Except it wasn't. Wages were reduced (by National Labor Board, or some such), which allowed unemployment to go down. And Federal Reserve stopped strangling the economy by keeping low money supply.
Those two critical factors dwarfed everything else in economy. Even increase in govt spending wasn't as important.
>The Government quite literally quadrupled spending
Spending on what? Weapons? That also makes a difference, as opposed to previous spending on jobless hacks to break up good pavement and lay a new one.
To produce viable weapons, *real* infrastructure has to be built. That's another difference.
To compare war spending and New Deal is a huge misunderstanding.
>>and took full control of the economy, even to the point of regulating wages and dictating output. If you want to argue WW2 pulled the US out of the Depression, then you're just saying the New Deal was too small.
Nope. It's not the size that matters, it's the actual policies. How you use it.:-)
"One of the biggest strength of the Chinese government right now is that it can leverage a massive and widespread feeling in the population that the West is treating China unfairly and more like a stupid dog than an equal nation"
People who make claims like "a hundred years of tyranny is better than one day of anarchy" deserve no better.
"FOSS is not capitalism, or communism. Both are economic systems based on scarcity and information by its nature is not scarce."
Oh but it is scarce. The marginal cost of information is zero (for practical purposes), but its production cost is very high.
Had *everything* gone FOSS, we'd instantly experience huge fall in production of certain kinds of IP: popular books, movies, etc.
Sure, FOSS would still run along nicely. But as it is mostly not impacted by financial supply and demand, it would not get produced in significantly higher quantities to make up for loss of IP produced in response to financial stimuli. So, the entire volume / time of information production would have fallen.
"Heh. That's pretty much accurate, and may give headaches to the economic liberals here."
Weird, I'm an economic (classical) liberal, and neither WalMart nor FOSS give me headaches. On the contrary, from my viewpoint both are perfect examples of near-perfect efficiency of markets.
"And "alleged" is key. Thought experiment: In a parallel world, free software never became popular; if somebody wants a website they have to pay thousands of dollars for HTTP servers, compilers, scripting tools, and databases. Is their demand for programmers higher or lower than in our world?"
Overally, the demand would be *lower*.
The structure of demand would have changed: there would be some more people employed in development infrastructural software (compilers, HTTP servers, OS, etc), and *a lot* fewer employed in PHP website development, application servers development, websites, service companies, media, etc.
In the short run, the same amount of money spent on software would go the shorter distance from the bottom of software stack to the top.
In the long run, the economic growth would be dampened and in consequence both total wealth in the society and the total $ going to developers' pockets would be lower.
And, although I am loath to defend communism, the communist countries at least worked after a fashion (hell, they even managed to put a dude into space). They worked nowhere near as well as ours, but they struggled along like a badly made car.
They didn't work. I was born in one. This is not to say I knew everything, but believe me, there was even less to them than met your eye. Hell, an old-style monarchy wouldn't be as bad. Serious.
On the other hand, there is no example of a modern economy being entirely run on free market principles that has actually managed to sustain itself.
That's only because people are immoral: they *love* political rent-seeking. They crave it, dream about it, want it and prefer it to real opportunity, happiness and professional and personal fulfillment.
This probably has smth to do with Maslow's hierarchy of needs: security is the most basic of needs. So people will take measly and miserly security delivered by feudal-socialist state over happiness derived from hard work and pursuit of happiness in a free-market economy.
Canada's main exports are raw materials (oil and lumber) and its main imports are knowledge and people (immigrants). It's a mix of Third World economy, state simulation of socialist delusion, progressive naiviety and increasing practical problems.
See nice comment here:
"In conclusion, I'm not optimistic about Canada for various reasons--from the recent Chinese enthusiasm for buying up the country's resources to the ongoing brain drain--but also for a reason more profound. The biggest difference between Canada and the U.S. is not that you crazy, violent, psycho Yanks have guns and we caring, progressive Canucks have socialized health care, but that America has a healthy fertility rate and we don't. Americans have 2.1 children per couple, which is enough to maintain a stable population, whereas according to the latest official figures, Canadian couples have only 1.5. This puts us on the brink of steep demographic decline. Consider the math: 10 million parents have 7.5 million children, 5.6 million grandchildren, and 4.2 million great-grandchildren. You can imagine what shape those lavish Canadian social programs will be in under that scenario, and that's before your average teenage burger-flipper gets tired of supporting entire gated communities and decides he'd rather head south than pay 70 percent tax rates.
