That's fine if that was your actual point, and I agree with you by-and-large. I think your point was confused by this statement, which is why I responded:
When the goddamn deadline rolls around in 2013, health insurance companies will have to sell insurance to me.
While the above may be technically correct, it is only correct since the mandate essentially redefines what the term "insurance" means. Yes, more people's healthcare costs are paid for. No, more people are not covered by anything resembling the up-till-now definition of "insurance."
I've actually known a large number of poor people. I include myself, though only as a result of absolute income rather than because I consider myself "poor." That would be ~$800/month, FYI, which I believe falls a tad below the Federal definition of "poverty."
I probably shouldn't have used the term "gadgetry," since, like the way the Constitution is currently interpreted, people take it as an exhaustive list when it was actually just a single example out of many possible options.
You cannot compare health insurance to auto insurance. Millions live perfectly well without auto insurance because they do not drive. The cost is split amongst drivers, and habitually bad drivers are kicked off the rolls and can no longer drive legally.
Those same parallels do not apply when you replace "drive" with "live." Unless you're a necromancer.
I realize I'm feeding the fire here, but the general ignorance of what insurance is and isn't sticks in my craw.
It really does feel like screaming into a hurricane, doesn't it?
Ultimately, my problem with the entire argument is that everyone I know who doesn't have health insurance could easily afford it but for an unwillingness to correct blatant prioritization problems. The latest gadget is far more important than saving for future rainy days. Those same people cry and carry on that people who make better decisions come out way ahead of them, and should now pay for for the problems that they themselves created with their poor decisions. Yes, there are people who truly get screwed through no fault of their own, but those represent a tiny minority of cases, at least amongst those I've encountered.
When companies start enrolling those with guaranteed costs in excess of premiums they can charge, it's no longer insurance. Insurance is, by definition, a gamble. In order for a company to remain in business, income must at least meet expenditures. You, just you, represent a guaranteed loss of thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars for the rest of your life. It is unlikely you will contribute back that much, so the cost must be made up elsewhere for them to remain solvent.
When the deadline rolls around, you will not have insurance then either. What you will have is a company required to pay medical bills you are already guaranteed to have. It's like having a house burn to the ground and calling up Liberty Mutual: "Hey, I have a smoldering ruin. Give me coverage at $100/month so I can get a $150,000 check cut tomorrow to rebuild it." That's not fire insurance, that's a company's other clients paying for a house that was burned to the ground before you paid them a dime for coverage.
I'm not arguing we shouldn't have healthcare coverage at all. That's way beyond the scope of this comment. What I'm arguing is that you, specifically, are not talking about insurance. What you're talking about requires re-working the way healthcare is paid for from the ground up. When everyone has a policy, and the price is mandated by law, and people with pre-existing conditions are covered, you don't have an insurance system any more.
You can't even compare this to auto insurance, because the bad drivers eventually get kicked off the rolls after they become too expensive to insure. They no longer get to drive legally. The reason that happens is, again, because insurance is a gamble. If you make it no longer a gamble, it is no longer insurance, it's an entitlement. There is no way to pay for universal coverage without splitting the cost amongst everyone. You have to subsidize risky health behavior either at equal cost to everyone else (not going to happen) or at great cost to those who make more money (this is how it will happen if it does). The system is not fair now, but there is not a system in existence (or ever proposed) in the world that is fair by all measures. Every system has to screw someone over, because neither wealth, nor health, nor ability are actually equally distributed. If they were, universal healthcare would be unnecessary.
So, while I sympathize with you being unable to afford healthcare, I don't agree with the characterization that this debate has a damn thing to do with insurance. It doesn't. You won't get insurance coverage, you'll get a reimbursement entitlement.
Yes, thank you Google for reducing taxpayer burden by eliminating jobs that are no longer necessary due to technological advances and automation.
Nobody has a right to have their industry protected from modernization. Or should we be subsidizing wainwrights who were put out of business by the invention of that newfangled device the "horseless carriage?"
The law is never applied the same way to those committing crimes to entrap others as it is to those entrapped. It's not even necessary for the entrapping agent to be actually committing a crime, they only have to represent that is their goal. In stings, people setting others up are given broad leeway in committing other crimes in order to facilitate the sting. Lots of undercover cops have gone to drug rehab on the taxpayer's dime as a result of "maintaining" their cover, then coming back to their old job without a single black mark on their jacket as a result.
