They think the best way to beat a recession is to spend.
This is mainly because they subscribe to Keynesian thought. The new deal was probably the greatest example of Keynesian theory being applied, and it didn't benefit anything. The war did because it displaced millions of otherwise non-working Americans overseas, which offset the supply of labor in a way that inadvertently triggered a recovery. Keynesian thought was later shattered when stagflation happened in the 80's, which under Keynesian theory is impossible, and demonstrated rather conclusively that government spending isn't the cure all.
Tax cuts don't buy votes, by the way. Most of the wealthy are wealthy to such an extent that taxes don't bother them that much. The ones who hide money in overseas accounts from legitimate income are the minority. The majority of those who hide money in overseas accounts are hiding money that they gained illegally, such as through the drug trade, securities fraud, etc. Rather, paying their taxes would land them in jail quickly when the IRS can't determine where their money came from. Notice the effort required to keep money in overseas banks - the act of doing so isn't cheap at all, and can easily land you in hot water. Why risk going to jail for a very long time over not paying the government what ultimately doesn't amount to anything you'd really miss anyways?
Personally I have a hard time thinking of many wealthy people who don't vote Democrat, mainly because they tend to benefit the most by doing so. They vote democrat because democrats like to pay them for "make work" projects as well as invest in businesses that don't actually have a viable business model. Take Fisker for example. Fisker couldn't land much at all in private investments for a good reason. Tesla on the other hand had their shit together, which is why they actually had plenty of venture capitalist funding. Mr. Fisker just got some free income while he effectively pretended to innovate. Yes, those 1% that many self identified progressives rail against are themselves primarily progressive:
It's a strange set of circumstances that self identified conservatives claim to want to cut spending, but don't vote for anybody who will actually do so, whereas self identified liberals are against corporate welfare, but actively vote for those who hand out the most corporate welfare. Obama is probably one of the worst offenders of handing out corporate welfare.
Not sure how you draw the conclusion that it has any desire to be physics.
If you want to associate economics with another form of science, then you'd probably best compare it to psychology. For example, something simple like supply and demand play directly into somebody's thought process about what something is worth.
Debt without any plan to pay it off and without evaluating whether the costs of managing the debt outweigh the benefits is bad. The problem is that most political parties these days seem to have a horizon of the next election when it comes to balancing the books. The problem with this sort of debt is that they spend up big and have no real plan to pay it back.
Therein lies the problem. In my opinion, borrowing should be done to acquire capital for investment; not to simply acquire nice things. I think most people are so used to doing that (e.g. credit card debt,) that they don't really pay attention when the government does it either. Many are even fine with the idea that they can just spend until they are upside down, and then file chapter 7. Governments can't do that (if they did when they do - there will be hell to pay.)
Nice things would be (and this is a classic example libertarians point out) things like national endowment of the arts. If any given artwork isn't worth anything to anybody, then why on earth are we paying somebody to make it? I really don't know if any nice things have come of it, but in the end that is all it is - just a nice thing that we don't actually need in the classical sense, and that money should be going towards paying back debts.
Sadly that is lost among posters like the one just above you, who I think probably constitute a majority. I hear many talk about how a subset of Americans don't want to adopt European policies just for the sake of not being like Europe. Ignoring that the reverse is also true (it certainly is) there is also that subset who want to simply follow Europe's lead just for the sake of doing so. I don't think that is a wise idea given the current Eurozone crisis.
There was a time when the roles were reversed - the US tended to follow Keynesian thought more than Europe. That was the great depression. And as it turns out, the US fared far far worse than Europe.
The great depression wasn't caused by the stock market crash, by the way. The crash simply created a panic, but on its own it didn't cause the mess that followed. After the crash, the unemployment rate was about what it is now - floating between 9 and 10 percent, even showed signs of recovery for a brief period. Things didn't get really bad until the government tried to "fix" things. Smoot-Hawly for example, designed to create jobs, raised domestic prices dramatically and dropped exports by half. Domestic production and exports rise and fall with one another, for those who don't know. That followed by heavy deflation, prohibition, FDR declaring bullion as contraband, the new deal, among a bunch of other things that were supposed to "improve humanity" (the prohibitionists identified themselves as progressives, by the way) and only made things much worse.
