There's a fine line between soliciting public support and encouraging vigilante justice.
What's the deal with all these accusations of vigilantes, witch hunts, etc? This is just a standard and very effective law enforcement tactic which has been around as long as a modern police force has.
It's not some magic threat to liberty or justice which just cropped up yesterday. As has been noted a number of times, it is likely that the person or people who planted the bombs that killed and maimed people were photographed and videoed many times over. Do you really think it would be a good idea to ignore this massive amount of evidence merely because you disapprove of the appeal for this evidence?
That's pretty weak for an argument. So you're saying that because our ancestors didn't oppose tyranny sufficiently vigorously, then they agreed with it and hence, it's ok? Because that's what your argument sounds like to me.
And how is it "other peoples money" when I pay for it myself too?
As to your previous comment about other peoples' money, you apparently have never heard of tragedy of the commons. For example, consider the story of two dinners. Two groups decide to eat at the same restaurant. The first group decides that everyone will pay for their own meal while the second decides that everyone will pay into a pot which is then used to pay for the meals which everyone orders. End result is that the first group spends far less than the second group does. Because in the first case, if you decide to spend $1 less, then you save $1.
But in the second case, if you decide to spend $1 less, you save $1/N where N is the number of people in the group. There's very little savings to you from deciding to eat cheaper. It's a classic prisoners' dilemma style problem where the end result is that everyone eats as much as they want to.
This is the same huge difference between public and private spending. If I choice to forgo all public services, then I lose the value of those services yet only reduce my tax burden by an immeasurable amount. If I chose to forgo a private service that I completely pay for, I gain the full cost savings of that decision.
So saying that you chip in a minute amount into a huge pot of Other Peoples' Money ignores that you as well as everyone else consuming that pot have no economic reason not to consume as much of that pot as you can. Perhaps, you should wonder if that sort of incentive is healthy for a society to have.
Do you want to be unable to call for help because too many people are making phone calls talking about the building collapse?
What will that cell phone do for you within a few minutes of a building collapse? You could always call a couple of hours later when things die down and emergency communication equipment gets set up. You wouldn't be going anywhere anyway.
And if the cell network is dependent on the building standing (say because the nearby cell towers were on top of the building or some other collapsed building), you might not have that network available anyway due directly to the disaster or attack in question.
In the case of the Boston bombing, what if you saw something that was both important and time-sensitive, but couldn't call out?
I guess you'll just have to suck it up. Or maybe speak to a police officer or emergency worker who happens to have communication equipment designed to operate in this situation.
As an aside, you also make a huge assumption that being able to place a call means that you'll be able to reach someone who matters. 911 is going to be flooded even if you could make calls to the cell network. It makes far more sense from both economic and emergency preparedness senses to just not depend on cell phones in a large scale emergency.
Entropy doesn't prohibit the universe from always existing or being created, or other priors. It plus the laws of thermodynamics merely constrain how the universe evolves.
Large amounts of gold sit idly in Fort Knox. Clearly, these bars are already buried:) Burying gold is a dumb activity in any case, but the point is that in the case of a depressed economy, you don't get the ill-effects you would: the depression is caused by people not having work and thus not being able to afford stuff. Until they are able to afford things, the depression goes on and they stay unemployed, because no-one wants to hire people when no-one buys stuff.
That's why deflation works here. Prices go down. People buy stuff. Now one would not want to transition directly and immediately from a debt heavy, inflationary society to a savings heavy, occasionally deflationary society. That's like spontaneously reversing the flow of traffic on all highways.
The phobia of deflation is very irrational. And I think we see here one ideological consequence of that. Depressions don't go on forever. They stop once people start buying the now cheap stuff again.
I think it's also telling that you claim that there's little need for quality in "external intervention" spending. That's a huge sign of detachment from reality. If your spending were providing actual value, then that would be boosting the overall economy and the wealth of those involved. Why do you think it doesn't matter much whether that value is present or not?
My take is that interventions particularly the low value ones you advocate actually generate net harm. They misallocate resources and labor (the most common cause of asset bubbles, for example), they can save businesses which would be better off in bankruptcy (and allocated in turn to more productive competitors), and they're feeble attempts to preserve a poorly thought out economic ideal.
