"The point is that liberty is about freedom, and freedom is founded on rights. "
Absolutely true.
" The right not to be hungry. The right to healthcare. The right to education. The right to vote. The right to work. The right to warmth, clothing and shelter. The right to be protected and looked after when you are flooded, your home destroyed, or your land invaded, or you or your family merely get old, or sick."
Absolutely false.
None of those are rights. None of them could conceivably be rights outside of a system which allows for human slavery and some people having rights that others do not have.
The right not to be hungry? No. The right to pursue an honest living without interference, yes. Notice the difference?
If you had a 'right' to not be hungry the only way that could be translated into reality would be as an obligation for someone else to feed you. Which would violate their rights. That farmer has a right to pursue his own living, which includes selling his produce, and he cant exactly be free to sell it if it was already forcefully taken from him to satisfy someone elses 'right to not be hungry' now can he?
"The right to healthcare." No, the right to contract for the services of health care providers without interference.
Again, the doctor has a right to pursue his living as well. He does that by charging for his services. If I had a right to his services, that would be perilously close to simply making him my slave. If I need health care and I dont want to pay for it, he just has to give it to me anyway, after all it's my 'right,' right? No.
"The right to education." No. The right to seek education without interference - not the right to force people to educate you for free.
What is preventing you from seeing where liberty lies here is nothing other than a faulty definition - one that has been pushed for many years precisely to do what I see it doing here - to prevent people from even thinking about rights clearly. Just make a list of all the things that would be good to have, and call them 'rights.' But they arent rights. Rights are very specific things. Misusing the word like this simply strips it of meaning and makes the entire conversation nonsense.
Uh, no. That's the broken window fallacy. Taxation redirects capital from productive work to unproductive, which is always going to cause a net loss of demand in the labour market. Yes, you put some people to work in the areas that you mentioned, and that is plainly visible and obvious. What is less obvious is the opportunity cost of that spending, but it's nonetheless quite real. The taxation reduces the demand for labour by more than the hiring can replace.
"I guess that there's nothing that distances the US from western europe more than the attitude towards taxation"
Having spent a few years in western Europe I am inclined to agree with you.
You talk about the money going to help the less fortunate. I can see how you might think that, in Europe where some portion of that money probably does do that, but much does not.
The more important issue, however, is one of consent. There are plenty of good charities that would be happy to have your voluntary donation. They do good works far more efficiently than any government, and they have to - if they dont those who donate can simply quit giving and the organisation will be dead.
Governments dont ask for donations, they dont need to please you or impress you or even give you the time of day, they claim a 'right' to simply take your money anytime they like, as any thief would. They've been doing it for centuries and everyone is used to it by now but if you look at it logically, what do you call someone that takes your money without your consent? A thief, pure and simple.
If you are lucky they may do some good with it. And I am told many pickpockets give to charity. It does not justify their thievery.
" I cannot believe that anyone who has substantially lived in a country that offers universal healthcare would ever dream of going back to any other system, regardless of the fact that such a system entails taxation."
Believe it. I had (still have actually, if I wanted to go back) full access to one of the top rated medical systems in western Europe. I had to use it a few times and I am quite familiar with that system. I will grant it's not the worst system imaginable (that crown goes to the current bastardized version we have here in the US) but I would still happily give it up in return for my freedom to seek medical care on my own terms without interference, a basic human right which NO industrialised nation currently respects.
I think you're horribly confused. Libertarians dont just expect everyone to do what's right (although we believe such behaviour should be rewarded rather than pilloried) and we advocate good old fashioned law enforcement to deal with those who break the rules. How this turns into what you posted is one of the mysteries of the human mind.
Treason? Yes. Applies to all the other people (most or all more senior and thus more culpable) that were aware of this and did NOT do what Snowden did. Those are your traitors.
It's accurate and well placed although he could have been clearer. The traditional free market approach to pollution is the tort system. Strict liability does indeed imply everyone has a right to reasonably clean air and any person that pollutes that air is subject to civil penalties. This traditional system was over-ridden with a regulatory regime instead during industrialisation, not to protect the environment, but to protect business investment. And this is still the scheme we use today. The regulators decide what a 'reasonable' amount of pollution for a given business is and as long as that business abides those limit it is immune to being sued for the damages it is doing. A strict liability system like free-market advocates advocate for would amount to much stricter environmental protection than any system of regulation will produce.