So, to produce the children we couldn't be bothered having ourselves, we use the developing world as our maternity ward. Between 2001 and 2006, Canada's population increased by 1.6 million. 400,000 came from natural population growth kids, while 1.2 million came from immigration. Thus native Canadians--already only amounting to 25 percent of the country's population growth--will become an ever smaller minority in the Canada of the future. It's like a company in which you hold an ever diminishing percentage of the stock. It might still be a great, successful company in the years ahead, but if it is, it won't have much--if anything--to do with you.
In that most basic sense, American progressives who look to Canada are wrong. Not only is Canada's path not a model for America, it's not a viable model for Canada. As Canadians are about to discover, the future belongs to those who show up for it."
Ahh. You begin to understand the meaning of "socialism".
Really? It's about sharing money/costs? And I thought socialism was about "collective ownership of means of production". Do smth to do away with fuzzy thinking.
By spreading the cost out among everybody, rather than just the people who use the service, you can reduce the overall cost for everybody.
Only if you keep quality, worker and company motivation and costs equal between those two systems more or less the same. You implicitly apply a principle called ceteris paribus (given all other things equal...). The problem is it doesn't apply: in political system such as this, ultimately costs are sure to rise, quality and quantity are sure to plummet.
You ARE evil, because you are collectivist. Humans are essentially individual, not collective (so called "eusocial") animals. Your culture runs contrary to that principle. That makes you no-funny-face evil.
You've made it pretty clear that you don't understand public goods.
You've made it pretty clear you don't understand consequences of public goods being delivered in POLITICAL way, and consequences of private goods delivery done in MARKET way.
There are critical differences between those two ways. To make long story short, political way doesn't work (iron law of oligarchy, nepotism, rent seeking, corruption, etc make for pretty grim and poisonous social mixture), on top of being totally contrary to liberty, free choice of individual and ultimately tyrannical.
Moral arguments don't matter to collectivists like you which are inherently demoralized, so I'm using arguments focused on social utility, but everyone else, please notice the immoral overhead that politics imposes on practical organization of "public" goods.
Exactly. I'd gladly pay $5 a month to download all the music I want, as long as the supply and quality is there.
Quantity and quality are exactly what would not be there.
Think Soviet-style economy: persistent shortages, govt tax resources distributed to pals, nephews and politically connected, 99% miserly quality punctuated by occasional high quality exceptions produced by total idealists until they run out of steam of running it all only on sentiment, constantly rising prices and confused consumers wondering why they are getting less and less for paying more and more (must be not enough social justice! they typically think in Canada).
That's what e.g. Canadian science and culture already closely resembles.
How about, because one day, I may get sick, and then the health system is going to be there for me when I need it.
The Canadian way makes sure it will _not_ be there:
Remarkably, Kuehl's proposal to socialize California's health care is being made just at the time when the Canadian system it resembles is falling apart at the seams. For instance, Canada's single payer system is projected to absorb more than half the budgets of most Canadian provinces. In addition, the amount of time a Canadian patient must wait before receiving medical care is notorious. "This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years," said Dr. Brian Day in a recent New York Times article on Canada's health care crisis.
"Government should be much more than that. Please explain why it is wrong for the government to do good things."
I elaborated on this but what the hell happened to my comment? Did I forget to push submit or whatever?
Oh, anyway, to summarize quickly - since government is merely superposition of political interests (mostly incumbents), it's inherently reactionary in the sense it exists just to conserve those interests. The business of govt is power & coercion, e.g. war, not happiness of citizens.
To believe that govt exists to represent interests of citizens is a romantic theory of politics. There is no factual reason just why would (not: should) govt do that. Checks and balances would not be necessary had the power that is checked and balanced were fundamentally friendly. And a small group of dogooders that try to pull govt in other direction systematically learns the hard way about perverse operation of law of unintended consequences. This is because politics and reality are totally divorced. E.g. Reagan put it well, talking about Johnson's "war on poverty", "they declared war on poverty and poverty won".
"When you look the meddling in Central and South American affairs, it would appear that's exactly what we have. A conquest perpetrated by the bankers, north and south...well, mostly east."
Oh bullcrap. This is result of Monroe Doctrine, not bankers.
"By the way, if the purpose of goverment is to perpetuate policy, then do you think it was wrong for the US government to abolish slavery? After all, if perpetuation of policy is what they are supposed to do, then discontinuing this policy would be something they shouldn't have done."
