This is net neutrality in action. Once you hand over responsibility to the government, your service is only as good as those in power see fit. Internet censorship becomes a political whim, to be used when it is politically profitable for campaigns.
If you spend 10 hours of work to get a $500 increase in the "intangible" number in your bank account, and you suddenly lose that number, has something tangible been lost? Is something tangible lost when you have to spend more time trying to figure out what happened and to recover that intangible number?
That's a defeatist attitude. My intent is to help make them go away - at least, in the coercive form of which we are all familiar.
so the least one might ask is that they not be spent wastefully.
But they must by definition be spent wastefully. Unless the government succeeds in fooling everyone all the time, there will always be market pressure to counteract the intended purpose of a tax-funded project (at least if that purpose is to sway the economy), with the end result being worse than before. As for those projects not directly intended to sway the economy, they must inevitably lead to a monopoly in one form or another, resulting in less efficiency, higher prices, and more waste.
As long as we get some return on the investment I'm all for it
And I'm against it, even if we get some return on the "investment". The ends don't justify the means.
But, then, what choice do I have in what is done with the money I earned? When a society puts mob rule above individual rights, its no surprise that people assume that whatever passes a vote passes as just.
You seem to have forgotten that the President serves the country, not the other way around. If you would like such a country, check out Troy circa 12th century BC.
The world needs more people to think about their responsibilities as well as just their rights.
A person's only responsibility is to himself and those he loves. Anyone who tries to assert another responsibility on that person, with his consent, is violating his rights.
I don't really think it's appropriate for you to use the very real suffering of people around the world to attack a president who has not done anything remotely comparable to his citizens.
You seem to have drawn a distinction between the violation of certain rights and the violation of other rights. I'm curious what rationale you used to make this distinction.
Indeed. But there's no guarantee Obama's going to use the definition you prefer. Based on what I said in the first half of my post, it doesn't seem likely.
he really doesn't support our rights like he claimed he did
I'm curious where you think he made such a claim. Every statement I've seen him or his wife make, and every plan he's proposed, from universal healthcare to wealth redistribution, must invariably violate rights to be implemented.
For a particularly frightening example, check out this "pledge to Obama" video - make sure to watch starting at 3:50 for the scariest part: "I pledge to be a servant to our President, and all mankind." Exactly what rights do slaves have?
In addition, why is consumer confidence important? If you put your money in a bank, it doesn't sit there idle. It's used by the bank to invest in productivity. The more people save in banks, the more capital banks have to loan out to companies to expand their businesses and create jobs. People who live paycheck to paycheck have no savings, and thus no investment toward the future. They hold their own, but do not advance the economy. Buying products is the end result of production, not the cause. It is savings that made those products possible.
Saving money is the right move now for everyone, and that is why you see everyone doing it - it just so happens that what works best for the individual also works best for the economy.
The extra things that people are buying with their salaries from this are not coming at the cost to someone else *now*.
What can happen *now* is that other countries can see our huge debt and decide it's not a good idea to trade with us. They'll want nothing to do with our currency if they see that we have no intention of paying back our debts, that our government is essentially "owned" by other governments. This is one effect of the disastrous economic bailouts that have already been passed under Bush and are soon to pass under Obama.
if that raises consumer confidence
Why would it? You've simply increased uncertainty about the future. That drives people to save more, not spend more, no?
we actually get something out of it
Your false presumption is that it would not happen otherwise. Why wouldn't it?
But again, this is still an ideological assertion on your part, you have not put forward any empirical, factual or logical evidence that the individual coming ahead of the collective is the best outcome.
The "best outcome" for achieving what goal? Until I know what you mean by "best", I can't answer your question to your satisfaction.
Yes, lying is fraud; but court and laws are aspects of "central planning".
Indeed, you are quite good at context-dropping. It is one thing to talk about central-planning toward the purpose of upholding and protecting individual rights. It is another thing to talk about a centrally-planned economy, which is the topic at hand.