Those whose job it is to assault others with the judicial system are not held to the same standards as the mere mortals who are at their mercy.
The problem with random peers is stated above, though perhaps not explicitly. Given the levels of botnet infection, all spammers would have to do is install the software on their zombies and a huge chunk of those "random peers" become malicious DNS servers.
Gasoline transported by pipeline carries a mixed-producer product. All stations that buy from the same bulk terminal are buying the same gasoline, and that gasoline is a mixture of product from every refinery that transports using that particular pipeline (which, for the larger pipelines, is almost all of the major names). The only thing the filling station can tell you is which bulk terminal they purchase from, not which producer their gasoline was actually refined at.
Asking where the gas came from is more than likely going to get you an answer of "I haven't the slightest clue." And they'll be telling you the truth, too.
BP has a consumer solar division, sells LPG directly to individuals, has a consumer lubricants division, and produces a vast array of petrochemical products for business use (and in quantities far smaller than "supertanker").
Not that I believe a boycott will do much to a company that derives their income primarily from producing a product that is traded as a commodity, but the above comment was too asinine to pass up.
Franchises play an incredibly minor part in BP's revenue. It is nearly impossible for consumers to damage a company whose product is a commodity, short of organizing a boycott of that commodity in its entirety (and hence, every other company who produces/markets that commodity).
While I'm not saying a gasoline boycott is out of the question, a consumer-lead campaign to financially punish BP would have to be far larger in scope than BP itself. There are, of course, other BP subsidiaries that produce non-commodity products. I doubt they'd notice much of a boycott there though...
This is the only comment that needed to be posted for this story. The arguments here are rehashing stuff that was settled years ago. Some of that was settled correctly, some not.
States that charge use tax on out-of-state purchases exercise power which is clearly and specifically denied them by the US Constitution's Interstate Commerce Clause, which gives sole authority to do such things to Congress. People failing to report the purchases may be committing a crime, but they are certainly not doing anything wrong.
Almost anyone who would use the term "1/2 ton truck" knows it refers to hauling capacity, not gross vehicular weight. Anyone reading it and believing it refers to gross vehicular weight is likely gifted in the art of missing the obvious, as most passenger vehicles (at least those not made from carbon fiber) weigh more than 1000 pounds. Given the ambiguity of the English language, your revision is open to exactly the same sort of nitpicking as the "error" it aims to address. Increased size and weight go hand-in-hand with trucks, so saying one term is more preferable than another is meaningless unless you're making specific, numerical comparisons. In the context of impacting a mid-sized quadruped at high speed, "larger" and "heavier" may as well be synonyms with regard to what is going to reduce the damage to the occupants of the vehicle.
Currently, you don't. In those places that want to allow Christians to do so, they should also allow you to do so. That's my point: decisions should be religion-neutral, and nowhere in the linked article was any statement to the contrary. If a government entity is allowing citizens to place religious memorials, tributes, or messages using public resources, they need to be forced to allow any religious group (no matter how fringe) equal access. If they are unwilling to do so, then they deserve to have their ass handed to them legally.
If you can show me an article where Ron says only Christians should be allowed to do X thing with public resources, then you'll have something to support a claim that Ron is endorsing state support of a particular religion.
Then again, I'd support him even if he were claiming he wanted state-sponsored Christianity, since I know he doesn't have the power to get that (or the other things I disagree with him on) passed. I think most Christians with a modicum of sense realize that actually getting such things driven through at upper levels of government would lead to another civil war, and it's not one they'd necessarily win.
It's a bit more complex than that, and a lot of it has to do with the belief that people will construct institutions using the frameworks available to them.
In the US, we do not have universal healthcare (despite the passage of the "Universal Healthcare" bill, we still do not). There are certain areas, despite that, which do have universal healthcare available. I live in one of the only urban areas in the United States that can be considered nominally conservative, and we have an association of private organizations (charities, doctors, hospitals) that provide healthcare for anyone who is unable to afford it, and do so quite successfully. The largest threat to this association is the government. It is a sustainable model, but once healthcare is nationalized it will no longer be supported. As with other things, people will eventually forget that it is possible, frequently preferable, to control important processes through the local community. If anything happens to the national system, or if there are major disasters in other places which impact it adversely, local communities that could otherwise take care of themselves are adversely affected when they would not otherwise be.