Given the interest of slaveowners - factual and prospective, don't forget them - and given that the govt represented them as well, it definitely should have continued support for slavery. Which it did, until it was forced by northern military not to. In our eyes that was evil. In their eyes, complicated and bizarre explanations were made why it was justified.
"The first lie addresses a glaring question: If the South fought the war to preserve chattel slavery, what possessed the 80-90 percent of southerners who owned no slaves to die for a practice from which they drew no immediate benefit? Professor Gary W Gallagher (The Confederate War, Cambridge 1997) represents the scholarly side of this myth, while popular fiction and films such as Gods and Generals dish it out to the broad public. That does not wash; one does not register 40 percent casualty rates for sentimental reasons. Catastrophic casualties pile up when a conqueror rallies greedy men to his banner. Ask the half-million men who marched to Moscow in 1812 under Napoleon Bonaparte's banner why they fought for an emperor, although they had no empire of their own. Napoleon said it best: Every soldier carried a field marshal's baton in his rucksack. The same apples to Alexander of Macedonia, Mohammed and his successors, the Thirty Years' War General Albrecht von Wallenstein (1583-1634), Francisco Villa during the Mexican civil war of 1910-18, the Germans during World War II, and so forth.
The unpleasant fact is that Southerners who had no slaves hoped eventually to get some, and fought for the Confederacy for the same reason that Napoleon's freebooters fought for the emperor. In fact, Southerners had been fighting for the right to bring slaves to new territories for a generation prior to the outbreak of war, in Kansas and elsewhere. Cotton, their principal cash crop, exhausted the soil in a decade's planting, and the planter took his slaves and moved on. Slavery and the Southern economic system would choke to death without expansion. Had the South formed an independent state, it would have embarked on a campaign of conquest and imposed slavery on the whole southern half of the Western Hemisphere. "
"Sure, there is plenty of work to do to make Linux (or *BSD) a more competitive alternative to Windows or OS X, but AFAIAC, the groundwork is nearly finished."
What's missing is some sort of self-repair functionality - one guy for whom I installed Linux for free gave it up (it was Mandriva I think) because a link to floppy disk on his desktop broke and he didn't know how to fix that, which pretty much made him dislike the entire package.
Self-repair for Linux desktop would be cool and relatively simple to program, if tedious - say, make some "diagnostics-oriented mini-language" and run scripts to fix broken video driver, KDE settings, broken floppy drive shortcut, missing FUSE group ownership, etc.
And you probably think that bulshitter Gramsci is insightful.
Everyone has their favorite narcotic. Your evident sentiments aren't any better, they are worse than The Economist, which is often boring exactly because it is so true.
"I've heard that it's "the year of desktop Linux" since Redhat 5 and experience has taught me to wait for actual proof on that claim."
What you say is true but not the whole picture - I've heard it since the days of Abiword and Gnumeric that it's alternative for MS Office. Sure it's been wishful thinking. But, and it's a big but, things are definitely and demonstrably going up -- just because things are at level of OO 2 and Kubuntu doesn't mean they'll stay there. Since things are going up, some day in future they will reach the point of "good enough". OO2 at the moment has the problem of slow recalculating graphs. Some people I know gave it up for Excel just for this single reason. Had things stayed static, what you write would have been true. But things are not static.
In many cases good enough & cheap kills better. Sure I like Mac OS X better, but I'm not willing to pay enough, so I run Kubuntu at my home (not at the moment though).
This "el cheapo" prediction just might become true, because trends certainly indicate that. Linux on desktop used to be wishful thinking, but it just might become true.
To summarize, the typical market formation of oligopoly will probably be formed, with, say 80% of "good enough, cheap" market belonging to smth like Ubuntu/x86, and 20% of market belonging to "fancy, polished and pricey" belonging to Mac OS X.
In many cases I suspect this duopoly will even be present in many homes, say, Mac OS X on father's workstation used for professional purposes and cheap Linux box for a kid, or some other combo of this kind.
"It's the gridlock that gives the illusion of safety, and allows perpetuation bad policy"
Excuse me, but _policy perpetuation_ is exactly the point and purpose of govt. It's called stability, or "not exchanging bad for worse".
Whether policy is good or bad depends on whom you ask. Almost never you get agreement on that. Everyone goes after their gut reflexes, not after "good laws". Trying to make good laws is pointless. What one should be trying is making the laws that don't harm.
