That's a pretty large exception in my state thanks to No Child Left Behind being underfunded. I pay $200 a month in property taxes alone- and that's after the 30% other taxes that I have to pay to earn the $200.
$200 property taxes?! And you think this is high? I pay considerably more than that, and we have a generous homestead exemption here.
And you should be able to earn $300 per year mowing lawns for people. It's not like it requires a full time job, much less a well-paying job (at current minimum wage, And yet- the price keeps going up and the costs of building the cars keep going down....
Does it? What's the cost of building a car? Last I looked, the UAW has a rather generous contract.
Inflation=free money to the bankers. Shouldn't be allowed at all- but that's the price we pay for having fictional money.
Umm, no. Inflation is free money for the Government. Government controls money supply, which is what causes inflation. Remember, higher prices != inflation. increased money supply relative to goods produced == inflation. Banks are, in fact, one of the most damaged by inflation. Long term loans by banks are free money for individuals in inflationary times.
Example: I borrow $100k for 30 years. I'll pay back around $200k (just for the sake of argument - I don't really want to drag out a financial calculator to determine exact payback for any given interest rate. so assume an interest rate that results in a 2 for 1 payback over 30 years.
the next year, inflation jumps from negligible to,say, 20% per year. Over 29 more years, the value of $1 will drop by 99.5%. So the $200k I pay back is worth about 1% of the $100k I borrowed. At the end of that time, I have whatever I bought with the $100k, and I have spent ~$1k in real dollars for it. I WIN!!!
Yah, this assumes that that kind of inflation can be sustained that long, and that my pay goes up with inflation. The latter is quite common under Union contracts, though, so I can get a job as a telephone repairman for Ma Bell, be unionized, and thus be immune to inflation personally.
Actually, according to Unicef, 12 million children will die of malnourishment in the United States this year. Not real starvation for most of them; just a lack of the basic sustenance needed to survive. Even during the Clinton Administration, when the DOW was hitting 10,000 regularly, we were losing someplace between 4-8 million children a year to malnourishment IN THE UNITED STATES. My state in particular seems quite hard hit- our hunger rate is the highest in the nation.
Hmm, 4-8 million children per year. Out of 280 million people. Interesting, when you consider that overall deathrate for the entire US population is only 0.88%, which translates to total deaths at any age as only 2-3 million, much less children who die, much less children who die of malnutrition. Somehow, I think those numbers of your's are slightly exaggerated. ANd if you got it from the place I last looked for starvation numbers worldwide, you should read a bit more closely. The definition of "hunger" they use would include me, since I skipped lunch today.
Forced to to survive in a capitalistic society. If the damn government would leave me alone to run my own property as I wished, that would change quickly.
With the obvious exception of property taxes, you pretty much can do so now. My grandmother grew almost everything she ate in her back yard. And she'd have grown all of it if she had been willing to give up on her Coca Cola....
Or an oligopoly- much like the Medieval Guild, an oligopoly sets prices- why do you think cars cost the same for similar models? Certainly not COST of building the car, which has been going down for quite some time now.
Hmm, similar prices for similar models. Given similar costs for labour and materials (which makes sense, given that they are similar cars), it makes sense that they would cost about the same. Especially given that if one of them charged much more than the other's, the cheap one would take all the business from the other makers.
My first car cost 2700 dollars new in 1972. The last new car I bought cost $12,000 in 1985 (I decided to give up new cars for Lent after 1985). After adjusting for inflation, in 1972 dollars, the last car cost about $4600. A bit more, but not out to lunch, especially considering the difference between the two (the turbocharged engine, for one), not unreasonable. When I adjust for inflation, I notice that modern cars are about the same cost as they were 40 years ago, even ignoring the goodies you couldn't get in your car back then....
And yet, one could get excommunicated for not doing it.
And yet, how many actually wre?
Which was also against the teachings of the Church and could get a ruler hauled before the Inquisition.
And how many did this happen to? I can think of three or four kings of England who played this game, none of whom were even talked to by the Church. The trick, you see, was to give the Church half the assets you seized in your progroms. They'd overlook anything then.
And where were the slaves in the Christian Era?
Same place as previously. Working in the fields, the mills, what passed for the factories. If you think slavery became illegal/immoral with the introduction of Christianity, you really need to read more history.
Actually- I think you mean "Fish on Friday" as a support for the fishing industry- and it was so successfull that even today during Lent firshermen in Catholic nations get a higher price for their fish.
No. "Fish on Friday" was the weaseling that allowed people to continue to eat on Fridays. Originally, it was "fast". But "fast" has an enormous number of exceptions (among many others, pregnant women were not expected to not eat just because they were "fasting"). One of them was the word "meat". Which meant something different than it does now, by the way. Anyway, "fast" became equivalent to "don't eat meat", which became equivalent to "do eat fish". And it was never about supporting the fishing industry. People were too close to starvation as a routine order of business for any food producing industry to need support.
Why should the Government give you enough free money to indulge yourself, when the basic requirements can be met supplying ONLY basic needs and no more?
But, I already have the equipment. I just need the food and the time. I assume enough money to eat (or enough food) qualifies as "basic needs". And time I would have if I didn't have to show up for work every morning.
Disease prevention is- disease treatment isn't neccessarly within the confines of NEED. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is what this is based on- not wants and not luxuries.
Just curious. Why is disease prevention included?
At least if you provide no healthcare- you're not providing abortions or euthanasia or stem cell research either.
I'm not providing it, true. Doesn't mean it won't happen, of course.
And how are you going to let everyone work enough to buy all the bread they want? Private industry has shown itself to be spectacularily bad at providing full universal employment, let alone even employment enough for everybody to fullfill their basic needs.
Hmm, know anyone who has starved to death in the USA this year? I don't. I believe I've read about such happening, as a result of criminal acts (locking some woman in the basement, for instance).
Have I read about people starving back before the industrial revolution? Yes, pretty regularly.
How about in the Soviet Union (one of the two largest examples of industrialization without "private industry")? Yes, by the tens of millions in the years before WW2.
