Projecting much? Your response is disingenuous scaremongering. You guys are like Intelligent Design advocates, constantly shifting from one justification to another as each is debunked, each one flimsier than the last, with the only constant being the judicious abuse of scientific language to instill fear and doubt in ordinary people. Yes, you are exactly like Intelligent Design advocates.
It produces CFC114 emissions in the enrichment process.
Also, the one primary source I found for the CFC114 information mentions 800,000 pounds per year for two plants, which means that it's around 400,000 pounds now, equivalent (using your numbers) to 1.5e9 kg of CO2. That refined uranium generates 8e8 megawatt-hours. Coal generates 1,970 pounds of CO2 per megawatt-hour. So had the electricity supplied by nuclear been produced by coal, we would instead have emitted 7.1e11kg on CO2. That's approximately five hundred times less CO2, and starting to get into negligible territory. And that's 1) using a relatively inefficient enrichment process, and 2) not recycling the enriched fuel in any way. Do you want to compare that to the CO2 used to manufacture and maintain wind turbines (don't forget transportation), or the quite toxic chemical soup used to manufacture photovoltaic cells?
The rest of your post is similarly misleading, and not worthwhile to debunk in detail. In brief, the noble (I don't know why you capitalized it) gas fission products are managed and harvested (as we've known how to do for 50 years --- read the date on that paper), not simply emitted into the atmosphere. Even if they were emitted, they have very short half-lives, and would contribute insignificantly the background radiation level. Remember, noble gases are insert and don't bioaccumulate. But since they're not simply vented, it's a moot point anyway.
Your phytoplankton reference is the worst kind of scientific pandering. It's not CFCs that are the primary danger, but rather the acidification of the oceans caused by their absorption of CO2. We've already established that coal emits quite a bit more CO2.
As for Yucca mountain: a granite facility with no groundwater permeation probably would be better, sure. Let's use or make one.
Nevertheless, Yucca isn't bad. Even a 5.5 "aftershock" is hardly enough to damage a secure facility. (If these shocks even exist: a source would be nice here.) Long-term corrosion information, because it's a gradual process, can be extrapolated from short-term experiments. Corrosion doesn't suddenly accelerate three hundred years out, as you imply. And remember: by the time nuclear waste even gets to a storage facility, it's already radioactively decayed into longer-lived isotopes that simply aren't that dangerous. As for groundwater permeation: first of all, the waste is put in containers specifically designed to avoid water contact. Second, even if water were to erode these containers, the radioactive waste within is highly insoluble and vitrified, so contamination would be low. And even if contamination were something
Even without further technological advance, nuclear power will suffice for several millennia. It produces zero emissions (except a little hot water) and produces a tiny volume of solid waste that doesn't escape into the environment. It runs silently all day and all night. If you were handed a datasheet for a nuclear power plant with the source of power blacked out, you'd jump at the chance to build the thing.
Nuclear power produces long-lived, dangerous waste, doesn't it? Dangerous and long-lived are mutually exclusive when it comes to nuclear materials. That's just the way the science of radioactive decay works. After being taken out of the reactor, the waste that remains can be reprocessed into more fuel. But if it isn't, then you can leave it in a cooling pond for a few years, and after that point, it's safe enough to handle, store, and bury. There are far worse industrial outputs than cooled-down nuclear waste.
But it's still dangerous and we have no place to store the waste! What's wrong with a cave in the middle of the desert? There's no water table. The area is seismically stable, and there's no life where we want to store the waste. And by itself, nuclear waste will do nothing. It won't make your children glow in the middle of the night. It won't contaminate your crops. It won't do anything because it's inert.
What about the risk of nuclear meltdown? Won't that destroy cities? Well, what about steam boiler explosions? What about refinery disasters? What about train disasters? Do those keep your up at night? They all killed people regularly back in their early days. But we don't worry about them now because improved safety technology has reduced the risk to an acceptable level. The same principle applies to nuclear power: another disaster like Chernobyl could never happen to even a 1970s-era American reactor, much less the far-improved versions we have today. The risk of being injured by a nuclear meltdown today is on par with being injured by lightning.
Wait -- won't we run out of fuel? Don't we only have reserves for a hundred years? You don't understand how much energy is contained in nuclear fuel. You need so little of it that the fuel is dirt cheap. The price of uranium could increase a thousandfold without affecting a nuclear plant's bottom line. And because uranium is so cheap, there's been very little prospecting. The reason our proven reserves are relatively small is that nobody has been looking very hard, because uranium is dirt cheap. In fact, for the past few decades, the nuclear power industry has been running on decommissioned nuclear warheads. That's how little fuel you really need for nuclear power.
