I'm pretty sure the Babylonians used base 60, not 12, and the Egyptians may have also.
Also I really doubt the Arabs "forgot" 11 and 12.. they got their number system from the Hindus pretty much verbatim. Not the Babylonians or Egyptians.
Being widespread with low population density is a problem in the US. Too expensive to run fiber out to the suburban or rural houses.
Also in the US, being small with high population density is a problem. Too expensive to run fiber in established cities. Imagine rewiring NYC!!
Of course then you have projects like Google Fiber, or more locally for me, Greenlight NC, that ARE DOING IT. So it's all bullshit. It is possible, and not especially difficult or expensive, in both urban and suburban areas, in the US. We just like to tell ourselves it's not possible because we haven't done it yet.
No, this is the key point: the value of money is not some fixed amount divided by the number of dollars in existence.
At any given point in time, it is. You're right that it changes over time as new goods and services are provided, but at the instant someone says "I'm going to print off a new $100 bill" the value is diluted. It may recover in the future, or not. The value of money may have increased even more in the absence of that printing, or not. Printing the money doesn't automatically add value to the economy, case in point Zimbabwe.
Thus you may have cases where adding dollars to the economy increases the value of the dollars
Yeah, you're basically describing an investment now, and like any investor, we should look at the merits of the investment before buying into it. Your idea of the buried gold scheme is obviously a bad investment. It produces no actual value and has no hope of returning the investment so it's a welfare program or charity, not an investment. Great. I'm all for temporary assistance for the unemployed. But why on earth, if you are going to require labor in return for the welfare (which I think is a great idea), would you do something as useless as digging ditches and filling them back up? There is real work that could be done. In the Great Depression they did ditch digging and filling, and they also built dams and roads. Looking back, which should they have done more of in your opinion or would you say the ditches and the dams produced equal value?
I agree with the other person who said debt can be good or bad depending what it's for. If the debt is paid by the next generation, but disproportionately benefits the current generation, then it's unethical debt. Even rolling over debt, the fact that the debt exists decreases the borrowing capacity of the next generation to cover their own needs. Not to mention while rolling over debt you are obviously still paying or accumulating interest so there's a direct cost as well.
As for countries vs small businesses or even family budgets, well, obviously they are not "bigger versions" as in "the same in every detail but bigger". Requiring that level of similarity is useless for pretty much any analogy. But there are more similarities than differences for sure. Living within your means is an obvious one that is similar. The major difference isn't whether they can print money (you can print money but not value), but their lifespan vs the things they buy.
I agree with Stradivarius's point about your argument (Keynes's argument essentially) ignoring the destroyed value of burying the gold. That's a great point.
Another point I'll bring to your attention -- even if someone isn't burying the gold/oil, finding new gold/oil doesn't *just* add value, it dilutes it. Lets say you find some gold, and it turns out you found a billion tons of gold, compared to worldwide historical production of about 150k tons. What happens? Well you're richer, and the people who currently own gold are poorer. So you didn't exactly add much to society, you just reallocated some wealth to yourself through luck.
Same thing happens when the government prints money, buries it, and pays unemployed people to dig it up. You didn't actually add any value, you stole from the people who already had some money. It's like inflation. It's why the concept of "real GDP" subtracts out the effects of inflation, because that type of growth is not real.
It's bad for the future. You're spending a bunch of stuff and then dying, which means at worst your kids will get nothing when you die. That kind of sucks for them, but you are entitled to spend your own money as you see fit.
Government debt doesn't die just because the people who benefit from it die. Unlike your debts which evaporate, government debt is borne by the next generation.
Surely you can see how applying your same philosophy to a country is horribly immoral?
Because it already applies. Medical expenses are tax-deductible once they exceed a percentage of your income. And have been for a long, long time.
Health-care premiums don't apply, and that's the biggest health related expense for most people. Since the employer portion of insurance premiums is deductible, it makes it that much harder to get your own insurance.
There are countries that have tried austerity and are happy with the results -- Germany, Estonia, Latvia.
Krugman famously disagreed on Estonia last year and was called out by the president of Estonia on Twitter. It was quite funny.
