and they are, I am a scientist as well and can tell when somebody games results, absolutely no cherry-picking is going on
LOL. Bullshit.
I'll leave aside the very clear differences of social science from real science that can produce deterministic results. It looks like science, but he basically cherry-picks specific people and calls them representatives of large groups, then proceeds to define a few behaviors of a large group based on a very tiny sample (sometimes, just 1) and their statements. It's propaganda, not science.
Certainly in science and especially in social science, you can't go around praising all the efforts of a single political party and blaming all their faults on the other party exclusively and call yourself unbiased. If you buy into his "science", all of our political problems would be solved overnight if the Democrats won all their elections and the Republicans were excised. That's bullshit. Corruption and tyranny is non-partisan, and I don't need surveys or social experiments to demonstrate that when his hero, Obama, has continued and expanded 90% of the tyrannical and statist policies that Bush started.
People "vote with their dollars and their feet" means that people make their choices known through actions other than voting on the issue.
Voting and voluntary exchanges are legal activities.
But the person you replied to is pointing that "voting with dollars and feet" does not legitimize the contested activity
It legitimizes ALL voluntary exchanges. The only thing "contested" is unnecessary government intervention.
just like "voting with your feet" that having to pay for garbage removal is too onerous and demonstrating that by dumping your trash inappropriately does not legitimize that activity.
That analogy doesn't hold up. The example "dumping trash on abandoned property" is a person illegally violating the rights of the property owner. If I want to create a landfill on my own property, ensuring that it does not contaminate water supplies and doesn't create a nuisance for neighbors, I'm within my rights to do so. I don't have to pay tribute to the local warlord for permission to do that.
In other words, just because people prefer an alternative and would take that alternative when nothing else prevents them from doing so, does not legitimize that alternative.
As long as it doesn't create a victim, it actually does. The GP did not provide such an analogy.
Regulations may prevent cab alternatives from operating now but
But it does have greater merit than some random people declaring otherwise. After all good and bad without any criteria is purely subjective so a democratic government voting for something shows that the representatives of at least the largest minority have been convinced. This means (if it is democratic) that more people think that X is good than think an alternative is better so it does have validity as a counter to fewer people complaining that they should be allowed everything the way they want.
Oh, excellent. So you support Democracy as valid because minorities are always wrong.
People are voting with their dollars and their feet EVERYDAY. What is your "democratically elected" government worth in the face of that? How representative...
People vote with their dollars and their feet for dumping in unlicensed landfills and on abandoned property EVERYDAY. That doesn't make it a remotely good idea.
"Unlicensed landfills"? WTF are you talking about? Oh, it's just a strawman.
We don't need new regulations for every activity. Your example is (the actual one, of dumping on abandoned property), is people violating others' property rights. That has been illegal for hundreds of years. Why do we need a new law for some specific type of property right violations?
This isn't wah-wah I need the nanny state to protect me from my own stupidity, this is I want to live in a country where if a toy is marketed as suitable for a 3 year old, that it actually contains no small sharp parts or is made of hazerdous toxic materials or is likely to explode, without me having to personally vet them all.
And why do you suppose that every taxpayer and business should have to pay and be subject to prosecution by the government because you don't want to take responsibility for your children and the things you give them to play with?
I saw a TV news magazine story the other day, and they had people that were shocked and outraged that "there are no federal regulations on how to grow vegetables"! Really. You can't make this shit up.
I'm really tired of legislating by MSM fear-mongering, as if every activity needs some federal law regulating it or we're all in danger.
Still all unsubstantiated assertion. It doesn't "look to me" like regulation is expanding, it actually is. The only "assault on government" is coming from grassroots activists, and it's not even working to hold back the tide, because the Establishment of both parties and the progressive movement keep pushing for more increased centralization of power.
This is actual science with experiments, statistics, control groups, etc. That you only see what you want to see and not what is there is a problem on your side.
No, it's not "science". It's selective cherry-picking of data to fit a pre-conceived conclusion.