Sure, nuclear might be okay, but wind power! It's decentralized, and therefore better! And it appeals to my philosophical sensibilities because it's not a big evil industry!Wind power can't provide baseload power. Plus, it's limited by the number of sites with good winds. You can, on the other hand, build as many nuclear plants as necessary without severe geographic constraints. As for nuclear being centralized, big, and therefore evil: big isn't necessarily bad. Properly regulated, a huge nuclear plant can provide inexpensive power to millions far more efficiently than many small ones, or thousands of turbines, coal-fired power stations, and natural gas generators. Furthermore, there's no particular reason nuclear stations need to be private per se: consider the Tennessee Valley Authority model.
If nuclear power is so great, why does it take two decades to build one, and why does the government have to subsidize the insurance?In terms of physical build time, it only takes a few years to erect a power plant. The delays come from hysterical opponents using every possible legal avenue to block new nuclear plants. The complaints have no basis in fact, but the courts have to hear them just the same. Often, legal delays are so severe that projects are abandoned altogether (which is, of course, what op
Of course it's a Utopia, but if we can't describe the ideal, how are we supposed to be develop policy that approximates it?
Unfortunately those theories have no effect on current affairs of existing governments. I'm talking specifically about real world governments - those that are corrupt, inefficient and have goals that could be described as nefarious.
=Governments don't have goals any more than species do. Individuals within them have goals, and if we structure government such that it's in the best interest of each actor to work for the common good, we construct a government that works for the common good. Sure, governments can turn malicious, but you can stab someone with a salad fork too.
How many governments were or are known that, even starting from a group of fine thinkers, didn't devolve into some sort of dictatorship?
Societies are unstable systems. Civilizations rise and fall, and if history is any guide, that fact is inevitable. The inevitability of the fall, however, isn't a reason to forgo good government while it lasts, and I don't think we can forestall the fall by limiting government. You're right in that revolutions tend to decay quickly, but Western democracies are unlikely to degenerate into tyranny any time soon.
As for your argument about power corrupting: that oft-repeated aphorism is certainly true. That's why separation of powers is the most important feature of any government. Benevolent dictatorships don't stay that way.
But it's more important for the economy to just give those 5 (or 50) workers a job.
Luxury goods are relatively inefficient ways to generate economic activity compared to broad-base activity: luxury goods have a lower multiplier effect and don't generate further economic activity. Building 50 Chevy Malibus will generate more economic activity than 1 Ferrari because the Chevy cars will be used by people to get to jobs, to make trips to stores, and so on, in ways that spur on further activity. Luxury goods, for the most part, just sit there. As for my original point about progressive taxation: because of the declining marginal value of money, a progressive tax actually results in a constant tax on utility. That's only fair.
Pray tell where is (or was) that magical ballot box where I could cast my vote against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And against bailouts of banks. And against "cash for clunkers."
One will appear at your local polling place next November.
I only want to reiterate - ability to survive without working leads to formation of ghettos where nobody works because only fools work.
Only if people are prevented from working by being denied the opportunity. Very few people accept the dole instead of a decent job by choice: not only is the resulting standard of living lower, but there's a social stigma attached. If your opportunities are so limited that you can't improve your standard of living through work (which is its own motivation), then there's an opportunity problem, not a welfare problem.
If the safety net entangles honest workers then there is no reason to work at all. Many people point out that the USA's social security programs, as they are set up, only make sure that poor people remain poor.
Considering that the poor pay little or no income tax, I don't see how they can be "entangled" in the safety net. Also, I already dealt with the motivation to work in the preceding paragraph.
In Sweden, for example, the security net was so extensive that taxes on those who dared to work exceeded 100% - and people refused to work for anything but cash. You couldn't get any service there at that time unless you pay cash.
There is no natural right to make a profit. You have the right to try. But if you fail, even if you've previously been successful, that's not society's problem: it's yours.
Don't forget that on Slashdot, we have people with ages ranging from 13 to 70. You can't assign them to a "generation". I have no data to back this up, but my hunch is that the libertarians here are part of the older crowd who embraced Ronald Reagan's "government is always bad" idea, and who will never let that go. It's a very simple and satisfying worldview, really. It just has the slight disadvantage of being wrong.
Of course, that leaves the younger Ron Paul and Ayn Rand fans. I attribute them to there being 25% or so of the population that will vote for the authoritarian no matter what. You can explain that using childhood upbringing, natural organic psychological variation, orthodox religious upbringing, or any other mechanism, but the fact remains that in all modern societies at all times, you have people who would be happiest under a strong, masculine, swaggering leader who told them and everyone else exactly what to do.
