How about the nuanced view: Sometimes, government is the best solution. Sometimes, a free market is the best solution. There's a range of policies between free-for-all and complete-government-control, and the best solution will vary depending on what's being bought or sold and on the wider context the market is operating in (e.g. rationing rubber or gasoline might have been wise in 1942 and stupid in 1948).
Some sort of scale here might be in order, ranging from 0 (no government control) to 9 (complete government control):
0. A market with no rules at all is best demonstrated by the current markets for illegal drugs. Those markets function, sort of, but also have built into them murders, assaults, robberies, and other serious crimes.
1. You add some basic criminal rules that prevent murder, assaults, robberies, etc. This functions a bit better, but there's also no protection against a monopoly / monopsony that distorts the price in favor of the one company.
2. You outlaw monopoly or monopsony, at least on products that are critical to human life like water or food, this functions a bit better, but you still have the problem of a group of sellers or buyers getting together and controlling the prices that way at a cost to everyone else.
3. You now add a law against collusion between buyers and sellers. You still have the problem that sellers can falsely advertise their products or adulterate them in some way so that while they appear to be OK they're really quite dangerous.
4. You now add a law with either government inspections or civil penalties to prevent false advertising and adulteration. You still have the problem of the effects of the transaction on a third party. For example, if I contract with you to dump all my trash in your back yard, your next-door neighbor is effectively getting cheated, especially if the nasty stuff in that trash is seeping into his water supply.
5. You now add laws to require externalities (like the trash in your neighbor's water supply) either be stopped or be paid for (via contracts or civil penalties). But you still have a problem with price comparisons, because everyone's offering different wildly products to solve the same problem. So you might consider forcing everyone to offer similar or even identical products and differing only on price.
6. You now add laws that specify, in detail, what can be sold as a particular product. The price for the product is getting too high or too low for sellers and buyers.
7. You add price controls to your product, demanding that it can't get above or below a particular point. However, this is too unpredictable for some sellers or buyers.
8. You mandate a particular price for a product, and outlaw all attempts to sell higher or lower than that price. However, this means that people are adjusting the quantities sold due to the price, which may not be what the government wants or needs.
9. You mandate that buyers and sellers sell exactly a particular quantity of a product, at a particular price, to particular specifications, only transacting with particular parties. This is obviously the "complete government control" end of the spectrum.
Current policy in the US, EU, Canada, and other wealthy countries typically falls somewhere between 3 and 9, and varies a lot based on product. For instance, there are very few rules about selling word processing software, but the government can force you to sell particular parcels of land at what they decide is the prevailing market price.
That's not really the relevant correlation, because as a sibling poster points out, that doesn't actually control for anything.
More interesting to me is happiness versus median household income: There may be some sort of relationship between those two, but there appear to be some happy places that aren't rich and some rich places that aren't happy.
The citation I'd recommend using is Arkell vs Pressdram. Now granted, that was a UK case, not a Swedish case, but I'm guessing that The Rights Alliance will get the message.
I don't know about that exact scenario, but I will say that when I get applications from older workers that show signs of skill, I am happy to call them in for an interview, and happy to hire them, because they can be worth their weight in gold.
Age discrimination is illegal. You can read the law yourself, where it specifically states:
It shall be unlawful for an employer-
(1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual or otherwise discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s age;
(2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s age; or
(3) to reduce the wage rate of any employee in order to comply with this chapter.
It's very clear language, and there's no legitimate reason that the companies who are doing this should not be in court right now about it.
I did a quick check on this: If you combine the Tea Party organizations that have publicized the size of their membership, you're looking at about 2-3 million people, assuming no overlap in membership. 2.5 million people times $25 per person = $62.5 million annual budget from small donors. That's not a small amount of money, but $500,000 is still a significant chunk of change, representing almost 1% of the entire annual budget, and not something you would just casually spend on one person when you could use that money to, say, run an ad campaign.
I'd like you to compare that to, say, your average religious or charitable institution, which will regularly ask its members for significant donations and frequently holds fundraising events in hopes of drawing in cash from members and non-members alike. For example, a friend of mine runs a well-respected charity that spends most of its time and money on helping inner-city Hispanic youth get into and through college, and he spends a huge percentage of his time soliciting donations and writing grant applications to keep his organization afloat.
The Democratic Party was a racist party until 1960, although it had started moving in that direction during the Truman administration. The Kennedy administration, and Robert Kennedy in particular, were explicitly anti-racist. When Lyndon Johnson passed the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act in 1964, that was the final straw for most of the racists in the Democratic Party, and they left for the Republican Party. At the same time, Barry Goldwater specifically appealed to racism, and that strategy continued to be tapped progressively more carefully by Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Newt Gingrich. It occasionally rises to the surface too, with "macaca" moments and the like.