HOw about China (the other example)? Yes, as recently as the 70's?
How odd. Starvation seems to be less prevalent where private industry exists than where it doesn't....
Depends what you mean by better off. Nobody's living in luxury, but everybody having their needs met is better off to me.
Just curious. Do you donate all your income to charity/government but the minimum to meet your needs? If so, where does the computer you were using to answer me come from? Because it surely doesn't meet any definition of "need" I ever heard of.
For still others, it's "I have all the skills I need to survive, and if the government would only leave me alone, I don't need to trade".
Hmm, so you want to have Universal Welfare, but with noone to actually make in universal? Again, you enlarg
Quite likely you mean that. *I* would prefer that the government be as close to incapacitated as possible.
I have long believed that we really don't need very many more laws than we have now. But the metric of success of a politician is "passing laws", so they all try to pass SOMETHING! Frequently, on a subject they know nothing about.
Are we better off because we passed the DMCA? No? But the lads who passed it were chosen by us, and at least some of them were chosen because the promised us stronger IP laws.
In the Dark Ages (which I call the Catholic Ages) we did support a Welfare State in the form of the Guild Economy, with a Just Wage for a Fair Price, and a baning of the evils of the banking industry, and feudal lords who followed the concept of Noblese Oblige (the obligation of the wealthy to take care of the poor). Anybody who supports a welfare state should look to what you call the "Dark Ages" as a 1000 year experiment in how to accomplish it.
You have a peculiarly myopic view of the Dark Ages. The Guild Economy was just another form of Monopoly (granted by the Crown). Noblesse Oblige was more spoken of than actually practiced. And, as I recall from the history books, Banking was handled by the simple technique of Rulers borrowing from the Jews, then inciting a pogrom when said Jews insisted on repayment.
In any case, if you consider the Dark Ages an ideal, you either need to read more history, or raise your standards slightly. Say, to the point where your "ideal" doesn't include routine famines.
After the fall of the Empire, the Holy Roman Catholic Church also tried it and succeeded. Funny how you call honest labor "enslavement" though. But that's just your myoptic lens of a capitalist society.
*Laughs* You really must read more history. The Roman economy wasn't as slave-based as the Spartan economy, but it was probably a close second. It wasn't "honest labor" that resulted in slave-run farms driving the family farmers out of business.
The Catholic Church's ideas about a welfare state included "fast on Friday". Read some history, and you find that that particular idea was instituted as a way of stretching the food supply. As if eating only six days a week reduces your caloric requirements...as idiotic an idea as banning crossbows as "too terrible to allow in warfare". Which they also did. Note that neither of these ideas were particularly successful.
Better yet- why don't you tell me how not to work.
Why should I care whether you're a workaholic or not? If you desire a universal welfare state, one burning question is going to be "how is it paid for?" Like it or not, SOMEONE has to work. The number of people who MUST work is very likely to be higher than the number of people who LIKE working. So, you'll have to convince some of us who don't like to work to work anyway. How do you do it?
I was amused by the phrase "technical unemployment", though. So, you worked freelance, and were paid for it for a couple years. Sounds like a dream job, if you made enough to live.
All of my better ways of spending my days are also work- why is your life so incredibly empty of ability that you can't find a *creative* way to spend your time?
Whatever makes you think that? I think spending three months walking the Oregon Trail would be a wonderful way to spend my time. Or sailing the Atlantic in a replica of the Pelican. My preferred hobbies, whether YOU consider them creative or not, all take more than a couple days straight to do, thus are impractical with a 40 hour workweek. And most of them would be impractical with a one-hour workweek. But, given enough free money by the Government, I coulc indulge myself, instead of working to allow someone else to indulge himself.
Only due to artificial heroic life support- which is not a requirment in the Catholic Seamless Garment of Life. Disease prevention is- but that's relatively simple to do with very few doctors.
umm, no. Most heart attacks aren't life-threatening, actually. Many are, and the ones that are are the ones we hear about. That said, so why are diseases not part of a "natural life"? And where do you get off deciding for the rest of us what is acceptable healthcare?
And all I'm saying is, equal rationing is not letting economic cost prevent the defense of life. Unequal rationing is.
So if I offer NO healthcare to anyone, that is superior to offering whatever healthcare each person can afford? Hmm, looks
Really?, Who is going to enforce these 'rights' if the government isn't sticking to them and the majority don't care?
*Smirks* that's why we have a Second Amendment.
As to PATRIOT and INDUCE, you might want to give the judicial process some time to work. For instance, unless you have been harmed by a law, you have no legal ground to bring suit to overturn it in our Courts. Which was why MacCain-Feingold couldn't be sued out of existance before the law went into effect (several groups tried, and were told to wait till the law went into effect, and try again).
Actually- it got going at a time when civilization was relatively poor, during the Great Depression, when Western Civilization was in the middle of a MAJOR economic collapse worldwide
*laughs* We were wealthier during the Great Depression than 99.9% of humanity had ever been at any time in history. In the Dark Ages, do you really think we could have supported a welfare state? The Roman Empire tried it. Only for people who lived in Rome, and they had to enslave much of Europe and North Africa to do it, but they tried it. Wasn't "universal" by any means.
Having said that, yes, I agree you need incentives of SOME FORM to work.
Alright. Come up with an incentie that'll work. Tell me why *I* should work, if I don't have to. I'm reasonable, sometimes, but I doubt seriously you could come up with something that would motivate me to get up at 5:30 every morning (as I do now). Especially since I can think of so many better ways of spending my days.
You mean kind of like the Social Security System couldn't possibly have been implemented in 1936 because there wasn't enough wealth in the country to do it?
I should point out, again, that we were wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice of most humans throughout history at that time. In addition, the original form of Social Security really wasn't much - it didn't kick in till you lived beyond the average lifespan of the period (as I recall, "retirement age" was 6 months greater than "average lifespan" at that time).