There were numerous articles about Estonia at the time and when I read them, I found myself agreeing with the Estonians. Krugman's argument boils down to measuring the country's GDP at its historical peak and saying that austerity isn't successful if the post-austerity GDP is lower than the peak. The appealing part of his argument is that it's objective. You're looking at some numbers and you can make a decision. The unappealing part is that it doesn't match a common sense view of a country's economic health.
Everybody would agree that if you can achieve the same growth with debt and without debt, you should do it without debt. As another uncontroversial datapoint, everybody would agree that if adding a tiny amount of debt helps you avoid an economic catastrophe, and that the debt can be easily repaid in a reasonable amount of time, then the country should take advantage of the debt.
Beyond those obvious points, there's no clear formula for the benefit of debt. Let's say a country takes on $1 billion of new debt per year, and their GDP is growing by $1 million per year, and if they stopped the debt their GDP would fall by $2 billion but start growing at $500 million/year after that without new debt. Is it worth continuing the debt additions? I guess Krugman would have to say yes because losing any GDP is a sign of failure. Common sense says it's a good deal because you increase your growth so much, you'll catch up to and surpass the high-debt scenario in a few years but have less debt. Of course in real life you can't predict the future with certainty, but it shows a problem in the argument that any immediate drop in GDP is a sign of failure.
No he failed to convince you that other people should be allowed to be selfish. You could still be unselfish regardless of what your tax burden is.
It's like gay marriage. To get someone to support gay marriage you don't have to convince them to become gay and get married, you have to convince them that others should be allowed to and that it won't affect your own freedom. It's tough because freedom is unfortunately a very low priority for people who aren't faced with restrictions on their own freedom.
Let's assume the benefits of a healthy economy are a legitimate want of non-calculators in your mind. (I don't understand why.. you could apply your argument to those as well.)
A healthy economy is one way to achieve the benefits of a healthy economy. That's obvious.
You're suggesting there may be other ways, better or worse, to achieve the benefits of a healthy economy that don't involve a healthy economy. That's possible.
But then you're saying that the person *doesn't* want a healthy economy, just the benefits of it. That's wrong. Just because there's more than one way to get to a certain state doesn't mean one way isn't more desirable, i.e. more wanted.
Yes, you're right, you won't have a high standard of living -- you'll be eating crappy food, your healthcare will be whatever services your school provides (though these days you can stay on your parents' insurance until 26), and you'll have several roommates to make rent affordable.
Isn't that part of the college experience? Looking back on it, the "poor" period of my life was pretty enriching. I wouldn't want to live out my life like that, but experiencing it for a few years was fine... character building you might say.
I didn't graduate debt free -- but I worked and graduated with only $4k of debt, which I thought was pretty good.
India has the 7th largest defense budget in the world at about $50 billion (US). They have a space program. They develop and maintain nuclear weapons.
All the talk about how poor India is and how they need free medicine is bullshit. They could pay for it but instead they choose the route of compulsory licenses and invalidating patents. Instead of working with drug companies to give them a fair profit while providing drugs, they want domestic companies to produce the generics and keep the profits (it's no charity like they would have you believe).
Now is that "bad?" I don't know, it's certainly a good deal for them and has given them an advanced and very capable pharmaceutical manufacturing industry. That's great for them.
BUT.. They don't get to do that and pretend to be on the high moral horse at the same time.
You're telling a story of a business owner who gets screwed by eminent domain. You didn't mention what type of business it is, so it's probably something mundane.
Then you say you want to apply the same screwing-you-over eminent domain to drug companies whose employees work day in and day out to save lives and produce the next generation of medicine. You want to screw those people over because they also make money, same as the mundane business owner you have sympathy for.
You know what's even more simple and obvious -- make everything free, including unnecessary luxuries, and just rely on everyone's good nature to make the system work.
It's so simple and obvious I can't believe nobody has tried that before.
Restricting corporate speech is not a restriction on individual rights. Permitting corporate speech is rightly considered as government assistance for that speech, and the government is not obligated to help you speak.