By centralizing things, you create a monoculture which has all the weaknesses of any other monoculture. If there's anything geeks should understand, it is that such monocultures breed nasty weaknesses which can be easily, effectively, and ruthlessly exploited. It's amazing how much the open source movement parallels some of the concepts of libertarianism, and how blind many people are to that fact. It's fine if you want all these government services, but you should be able to pick other platforms for most functions if you so choose. Do you really want complete vendor lock-in for every service you access, or would you like people to be able to innovate and create novel solutions from the ground up?
We need a law saying you can because you currently can't (simplistic and not wholly accurate, but this is/. and to do otherwise is an invitation to an argument on semantics). They are unnecessarily immune from the consequences of their actions, like almost all executive employees during the exercise of the power of their position. I would honestly like to see executive immunity limited much further than this, so that enforcement officers have a damned good case before they do anything to someone else. That the situation is frequently described as a choice between unchecked abuse of power and the fear that any responsible use of power can land an enforcement officer in jail (or at least jobless) shows just how broken the current system is.
Ultimately, doing physical harm to the Crotch-Grabbing Administration employee is definitely more satisfying, if much less practical, than legal action. Legal action also opens you up less to prosecution for your actions in regards to the crotch-grabbers at the TSA, while pummeling said employee tends to be frowned upon as an unnecessary escalation that can lead to legal penalties for the crotch-grabee.
While I agree with the points raised in general (and specifically that the idea of economics as a science), I'd have to also agree that you're either doing something wrong or there's some clouding in your perspective. Given that the comparison is about your childhood, I'm inclined to strongly believe the latter is the case. Should neither be the case, there are other things to explain the loss of purchasing power.
In inflation-adjusted terms, you and your wife are only making twice what your father made. There are also probably other differences. Same number of children? That's an enormous factor in your cost of living. Also, the costs of child care increase dramatically when both parents are out of the home. Sometimes that increase is nearly as much as one of the parent's earned income. Those two factors alone could cut your effective income, compared to your father's, in half. Then you're right where he was, despite making 10x the dollar figure. I'll leave it at that, since that's already a good deal of conjecture about a situation only described in the vaguest terms.
The problem is really that there are economists who actually believe what you just said is true.
It's a common way to attempt to prove or disprove a theory, but it does nothing of the sort. There is no way to provide for a control, or account for most of the countless variables that can grossly skew the results one way or the other. There is nothing to say that a different economic policy implemented at the same time wouldn't have had nearly identical results, or that the same policy implemented at a different time wouldn't have radically different results.
If you have a single policy over hundreds or thousands of years, and then compare it to another policy that stands hundreds or thousands of years, then you might have a good idea of which one does what and when they do that "what." Until then, economics will remain the softest of soft sciences, and the concept of "empirical" economics will result in gales of laughter from real, actual scientists.
He won the Nobel Prize for developing a mathematical model that accurately predicts what economic behavior? As far as I'm aware, no such model exists. The Austrian school is anathema to many economists because they embrace economics as the soft science it is, rather than attempting to make it something it is unlikely to ever become: a hard science.
Economics is even softer than social sciences, because it is nearly impossible to construct adequate control groups and produce actual functional, empirical data. Austrian economists recognize this, and instead study human behavior to predict economic movements rather than attempting to mathematically model them. I've known a couple economists who also held PhDs in actual hard science fields, and they invariably deride non-scientist economists for deluding themselves into thinking economics is anything other than a soft science.
The closest economics gets to a hard science is in MMOs, which are self-contained economies where every single interaction can be accounted for.
Macro-scale human interactions are highly predictable, but hard to model mathematically in a fashion that stands up to the rigor of scientific empiricism. Austrian economists are by-and-large those who have accepted that fact and moved on. The rest are still trying to shoehorn people into one-size-fits-all mathematical models. It's going to be a long time before we have the processing power to come close to doing the latter successfully.