How about this- we define a minimal level of medical care and let NATURAL DEATH take care of the rest? There's a reason why the seamless garment of life is from CONCEPTION to NATURAL DEATH.
So, what is a "natural" death? Is that when you have a heart attack? I Know people who did that before the age of 45. And survived quite nicely, thanks to our horribly flawed healthcare system.
Face it, any level of healthcare short of the best we know how to provide (not the level we can afford, but what we know how to do) is "rationed", if the Government decides how much everyone gets. WHich is to say, we're letting economic cost prefent the defense of life.
Only due to a total lack of morality on the part of the rich.
And yet, those countries I named were among the poorest in the world today. It's not "the rich" preventing adoption of your UDHR. It's the governments that would have to pay for it. The fact that the UDHR requires universal compliance at an international level to be completely fulfilled doesn't make it any easier. And that it requires that nations turn over part of their sovereignty to an international body they have no reason to trust has their interests at heart makes it even tougher.
That said, that's not why I'd bet on those time guesstimates. That's how long I think it will be till the world economy is big enough to sustain the UDHR. Mind you, I think that by that time, the people who brought us the UDHR will have expanded it to include a bunch of extra unfunded mandates, thus making it impossible even then. But, as written, it won't happen till the world can afford it, and that won't happen for some time.
Dollars mean nothing- at all. That measurement of production is completely mythological- hasn't had any real value since we left the gold standard behind. Sure- it would mean we'd need a different economy. So what? The economy is just an invention of mankind, an artifact.
Nonsense! Gold standard isn't required to determine the value of a dollar. Try using the price of 1 pound (or Kg, if you like metric) of bread as an index. $12 trillion doesn't mean the same as it did in WW2, but it still is a measure of production of wealth. When you compare it to the cost of living, you get an idea how many people an economy that size can sustain at our standard of living.
The economy is just an artifact to the exact same extent that the UDHR is an artifact. But the economy has some relevance to any society. Sure, I
You know- that's the thing that gets to me. We say we're for the right to life- but NO conservative is willing to give up even a single dollar of profit to support it. To me, what does it matter if we ruin the entire economy, as long as everybody has the right to life (and support of that life in the form of food, clothing, shelter, water, and medical care)? But NO- we can't actually give up our worship of mammon to support a universal right to life. At that point, I say if you're not willing to give up all hope of ever being rich in return for a society where the right to life is supported, you shouldn't be able to call yourself pro-life. Economic cost should NEVER be an issue preventing the defense of life.
You are aware that this whole social security/socialism concept only got going big when civilization became wealthy enough to afford it, right?
Face it, if 99% of everyone is working their butts off just to avoid famine more often than every ten years or so, "universal health care" and "environmental protection" aren't even on the radar.
If we "ruin the economy" this year, there won't be any "support of that life in the form of food, clothing, shelter, water, and medical care" next year. In order to guarantee "support of that life in the form of food, clothing, shelter, water, and medical care" all this, we have to be able to produce enough real wealth every single year to provide this for every single person. A daunting prospect, when you consider that right now no more than 1/6 the people in the world get anywhere close to this much social support.
The USA is a $12 trillion economy. That translates into ~$2000 per person, worldwide. American Poverty Level doesn't meet those standards, so it's safe to assume that $10,000 per person would be insufficient. $15,000 might be closer. So you'd need to suck up 8 times the USA economy every year just to support the UDHR. I'm not sure, but it seems to me I remember that the USA economy is more than 15% of the world economy. Which would make the minimal requirements for implementation of the UDHR at rather more than the entire world economy.
And bet on it - if there is no profit to be had from working hard, then noone will work hard. Sort of like the Soviet Union ("They pretend to pay us, so we pretend to work"). So you'd probably need an economy at least twice as big as the minimum to support UDHR, just to insert enough profit motive to get people to do the work needed. Again, WAY more than the world's economy today.
Economic cost should NEVER be an issue preventing the defense of life.
Really? So the government should guarantee immortality for every citizen? Or failing that, that the level of medical care for everyone should be the same as for the President? Interesting, since that would require that EACH person have two or three personal physicians dedicated only to keeping him/her/it healthy. So, for 6 billion people, we'd need 15 billion doctors. hmm, I see a problem here. Or should we just ration healthcare? Which is just another way of letting economic cost prevent the defense of life.
Face it, like it or not, wealth is what will make this whole UDHR possible. And not just a little wealth - great, heaping gobs of it. Mountains of money. If we choke our economy trying to implement it now, we'll never get to where we can afford it. If I was a betting man, I'd guesstimate 50 years, given no major changes in resource availability, 100+ years given the current outlook for fossil fuel depletion. And that's assuming that the political situation changes to allow UDHR. Won't work until every sovereign nation agrees to it, and I don't see, for instance, North Korea going along with it, or Sudan, or Libya, or...not for a very long time, anyway.
For that matter, in the original form of the Constitution before Ammendments- only 18 year old landowning males were considered people. EVERYBODY else was expendable
No. Only 18+ year old landowning males were Citizens. There is a distinction between "people" and "citizen". As an example, I am not a citizen of Canada, though I have a good chance of being recognized as "people" in Canada. At least, they were remarkably polite last time I was there, if they didn't consider me "people".;)
Actually, in the UDHR, killing people is indeed UNIVERSALLY wrong
Really? So, if the next generation's Hitler were to invade Belgium, UDHR advocates wouldn't shoot back? I find that extremely unlikely. "These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations." looks like a pretty big caveat to cover any, shall we say, abrogation of those Rights...
Has the UN ever figured out just how much it would cost to implement this particular piece of rhetoric? Just curious....
I'm a Catholic Pro-lifer voting for Kerry because I believe he'll do a better job of reducing abortion than Bush has done. What does that make me?
An idiot. Kerry won't do any more to reduce abortion than Bush will.
His hypothetical "make it cost as much as having a baby" in his Health Care reform won't survive the first legal challenge. One thing you have to give the pro-abortion people credit for is understanding the "slippery slope" idea. They oppose EVERYTHING that affects the availability of abortion even the tiniest amount. Because they know that if we reach the point where abortion is illegal in any way, however slight, the line between illegal and legal will continue moving back the other way.