Even Western Europe has these people. Over there, though, they do a much better job of marginalizing this dangerous group.
You're living in a fantasy world. But I don't blame you: it's the "American Dream" after all, the idea that you, too, can become one of the great and wealthy barons of industry if you only try hard enough. Ergo, anyone who isn't a baron didn't try hard enough, is morally faulty, and deserves the hard knocks he receives. It's Calvinism wrapped up in an American flag, and it's evil.
The reality is that you're not going to end up in the 0.01% of the population that actually benefits from the Laissez-Faire policies you advocate. There's no shame in that. You can lead a good, productive life without ascending the very apex of society, and you should try to make that life that better. Advocating these policies is like adding gilded miniature lamps to a dollhouse while your actual termite-rotted house is collapsing around you.
I've addressed most of your post elsewhere, so let me focus on the new arguments.
An impartial observer would say that the US government is steadily working to expand its control over US citizens and over foreign lands and foreign resources, with benefits channeled to select few corporations.
Don't confuse the model with the implementation. I described how government is supposed to work. We can agree that for the past decade or so, we've had an especially corrupt, dysfunctional government. That dysfunction, however, is not shared by governments in all places and times. Good government is possible.
You are paying all of these taxes and many more, most of them are useless at best, but usually destructive. That's the problem...., all the progressive taxation does is gives more of your money to the government, where it will be misused in millions of ways
You seem to take it as a self-evidence axiom in the world that government is malicious, corrupt, inefficient, and ineffectual. I reject this axiom because it is patently false. Without the underlying assumption that giving more money to the government is always a bad thing, your argument falls apart.
Even if we focus on personal income and personal taxes, how is it that each dollar is less useful? I can spend a $50K on a house and it keeps 5 laborers employed. Or I can spend $500K on a house, and it keeps 50 laborers employed. I think dollars just don't have the attribute of usefulness; each dollar is equally useful in the economy.
Yes, the amount of stuff you can get increases linearly with your income. But how much satisfaction do you gain? Does having 50 laborers make you ten times happier than having five? Does having two yachts make you get out of bed any faster in the morning? Utility and satisfaction increase slowly with income when you are very wealthy.
Yet another way found to deincentivize honest work. Work for cash only (as a pimp, for example,) run red lights all you want, and pay nothing. Great idea, just as most governments' ideas are.
There are plenty of incentives to work even with a graduated fine system. The benefits of success should not include the ability to violate laws with impunity. A non-graduated fine means exactly that. I remember a case in New York City a while ago of some lawyers parking anywhere they'd like and just paying all the parking tickets because the fines meant nothing. That behavior is antisocial.
[with taxes, the government] might build a mega-school where none are needed, or they can build a bridge to nowhere, or they can build an international airport in a fishing village, or they can just burn the cash up in some war. The money is taken out of your hands, this means you are denied the right to decide how to spend it. This reduces the desire to earn more; the opposite end of the spectrum is to earn nothing at all and live on social security or some illegal income.
You have the ability to influence the budget through many different political channels, the most powerful of which is the ballot box. Through government spending, we can accomplish great things that would never have been done had individually individually allocated the same funds.
The money is taken out of your hands, this means you are denied the right to decide how to spend it. This reduces the desire to earn more; the opposite end of the spectrum is to earn nothing at all and live on social security or some illegal income.
And so we arrive at the meat of he issue. Are you seriously claiming that there's no incentive to work in a society with a safety net? There are quite a few advantages to wealth.
Or is it that you're more upset that it's possible to survive without working? Are your sensibilities offended by the idea of someone not being punished for idle
You're confusing cause and effect. The flight of business offshore is allowed and encouraged by our lax regulatory environment and "free" (to screw you) trade policies. When we had strong regulation, companies didn't leave. Europe, which has strong regulation, is not seeing the hollowing-out of their economy the way we are.
Ergo, regulations are not causing our corporate flight. And if you look at history, it seems that the opposite is true: lax regulations are associated with offshoring.
Do you milk your own cows? Thresh your own grain? Forge your own steel? Gather herbs for your own medicine?
Thought so. Your key problem is that you consider it a greater sin to help someone else than to see someone fail. I don't think that's right. In an industrialized world, nobody who's put 30 years into working for a company should be a pauper for the rest of his life if he happens to retire into a bear market. That's cruel.
As for management issues --- the answer is regulation. And yes, sometimes the government picks up the tab. That's life. Is it the fault of the pensioner that his company went bankrupt?