You may believe the article says that. I, myself, am more hostile to religion than most people I know, and I found little to condemn in the article. It is clearly not a call for state-sponsored religion, merely a statement that the state should have no authority to be hostile to religion. Any public resource use should be completely religion-blind. If it becomes impractical to allow the accommodation of every faith and lack of faith in a particular instance, then none should be allowed. This is the one happy medium that is best served in an all-or-nothing fashion. You allow everyone the same access, or you allow nobody access. Government shouldn't have the power to pick and choose anything based on religious criteria of any kind, at any time, in any way. If one of the teams can't share the ball, nobody gets it.
As long as the avenues of expression are open to all, without bias, there is nothing wrong with it. Few on either side of the issue seem able to actually see that though. They want just their own viewpoint protected, at the expense of everyone else. I don't like a lot of things personally, but I'm still willing to defend them politically.
I really don't see, at least based on your description, why you would be offended if someone mistook you for a libertarian. Libertarians span a fairly broad spectrum of beliefs in what actions are necessary to maximize liberty and minimize the harm that is inflicted on individuals by other individuals and by governments.
Just like the are Democrats who are against gun control and Republicans who are fine with gay marriage, there are libertarians who do not conform to every aspect of what any given person believes is "the one true Libertarianism." Trying to pigeonhole people who generally adopt one label is just like trying to pigeonhole those who adopt another label. They're generally informative, but like a good stereotype usually only hit (at most) the high points. There's a lot more there in most cases, and usually it requires actually talking to a person to find out the depth and breadth of what they actually believe.
It's clear that there are a lot of people here on Slashdot who want to demonize and dehumanize anyone daring to adopt the label "libertarian," and most of them appear to be as accurate in their depictions as a neo-con demagogue is in their estimation of the character of an ultra-leftist. It's truly sad, and clearly shows just how polarized people are politically. They aren't willing to entertain the slightest notion that someone who chooses a label other than their own might possibly have a logical reason for not falling into lockstep beside them. There is no "One True Path."
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That's fine if that was your actual point, and I agree with you by-and-large. I think your point was confused by this statement, which is why I responded:
When the goddamn deadline rolls around in 2013, health insurance companies will have to sell insurance to me.
While the above may be technically correct, it is only correct since the mandate essentially redefines what the term "insurance" means. Yes, more people's healthcare costs are paid for. No, more people are not covered by anything resembling the up-till-now definition of "insurance."
I've actually known a large number of poor people. I include myself, though only as a result of absolute income rather than because I consider myself "poor." That would be ~$800/month, FYI, which I believe falls a tad below the Federal definition of "poverty."
I probably shouldn't have used the term "gadgetry," since, like the way the Constitution is currently interpreted, people take it as an exhaustive list when it was actually just a single example out of many possible options.
Which word would that be, and what's the claimed original definition?
You cannot compare health insurance to auto insurance. Millions live perfectly well without auto insurance because they do not drive. The cost is split amongst drivers, and habitually bad drivers are kicked off the rolls and can no longer drive legally.
Those same parallels do not apply when you replace "drive" with "live." Unless you're a necromancer.
I realize I'm feeding the fire here, but the general ignorance of what insurance is and isn't sticks in my craw.
It really does feel like screaming into a hurricane, doesn't it?
Ultimately, my problem with the entire argument is that everyone I know who doesn't have health insurance could easily afford it but for an unwillingness to correct blatant prioritization problems. The latest gadget is far more important than saving for future rainy days. Those same people cry and carry on that people who make better decisions come out way ahead of them, and should now pay for for the problems that they themselves created with their poor decisions. Yes, there are people who truly get screwed through no fault of their own, but those represent a tiny minority of cases, at least amongst those I've encountered.
When companies start enrolling those with guaranteed costs in excess of premiums they can charge, it's no longer insurance. Insurance is, by definition, a gamble. In order for a company to remain in business, income must at least meet expenditures. You, just you, represent a guaranteed loss of thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars for the rest of your life. It is unlikely you will contribute back that much, so the cost must be made up elsewhere for them to remain solvent.
When the deadline rolls around, you will not have insurance then either. What you will have is a company required to pay medical bills you are already guaranteed to have. It's like having a house burn to the ground and calling up Liberty Mutual: "Hey, I have a smoldering ruin. Give me coverage at $100/month so I can get a $150,000 check cut tomorrow to rebuild it." That's not fire insurance, that's a company's other clients paying for a house that was burned to the ground before you paid them a dime for coverage.