And when it reaches the point where abortions are absolutely illegal again, it'll start swinging back toward absolutely legal.
Fact is, abortion is going to continue exactly as is until a new Supreme Court rules that some form(s) of abortion are regulatable.
Note, by the way, that my duaghter required my written permission to get her ears pierced. An abortion she could have done without even letting me know she was missing school that day.
Please note that I was discussing people in general, not Bush. I don't know enough about him to even debate his own conversion.
However, it is not necessarily true that an alcoholic can't ever drink anything alcoholic without relapsing. It is considered safest to never touch alcohol, but given enough willpower, it isn't mandatory. And don't maunder on about alcoholics having no willpower - if alcholism is a disease, willpower, or lack of same, is irrelevant to it.
As to mood swings, my wife has those.;) and she doesn't use cocaine.
Once Saved Always Saved, last I looked, isn't about your addictions. It's a religious question. Whether you give in to your urges to drink, smoke, screw, and shoot people is irrelevant to your status among the "Saved". Given that Bush hasn't been seen in public drunk in a very long time (he has a lot of privacy as President, rather less as Governor, even less as Oil Company CEO, or whatever he was), it's likely he has his drinking firmly under control. I consider it unlikely he is using cocaine, because it's not the kind of thing that can be kept secret when you are surrounded by servants and T-Men 24/7....
You're using the word PEOPLE to mean what I used the word HUMAN to mean. Prior to the Civil War, Negros weren't "people". Though, as I learned in a historical tour of N'Awlins a few years back, they were considered more "people" than the Irish - once upon a time, when a project required some really hazardous labour, the slaveowners refused to use slaves for the work (since they were valuable property), so Irishmen were brought into the country to do it. THEY were considered expendable enough....
The unborn are, in fact, in a similar situation. It is very like the situation just pre-Civil War - half the people think they ARE people, half don't.
And yes, killing people isn't universally wrong. It's not universally wrong ANYWHERE. But, we have an overwhelming majority who agree, more or less, on when it is acceptable
Or did your founding fathers actually select two political alternatives that would have to work for all eternity?
If they did, they obviously failed. Neither the Deomcrats nor the Republicans were political Parties in the Founding Fathers' day.
Can Nader run in the Democratic Primaries? If he wants to bother, but then he has to wear the Democrat label. Hell, he can run in the Republican primtaries, if he wants. Same deal, though - he gets stuck with the label.
And Nader doesn't want to be labelled either Republican or Democrat, especially after vilifying both Parties for years.
No, the optimal electoral strategy is to convince the 50% who don't vote to come out and vote for you. Find out why they don't vote, and craft a campaign to appeal to them.
That's not quite Kerry's argument. Kerry's argument is that the Constituation defines birth as the point in time that a human becomes a citizen and gains personhood. And he's right about that
No, he isn't. While the Constitution may very well imply that someone becomes a Citizen at birth, it nowhere implies that someone becomes HUMAN at birth.
Of course, the issue never really came up till we acquired the ability to maintain life outside the womb prior to "birth". The ability to do so gave us the necessity of deciding when humanity begins (since killing humans is wrong, but killing other things isn't necessarily wrong, we're pretty much forced to decide what is human and what is not-human, and live with the result). So far, we haven't settled on one universally accepted definition. Thus, the abortion debate.
Nobody I know- at least, not really reform. And the scientific evidence is against it, as well as the common sense evidence (can't teach an old dog new tricks).
You don't know enough people. My grandfather quit drinking after 30. He did it so throughly that I never knew he was an alcoholic as a young man till afte his death. My mother quite smoking after she was 30 - after smoking since she was a teenager.
A change in system won't help. If the Democrats keep getting elected, won't matter a hill of beans to them that they were your second choice. Same with the Republicans. Only thing that will change the current situation is a third party President. And changing our voting system won't give us one of those.
What matters in the end is who gets sworn in. As long as it is Kerry or Bush, nothing Nader voters "demand" means anything.
If SC had been smart they would have seceded and *not* fired on Fort Sumpter, thus forcing the US to have to play the heavy.
The Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter because they couldn't make the Union give it up. And it sat at the mouth of the harbor. Having your territorial waters controlled by another country is generally considered a sign that you're not to be taken seriously as a nation.
Plus, there was the whole Post Office thing - the Union continued to provide Postal Service in the Confederacy, as they had done since the beginning of the USA. You also won't get taken seriously as a nation if another nation runs some of your basic infrastructure, and YOUR OWN PEOPLE prefer that service to the one you threw together.
In other words, if Fort Sumter had not been fired on, the Confederacy would have been ignored into nonexistance by most of its own people.
You're missing a point - Kerry doesn't CARE why you vote for him, as long as you vote for him. So, you have your own agenda? Who cares, so long as your vote is going to the Dems?
I'm not, however, trying to imply that this is unique to Kerry. It is typical of all political figures. If you don't win the election, it doesn't really matter. If you do, it doesn't really matter that people voted against your opponent rather than for you.
This is a big problem with all special interests to a greater or lesser extent. They tend to be "safe". That is, they tend to vote either Democrat or Republican almost exclusively. The environmentalists vote Dem, so both sides can safely ignore them. The pro-lifers vote Rep, so both sides can safely ignore them.
The only time this changes is when one of these blocs refuses to come to the polls, or votes third party. Which tends to cause the D/R that they dislike even more to win. So they don't make that mistake again for a while, and the Dems and Reps ignore them for another twenty years or so.
Only way it will ever change is if such a bloc splinters, or starts offering their vote to either side, depending on who makes the best offer. Which happens about once a century....
Straight Party Line? Well, we have at least 15 different parties to choose from, and we have seven parties in the parliament. How many do you have?