Notice below how you see the dow begin to recover up until Smoot-Hawly
(Strange world we live in how Republicans wanted tariffs, Democrats did not, and now things are reversed with Unions heavily lobbying for tariffs to protect their jobs.)
What do I know though, I'm just another one of those libertarian whackos who still believe that Keynesian theory was shattered when it proposed that stagflation can't possibly happen, but it did anyways.
As an outsider, it's pretty easy to hear about an incident where X,000 poeple died, and just look at it as a statistic. Try looking at the pictures of the people who actually died on 9/11, they're on google images, and they're pretty gruesome. I wasn't there, but if I was I would be pretty damn pissed too. When somebody you don't even know declares open war on you, and underhandedly and violently attacks you, you do things you normally wouldn't do. While taking civil liberties away is a bad idea, calling people who react to it batshit crazy about it is a pretty callous, asshole thing to do. In other words, go fuck your sheltered complacent self.
It's likely some moderators will come down on me, but I don't really care to be honest.
Or we could maybe use GMO to, say for example, allow more plants to thrive better with far less fertile land, like what already happens in the central/south american jungles.
It's hard to argue greed when they didn't really profit from it.
Not having a limit is actually why most fiat currencies fail. Governments order their central banks to produce more when they need to pay off their debts. The worst example of this is the Weinmar Republic.
Good point. Metal currencies take a lot of energy just to melt; forget about mining. Paper ones still require energy to harvest the raw materials, transport them, etc. The transporting doesn't end at production though, namely think of the regular armored car movements between retail outlets and banks on a rather daily basis. Armored cars aren't exactly energy efficient.
While I can't say it's the majority, a lot of them are simply anti-technology. Think along the lines of those who believe that all farming should be organic farming, in spite of the food being more expensive, having zero proven nutritional benefit, having a lower crop yield, (so more land is needed to produce the same amount) and also being completely unsustainable. There really is no reason to do it other than if you simply like the old ways better.
The bitcoin currency divides into 8 digits past the decimal point. That comes out to 2 quadrillion denominations. If (read: when) it becomes necessary, people could just commonly trade then in e.g. uBTC instead of BTC denomination, which would put the currency at a much higher volume than the total number of US dollars in circulation.
That 21 million figure could be raised if it was really necessary, at which point more mining could be done, but it would take a big majority of those who currently own bitcoins to agree to it before it can happen. If I was to estimate, I'd say probably a harder thing to do than amending the US constitution.
Or perhaps I could just rely on nuclear energy, which has virtually none of the c word. We produce so much energy in Arizona that we actually sell it to California, and provide 25% of their energy supply. (A lot of their local governments want to boycott us still over SB1070, even though they have such little energy supply that they have rolling brown outs...such a poorly made decision.)
You're not surprised that there isn't an Asian American month, Jewish American month, Gay American month...? Now a White American month, well that would be just racist.
Well, balancing the budget is just, to put it bluntly, a really bad idea. There's a reason companies will frequently borrow to expand themselves. It is often the case that to do so produces better returns than the interest/dividends rates one has to pay on those loans/dividends/whatever. By the same token, government action into funding research (which leads to people/companies expanding the economy) and social programs (which provide a base framework of funding to keep the economic engine running even in bad times) can well pay for themselves. How do I know this to be true? Because rather consistently while the US debt has grown, the GDP has grown at a faster rate.
Actually that isn't the case at all. The budget deficit is increasing faster than the GDP is growing.
This means that the debt keeps getting bigger and bigger, even adjusting for inflation. When a company becomes heavily in debt, shows only the possibility of increasing debt, and its assets can't be liquidated to make up for that debt, the debtors begin to lose trust that this company will ever repay its assets and will stop lending.
The US government is doing exactly that. Sooner or later one of two things is going to happen. Either they print so much money that the dollar gets to a point where no foreign governments will accept it for trade (it has already done that in many places) that it eventually becomes worthless to the US citizens as well, so there would be no point in buying government bonds because you wouldn't gain anything by doing so, which results in the government having no more money to borrow, and government employees (soldiers, teachers, contractors, etc) no longer get paid, so the government basically just shuts down. Or, if they stop printing money, they'll default on their loans, and nobody buys bonds anyways.
Greece is what happens when governments go bankrupt. Now imagine that on a much larger scale.