Maybe we say, "We're ok with the cell phone network going out during an emergency, since those emergencies will be rare and the cost of making the network robust and redundant enough to handle the additional volume isn't worth being able to use your cell phone in an emergency." But then are we really ok with that? If we have a bombing in a major city and people can't really report what's going on because our telecommunications can't handle the strain, is that really alright?
Why do you think the answer would be anything other than "yes, it's ok"? We don't rely on the cell phone network in an emergency. Nor do we want to pay a lot extra just so that we can phone home from more emergencies. There's a huge cost here associated with this additional capacity (especially given the variety of disasters which can take out cell network capacity).
But unlikely things happen all the time, and when one of them causes a problem, they scream, "WHY DIDN'T WE SEE THIS COMING?"
That's what politicians are for. They'll take this VERY SERIOUSLY and not actually do anything once it is revealed how expensive a fix would be. But in the process the ignorant part of the public is placated and life moves on.
Because keeping space pristine is more important than doing anything in space. The solution is to figure out how to remove space debris not try to hold back the tide.
Yes, you might not have personally agreed to all this, but your ancestors did.
I hope you got that in writing. Because otherwise that's just unfounded speculation on your part.
It's worth remembering here that almost nothing collectively done is by full agreement (I'm reminded of the Norse tale of the death of Balder where one could find a living creature, here the long suffering wife of Loki, who disapproved of the bringing to life of the fairest of the gods) and many times things are done which a majority would disagree or disapprove of (US-based examples would be the war on drugs, Obamacare, a speed limit of 55, the current US copyright protection for Mickey Mouse).
I think we should be a lot less eager to pass highly divisive law - especially poorly thought out, highly divisive law. Especially in situations where there are substantial structural obstacles to how the will of the people is expressed (eg, first past the post voting systems which encourage the creation of two party systems at the national level in the US).
It's also worth remembering that taxes can buy the destruction of civilization as well. Onerous environmental and safety regulations which encouraged the "export of pollution" are a classic example of unintended consequence and of taxes being used to pay for the destruction of civilization (but don't worry, it's being built up elsewhere in compensation).
I note that the famous quote about taxes and buying civilization comes from Wendell Holmes who uttered a version of that in 1904. I wonder how much he appreciated the civilization-building event of the First World War a decade later. That was bought with taxes, after all. And he missed out on the Second World War, another classic example funded on the public dime. The instigators of each war did so on public funds and with the purpose of extending their particular civilizations' reach and control.
I doubt libertarianism would be anything more than a curiosity, if paying taxes actually did result solely in the building of civilization. Sure, we like to pay less taxes. But we also like the benefits of modern civilization. It's when these two activities are disengaged from one another at least in perception that opposition gathers strength.
I should clarify why I make the distinction. There are a variety of schemes of existence. My view is that things exist which are physical in our universe or in some larger reality which happens to contain our universe as a nearly closed subspace under observation. So three objects or a mental representation of "3" would be considered to exist in my view.
One can also consider anything which could exist as a form of existence. I could have been the opposite sex (female instead of male) at fertilization of the egg (all else being equal) and so an opposite sex version of me could be said to exist on that basis.
I don't find this sense to be useful because there are far more possibilities than actual; we don't actually know what is possible (and I doubt there's enough computational resources possible in the universe to fix that); and it seems a tad bit ineffective semantically to conflate what happened with what didn't happen.
The other approach is to say that "patterns" (or more specifically, "ideas") exist. Semantically, I don't like it semantically because well we already have "patterns" and "ideas" to describe such things. This already implies that there's something out there. One can't think of impossible to imagine ideas or view the representations of patterns which cannot be represented.
In addition, even of the ideas and patterns we can imagine or observe representations thereof, there are at least an uncountable number. And at best we can imagine or observe a countably infinite number of things. We also end up with the same problem as the possibility scheme. A lot of ideas and patterns are possible, but don't actually happen, And at worst, we can embed the existence of possibilities by assigning each possibility a sufficiently distinct pattern (eg, a sufficiently elaborate written description of the possibility to distinguish from other possibilities we have already described).
That's why I don't think it's a good idea to label as "existence" things like patterns, ideas, or possibilities. Most of such things are fundamentally unknowable and never represented even if we had turned the entire visible universe into a machine for exactly the purpose of considering or observing them.
