Well, the fuel is largely hydrogen and oxygen which comes from water, but you are still correct, it takes material resources, energy, time, and money in general to do these launches, and who knows what goods could have been made cheaper, or what other products could have been engineered instead of space shuttles, had they not been taxed away for NASA's use.
If you trust Media Matters to do all your fact checking you will never hear about any of the other mistakes that Fox or any other network makes. It isn't uncommon for news programs to make typos, pull the wrong image or video clip, cut and paste part of a press release incorrectly, or even just not have any content to run at all. But when one of these mistakes happens to mismatch the wrong image with the wrong name it is somehow a huge scandal with a hidden motive.
Come back when you have actual evidence of malice, like, oh I don't know, forged military service records about a certain former president or something.
What about the source of the article? Are you trying to distract from the fact that Grayson is making up facts as he sees fit and is trying to silence people who challenge those "facts?"
I never claimed there was no problem with food (that would just be foolish), I claimed we have the best system on earth, including the most charitable on earth - by far. People like you are what we need to help those truly in crisis, and hopefully lift those people up and make themselves self sufficient again.
Those statistics are meaningless, really. It doesn't matter what the top people are making, standing alone or in proportion to anyone else (so long as they aren't gaining it from or using it to subvert the law, many do, that is wrong), what matters is everyone as a whole. So what if the rich are ten bazillion times richer than the lower quintile, they got that rich by providing goods limited in supply to a maximum number of consumers, there is nothing wrong with that. What matters is, like I showed, people are not locked into one economic class as you imply, and that standard of living rises as we can produce more goods with fewer resources.
I am only countering your point that no one holds such a position. You respond by citing quotes that agree with you, so I don't get what point you are trying to make. FDR, as I claim, did not fix the economy, no one did until after World War 2 (and it wasn't a very good recovery at that). Sure, GDP may change, but that really doesn't say a whole lot, after all, government spending counts towards it, as do high prices, yet both things things are bad. These are exactly the policies that FDR used, policies that would increase GDP without doing much else.
I just recognized an earlier question you asked from your journal. If you refuse to read the answer to that question, it isn't my problem. I can summarize the argument as property rights are not, in fact, exclusive to other rights, i.e. you have no right to build a jail around a person's home, and it offers some less extreme examples too. Regardless, it answers your question and I won't bother typing word for word from the article if I can just point to it. I have no problem reading competing works, I make it a policy to a balance of views from a variety of sources, why won't you?
You think we'd have a reliable economy without roads? When was the last time you bought something and didn't use roads to either pick it up or get it delivered?
I never implied we would have an economy without roads. I never said I know how many roads are ideal. I said without the benefit of economic calculation, government does not know either.
What savings? The average American had little or none to begin with, and with the economy in shambles, any savings they had would've been spent shortly after they were laid off.
You know, the several trillion US dollars in existance. People are just going to horde it until US dollars are not accepted and they are worthless? No, they are going to spend those dollars once they value a good more than the asking price.
I have absolutely no idea what you mean here.
Of course people buy cell phones and computers. Those things are getting cheaper relative to wages. But if everything goes down at the same time, that won't happen. And if wages go down sooner than the prices of the goods they want, they'll buy fewer goods.
So if goods are falling proportional to wages, people will buy. But if change in wages are proportional to change in goods, people stop spending money until their money is worthless and holding onto it is meaningless. I really don't think so, especially if the money is backed by a commodity. There is no example of a country forever being
Luckily, we have a progressive income tax, so the bulk of that money comes from people who would not have spent it on goods.
Luckly?!? Those are the people who spend and invest millions, billions of dollars on new products and innovations to make goods cheaper for all of us. Those are the people you want to tax?
Indeed. A recession is what happens when demand for money is too high: everyone hoards their money. To get things moving, you need to introduce more money (i.e. government spending) to satisfy that demand.
If demand for money is high, let's look to the demand curve and see what happens: The goods-price of money will rise (i.e. prices fall). Prices adjust themselves to reflect the new demand for money. You do not need government to take money from one person and give it to another, that is unproductive and does not reflect the combined human wants of the economy, merely the wants of special interests. At the very worst, it is a speculative bubble, and like all bubbles they must come to an end as we physically run out of resources to keep them running. Never mind that, like most bubbles, it is usually started by some sort of government action (like lowering interest rates to 1%, mandating that banks give loans with that new money to otherwise unqualified buyers, etc).
Voluntary exchange is a nasty myth. When someone is starving, they will 'voluntarily' trade whatever they have for food. When someone has no shelter, they will do things they do not want to do in order to get shelter.
