Not only is democracy a bad thing, the United States is not a democracy, it is a republic. Democracy is not the form of rule we want, that is mob rule, the purpose of the US Constitution was to protect this thing called liberty, not to establish democracy!
The Tea Party happened to re-elect Republicans, because people who adopted their reduce-spending platform ran as... surprise, Republicans! They still managed to oust quite a number of incumbents, in both parties. To say that they "re-elected the only party that openly expresses more support for millionaires than it does for the middle class" is not only a fallacy in your assessment of causation, but appears to assume that supporting (i.e. not stealing from) all people, no matter their income, is somehow a bad thing.
Fox News gets their money from... wait for it... Advertising. Oh, that awful ad revenue that's completely open to the public and biasing them so much... I can't tell you how but I just know it is!...Really?
Also, serious citation needed on the housing crash. What you are bashing is called commentary, have you ever heard of it? And in any case FNC and CNN both had commentators and guests actively describing the downfall of the housing market, in particular, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw . That video right there disproves your claim in fact, because they clearly were covering both sides of the issue at least a little, which is their job.
That's exactly we must not be forcing companies to provide products that they otherwise wouldn't want to. Not to mention forcing someone to provide a service like that is called slavery.
Again, prices carry information about scarcity and availability. Prices are actually meaningful, they aren't just some arbitrary number that tells you how many times more you are getting paid than someone else for no reason. What happens when you modify the market prices? You get shortages or surpluses, and other really bad, inefficient effects. If you can't pay people what they are worth, then you can't make efficient allocative decisions. Really, this is standard Econ 101 stuff.
What you are proposing is anti-free market by definition! If I'm not free to make contracts with other people without 3rd party interference, that's not free! If your time is worth $20/hr, and a gardening service is $40/hr, then clearly it is more efficient for you to do the work yourself (assuming you get the work done in equal time). Artificial caps on prices make this price mechanism stop functioning, and all of a sudden you have a CEO doing work that could be just as easily preformed by someone else, instead of doing work that is far more valuable to the company. The position of CEO is also not an easy job... you appear to have the concept of supply and demand backwards, it is a high-risk, high-demand, low-supply job, and higher risk always gets more money.
Value is subjective. that's been the central theory of economics since Adam Smith -- marginal utility, or the subjective theory of value. If you think something is overvalued, don't buy it, it's as simple as that. If you mean Fed-fueled price/currency bubbles... I don't know if you realized but the Federal Reserve isn't a free market institution.
Productivity has nothing to do with it, wages and prices in general are about a related but distinct concept called cost. The time of a CEOs literally costs more, their time is valuable, the job is incredibly demanding and very hard to get right. It doesn't mean they are literally out on the floor assembling goods, it means that (1) the time of a CEO is valuable (by definition, as previously stated); and (2) the cost of not having one (as assessed by the company, like the board of directors, owner/co-owners, shareholders, etc), in terms of the next best alternative (the opportunity cost) is far more costly than the wages being paid, therefore it's a mutually beneficial (profitable) exchange to pay the wages, regardless of what you think about them.
1) Get the government out of healthcare. Currently, there are many laws preventing insurance companies from operating in all 50 states.
Indeed, the "interstate commerce" clause was intended to allow the Federal government the ability to use its coercive power to force states to implement free trade - not to stop trade from happening between states!
Problem with that analysis is that workers in India have no use for dollars. People don't have a direct use for money period, that's why it's called money! If money leaves the country, then it becomes more valuable here, and it will have to come back in. It's not a one-way street you know. Even if we do have a perpetual trade imbalance, that's not a bad thing either. If more dollars are leaving then entering due to China's monetary policy, we're basically getting free goods from their work force. What you are espousing is mercantilism and it's been obsoleted in almost all the schools of economics since 1776.
The key word is "CEOs used to do just fine." Prices carry information about scarcity and availability, they are in fact semantically meaningful. They mean something. If prices for the very top wage earners have gone up it's because they are actually worth more, it tells us their time is more valuable, and the additional wages allows them to use their time more efficiently... Even if Bill Gates were the best lawn mower in the world, the grass cutting world champion, would you have expected him to do the work himself? Of course not, it would be far more efficient to hire a worker do the work for him.
The GPL, just like a proprietary license, allows you to sue someone if they do not distribute code that you authored in a particular way you like. That is something that could not exist without copyright law and government's coercive force to enforce it. This may be "open source," but a liberally free license would not allow this.
