don't even break a sweat.
Then in one episode, a cop is killed. The characters go NUTS! People are not questioned quietly, "Where were you on Thursday, ma'am?". No, people are thrown up against walls first, then the questions are not asked they are demanded. Vast efforts are expended. "One Of Our Own" has been harmed and the criminal WILL be found!
This is a normal evolution of society. Did you know that professional police, in the West anyway, were invented in the early 1800's by Sir Robert Peal in England? "Bobbies" they called them, and they went unarmed. They were servants, they were respected in the scope of their jobs and at the same time they could call out for aid with their voices and their whistles and people would come running to help them. And since England had a tradition of being an armed society, people responded armed and ready to help out in any way.
Then with the 20th century, the police went from "peace keeping" to a new role: Law Enforcement. Instead of waiting for someone to commit a crime, now police go looking for bad guys. The "knock in the middle of the night" is not a phenomenon of bad WW2 movies or TV shows about people with bad eastern-European accents. Now it happens in so-called "free" countries.
At the same time, the traditions of the "armed citizen" have come under attack. The more success the prohibition on private ownership of arms, the greater the effect has been: rising crime rates, fear, and a culture of victimhood.
The police are now armed in England, although I've heard that a token "unarmed" policy stays in effect for some number of police until someone calls backup or unlocks the trunk of the cop car. Citizens are no longer asked to come forward with information, they are no longer relied upon for aid, they are told to go home and not get involved.
Police are the armed class. They are the Samurai, whose name means "servant" but who in reality rule because they are armed while everyone else is disarmed. The people live in fear of offending a cop because the cop is always assumed to be in the right when they act against someone.
That is why this videotape was so dangerous. It removed that assumption of innocence from the cop, and it had to be stopped. The police cannot stand to have that assumption challenged, because it will undermine their power: fear.
Bob-
Yes, it is. Go look it up.
Unless you live in a state which makes self defense itself illegal, such as Massachusetts and New York, if someone breaks into your home that is prime face evidence of intent to do harm. And even in Mass and NY, it is the use of a gun which is illegal, not the self-defense itself. Even there, and I have lived in both those states, someone breaking into your home is legally assumed to already be a violent threat.
Even in "liberal" California, and I see someone has already pointed out that Texas is a very dangerous place to be a criminal.
Even if you think everyone who owns a private firearm is a "trigger-happy nut case", you would be very well served if you took the course required by your state to receive a concealed handgun license.
Not only will you get to meet and talk to people you paint as "trigger-happy nut case"s, which will be good all by itself, you will also find out just what the legal environment is concerning self defense, and the hows and whys of safely handling a firearm.
Just as there is a word for someone who distrusts others who do not look like them, "racism", there is a word for people who distrust others who choose to be armed. It's called "Hoplophobia". It is surprisingly common.
Bob-
Public schools are still more expensive. That money has to come from somewhere, regardless of whether they are touted as "free".
And the reason for having to bus, having to take all comers, being unable to expel, are all due to the bureaucracy. They all raise the costs even more, wasting resources on irrelevancies. Just because everyone pays the cost doesn't mean it costs less.
Let's see. I say that private schools cost less, you tell me they're incomparable. You compare Social Security to an investment, I point out that they are incomparable, and you come back with "So?"?
That's called hypocrisy.
Gladly. Being a coercive government program, it immediately displaced other alternatives. It immediately began being used as an alternative to private investment, if for no other reason than the wage earner was bringing home that much less money than they otherwise would after SS was taken out.
Working people therefore also had that much less to spend taking care of their own elderly. With medicare and medicaid, just stick the old folks in a home and ignore them. Much cheaper that way.
So yeah, the elderly have been harmed by Social Security, just as everyone has been harmed by Social Security. That's the nature of all coercive government programs.
That's easy: Capitalism and the Free Market.
That's who gets blamed for every government bureaucratic boondoggle.
Slashdot is hardly the place to call for abolishing NASA and repealing all the laws against individual exploitation of space. Too many government run public school "graduates" who have accepted the "government is good" Big Lie hook, line and sinker. Or rather, "lock, stock, and barrel."
Bob-
I don't think you are going to find any that support the absurdities that have been made of copyright and patent.
The most inconsistent positions will be 1) Supporting only the explicitly limited time frame of the monopoly grant, as specified in the Constitution, and 2) Abolishing the legal grant of monopoly completely and allowing contract to deal with the issues the same way everything else is done, including everything that was once copyrighten and patentted.
That's not a lot of spread, when compared to "The Mouse Will Never Go Public Domain!"
Bob-
Actually no, the government is authorized to build "post roads" only.
The private turnpikes were doing quite well until they were expropriated by governments. Bridges, dams, canals, all privately built. Really.
Indeed, if that's your impression, then marketing certainly isn't working.
So what did people do before the government owned all the highways? They built them themselves. Look up "turnpike" in a history book, and be amazed.