What a charge. I refuse to apologize for the system that has fed more people than any other country in history. I am sorry if we can't live in a happy utopia where there is no suffering, but fact is voluntary exchange maximizes prosperity, even if it cannot entirely eliminate "starving." Your argument is strictly an emotional one and not an objective one:
When government's only function is protection of property, then it's only real function is protecting the haves from the have-nots. Is that how you see government, as protecting the rich from the poor?
Except there is no evidence this happens either: the United States has this thing called Economic Mobility. According to a US treasury study, "ore than half of taxpayers (56 percent by one measure and 55 by another measure) moved to a different income quintile between 1996 and 2005." This isn't new, this is why we were flooded with immigrants during the Industrial revolution: even corporatist conditions were better than the heavily class-based society in other countries. Protecting "haves" from "have-nots" does, however, happen when you have a government heavily funded by special interests and corporations. That is not capitalism however, that is corporatism. You are condemning corporatism, and rightly so.
As for the depression, you cite a theory not held by most people, including most economists. FDR's policies fixed the depression, without him, it would have lasted much, much longer. That is why, in graphs of GDP, you can see things start to get better as soon as his policies were implemented. When the Republicans convinced him that the economy had been fixed, and he needed to stop his policies, the economy tanked again (1937-1938). When he started his policies back up again, things got better. And don't even try the "It was the war!" argument. It's ridiculous. If government spending on a war could fix the economy, then government spending on useful infrastructure can too.
Nice way to marginalize my argument, just claim that it isn't a popular theory, and then ignore the facts of the argument. Which economists said it was correct? The ones then who didn't see the Great Depression coming, the ones saying stocks have reached a "permanent plateau"? The ones today who couldn't explain how or even see the financial system would collapse? Never mind that it is one of the oldest theories, only practiced by such people as, oh, Adam Smith, Friedrich von Hayek (a Nobel winner at that), the founding fathers, and numerous modern people. Are you really trying to say that Hoover and FDR fixed the depression by, often unconstitutionally, imposing price controls, wage controls, so that you could not employ employees at the low cost, and then those unemployed people could not buy goods at the low price they wanted? Nice way to keep the depression going, mandate by law that people could not exchange goods. Take note, Hoover and FDR were both guilty of this (Hoover just felt constrained by the Constitution, FDR didn't care, he would sign an executive order without approval from Congress making gold illegal, or one sending Japanese-Americans to interment camps). Of course GDP goes up when the government spends money, by definition! That doesn't mean the economy is actually getting better, that doesn't mean our lives have become better or that more human wants have been satisfied, or more people have jobs, and is biased towards increasing prices, when in fact decreasing prices are what we want (decreasing prices that, for instance, feeds more people). I absolutely agree with your assessment of World War 2 for that reason.
Now, hang on. Who are you to say how much fire protection or law enforcement is ideal? Maybe too much fire protection and law enforcement is not economically viable! Are you saying the government is better at spending your money (on police and fire departments) than you are?;)
Once you admit that some services are most effectively provided by a central government, you've lost the argument, because you've given up on your bedrock principle that government spending is always worse than private spending.
That is indeed a problem, hence my "ironic" remark. The answer is we cannot know for sure exactly how much is ideal (because there is no profit to supply economic calculation within government, and profit loses meaning when dealing with violence or the threat of violence), all we know is that liberty must be protected if we are to have a reliable economy at all. Roads on the other hand? Not so much.
By that time, my wages would have dropped to insignificant fractions a penny, if I even still had a job, so probably not.
What about all the savings? That didn't disappear. The money supply has not changed - someone has increased spending power. You will not identify who though. Someone is going to have money to spend, and in the mean time prices will come down until demand meets supply. What do you think would happen if every good cost 1/100th of the total money in existence? Clearly, if this were even possible, prices would have to come down, but into a death spiral?
And in the meantime, everyone has become unemployed, hungry, and miserable because the economy has ground to a halt. No thanks! This is like arguing that a global plague is no big deal because it'll correct itself once the human race has been decimated.
There is no evidence this happens at all. What is the first sector to collapse? Energy, manufacturing. The last sector? The service sector. If your theory were really true, wouldn't it be the other way around? If your theory was true, no one would be buying cell phones or computers: The prices are always coming down, yet it is one of the fastest growing sectors there is. The race to the bottom is a good thing, it increases wealth.
No, it works on the theory that increased activity in one sector will spill over into other sectors. More money in the pockets of road builders leads to more money in the pockets of people who sell things to road builders, and more opportunities for people who use roads.
Broken window fallacy: You are not seeing what another person was deprived of in the process. Where did that purchasing power come from? It came from someone who was going to save it (which would decrease interest rates by the way), to employ someone to build roads. Congratulations, you just made one less future sale of a television, one less loan to buy a car, one fewer person to make that television cheaper, all in one fell swoop. Again, while generally so, you cannot assume money is a reliable meter stick for wealth, you must look at money as a commodity good just like any other good.