One could reduce this by saying that ideas or patterns exist only if there is a physical representation of them. But at that point, you gain nothing over my approach, and you still aren't directly observing the alleged patterns or ideas, but just the representations of them.
If one did the same for possibilities, one just gets the possibilities that actually happened, that is, the real world and what we can observe in it.
A side issue here is that we might also have many patterns with the exact same representations. For example, it's a popular activity in math to find equivalent sets of conditions. A famous example are "matroids", which can be described by more than 30 equivalent sets of axioms. It might be possible for a representation (perhaps any representation for that matter!) to be the manifestation of an uncountably infinite number of patterns. Then you're back to the lots of stuff which can never be known or observed exists.
Thus, it doesn't make sense to me to label abstract things like patterns or ideas (or possibilities) as existing. It doesn't add anything and we break the fundamental property of existence, that we observe the thing in question.
This wasn't caused by the software either. Sure, it's somewhat easier to make array boundary errors with spreadsheets than other software, but that's why the user looks for such things.
Germany has undergone many years of internal devaluation, partly because of the costs induced by the integration of East Germany, partly because of pure masochism.
And partly because it's better economically. I do find the subsequent rationalization interesting. Ever wonder why Germany has a "core" that could support a "periphery" and Greece did not?
It doesn't to me. The immediate postwar period was unusual especially for this sort of comparison of debt and GDP. And apparently neither of us have actually looked to see what R-R actually wrote for the years they use.
It would equally be a problem with any other sort of data analysis or data analysis program. So I guess, kids, we just shouldn't do data analysis because we'll eventually make mistakes.
Should you pile on any amount of debt? probably not.
Why not? What is the drawback? Why shouldn't we have arbitrarily large amounts of government debt, say several orders of magnitude larger than GDP? The anti-debt argument is that the negative aspects of high debt are high enough at current debt loads to cause major economic problems.
My take is that current relatively high debt loads weaken government's ability to pay for services. For example, the US federal government pays 7-9% of its revenue on debt servicing in 2008-2010. Greece was paying 12-14% going into its recession. If Greece had the US's debt load, it'd have 5% or more of its revenue available for programs. There'd probably be synergies from lower interest rates as well.
If Greece had spent that borrowed money on investments which grew the economy by enough to counter the interest payments, then the borrowing would make sense. I doubt anyone believes that actually happened given their current straits.
Another aspect to government borrowing is that it increases the cost of borrowing for everyone else who has to compete with them.
And of course, there is the incentive to increase the rate of inflation of government-backed currencies that exists with a debt load.
That's why I strongly oppose high levels of debt at the national government level. It causes a lot of problems.
You know that Germany has relatively low unemployment compared to the rest of Europe because many youth learn trades instead of being jobless? Same for Austria and Switzerland.
Ever wonder why that is the case? There's no bylaw in the EU Constitution that demands that Greece be on the bottom and Germany on the top. Germany has practiced austerity for many decades. Greece only practiced it when it had no other choice.
Austerity affects everyone. It kill opportunities, it stifles social mobility, it removes funds from research and long term investments.
That's why Germany is such a hell-hole.
But to rejoice in that makes you a horrible person.
If only there was someone doing that so we could gloat at their terribleness.
I'd be very interested in a citation -- everything I've read (and my grandparents, who were born about the turn of the century) said it was more like 25-35%.
Not six months after the crash. Those high levels of unemployment came later in 1932 and 1933.
Not much I can add, except that maybe people who use the term, "Libertards" seem universally to be idiots. But that's just an entitled opinion of mine.
Slashdot Mirror
At least one of them was pointed out (the guy wearing the backpack). I apologize, if I killed a joke that was actually meant to be funny.
the abyss also looks into you...
And that's a Problem, amirite?
There's a fine line between soliciting public support and encouraging vigilante justice.
What's the deal with all these accusations of vigilantes, witch hunts, etc? This is just a standard and very effective law enforcement tactic which has been around as long as a modern police force has.
It's not some magic threat to liberty or justice which just cropped up yesterday. As has been noted a number of times, it is likely that the person or people who planted the bombs that killed and maimed people were photographed and videoed many times over. Do you really think it would be a good idea to ignore this massive amount of evidence merely because you disapprove of the appeal for this evidence?