Limitations of what? Do you really mean, allowing the people who own and run organizations to be held responsible for their "organization's" actions? That isn't pro- or anti-business, that's anti government-granted-limited-liability.
They do? As someone stuck in traffic on the only road between A and B some time.
Actually, they're not. The public schools spend more than $10,000 per student, per year, every year, and it's only going up. Private schools charge far less than that, and get better academic performance on every measurement. Homeschoolers spend a fraction of that and beat public and private schools.
Try http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/ for a little background on the subject of "public" education.
If you like video instead of reading, try doing a little bit of piracy and finding "ABC's 20/20 Stupid In America". While John Stossel comes down hard in favor of vouchers, the reasons why are what will shock you to your boots if you are paying attention.
Social Security is not an investment at all, it's a ponzi scheme. Present beneficiaries are being paid out of present donations. There is no trust fund, there is no set-aside, the money goes into and comes out of the general fund.
The only reason SS is said to "cost less" is because the government doesn't include sallaries of government employees or costs of the buildings and facilities in their "cost" estimates.
Those lists of benefits are out there. http://www.fff.org/ http://www.lewrockwell.com/ http://www.mises.org/ http://www.cato.org/ http://www.pennradio.com/
If the only information you are listening to comes from government, as your statements of "fact" indicates, then no wonder you have a bad impression of "libertarians".
When someone comes to the school your child is in and starts killing them (even though murder is illegal) with whatever weapon they choose to use (regardless of any law to the contrary), you'd better pray that some principled gun owner who chose not to be disarmed by law is there to stop them. ...like what happened in Pearl, Mississippi, when a killer decided to visit a "gun free zone". Oh, you didn't hear about that? Then may I suggest http://www.johnrlott.com/ _The Bias Against Guns_ by John R. Lott?
But that would re
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0603e.asp The New Mercantilism
m l The Fraud of Intellectual Property
http://www.lewrockwell.com/mcelroy/mcelroy17.html Patently Absurd
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sapienza/sapienza36.ht
http://www.mises.org/blog/archives/002935.asp Mises Economics Blog: Bill Gates: Anti-IP Movement Is Communist
I wish the Pirate party far better success than the Libertarians have had. It is surprising that the message of Liberty does not resonate in the United States.
Bob-
"no private firm rich enough would be stupid enough to try."
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Burt Rutan and Steve Allen, "SpaceShip One".
"but even economists today acknowledge that..."
No, only government economists place such artificial limitations on "private" efforts.
Real economists talk about private space exploration and exploitation every day.
http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1644 Profit, Loss, and Pluto
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22private+s
There's the shotgun approach for you. I hope you can learn something about both economics and "risk". The problem being that government never risks itself, and private ventures "bet the farm" many times. That is why private efforts always out-perform government ones, be it "dollars to orbit", crossing the South Pole, finding the North West Passage, or delivering fresh strawberries to my grocery store in January cheap enough that even I can afford them.
Oh no, such an effort for mere strawberries would be a waste of taxpayer money. It's too risky.
"Both uncontrolled inflation and deflation..."
The problem is assuming that it can be controlled. Just like socialism, the problem is the assumption that it is possible to plan at all.
Without government interference, as soon as a medium of exchange becomes unstable it is abandoned. I am not going to trust something that is subject to "uncontrolled", by which you mean rampant, inflation or deflation. Neither would you.
The source of what problems there are is the legal mandate, the monopoly, "legal tender for all debts public and private". That is a legally forced monopoly, and monopolies cause problems.
Manipulations by private interests, again, can only happen when those interests, such as the Federal Reserve, operate by government fiat. Withtout that fiat, if it becomes unstable it is abandoned for a more stable commodity or whatever. That's why banks that try those funny games used to fail. But that again was before government stepped in and prevented such failures so that there are no limits to the corruption possible.
The reason so much of the world went to dollars, is because it was better than using the fiat currency that the local government(s) had printed into oblivion. Now the dollar has competition with the Euro, and sure enough as soon as someone like Iraq makes noises about selling their products in Euros the government backing the dollar sends in the marines.
Government ruins everything it touches. There is no measure by which I can tell you how much I prefer private freedom to the enslavement to evil which is government.
By any measure the bank runs, recessions and "instability" of the hundreds of years under the universal gold standard pale to nothing compared to just the 17 years of the "Great Depression" that happened, and could only have happened, once the government took hold of the money supply in 1913.
I believe the problem is that you are accustomed to government control of the money supply, and the thought of a commodity, rather than fiat, currency makes you uncomfortable because it would be different. That's the only way I can reconcile the difference between the historical record of events and the concerns you have about "manipulation by private interests."
"So long as "In God We Trust" is enough for people to accept dollar bills then there is no need for backing."
I couldn't agree more. Government and money are a toxic mix and need to be abolished ASAP.
Once that's done, I don't really care what the denominations, materials, commodities or "shares of Microsoft" are utilized as money, since any such transaction is a voluntary interaction between two parties and none of my business. I expect that what will happen is what has happened in the past, a particular commodity will become the "generally agreed upon" standard against which everything else is measured.