Fox & Friends, something that I am forced to watch nearly every morning by my companions, spits that out maybe once every two weeks, O'Reilly mentions it in a huff on occasion, Beck flies through it when he's on one of his crazy speeches, and I'm pretty sure the actual news side of Fox News pulled the whole "some sources say..." routine at some point over it. If you want, I can go digging for some video proof...
Fox and Friends comes across as the program that just couldn't say anything insightful if it weren't for the teleprompter (and they struggle even with that). It isn't exactly on my list of high quality programs as is, say, Special Report or NPR reporting in general.
I would like to see O'Reilly say that, from what I have seen it wouldn't surprise me, but I have never heard anything about him on that subject, and I mean beyond a possible implication from a question such as "How bad can the Obama administration vetting process get?" Beck has absolutely not said anything of the sort, at least while on Fox.
My point I was trying to make is this isn't something that Fox is guilty of, or at least not alone - other organizations are just as bad with facts if not worse.
I doubt they could. We'd have a lot fewer roadways if they had to be built by private interests and paid for out of usage fees. We'd have a lot more property damage from fires if fire service were a private service provided only to paying customers (we tried that before). We'd have a lot more crime if police departments were replaced with private security guards.
That means that too many roads are not economically viable, perhaps. Who are you to say how many roads are ideal? As for maintaining security and liberty, that is unquestionably a legitimate government function (if ironic).
Which is throughly fallacious. When in doubt, apply common sense: That which cannot go on forever, will eventually come to an end. Are you really trying to imply that prices will spiral down to zero? Really? I mean, come on, you wouldn't buy a bazillion houses if they eventually were priced at $0.01 each? Total dollars may decrease, but by this point the dollar isn't a reliable measuring stick anyways: Lower prices serves to increase effective savings, not decrease them. There is always a floor, just like there is always a limit to how high you can inflate bubbles. Eventually people run out of money to continue inflating bubbles, likewise, eventually people have enough money to stop price deflation. May I direct you to theneumerouscriticisms?
Those are not at all the same as increasing government spending.
It has to do with government propping up the banks, propping up wages with minimum wage, and just spending lots of money irrespective of how it will benefit the economy. It has to do with the fact that you cannot spend money on whatever you want: An economy satisfies things I want in return for things I have. If government is spending my money instead, it is sending wrong price signals, generating the wrong capital. We need to be building manufacturing plants, not roads, bridges, and houses, for instance. Spending works on the theory that you can take unemployed capital in one area and move it to another, but you cannot, capital is not homogeneous. Government spending is instead just exacerbating the problem.
First, "how to better spend money" is vague and meaningless. If I have $300 to buy a new video card, and the government takes that money to pay for a tiny bit of highway, is that "better"? Not for me; video games make me happier than some road I may never drive on. But the segment of highway provides more economic benefit in the long run.
Second, it's not always a case of the government having better things to spend the money on than the private sector -- in the case of stimulus during a recession, it may be that the private sector is irrationally unwilling to spend money on anything. If you're trying to get the economy moving, spending money on not-so-good things is better than not spending money on great things.
Everything is subjective. Which satisfies more wants, voluntary exchange which profits two people, or tax money which profits one person at the expense of another? You are claiming that central planning could theoretically provide more benefit in the long run, as if tollways (public or privately owned) couldn't do the same thing.
You are mistakenly thinking that spending dollars produces value, which isn't necessarily true. Voluntary exchange produces value because both people profit - not true when government spends money and forcefully buys things for people on their behalf. If people are unwilling to spend money, it means that prices are too high and need to come down. Wages need to come down, prices need to come down, so that savings and loans become more valuable. It is a myth to think that housing prices at a few million a house makes us more prosperous than housing prices at earth level, just because we might "spend more money." How high do prices need to go? Isn't the purpose of the economy to make processes more efficient, not less? It is what made the Great Depression last so long: wages being held artificially high (right from the start when Hoover told companies not to unemploy anyone or cut wages for exactly the reason you say), and prices being held artificially high, meaning no one could legally exchange for anything at market value.
True, there has been price deflation (which doesn't really say much, prices are supposed to go down as we become more efficient, look at cell phones and computers).
My question was how does this not eventually lead to hyperinflation? In the 1970s we didn't even inflate our currency that much and we had 20% interest. Now we have doubled our money supply and we are supposed to walk away from it? I doubt it.
Does it create more prosperity than if the people had used the dollars themselves? You are making quite the charge that government knows how to better spend money than the people do.