401K accounts and their ilk are cruel. Regular people don't have the knowledge to properly invest and hedge against market failures, and don't have the time to learn how to do so. And we shouldn't expect them to: life is not about finance. Furthermore, 401k users are at the mercy of the market. If someone happens to retire during a bear market, then through no fault of his own, his standard of living is much reduced versus someone who has the good fortune to retire into a bull market.
Old-fashioned pensions are much better for normal people because then it is up to the pension-providing organization, which employs savvy financial wizards, to manage the money. And since pension payouts are guaranteed, this organization has every incentive to properly manage the account.
I also noticed the circular linguistic absurdity, and meant to list laws against unjust termination. But by the time I noticed the error, I'd already posted.
As for the substance of your reply: government's duty under our social contract is to ensure the utilitarian welfare of all. (It's not to maximize liberty: anarchy is the liberty-maximizing form of government, and it tends not to work.) If restricting your liberty in the very benign form of taxation ends up causing a greater benefit as a whole to society, then it is worth it.
To that, you might make the natural leap to saying that we might as well murder people to benefit the whole, if the utilitarian calculus works out. However, I would retort that the benefit of guaranteeing fundamental rights far outstrips whatever might be gained, in human terms, by violating them. Avoidance of taxation is not one of these rights. It's perfectly legitimate for government to tax you in order to benefit society as a whole. Yes, the government can reach into your pocket, but it can also reach into everyone else's pocket, in order to effect things that benefit everyone.
Now that we have the legitimacy issue out of the way, we can talk about whether a certain level of taxation is good policy. Highly progressive income taxes serve to prevent extreme concentrations of wealth in society, which in turn distort the political system and lead to inefficient crony capitalism and oligarchy. By avoiding these beginnings, we avoid their ends. Progressive taxation is a far better option than the alternative method of avoiding wealth concentration, a maximum wage. Also, progressive taxation can be justified by observing that as one earns more, each dollar is less useful. Therefore, taking a greater percentage of a higher income actually exacts the same amount of utility from that income.
On a related note, some Scandinavian countries have begun to issue fines for traffic violations and such not as fixed dollar figures, but as percentages of the violator's income. That's an excellent idea: it makes the cost of a violation a cost in utility. Is running a red light any less bad if you're rich?
As for your ad absurdio minimum wage example: the government could do that, sure. But it'd be bad policy because it'd have disastrous economic effects. That doesn't a reasonable minimum wage a bad thing at all. A minimum wage ensures that businesses cannot use cheap labor for production, but that labor-saving machinery must be used instead. That's a good thing, because it encourages technological development and moves a society forward.
As for capital gains: reinvent the wealth in the business instead of letting it appreciate as capital will both stimulate economic activity and avoid the capital gains tax. The capital gains tax is a price for sitting on wealth. It's something we should discourage.
I'm not proposing "socialism" in the way you think I am. I'm proposing that we make a market economy that works better through forcing all the participants to play fair.
So do you support collective bargaining or not? If not, why? Your own principles dictate that you should: unions are a natural consequence of the freedom to assemble and the freedom to contract.
Look at all the fine automobiles turned out by the USSR, for example.
The USSR was a command economy with no competition, internal or external, or even market feedback. It's a completely invalid comparison. Libertarian fuckwads like you have the infuriating habit of comparing everything but Laissez-faire capitalism to authoritarian command economies. Either you're being deliberately dishonest or you're simply incapable of comprehending that societal organization is more subtle than a binary choice: capitalism OR authoritarianism. Either way, the comparison engenders more heat than light.
And if I'm going to start up a new company to make widgets, why on earth would I start it somewhere with laws like that?
Because places with laws like that are wonderful places to live, and you live there too. Companies are founded every day in the EU.
The structure supports itself using the energy stored in the moving ribbon. That's the whole point. It's not a 2,000km long, 80km-high viaduct.
Also, it's pathetic and sad if we forgo what would be one of the greatest advancements of our time because we're afraid somebody might knock it down like so many bricks. I can't believe that you're so paralyzed by fear that you'd rather do nothing than attempt something great, and, fail or success, at least say you've tried.
We're doomed to a race to the bottom because no amount of government regulation is going to stop corporations from doing everything they can to minimize costs, which incidentally implies paying their workers as little as possible.
No. There are plenty of things we can do to stop it:
Minimum wage
Progressive income taxes
Taxing capital gains as income
Strong unions for collective bargaining
Laws against unlawful termination
Tariffs against nations with poor labor laws
Or are you just presupposing that there's nothing we can do, and moving from that assertion to the idea that even trying is wrong?
These things worked here for 50 years, and they still work in Western Europe. What the hell is wrong with you when you argue against policies that benefit your own economic and social interests?