You're talking about militarization of the police, a fairly recent trend. At the same time you are completely forgetting the massive shrinking of power structures of the government agencies after Cold War ended among other things.
And you're living in fantasy land. There has been nothing but growth in the "power structures" of the federal government, no matter how you define it. And it was massively accelerated after 911 with Homeland Security, TSA, Patriot Act, etc. Even the Department of Education has a paramilitary swat team now. And the SEC is bigger than ever, it's just staffed with folks from Goldman Sachs instead of JP Morgan.
Because without government we could never accomplish these things. I'm sure if this guy eventually gets dressed and drives to work you'd bring up the roads, too, another impossibility to do without our benevolent rulers.:)
yeah, we COULD accomplish these things. Problem is, we wouldn't. Except in that one country where there's no government and they have clean water and clean air and electricity, and yes, even roads that you can safely drive 70 mph on. Where is that again? RIght, in the figment of an AC's mind.
Right. Because a government with Constitutional constraints on its authority is exactly like NO government at all.
The existence, size and influence of the companies you mentioned is the direct result of government intervention in markets.
Banking - FED, Communications - FCC, Air - TSA, Military - DOD/DOJ/CIA/NSA
You forgot all the food you eat and all the drugs you're allowed to buy - FDA.
That's because there were not as many regulations then as there are now. It got to the point where instead of the government and businesses working together, it was a war. Business won it and "big business" gets a stronger foothold against small business every time the liberal anti-corp "do-gooders" create new regulation.
They must have done some pretty good marketing for you to imagine that there was ever a "war".
No, you are proving his point. It's people like you that are the reason for government being weakened so much that these corporations are allowed to influence it to such a great degree.
Back when patriotism was a thing just a few decades ago, companies didn't wield even a fraction of political power they have today.
Companies didn't need that kind of political power, because the federal government wasn't nearly as powerful. Many people still followed the Constitution, which was designed to constrain federal power.
The more powerful government becomes, the more effort companies will exert to influence policy. There is no way around it. And the more that concentration of power (corporate / government together), the less free the "little people" become. Concentration of power is bad, and it's government that has the monopoly of force.
This "weakened" government (ignore history much?) is now using paramilitary-style raids to shut down milk farmers, food co-ops, and guitar companies. A few decades ago, companies could just ignore the federal government and pay their taxes, but as Microsoft discovered, making a lot of money in America means you need to spend some on lobbyists and campaign contributions or face costly court battles. What was the result of the government's "anti-trust" charges against Microsoft? They went from ignoring federal politics to spending more on lobbyists and campaign contributions than just about anyone else. It wasn't Microsoft that initiated that, it was the government.
Look at it this way. You've got a powerful, well-armed (and often militant) authority in charge, and a company (or a group of companies in an industry) with billions of dollars. And the only constraint is a voting public of which maybe 0.01% actually reads the legislation that their representatives are voting on. Just how much power do you want concentrated in that central authority? Your stance of "as much as possible" puts you on the road to a serfdom and a tyrannical government.
These people literally do not understand the immeasurable damage they do. At the same time, they think whatever they do is good for society. It is a special, unfortunately widespread, mental disability and one that pushes people into law enforcement, law and government work.
What a bunch of hyper-partisan clap-trap. All on one web page. I've never seen so many Democratic party talking points crammed into one paragraph as they have managed on that web site.
Sorry, but the issue is not attributable to one side of the 2-party duopoly coin, and, no, you can't blame Bush for 5 years of continuing down the same ruinous, tyrannical past. Republicans do not have an exclusive on authoritarianism, any more than Democrats have an exclusive on crony capitalism. If you're writing essays praising TARP and the 2009 Stimulus in one breath, and complaining about income inequality in the next, you obviously have a lot to learn about what the real issues are. Replacing all the Republicans with Democrats is not going to fix a single one of them.