To conservatives the most important aspect of freedom of speech is freedom of speech.
Opinions about free speech have not much to do with the liberal-conservative axis.
For example, the ACLU is generally considered a liberal organization, and it's been a staunch defender of free speech, most notably defending the right of a neo-Nazi group to march through a mostly Jewish neighborhood. But the liberal Tipper Gore created the Parents Music Resource Center to advocate for muzzling lyrics of popular songs dealing with sex, violence, drugs, and the occult.
It also varies among conservatives. Frank Zappa was a self-identified conservative and a staunch opponent of Tipper Gore's effort. But when the cops were doing their jackbooted thug routine on Occupy Wall St, a lot of conservatives were cheering them on.
A good example of the variety of attacks on free speech can be seen over at the Thomas Jefferson Center Muzzle Awards: Sometimes it's liberals, sometimes it's conservatives.
So when you and your liberal friends bash the hell out of President Bush, call him names, it's perfectly fine?
Umm, yes. It's called the First Amendment. People have been calling presidents nasty names since 1789, and there's no reason to stop now.
But when the a grassroots movement called the tea party goes out and PEACEFULLY assembles to protest an out of control government (not just the president) it's astro-turf?
I have no problem with the people who go to a protest, if they're expressing their true feelings on the subject. Even if I disagree with them. I do have a problem with people who go to political events because they're paid to do so, because it's creating the illusion of a broad base of support where none exists.
And why do you care that they raise money and how they use it?
Because if I want to truly understand an organization, no matter the size or type, I look at its budget. The money coming in defines who the organization really serves. The money going out defines what the organization has deemed important. The stated goals of the organization may be lies or self-deception, but the budget tells you what the group really cares about.
especially when your messiah
I assume you're referring to Barack Obama. I didn't vote for him in November, and I never thought he was any kind of messiah.
Two obvious reasons: 1. A lot of people think that the value of things is measured in dollars, and so if a project doesn't make money it's not worth doing. 2. There's basically nobody on the planet who wouldn't like having more money.
I think you can interpret any policy in terms of those extremes, but it's not helpful.
Here's the problem: If you're talking about government policy to stop population growth, you have very few to draw on. The choices are: * China, with the problems of forced abortion and infanticide. * India, who's trying to use various financial incentives to reduce population growth. * Iran, who has a surprisingly progressive policy of mandatory contraception classes for couples about to be married. * Singapore, which was basically a PR campaign and sterilization program. * Uzbekistan, with forced sterilization of women after a certain number of children.
Of those, the only one that's actually worked is China's.
It was actually intended as a joke, with a point: The point is that any solution to the "population-too-high" problem is going to involve killing people. For instance, the Chinese population control laws lead to forced abortions and infanticide (mostly of girls, because girls don't carry on the family name). For some reason, those who advocate for population controls don't want to sign up to be first to go.
See, that's because they aren't thinking ahead. Imagine this scenario if you will: 1. Liberals ban plastic bags. 2. Liberals are lazy and don't wash their reusable bags. 3. Liberals get sick and die from the dirty bags. 4. San Francisco, a bastion of everything Republicans hate, becomes a ghost town as the evil liberals die off, and takes Berzerkely with it. Haight-Ashbury gone, Castro gone, 5. That makes it easy for the GOP to dominate both the California state government and the presidency (due to those juicy 55 electoral votes).
So if this story is true, Roger Ailes would be wise to keep his mouth shut, or even encourage the bans to be expanded to New York City, Boston, and other liberal cities.
The Tea Party is actually really the most sophisticated astro-turfing I've ever encountered, because there are many many rank-and-file Tea Partiers that have no idea that it's astro-turf. For example, I encountered one Tea Partier who was a true believer and a bit offended by my offhand remark about the Tea Party being a megaphone for rich people, but was totally flummoxed when I asked him how they had come up with $500K to pay Sarah Palin to give a single speech at the Tea Party Convention (this was back when she was somebody important). That kind of cash is not something a real grassroots group has lying around to blow on a pep talk - it would represent months of fundraising efforts, and probably be directed at something much more useful.
how many rural states does it take to equal one OH, NY, FL, TX or CA?
How many people are living there? Land doesn't vote, people vote.
The reason Ohio gets far more electoral votes than, say, large western states, has a lot to do with the fact that you have more people living in the Cleveland metro area than you have in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana combined.