You have a strange definition of practical if it includes a 2000km maglev track that's 80km in the air.
Obviously, it'd be a massive undertaking, but it's practical in that we know how to build the thing with known materials. Space elevators, on the other hand, require exotic substances we simply don't have right now.
So we're doomed to a race to the bottom? Capital must be free to move across borders? We can't possibly raise our standard of living above that of the shittiest shithole nation in the world, because companies will just move there? We couldn't possibly use things like regulations and tarrifs to ensure that companies can't outsource everything?
Fuck you. You start with your desired outcome and come up with premises to support it. You're being intellectually dishonest.
There is no choice when there's a great power asymmetry between labor and capital. Unions would be a great remedy, but you libertarian fuckwads are opposed to those too for some unfathomable reason.
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Projecting much? Your response is disingenuous scaremongering. You guys are like Intelligent Design advocates, constantly shifting from one justification to another as each is debunked, each one flimsier than the last, with the only constant being the judicious abuse of scientific language to instill fear and doubt in ordinary people. Yes, you are exactly like Intelligent Design advocates.
Enrichment consists of passing vaporized uranium through membranes to separate out the heavier isotopes. It doesn't emit CFFs or anything else as a matter of course. That one older plant does is an artifact of that plant and not the process itself. The USEC plans to replace that plant.
Also, the one primary source I found for the CFC114 information mentions 800,000 pounds per year for two plants, which means that it's around 400,000 pounds now, equivalent (using your numbers) to 1.5e9 kg of CO2. That refined uranium generates 8e8 megawatt-hours. Coal generates 1,970 pounds of CO2 per megawatt-hour. So had the electricity supplied by nuclear been produced by coal, we would instead have emitted 7.1e11kg on CO2. That's approximately five hundred times less CO2, and starting to get into negligible territory. And that's 1) using a relatively inefficient enrichment process, and 2) not recycling the enriched fuel in any way. Do you want to compare that to the CO2 used to manufacture and maintain wind turbines (don't forget transportation), or the quite toxic chemical soup used to manufacture photovoltaic cells?
The rest of your post is similarly misleading, and not worthwhile to debunk in detail. In brief, the noble (I don't know why you capitalized it) gas fission products are managed and harvested (as we've known how to do for 50 years --- read the date on that paper), not simply emitted into the atmosphere. Even if they were emitted, they have very short half-lives, and would contribute insignificantly the background radiation level. Remember, noble gases are insert and don't bioaccumulate. But since they're not simply vented, it's a moot point anyway.
Your phytoplankton reference is the worst kind of scientific pandering. It's not CFCs that are the primary danger, but rather the acidification of the oceans caused by their absorption of CO2. We've already established that coal emits quite a bit more CO2.
As for Yucca mountain: a granite facility with no groundwater permeation probably would be better, sure. Let's use or make one.
Nevertheless, Yucca isn't bad. Even a 5.5 "aftershock" is hardly enough to damage a secure facility. (If these shocks even exist: a source would be nice here.) Long-term corrosion information, because it's a gradual process, can be extrapolated from short-term experiments. Corrosion doesn't suddenly accelerate three hundred years out, as you imply. And remember: by the time nuclear waste even gets to a storage facility, it's already radioactively decayed into longer-lived isotopes that simply aren't that dangerous. As for groundwater permeation: first of all, the waste is put in containers specifically designed to avoid water contact. Second, even if water were to erode these containers, the radioactive waste within is highly insoluble and vitrified, so contamination would be low. And even if contamination were something
The regulatory system worked. Why are you complaining?
Sure, 1968 was primitive by our standards, but they were hardly working with stone knives and bearskins back then.
Keep in mind that we landed on the moon in 1969, that UNIX-PDP7 was released the same year, and that quantum physics and relativity were 50 years old.
Maybe we should ban other substances that we can use to poison the earth too, then.
Get real.
(Or, if your post is satire, then good job!)
It goes something like this:
In reality, X produces far less overall pollution than Y.
I've seen this argument used to oppose:
All of these are great technologies. If we're ever to make any progress, we have to learn to think past the environmentalist's fallacy.
Even without further technological advance, nuclear power will suffice for several millennia. It produces zero emissions (except a little hot water) and produces a tiny volume of solid waste that doesn't escape into the environment. It runs silently all day and all night. If you were handed a datasheet for a nuclear power plant with the source of power blacked out, you'd jump at the chance to build the thing.