This is from the decision (http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf page 37):
There is simply no support for the view that the First Amendment, as originally understood, would permit the suppression of political speech by media corporations. The Framers may not have anticipated modern business and media corporations. See McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Comm’n, 514 U. S. 334, 360–361 (1995) (THOMAS, J., concurring in judgment). Yet television networks and major newspapers owned by media corporations have become the most important means of mass communication in modern times. The First Amendment was certainly not understood to condone the suppression of political speech in society’s most salient media. It was understood as a response to the repression of speech and the press that had existed in England and the heavy taxes on the press that were imposed in the colonies.
As you can see, the decision is not purely about protecting corporate speech because "corporations are people." It also acknowledges that corporations are tools, and if the government has the ability to regulate the most important tools used in political speech, it has basically regulated the speech.
There's also a group of men who drive "plain" cars because they are absolutely terrified at being called out on having a small penis. They'd rather avoid the whole situation and not call attention to themselves.
Then there are the people who have normal dicks but are obsessed with penises. They think it's the only thing that counts, and that every other type of competition is actually a sham to avoid direct penis competition (which they think about all the time). Men compete to look better in whatever way they can, and whatever way will attract the mate they want.. whether intellectual competition, art/poetry/writing, salary, car, clothes/shoes, physique... it's all the same, but appeals to different types of girls. But this person sees a guy driving around in an awesome car that goes really fast and is fun to drive, and they immediately start thinking about that guy's penis. It's really weird. They see a guy dressing really well and carrying new shiny gadgets, symbols of a good job and financial success, and they think "Oh man, imagine the dick on that guy.. I can just picture it.. I could probably wrap my hand around it completely it's so thin hehe. Yeah I'm imagining it in my hand right now! What a loser that guy is."
That's a bitter way of looking at the advice. Living in a smaller house isn't the same as spending the least amount of money possible (e.g. being homeless, living with parents, having a bad apartment in a bad part of town, etc). Thinking about the cost of things like a coffee a day or cable tv doesn't mean you can't buy them, merely that you should be aware of long-term aggregate costs for things that seem cheap. Avoiding interest payments by saving and paying in cash isn't the same as never buying the item you desire.
I thought it was the opposite, at least for North Carolina -- the company is allowed to not pay out accrued vacation time on termination if that is their written policy. In the absence of a written policy, state law defaults to requiring payment of unused vacation.
If the owner developed a new breed of horse and patented it, then yes. For example, there are lots of patented varieties of lab mice.
The weird thing about this case is there are two angles of attack -- patent, and contract. If you bred a new type of horse and patented it, and then sold it to people, I'm sure you would have them sign a contract saying that they wouldn't allow the horse to breed. This case is now saying that the contract isn't necessary. If you just buy the horse with absolutely no restrictions in the sales contract, you still can't breed the horse because of patent law. Even if you buy the horse from a 3rd party and didn't know that it contained patented genes, and bred the horse, you would be violating the patent. Possibly even if the horse ran away from the rightful owner, entered your property, and bred with your existing horses without your knowledge, you would have violated the patent. (That's a lot like pollen with the patented genes from neighbors' fields getting onto your plants.)
I mean it's really ludicrous. If you sell something that self-replicates, then you should use a contract to limit the rights of what can be done with it. Otherwise it really seems implicitly allowed that the thing replicates. After all it takes zero human intervention, since it's "self" replicating. How can something that happens on its own, as designed, as sold, get the person who happens to own it in trouble? It certainly doesn't work that way with other things. If I buy a car, get in an accident, and the car is poorly designed so it catches fire easily and kills a bunch of people, then the car manufacturer is held liable. THEY designed it, they made it, they sold it. Why shouldn't it be the same with seeds or horses? You "genetically engineer" something, you take responsibility for the genes and what the genes are capable of.
How does paying a tax for the military imply that you'll get more money back later? Did you even read the definition you're criticizing?
Paying for stuff like roads, health, and the military is not a Ponzi scheme because you're getting some kind of non-money thing for the money. Paying for stuff like welfare isn't a Ponzi scheme, because going into it you know it's charity for other people, not an investment of any kind that will be returned to you.