I dont think any of these suggestions hold water looking at the total distribution and the size of the sample. This isnt a small sample, it's simply too large to see that sort of distribution without some sort of systematic explanation. It seems to me obvious that the scores have been altered systematically. It would have to have been in accord with some sort of policy and it would have to be pretty strictly enforced for there to be no exceptions in that large a data set. I dont know what the policy is or whether or not it is ultimately legit, but it certainly looks like something that bears investigating. If the national testing body is systematically altering scores it seems like something the public in that country would have a right to know about, and something they should be required to defend in public rather than simply doing secretly.
Because they imagine that they will be able to force their way into a controlling share of other markets (phone and tablets) by wielding their desktop position like a club. If they refuse to sell older OSs that people like, then people will just have to get Win8. And once they use Win8 for awhile, they will prefer a phone that runs it to one running a better OS that they arent already familiar with.
Indeed. I was doing z80 assembly at age 9 and I didnt think it was difficult, I thought it was fun. Later I went to school and they told me I had to learn high level languages like C, and I didnt find them nearly as fun, so I went into other things.
"Inflation is a way to force extremely wealthy individuals to actively invest their money and put it to work, instead of just locking it into a vault and waiting for it to appreciate in value by keeping it out of circulation."
Nonsense. Extremely wealthy individuals have access to bright specialists to ensure that their money works for them and their money increases faster than inflation.
It's regular old folks who socked away a sum to retire on who actually get stuck paying the bill here.
Austrians are finally getting a little attention precisely because the last 100 years have actually proven them 100% correct. Breaking windows does not help the economy, no matter how happy it makes the window-maker.
The value of technology is truly enormous, yes, but it's not what money is used to measure. Money is medium *of exchange* and it is only the goods and services that are being exchanged which it needs to accomodate, not increases in general productivity due to improvement in technology, but only the tangible products of that productivity.
In a very real way, money is just like any other good. Even though we are used to thinking of all other goods as being valued in units of currency, the valuation works the same in reverse. It's just two ways of looking at the same problem. Any centralised monetary authority therefore falls prey to the calculation problem just as surely as centralised price setting for any other commodity does.
One thing I think we can agree with after reading your post is that there is, at any given time, a theoretical optimum level of money (or currency) in circulation, and the closer to that optimum level the actual level stays, the better the economy will work. But here's the problem. There is no way for a central authority to calculate that level correctly and in a timely manner, it's not difficult it is actually impossible. (In reality we have much bigger problems, it's inevitable that the central authority will wind up abusing its position rather than simply failing to function adequately, but that's another argument.)
It's a price problem, and the only known way to arrive at close approximations of proper price points reliably and quickly enough is through a market. With a market, you dont have a centralised authority, you have a large number of actors acting independently, each with specialised knowledge that is not accessible to the central authority. They are thus able, in aggregate, to do what the smartest and best informed man in the world would not be able to do - properly price commodities. Including money.
Right now the state has a legal monopoly on money. No one else is allowed to provide it. With no competition, there is no market. (And I know many nations have their own currency but they are all fiat currencies tied to the same corrupt banking system, no one is allowed to offer real money which cannot be inflated at will.)
Open up the market in money, and you will get a reasonable approximation of the optimum balance between inflation and deflation, because when there is too little inflation people will be motivated to find ways to provide more money, and when there is too much inflation they wont bother.
A way to provide more money, btw, could be any number of things. Historically it might have meant intensive mollusk cultivation, or expanded mining operations, but it doesnt have to be limited to those things. But in a similar way to how 0-cost email predictably created spam, 0-cost inflation is just too abusable for humans to handle.
One last thing, money is not only used as a unit of exchange but a unit of savings. Again, I think we agree there is an optimum level of savings, but the question is how to determine it. Top down here is a fatal conceit. The only fair and accurate way to determine this is from the bottom up - by a market valuation. The current system effectively drains value out of retirement accounts to fund wars. This is deeply unfair.
The flaws in this system? Well as I said, it's not perfect, but perfect isnt an option. The only real flaw I can see in it is that the powers that be wouldnt be able to enrich themselves from a priviliged position anymore, and thus they obviously arent going to let it happen anytime soon.
I am not working on that assumption and your impression is badly mistaken.
There is a point of balance between the growth in value (causing deflation) and the growth in currency (causing inflation.) The fallacy in our current system is the idea that an elite group of centralised planners with the power to create currency at will could or would keep those in balance.