From the looks of this, the technical version of what this means is that Netflix has been working closely with Apple to bring MPEG-DASH Media Stream Extensions to Safari (they're already present in Chrome and IE11)
So why do they still require Silverlight for IE 11 on Windows 7?
Don't misunderstand. I was only responding to the GP's assertion that voters don't vote based on wanting a "piece of the pie". It really DOES happen, but you're right that eliminating that practice isn't going to solve much. It's offset by all the people pulling the lever for the "R" on the ticket because they promise to stop abortion and gay marriage.
I won't get into the false memes about oil company handouts (it's not actually happening), but there is certainly a huge issue with crony capitalism and phony wars that benefit only the military industrial complex while make the US look like the biggest global bully the world has ever seen.
Our representatives in Washington are wholly unresponsive to the needs and desires of the people, and they game the system to remain in power, using whatever rhetoric will work for their district or state at the time. Making the single available opposition look like a worse evil seems to be pretty effective in getting voters to select the lesser evil. People are completely disenfranchised, and they know it. The problem is getting people to realize that their own representative is also part of the problem. That should be easy considering the guy has been there for 30 or 40 years (because you keep voting for him), and he clearly hasn't done anything to improve the situation. People pay too much attention to what these guys say and don't even do the research that would reveal what they do is completely different.
The US constitution may have eliminate the divine right and recognized (not for the first time) individual rights to property
Yes, it was, indeed, the first time a system of government was established that recognized individual rights to real property. And now the US is using techniques from Agenda 21 to end it.
So you support the return to Divine Right of Kings, with the government having ownership of all land and the citizens only get tenancy?
The land is orginally owned by the city generally, so you can not just decide on your own to dig a well and bury your waste, as those can adversely affect your neighbors.
No, no it wasn't. That's not only the most asinine excuse for trampling of property rights I've ever heard, it's also unsupportable from a legal and common law viewpoint.
nothing in America remotely fits that description, if you go back far enough there are Spanish, English, and native American rights to contend with
The US Constitution eliminated the "divine right of kings", including England's and Spain's, to make claim to all real property. It established for the first time a country that recognized individual rights to property. Native American rights are different, and despite some of us feeling they should have superior right of supremacy to all land claims, the law only recognizes certain specific areas as tribal grounds, and that has absolutely ZERO impact on those acres in a residential or rural zoned area that you purchased from the prior deeded owner.
Local ordinances that allow the government to sell your property at auction for 1/3 of the value because you were late paying the $1.86 balance on your property tax bill are nothing but theft.
The expense of these ads corrupts Congress and makes them not care about us.
It's worse than that. It also corrupts the mainstream media, which needs that campaign ad money to survive. They won't even talk about populist candidates because it distracts from the conflict-based rhetorical battles between the highly financed candidates.
" The voters are looking for a piece of that pie."
no they aren't. Are you saying voter want lobbyists?
Pft! Of course they are. Many voters go to the polls to vote for Democrats because they want subsidized health care because of their health situation, even though they don't like the system as a whole, they feel like it's going to help them personally. Ditto with other benefits, as well. It's why Democrats bought ads with Paul Ryan throwing grandma off a cliff (older people are very reliable voters), and it's also why many on the left get frustrated with the view that there are voters not "voting in their own self-interest". That is, "We promised them a piece of the treasury, stocked with other peoples' money but they won't vote for that."
It's a real shame that the entire debate seems to be over higher vs. lower taxes and who should pay more. The tax system needs some massive reform and simplification, but nobody will even talk about that (unless it's someone the media portrays as "fringe").
Back to propaganda, sound bites, and low information voters, again.
with congress. In fact, it's practically a red herring.
The voters are.
Correct.
Educate the voters.
That has been tried and shown to be an abysmal failure. Propaganda and sound bites are far more effective. That's why federal bureaucracies fund NGOs (people trust what NGOs say, for some reason), it's why so much news and entertainment in the media is so agenda-driven, and, if you look closely, you can see it's why people mistrust and condemn congress, yet are entirely okay with their own representative there.