Since there is no such thing as the right of some men to vote away the rights of others, and no such thing as the right of the government to seize the property of some men for the unearned benefit of others—the advocates and supporters of the welfare state are morally guilty of robbing their opponents, and the fact that the robbery is legalized makes it morally worse, not better. The victims do not have to add self-inflicted martyrdom to the injury done to them by others; they do not have to let the looters profit doubly, by letting them distribute the money exclusively to the parasites who clamored for it. Whenever the welfare-state laws offer them some small restitution, the victims should take it . . ..
They want to deliver vast amounts of information over Slashdot. And again, Slashdot is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
The moral justification is that beyond a certain number those millions of dollars have less value than your $50,000.
I don't think that in itself is a moral justification. The real moral justification is probably "taking something of little relative value from one group to help another group where it has a higher relative value is good" or something along those lines. Of course nobody who says that really believes it.. the amount of goodness in that act mysteriously vanishes when people point out that they themselves are pretty darn well off compared to some other group! Even if you're one of the working poor posting on Slashdot from a community library on your 15 minute lunch break because you work 3 jobs and still can't afford internet at home you're well off compared to some poor villager in rural Pakistan who eats one government subsidized roti a day with a half cup of lentils and spends his 15 minute lunch break trying to decide which of his daughters to send into prostitution to pay for the eldest son to finish the 5th grade and have a shot at becoming a leather tanner's apprentice.
As for the rest of your post, competing on taxes is a downward spiral that leaves governments unable to take care of their people in order to export wealth out of the country.
It won't ever turn into a death spiral, because ultimately all taxes are paid by individuals, not corporations. If the corporate tax is completely eliminated, the individual tax rate goes up. At that point I don't think 300 million Americans are going to move to Ireland to get a slightly lower individual tax... it's just so much more work compared to a corporation setting up a shell company in Ireland and saving money on paper while most of their people stay exactly where they are.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure the Babylonians used base 60, not 12, and the Egyptians may have also.
Also I really doubt the Arabs "forgot" 11 and 12.. they got their number system from the Hindus pretty much verbatim. Not the Babylonians or Egyptians.
Being widespread with low population density is a problem in the US. Too expensive to run fiber out to the suburban or rural houses.
Also in the US, being small with high population density is a problem. Too expensive to run fiber in established cities. Imagine rewiring NYC!!
Of course then you have projects like Google Fiber, or more locally for me, Greenlight NC, that ARE DOING IT. So it's all bullshit. It is possible, and not especially difficult or expensive, in both urban and suburban areas, in the US. We just like to tell ourselves it's not possible because we haven't done it yet.
We're talking about in-state tuition at state schools.
No, this is the key point: the value of money is not some fixed amount divided by the number of dollars in existence.
At any given point in time, it is. You're right that it changes over time as new goods and services are provided, but at the instant someone says "I'm going to print off a new $100 bill" the value is diluted. It may recover in the future, or not. The value of money may have increased even more in the absence of that printing, or not. Printing the money doesn't automatically add value to the economy, case in point Zimbabwe.
Thus you may have cases where adding dollars to the economy increases the value of the dollars
Yeah, you're basically describing an investment now, and like any investor, we should look at the merits of the investment before buying into it. Your idea of the buried gold scheme is obviously a bad investment. It produces no actual value and has no hope of returning the investment so it's a welfare program or charity, not an investment. Great. I'm all for temporary assistance for the unemployed. But why on earth, if you are going to require labor in return for the welfare (which I think is a great idea), would you do something as useless as digging ditches and filling them back up? There is real work that could be done. In the Great Depression they did ditch digging and filling, and they also built dams and roads. Looking back, which should they have done more of in your opinion or would you say the ditches and the dams produced equal value?
I agree with the other person who said debt can be good or bad depending what it's for. If the debt is paid by the next generation, but disproportionately benefits the current generation, then it's unethical debt. Even rolling over debt, the fact that the debt exists decreases the borrowing capacity of the next generation to cover their own needs. Not to mention while rolling over debt you are obviously still paying or accumulating interest so there's a direct cost as well.