Metallic money is not perfect, and if you think I think it is you badly underestimate my intelligence. But perfect is not an option, and it's better than fiat currency. In some ideal world where and all-knowing angel sits in the federal reserve and makes the decisions, maybe it could work. But we dont have angels, we have human beings.
The ideal situation is one where you have competing currencies based on whatever works - whether it is gold and silver or pork bellies and corn. But it needs to be based on something tangible - so that the supply cannot be inflated at will, else we are doomed to repeat the boom and bust cycle indefinitely, with tragic results.
If you think I think I 'have it all figured out' you are wrong. One thing I am very sure of is that the economy is more complex than any economists model of it.
This is one of the reasons why relying on central control doesnt work. Even if conflicts of interest and corruption werent issues centralised control of an economy still wont work because of calculation problems.
Hey, guess what? The 'error' you spotted and 'corrected' is not one of grammar. It's a matter of orthography. I wont even bother going into why it's not actually an error - you couldnt even get the basic subject matter correct.
You're referring more to TARP than the Fed. Quantitative easing via the Fed is for getting the economy going again. It's simply adding to the money supply so banks will lend more thereby stimulating GDP.
Nice contentless reply. You dont understand inflation, you dont understand how the numbers are massaged, and you couldnt even begin to explain the relationship between currency and value. But you can call me a conspiracy theorist, that should shut me up, right? Never mind that it makes no sense at all. Wave your hands and run away.
Do you understand that banker are creditors, who benefit from a strong currency? So if their unenlightened self interest is the opposite of what they are doing, why are they doing it?
Over the past 20 years the currency supply as estimated by the Fed themselves has gone from $400 billion to $3,000 billion dollars - a gain of $2,600 billion. That means 6.5 times more US currency than *existed* 20 years ago has been *added* to the supply since then, and that's *net* so gross numbers would be even bigger. That's a pretty huge slice of 'pie' even for the richest men on the planet. In the meantime the devaluing aspect that pays for this windfall is spread out evenly among everyone holding US dollars, while the enriching portion hits you alone, so you are taking a relatively small hit for a relatively large return. In sum, your thesis that this is against their self interest is simply ill-founded. Particularly considering that what matters to the very rich is not actual value (since they have more than they could need already) but rather proportional value (since this is the aspect of money that brings power, and at that level money really is only a tool for acquiring power.)
Except that inflation is near record lows, despite trillions in new money. When unemployment is at 10% and factory utilization is below 80%, there is plenty of slack for "new money" to create real value by putting labor and capital to work.
Except that your numbers are heavily massaged for propaganda purposes and dont actually resemble reality. Unemployment numbers only count people that lost their jobs recently (the chronically unemployed become invisible this way) and only people that have no work at all (so people that lose good jobs and have them 'replaced' with minimum wage jobs that they cannot live on dont count as unemployed either.) 'Our' factory utilisation is low because 'we' are busy moving those jobs overseas.
Bryant, for all his flaws and mistakes, was advocating a bimetallic monetary standard, not fiat currency, and your citation of him seems a bit gratuitous.
Even overcooked it is hardly a great food. And cooking does nothing to mitigate the health threat of living pigs in the area. Pigs are noted for how similar their flesh is to that of humans - this is why they are so useful in medical research aimed at human ailments, and also why it is relatively easy for diseases to cross the species boundary - in either direction. A pig stye in the neighborhood is a considerably more serious threat to public health than, say, cattle, goat, or sheep husbandry would pose.
There is ample reason to think that pork tastes like human flesh as well. Havent sampled the long pig myself and not recommending it, but historical records indicate that when cannibals are no longer able to procure it they universally determine pork to the be the only substitute. This has happened in Mexico and Papua in very different time frames. So there is certainly a potential spiritual issue as well for those that think 'bacon is delicious.'
There is plenty of apparently crazy stuff in the Torah to blame G_d for without dissing one of the rules that DO make sense both scientifically and spiritually.
I did not in any way suggest surrendering anything. You rant nonsense. It's not a fallacy - it's not that good! You arent even making sense, you are just drooling hatred.
"We" dont do any of this. A cabal of the best connected and wealthiest bankers in the country do it, in private, as they see fit, and we get no say. When they inflate the currency, they dont create new value - they just suck some of the value out of the old currency. And then they get to spend the new currency. Great scam. Of course they try to restrain their greed enough to keep the inflation at a level where the increase in GDP can mask it - they dont want to be set on with torches and pitchforks any more than anyone else does.