Another example of how the small-by-population states have undue influence: The 21 smallest states in the US comprise 13.8% of the US population. That means that 7% of the US population could, in theory, elect 42 senators, which is enough to control national policy via a filibuster. The only reason that doesn't work out exactly that way is that 13 of those states lean one way politically and 8 lean the other way, so in fact those 42 senators are as much at loggerheads as everyone else. Or another way of measuring it: A resident of Wyoming has approximately 61.5 times more voting power in the Senate as a resident of California has.
That's because the President keeps spending money.
That's wrong on a lot of levels: 1. The President can't carry out any of the laws of the US without spending money, unless you somehow think that all the civil servants and soldiers and contractors are suddenly going to do things on a volunteer basis. No money for government = no government.
2. The President can't (legally) spend a dime without authorization from Congress. Congress has passed laws either allowing him or demanding him to spend exactly what he's spending.
3. Total federal spending as a percentage of GDP wase the same in 2012 as 1983 under that notorious liberal Ronald Reagan. There was a spike between 2008 and 2009 because the country's economy crashed, but it's gone down ever since.
4. Federal tax receipts are the lowest since 1945. It's not a stretch to suggest that this might have some sort of effect on budget deficits.
5. The Republicans in the House have opposed proposals by the president that involve combinations of tax increases and spending cuts to reduce the deficit. That means they're making decisions based on principles that have nothing to do with the deficit.
6. To get a balanced budget, you have to cut approximately 1/3 of the federal budget, immediately. Some math: If we completely eliminated the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Interior, Health and Human Services, Labor, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, and stopped paying anyone who works at the White House, we'd still not have a balanced budget. So what would you suggest that Obama stop spending money on?
I'd like to see Moon Base Gingrich as much as the next geek, but it's simply not going to happen with this Congress and this President. The reason is that the Republicans in Congress have decided as pretty much a matter of policy that they will vote against anything the President proposes.
I'm sorry, most of us dumb Americans don't understand the words "lamentable" and "vociferously". Please limit yourself to monosyllables if you intend to get your point across.
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How about the nuanced view: Sometimes, government is the best solution. Sometimes, a free market is the best solution. There's a range of policies between free-for-all and complete-government-control, and the best solution will vary depending on what's being bought or sold and on the wider context the market is operating in (e.g. rationing rubber or gasoline might have been wise in 1942 and stupid in 1948).
Some sort of scale here might be in order, ranging from 0 (no government control) to 9 (complete government control):
0. A market with no rules at all is best demonstrated by the current markets for illegal drugs. Those markets function, sort of, but also have built into them murders, assaults, robberies, and other serious crimes.
1. You add some basic criminal rules that prevent murder, assaults, robberies, etc. This functions a bit better, but there's also no protection against a monopoly / monopsony that distorts the price in favor of the one company.
2. You outlaw monopoly or monopsony, at least on products that are critical to human life like water or food, this functions a bit better, but you still have the problem of a group of sellers or buyers getting together and controlling the prices that way at a cost to everyone else.
3. You now add a law against collusion between buyers and sellers. You still have the problem that sellers can falsely advertise their products or adulterate them in some way so that while they appear to be OK they're really quite dangerous.
4. You now add a law with either government inspections or civil penalties to prevent false advertising and adulteration. You still have the problem of the effects of the transaction on a third party. For example, if I contract with you to dump all my trash in your back yard, your next-door neighbor is effectively getting cheated, especially if the nasty stuff in that trash is seeping into his water supply.
5. You now add laws to require externalities (like the trash in your neighbor's water supply) either be stopped or be paid for (via contracts or civil penalties). But you still have a problem with price comparisons, because everyone's offering different wildly products to solve the same problem. So you might consider forcing everyone to offer similar or even identical products and differing only on price.
6. You now add laws that specify, in detail, what can be sold as a particular product. The price for the product is getting too high or too low for sellers and buyers.
7. You add price controls to your product, demanding that it can't get above or below a particular point. However, this is too unpredictable for some sellers or buyers.
8. You mandate a particular price for a product, and outlaw all attempts to sell higher or lower than that price. However, this means that people are adjusting the quantities sold due to the price, which may not be what the government wants or needs.
9. You mandate that buyers and sellers sell exactly a particular quantity of a product, at a particular price, to particular specifications, only transacting with particular parties. This is obviously the "complete government control" end of the spectrum.
Current policy in the US, EU, Canada, and other wealthy countries typically falls somewhere between 3 and 9, and varies a lot based on product. For instance, there are very few rules about selling word processing software, but the government can force you to sell particular parcels of land at what they decide is the prevailing market price.
That's not really the relevant correlation, because as a sibling poster points out, that doesn't actually control for anything.