As for countries vs small businesses or even family budgets, well, obviously they are not "bigger versions" as in "the same in every detail but bigger". Requiring that level of similarity is useless for pretty much any analogy. But there are more similarities than differences for sure. Living within your means is an obvious one that is similar. The major difference isn't whether they can print money (you can print money but not value), but their lifespan vs the things they buy.
I agree with Stradivarius's point about your argument (Keynes's argument essentially) ignoring the destroyed value of burying the gold. That's a great point.
Another point I'll bring to your attention -- even if someone isn't burying the gold/oil, finding new gold/oil doesn't *just* add value, it dilutes it. Lets say you find some gold, and it turns out you found a billion tons of gold, compared to worldwide historical production of about 150k tons. What happens? Well you're richer, and the people who currently own gold are poorer. So you didn't exactly add much to society, you just reallocated some wealth to yourself through luck.
Same thing happens when the government prints money, buries it, and pays unemployed people to dig it up. You didn't actually add any value, you stole from the people who already had some money. It's like inflation. It's why the concept of "real GDP" subtracts out the effects of inflation, because that type of growth is not real.
It's bad for the future. You're spending a bunch of stuff and then dying, which means at worst your kids will get nothing when you die. That kind of sucks for them, but you are entitled to spend your own money as you see fit.
Government debt doesn't die just because the people who benefit from it die. Unlike your debts which evaporate, government debt is borne by the next generation.
Surely you can see how applying your same philosophy to a country is horribly immoral?
Because it already applies. Medical expenses are tax-deductible once they exceed a percentage of your income. And have been for a long, long time.
Health-care premiums don't apply, and that's the biggest health related expense for most people. Since the employer portion of insurance premiums is deductible, it makes it that much harder to get your own insurance.
There are countries that have tried austerity and are happy with the results -- Germany, Estonia, Latvia.
Krugman famously disagreed on Estonia last year and was called out by the president of Estonia on Twitter. It was quite funny.
There were numerous articles about Estonia at the time and when I read them, I found myself agreeing with the Estonians. Krugman's argument boils down to measuring the country's GDP at its historical peak and saying that austerity isn't successful if the post-austerity GDP is lower than the peak. The appealing part of his argument is that it's objective. You're looking at some numbers and you can make a decision. The unappealing part is that it doesn't match a common sense view of a country's economic health.
Everybody would agree that if you can achieve the same growth with debt and without debt, you should do it without debt. As another uncontroversial datapoint, everybody would agree that if adding a tiny amount of debt helps you avoid an economic catastrophe, and that the debt can be easily repaid in a reasonable amount of time, then the country should take advantage of the debt.
Beyond those obvious points, there's no clear formula for the benefit of debt. Let's say a country takes on $1 billion of new debt per year, and their GDP is growing by $1 million per year, and if they stopped the debt their GDP would fall by $2 billion but start growing at $500 million/year after that without new debt. Is it worth continuing the debt additions? I guess Krugman would have to say yes because losing any GDP is a sign of failure. Common sense says it's a good deal because you increase your growth so much, you'll catch up to and surpass the high-debt scenario in a few years but have less debt. Of course in real life you can't predict the future with certainty, but it shows a problem in the argument that any immediate drop in GDP is a sign of failure.
No he failed to convince you that other people should be allowed to be selfish. You could still be unselfish regardless of what your tax burden is.
It's like gay marriage. To get someone to support gay marriage you don't have to convince them to become gay and get married, you have to convince them that others should be allowed to and that it won't affect your own freedom. It's tough because freedom is unfortunately a very low priority for people who aren't faced with restrictions on their own freedom.
Let's assume the benefits of a healthy economy are a legitimate want of non-calculators in your mind. (I don't understand why.. you could apply your argument to those as well.)
A healthy economy is one way to achieve the benefits of a healthy economy. That's obvious.
You're suggesting there may be other ways, better or worse, to achieve the benefits of a healthy economy that don't involve a healthy economy. That's possible.
But then you're saying that the person *doesn't* want a healthy economy, just the benefits of it. That's wrong. Just because there's more than one way to get to a certain state doesn't mean one way isn't more desirable, i.e. more wanted.