I'm not arguing we shouldn't have healthcare coverage at all. That's way beyond the scope of this comment. What I'm arguing is that you, specifically, are not talking about insurance. What you're talking about requires re-working the way healthcare is paid for from the ground up. When everyone has a policy, and the price is mandated by law, and people with pre-existing conditions are covered, you don't have an insurance system any more.
You can't even compare this to auto insurance, because the bad drivers eventually get kicked off the rolls after they become too expensive to insure. They no longer get to drive legally. The reason that happens is, again, because insurance is a gamble. If you make it no longer a gamble, it is no longer insurance, it's an entitlement. There is no way to pay for universal coverage without splitting the cost amongst everyone. You have to subsidize risky health behavior either at equal cost to everyone else (not going to happen) or at great cost to those who make more money (this is how it will happen if it does). The system is not fair now, but there is not a system in existence (or ever proposed) in the world that is fair by all measures. Every system has to screw someone over, because neither wealth, nor health, nor ability are actually equally distributed. If they were, universal healthcare would be unnecessary.
So, while I sympathize with you being unable to afford healthcare, I don't agree with the characterization that this debate has a damn thing to do with insurance. It doesn't. You won't get insurance coverage, you'll get a reimbursement entitlement.
I can now envision a new slogan for Westboro Baptist: God Hates Bees!
Colony collapse disorder is God's way of showing disapproval that worker bees do not reproduce.
Yes, thank you Google for reducing taxpayer burden by eliminating jobs that are no longer necessary due to technological advances and automation.
Nobody has a right to have their industry protected from modernization. Or should we be subsidizing wainwrights who were put out of business by the invention of that newfangled device the "horseless carriage?"
To borrow Clarke's Third Law:
Any sufficiently advanced criminal organization is indistinguishable from a government.
The law is never applied the same way to those committing crimes to entrap others as it is to those entrapped. It's not even necessary for the entrapping agent to be actually committing a crime, they only have to represent that is their goal. In stings, people setting others up are given broad leeway in committing other crimes in order to facilitate the sting. Lots of undercover cops have gone to drug rehab on the taxpayer's dime as a result of "maintaining" their cover, then coming back to their old job without a single black mark on their jacket as a result.
Those whose job it is to assault others with the judicial system are not held to the same standards as the mere mortals who are at their mercy.
The Mac App Store is not a part of iTunes yet..
The problem with random peers is stated above, though perhaps not explicitly. Given the levels of botnet infection, all spammers would have to do is install the software on their zombies and a huge chunk of those "random peers" become malicious DNS servers.
Gasoline transported by pipeline carries a mixed-producer product. All stations that buy from the same bulk terminal are buying the same gasoline, and that gasoline is a mixture of product from every refinery that transports using that particular pipeline (which, for the larger pipelines, is almost all of the major names). The only thing the filling station can tell you is which bulk terminal they purchase from, not which producer their gasoline was actually refined at.
Asking where the gas came from is more than likely going to get you an answer of "I haven't the slightest clue." And they'll be telling you the truth, too.
BP has a consumer solar division, sells LPG directly to individuals, has a consumer lubricants division, and produces a vast array of petrochemical products for business use (and in quantities far smaller than "supertanker").
Not that I believe a boycott will do much to a company that derives their income primarily from producing a product that is traded as a commodity, but the above comment was too asinine to pass up.
http://www.bp.com/productsservices.do?categoryId=37&contentId=2007985
Franchises play an incredibly minor part in BP's revenue. It is nearly impossible for consumers to damage a company whose product is a commodity, short of organizing a boycott of that commodity in its entirety (and hence, every other company who produces/markets that commodity).
While I'm not saying a gasoline boycott is out of the question, a consumer-lead campaign to financially punish BP would have to be far larger in scope than BP itself. There are, of course, other BP subsidiaries that produce non-commodity products. I doubt they'd notice much of a boycott there though...
This is the only comment that needed to be posted for this story. The arguments here are rehashing stuff that was settled years ago. Some of that was settled correctly, some not.