How would you prove it in a court when there is no documentation, no standardized information and no standard of proof?
If you do not have that information, then obviously you have no evidence. By not demanding some documentation of the transaction (ie, receipt) and expiration date, you were not looking out for your own interests when you entered into that transaction. What is your point?
I think that the idea that 1+1=2 is not property and you do.
Now you're equivocating. I certainly do not consider "1+1=2" property. The component of this that "is valuable to people" is the function of addition, but it did not require some specific person to create it to make it valuable to people. Rather, it is possible by everyone through direct observation of reality. A story, poem, or song, in contrast, for it to exist, required a specific person to create it. Without that person, we would not have a thing from which to gain value. So it is their property. Addition on the other hand is self-evident to a rational mind. A complex equation, such as Google's page-rank calculation, could be considered intellectual property, precisely because it is generalized to accept different inputs, and relates them in a non-obvious way to present something of value.
See definition 2 here. Regarding the "gun to my head". While there is certainly no gun to it now, that doesn't make the coercion no less real. Simple inaction on my part, without violating any individual rights, can quickly bring that gun to my head. This is the clearest explanation of the coercion I referred to.
shouldn't the mindset I choose for me be the best possible choice?
Again with the context-dropping! This is getting tedious. What's best for the market is freedom. What's best for you is to make rational decisions about your values and how to advance those values.
Economic transactions usually involve more than one participant (typically 2 participants in a simple system). They are a collective action, not an individual action - a mutual agreement must be reached. This isn't an aspect of central planning, central planning as a mindset doesn't have to come into it.
Of course, but your conclusion from your last post was one of a central-planning mindset, ie, "I know what the best trade should be between those two people, and I will demand that they accept that trade." This is implicit in any economic system that tries to "work", ie, that tries to accomplish some collective goal for the market as a whole. Anytime someone says, "the free market doesn't work!", they are presuming such a collective goal - a goal that is not the goal of either individual in your example trade.
Let's say that the yak butter is very close to expiring, but the trader lies and says that it isn't
Lying is fraud. They can be taken to court for that, and the buyer can try to get his money back. Meanwhile, the seller can be punished for the fraud. What's your point?
You cannot vote away individual rights. You can vote to violate them, and that is one of the dangers of a democracy, as in any other form of society. The great thing about democracy is representation. That doesn't mean the end results of a democracy are always justified, however, which is what I believe you were trying to imply.
Please re-read my post and try to drop your central-planner mindset. Perfect information is not necessary for the best possible choices. Only complete freedom is necessary.
Argument from incredulity. Your argument is quite similar to those used by creationists to argue that certain biological mechanisms could not possibly have arisen via evolution, and therefore evolution is wrong. Your faulty presumption is that wind farms should exist because you want them to exist. If you want them to exist, you should fund their creation, or persuade your friends, family, neighbors, etc, to fund their creation. What you should not do is force everyone to fund what you think is right. Whether or not wind farms should exist is up to people to freely decide.
Sigh, the common libertarian approach to economics is akin to saying that the understanding the simple Newtonian mechanics of objects moving in a vacuum and without friction is all you need to adequately predict all physical phenomena.
In fact, you're completely wrong. You're stuck in the central planning frame of reference. You need a Copernican to come along and kick you out of your fixed mindset, and realize that people are all independent bodies with their own orbits (goals). They do not all have a common goal as decreed on High. People have the right to their lives, liberty, property, and the pursuit of their values. Your idiotic notion that "if only I could just be in charge of the world, surely it would work better!" assumes 1) that you have all information (omniscience), and 2) that you can fool everyone all the time (omnipotence). It is remarkable how similar the believers' appeals to God are to the Keynesians' appeals to the Government.
What you don't grasp is that whatever people spend their money on, so long as it doesn't violate the rights of others, is the best choice precisely because it was made my them, free from coercion. At best, such a transaction provides maximum benefit to both buyer and seller. At the very least, the transaction adds positive information to the market - it identifies an exchange rate where there wasn't one previously.