Speak for yourself, I am not the one who linked to Campaign for America's Future. Mainstream economists not only failed to see what was happening but denied what was happening - Greenspan refused to admit there was a bubble until he was long our of the Chairman position, Bernanke wasn't much better! Now any old economist can say the markets will go up or down (you have a roughly 50% shot). Only the Austrians throughly predicted how and why the economy went the way it did (starting with the Fed, Fannie and Freddie, the housing bubble, and so on).
So when someone finds something negative about the Bush administration, it is journalism. But when someone uncovers things about someone in the Obama administration, which causes enough controversy for him to resign (in the cover of darkness on a holiday weekend) that is right-wing hatemongering? I realize the "green jobs advisor" is no Secretary of Defense, but really?
Profits don't have to be monetary. Even if I fork over $30 for gas, I am profiting, because I decided so: I benefit more from the gas than I do holding the $30 and an empty tank (granted, I may not be very happy, but I profit none the less). People contribute to FOSS for the same reason they donate to charity, because they get personal satisfaction or benefits from it. Profit is by definition part of voluntary exchange, go read about it.
Try it at the macroeconomic level when you are dealing with national debt, trade, and massive natural supplies, capital, large corporations, and governments. Or how about you just read Human Action for yourself, or my preference, Man, Economy, and State by Murray N. Rothbard, where they try exactly what you suggest anyways, knowing full well and interpreting the limitations first.
Indeed, it is a long standing tradition of sorts to give talking points to people favorable to your views. The issue here is should the government be deciding these things in the first place, it certainly flies in the face of the first amendment in a "nayh nayh you can't get me" fashion when the Administration entirely shuts out a news origination (the most popular cable news channel at that) and several officials publicly, at the same time, say bad things. You can try and cite similar examples (some of which are just as bad), but the scale they did this on is unprecedented.
Perhaps because the video wasn't posted online until recently for privacy concerns? Or perhaps because the right people didn't know about it, kind of like how Van Jones had his name on that 9/11 truther petition for all that time, but it wasn't an issue until someone doing real investigative journalism stumbled upon it? Maybe? No, I am alone I guess.
And maybe I am forgetful, but I don't recall their two big news programs running that video (Special Report, The Fox Report). Perhaps they did.
And he showed the entire video, including that portion, as not to take anything out of context, which I respect. Regardless of why she did it I think we can agree she has no future career in stand up comedy.
At the very best, delivering this speech, and saying Mao is one of two people (along with Mother Teresa) that you "turn to most," in front of a high school graduation with almost no indication of sarcasm is not in good taste. Coupled with her other remarks I have read it would not surprise me either way, Maoist or failed comedian. Or both.
Quoting is perfectly fine. I read such quotes, Beck has (he showed off his collection of books, from Marx to Hitler). The Holocaust museum, for instance, quotes Hitler quite an awful lot, but it isn't quite the same thing as saying it is someone/some people "I turn to most." So don't get your point.
The "did he kill a girl" satire isn't as powerful as the satire Beck actually uses.
Beck uses satire? Now that would be newsworthy.
What the fuck are you talking about? You know you shouldn't believe fairy tales or outright lies, right?
The only scary development is the resurgent muttering, on the left, about the actually evil "fairness doctrine."
What the fuck are you talking about? You know you shouldn't believe fairy tales or outright lies, right?
What are YOU talking about? I have heard quite a number of congressmen openly support a fairness doctrine. The fact it has not gotten any floor time suggests it doesn't have the votes, but the fact anyone is for it is rather scary.
and their perspective is that this White House is run by a Socialist Kenyan
Never seen this, and in fact I have seen it being raised/debunked on Special Report. CNN, however, does have a birther (Lou Dobbs, I refuse to comment on if I like him or not as I do not watch him).
You've both also lost the object or service you traded away. It's still a zero sum game in terms of the resources. Pretending it's not is exactly why the economic system is so damn broken.
No, that person lost $150 and got an hour of labor that he values more, likewise you rented an hour of your labor in return for $150 that you value more. Because you both subjectively have different value scales, you both profited. While the physical atoms may not have changed, that isn't what humans value: we value particular uses of them. Not all sets of atoms are equal to us, and not everyone values the same set of matter equally (or labor, or any good). This is one of the most influential articles I have ever read, demonstrating this point: http://mises.org/story/3015
Profit has always been necessary, reporters aren't exactly selfless volunteers. Profit means you are satisfying human wants with something limited in supply (which is a good thing). If you dislike the large audiences of opinion shows that reporting doesn't get, we can only blame ourselves. I also think bad reporting has turned people away, it seems like investigative reporting is a rare occurrence these days.
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Well, the fuel is largely hydrogen and oxygen which comes from water, but you are still correct, it takes material resources, energy, time, and money in general to do these launches, and who knows what goods could have been made cheaper, or what other products could have been engineered instead of space shuttles, had they not been taxed away for NASA's use.