Irrelevant, since our elections are non-partisan. Primary will have anywhere from 1 to 6 candidates typically, runoff always has two. I seem to recall that Party is listed by candidate's name on the ballot, but the system we use allows us to have 2 Republicans, 2 Democrats, 2 of something else, or any combination in the runoff. It also allows us to have as many Dems and Reps and others as want to run in the Primary, all running against everyone else.
We don't vote for the Republicans in the local government, we vote for Ray Nagin for Mayor. Well, I use "we" figuratively, since Mayor isn't one of the local offices we have where I vote, but down the Interstate a few miles, they voted that way.
As you pointed out, you vote Party, not Individual. We do the reverse. Yah, some people here vote straight Party-line as well. Of course, that gets tough to do when two Democrats are in the runoff, whether you're Republican or Democrat or something else entirely.
True enough. A lot of people think of dogs like that as really ill-tempered, aggressive animals, though, and I hate to see the stereotype reinforced.
Far as I can tell, bomb-sniffing dogs are chosen for intelligence and mild disposition. The former so they can learn what they need to know, the latter because they do their work around strangers a lot, and it doesn't do to have the dog wig out over the number of strange people in the area while it does what it was trained to do.
Yah, and you vote essentially straight Party line there.
We don't. Last election, I had around 20 things to vote on, including several State Constitutional Amendments. And that wasn't an unusually large ballot.
How well would your system would work if you had to do twenty pieces of paper per envelope, or twenty envelopes per voter?
The only bomb-sniffing dogs I know are real pussycats. They have the kind of disposition that you trust with the baby, even when the baby is teething and thinks chewing on the dog's ears will help.
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That's a pretty large exception in my state thanks to No Child Left Behind being underfunded. I pay $200 a month in property taxes alone- and that's after the 30% other taxes that I have to pay to earn the $200.
$200 property taxes?! And you think this is high? I pay considerably more than that, and we have a generous homestead exemption here.
And you should be able to earn $300 per year mowing lawns for people. It's not like it requires a full time job, much less a well-paying job (at current minimum wage, And yet- the price keeps going up and the costs of building the cars keep going down....
Does it? What's the cost of building a car? Last I looked, the UAW has a rather generous contract.
Inflation=free money to the bankers. Shouldn't be allowed at all- but that's the price we pay for having fictional money.
Umm, no. Inflation is free money for the Government. Government controls money supply, which is what causes inflation. Remember, higher prices != inflation. increased money supply relative to goods produced == inflation. Banks are, in fact, one of the most damaged by inflation. Long term loans by banks are free money for individuals in inflationary times.
Example: I borrow $100k for 30 years. I'll pay back around $200k (just for the sake of argument - I don't really want to drag out a financial calculator to determine exact payback for any given interest rate. so assume an interest rate that results in a 2 for 1 payback over 30 years.
the next year, inflation jumps from negligible to,say, 20% per year. Over 29 more years, the value of $1 will drop by 99.5%. So the $200k I pay back is worth about 1% of the $100k I borrowed. At the end of that time, I have whatever I bought with the $100k, and I have spent ~$1k in real dollars for it. I WIN!!!
Yah, this assumes that that kind of inflation can be sustained that long, and that my pay goes up with inflation. The latter is quite common under Union contracts, though, so I can get a job as a telephone repairman for Ma Bell, be unionized, and thus be immune to inflation personally.
Hmm, 4-8 million children per year. Out of 280 million people. Interesting, when you consider that overall deathrate for the entire US population is only 0.88%, which translates to total deaths at any age as only 2-3 million, much less children who die, much less children who die of malnutrition. Somehow, I think those numbers of your's are slightly exaggerated. ANd if you got it from the place I last looked for starvation numbers worldwide, you should read a bit more closely. The definition of "hunger" they use would include me, since I skipped lunch today.
Forced to to survive in a capitalistic society. If the damn government would leave me alone to run my own property as I wished, that would change quickly.
With the obvious exception of property taxes, you pretty much can do so now. My grandmother grew almost everything she ate in her back yard. And she'd have grown all of it if she had been willing to give up on her Coca Cola....
Or an oligopoly- much like the Medieval Guild, an oligopoly sets prices- why do you think cars cost the same for similar models? Certainly not COST of building the car, which has been going down for quite some time now.
Hmm, similar prices for similar models. Given similar costs for labour and materials (which makes sense, given that they are similar cars), it makes sense that they would cost about the same. Especially given that if one of them charged much more than the other's, the cheap one would take all the business from the other makers.
My first car cost 2700 dollars new in 1972. The last new car I bought cost $12,000 in 1985 (I decided to give up new cars for Lent after 1985). After adjusting for inflation, in 1972 dollars, the last car cost about $4600. A bit more, but not out to lunch, especially considering the difference between the two (the turbocharged engine, for one), not unreasonable. When I adjust for inflation, I notice that modern cars are about the same cost as they were 40 years ago, even ignoring the goodies you couldn't get in your car back then....
And yet, one could get excommunicated for not doing it.
And yet, how many actually wre?
Which was also against the teachings of the Church and could get a ruler hauled before the Inquisition.
And how many did this happen to? I can think of three or four kings of England who played this game, none of whom were even talked to by the Church. The trick, you see, was to give the Church half the assets you seized in your progroms. They'd overlook anything then.
And where were the slaves in the Christian Era?
Same place as previously. Working in the fields, the mills, what passed for the factories. If you think slavery became illegal/immoral with the introduction of Christianity, you really need to read more history.
Actually- I think you mean "Fish on Friday" as a support for the fishing industry- and it was so successfull that even today during Lent firshermen in Catholic nations get a higher price for their fish.
No. "Fish on Friday" was the weaseling that allowed people to continue to eat on Fridays. Originally, it was "fast". But "fast" has an enormous number of exceptions (among many others, pregnant women were not expected to not eat just because they were "fasting"). One of them was the word "meat". Which meant something different than it does now, by the way. Anyway, "fast" became equivalent to "don't eat meat", which became equivalent to "do eat fish". And it was never about supporting the fishing industry. People were too close to starvation as a routine order of business for any food producing industry to need support.