Slashdot Mirror
"The point is that liberty is about freedom, and freedom is founded on rights. "
Absolutely true.
" The right not to be hungry. The right to healthcare. The right to education. The right to vote. The right to work. The right to warmth, clothing and shelter. The right to be protected and looked after when you are flooded, your home destroyed, or your land invaded, or you or your family merely get old, or sick."
Absolutely false.
None of those are rights. None of them could conceivably be rights outside of a system which allows for human slavery and some people having rights that others do not have.
The right not to be hungry? No. The right to pursue an honest living without interference, yes. Notice the difference?
If you had a 'right' to not be hungry the only way that could be translated into reality would be as an obligation for someone else to feed you. Which would violate their rights. That farmer has a right to pursue his own living, which includes selling his produce, and he cant exactly be free to sell it if it was already forcefully taken from him to satisfy someone elses 'right to not be hungry' now can he?
"The right to healthcare." No, the right to contract for the services of health care providers without interference.
Again, the doctor has a right to pursue his living as well. He does that by charging for his services. If I had a right to his services, that would be perilously close to simply making him my slave. If I need health care and I dont want to pay for it, he just has to give it to me anyway, after all it's my 'right,' right? No.
"The right to education." No. The right to seek education without interference - not the right to force people to educate you for free.
What is preventing you from seeing where liberty lies here is nothing other than a faulty definition - one that has been pushed for many years precisely to do what I see it doing here - to prevent people from even thinking about rights clearly. Just make a list of all the things that would be good to have, and call them 'rights.' But they arent rights. Rights are very specific things. Misusing the word like this simply strips it of meaning and makes the entire conversation nonsense.
"Taxation creates jobs"
Uh, no. That's the broken window fallacy. Taxation redirects capital from productive work to unproductive, which is always going to cause a net loss of demand in the labour market. Yes, you put some people to work in the areas that you mentioned, and that is plainly visible and obvious. What is less obvious is the opportunity cost of that spending, but it's nonetheless quite real. The taxation reduces the demand for labour by more than the hiring can replace.
"I guess that there's nothing that distances the US from western europe more than the attitude towards taxation"
Having spent a few years in western Europe I am inclined to agree with you.
You talk about the money going to help the less fortunate. I can see how you might think that, in Europe where some portion of that money probably does do that, but much does not.
The more important issue, however, is one of consent. There are plenty of good charities that would be happy to have your voluntary donation. They do good works far more efficiently than any government, and they have to - if they dont those who donate can simply quit giving and the organisation will be dead.
Governments dont ask for donations, they dont need to please you or impress you or even give you the time of day, they claim a 'right' to simply take your money anytime they like, as any thief would. They've been doing it for centuries and everyone is used to it by now but if you look at it logically, what do you call someone that takes your money without your consent? A thief, pure and simple.
If you are lucky they may do some good with it. And I am told many pickpockets give to charity. It does not justify their thievery.
" I cannot believe that anyone who has substantially lived in a country that offers universal healthcare would ever dream of going back to any other system, regardless of the fact that such a system entails taxation."
Believe it. I had (still have actually, if I wanted to go back) full access to one of the top rated medical systems in western Europe. I had to use it a few times and I am quite familiar with that system. I will grant it's not the worst system imaginable (that crown goes to the current bastardized version we have here in the US) but I would still happily give it up in return for my freedom to seek medical care on my own terms without interference, a basic human right which NO industrialised nation currently respects.
I think you're horribly confused. Libertarians dont just expect everyone to do what's right (although we believe such behaviour should be rewarded rather than pilloried) and we advocate good old fashioned law enforcement to deal with those who break the rules. How this turns into what you posted is one of the mysteries of the human mind.
The free staters have nothing to do with the RNC. They're mortal enemies, in fact.
Treason? Yes. Applies to all the other people (most or all more senior and thus more culpable) that were aware of this and did NOT do what Snowden did. Those are your traitors.
Official channels are worse than useless when the corruption is top-down.
It's accurate and well placed although he could have been clearer. The traditional free market approach to pollution is the tort system. Strict liability does indeed imply everyone has a right to reasonably clean air and any person that pollutes that air is subject to civil penalties. This traditional system was over-ridden with a regulatory regime instead during industrialisation, not to protect the environment, but to protect business investment. And this is still the scheme we use today. The regulators decide what a 'reasonable' amount of pollution for a given business is and as long as that business abides those limit it is immune to being sued for the damages it is doing. A strict liability system like free-market advocates advocate for would amount to much stricter environmental protection than any system of regulation will produce.