States that charge use tax on out-of-state purchases exercise power which is clearly and specifically denied them by the US Constitution's Interstate Commerce Clause, which gives sole authority to do such things to Congress. People failing to report the purchases may be committing a crime, but they are certainly not doing anything wrong.
Almost anyone who would use the term "1/2 ton truck" knows it refers to hauling capacity, not gross vehicular weight. Anyone reading it and believing it refers to gross vehicular weight is likely gifted in the art of missing the obvious, as most passenger vehicles (at least those not made from carbon fiber) weigh more than 1000 pounds. Given the ambiguity of the English language, your revision is open to exactly the same sort of nitpicking as the "error" it aims to address. Increased size and weight go hand-in-hand with trucks, so saying one term is more preferable than another is meaningless unless you're making specific, numerical comparisons. In the context of impacting a mid-sized quadruped at high speed, "larger" and "heavier" may as well be synonyms with regard to what is going to reduce the damage to the occupants of the vehicle.
Currently, you don't. In those places that want to allow Christians to do so, they should also allow you to do so. That's my point: decisions should be religion-neutral, and nowhere in the linked article was any statement to the contrary. If a government entity is allowing citizens to place religious memorials, tributes, or messages using public resources, they need to be forced to allow any religious group (no matter how fringe) equal access. If they are unwilling to do so, then they deserve to have their ass handed to them legally.
If you can show me an article where Ron says only Christians should be allowed to do X thing with public resources, then you'll have something to support a claim that Ron is endorsing state support of a particular religion.
Then again, I'd support him even if he were claiming he wanted state-sponsored Christianity, since I know he doesn't have the power to get that (or the other things I disagree with him on) passed. I think most Christians with a modicum of sense realize that actually getting such things driven through at upper levels of government would lead to another civil war, and it's not one they'd necessarily win.
It's a bit more complex than that, and a lot of it has to do with the belief that people will construct institutions using the frameworks available to them.
In the US, we do not have universal healthcare (despite the passage of the "Universal Healthcare" bill, we still do not). There are certain areas, despite that, which do have universal healthcare available. I live in one of the only urban areas in the United States that can be considered nominally conservative, and we have an association of private organizations (charities, doctors, hospitals) that provide healthcare for anyone who is unable to afford it, and do so quite successfully. The largest threat to this association is the government. It is a sustainable model, but once healthcare is nationalized it will no longer be supported. As with other things, people will eventually forget that it is possible, frequently preferable, to control important processes through the local community. If anything happens to the national system, or if there are major disasters in other places which impact it adversely, local communities that could otherwise take care of themselves are adversely affected when they would not otherwise be.
By centralizing things, you create a monoculture which has all the weaknesses of any other monoculture. If there's anything geeks should understand, it is that such monocultures breed nasty weaknesses which can be easily, effectively, and ruthlessly exploited. It's amazing how much the open source movement parallels some of the concepts of libertarianism, and how blind many people are to that fact. It's fine if you want all these government services, but you should be able to pick other platforms for most functions if you so choose. Do you really want complete vendor lock-in for every service you access, or would you like people to be able to innovate and create novel solutions from the ground up?
We need a law saying you can because you currently can't (simplistic and not wholly accurate, but this is /. and to do otherwise is an invitation to an argument on semantics). They are unnecessarily immune from the consequences of their actions, like almost all executive employees during the exercise of the power of their position. I would honestly like to see executive immunity limited much further than this, so that enforcement officers have a damned good case before they do anything to someone else. That the situation is frequently described as a choice between unchecked abuse of power and the fear that any responsible use of power can land an enforcement officer in jail (or at least jobless) shows just how broken the current system is.
Ultimately, doing physical harm to the Crotch-Grabbing Administration employee is definitely more satisfying, if much less practical, than legal action. Legal action also opens you up less to prosecution for your actions in regards to the crotch-grabbers at the TSA, while pummeling said employee tends to be frowned upon as an unnecessary escalation that can lead to legal penalties for the crotch-grabee.
While I agree with the points raised in general (and specifically that the idea of economics as a science), I'd have to also agree that you're either doing something wrong or there's some clouding in your perspective. Given that the comparison is about your childhood, I'm inclined to strongly believe the latter is the case. Should neither be the case, there are other things to explain the loss of purchasing power.