In fact, manipulating the vote, in our 2-party system, is so deterministic it practically pointless. Obama's 2008 election is one of the few examples in recent history where voting up-ended the status quo. Those examples are very rare. Too bad Obama turned out to be such a useless puppet of the entrenched Washington interests.
If you were to instead demolish an existing home and replace it with a new one of similar size, the building permit costs would be far less than $30,000, since the home would already have water, sewer, roads, electrical service....
This is actually 100% false. Instead, it would cost you more, because now you have permitting from several agencies required for the demolition and removal of debris, and you still have to pay all the concomitant costs required for new construction.
The purpose of development charges is to defray (some of) the costs to local government that they would otherwise incur for doing things like connecting your new home to the water, sewer, electrical, and any other utilities;
Except there is no legal way to opt out of those things, due to revenue-generating requirements in the local ordinances. So that makes it just as onerous and unnecessarily expensive. That is, you can't just say "I will be using X and Y homesteading technologies to supply my own water, sanitation, and power".
construction of roads and streetlights;
Those things are provided by local property taxes, developer stipends, and other fees unrelated to specific new home construction. And, again, there is no provision for allowing discounts / credits for putting in your own security lighting at the street, or having built your own access road.
construction and purchase of additional emergency services equipment (fire trucks and fire houses, etc.); construction or enlargement of water reservoirs, sewage treatment plants, and electrical substations....
Again, there are developer fees and stipends as well as property taxes that pay for these things. You're claiming that the local government is required to double, triple, and quintuple -dip because every stage of development planning is subject to multiple levels of zoning, land use planning, urban development planning, and developer approval requests all of which the government gets more dips. Presumably the government should already be ready for this new single family, because the lot is available, sold, zoned, and all it needs now is 4 walls and a roof - but, no, you'll need to double your budget because the local Lord needs his tribute, shitizen!
Slashdot Mirror
and they are, I am a scientist as well and can tell when somebody games results, absolutely no cherry-picking is going on
LOL. Bullshit.
I'll leave aside the very clear differences of social science from real science that can produce deterministic results. It looks like science, but he basically cherry-picks specific people and calls them representatives of large groups, then proceeds to define a few behaviors of a large group based on a very tiny sample (sometimes, just 1) and their statements. It's propaganda, not science.
Certainly in science and especially in social science, you can't go around praising all the efforts of a single political party and blaming all their faults on the other party exclusively and call yourself unbiased. If you buy into his "science", all of our political problems would be solved overnight if the Democrats won all their elections and the Republicans were excised. That's bullshit. Corruption and tyranny is non-partisan, and I don't need surveys or social experiments to demonstrate that when his hero, Obama, has continued and expanded 90% of the tyrannical and statist policies that Bush started.
People "vote with their dollars and their feet" means that people make their choices known through actions other than voting on the issue.
Voting and voluntary exchanges are legal activities.
But the person you replied to is pointing that "voting with dollars and feet" does not legitimize the contested activity
It legitimizes ALL voluntary exchanges. The only thing "contested" is unnecessary government intervention.
just like "voting with your feet" that having to pay for garbage removal is too onerous and demonstrating that by dumping your trash inappropriately does not legitimize that activity.
That analogy doesn't hold up. The example "dumping trash on abandoned property" is a person illegally violating the rights of the property owner. If I want to create a landfill on my own property, ensuring that it does not contaminate water supplies and doesn't create a nuisance for neighbors, I'm within my rights to do so. I don't have to pay tribute to the local warlord for permission to do that.
In other words, just because people prefer an alternative and would take that alternative when nothing else prevents them from doing so, does not legitimize that alternative.
As long as it doesn't create a victim, it actually does. The GP did not provide such an analogy.
Regulations may prevent cab alternatives from operating now but
And THAT is illegitimate.