Yes, you're right, you won't have a high standard of living -- you'll be eating crappy food, your healthcare will be whatever services your school provides (though these days you can stay on your parents' insurance until 26), and you'll have several roommates to make rent affordable.
Isn't that part of the college experience? Looking back on it, the "poor" period of my life was pretty enriching. I wouldn't want to live out my life like that, but experiencing it for a few years was fine... character building you might say.
I didn't graduate debt free -- but I worked and graduated with only $4k of debt, which I thought was pretty good.
India has the 7th largest defense budget in the world at about $50 billion (US). They have a space program. They develop and maintain nuclear weapons.
All the talk about how poor India is and how they need free medicine is bullshit. They could pay for it but instead they choose the route of compulsory licenses and invalidating patents. Instead of working with drug companies to give them a fair profit while providing drugs, they want domestic companies to produce the generics and keep the profits (it's no charity like they would have you believe).
Now is that "bad?" I don't know, it's certainly a good deal for them and has given them an advanced and very capable pharmaceutical manufacturing industry. That's great for them.
BUT.. They don't get to do that and pretend to be on the high moral horse at the same time.
You're telling a story of a business owner who gets screwed by eminent domain. You didn't mention what type of business it is, so it's probably something mundane.
Then you say you want to apply the same screwing-you-over eminent domain to drug companies whose employees work day in and day out to save lives and produce the next generation of medicine. You want to screw those people over because they also make money, same as the mundane business owner you have sympathy for.
You have some fucked up priorities!
You know what's even more simple and obvious -- make everything free, including unnecessary luxuries, and just rely on everyone's good nature to make the system work.
It's so simple and obvious I can't believe nobody has tried that before.
If you see violence as sometimes necessary, it must be accessible to people when those cases of need arise. So why isn't it a right?
It's like saying habeas corpus is only REALLY needed sometimes (when the imprisonment is unlawful) so it's not a right.
Restricting corporate speech is not a restriction on individual rights. Permitting corporate speech is rightly considered as government assistance for that speech, and the government is not obligated to help you speak.
This is from the decision (http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf page 37):
There is simply no support for the view that the First
Amendment, as originally understood, would permit the
suppression of political speech by media corporations. The
Framers may not have anticipated modern business and
media corporations. See McIntyre v. Ohio Elections
Comm’n, 514 U. S. 334, 360–361 (1995) (THOMAS, J.,
concurring in judgment). Yet television networks and
major newspapers owned by media corporations have
become the most important means of mass communication
in modern times. The First Amendment was certainly not
understood to condone the suppression of political speech
in society’s most salient media. It was understood as a
response to the repression of speech and the press that
had existed in England and the heavy taxes on the press
that were imposed in the colonies.
As you can see, the decision is not purely about protecting corporate speech because "corporations are people." It also acknowledges that corporations are tools, and if the government has the ability to regulate the most important tools used in political speech, it has basically regulated the speech.
There's also a group of men who drive "plain" cars because they are absolutely terrified at being called out on having a small penis. They'd rather avoid the whole situation and not call attention to themselves.
Then there are the people who have normal dicks but are obsessed with penises. They think it's the only thing that counts, and that every other type of competition is actually a sham to avoid direct penis competition (which they think about all the time). Men compete to look better in whatever way they can, and whatever way will attract the mate they want.. whether intellectual competition, art/poetry/writing, salary, car, clothes/shoes, physique... it's all the same, but appeals to different types of girls. But this person sees a guy driving around in an awesome car that goes really fast and is fun to drive, and they immediately start thinking about that guy's penis. It's really weird. They see a guy dressing really well and carrying new shiny gadgets, symbols of a good job and financial success, and they think "Oh man, imagine the dick on that guy.. I can just picture it.. I could probably wrap my hand around it completely it's so thin hehe. Yeah I'm imagining it in my hand right now! What a loser that guy is."
That's a bitter way of looking at the advice. Living in a smaller house isn't the same as spending the least amount of money possible (e.g. being homeless, living with parents, having a bad apartment in a bad part of town, etc). Thinking about the cost of things like a coffee a day or cable tv doesn't mean you can't buy them, merely that you should be aware of long-term aggregate costs for things that seem cheap. Avoiding interest payments by saving and paying in cash isn't the same as never buying the item you desire.