Nuclear power produces long-lived, dangerous waste, doesn't it? Dangerous and long-lived are mutually exclusive when it comes to nuclear materials. That's just the way the science of radioactive decay works. After being taken out of the reactor, the waste that remains can be reprocessed into more fuel. But if it isn't, then you can leave it in a cooling pond for a few years, and after that point, it's safe enough to handle, store, and bury. There are far worse industrial outputs than cooled-down nuclear waste.
But it's still dangerous and we have no place to store the waste! What's wrong with a cave in the middle of the desert? There's no water table. The area is seismically stable, and there's no life where we want to store the waste. And by itself, nuclear waste will do nothing. It won't make your children glow in the middle of the night. It won't contaminate your crops. It won't do anything because it's inert.
What about the risk of nuclear meltdown? Won't that destroy cities? Well, what about steam boiler explosions? What about refinery disasters? What about train disasters? Do those keep your up at night? They all killed people regularly back in their early days. But we don't worry about them now because improved safety technology has reduced the risk to an acceptable level. The same principle applies to nuclear power: another disaster like Chernobyl could never happen to even a 1970s-era American reactor, much less the far-improved versions we have today. The risk of being injured by a nuclear meltdown today is on par with being injured by lightning.
Wait -- won't we run out of fuel? Don't we only have reserves for a hundred years? You don't understand how much energy is contained in nuclear fuel. You need so little of it that the fuel is dirt cheap. The price of uranium could increase a thousandfold without affecting a nuclear plant's bottom line. And because uranium is so cheap, there's been very little prospecting. The reason our proven reserves are relatively small is that nobody has been looking very hard, because uranium is dirt cheap. In fact, for the past few decades, the nuclear power industry has been running on decommissioned nuclear warheads. That's how little fuel you really need for nuclear power.
Sure, nuclear might be okay, but wind power! It's decentralized, and therefore better! And it appeals to my philosophical sensibilities because it's not a big evil industry!Wind power can't provide baseload power. Plus, it's limited by the number of sites with good winds. You can, on the other hand, build as many nuclear plants as necessary without severe geographic constraints. As for nuclear being centralized, big, and therefore evil: big isn't necessarily bad. Properly regulated, a huge nuclear plant can provide inexpensive power to millions far more efficiently than many small ones, or thousands of turbines, coal-fired power stations, and natural gas generators. Furthermore, there's no particular reason nuclear stations need to be private per se: consider the Tennessee Valley Authority model.
If nuclear power is so great, why does it take two decades to build one, and why does the government have to subsidize the insurance?In terms of physical build time, it only takes a few years to erect a power plant. The delays come from hysterical opponents using every possible legal avenue to block new nuclear plants. The complaints have no basis in fact, but the courts have to hear them just the same. Often, legal delays are so severe that projects are abandoned altogether (which is, of course, what op
Of course it's a Utopia, but if we can't describe the ideal, how are we supposed to be develop policy that approximates it?
=Governments don't have goals any more than species do. Individuals within them have goals, and if we structure government such that it's in the best interest of each actor to work for the common good, we construct a government that works for the common good. Sure, governments can turn malicious, but you can stab someone with a salad fork too.
Societies are unstable systems. Civilizations rise and fall, and if history is any guide, that fact is inevitable. The inevitability of the fall, however, isn't a reason to forgo good government while it lasts, and I don't think we can forestall the fall by limiting government. You're right in that revolutions tend to decay quickly, but Western democracies are unlikely to degenerate into tyranny any time soon.
As for your argument about power corrupting: that oft-repeated aphorism is certainly true. That's why separation of powers is the most important feature of any government. Benevolent dictatorships don't stay that way.
Luxury goods are relatively inefficient ways to generate economic activity compared to broad-base activity: luxury goods have a lower multiplier effect and don't generate further economic activity. Building 50 Chevy Malibus will generate more economic activity than 1 Ferrari because the Chevy cars will be used by people to get to jobs, to make trips to stores, and so on, in ways that spur on further activity. Luxury goods, for the most part, just sit there. As for my original point about progressive taxation: because of the declining marginal value of money, a progressive tax actually results in a constant tax on utility. That's only fair.
One will appear at your local polling place next November.
Only if people are prevented from working by being denied the opportunity. Very few people accept the dole instead of a decent job by choice: not only is the resulting standard of living lower, but there's a social stigma attached. If your opportunities are so limited that you can't improve your standard of living through work (which is its own motivation), then there's an opportunity problem, not a welfare problem.
Considering that the poor pay little or no income tax, I don't see how they can be "entangled" in the safety net. Also, I already dealt with the motivation to work in the preceding paragraph.
Effective tax rates should nev
There is no natural right to make a profit. You have the right to try. But if you fail, even if you've previously been successful, that's not society's problem: it's yours.