Trolling must imply you won't back up your arguments and you only want to cause a problem. I don't see that happening.
Packets traveling over state lines might be subject to Interstate regulation - not companies making exchanges within state lines. The Constitution is very clear about this: It has to be COMMERCE, and it has to be INTERSTATE. The fact the Internet is worldwide does not imply they can regulate any tiny portion of it.
THEY CAN BE REGULATED. THEY AGREED TO IT WHEN THEY TOOK THE MONEY TO PROVIDE THE SERVICE.
Apparently there's no arguing with someone who blatantly denies the sky is blue... Government, except in their capacity as a coercive institution, has no right to tell people how they will operate their business just because they accepted money. It is no different than any other entity who gives out grants. When I say "private" THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT IS IMPLIED. Once they receive the money they own it, not the government, period.
I never claimed you said ISPs weren't private, I don't know why you are arguing about that... I said that because if they are in fact entirely private, they are *free* from other people being able to tell them how to operate... If some entity (the government here, but this is true for anyone) paid them for a share of ownership, they would be in a position to do so, however this is not the case, as I implied by saying they are private.
The ISPs are entirely private, and the fact the government gives them money doesn't change that, any more than a private grant would (that is, you can make the grant conditional, but that doesn't mean you get to order them around after!). Additionally, the commerce clause does not allow the Federal government to regulate Intrastate trade or own or operate the Internet, such as how an ISP will regulate their own network (outside of the necessary and proper clause which would let Congress manage, for instance, a military network for the military to use, but this wouldn't be open to customers). How is this so hard to understand?
That is entirely irrelevant. It doesn't matter if the government funded anything, what matters is if coercive power is being used to modify speech. The Federal government has not been granted the power to modify speech, and in fact it is explicitly banned from doing so in the First Amendment!
The government may regulate its own speech as a private business may. It may not require private entities, no matter what their history looks like, to publish other people's "free speech". The Supreme Court has ruled that requiring newspapers to run other people's stories is a violation of the first amendment for this reason. In theory they could bribe the ISPs and say "hey if you don't operate your network with net neutrality principles, you don't get federal funding" but in that case it wouldn't be the First Amendment, but ability of Congress to spend money (and spending money on the Internet is not a delegated power of congress, unlike "post roads" for the post office/highways and such).
If you believe in never using force, then you are strictly anarchist.
Does not follow.
See if you can remember where this comes from:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
So, to review:
We get rights as a part of our humanity
A right does not imply it is guaranteed
So we form governments to protect our rights, including our life, our liberty, our property, and our ability to voluntarily make associations and other mutually beneficial decisions between individuals
It follows that governments may not initiate coercive force, however they may respond with it to establish justice.
And even then there is a pretty strong argument that even all these protective services could be provided by privately employed individuals.
Congratulations, you managed to answer not a single one of my questions and at the same time just mock people, I'll take that as a concession. Until you want to either answer my questions or refute my points, I'm noting this as troll.
They aren't puppets to a political party if that's what you mean, they were some of the few people actually taking on the Republican party while Bush was in office. Beck was especially unpopular over his critique of Bush over the patriot act, immigration, the economy, and power-grabbing in general. How is that "hyper-partisan?" You are trying to tell me that their mere appearance is supportive of party over principle, but somehow when Obama calls for an end to partisan politics, I will assume, that is creditable?
Did you actually watch the event to come to the conclusion it was worthless or was political some how?
Why would anyone who puts down "hyper-partisan" showings at the same time call this a "teabagger" rally?
So all drug addicts are insane people with no value to the world and they can't ever be recovered and make a positive contribution. Nice, thanks for your stereotyping, maybe next time you can stop judging people because they happen to have a different opinion than you.
For something you dismiss as a decision that goes against common sense his arguments are awfully coherent over time. Has it occurred to you that maybe he just, how does he put it, "say what you mean and mean what you say?" "There are some things I believe I shall never say but I shall never say the things I do not believe" "Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear." Do you disagree with these statements? Are they really the quotes of a "religious fanatic" and "drug addict lunatic?"
Has it occurred to you that people can make millions of dollars a year because their services are worth that much? When there is a price for something like that, it actually means something about these things called scarcity and value. Prices aren't arbitrary numbers that you can just change at a whim, again they mean something, the literally aggregate all the information about scarcity and subjective value into a neat little ratio that you can agree to exchange for or not, depending on your own marginal valuation. If a personal CEO isn't worth that much to you then just don't hire one, no one is forcing you to hire him! I mean, that's just common sense I thought.