Neither "inflation" nor "deflation" are the hazard where money is concerned. The hazard is manipulation.
Bob-
"This requires the addition of silver (or alternate an alternate currency such as Microsoft stock) to increase the liquid assests in circulation for use. That is by definition inflation, that the original poster is against."
I disagree only in the particular that substituting the medium of exchange isn't inflation, because the explicit "money supply" is still fixed in terms of whatever the standard is. Other commodities don't change the availability of a gold standard, for example, they merely allow greater fungability of the currency. Hmmm.... how to word this.....
Inflation is changing the supply of money, it is noticed as an increase in the "price" of goods due to the greater supply of currency compared to the supply of those goods. The unit of money is cheapened because there are more of those units of money in circulation. The German "Great Inflation" is a good example, so is the substantial devaluation of the Federal Reserve Note that even I can see in the last few years of my own experience.
In a commodity money environment, as deflationary pressure exists, something like the dime, nickle and penny are utilized. They are used in place of the standard, let's say gold for the sake of historic argument. Having silver available doesn't change the value of gold, having copper available doesn't change silver, having nickel available doesn't change copper. They may fluxuate compared to each other, which fuels speculation when some government tries to set a legal fixed exchange rate. But then we're right back where we stared with governments causing interference in the use of money and such speculation has nothing to do with "free market money" at all. When cheaper than their face value, they're currency. When more expensive, they are commodity. That's why silver forks were melted down like mad when the Hunt brothers tried to corner the Silver market in the early 80s.
Actual inflation, the changing in the value of money itself, can only occur when, for instance, today there are more "dollars" in circulation than there were yesterday. The central banks talk about simply matching the increasing supply with the rate of what-would-have-been deflation, but in reality they give lots of new money to the governments to spend, who get to spend it at the old rate, and by the time it filters down through the contractors and sub-contractors to use common citizens, prices have adjusted to the new supply and you and I experience "inflation".
Commodity money is far, far less subject to such creation of money from nowhere. In every example of inflation some government (or central bank, same thing) was behind it. From Roman coin-clipping to fractional reserve banking, it's all just fraud.
At least with a complete separation of government from money, the flim-flam artists could be prosecuted instead of enshrined by law.
Bob-
Abolish NASA, get the laws restricting space travel repealed. Let the same profit motive that explored the planet explore the other planets.
Yes, it is easier to say than do. Doing is what entrepreneurs do best. If moon rocks could be sold, there would be more moon exploration looking for interesting rocks than Congress could fund in 100 years!
And then there are asteroids, just floating there waiting for someone to go grab one...
Bob-
"If this thing blows up, guess who're going to be blamed for it?"
That's easy: Capitalism and the Free Market.
That's who gets blamed for every government bureaucratic boondoggle.
Slashdot is hardly the place to call for abolishing NASA and repealing all the laws against individual exploitation of space. Too many government run public school "graduates" who have accepted the "government is good" Big Lie hook, line and sinker. Or rather, "lock, stock, and barrel."
Bob-
"If this thing blows up, guess who're going to be blamed for it?"
That's easy: Capitalism and the Free Market.
That's who gets blamed for every government bureaucratic boondoggle.
Slashdot is hardly the place to call for abolishing NASA and repealing all the laws against individual exploitation of space. Too many government run public school "graduates" who have accepted the "government is good" Big Lie hook, line and sinker. Or rather, "lock, stock, and barrel."
Bob-
"we haven't seen deflation in America in quite a while"
Not since 1912 and the establishment of the Federal Reserve.
The "price of money" graph shows a slow, steady increase in the value of money, "deflation" as it were, because of improvements in technology and distribution making it possible to do "do more with less".
Then the Fed started printing money. Then inflation takes off like a rocket. There is a small leveling around 1934-6 when the price controlls were in full force, but other than that it's been a continuous debasement of the dollar.
"Yes because what we really need is only the rich being able to readily access liquid assets."
Interesting. Can you tell me why not having the government printing money would prevent anyone else from doing the same?
Just as an exercise, I asked a group of people to consider shares of Microsoft. Would they take them as currency? I was not surprised to have them universally positive about the idea.
The problem with this theory you have about money, is that money is fungable. That means it can be divided infinitely. 10,000 pennies is just another way of saying $100. That's why money has existed in many different forms over time, including mills. Remember mills? You can still calculate your taxes in mills, being 1/1000 of a dollar, even though the printing of worthless fiat currency has made the mill non-existant in common American currency.
If all currency had to be gold, as you seem to be implying, then yes gold would have a very high value. But gold has _always_ had a very high value, that's why silver and copper were used as currency with a lower unit value as reflects the greater quantity available for circulation.
Would you care to elaborate on your assertion that assets would be difficult to liquidate if the government didn't print paper money? Have I completely missed your mark?
Bob-