If you trust Media Matters to do all your fact checking you will never hear about any of the other mistakes that Fox or any other network makes. It isn't uncommon for news programs to make typos, pull the wrong image or video clip, cut and paste part of a press release incorrectly, or even just not have any content to run at all. But when one of these mistakes happens to mismatch the wrong image with the wrong name it is somehow a huge scandal with a hidden motive.
Come back when you have actual evidence of malice, like, oh I don't know, forged military service records about a certain former president or something.
foxnews fabrication? Do you want to challenge the primary sources that the FOXNews.com article posted, including the complaint from Grayson himself?
It looks legitimate to me and anyone else who bothers to do even a little work on Google, apparently you don't want to do that though.
What about the source of the article? Are you trying to distract from the fact that Grayson is making up facts as he sees fit and is trying to silence people who challenge those "facts?"
So being black protects you from certain insults even though the content is exactly the same? Isn't that in and of itself racist?
I never claimed there was no problem with food (that would just be foolish), I claimed we have the best system on earth, including the most charitable on earth - by far. People like you are what we need to help those truly in crisis, and hopefully lift those people up and make themselves self sufficient again.
Those statistics are meaningless, really. It doesn't matter what the top people are making, standing alone or in proportion to anyone else (so long as they aren't gaining it from or using it to subvert the law, many do, that is wrong), what matters is everyone as a whole. So what if the rich are ten bazillion times richer than the lower quintile, they got that rich by providing goods limited in supply to a maximum number of consumers, there is nothing wrong with that. What matters is, like I showed, people are not locked into one economic class as you imply, and that standard of living rises as we can produce more goods with fewer resources.
I am only countering your point that no one holds such a position. You respond by citing quotes that agree with you, so I don't get what point you are trying to make. FDR, as I claim, did not fix the economy, no one did until after World War 2 (and it wasn't a very good recovery at that). Sure, GDP may change, but that really doesn't say a whole lot, after all, government spending counts towards it, as do high prices, yet both things things are bad. These are exactly the policies that FDR used, policies that would increase GDP without doing much else.
I just recognized an earlier question you asked from your journal. If you refuse to read the answer to that question, it isn't my problem. I can summarize the argument as property rights are not, in fact, exclusive to other rights, i.e. you have no right to build a jail around a person's home, and it offers some less extreme examples too. Regardless, it answers your question and I won't bother typing word for word from the article if I can just point to it. I have no problem reading competing works, I make it a policy to a balance of views from a variety of sources, why won't you?
You think we'd have a reliable economy without roads? When was the last time you bought something and didn't use roads to either pick it up or get it delivered?
I never implied we would have an economy without roads. I never said I know how many roads are ideal. I said without the benefit of economic calculation, government does not know either.
What savings? The average American had little or none to begin with, and with the economy in shambles, any savings they had would've been spent shortly after they were laid off.
You know, the several trillion US dollars in existance. People are just going to horde it until US dollars are not accepted and they are worthless? No, they are going to spend those dollars once they value a good more than the asking price.
I have absolutely no idea what you mean here.
Of course people buy cell phones and computers. Those things are getting cheaper relative to wages. But if everything goes down at the same time, that won't happen. And if wages go down sooner than the prices of the goods they want, they'll buy fewer goods.
So if goods are falling proportional to wages, people will buy. But if change in wages are proportional to change in goods, people stop spending money until their money is worthless and holding onto it is meaningless. I really don't think so, especially if the money is backed by a commodity. There is no example of a country forever being
Luckily, we have a progressive income tax, so the bulk of that money comes from people who would not have spent it on goods.
Luckly?!? Those are the people who spend and invest millions, billions of dollars on new products and innovations to make goods cheaper for all of us. Those are the people you want to tax?
Indeed. A recession is what happens when demand for money is too high: everyone hoards their money. To get things moving, you need to introduce more money (i.e. government spending) to satisfy that demand.
If demand for money is high, let's look to the demand curve and see what happens: The goods-price of money will rise (i.e. prices fall). Prices adjust themselves to reflect the new demand for money. You do not need government to take money from one person and give it to another, that is unproductive and does not reflect the combined human wants of the economy, merely the wants of special interests. At the very worst, it is a speculative bubble, and like all bubbles they must come to an end as we physically run out of resources to keep them running. Never mind that, like most bubbles, it is usually started by some sort of government action (like lowering interest rates to 1%, mandating that banks give loans with that new money to otherwise unqualified buyers, etc).
Voluntary exchange is a nasty myth. When someone is starving, they will 'voluntarily' trade whatever they have for food. When someone has no shelter, they will do things they do not want to do in order to get shelter.