I thought it was the opposite, at least for North Carolina -- the company is allowed to not pay out accrued vacation time on termination if that is their written policy. In the absence of a written policy, state law defaults to requiring payment of unused vacation.
If the owner developed a new breed of horse and patented it, then yes. For example, there are lots of patented varieties of lab mice.
The weird thing about this case is there are two angles of attack -- patent, and contract. If you bred a new type of horse and patented it, and then sold it to people, I'm sure you would have them sign a contract saying that they wouldn't allow the horse to breed. This case is now saying that the contract isn't necessary. If you just buy the horse with absolutely no restrictions in the sales contract, you still can't breed the horse because of patent law. Even if you buy the horse from a 3rd party and didn't know that it contained patented genes, and bred the horse, you would be violating the patent. Possibly even if the horse ran away from the rightful owner, entered your property, and bred with your existing horses without your knowledge, you would have violated the patent. (That's a lot like pollen with the patented genes from neighbors' fields getting onto your plants.)
I mean it's really ludicrous. If you sell something that self-replicates, then you should use a contract to limit the rights of what can be done with it. Otherwise it really seems implicitly allowed that the thing replicates. After all it takes zero human intervention, since it's "self" replicating. How can something that happens on its own, as designed, as sold, get the person who happens to own it in trouble? It certainly doesn't work that way with other things. If I buy a car, get in an accident, and the car is poorly designed so it catches fire easily and kills a bunch of people, then the car manufacturer is held liable. THEY designed it, they made it, they sold it. Why shouldn't it be the same with seeds or horses? You "genetically engineer" something, you take responsibility for the genes and what the genes are capable of.
How does paying a tax for the military imply that you'll get more money back later? Did you even read the definition you're criticizing?
Paying for stuff like roads, health, and the military is not a Ponzi scheme because you're getting some kind of non-money thing for the money. Paying for stuff like welfare isn't a Ponzi scheme, because going into it you know it's charity for other people, not an investment of any kind that will be returned to you.
You're completely wrong, Ayn Rand said this:
Since there is no such thing as the right of some men to vote away the rights of others, and no such thing as the right of the government to seize the property of some men for the unearned benefit of others—the advocates and supporters of the welfare state are morally guilty of robbing their opponents, and the fact that the robbery is legalized makes it morally worse, not better. The victims do not have to add self-inflicted martyrdom to the injury done to them by others; they do not have to let the looters profit doubly, by letting them distribute the money exclusively to the parasites who clamored for it. Whenever the welfare-state laws offer them some small restitution, the victims should take it . . . .
They want to deliver vast amounts of information over Slashdot. And again, Slashdot is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
The moral justification is that beyond a certain number those millions of dollars have less value than your $50,000.
I don't think that in itself is a moral justification. The real moral justification is probably "taking something of little relative value from one group to help another group where it has a higher relative value is good" or something along those lines. Of course nobody who says that really believes it.. the amount of goodness in that act mysteriously vanishes when people point out that they themselves are pretty darn well off compared to some other group! Even if you're one of the working poor posting on Slashdot from a community library on your 15 minute lunch break because you work 3 jobs and still can't afford internet at home you're well off compared to some poor villager in rural Pakistan who eats one government subsidized roti a day with a half cup of lentils and spends his 15 minute lunch break trying to decide which of his daughters to send into prostitution to pay for the eldest son to finish the 5th grade and have a shot at becoming a leather tanner's apprentice.
As for the rest of your post, competing on taxes is a downward spiral that leaves governments unable to take care of their people in order to export wealth out of the country.
It won't ever turn into a death spiral, because ultimately all taxes are paid by individuals, not corporations. If the corporate tax is completely eliminated, the individual tax rate goes up. At that point I don't think 300 million Americans are going to move to Ireland to get a slightly lower individual tax... it's just so much more work compared to a corporation setting up a shell company in Ireland and saving money on paper while most of their people stay exactly where they are.