In contrast, forced coercion can do maximum harm to buyer and seller, and add uncertainty to the market. For example, the powers of the Federal Reserve - ie, their ability to sway the entire market with the snap of a finger - add great uncertainty to the market. Fiat, paper currency, as another example, increases market uncertainty.
And that ridiculous army you have
Who is opposed to the army? The military is necessary to uphold and protect individual rights. Way to apply things out of context!
while completely ignoring the velocity of money. People employed by the govt. still buy things. Especially haircuts.
I'm not sure how my federal tax dollars are getting routed to support my local barber shop. Did they solve P vs NP?
Fundamental to my argument is that people have a right to that which they produce. Secondary to that is that people know how best to spend the money that they earn. Those that do not earn their money - e.g. politicians - do not know how best to spend it because they did not go through the trial and error necessary to learn from mistakes. They will invariably take the shortcut of funding whatever is most convenient to them - e.g. helping a friend out (cronyism), indiscriminately trying any suggestions, or simply holding out for pork projects that will buy them another term in office. The most convenient route, it turns out, often violates the most rights, and is the least efficient option.
Please, sweet jebus, read Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. You cannot advance an economy by moving money and jobs from the private sector to the public sector. Every dollar that goes into this project through taxpayer money is a dollar not spent on food, clothing, haircuts, etc. All those local businesses will eventually see that reduced income and be forced to downsize. With government services, the most you can hope to do in the long term is break even. There is no competitive incentive to drive the service provider toward efficiency, and so public services tend to be the least efficient out there, as well as being the most prone to corruption.
Any thing can be made to seem cheap if you subsidize it with tax money. People only look at that one thing, and not at all the other things that are negatively impacted.
Slashdot Mirror
This is net neutrality in action. Once you hand over responsibility to the government, your service is only as good as those in power see fit. Internet censorship becomes a political whim, to be used when it is politically profitable for campaigns.
Useless web tools + ridiculously overpriced hardware = win win for the consumer!
If you spend 10 hours of work to get a $500 increase in the "intangible" number in your bank account, and you suddenly lose that number, has something tangible been lost? Is something tangible lost when you have to spend more time trying to figure out what happened and to recover that intangible number?
Is it just me, or does 5 years seem kinda low for someone who has infiltrated 250,000 computers and has been stealing bank account passwords??
They're not going to go away
That's a defeatist attitude. My intent is to help make them go away - at least, in the coercive form of which we are all familiar.
so the least one might ask is that they not be spent wastefully.
But they must by definition be spent wastefully. Unless the government succeeds in fooling everyone all the time, there will always be market pressure to counteract the intended purpose of a tax-funded project (at least if that purpose is to sway the economy), with the end result being worse than before. As for those projects not directly intended to sway the economy, they must inevitably lead to a monopoly in one form or another, resulting in less efficiency, higher prices, and more waste.
As long as we get some return on the investment I'm all for it
And I'm against it, even if we get some return on the "investment". The ends don't justify the means.
But, then, what choice do I have in what is done with the money I earned? When a society puts mob rule above individual rights, its no surprise that people assume that whatever passes a vote passes as just.
The world needs more people to think about their responsibilities as well as just their rights.
A person's only responsibility is to himself and those he loves. Anyone who tries to assert another responsibility on that person, with his consent, is violating his rights.
I don't really think it's appropriate for you to use the very real suffering of people around the world to attack a president who has not done anything remotely comparable to his citizens.
You seem to have drawn a distinction between the violation of certain rights and the violation of other rights. I'm curious what rationale you used to make this distinction.
Indeed. But there's no guarantee Obama's going to use the definition you prefer. Based on what I said in the first half of my post, it doesn't seem likely.
he really doesn't support our rights like he claimed he did
I'm curious where you think he made such a claim. Every statement I've seen him or his wife make, and every plan he's proposed, from universal healthcare to wealth redistribution, must invariably violate rights to be implemented.