Why would anyone want more taxes on anyone? Do you realize how much money it takes to produce goods and services? Are you so shallow that you think we can just steal all that away from the job creators of the world and that won't have any effect on production?
Do me a favor and take a real economics course and learn about alternative cost and supply and demand.
If you are trying to prove a point I completely missed it.
The promotion line was "Leave your signs at home, bring your children; come as you are and leave stronger."
Was there anything actually objectionable to the event? No? Then why wouldn't you want to put differences aside and say "this is something I can agree on?" This is exactly the sort of partisanship that we can legitimately put aside, that doesn't involve compromise, and yet for some reason we still wonder why no one actually does. No, instead we still want to play the politics even when it's not a political event. Amazing.
If he were in it to make a ton of money why would he cancel a seven figure advertising contract with GM?
His philosophy is remarkably unchanged, he has been a heavy critic of both the Bush administration and the Obama administration (indeed, that's probably why he wasn't popular during the Bush administration, he was saying the things no one else would against Bush). If you have been listening to him for the last decade as I have there is absolutely no reason to believe he just says stuff because it's self-promoting, he says it because he does believe it's true. If he holds an event that's non-political then, surprise, it's going to be non-political.
He says he doesn't come to the conclusions he does because it's popular or because it makes sense, but because there is no better explanation.
Right, artificially/legally making it hard to fire a teacher when they would otherwise be gone is most likely a violation of the employer's rights, and just makes for crappy schools.
My point is that people accept jobs because it's mutually beneficial, usually that means because they want the pay more than not having that job, and the employer finds that job more profitable than not filling it. But regardless of the details (money, charity, etc) the important part is that both sides agree and mutually benefit.
Your argument is correct but your point is flawed. Money doesn't have anything to do with it, it's a more abstract notion of do both sides mutually benefit, which is entirely subjective. Once one side determines they don't, they can simply stop working, or stop employing/not sign the next contract/whatever. You don't accept a job because you think it pays you what you are worth, you accept a job because it is better than not taking that job, period. Same goes for the employer. That is the very definition of voluntary exchange.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only is democracy a bad thing, the United States is not a democracy, it is a republic. Democracy is not the form of rule we want, that is mob rule, the purpose of the US Constitution was to protect this thing called liberty, not to establish democracy!
The Tea Party happened to re-elect Republicans, because people who adopted their reduce-spending platform ran as... surprise, Republicans! They still managed to oust quite a number of incumbents, in both parties. To say that they "re-elected the only party that openly expresses more support for millionaires than it does for the middle class" is not only a fallacy in your assessment of causation, but appears to assume that supporting (i.e. not stealing from) all people, no matter their income, is somehow a bad thing.
Speak for yourself (Hey, there's a great idea!)
Fox News gets their money from... wait for it... Advertising. Oh, that awful ad revenue that's completely open to the public and biasing them so much... I can't tell you how but I just know it is! ...Really?
Also, serious citation needed on the housing crash. What you are bashing is called commentary, have you ever heard of it? And in any case FNC and CNN both had commentators and guests actively describing the downfall of the housing market, in particular, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw . That video right there disproves your claim in fact, because they clearly were covering both sides of the issue at least a little, which is their job.
That's exactly we must not be forcing companies to provide products that they otherwise wouldn't want to. Not to mention forcing someone to provide a service like that is called slavery.
That's /. sending an "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" header with "Location: http://slashdot.org/" /etc/hosts file.
You would need to edit your
Again, prices carry information about scarcity and availability. Prices are actually meaningful, they aren't just some arbitrary number that tells you how many times more you are getting paid than someone else for no reason. What happens when you modify the market prices? You get shortages or surpluses, and other really bad, inefficient effects. If you can't pay people what they are worth, then you can't make efficient allocative decisions. Really, this is standard Econ 101 stuff.
What you are proposing is anti-free market by definition! If I'm not free to make contracts with other people without 3rd party interference, that's not free! If your time is worth $20/hr, and a gardening service is $40/hr, then clearly it is more efficient for you to do the work yourself (assuming you get the work done in equal time). Artificial caps on prices make this price mechanism stop functioning, and all of a sudden you have a CEO doing work that could be just as easily preformed by someone else, instead of doing work that is far more valuable to the company. The position of CEO is also not an easy job... you appear to have the concept of supply and demand backwards, it is a high-risk, high-demand, low-supply job, and higher risk always gets more money.