Don't forget that on Slashdot, we have people with ages ranging from 13 to 70. You can't assign them to a "generation". I have no data to back this up, but my hunch is that the libertarians here are part of the older crowd who embraced Ronald Reagan's "government is always bad" idea, and who will never let that go. It's a very simple and satisfying worldview, really. It just has the slight disadvantage of being wrong.
Of course, that leaves the younger Ron Paul and Ayn Rand fans. I attribute them to there being 25% or so of the population that will vote for the authoritarian no matter what. You can explain that using childhood upbringing, natural organic psychological variation, orthodox religious upbringing, or any other mechanism, but the fact remains that in all modern societies at all times, you have people who would be happiest under a strong, masculine, swaggering leader who told them and everyone else exactly what to do.
Even Western Europe has these people. Over there, though, they do a much better job of marginalizing this dangerous group.
You're living in a fantasy world. But I don't blame you: it's the "American Dream" after all, the idea that you, too, can become one of the great and wealthy barons of industry if you only try hard enough. Ergo, anyone who isn't a baron didn't try hard enough, is morally faulty, and deserves the hard knocks he receives. It's Calvinism wrapped up in an American flag, and it's evil.
The reality is that you're not going to end up in the 0.01% of the population that actually benefits from the Laissez-Faire policies you advocate. There's no shame in that. You can lead a good, productive life without ascending the very apex of society, and you should try to make that life that better. Advocating these policies is like adding gilded miniature lamps to a dollhouse while your actual termite-rotted house is collapsing around you.
I've addressed most of your post elsewhere, so let me focus on the new arguments.
Don't confuse the model with the implementation. I described how government is supposed to work. We can agree that for the past decade or so, we've had an especially corrupt, dysfunctional government. That dysfunction, however, is not shared by governments in all places and times. Good government is possible.
You seem to take it as a self-evidence axiom in the world that government is malicious, corrupt, inefficient, and ineffectual. I reject this axiom because it is patently false. Without the underlying assumption that giving more money to the government is always a bad thing, your argument falls apart.
Yes, the amount of stuff you can get increases linearly with your income. But how much satisfaction do you gain? Does having 50 laborers make you ten times happier than having five? Does having two yachts make you get out of bed any faster in the morning? Utility and satisfaction increase slowly with income when you are very wealthy.
There are plenty of incentives to work even with a graduated fine system. The benefits of success should not include the ability to violate laws with impunity. A non-graduated fine means exactly that. I remember a case in New York City a while ago of some lawyers parking anywhere they'd like and just paying all the parking tickets because the fines meant nothing. That behavior is antisocial.
You have the ability to influence the budget through many different political channels, the most powerful of which is the ballot box. Through government spending, we can accomplish great things that would never have been done had individually individually allocated the same funds.
And so we arrive at the meat of he issue. Are you seriously claiming that there's no incentive to work in a society with a safety net? There are quite a few advantages to wealth.
Or is it that you're more upset that it's possible to survive without working? Are your sensibilities offended by the idea of someone not being punished for idle
You're confusing cause and effect. The flight of business offshore is allowed and encouraged by our lax regulatory environment and "free" (to screw you) trade policies. When we had strong regulation, companies didn't leave. Europe, which has strong regulation, is not seeing the hollowing-out of their economy the way we are.
Ergo, regulations are not causing our corporate flight. And if you look at history, it seems that the opposite is true: lax regulations are associated with offshoring.
Do you milk your own cows? Thresh your own grain? Forge your own steel? Gather herbs for your own medicine?
Thought so. Your key problem is that you consider it a greater sin to help someone else than to see someone fail. I don't think that's right. In an industrialized world, nobody who's put 30 years into working for a company should be a pauper for the rest of his life if he happens to retire into a bear market. That's cruel.
As for management issues --- the answer is regulation. And yes, sometimes the government picks up the tab. That's life. Is it the fault of the pensioner that his company went bankrupt?
401K accounts and their ilk are cruel. Regular people don't have the knowledge to properly invest and hedge against market failures, and don't have the time to learn how to do so. And we shouldn't expect them to: life is not about finance. Furthermore, 401k users are at the mercy of the market. If someone happens to retire during a bear market, then through no fault of his own, his standard of living is much reduced versus someone who has the good fortune to retire into a bull market.
Old-fashioned pensions are much better for normal people because then it is up to the pension-providing organization, which employs savvy financial wizards, to manage the money. And since pension payouts are guaranteed, this organization has every incentive to properly manage the account.
I also noticed the circular linguistic absurdity, and meant to list laws against unjust termination. But by the time I noticed the error, I'd already posted.