Why should the Government give you enough free money to indulge yourself, when the basic requirements can be met supplying ONLY basic needs and no more?
But, I already have the equipment. I just need the food and the time. I assume enough money to eat (or enough food) qualifies as "basic needs". And time I would have if I didn't have to show up for work every morning.
Disease prevention is- disease treatment isn't neccessarly within the confines of NEED. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is what this is based on- not wants and not luxuries.
Just curious. Why is disease prevention included?
At least if you provide no healthcare- you're not providing abortions or euthanasia or stem cell research either.
I'm not providing it, true. Doesn't mean it won't happen, of course.
And how are you going to let everyone work enough to buy all the bread they want? Private industry has shown itself to be spectacularily bad at providing full universal employment, let alone even employment enough for everybody to fullfill their basic needs.
Hmm, know anyone who has starved to death in the USA this year? I don't. I believe I've read about such happening, as a result of criminal acts (locking some woman in the basement, for instance).
Have I read about people starving back before the industrial revolution? Yes, pretty regularly.
How about in the Soviet Union (one of the two largest examples of industrialization without "private industry")? Yes, by the tens of millions in the years before WW2.
HOw about China (the other example)? Yes, as recently as the 70's?
How odd. Starvation seems to be less prevalent where private industry exists than where it doesn't....
Depends what you mean by better off. Nobody's living in luxury, but everybody having their needs met is better off to me.
Just curious. Do you donate all your income to charity/government but the minimum to meet your needs? If so, where does the computer you were using to answer me come from? Because it surely doesn't meet any definition of "need" I ever heard of.
For still others, it's "I have all the skills I need to survive, and if the government would only leave me alone, I don't need to trade".
Hmm, so you want to have Universal Welfare, but with noone to actually make in universal? Again, you enlarg
I have long believed that we really don't need very many more laws than we have now. But the metric of success of a politician is "passing laws", so they all try to pass SOMETHING! Frequently, on a subject they know nothing about.
Are we better off because we passed the DMCA? No? But the lads who passed it were chosen by us, and at least some of them were chosen because the promised us stronger IP laws.
In the Dark Ages (which I call the Catholic Ages) we did support a Welfare State in the form of the Guild Economy, with a Just Wage for a Fair Price, and a baning of the evils of the banking industry, and feudal lords who followed the concept of Noblese Oblige (the obligation of the wealthy to take care of the poor). Anybody who supports a welfare state should look to what you call the "Dark Ages" as a 1000 year experiment in how to accomplish it.
You have a peculiarly myopic view of the Dark Ages. The Guild Economy was just another form of Monopoly (granted by the Crown). Noblesse Oblige was more spoken of than actually practiced. And, as I recall from the history books, Banking was handled by the simple technique of Rulers borrowing from the Jews, then inciting a pogrom when said Jews insisted on repayment.
In any case, if you consider the Dark Ages an ideal, you either need to read more history, or raise your standards slightly. Say, to the point where your "ideal" doesn't include routine famines.
After the fall of the Empire, the Holy Roman Catholic Church also tried it and succeeded. Funny how you call honest labor "enslavement" though. But that's just your myoptic lens of a capitalist society.
*Laughs* You really must read more history. The Roman economy wasn't as slave-based as the Spartan economy, but it was probably a close second. It wasn't "honest labor" that resulted in slave-run farms driving the family farmers out of business.
The Catholic Church's ideas about a welfare state included "fast on Friday". Read some history, and you find that that particular idea was instituted as a way of stretching the food supply. As if eating only six days a week reduces your caloric requirements...as idiotic an idea as banning crossbows as "too terrible to allow in warfare". Which they also did. Note that neither of these ideas were particularly successful.
Better yet- why don't you tell me how not to work.
Why should I care whether you're a workaholic or not? If you desire a universal welfare state, one burning question is going to be "how is it paid for?" Like it or not, SOMEONE has to work. The number of people who MUST work is very likely to be higher than the number of people who LIKE working. So, you'll have to convince some of us who don't like to work to work anyway. How do you do it?
I was amused by the phrase "technical unemployment", though. So, you worked freelance, and were paid for it for a couple years. Sounds like a dream job, if you made enough to live.
All of my better ways of spending my days are also work- why is your life so incredibly empty of ability that you can't find a *creative* way to spend your time?
Whatever makes you think that? I think spending three months walking the Oregon Trail would be a wonderful way to spend my time. Or sailing the Atlantic in a replica of the Pelican. My preferred hobbies, whether YOU consider them creative or not, all take more than a couple days straight to do, thus are impractical with a 40 hour workweek. And most of them would be impractical with a one-hour workweek. But, given enough free money by the Government, I coulc indulge myself, instead of working to allow someone else to indulge himself.
Only due to artificial heroic life support- which is not a requirment in the Catholic Seamless Garment of Life. Disease prevention is- but that's relatively simple to do with very few doctors.
umm, no. Most heart attacks aren't life-threatening, actually. Many are, and the ones that are are the ones we hear about. That said, so why are diseases not part of a "natural life"? And where do you get off deciding for the rest of us what is acceptable healthcare?
And all I'm saying is, equal rationing is not letting economic cost prevent the defense of life. Unequal rationing is.
So if I offer NO healthcare to anyone, that is superior to offering whatever healthcare each person can afford? Hmm, looks
And what's wrong, conceptually, with the government doing less? We've had King Log, and we've had King Stork. I prefer King Log any day.
That would be when George Washington chose not to run for a third term.
At least noone is threatening to secede from the Union if this election goes the wrong way.
*Smirks* that's why we have a Second Amendment.
As to PATRIOT and INDUCE, you might want to give the judicial process some time to work. For instance, unless you have been harmed by a law, you have no legal ground to bring suit to overturn it in our Courts. Which was why MacCain-Feingold couldn't be sued out of existance before the law went into effect (several groups tried, and were told to wait till the law went into effect, and try again).