And how is it "other peoples money" when I pay for it myself too?
As to your previous comment about other peoples' money, you apparently have never heard of tragedy of the commons. For example, consider the story of two dinners. Two groups decide to eat at the same restaurant. The first group decides that everyone will pay for their own meal while the second decides that everyone will pay into a pot which is then used to pay for the meals which everyone orders. End result is that the first group spends far less than the second group does. Because in the first case, if you decide to spend $1 less, then you save $1.
But in the second case, if you decide to spend $1 less, you save $1/N where N is the number of people in the group. There's very little savings to you from deciding to eat cheaper. It's a classic prisoners' dilemma style problem where the end result is that everyone eats as much as they want to.
This is the same huge difference between public and private spending. If I choice to forgo all public services, then I lose the value of those services yet only reduce my tax burden by an immeasurable amount. If I chose to forgo a private service that I completely pay for, I gain the full cost savings of that decision.
So saying that you chip in a minute amount into a huge pot of Other Peoples' Money ignores that you as well as everyone else consuming that pot have no economic reason not to consume as much of that pot as you can. Perhaps, you should wonder if that sort of incentive is healthy for a society to have.
Do you want to be unable to call for help because too many people are making phone calls talking about the building collapse?
What will that cell phone do for you within a few minutes of a building collapse? You could always call a couple of hours later when things die down and emergency communication equipment gets set up. You wouldn't be going anywhere anyway.
And if the cell network is dependent on the building standing (say because the nearby cell towers were on top of the building or some other collapsed building), you might not have that network available anyway due directly to the disaster or attack in question.
In the case of the Boston bombing, what if you saw something that was both important and time-sensitive, but couldn't call out?
I guess you'll just have to suck it up. Or maybe speak to a police officer or emergency worker who happens to have communication equipment designed to operate in this situation.
As an aside, you also make a huge assumption that being able to place a call means that you'll be able to reach someone who matters. 911 is going to be flooded even if you could make calls to the cell network. It makes far more sense from both economic and emergency preparedness senses to just not depend on cell phones in a large scale emergency.
Entropy doesn't prohibit the universe from always existing or being created, or other priors. It plus the laws of thermodynamics merely constrain how the universe evolves.
Large amounts of gold sit idly in Fort Knox. Clearly, these bars are already buried :) Burying gold is a dumb activity in any case, but the point is that in the case of a depressed economy, you don't get the ill-effects you would: the depression is caused by people not having work and thus not being able to afford stuff. Until they are able to afford things, the depression goes on and they stay unemployed, because no-one wants to hire people when no-one buys stuff.
That's why deflation works here. Prices go down. People buy stuff. Now one would not want to transition directly and immediately from a debt heavy, inflationary society to a savings heavy, occasionally deflationary society. That's like spontaneously reversing the flow of traffic on all highways.
The phobia of deflation is very irrational. And I think we see here one ideological consequence of that. Depressions don't go on forever. They stop once people start buying the now cheap stuff again.
I think it's also telling that you claim that there's little need for quality in "external intervention" spending. That's a huge sign of detachment from reality. If your spending were providing actual value, then that would be boosting the overall economy and the wealth of those involved. Why do you think it doesn't matter much whether that value is present or not?
My take is that interventions particularly the low value ones you advocate actually generate net harm. They misallocate resources and labor (the most common cause of asset bubbles, for example), they can save businesses which would be better off in bankruptcy (and allocated in turn to more productive competitors), and they're feeble attempts to preserve a poorly thought out economic ideal.
Maybe we say, "We're ok with the cell phone network going out during an emergency, since those emergencies will be rare and the cost of making the network robust and redundant enough to handle the additional volume isn't worth being able to use your cell phone in an emergency." But then are we really ok with that? If we have a bombing in a major city and people can't really report what's going on because our telecommunications can't handle the strain, is that really alright?
Why do you think the answer would be anything other than "yes, it's ok"? We don't rely on the cell phone network in an emergency. Nor do we want to pay a lot extra just so that we can phone home from more emergencies. There's a huge cost here associated with this additional capacity (especially given the variety of disasters which can take out cell network capacity).