But it does have greater merit than some random people declaring otherwise. After all good and bad without any criteria is purely subjective so a democratic government voting for something shows that the representatives of at least the largest minority have been convinced. This means (if it is democratic) that more people think that X is good than think an alternative is better so it does have validity as a counter to fewer people complaining that they should be allowed everything the way they want.
Oh, excellent. So you support Democracy as valid because minorities are always wrong.
People vote with their dollars and their feet for dumping in unlicensed landfills and on abandoned property EVERYDAY. That doesn't make it a remotely good idea.
"Unlicensed landfills"? WTF are you talking about? Oh, it's just a strawman.
We don't need new regulations for every activity. Your example is (the actual one, of dumping on abandoned property), is people violating others' property rights. That has been illegal for hundreds of years. Why do we need a new law for some specific type of property right violations?
This isn't wah-wah I need the nanny state to protect me from my own stupidity, this is I want to live in a country where if a toy is marketed as suitable for a 3 year old, that it actually contains no small sharp parts or is made of hazerdous toxic materials or is likely to explode, without me having to personally vet them all.
And why do you suppose that every taxpayer and business should have to pay and be subject to prosecution by the government because you don't want to take responsibility for your children and the things you give them to play with?
Thank you! Exactly this.
I saw a TV news magazine story the other day, and they had people that were shocked and outraged that "there are no federal regulations on how to grow vegetables"! Really. You can't make this shit up.
I'm really tired of legislating by MSM fear-mongering, as if every activity needs some federal law regulating it or we're all in danger.
Still all unsubstantiated assertion. It doesn't "look to me" like regulation is expanding, it actually is. The only "assault on government" is coming from grassroots activists, and it's not even working to hold back the tide, because the Establishment of both parties and the progressive movement keep pushing for more increased centralization of power.
This is actual science with experiments, statistics, control groups, etc. That you only see what you want to see and not what is there is a problem on your side.
No, it's not "science". It's selective cherry-picking of data to fit a pre-conceived conclusion.
You're talking about militarization of the police, a fairly recent trend. At the same time you are completely forgetting the massive shrinking of power structures of the government agencies after Cold War ended among other things.
And you're living in fantasy land. There has been nothing but growth in the "power structures" of the federal government, no matter how you define it. And it was massively accelerated after 911 with Homeland Security, TSA, Patriot Act, etc. Even the Department of Education has a paramilitary swat team now. And the SEC is bigger than ever, it's just staffed with folks from Goldman Sachs instead of JP Morgan.
Because without government we could never accomplish these things. I'm sure if this guy eventually gets dressed and drives to work you'd bring up the roads, too, another impossibility to do without our benevolent rulers. :)
yeah, we COULD accomplish these things. Problem is, we wouldn't. Except in that one country where there's no government and they have clean water and clean air and electricity, and yes, even roads that you can safely drive 70 mph on. Where is that again? RIght, in the figment of an AC's mind.
Right. Because a government with Constitutional constraints on its authority is exactly like NO government at all.
The existence, size and influence of the companies you mentioned is the direct result of government intervention in markets. Banking - FED, Communications - FCC, Air - TSA, Military - DOD/DOJ/CIA/NSA
You forgot all the food you eat and all the drugs you're allowed to buy - FDA.
That's because there were not as many regulations then as there are now. It got to the point where instead of the government and businesses working together, it was a war. Business won it and "big business" gets a stronger foothold against small business every time the liberal anti-corp "do-gooders" create new regulation.
They must have done some pretty good marketing for you to imagine that there was ever a "war".
No, you are proving his point. It's people like you that are the reason for government being weakened so much that these corporations are allowed to influence it to such a great degree.
Back when patriotism was a thing just a few decades ago, companies didn't wield even a fraction of political power they have today.
Companies didn't need that kind of political power, because the federal government wasn't nearly as powerful. Many people still followed the Constitution, which was designed to constrain federal power.
The more powerful government becomes, the more effort companies will exert to influence policy. There is no way around it. And the more that concentration of power (corporate / government together), the less free the "little people" become. Concentration of power is bad, and it's government that has the monopoly of force.