As for the substance of your reply: government's duty under our social contract is to ensure the utilitarian welfare of all. (It's not to maximize liberty: anarchy is the liberty-maximizing form of government, and it tends not to work.) If restricting your liberty in the very benign form of taxation ends up causing a greater benefit as a whole to society, then it is worth it.
To that, you might make the natural leap to saying that we might as well murder people to benefit the whole, if the utilitarian calculus works out. However, I would retort that the benefit of guaranteeing fundamental rights far outstrips whatever might be gained, in human terms, by violating them. Avoidance of taxation is not one of these rights. It's perfectly legitimate for government to tax you in order to benefit society as a whole. Yes, the government can reach into your pocket, but it can also reach into everyone else's pocket, in order to effect things that benefit everyone.
Now that we have the legitimacy issue out of the way, we can talk about whether a certain level of taxation is good policy. Highly progressive income taxes serve to prevent extreme concentrations of wealth in society, which in turn distort the political system and lead to inefficient crony capitalism and oligarchy. By avoiding these beginnings, we avoid their ends. Progressive taxation is a far better option than the alternative method of avoiding wealth concentration, a maximum wage. Also, progressive taxation can be justified by observing that as one earns more, each dollar is less useful. Therefore, taking a greater percentage of a higher income actually exacts the same amount of utility from that income.
On a related note, some Scandinavian countries have begun to issue fines for traffic violations and such not as fixed dollar figures, but as percentages of the violator's income. That's an excellent idea: it makes the cost of a violation a cost in utility. Is running a red light any less bad if you're rich?
As for your ad absurdio minimum wage example: the government could do that, sure. But it'd be bad policy because it'd have disastrous economic effects. That doesn't a reasonable minimum wage a bad thing at all. A minimum wage ensures that businesses cannot use cheap labor for production, but that labor-saving machinery must be used instead. That's a good thing, because it encourages technological development and moves a society forward.
As for capital gains: reinvent the wealth in the business instead of letting it appreciate as capital will both stimulate economic activity and avoid the capital gains tax. The capital gains tax is a price for sitting on wealth. It's something we should discourage.
I'm not proposing "socialism" in the way you think I am. I'm proposing that we make a market economy that works better through forcing all the participants to play fair.
Well, good for you, but your fellow Libertarians don't seem to be fond of the idea.
"Oh no, you've brought out those big, nasty words! Oh no, we're scared! Nevermind his ideas, ignore the person I called a communist!"
Someday, you'll be hurt by the policies you advocate. Will you be such an ardent advocate of the rich then?
A space fountain is a launch loop turned on its side. AIUI, the advantages of a launch loop over a space fountain are that:
So do you support collective bargaining or not? If not, why? Your own principles dictate that you should: unions are a natural consequence of the freedom to assemble and the freedom to contract.
The USSR was a command economy with no competition, internal or external, or even market feedback. It's a completely invalid comparison. Libertarian fuckwads like you have the infuriating habit of comparing everything but Laissez-faire capitalism to authoritarian command economies. Either you're being deliberately dishonest or you're simply incapable of comprehending that societal organization is more subtle than a binary choice: capitalism OR authoritarianism. Either way, the comparison engenders more heat than light.
Because places with laws like that are wonderful places to live, and you live there too. Companies are founded every day in the EU.
The structure supports itself using the energy stored in the moving ribbon. That's the whole point. It's not a 2,000km long, 80km-high viaduct.
Also, it's pathetic and sad if we forgo what would be one of the greatest advancements of our time because we're afraid somebody might knock it down like so many bricks. I can't believe that you're so paralyzed by fear that you'd rather do nothing than attempt something great, and, fail or success, at least say you've tried.
No. There are plenty of things we can do to stop it:
Or are you just presupposing that there's nothing we can do, and moving from that assertion to the idea that even trying is wrong?
These things worked here for 50 years, and they still work in Western Europe. What the hell is wrong with you when you argue against policies that benefit your own economic and social interests?
Obviously, it'd be a massive undertaking, but it's practical in that we know how to build the thing with known materials. Space elevators, on the other hand, require exotic substances we simply don't have right now.
So we're doomed to a race to the bottom? Capital must be free to move across borders? We can't possibly raise our standard of living above that of the shittiest shithole nation in the world, because companies will just move there? We couldn't possibly use things like regulations and tarrifs to ensure that companies can't outsource everything?
Fuck you. You start with your desired outcome and come up with premises to support it. You're being intellectually dishonest.
There is no choice when there's a great power asymmetry between labor and capital. Unions would be a great remedy, but you libertarian fuckwads are opposed to those too for some unfathomable reason.