Taxing the shit out of the wealthy won't solve the problem either, for a multitude of reasons. Poor people don't hire other people. Making the rich poor is a bad idea for that reason. Also, if you even hint at doing so, they can and WILL leave. Look at France. A few years back they made tax increases designed to bring in an extra $120 billion in revenue, and the result was a net reduction of $50 billion in revenue below what they already had. Why? Because people just left, many of them bringing their businesses along with them, even people who lived in France over generations proudly spanning from time immemorial. Trying to fix that problem by preventing people from leaving is just asking for a civil war. Ceasing assets will result in what is happening in Cyprus right now.
Go look at all of the nasty things that Johnny Depp had to say about America prior to permanently moving to France back in 2003 or so, how evil America is, and how France was this beautiful paradise. After realizing that they were basically taxing away basically everything he had, he RAN back to America as fast as he could.
Taxing your way out of a budget deficit is like trying to dig your way out of a hole.
I haven't watched cable TV in a long time now, and lost interest in politics (mostly) over a year ago, but as I recall Fox didn't really do that. In fact, most of the stuff I heard about Fox didn't even end up being true. They follow the same format as everybody else from what I could determine. They have soft news and hard news. Slashdot actually had an article not long ago that found MSNBC is far more biased than Fox, hell Chris Matthews basically calls everybody a racist every other day, but nobody ever talks about that.
I think the major beef that people have with Fox news is that its soft news leans right whereas the rest lean left. So naturally, it catches the most heat.
From my perspective, either they are all doing that or they all aren't. And you're basically falling into the same trap that I'm talking about. You're pitching them on one side and rooting for the other side.
That's one thing I love about calling myself libertarian. There isn't much room for pigeonholing when you think about it. Look at slashdot, there are a bunch of self identified liberal commenters on here who are anti-gun control. Yet when they call themselves liberal, it's generally assumed to be that they are in favor of gun control.
A sometimes perk of identifying as libertarian, it that seems everybody likes to give you their ration of shit, and it's nice because you get to damage their credibility when you break their straw man arguments (e.g. attacking you on positions that you've never held) which enables you to better speak amongst the noise of everybody else coming down upon you for not falling in line with the popular view.
Well what do you mean by positive impact? In my opinion, regulations shouldn't extend to e.g. the trans fat, salt, msg, or sugar content of food. I think it is common sense that these are unreasonable regulations and shouldn't exist. That's just mothering people. I've already got a mother. I don't need a second one who if I disobey I'll be forced to go to jail.
Can it have a positive impact? I suppose some derp who only eats whatever he can find at the corner vendor might see a positive impact, until he goes down to the grocery store and buys it anyways. That's not common sense, that's just being a self righteous douche who thinks he should have the ability to say what thou shalt not do. Thus the reason for my overall view of the democratic party.
I'm also in favor of the unconditional legalization of all narcotic substances (I'm looking at you, Chuck Schumer) and I think it's a bit stupid that we have an entire month dedicated to 12% of the population.
A lot of that came about from the Matthew Shepard case. Everybody involved, including the prosecutor, believed that his sexuality had nothing to do with his murder. The perp just got off of a meth binge was looking for somebody to rob for drug money. The only people who believed it was about his sexuality was Shepard's mom and the court of public opinion.
In my opinion a lot of people confuse libertarians with anarchists. For example, they assume libertarians are against any and all regulation. We're just against unreasonable regulation. For example, vocal libertarians such as John Stossel support the EPA regulating soot emissions from cars so that we can have clean air. But we hate regulations that for example make certain medications and surgeries needlessly expensive, or surgeries commonly performed overseas with great results that are banned here.
We're also very vocal against handing tax money to private corporations. For example, PBS is insanely profitable (its executives make over 300,000 per year) yet how dare anybody suggest we stop handing them free money, because clearly that means they hate children.
One thing I've noticed (read: pure anecdote) is that most people who are enthusiastic about their party don't behave much differently from sports fans of opposing teams. It doesn't really matter what their side does, what matters is which letter wins the game. Even on Slashdot I've confronted a few people who say "well my side never does x abhorrent behavior" when all of ten seconds worth of Google found the opposite.
Personally I simply avoid registering to vote because all that happens is I get calls from people telling me to vote for their guy and they can't really explain why. For example I got a call from somebody on Matt Salmon's team telling me that they would repeal Obama Care, and lower medical costs through deregulation. Being a libertarian, that is music to my ears because I know from experience that red tape does raise costs in the medical field significantly. However when I asked what he would deregulate and how that would help, he didn't even know. But he expects me to vote for his guy anyways.