I dont think any of these suggestions hold water looking at the total distribution and the size of the sample. This isnt a small sample, it's simply too large to see that sort of distribution without some sort of systematic explanation. It seems to me obvious that the scores have been altered systematically. It would have to have been in accord with some sort of policy and it would have to be pretty strictly enforced for there to be no exceptions in that large a data set. I dont know what the policy is or whether or not it is ultimately legit, but it certainly looks like something that bears investigating. If the national testing body is systematically altering scores it seems like something the public in that country would have a right to know about, and something they should be required to defend in public rather than simply doing secretly.
Because they imagine that they will be able to force their way into a controlling share of other markets (phone and tablets) by wielding their desktop position like a club. If they refuse to sell older OSs that people like, then people will just have to get Win8. And once they use Win8 for awhile, they will prefer a phone that runs it to one running a better OS that they arent already familiar with.
The scary thing is it might work.
That man is a hacker. (Using that word properly.)
Exactly.
Indeed. I was doing z80 assembly at age 9 and I didnt think it was difficult, I thought it was fun. Later I went to school and they told me I had to learn high level languages like C, and I didnt find them nearly as fun, so I went into other things.
"Inflation is a way to force extremely wealthy individuals to actively invest their money and put it to work, instead of just locking it into a vault and waiting for it to appreciate in value by keeping it out of circulation."
Nonsense. Extremely wealthy individuals have access to bright specialists to ensure that their money works for them and their money increases faster than inflation.
It's regular old folks who socked away a sum to retire on who actually get stuck paying the bill here.
Austrians are finally getting a little attention precisely because the last 100 years have actually proven them 100% correct. Breaking windows does not help the economy, no matter how happy it makes the window-maker.
The value of technology is truly enormous, yes, but it's not what money is used to measure. Money is medium *of exchange* and it is only the goods and services that are being exchanged which it needs to accomodate, not increases in general productivity due to improvement in technology, but only the tangible products of that productivity.
In a very real way, money is just like any other good. Even though we are used to thinking of all other goods as being valued in units of currency, the valuation works the same in reverse. It's just two ways of looking at the same problem. Any centralised monetary authority therefore falls prey to the calculation problem just as surely as centralised price setting for any other commodity does.
One thing I think we can agree with after reading your post is that there is, at any given time, a theoretical optimum level of money (or currency) in circulation, and the closer to that optimum level the actual level stays, the better the economy will work. But here's the problem. There is no way for a central authority to calculate that level correctly and in a timely manner, it's not difficult it is actually impossible. (In reality we have much bigger problems, it's inevitable that the central authority will wind up abusing its position rather than simply failing to function adequately, but that's another argument.)
It's a price problem, and the only known way to arrive at close approximations of proper price points reliably and quickly enough is through a market. With a market, you dont have a centralised authority, you have a large number of actors acting independently, each with specialised knowledge that is not accessible to the central authority. They are thus able, in aggregate, to do what the smartest and best informed man in the world would not be able to do - properly price commodities. Including money.
Right now the state has a legal monopoly on money. No one else is allowed to provide it. With no competition, there is no market. (And I know many nations have their own currency but they are all fiat currencies tied to the same corrupt banking system, no one is allowed to offer real money which cannot be inflated at will.)
Open up the market in money, and you will get a reasonable approximation of the optimum balance between inflation and deflation, because when there is too little inflation people will be motivated to find ways to provide more money, and when there is too much inflation they wont bother.
A way to provide more money, btw, could be any number of things. Historically it might have meant intensive mollusk cultivation, or expanded mining operations, but it doesnt have to be limited to those things. But in a similar way to how 0-cost email predictably created spam, 0-cost inflation is just too abusable for humans to handle.
One last thing, money is not only used as a unit of exchange but a unit of savings. Again, I think we agree there is an optimum level of savings, but the question is how to determine it. Top down here is a fatal conceit. The only fair and accurate way to determine this is from the bottom up - by a market valuation. The current system effectively drains value out of retirement accounts to fund wars. This is deeply unfair.
The flaws in this system? Well as I said, it's not perfect, but perfect isnt an option. The only real flaw I can see in it is that the powers that be wouldnt be able to enrich themselves from a priviliged position anymore, and thus they obviously arent going to let it happen anytime soon.