*laughs* We were wealthier during the Great Depression than 99.9% of humanity had ever been at any time in history. In the Dark Ages, do you really think we could have supported a welfare state? The Roman Empire tried it. Only for people who lived in Rome, and they had to enslave much of Europe and North Africa to do it, but they tried it. Wasn't "universal" by any means.
Having said that, yes, I agree you need incentives of SOME FORM to work.
Alright. Come up with an incentie that'll work. Tell me why *I* should work, if I don't have to. I'm reasonable, sometimes, but I doubt seriously you could come up with something that would motivate me to get up at 5:30 every morning (as I do now). Especially since I can think of so many better ways of spending my days.
You mean kind of like the Social Security System couldn't possibly have been implemented in 1936 because there wasn't enough wealth in the country to do it?
I should point out, again, that we were wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice of most humans throughout history at that time. In addition, the original form of Social Security really wasn't much - it didn't kick in till you lived beyond the average lifespan of the period (as I recall, "retirement age" was 6 months greater than "average lifespan" at that time).
How about this- we define a minimal level of medical care and let NATURAL DEATH take care of the rest? There's a reason why the seamless garment of life is from CONCEPTION to NATURAL DEATH.
So, what is a "natural" death? Is that when you have a heart attack? I Know people who did that before the age of 45. And survived quite nicely, thanks to our horribly flawed healthcare system.
Face it, any level of healthcare short of the best we know how to provide (not the level we can afford, but what we know how to do) is "rationed", if the Government decides how much everyone gets. WHich is to say, we're letting economic cost prefent the defense of life.
Only due to a total lack of morality on the part of the rich.
And yet, those countries I named were among the poorest in the world today. It's not "the rich" preventing adoption of your UDHR. It's the governments that would have to pay for it. The fact that the UDHR requires universal compliance at an international level to be completely fulfilled doesn't make it any easier. And that it requires that nations turn over part of their sovereignty to an international body they have no reason to trust has their interests at heart makes it even tougher.
That said, that's not why I'd bet on those time guesstimates. That's how long I think it will be till the world economy is big enough to sustain the UDHR. Mind you, I think that by that time, the people who brought us the UDHR will have expanded it to include a bunch of extra unfunded mandates, thus making it impossible even then. But, as written, it won't happen till the world can afford it, and that won't happen for some time.
Dollars mean nothing- at all. That measurement of production is completely mythological- hasn't had any real value since we left the gold standard behind. Sure- it would mean we'd need a different economy. So what? The economy is just an invention of mankind, an artifact.
Nonsense! Gold standard isn't required to determine the value of a dollar. Try using the price of 1 pound (or Kg, if you like metric) of bread as an index. $12 trillion doesn't mean the same as it did in WW2, but it still is a measure of production of wealth. When you compare it to the cost of living, you get an idea how many people an economy that size can sustain at our standard of living.
The economy is just an artifact to the exact same extent that the UDHR is an artifact. But the economy has some relevance to any society. Sure, I
You are aware that this whole social security/socialism concept only got going big when civilization became wealthy enough to afford it, right?
Face it, if 99% of everyone is working their butts off just to avoid famine more often than every ten years or so, "universal health care" and "environmental protection" aren't even on the radar.
If we "ruin the economy" this year, there won't be any "support of that life in the form of food, clothing, shelter, water, and medical care" next year. In order to guarantee "support of that life in the form of food, clothing, shelter, water, and medical care" all this, we have to be able to produce enough real wealth every single year to provide this for every single person. A daunting prospect, when you consider that right now no more than 1/6 the people in the world get anywhere close to this much social support.
The USA is a $12 trillion economy. That translates into ~$2000 per person, worldwide. American Poverty Level doesn't meet those standards, so it's safe to assume that $10,000 per person would be insufficient. $15,000 might be closer. So you'd need to suck up 8 times the USA economy every year just to support the UDHR. I'm not sure, but it seems to me I remember that the USA economy is more than 15% of the world economy. Which would make the minimal requirements for implementation of the UDHR at rather more than the entire world economy.
And bet on it - if there is no profit to be had from working hard, then noone will work hard. Sort of like the Soviet Union ("They pretend to pay us, so we pretend to work"). So you'd probably need an economy at least twice as big as the minimum to support UDHR, just to insert enough profit motive to get people to do the work needed. Again, WAY more than the world's economy today.
Economic cost should NEVER be an issue preventing the defense of life.
Really? So the government should guarantee immortality for every citizen? Or failing that, that the level of medical care for everyone should be the same as for the President? Interesting, since that would require that EACH person have two or three personal physicians dedicated only to keeping him/her/it healthy. So, for 6 billion people, we'd need 15 billion doctors. hmm, I see a problem here. Or should we just ration healthcare? Which is just another way of letting economic cost prevent the defense of life.
Face it, like it or not, wealth is what will make this whole UDHR possible. And not just a little wealth - great, heaping gobs of it. Mountains of money. If we choke our economy trying to implement it now, we'll never get to where we can afford it. If I was a betting man, I'd guesstimate 50 years, given no major changes in resource availability, 100+ years given the current outlook for fossil fuel depletion. And that's assuming that the political situation changes to allow UDHR. Won't work until every sovereign nation agrees to it, and I don't see, for instance, North Korea going along with it, or Sudan, or Libya, or...not for a very long time, anyway.
No. Only 18+ year old landowning males were Citizens. There is a distinction between "people" and "citizen". As an example, I am not a citizen of Canada, though I have a good chance of being recognized as "people" in Canada. At least, they were remarkably polite last time I was there, if they didn't consider me "people". ;)
Actually, in the UDHR, killing people is indeed UNIVERSALLY wrong
Really? So, if the next generation's Hitler were to invade Belgium, UDHR advocates wouldn't shoot back? I find that extremely unlikely. "These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations." looks like a pretty big caveat to cover any, shall we say, abrogation of those Rights...
Has the UN ever figured out just how much it would cost to implement this particular piece of rhetoric? Just curious....
An idiot. Kerry won't do any more to reduce abortion than Bush will.