No thanks. I'd only register to vote if there was actually a significant movement to balance the budget and prevent what I see as an otherwise inevitable catastrophic economic collapse. I don't think that will ever happen though. Once you add social entitlements, no matter how unsustainable or unaffordable, they're basically impossible to get rid of. The best you can do is hedge your assets (gold is a horrible idea BTW) and grab your ankles.
That basically confirms what I've been saying repeatedly on Slashdot. Most of those who complain about H-1B advocates who say there isn't enough talent are in theoretical fields like CS. They have very little to no practical experience.
The typical response I get from them is "yeah well if they simply hired me and let me read some books for a few months then I'll be fine." Wrong answer. Employers want people who already have hands on experience with real equipment. Trade schools are great for that. Your problem is that you believe trade schools are below your intellect, and that going tens of thousands in debt for a university education for a career field that nobody is looking to hire for is such a great idea. Then you believe that the employer is wrong for not wanting to hire you because you don't already know what he needs the job candidate to know.
It's no wonder they favor the immigrants who are more willing to work for the employer rather than the other way around. Before you mod me troll, go look at my comment history and you'll find lots of replies from people saying they "ought to be able to" do exactly what I'm saying they shouldn't do as if it's their right and the employer should have no say in the matter..
Could end up being like Iraq where the politicians talked up a storm about how hard they'll fight to win, and what ended up happening is their soldiers came walking single file into the desert with their weapons holstered and their hands above their heads.
I don't think China cares much about NK anymore. They supported them back then because they needed more trading partners under the communist regime. However China officially abandoned communism as unsustainable back in the 80's, and have been thriving ever since. There really isn't any reason to back them on this anymore, and lately they don't appear to be doing so anyways.
Slashdot Mirror
They think the best way to beat a recession is to spend.
This is mainly because they subscribe to Keynesian thought. The new deal was probably the greatest example of Keynesian theory being applied, and it didn't benefit anything. The war did because it displaced millions of otherwise non-working Americans overseas, which offset the supply of labor in a way that inadvertently triggered a recovery. Keynesian thought was later shattered when stagflation happened in the 80's, which under Keynesian theory is impossible, and demonstrated rather conclusively that government spending isn't the cure all.
Tax cuts don't buy votes, by the way. Most of the wealthy are wealthy to such an extent that taxes don't bother them that much. The ones who hide money in overseas accounts from legitimate income are the minority. The majority of those who hide money in overseas accounts are hiding money that they gained illegally, such as through the drug trade, securities fraud, etc. Rather, paying their taxes would land them in jail quickly when the IRS can't determine where their money came from. Notice the effort required to keep money in overseas banks - the act of doing so isn't cheap at all, and can easily land you in hot water. Why risk going to jail for a very long time over not paying the government what ultimately doesn't amount to anything you'd really miss anyways?
Personally I have a hard time thinking of many wealthy people who don't vote Democrat, mainly because they tend to benefit the most by doing so. They vote democrat because democrats like to pay them for "make work" projects as well as invest in businesses that don't actually have a viable business model. Take Fisker for example. Fisker couldn't land much at all in private investments for a good reason. Tesla on the other hand had their shit together, which is why they actually had plenty of venture capitalist funding. Mr. Fisker just got some free income while he effectively pretended to innovate. Yes, those 1% that many self identified progressives rail against are themselves primarily progressive:
http://legalinsurrection.com/2011/10/the-top-1-probably-voted-disproportionally-for-obama/
It's a strange set of circumstances that self identified conservatives claim to want to cut spending, but don't vote for anybody who will actually do so, whereas self identified liberals are against corporate welfare, but actively vote for those who hand out the most corporate welfare. Obama is probably one of the worst offenders of handing out corporate welfare.
Not sure how you draw the conclusion that it has any desire to be physics.
If you want to associate economics with another form of science, then you'd probably best compare it to psychology. For example, something simple like supply and demand play directly into somebody's thought process about what something is worth.
Debt without any plan to pay it off and without evaluating whether the costs of managing the debt outweigh the benefits is bad. The problem is that most political parties these days seem to have a horizon of the next election when it comes to balancing the books. The problem with this sort of debt is that they spend up big and have no real plan to pay it back.