More interesting to me is happiness versus median household income: There may be some sort of relationship between those two, but there appear to be some happy places that aren't rich and some rich places that aren't happy.
The citation I'd recommend using is Arkell vs Pressdram. Now granted, that was a UK case, not a Swedish case, but I'm guessing that The Rights Alliance will get the message.
I don't know about that exact scenario, but I will say that when I get applications from older workers that show signs of skill, I am happy to call them in for an interview, and happy to hire them, because they can be worth their weight in gold.
Also very interesting in this regard is Robert Cringley's What Americans Don't Know about H-1B Visas Could Hurt Us All.
Age discrimination is illegal. You can read the law yourself, where it specifically states:
It shall be unlawful for an employer-
(1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual or otherwise discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s age;
(2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s age; or
(3) to reduce the wage rate of any employee in order to comply with this chapter.
It's very clear language, and there's no legitimate reason that the companies who are doing this should not be in court right now about it.
I did a quick check on this: If you combine the Tea Party organizations that have publicized the size of their membership, you're looking at about 2-3 million people, assuming no overlap in membership. 2.5 million people times $25 per person = $62.5 million annual budget from small donors. That's not a small amount of money, but $500,000 is still a significant chunk of change, representing almost 1% of the entire annual budget, and not something you would just casually spend on one person when you could use that money to, say, run an ad campaign.
I'd like you to compare that to, say, your average religious or charitable institution, which will regularly ask its members for significant donations and frequently holds fundraising events in hopes of drawing in cash from members and non-members alike. For example, a friend of mine runs a well-respected charity that spends most of its time and money on helping inner-city Hispanic youth get into and through college, and he spends a huge percentage of his time soliciting donations and writing grant applications to keep his organization afloat.
Unfortunately, no Windows 7 upgrade is offered with most PC manufacturers in the US.
Fixed that for you.
The Democratic Party was a racist party until 1960, although it had started moving in that direction during the Truman administration. The Kennedy administration, and Robert Kennedy in particular, were explicitly anti-racist. When Lyndon Johnson passed the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act in 1964, that was the final straw for most of the racists in the Democratic Party, and they left for the Republican Party. At the same time, Barry Goldwater specifically appealed to racism, and that strategy continued to be tapped progressively more carefully by Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Newt Gingrich. It occasionally rises to the surface too, with "macaca" moments and the like.
To conservatives the most important aspect of freedom of speech is freedom of speech.
Opinions about free speech have not much to do with the liberal-conservative axis.
For example, the ACLU is generally considered a liberal organization, and it's been a staunch defender of free speech, most notably defending the right of a neo-Nazi group to march through a mostly Jewish neighborhood. But the liberal Tipper Gore created the Parents Music Resource Center to advocate for muzzling lyrics of popular songs dealing with sex, violence, drugs, and the occult.
It also varies among conservatives. Frank Zappa was a self-identified conservative and a staunch opponent of Tipper Gore's effort. But when the cops were doing their jackbooted thug routine on Occupy Wall St, a lot of conservatives were cheering them on.
A good example of the variety of attacks on free speech can be seen over at the Thomas Jefferson Center Muzzle Awards: Sometimes it's liberals, sometimes it's conservatives.
So when you and your liberal friends bash the hell out of President Bush, call him names, it's perfectly fine?
Umm, yes. It's called the First Amendment. People have been calling presidents nasty names since 1789, and there's no reason to stop now.
But when the a grassroots movement called the tea party goes out and PEACEFULLY assembles to protest an out of control government (not just the president) it's astro-turf?
I have no problem with the people who go to a protest, if they're expressing their true feelings on the subject. Even if I disagree with them. I do have a problem with people who go to political events because they're paid to do so, because it's creating the illusion of a broad base of support where none exists.
And why do you care that they raise money and how they use it?
Because if I want to truly understand an organization, no matter the size or type, I look at its budget. The money coming in defines who the organization really serves. The money going out defines what the organization has deemed important. The stated goals of the organization may be lies or self-deception, but the budget tells you what the group really cares about.
especially when your messiah
I assume you're referring to Barack Obama. I didn't vote for him in November, and I never thought he was any kind of messiah.
Two obvious reasons:
1. A lot of people think that the value of things is measured in dollars, and so if a project doesn't make money it's not worth doing.
2. There's basically nobody on the planet who wouldn't like having more money.
I think you can interpret any policy in terms of those extremes, but it's not helpful.
Here's the problem: If you're talking about government policy to stop population growth, you have very few to draw on. The choices are:
* China, with the problems of forced abortion and infanticide.
* India, who's trying to use various financial incentives to reduce population growth.