This "weakened" government (ignore history much?) is now using paramilitary-style raids to shut down milk farmers, food co-ops, and guitar companies. A few decades ago, companies could just ignore the federal government and pay their taxes, but as Microsoft discovered, making a lot of money in America means you need to spend some on lobbyists and campaign contributions or face costly court battles. What was the result of the government's "anti-trust" charges against Microsoft? They went from ignoring federal politics to spending more on lobbyists and campaign contributions than just about anyone else. It wasn't Microsoft that initiated that, it was the government.
Look at it this way. You've got a powerful, well-armed (and often militant) authority in charge, and a company (or a group of companies in an industry) with billions of dollars. And the only constraint is a voting public of which maybe 0.01% actually reads the legislation that their representatives are voting on. Just how much power do you want concentrated in that central authority? Your stance of "as much as possible" puts you on the road to a serfdom and a tyrannical government.
Read Bob Altemeyers "The Authoritarians" http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~a...
These people literally do not understand the immeasurable damage they do. At the same time, they think whatever they do is good for society. It is a special, unfortunately widespread, mental disability and one that pushes people into law enforcement, law and government work.
What a bunch of hyper-partisan clap-trap. All on one web page. I've never seen so many Democratic party talking points crammed into one paragraph as they have managed on that web site.
Sorry, but the issue is not attributable to one side of the 2-party duopoly coin, and, no, you can't blame Bush for 5 years of continuing down the same ruinous, tyrannical past. Republicans do not have an exclusive on authoritarianism, any more than Democrats have an exclusive on crony capitalism. If you're writing essays praising TARP and the 2009 Stimulus in one breath, and complaining about income inequality in the next, you obviously have a lot to learn about what the real issues are. Replacing all the Republicans with Democrats is not going to fix a single one of them.
Please, RTFA!
You must be new here.
it seems to work for President Obama too.
The actual excuse he uses is "I didn't know about it until I saw it on the news."
From the looks of this, the technical version of what this means is that Netflix has been working closely with Apple to bring MPEG-DASH Media Stream Extensions to Safari (they're already present in Chrome and IE11)
So why do they still require Silverlight for IE 11 on Windows 7?
Don't misunderstand. I was only responding to the GP's assertion that voters don't vote based on wanting a "piece of the pie". It really DOES happen, but you're right that eliminating that practice isn't going to solve much. It's offset by all the people pulling the lever for the "R" on the ticket because they promise to stop abortion and gay marriage.
I won't get into the false memes about oil company handouts (it's not actually happening), but there is certainly a huge issue with crony capitalism and phony wars that benefit only the military industrial complex while make the US look like the biggest global bully the world has ever seen.
Our representatives in Washington are wholly unresponsive to the needs and desires of the people, and they game the system to remain in power, using whatever rhetoric will work for their district or state at the time. Making the single available opposition look like a worse evil seems to be pretty effective in getting voters to select the lesser evil. People are completely disenfranchised, and they know it. The problem is getting people to realize that their own representative is also part of the problem. That should be easy considering the guy has been there for 30 or 40 years (because you keep voting for him), and he clearly hasn't done anything to improve the situation. People pay too much attention to what these guys say and don't even do the research that would reveal what they do is completely different.
The US constitution may have eliminate the divine right and recognized (not for the first time) individual rights to property
Yes, it was, indeed, the first time a system of government was established that recognized individual rights to real property. And now the US is using techniques from Agenda 21 to end it.
So you support the return to Divine Right of Kings, with the government having ownership of all land and the citizens only get tenancy?
The land is orginally owned by the city generally, so you can not just decide on your own to dig a well and bury your waste, as those can adversely affect your neighbors.