Therein lies the problem. In my opinion, borrowing should be done to acquire capital for investment; not to simply acquire nice things. I think most people are so used to doing that (e.g. credit card debt,) that they don't really pay attention when the government does it either. Many are even fine with the idea that they can just spend until they are upside down, and then file chapter 7. Governments can't do that (if they did when they do - there will be hell to pay.)
Nice things would be (and this is a classic example libertarians point out) things like national endowment of the arts. If any given artwork isn't worth anything to anybody, then why on earth are we paying somebody to make it? I really don't know if any nice things have come of it, but in the end that is all it is - just a nice thing that we don't actually need in the classical sense, and that money should be going towards paying back debts.
Sadly that is lost among posters like the one just above you, who I think probably constitute a majority. I hear many talk about how a subset of Americans don't want to adopt European policies just for the sake of not being like Europe. Ignoring that the reverse is also true (it certainly is) there is also that subset who want to simply follow Europe's lead just for the sake of doing so. I don't think that is a wise idea given the current Eurozone crisis.
There was a time when the roles were reversed - the US tended to follow Keynesian thought more than Europe. That was the great depression. And as it turns out, the US fared far far worse than Europe.
The great depression wasn't caused by the stock market crash, by the way. The crash simply created a panic, but on its own it didn't cause the mess that followed. After the crash, the unemployment rate was about what it is now - floating between 9 and 10 percent, even showed signs of recovery for a brief period. Things didn't get really bad until the government tried to "fix" things. Smoot-Hawly for example, designed to create jobs, raised domestic prices dramatically and dropped exports by half. Domestic production and exports rise and fall with one another, for those who don't know. That followed by heavy deflation, prohibition, FDR declaring bullion as contraband, the new deal, among a bunch of other things that were supposed to "improve humanity" (the prohibitionists identified themselves as progressives, by the way) and only made things much worse.
Notice below how you see the dow begin to recover up until Smoot-Hawly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1929_wall_street_crash_graph.svg
(Strange world we live in how Republicans wanted tariffs, Democrats did not, and now things are reversed with Unions heavily lobbying for tariffs to protect their jobs.)
What do I know though, I'm just another one of those libertarian whackos who still believe that Keynesian theory was shattered when it proposed that stagflation can't possibly happen, but it did anyways.
Some people have been saying they've found ball bearings (read: "BB"s) near the blasts.
As an outsider, it's pretty easy to hear about an incident where X,000 poeple died, and just look at it as a statistic. Try looking at the pictures of the people who actually died on 9/11, they're on google images, and they're pretty gruesome. I wasn't there, but if I was I would be pretty damn pissed too. When somebody you don't even know declares open war on you, and underhandedly and violently attacks you, you do things you normally wouldn't do. While taking civil liberties away is a bad idea, calling people who react to it batshit crazy about it is a pretty callous, asshole thing to do. In other words, go fuck your sheltered complacent self.
It's likely some moderators will come down on me, but I don't really care to be honest.
Seems a lot of the Newtown victim's families were seated at the VIP section near the finish lines, which is where the bombs were planted.
Or we could maybe use GMO to, say for example, allow more plants to thrive better with far less fertile land, like what already happens in the central/south american jungles.
Or fuel inefficient armored trucks to constantly move cash around from retailers.
It's hard to argue greed when they didn't really profit from it.
Not having a limit is actually why most fiat currencies fail. Governments order their central banks to produce more when they need to pay off their debts. The worst example of this is the Weinmar Republic.
Good point. Metal currencies take a lot of energy just to melt; forget about mining. Paper ones still require energy to harvest the raw materials, transport them, etc. The transporting doesn't end at production though, namely think of the regular armored car movements between retail outlets and banks on a rather daily basis. Armored cars aren't exactly energy efficient.
While I can't say it's the majority, a lot of them are simply anti-technology. Think along the lines of those who believe that all farming should be organic farming, in spite of the food being more expensive, having zero proven nutritional benefit, having a lower crop yield, (so more land is needed to produce the same amount) and also being completely unsustainable. There really is no reason to do it other than if you simply like the old ways better.
The bitcoin currency divides into 8 digits past the decimal point. That comes out to 2 quadrillion denominations. If (read: when) it becomes necessary, people could just commonly trade then in e.g. uBTC instead of BTC denomination, which would put the currency at a much higher volume than the total number of US dollars in circulation.