Value is subjective. that's been the central theory of economics since Adam Smith -- marginal utility, or the subjective theory of value. If you think something is overvalued, don't buy it, it's as simple as that. If you mean Fed-fueled price/currency bubbles... I don't know if you realized but the Federal Reserve isn't a free market institution.
Productivity has nothing to do with it, wages and prices in general are about a related but distinct concept called cost. The time of a CEOs literally costs more, their time is valuable, the job is incredibly demanding and very hard to get right. It doesn't mean they are literally out on the floor assembling goods, it means that (1) the time of a CEO is valuable (by definition, as previously stated); and (2) the cost of not having one (as assessed by the company, like the board of directors, owner/co-owners, shareholders, etc), in terms of the next best alternative (the opportunity cost) is far more costly than the wages being paid, therefore it's a mutually beneficial (profitable) exchange to pay the wages, regardless of what you think about them.
1) Get the government out of healthcare. Currently, there are many laws preventing insurance companies from operating in all 50 states.
Indeed, the "interstate commerce" clause was intended to allow the Federal government the ability to use its coercive power to force states to implement free trade - not to stop trade from happening between states!
Problem with that analysis is that workers in India have no use for dollars. People don't have a direct use for money period, that's why it's called money! If money leaves the country, then it becomes more valuable here, and it will have to come back in. It's not a one-way street you know. Even if we do have a perpetual trade imbalance, that's not a bad thing either. If more dollars are leaving then entering due to China's monetary policy, we're basically getting free goods from their work force. What you are espousing is mercantilism and it's been obsoleted in almost all the schools of economics since 1776.
The key word is "CEOs used to do just fine." Prices carry information about scarcity and availability, they are in fact semantically meaningful. They mean something. If prices for the very top wage earners have gone up it's because they are actually worth more, it tells us their time is more valuable, and the additional wages allows them to use their time more efficiently... Even if Bill Gates were the best lawn mower in the world, the grass cutting world champion, would you have expected him to do the work himself? Of course not, it would be far more efficient to hire a worker do the work for him.
The GPL, just like a proprietary license, allows you to sue someone if they do not distribute code that you authored in a particular way you like. That is something that could not exist without copyright law and government's coercive force to enforce it. This may be "open source," but a liberally free license would not allow this.
Trolling must imply you won't back up your arguments and you only want to cause a problem. I don't see that happening.
Packets traveling over state lines might be subject to Interstate regulation - not companies making exchanges within state lines. The Constitution is very clear about this: It has to be COMMERCE, and it has to be INTERSTATE. The fact the Internet is worldwide does not imply they can regulate any tiny portion of it.
Apparently there's no arguing with someone who blatantly denies the sky is blue... Government, except in their capacity as a coercive institution, has no right to tell people how they will operate their business just because they accepted money. It is no different than any other entity who gives out grants. When I say "private" THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT IS IMPLIED. Once they receive the money they own it, not the government, period.
I never claimed you said ISPs weren't private, I don't know why you are arguing about that... I said that because if they are in fact entirely private, they are *free* from other people being able to tell them how to operate... If some entity (the government here, but this is true for anyone) paid them for a share of ownership, they would be in a position to do so, however this is not the case, as I implied by saying they are private.
The ISPs are entirely private, and the fact the government gives them money doesn't change that, any more than a private grant would (that is, you can make the grant conditional, but that doesn't mean you get to order them around after!). Additionally, the commerce clause does not allow the Federal government to regulate Intrastate trade or own or operate the Internet, such as how an ISP will regulate their own network (outside of the necessary and proper clause which would let Congress manage, for instance, a military network for the military to use, but this wouldn't be open to customers). How is this so hard to understand?
That is entirely irrelevant. It doesn't matter if the government funded anything, what matters is if coercive power is being used to modify speech. The Federal government has not been granted the power to modify speech, and in fact it is explicitly banned from doing so in the First Amendment!
The government may regulate its own speech as a private business may. It may not require private entities, no matter what their history looks like, to publish other people's "free speech". The Supreme Court has ruled that requiring newspapers to run other people's stories is a violation of the first amendment for this reason. In theory they could bribe the ISPs and say "hey if you don't operate your network with net neutrality principles, you don't get federal funding" but in that case it wouldn't be the First Amendment, but ability of Congress to spend money (and spending money on the Internet is not a delegated power of congress, unlike "post roads" for the post office/highways and such).