What a charge. I refuse to apologize for the system that has fed more people than any other country in history. I am sorry if we can't live in a happy utopia where there is no suffering, but fact is voluntary exchange maximizes prosperity, even if it cannot entirely eliminate "starving." Your argument is strictly an emotional one and not an objective one:
When government's only function is protection of property, then it's only real function is protecting the haves from the have-nots. Is that how you see government, as protecting the rich from the poor?
Except there is no evidence this happens either: the United States has this thing called Economic Mobility. According to a US treasury study, "ore than half of taxpayers (56 percent by one measure and 55 by another measure) moved to a different income quintile between 1996 and 2005." This isn't new, this is why we were flooded with immigrants during the Industrial revolution: even corporatist conditions were better than the heavily class-based society in other countries. Protecting "haves" from "have-nots" does, however, happen when you have a government heavily funded by special interests and corporations. That is not capitalism however, that is corporatism. You are condemning corporatism, and rightly so.
As for the depression, you cite a theory not held by most people, including most economists. FDR's policies fixed the depression, without him, it would have lasted much, much longer. That is why, in graphs of GDP, you can see things start to get better as soon as his policies were implemented. When the Republicans convinced him that the economy had been fixed, and he needed to stop his policies, the economy tanked again (1937-1938). When he started his policies back up again, things got better. And don't even try the "It was the war!" argument. It's ridiculous. If government spending on a war could fix the economy, then government spending on useful infrastructure can too.
Nice way to marginalize my argument, just claim that it isn't a popular theory, and then ignore the facts of the argument. Which economists said it was correct? The ones then who didn't see the Great Depression coming, the ones saying stocks have reached a "permanent plateau"? The ones today who couldn't explain how or even see the financial system would collapse? Never mind that it is one of the oldest theories, only practiced by such people as, oh, Adam Smith, Friedrich von Hayek (a Nobel winner at that), the founding fathers, and numerous modern people. Are you really trying to say that Hoover and FDR fixed the depression by, often unconstitutionally, imposing price controls, wage controls, so that you could not employ employees at the low cost, and then those unemployed people could not buy goods at the low price they wanted? Nice way to keep the depression going, mandate by law that people could not exchange goods. Take note, Hoover and FDR were both guilty of this (Hoover just felt constrained by the Constitution, FDR didn't care, he would sign an executive order without approval from Congress making gold illegal, or one sending Japanese-Americans to interment camps).
Of course GDP goes up when the government spends money, by definition! That doesn't mean the economy is actually getting better, that doesn't mean our lives have become better or that more human wants have been satisfied, or more people have jobs, and is biased towards increasing prices, when in fact decreasing prices are what we want (decreasing prices that, for instance, feeds more people). I absolutely agree with your assessment of World War 2 for that reason.
By the way, here is your answer (or at least one answer) to how prosperity/freedom and property rights work together and an intuitive explanation that I rather like (to a certain extent).
Now, hang on. Who are you to say how much fire protection or law enforcement is ideal? Maybe too much fire protection and law enforcement is not economically viable! Are you saying the government is better at spending your money (on police and fire departments) than you are? ;)
Once you admit that some services are most effectively provided by a central government, you've lost the argument, because you've given up on your bedrock principle that government spending is always worse than private spending.
That is indeed a problem, hence my "ironic" remark. The answer is we cannot know for sure exactly how much is ideal (because there is no profit to supply economic calculation within government, and profit loses meaning when dealing with violence or the threat of violence), all we know is that liberty must be protected if we are to have a reliable economy at all. Roads on the other hand? Not so much.
By that time, my wages would have dropped to insignificant fractions a penny, if I even still had a job, so probably not.
What about all the savings? That didn't disappear. The money supply has not changed - someone has increased spending power. You will not identify who though. Someone is going to have money to spend, and in the mean time prices will come down until demand meets supply. What do you think would happen if every good cost 1/100th of the total money in existence? Clearly, if this were even possible, prices would have to come down, but into a death spiral?
And in the meantime, everyone has become unemployed, hungry, and miserable because the economy has ground to a halt. No thanks! This is like arguing that a global plague is no big deal because it'll correct itself once the human race has been decimated.
There is no evidence this happens at all. What is the first sector to collapse? Energy, manufacturing. The last sector? The service sector. If your theory were really true, wouldn't it be the other way around? If your theory was true, no one would be buying cell phones or computers: The prices are always coming down, yet it is one of the fastest growing sectors there is. The race to the bottom is a good thing, it increases wealth.
No, it works on the theory that increased activity in one sector will spill over into other sectors. More money in the pockets of road builders leads to more money in the pockets of people who sell things to road builders, and more opportunities for people who use roads.
Broken window fallacy: You are not seeing what another person was deprived of in the process. Where did that purchasing power come from? It came from someone who was going to save it (which would decrease interest rates by the way), to employ someone to build roads. Congratulations, you just made one less future sale of a television, one less loan to buy a car, one fewer person to make that television cheaper, all in one fell swoop. Again, while generally so, you cannot assume money is a reliable meter stick for wealth, you must look at money as a commodity good just like any other good.