For a particularly frightening example, check out this "pledge to Obama" video - make sure to watch starting at 3:50 for the scariest part: "I pledge to be a servant to our President, and all mankind." Exactly what rights do slaves have?
if that raises consumer confidence
In addition, why is consumer confidence important? If you put your money in a bank, it doesn't sit there idle. It's used by the bank to invest in productivity. The more people save in banks, the more capital banks have to loan out to companies to expand their businesses and create jobs. People who live paycheck to paycheck have no savings, and thus no investment toward the future. They hold their own, but do not advance the economy. Buying products is the end result of production, not the cause. It is savings that made those products possible.
Saving money is the right move now for everyone, and that is why you see everyone doing it - it just so happens that what works best for the individual also works best for the economy.
The extra things that people are buying with their salaries from this are not coming at the cost to someone else *now*.
What can happen *now* is that other countries can see our huge debt and decide it's not a good idea to trade with us. They'll want nothing to do with our currency if they see that we have no intention of paying back our debts, that our government is essentially "owned" by other governments. This is one effect of the disastrous economic bailouts that have already been passed under Bush and are soon to pass under Obama.
if that raises consumer confidence
Why would it? You've simply increased uncertainty about the future. That drives people to save more, not spend more, no?
we actually get something out of it
Your false presumption is that it would not happen otherwise. Why wouldn't it?
But again, this is still an ideological assertion on your part, you have not put forward any empirical, factual or logical evidence that the individual coming ahead of the collective is the best outcome.
The "best outcome" for achieving what goal? Until I know what you mean by "best", I can't answer your question to your satisfaction.
Yes, lying is fraud; but court and laws are aspects of "central planning".
Indeed, you are quite good at context-dropping. It is one thing to talk about central-planning toward the purpose of upholding and protecting individual rights. It is another thing to talk about a centrally-planned economy, which is the topic at hand.
How would you prove it in a court when there is no documentation, no standardized information and no standard of proof?
If you do not have that information, then obviously you have no evidence. By not demanding some documentation of the transaction (ie, receipt) and expiration date, you were not looking out for your own interests when you entered into that transaction. What is your point?
I think that the idea that 1+1=2 is not property and you do.
Now you're equivocating. I certainly do not consider "1+1=2" property. The component of this that "is valuable to people" is the function of addition, but it did not require some specific person to create it to make it valuable to people. Rather, it is possible by everyone through direct observation of reality. A story, poem, or song, in contrast, for it to exist, required a specific person to create it. Without that person, we would not have a thing from which to gain value. So it is their property. Addition on the other hand is self-evident to a rational mind. A complex equation, such as Google's page-rank calculation, could be considered intellectual property, precisely because it is generalized to accept different inputs, and relates them in a non-obvious way to present something of value.
See definition 2 here. Regarding the "gun to my head". While there is certainly no gun to it now, that doesn't make the coercion no less real. Simple inaction on my part, without violating any individual rights, can quickly bring that gun to my head. This is the clearest explanation of the coercion I referred to.
shouldn't the mindset I choose for me be the best possible choice?
Again with the context-dropping! This is getting tedious. What's best for the market is freedom. What's best for you is to make rational decisions about your values and how to advance those values.
Economic transactions usually involve more than one participant (typically 2 participants in a simple system). They are a collective action, not an individual action - a mutual agreement must be reached. This isn't an aspect of central planning, central planning as a mindset doesn't have to come into it.
Of course, but your conclusion from your last post was one of a central-planning mindset, ie, "I know what the best trade should be between those two people, and I will demand that they accept that trade." This is implicit in any economic system that tries to "work", ie, that tries to accomplish some collective goal for the market as a whole. Anytime someone says, "the free market doesn't work!", they are presuming such a collective goal - a goal that is not the goal of either individual in your example trade.