If you believe in never using force, then you are strictly anarchist.
Does not follow.
See if you can remember where this comes from:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
So, to review:
And even then there is a pretty strong argument that even all these protective services could be provided by privately employed individuals.
probably why my premiums are so high.
Except that cost doesn't determine price, price is supply and demand, and price determines the cost.
Congratulations, you managed to answer not a single one of my questions and at the same time just mock people, I'll take that as a concession. Until you want to either answer my questions or refute my points, I'm noting this as troll.
They aren't puppets to a political party if that's what you mean, they were some of the few people actually taking on the Republican party while Bush was in office. Beck was especially unpopular over his critique of Bush over the patriot act, immigration, the economy, and power-grabbing in general. How is that "hyper-partisan?" You are trying to tell me that their mere appearance is supportive of party over principle, but somehow when Obama calls for an end to partisan politics, I will assume, that is creditable?
Did you actually watch the event to come to the conclusion it was worthless or was political some how?
Why would anyone who puts down "hyper-partisan" showings at the same time call this a "teabagger" rally?
So all drug addicts are insane people with no value to the world and they can't ever be recovered and make a positive contribution. Nice, thanks for your stereotyping, maybe next time you can stop judging people because they happen to have a different opinion than you.
For something you dismiss as a decision that goes against common sense his arguments are awfully coherent over time. Has it occurred to you that maybe he just, how does he put it, "say what you mean and mean what you say?" "There are some things I believe I shall never say but I shall never say the things I do not believe" "Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear." Do you disagree with these statements? Are they really the quotes of a "religious fanatic" and "drug addict lunatic?"
Hm?
Has it occurred to you that people can make millions of dollars a year because their services are worth that much? When there is a price for something like that, it actually means something about these things called scarcity and value. Prices aren't arbitrary numbers that you can just change at a whim, again they mean something, the literally aggregate all the information about scarcity and subjective value into a neat little ratio that you can agree to exchange for or not, depending on your own marginal valuation. If a personal CEO isn't worth that much to you then just don't hire one, no one is forcing you to hire him! I mean, that's just common sense I thought.
Why would anyone want more taxes on anyone? Do you realize how much money it takes to produce goods and services? Are you so shallow that you think we can just steal all that away from the job creators of the world and that won't have any effect on production?
Do me a favor and take a real economics course and learn about alternative cost and supply and demand.
If you are trying to prove a point I completely missed it.
The promotion line was "Leave your signs at home, bring your children; come as you are and leave stronger."
Was there anything actually objectionable to the event? No? Then why wouldn't you want to put differences aside and say "this is something I can agree on?" This is exactly the sort of partisanship that we can legitimately put aside, that doesn't involve compromise, and yet for some reason we still wonder why no one actually does. No, instead we still want to play the politics even when it's not a political event. Amazing.
If he were in it to make a ton of money why would he cancel a seven figure advertising contract with GM?
His philosophy is remarkably unchanged, he has been a heavy critic of both the Bush administration and the Obama administration (indeed, that's probably why he wasn't popular during the Bush administration, he was saying the things no one else would against Bush). If you have been listening to him for the last decade as I have there is absolutely no reason to believe he just says stuff because it's self-promoting, he says it because he does believe it's true. If he holds an event that's non-political then, surprise, it's going to be non-political.
He says he doesn't come to the conclusions he does because it's popular or because it makes sense, but because there is no better explanation.
Right, artificially/legally making it hard to fire a teacher when they would otherwise be gone is most likely a violation of the employer's rights, and just makes for crappy schools.
My point is that people accept jobs because it's mutually beneficial, usually that means because they want the pay more than not having that job, and the employer finds that job more profitable than not filling it. But regardless of the details (money, charity, etc) the important part is that both sides agree and mutually benefit.
Your argument is correct but your point is flawed. Money doesn't have anything to do with it, it's a more abstract notion of do both sides mutually benefit, which is entirely subjective. Once one side determines they don't, they can simply stop working, or stop employing/not sign the next contract/whatever. You don't accept a job because you think it pays you what you are worth, you accept a job because it is better than not taking that job, period. Same goes for the employer. That is the very definition of voluntary exchange.