His hypothetical "make it cost as much as having a baby" in his Health Care reform won't survive the first legal challenge. One thing you have to give the pro-abortion people credit for is understanding the "slippery slope" idea. They oppose EVERYTHING that affects the availability of abortion even the tiniest amount. Because they know that if we reach the point where abortion is illegal in any way, however slight, the line between illegal and legal will continue moving back the other way.
And when it reaches the point where abortions are absolutely illegal again, it'll start swinging back toward absolutely legal.
Fact is, abortion is going to continue exactly as is until a new Supreme Court rules that some form(s) of abortion are regulatable.
Note, by the way, that my duaghter required my written permission to get her ears pierced. An abortion she could have done without even letting me know she was missing school that day.
However, it is not necessarily true that an alcoholic can't ever drink anything alcoholic without relapsing. It is considered safest to never touch alcohol, but given enough willpower, it isn't mandatory. And don't maunder on about alcoholics having no willpower - if alcholism is a disease, willpower, or lack of same, is irrelevant to it.
As to mood swings, my wife has those. ;) and she doesn't use cocaine.
Once Saved Always Saved, last I looked, isn't about your addictions. It's a religious question. Whether you give in to your urges to drink, smoke, screw, and shoot people is irrelevant to your status among the "Saved". Given that Bush hasn't been seen in public drunk in a very long time (he has a lot of privacy as President, rather less as Governor, even less as Oil Company CEO, or whatever he was), it's likely he has his drinking firmly under control. I consider it unlikely he is using cocaine, because it's not the kind of thing that can be kept secret when you are surrounded by servants and T-Men 24/7....
The unborn are, in fact, in a similar situation. It is very like the situation just pre-Civil War - half the people think they ARE people, half don't.
And yes, killing people isn't universally wrong. It's not universally wrong ANYWHERE. But, we have an overwhelming majority who agree, more or less, on when it is acceptable
If they did, they obviously failed. Neither the Deomcrats nor the Republicans were political Parties in the Founding Fathers' day.
Can Nader run in the Democratic Primaries? If he wants to bother, but then he has to wear the Democrat label. Hell, he can run in the Republican primtaries, if he wants. Same deal, though - he gets stuck with the label.
And Nader doesn't want to be labelled either Republican or Democrat, especially after vilifying both Parties for years.
It can be done. We have the technology.
No, he isn't. While the Constitution may very well imply that someone becomes a Citizen at birth, it nowhere implies that someone becomes HUMAN at birth.
Of course, the issue never really came up till we acquired the ability to maintain life outside the womb prior to "birth". The ability to do so gave us the necessity of deciding when humanity begins (since killing humans is wrong, but killing other things isn't necessarily wrong, we're pretty much forced to decide what is human and what is not-human, and live with the result). So far, we haven't settled on one universally accepted definition. Thus, the abortion debate.
You don't know enough people. My grandfather quit drinking after 30. He did it so throughly that I never knew he was an alcoholic as a young man till afte his death. My mother quite smoking after she was 30 - after smoking since she was a teenager.
Just to name two off the top of my head.
What matters in the end is who gets sworn in. As long as it is Kerry or Bush, nothing Nader voters "demand" means anything.
The Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter because they couldn't make the Union give it up. And it sat at the mouth of the harbor. Having your territorial waters controlled by another country is generally considered a sign that you're not to be taken seriously as a nation.
Plus, there was the whole Post Office thing - the Union continued to provide Postal Service in the Confederacy, as they had done since the beginning of the USA. You also won't get taken seriously as a nation if another nation runs some of your basic infrastructure, and YOUR OWN PEOPLE prefer that service to the one you threw together.
In other words, if Fort Sumter had not been fired on, the Confederacy would have been ignored into nonexistance by most of its own people.
I'm not, however, trying to imply that this is unique to Kerry. It is typical of all political figures. If you don't win the election, it doesn't really matter. If you do, it doesn't really matter that people voted against your opponent rather than for you.
This is a big problem with all special interests to a greater or lesser extent. They tend to be "safe". That is, they tend to vote either Democrat or Republican almost exclusively. The environmentalists vote Dem, so both sides can safely ignore them. The pro-lifers vote Rep, so both sides can safely ignore them.
The only time this changes is when one of these blocs refuses to come to the polls, or votes third party. Which tends to cause the D/R that they dislike even more to win. So they don't make that mistake again for a while, and the Dems and Reps ignore them for another twenty years or so.
Only way it will ever change is if such a bloc splinters, or starts offering their vote to either side, depending on who makes the best offer. Which happens about once a century....
Irrelevant, since our elections are non-partisan. Primary will have anywhere from 1 to 6 candidates typically, runoff always has two. I seem to recall that Party is listed by candidate's name on the ballot, but the system we use allows us to have 2 Republicans, 2 Democrats, 2 of something else, or any combination in the runoff. It also allows us to have as many Dems and Reps and others as want to run in the Primary, all running against everyone else.
We don't vote for the Republicans in the local government, we vote for Ray Nagin for Mayor. Well, I use "we" figuratively, since Mayor isn't one of the local offices we have where I vote, but down the Interstate a few miles, they voted that way.
As you pointed out, you vote Party, not Individual. We do the reverse. Yah, some people here vote straight Party-line as well. Of course, that gets tough to do when two Democrats are in the runoff, whether you're Republican or Democrat or something else entirely.
Far as I can tell, bomb-sniffing dogs are chosen for intelligence and mild disposition. The former so they can learn what they need to know, the latter because they do their work around strangers a lot, and it doesn't do to have the dog wig out over the number of strange people in the area while it does what it was trained to do.
We don't. Last election, I had around 20 things to vote on, including several State Constitutional Amendments. And that wasn't an unusually large ballot.
How well would your system would work if you had to do twenty pieces of paper per envelope, or twenty envelopes per voter?
The only bomb-sniffing dogs I know are real pussycats. They have the kind of disposition that you trust with the baby, even when the baby is teething and thinks chewing on the dog's ears will help.