Let's say that the yak butter is very close to expiring, but the trader lies and says that it isn't
Lying is fraud. They can be taken to court for that, and the buyer can try to get his money back. Meanwhile, the seller can be punished for the fraud. What's your point?
You cannot vote away individual rights. You can vote to violate them, and that is one of the dangers of a democracy, as in any other form of society. The great thing about democracy is representation. That doesn't mean the end results of a democracy are always justified, however, which is what I believe you were trying to imply.
Please re-read my post and try to drop your central-planner mindset. Perfect information is not necessary for the best possible choices. Only complete freedom is necessary.
In your world, words fly around free of meaning and context. Back in reality, words have specific meanings and context.
Argument from incredulity. Your argument is quite similar to those used by creationists to argue that certain biological mechanisms could not possibly have arisen via evolution, and therefore evolution is wrong. Your faulty presumption is that wind farms should exist because you want them to exist. If you want them to exist, you should fund their creation, or persuade your friends, family, neighbors, etc, to fund their creation. What you should not do is force everyone to fund what you think is right. Whether or not wind farms should exist is up to people to freely decide.
Sigh, the common libertarian approach to economics is akin to saying that the understanding the simple Newtonian mechanics of objects moving in a vacuum and without friction is all you need to adequately predict all physical phenomena.
In fact, you're completely wrong. You're stuck in the central planning frame of reference. You need a Copernican to come along and kick you out of your fixed mindset, and realize that people are all independent bodies with their own orbits (goals). They do not all have a common goal as decreed on High. People have the right to their lives, liberty, property, and the pursuit of their values. Your idiotic notion that "if only I could just be in charge of the world, surely it would work better!" assumes 1) that you have all information (omniscience), and 2) that you can fool everyone all the time (omnipotence). It is remarkable how similar the believers' appeals to God are to the Keynesians' appeals to the Government.
What you don't grasp is that whatever people spend their money on, so long as it doesn't violate the rights of others, is the best choice precisely because it was made my them, free from coercion. At best, such a transaction provides maximum benefit to both buyer and seller. At the very least, the transaction adds positive information to the market - it identifies an exchange rate where there wasn't one previously.
In contrast, forced coercion can do maximum harm to buyer and seller, and add uncertainty to the market. For example, the powers of the Federal Reserve - ie, their ability to sway the entire market with the snap of a finger - add great uncertainty to the market. Fiat, paper currency, as another example, increases market uncertainty.
Because clearly building the Interstates destroyed the US economy.
Nice fallacy. Can I sell you some tiger repellent?
And that ridiculous army you have Who is opposed to the army? The military is necessary to uphold and protect individual rights. Way to apply things out of context!
while completely ignoring the velocity of money. People employed by the govt. still buy things. Especially haircuts.
I'm not sure how my federal tax dollars are getting routed to support my local barber shop. Did they solve P vs NP?
Fundamental to my argument is that people have a right to that which they produce. Secondary to that is that people know how best to spend the money that they earn. Those that do not earn their money - e.g. politicians - do not know how best to spend it because they did not go through the trial and error necessary to learn from mistakes. They will invariably take the shortcut of funding whatever is most convenient to them - e.g. helping a friend out (cronyism), indiscriminately trying any suggestions, or simply holding out for pork projects that will buy them another term in office. The most convenient route, it turns out, often violates the most rights, and is the least efficient option.
Please, sweet jebus, read Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. You cannot advance an economy by moving money and jobs from the private sector to the public sector. Every dollar that goes into this project through taxpayer money is a dollar not spent on food, clothing, haircuts, etc. All those local businesses will eventually see that reduced income and be forced to downsize. With government services, the most you can hope to do in the long term is break even. There is no competitive incentive to drive the service provider toward efficiency, and so public services tend to be the least efficient out there, as well as being the most prone to corruption.
Any thing can be made to seem cheap if you subsidize it with tax money. People only look at that one thing, and not at all the other things that are negatively impacted.
Typo in title. It should read: "No More Space Program After 2009, Russia Says"