But unlikely things happen all the time, and when one of them causes a problem, they scream, "WHY DIDN'T WE SEE THIS COMING?"
That's what politicians are for. They'll take this VERY SERIOUSLY and not actually do anything once it is revealed how expensive a fix would be. But in the process the ignorant part of the public is placated and life moves on.
Well, for starters come up with a better alternative. Right now, these companies are the only game in town.
Because keeping space pristine is more important than doing anything in space. The solution is to figure out how to remove space debris not try to hold back the tide.
Yes, you might not have personally agreed to all this, but your ancestors did.
I hope you got that in writing. Because otherwise that's just unfounded speculation on your part.
It's worth remembering here that almost nothing collectively done is by full agreement (I'm reminded of the Norse tale of the death of Balder where one could find a living creature, here the long suffering wife of Loki, who disapproved of the bringing to life of the fairest of the gods) and many times things are done which a majority would disagree or disapprove of (US-based examples would be the war on drugs, Obamacare, a speed limit of 55, the current US copyright protection for Mickey Mouse).
I think we should be a lot less eager to pass highly divisive law - especially poorly thought out, highly divisive law. Especially in situations where there are substantial structural obstacles to how the will of the people is expressed (eg, first past the post voting systems which encourage the creation of two party systems at the national level in the US).
It's also worth remembering that taxes can buy the destruction of civilization as well. Onerous environmental and safety regulations which encouraged the "export of pollution" are a classic example of unintended consequence and of taxes being used to pay for the destruction of civilization (but don't worry, it's being built up elsewhere in compensation).
I note that the famous quote about taxes and buying civilization comes from Wendell Holmes who uttered a version of that in 1904. I wonder how much he appreciated the civilization-building event of the First World War a decade later. That was bought with taxes, after all. And he missed out on the Second World War, another classic example funded on the public dime. The instigators of each war did so on public funds and with the purpose of extending their particular civilizations' reach and control.
I doubt libertarianism would be anything more than a curiosity, if paying taxes actually did result solely in the building of civilization. Sure, we like to pay less taxes. But we also like the benefits of modern civilization. It's when these two activities are disengaged from one another at least in perception that opposition gathers strength.
I should clarify why I make the distinction. There are a variety of schemes of existence. My view is that things exist which are physical in our universe or in some larger reality which happens to contain our universe as a nearly closed subspace under observation. So three objects or a mental representation of "3" would be considered to exist in my view.
One can also consider anything which could exist as a form of existence. I could have been the opposite sex (female instead of male) at fertilization of the egg (all else being equal) and so an opposite sex version of me could be said to exist on that basis.
I don't find this sense to be useful because there are far more possibilities than actual; we don't actually know what is possible (and I doubt there's enough computational resources possible in the universe to fix that); and it seems a tad bit ineffective semantically to conflate what happened with what didn't happen.
The other approach is to say that "patterns" (or more specifically, "ideas") exist. Semantically, I don't like it semantically because well we already have "patterns" and "ideas" to describe such things. This already implies that there's something out there. One can't think of impossible to imagine ideas or view the representations of patterns which cannot be represented.
In addition, even of the ideas and patterns we can imagine or observe representations thereof, there are at least an uncountable number. And at best we can imagine or observe a countably infinite number of things. We also end up with the same problem as the possibility scheme. A lot of ideas and patterns are possible, but don't actually happen, And at worst, we can embed the existence of possibilities by assigning each possibility a sufficiently distinct pattern (eg, a sufficiently elaborate written description of the possibility to distinguish from other possibilities we have already described).
That's why I don't think it's a good idea to label as "existence" things like patterns, ideas, or possibilities. Most of such things are fundamentally unknowable and never represented even if we had turned the entire visible universe into a machine for exactly the purpose of considering or observing them.
One could reduce this by saying that ideas or patterns exist only if there is a physical representation of them. But at that point, you gain nothing over my approach, and you still aren't directly observing the alleged patterns or ideas, but just the representations of them.
If one did the same for possibilities, one just gets the possibilities that actually happened, that is, the real world and what we can observe in it.