That 21 million figure could be raised if it was really necessary, at which point more mining could be done, but it would take a big majority of those who currently own bitcoins to agree to it before it can happen. If I was to estimate, I'd say probably a harder thing to do than amending the US constitution.
Or perhaps I could just rely on nuclear energy, which has virtually none of the c word. We produce so much energy in Arizona that we actually sell it to California, and provide 25% of their energy supply. (A lot of their local governments want to boycott us still over SB1070, even though they have such little energy supply that they have rolling brown outs...such a poorly made decision.)
You're not surprised that there isn't an Asian American month, Jewish American month, Gay American month...? Now a White American month, well that would be just racist.
Well, balancing the budget is just, to put it bluntly, a really bad idea. There's a reason companies will frequently borrow to expand themselves. It is often the case that to do so produces better returns than the interest/dividends rates one has to pay on those loans/dividends/whatever. By the same token, government action into funding research (which leads to people/companies expanding the economy) and social programs (which provide a base framework of funding to keep the economic engine running even in bad times) can well pay for themselves. How do I know this to be true? Because rather consistently while the US debt has grown, the GDP has grown at a faster rate.
Actually that isn't the case at all. The budget deficit is increasing faster than the GDP is growing.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fc/U.S._Total_Deficits_vs._National_Debt_Increases_2001-2010.png
This means that the debt keeps getting bigger and bigger, even adjusting for inflation. When a company becomes heavily in debt, shows only the possibility of increasing debt, and its assets can't be liquidated to make up for that debt, the debtors begin to lose trust that this company will ever repay its assets and will stop lending.
The US government is doing exactly that. Sooner or later one of two things is going to happen. Either they print so much money that the dollar gets to a point where no foreign governments will accept it for trade (it has already done that in many places) that it eventually becomes worthless to the US citizens as well, so there would be no point in buying government bonds because you wouldn't gain anything by doing so, which results in the government having no more money to borrow, and government employees (soldiers, teachers, contractors, etc) no longer get paid, so the government basically just shuts down. Or, if they stop printing money, they'll default on their loans, and nobody buys bonds anyways.
Greece is what happens when governments go bankrupt. Now imagine that on a much larger scale.
Taxing the shit out of the wealthy won't solve the problem either, for a multitude of reasons. Poor people don't hire other people. Making the rich poor is a bad idea for that reason. Also, if you even hint at doing so, they can and WILL leave. Look at France. A few years back they made tax increases designed to bring in an extra $120 billion in revenue, and the result was a net reduction of $50 billion in revenue below what they already had. Why? Because people just left, many of them bringing their businesses along with them, even people who lived in France over generations proudly spanning from time immemorial. Trying to fix that problem by preventing people from leaving is just asking for a civil war. Ceasing assets will result in what is happening in Cyprus right now.
Go look at all of the nasty things that Johnny Depp had to say about America prior to permanently moving to France back in 2003 or so, how evil America is, and how France was this beautiful paradise. After realizing that they were basically taxing away basically everything he had, he RAN back to America as fast as he could.
Taxing your way out of a budget deficit is like trying to dig your way out of a hole.
I haven't watched cable TV in a long time now, and lost interest in politics (mostly) over a year ago, but as I recall Fox didn't really do that. In fact, most of the stuff I heard about Fox didn't even end up being true. They follow the same format as everybody else from what I could determine. They have soft news and hard news. Slashdot actually had an article not long ago that found MSNBC is far more biased than Fox, hell Chris Matthews basically calls everybody a racist every other day, but nobody ever talks about that.
I think the major beef that people have with Fox news is that its soft news leans right whereas the rest lean left. So naturally, it catches the most heat.
From my perspective, either they are all doing that or they all aren't. And you're basically falling into the same trap that I'm talking about. You're pitching them on one side and rooting for the other side.
That's one thing I love about calling myself libertarian. There isn't much room for pigeonholing when you think about it. Look at slashdot, there are a bunch of self identified liberal commenters on here who are anti-gun control. Yet when they call themselves liberal, it's generally assumed to be that they are in favor of gun control.
A sometimes perk of identifying as libertarian, it that seems everybody likes to give you their ration of shit, and it's nice because you get to damage their credibility when you break their straw man arguments (e.g. attacking you on positions that you've never held) which enables you to better speak amongst the noise of everybody else coming down upon you for not falling in line with the popular view.