* Iran, who has a surprisingly progressive policy of mandatory contraception classes for couples about to be married.
* Singapore, which was basically a PR campaign and sterilization program.
* Uzbekistan, with forced sterilization of women after a certain number of children.
Of those, the only one that's actually worked is China's.
It was actually intended as a joke, with a point: The point is that any solution to the "population-too-high" problem is going to involve killing people. For instance, the Chinese population control laws lead to forced abortions and infanticide (mostly of girls, because girls don't carry on the family name). For some reason, those who advocate for population controls don't want to sign up to be first to go.
The solution is to have fewer people
My advice, for everyone who thinks this way, is to show some leadership and drop dead.
See, that's because they aren't thinking ahead. Imagine this scenario if you will:
1. Liberals ban plastic bags.
2. Liberals are lazy and don't wash their reusable bags.
3. Liberals get sick and die from the dirty bags.
4. San Francisco, a bastion of everything Republicans hate, becomes a ghost town as the evil liberals die off, and takes Berzerkely with it. Haight-Ashbury gone, Castro gone,
5. That makes it easy for the GOP to dominate both the California state government and the presidency (due to those juicy 55 electoral votes).
So if this story is true, Roger Ailes would be wise to keep his mouth shut, or even encourage the bans to be expanded to New York City, Boston, and other liberal cities.
We have those already: MATE, KDE 3, Xfce, etc. The problem is just that Gnome and Ubuntu have gone off the rails in their quest to be more like Apple.
The Tea Party is actually really the most sophisticated astro-turfing I've ever encountered, because there are many many rank-and-file Tea Partiers that have no idea that it's astro-turf. For example, I encountered one Tea Partier who was a true believer and a bit offended by my offhand remark about the Tea Party being a megaphone for rich people, but was totally flummoxed when I asked him how they had come up with $500K to pay Sarah Palin to give a single speech at the Tea Party Convention (this was back when she was somebody important). That kind of cash is not something a real grassroots group has lying around to blow on a pep talk - it would represent months of fundraising efforts, and probably be directed at something much more useful.
Reduce military spending to 0, and you still have to come up with another $400 billion in cuts to make a balanced budget.
how many rural states does it take to equal one OH, NY, FL, TX or CA?
How many people are living there? Land doesn't vote, people vote.
The reason Ohio gets far more electoral votes than, say, large western states, has a lot to do with the fact that you have more people living in the Cleveland metro area than you have in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana combined.
Another example of how the small-by-population states have undue influence: The 21 smallest states in the US comprise 13.8% of the US population. That means that 7% of the US population could, in theory, elect 42 senators, which is enough to control national policy via a filibuster. The only reason that doesn't work out exactly that way is that 13 of those states lean one way politically and 8 lean the other way, so in fact those 42 senators are as much at loggerheads as everyone else. Or another way of measuring it: A resident of Wyoming has approximately 61.5 times more voting power in the Senate as a resident of California has.
That's because the President keeps spending money.
That's wrong on a lot of levels:
1. The President can't carry out any of the laws of the US without spending money, unless you somehow think that all the civil servants and soldiers and contractors are suddenly going to do things on a volunteer basis. No money for government = no government.
2. The President can't (legally) spend a dime without authorization from Congress. Congress has passed laws either allowing him or demanding him to spend exactly what he's spending.
3. Total federal spending as a percentage of GDP wase the same in 2012 as 1983 under that notorious liberal Ronald Reagan. There was a spike between 2008 and 2009 because the country's economy crashed, but it's gone down ever since.
4. Federal tax receipts are the lowest since 1945. It's not a stretch to suggest that this might have some sort of effect on budget deficits.
5. The Republicans in the House have opposed proposals by the president that involve combinations of tax increases and spending cuts to reduce the deficit. That means they're making decisions based on principles that have nothing to do with the deficit.
6. To get a balanced budget, you have to cut approximately 1/3 of the federal budget, immediately. Some math: If we completely eliminated the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Interior, Health and Human Services, Labor, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, and stopped paying anyone who works at the White House, we'd still not have a balanced budget. So what would you suggest that Obama stop spending money on?
I'd like to see Moon Base Gingrich as much as the next geek, but it's simply not going to happen with this Congress and this President. The reason is that the Republicans in Congress have decided as pretty much a matter of policy that they will vote against anything the President proposes.
I'm sorry, most of us dumb Americans don't understand the words "lamentable" and "vociferously". Please limit yourself to monosyllables if you intend to get your point across.
In Soviet Russia, asteroids play YOU!
All those years wearing a stupid-looking visor that looks like he swiped it from a cylon, and it turns out that the eye implants already existed!