Fox & Friends, something that I am forced to watch nearly every morning by my companions, spits that out maybe once every two weeks, O'Reilly mentions it in a huff on occasion, Beck flies through it when he's on one of his crazy speeches, and I'm pretty sure the actual news side of Fox News pulled the whole "some sources say..." routine at some point over it. If you want, I can go digging for some video proof...
Fox and Friends comes across as the program that just couldn't say anything insightful if it weren't for the teleprompter (and they struggle even with that). It isn't exactly on my list of high quality programs as is, say, Special Report or NPR reporting in general.
I would like to see O'Reilly say that, from what I have seen it wouldn't surprise me, but I have never heard anything about him on that subject, and I mean beyond a possible implication from a question such as "How bad can the Obama administration vetting process get?" Beck has absolutely not said anything of the sort, at least while on Fox.
My point I was trying to make is this isn't something that Fox is guilty of, or at least not alone - other organizations are just as bad with facts if not worse.
I doubt they could. We'd have a lot fewer roadways if they had to be built by private interests and paid for out of usage fees. We'd have a lot more property damage from fires if fire service were a private service provided only to paying customers (we tried that before). We'd have a lot more crime if police departments were replaced with private security guards.
That means that too many roads are not economically viable, perhaps. Who are you to say how many roads are ideal? As for maintaining security and liberty, that is unquestionably a legitimate government function (if ironic).
And then things will be even worse. See the paradox of thrift.
Which is throughly fallacious. When in doubt, apply common sense: That which cannot go on forever, will eventually come to an end. Are you really trying to imply that prices will spiral down to zero? Really? I mean, come on, you wouldn't buy a bazillion houses if they eventually were priced at $0.01 each? Total dollars may decrease, but by this point the dollar isn't a reliable measuring stick anyways: Lower prices serves to increase effective savings, not decrease them. There is always a floor, just like there is always a limit to how high you can inflate bubbles. Eventually people run out of money to continue inflating bubbles, likewise, eventually people have enough money to stop price deflation. May I direct you to the neumerous criticisms?
Those are not at all the same as increasing government spending.
It has to do with government propping up the banks, propping up wages with minimum wage, and just spending lots of money irrespective of how it will benefit the economy. It has to do with the fact that you cannot spend money on whatever you want: An economy satisfies things I want in return for things I have. If government is spending my money instead, it is sending wrong price signals, generating the wrong capital. We need to be building manufacturing plants, not roads, bridges, and houses, for instance. Spending works on the theory that you can take unemployed capital in one area and move it to another, but you cannot, capital is not homogeneous. Government spending is instead just exacerbating the problem.
No, he isn't.
First, "how to better spend money" is vague and meaningless. If I have $300 to buy a new video card, and the government takes that money to pay for a tiny bit of highway, is that "better"? Not for me; video games make me happier than some road I may never drive on. But the segment of highway provides more economic benefit in the long run.
Second, it's not always a case of the government having better things to spend the money on than the private sector -- in the case of stimulus during a recession, it may be that the private sector is irrationally unwilling to spend money on anything. If you're trying to get the economy moving, spending money on not-so-good things is better than not spending money on great things.
Everything is subjective. Which satisfies more wants, voluntary exchange which profits two people, or tax money which profits one person at the expense of another? You are claiming that central planning could theoretically provide more benefit in the long run, as if tollways (public or privately owned) couldn't do the same thing.
You are mistakenly thinking that spending dollars produces value, which isn't necessarily true. Voluntary exchange produces value because both people profit - not true when government spends money and forcefully buys things for people on their behalf. If people are unwilling to spend money, it means that prices are too high and need to come down. Wages need to come down, prices need to come down, so that savings and loans become more valuable. It is a myth to think that housing prices at a few million a house makes us more prosperous than housing prices at earth level, just because we might "spend more money." How high do prices need to go? Isn't the purpose of the economy to make processes more efficient, not less? It is what made the Great Depression last so long: wages being held artificially high (right from the start when Hoover told companies not to unemploy anyone or cut wages for exactly the reason you say), and prices being held artificially high, meaning no one could legally exchange for anything at market value.
True, there has been price deflation (which doesn't really say much, prices are supposed to go down as we become more efficient, look at cell phones and computers).
My question was how does this not eventually lead to hyperinflation? In the 1970s we didn't even inflate our currency that much and we had 20% interest. Now we have doubled our money supply and we are supposed to walk away from it? I doubt it.
Does it create more prosperity than if the people had used the dollars themselves? You are making quite the charge that government knows how to better spend money than the people do.