In inflation-adjusted terms, you and your wife are only making twice what your father made. There are also probably other differences. Same number of children? That's an enormous factor in your cost of living. Also, the costs of child care increase dramatically when both parents are out of the home. Sometimes that increase is nearly as much as one of the parent's earned income. Those two factors alone could cut your effective income, compared to your father's, in half. Then you're right where he was, despite making 10x the dollar figure. I'll leave it at that, since that's already a good deal of conjecture about a situation only described in the vaguest terms.
The problem is really that there are economists who actually believe what you just said is true.
It's a common way to attempt to prove or disprove a theory, but it does nothing of the sort. There is no way to provide for a control, or account for most of the countless variables that can grossly skew the results one way or the other. There is nothing to say that a different economic policy implemented at the same time wouldn't have had nearly identical results, or that the same policy implemented at a different time wouldn't have radically different results.
If you have a single policy over hundreds or thousands of years, and then compare it to another policy that stands hundreds or thousands of years, then you might have a good idea of which one does what and when they do that "what." Until then, economics will remain the softest of soft sciences, and the concept of "empirical" economics will result in gales of laughter from real, actual scientists.
He won the Nobel Prize for developing a mathematical model that accurately predicts what economic behavior? As far as I'm aware, no such model exists. The Austrian school is anathema to many economists because they embrace economics as the soft science it is, rather than attempting to make it something it is unlikely to ever become: a hard science.
Economics is even softer than social sciences, because it is nearly impossible to construct adequate control groups and produce actual functional, empirical data. Austrian economists recognize this, and instead study human behavior to predict economic movements rather than attempting to mathematically model them. I've known a couple economists who also held PhDs in actual hard science fields, and they invariably deride non-scientist economists for deluding themselves into thinking economics is anything other than a soft science.
The closest economics gets to a hard science is in MMOs, which are self-contained economies where every single interaction can be accounted for.
Macro-scale human interactions are highly predictable, but hard to model mathematically in a fashion that stands up to the rigor of scientific empiricism. Austrian economists are by-and-large those who have accepted that fact and moved on. The rest are still trying to shoehorn people into one-size-fits-all mathematical models. It's going to be a long time before we have the processing power to come close to doing the latter successfully.
You may believe the article says that. I, myself, am more hostile to religion than most people I know, and I found little to condemn in the article. It is clearly not a call for state-sponsored religion, merely a statement that the state should have no authority to be hostile to religion. Any public resource use should be completely religion-blind. If it becomes impractical to allow the accommodation of every faith and lack of faith in a particular instance, then none should be allowed. This is the one happy medium that is best served in an all-or-nothing fashion. You allow everyone the same access, or you allow nobody access. Government shouldn't have the power to pick and choose anything based on religious criteria of any kind, at any time, in any way. If one of the teams can't share the ball, nobody gets it.
As long as the avenues of expression are open to all, without bias, there is nothing wrong with it. Few on either side of the issue seem able to actually see that though. They want just their own viewpoint protected, at the expense of everyone else. I don't like a lot of things personally, but I'm still willing to defend them politically.
I really don't see, at least based on your description, why you would be offended if someone mistook you for a libertarian. Libertarians span a fairly broad spectrum of beliefs in what actions are necessary to maximize liberty and minimize the harm that is inflicted on individuals by other individuals and by governments.
Just like the are Democrats who are against gun control and Republicans who are fine with gay marriage, there are libertarians who do not conform to every aspect of what any given person believes is "the one true Libertarianism." Trying to pigeonhole people who generally adopt one label is just like trying to pigeonhole those who adopt another label. They're generally informative, but like a good stereotype usually only hit (at most) the high points. There's a lot more there in most cases, and usually it requires actually talking to a person to find out the depth and breadth of what they actually believe.
It's clear that there are a lot of people here on Slashdot who want to demonize and dehumanize anyone daring to adopt the label "libertarian," and most of them appear to be as accurate in their depictions as a neo-con demagogue is in their estimation of the character of an ultra-leftist. It's truly sad, and clearly shows just how polarized people are politically. They aren't willing to entertain the slightest notion that someone who chooses a label other than their own might possibly have a logical reason for not falling into lockstep beside them. There is no "One True Path."