I am not working on that assumption and your impression is badly mistaken.
There is a point of balance between the growth in value (causing deflation) and the growth in currency (causing inflation.) The fallacy in our current system is the idea that an elite group of centralised planners with the power to create currency at will could or would keep those in balance.
Metallic money is not perfect, and if you think I think it is you badly underestimate my intelligence. But perfect is not an option, and it's better than fiat currency. In some ideal world where and all-knowing angel sits in the federal reserve and makes the decisions, maybe it could work. But we dont have angels, we have human beings.
The ideal situation is one where you have competing currencies based on whatever works - whether it is gold and silver or pork bellies and corn. But it needs to be based on something tangible - so that the supply cannot be inflated at will, else we are doomed to repeat the boom and bust cycle indefinitely, with tragic results.
If you think I think I 'have it all figured out' you are wrong. One thing I am very sure of is that the economy is more complex than any economists model of it.
This is one of the reasons why relying on central control doesnt work. Even if conflicts of interest and corruption werent issues centralised control of an economy still wont work because of calculation problems.
Hey, guess what? The 'error' you spotted and 'corrected' is not one of grammar. It's a matter of orthography. I wont even bother going into why it's not actually an error - you couldnt even get the basic subject matter correct.
The economy is not a car, there's no engine to stall. No expert can fix it, there's no 'it' at all. The economy is US, we dont need a mechanic. Put away the wrenches, the economy is organic.
Nice contentless reply. You dont understand inflation, you dont understand how the numbers are massaged, and you couldnt even begin to explain the relationship between currency and value. But you can call me a conspiracy theorist, that should shut me up, right? Never mind that it makes no sense at all. Wave your hands and run away.
Over the past 20 years the currency supply as estimated by the Fed themselves has gone from $400 billion to $3,000 billion dollars - a gain of $2,600 billion. That means 6.5 times more US currency than *existed* 20 years ago has been *added* to the supply since then, and that's *net* so gross numbers would be even bigger. That's a pretty huge slice of 'pie' even for the richest men on the planet. In the meantime the devaluing aspect that pays for this windfall is spread out evenly among everyone holding US dollars, while the enriching portion hits you alone, so you are taking a relatively small hit for a relatively large return. In sum, your thesis that this is against their self interest is simply ill-founded. Particularly considering that what matters to the very rich is not actual value (since they have more than they could need already) but rather proportional value (since this is the aspect of money that brings power, and at that level money really is only a tool for acquiring power.)
Except that your numbers are heavily massaged for propaganda purposes and dont actually resemble reality. Unemployment numbers only count people that lost their jobs recently (the chronically unemployed become invisible this way) and only people that have no work at all (so people that lose good jobs and have them 'replaced' with minimum wage jobs that they cannot live on dont count as unemployed either.) 'Our' factory utilisation is low because 'we' are busy moving those jobs overseas.
Bryant, for all his flaws and mistakes, was advocating a bimetallic monetary standard, not fiat currency, and your citation of him seems a bit gratuitous.
Even overcooked it is hardly a great food. And cooking does nothing to mitigate the health threat of living pigs in the area. Pigs are noted for how similar their flesh is to that of humans - this is why they are so useful in medical research aimed at human ailments, and also why it is relatively easy for diseases to cross the species boundary - in either direction. A pig stye in the neighborhood is a considerably more serious threat to public health than, say, cattle, goat, or sheep husbandry would pose.
There is ample reason to think that pork tastes like human flesh as well. Havent sampled the long pig myself and not recommending it, but historical records indicate that when cannibals are no longer able to procure it they universally determine pork to the be the only substitute. This has happened in Mexico and Papua in very different time frames. So there is certainly a potential spiritual issue as well for those that think 'bacon is delicious.'
There is plenty of apparently crazy stuff in the Torah to blame G_d for without dissing one of the rules that DO make sense both scientifically and spiritually.
I did not in any way suggest surrendering anything. You rant nonsense. It's not a fallacy - it's not that good! You arent even making sense, you are just drooling hatred.
You must make yourself very sad.
"We" dont do any of this. A cabal of the best connected and wealthiest bankers in the country do it, in private, as they see fit, and we get no say. When they inflate the currency, they dont create new value - they just suck some of the value out of the old currency. And then they get to spend the new currency. Great scam. Of course they try to restrain their greed enough to keep the inflation at a level where the increase in GDP can mask it - they dont want to be set on with torches and pitchforks any more than anyone else does.