Speak for yourself, I am not the one who linked to Campaign for America's Future. Mainstream economists not only failed to see what was happening but denied what was happening - Greenspan refused to admit there was a bubble until he was long our of the Chairman position, Bernanke wasn't much better! Now any old economist can say the markets will go up or down (you have a roughly 50% shot). Only the Austrians throughly predicted how and why the economy went the way it did (starting with the Fed, Fannie and Freddie, the housing bubble, and so on).
By "someone doing real investigative journalism", do you perhaps mean Glenn Beck and right-wing bloggers?
So when someone finds something negative about the Bush administration, it is journalism. But when someone uncovers things about someone in the Obama administration, which causes enough controversy for him to resign (in the cover of darkness on a holiday weekend) that is right-wing hatemongering? I realize the "green jobs advisor" is no Secretary of Defense, but really?
Profits don't have to be monetary. Even if I fork over $30 for gas, I am profiting, because I decided so: I benefit more from the gas than I do holding the $30 and an empty tank (granted, I may not be very happy, but I profit none the less). People contribute to FOSS for the same reason they donate to charity, because they get personal satisfaction or benefits from it. Profit is by definition part of voluntary exchange, go read about it.
Try it at the macroeconomic level when you are dealing with national debt, trade, and massive natural supplies, capital, large corporations, and governments. Or how about you just read Human Action for yourself, or my preference, Man, Economy, and State by Murray N. Rothbard, where they try exactly what you suggest anyways, knowing full well and interpreting the limitations first.
Indeed, it is a long standing tradition of sorts to give talking points to people favorable to your views. The issue here is should the government be deciding these things in the first place, it certainly flies in the face of the first amendment in a "nayh nayh you can't get me" fashion when the Administration entirely shuts out a news origination (the most popular cable news channel at that) and several officials publicly, at the same time, say bad things. You can try and cite similar examples (some of which are just as bad), but the scale they did this on is unprecedented.
Perhaps because the video wasn't posted online until recently for privacy concerns? Or perhaps because the right people didn't know about it, kind of like how Van Jones had his name on that 9/11 truther petition for all that time, but it wasn't an issue until someone doing real investigative journalism stumbled upon it? Maybe? No, I am alone I guess.
And maybe I am forgetful, but I don't recall their two big news programs running that video (Special Report, The Fox Report). Perhaps they did.
And he showed the entire video, including that portion, as not to take anything out of context, which I respect. Regardless of why she did it I think we can agree she has no future career in stand up comedy.
At the very best, delivering this speech, and saying Mao is one of two people (along with Mother Teresa) that you "turn to most," in front of a high school graduation with almost no indication of sarcasm is not in good taste. Coupled with her other remarks I have read it would not surprise me either way, Maoist or failed comedian. Or both.
Quoting is perfectly fine. I read such quotes, Beck has (he showed off his collection of books, from Marx to Hitler). The Holocaust museum, for instance, quotes Hitler quite an awful lot, but it isn't quite the same thing as saying it is someone/some people "I turn to most." So don't get your point.
The "did he kill a girl" satire isn't as powerful as the satire Beck actually uses.
Beck uses satire? Now that would be newsworthy.
What the fuck are you talking about? You know you shouldn't believe fairy tales or outright lies, right?
The only scary development is the resurgent muttering, on the left, about the actually evil "fairness doctrine."
What the fuck are you talking about? You know you shouldn't believe fairy tales or outright lies, right?
What are YOU talking about? I have heard quite a number of congressmen openly support a fairness doctrine. The fact it has not gotten any floor time suggests it doesn't have the votes, but the fact anyone is for it is rather scary.
and their perspective is that this White House is run by a Socialist Kenyan
Never seen this, and in fact I have seen it being raised/debunked on Special Report. CNN, however, does have a birther (Lou Dobbs, I refuse to comment on if I like him or not as I do not watch him).
You've both also lost the object or service you traded away. It's still a zero sum game in terms of the resources. Pretending it's not is exactly why the economic system is so damn broken.
No, that person lost $150 and got an hour of labor that he values more, likewise you rented an hour of your labor in return for $150 that you value more. Because you both subjectively have different value scales, you both profited. While the physical atoms may not have changed, that isn't what humans value: we value particular uses of them. Not all sets of atoms are equal to us, and not everyone values the same set of matter equally (or labor, or any good). This is one of the most influential articles I have ever read, demonstrating this point: http://mises.org/story/3015
Profit has always been necessary, reporters aren't exactly selfless volunteers. Profit means you are satisfying human wants with something limited in supply (which is a good thing). If you dislike the large audiences of opinion shows that reporting doesn't get, we can only blame ourselves. I also think bad reporting has turned people away, it seems like investigative reporting is a rare occurrence these days.