No, no it wasn't. That's not only the most asinine excuse for trampling of property rights I've ever heard, it's also unsupportable from a legal and common law viewpoint.
nothing in America remotely fits that description, if you go back far enough there are Spanish, English, and native American rights to contend with
The US Constitution eliminated the "divine right of kings", including England's and Spain's, to make claim to all real property. It established for the first time a country that recognized individual rights to property. Native American rights are different, and despite some of us feeling they should have superior right of supremacy to all land claims, the law only recognizes certain specific areas as tribal grounds, and that has absolutely ZERO impact on those acres in a residential or rural zoned area that you purchased from the prior deeded owner.
Local ordinances that allow the government to sell your property at auction for 1/3 of the value because you were late paying the $1.86 balance on your property tax bill are nothing but theft.
The expense of these ads corrupts Congress and makes them not care about us.
It's worse than that. It also corrupts the mainstream media, which needs that campaign ad money to survive. They won't even talk about populist candidates because it distracts from the conflict-based rhetorical battles between the highly financed candidates.
" The voters are looking for a piece of that pie." no they aren't. Are you saying voter want lobbyists?
Pft! Of course they are. Many voters go to the polls to vote for Democrats because they want subsidized health care because of their health situation, even though they don't like the system as a whole, they feel like it's going to help them personally. Ditto with other benefits, as well. It's why Democrats bought ads with Paul Ryan throwing grandma off a cliff (older people are very reliable voters), and it's also why many on the left get frustrated with the view that there are voters not "voting in their own self-interest". That is, "We promised them a piece of the treasury, stocked with other peoples' money but they won't vote for that."
It's a real shame that the entire debate seems to be over higher vs. lower taxes and who should pay more. The tax system needs some massive reform and simplification, but nobody will even talk about that (unless it's someone the media portrays as "fringe").
Back to propaganda, sound bites, and low information voters, again.
with congress. In fact, it's practically a red herring. The voters are.
Correct.
Educate the voters.
That has been tried and shown to be an abysmal failure. Propaganda and sound bites are far more effective. That's why federal bureaucracies fund NGOs (people trust what NGOs say, for some reason), it's why so much news and entertainment in the media is so agenda-driven, and, if you look closely, you can see it's why people mistrust and condemn congress, yet are entirely okay with their own representative there.
In fact, manipulating the vote, in our 2-party system, is so deterministic it practically pointless. Obama's 2008 election is one of the few examples in recent history where voting up-ended the status quo. Those examples are very rare. Too bad Obama turned out to be such a useless puppet of the entrenched Washington interests.
If you were to instead demolish an existing home and replace it with a new one of similar size, the building permit costs would be far less than $30,000, since the home would already have water, sewer, roads, electrical service....
This is actually 100% false. Instead, it would cost you more, because now you have permitting from several agencies required for the demolition and removal of debris, and you still have to pay all the concomitant costs required for new construction.
The purpose of development charges is to defray (some of) the costs to local government that they would otherwise incur for doing things like connecting your new home to the water, sewer, electrical, and any other utilities;
Except there is no legal way to opt out of those things, due to revenue-generating requirements in the local ordinances. So that makes it just as onerous and unnecessarily expensive. That is, you can't just say "I will be using X and Y homesteading technologies to supply my own water, sanitation, and power".
construction of roads and streetlights;
Those things are provided by local property taxes, developer stipends, and other fees unrelated to specific new home construction. And, again, there is no provision for allowing discounts / credits for putting in your own security lighting at the street, or having built your own access road.
construction and purchase of additional emergency services equipment (fire trucks and fire houses, etc.); construction or enlargement of water reservoirs, sewage treatment plants, and electrical substations....
Again, there are developer fees and stipends as well as property taxes that pay for these things. You're claiming that the local government is required to double, triple, and quintuple -dip because every stage of development planning is subject to multiple levels of zoning, land use planning, urban development planning, and developer approval requests all of which the government gets more dips. Presumably the government should already be ready for this new single family, because the lot is available, sold, zoned, and all it needs now is 4 walls and a roof - but, no, you'll need to double your budget because the local Lord needs his tribute, shitizen!