Well what do you mean by positive impact? In my opinion, regulations shouldn't extend to e.g. the trans fat, salt, msg, or sugar content of food. I think it is common sense that these are unreasonable regulations and shouldn't exist. That's just mothering people. I've already got a mother. I don't need a second one who if I disobey I'll be forced to go to jail.
Can it have a positive impact? I suppose some derp who only eats whatever he can find at the corner vendor might see a positive impact, until he goes down to the grocery store and buys it anyways. That's not common sense, that's just being a self righteous douche who thinks he should have the ability to say what thou shalt not do. Thus the reason for my overall view of the democratic party.
I'm also in favor of the unconditional legalization of all narcotic substances (I'm looking at you, Chuck Schumer) and I think it's a bit stupid that we have an entire month dedicated to 12% of the population.
A lot of that came about from the Matthew Shepard case. Everybody involved, including the prosecutor, believed that his sexuality had nothing to do with his murder. The perp just got off of a meth binge was looking for somebody to rob for drug money. The only people who believed it was about his sexuality was Shepard's mom and the court of public opinion.
In my opinion a lot of people confuse libertarians with anarchists. For example, they assume libertarians are against any and all regulation. We're just against unreasonable regulation. For example, vocal libertarians such as John Stossel support the EPA regulating soot emissions from cars so that we can have clean air. But we hate regulations that for example make certain medications and surgeries needlessly expensive, or surgeries commonly performed overseas with great results that are banned here.
We're also very vocal against handing tax money to private corporations. For example, PBS is insanely profitable (its executives make over 300,000 per year) yet how dare anybody suggest we stop handing them free money, because clearly that means they hate children.
One thing I've noticed (read: pure anecdote) is that most people who are enthusiastic about their party don't behave much differently from sports fans of opposing teams. It doesn't really matter what their side does, what matters is which letter wins the game. Even on Slashdot I've confronted a few people who say "well my side never does x abhorrent behavior" when all of ten seconds worth of Google found the opposite.
Personally I simply avoid registering to vote because all that happens is I get calls from people telling me to vote for their guy and they can't really explain why. For example I got a call from somebody on Matt Salmon's team telling me that they would repeal Obama Care, and lower medical costs through deregulation. Being a libertarian, that is music to my ears because I know from experience that red tape does raise costs in the medical field significantly. However when I asked what he would deregulate and how that would help, he didn't even know. But he expects me to vote for his guy anyways.
No thanks. I'd only register to vote if there was actually a significant movement to balance the budget and prevent what I see as an otherwise inevitable catastrophic economic collapse. I don't think that will ever happen though. Once you add social entitlements, no matter how unsustainable or unaffordable, they're basically impossible to get rid of. The best you can do is hedge your assets (gold is a horrible idea BTW) and grab your ankles.
That basically confirms what I've been saying repeatedly on Slashdot. Most of those who complain about H-1B advocates who say there isn't enough talent are in theoretical fields like CS. They have very little to no practical experience.
The typical response I get from them is "yeah well if they simply hired me and let me read some books for a few months then I'll be fine." Wrong answer. Employers want people who already have hands on experience with real equipment. Trade schools are great for that. Your problem is that you believe trade schools are below your intellect, and that going tens of thousands in debt for a university education for a career field that nobody is looking to hire for is such a great idea. Then you believe that the employer is wrong for not wanting to hire you because you don't already know what he needs the job candidate to know.
It's no wonder they favor the immigrants who are more willing to work for the employer rather than the other way around. Before you mod me troll, go look at my comment history and you'll find lots of replies from people saying they "ought to be able to" do exactly what I'm saying they shouldn't do as if it's their right and the employer should have no say in the matter..
Uh... Wut?
I don't know if you've ever paid attention, but tuition rates for non-residents are MUCH higher since they aren't government (i.e. tax) subsidized.
Could end up being like Iraq where the politicians talked up a storm about how hard they'll fight to win, and what ended up happening is their soldiers came walking single file into the desert with their weapons holstered and their hands above their heads.
I don't think China cares much about NK anymore. They supported them back then because they needed more trading partners under the communist regime. However China officially abandoned communism as unsustainable back in the 80's, and have been thriving ever since. There really isn't any reason to back them on this anymore, and lately they don't appear to be doing so anyways.