A side issue here is that we might also have many patterns with the exact same representations. For example, it's a popular activity in math to find equivalent sets of conditions. A famous example are "matroids", which can be described by more than 30 equivalent sets of axioms. It might be possible for a representation (perhaps any representation for that matter!) to be the manifestation of an uncountably infinite number of patterns. Then you're back to the lots of stuff which can never be known or observed exists.
Thus, it doesn't make sense to me to label abstract things like patterns or ideas (or possibilities) as existing. It doesn't add anything and we break the fundamental property of existence, that we observe the thing in question.
Discretionary federal spending is the lowest it's been since the 1950s.
That's a pretty deceptive thing to say, given that the discretionary US federal spending is only 44% of the total budget.
The deficit this year is 5.5% of GDP, which is a fairly healthy number taken by itself.
No, it's not. High debt per GDP plus enough deficit to grow that figure further is not "fairly healthy".
I figure the endgame for this particular mess is going to be a long bout of high inflation.
This wasn't caused by the software either. Sure, it's somewhat easier to make array boundary errors with spreadsheets than other software, but that's why the user looks for such things.
I don't see how something can manifest without such manifestation existing.
Of course, a manifestation exists by definition. Don't confuse a representation with the underlying idea that is being represented.
Germany has undergone many years of internal devaluation, partly because of the costs induced by the integration of East Germany, partly because of pure masochism.
And partly because it's better economically. I do find the subsequent rationalization interesting. Ever wonder why Germany has a "core" that could support a "periphery" and Greece did not?
Your reasoning seems pretty ad-hoc to me
It doesn't to me. The immediate postwar period was unusual especially for this sort of comparison of debt and GDP. And apparently neither of us have actually looked to see what R-R actually wrote for the years they use.
The only problem is that Ireland didn't save in the good times, did they? Why blame austerity when it isn't the fundamental problem.
It would equally be a problem with any other sort of data analysis or data analysis program. So I guess, kids, we just shouldn't do data analysis because we'll eventually make mistakes.
Should you pile on any amount of debt? probably not.
Why not? What is the drawback? Why shouldn't we have arbitrarily large amounts of government debt, say several orders of magnitude larger than GDP? The anti-debt argument is that the negative aspects of high debt are high enough at current debt loads to cause major economic problems.
My take is that current relatively high debt loads weaken government's ability to pay for services. For example, the US federal government pays 7-9% of its revenue on debt servicing in 2008-2010. Greece was paying 12-14% going into its recession. If Greece had the US's debt load, it'd have 5% or more of its revenue available for programs. There'd probably be synergies from lower interest rates as well.
If Greece had spent that borrowed money on investments which grew the economy by enough to counter the interest payments, then the borrowing would make sense. I doubt anyone believes that actually happened given their current straits.
Another aspect to government borrowing is that it increases the cost of borrowing for everyone else who has to compete with them.
And of course, there is the incentive to increase the rate of inflation of government-backed currencies that exists with a debt load.
That's why I strongly oppose high levels of debt at the national government level. It causes a lot of problems.
You know that Germany has relatively low unemployment compared to the rest of Europe because many youth learn trades instead of being jobless? Same for Austria and Switzerland.
Ever wonder why that is the case? There's no bylaw in the EU Constitution that demands that Greece be on the bottom and Germany on the top. Germany has practiced austerity for many decades. Greece only practiced it when it had no other choice.
Austerity affects everyone. It kill opportunities, it stifles social mobility, it removes funds from research and long term investments.
That's why Germany is such a hell-hole.
But to rejoice in that makes you a horrible person.
If only there was someone doing that so we could gloat at their terribleness.
I have yet to meet a libertarian that was not a greedy asshole (the pretend ones) or lived in a parallel universe (the true believers).
I wouldn't expect you to recognize a situation where you had.
I'd be very interested in a citation -- everything I've read (and my grandparents, who were born about the turn of the century) said it was more like 25-35%.
Not six months after the crash. Those high levels of unemployment came later in 1932 and 1933.
You are entitled opinions, but not facts.
Not much I can add, except that maybe people who use the term, "Libertards" seem universally to be idiots. But that's just an entitled opinion of mine.
and you probably ought to weight the figures relative to the size of the coutrys economy to stop outliers having a disproportionate effect
Unless, of course, the large economy is the outlier. Then you made the disproportionate effect worse.