"I'm skeptical about that. I would think that it results in only the creation of bad, authoritarian laws - and prevents the creation of good ones. "
There's no such thing as a good law.
Laws are supposedly about survival, about keeping something bad from developing, say, tyranny, war, military coup'd etat, white collar crime, stealing tax money, etc. Laws are reactive, not proactive, and they are about keeping safe locked, not building something new. If laws were productive, Soviet Union which had a lot of laws, would be functioning better than US.
It is fundamental misunderstanding that laws are created for sake of your wellbeing, satisfaction or happiness. Most that can be said about laws is that they try to limit damage.
It's only the left that in their near-infinite stupidity try to make social mechs out of law and treat law as prerequisite to social utility.
Re:connection of declining intelligence to liberal
on
Capitol Hill Quiet On Tech
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"They never adhere to a fundamentally fallacious economic policy which ignores such basic concepts as moral hazard."
This is favorite gut reflex of left-liberals (there's nothing classically liberal about contemporary "liberals", they are sort of libertines in favor of government regulating hedonism, everyone gets their share of tax-funded orgasmic experiences).
"They never try to mingle church and state."
Ever met conservatives that _really, actually try or argue_ to do that? You just wrote vague innuendo. And I'm not even conservative, just a plain vanilla libertarian.
As someone insightfully noted, western theocrats do happen, but they are rarer than hen's teeth. State your facts, not your hysteries and hatreds.
"They never try to "protect us from ourselves" by outlawing common everyday activities"
Like what? Riding a bike without a helmet? Smoking? Eating fat foods? Doing a business? Drinking, except for adolescents?
About the only common activity that conservatives try to outlaw is dope.
Again, you're just a gut-motivated maniac, not a fact researcher.
"They never try to protect our freedom by destroying it through such authoritarian policies as: ----requiring permits for protests and limiting them to "free speech zones". ----allowing warrantless wiretaps and sifting of people's emails, then trying to pass ex post facto laws to protect a president who performed them. ----blackballing dissenters/opposition to their policies, and even going so far as to label them as "enemy combatants" and "disappear" them to gitmo. ----demanding the establishment of a "papers please" society."
This is what the left wants. Tony Blair in UK has established exactly such a society, perfectly controlled so the kid's parents could be fined if they don't give the kid fruits three times a day. The left is after social utility, "social justice", not liberty, freedom of speech, etc. These are all secondary or tertiary priorities to the left, what matters to the left is that everyone behaves in a manner loved and prescribed by the left. They are after the full stomach of their beloved puppies, so tyranny and totalitarianism are not a measure that the left will abstain from.
In contrast, conservatives are after _small_ govt, limited to military and security, domestic and external. So their state is limited, so like a typical liar you ignore the totalitarian tendencies of left and overblow conservatives' tendencies.
Most of this "homeland security" nonsense was done by Bush only because unfortunately, voters expected security first and foremost. So it was done by conservatives for political reasons, but exactly opposite to what you try to suggest, they don't really like it.
"In truth, I see the government as a rather accurate reflection of our collective selves and is actually serving us quite well."
Neat theory, except I don't see how it's based on any facts really. Just _why_ should it be a reflection? Elections alone can't provide this, words are cheap. Checks and balances are not set upon something that is fundamentally friendly to you, they wouldn't need to be there in the first place had this power been friendly. Fact is, they are necessary exactly because power corrupts, and today govts have a lot of power.
"It makes a very good mirror."
Really? Do you know many replicas of Billary Clinton? Or Hillary? Or, say, George W. Bush around? People who act and are in positions of power like that? Apparently we are all power brokers?
Note: my personal hero is Ronald Reagan. But I don't pretend he was a reflection of "us all". On domestic front he didn't even do much that was expected by his supporters that elected him.
"As such I can't complain about the job it is doing."
Except your premise is incorrect.
"I give it an A+."
Oh please... That's just pretending bad cards you're holding in your hand are good just because you don't have it any better.
Slashdot Mirror
> WW2 was the New Deal on steroids.
Except it wasn't. Wages were reduced (by National Labor Board, or some such), which allowed unemployment to go down. And Federal Reserve stopped strangling the economy by keeping low money supply.
Those two critical factors dwarfed everything else in economy. Even increase in govt spending wasn't as important.
>The Government quite literally quadrupled spending
Spending on what? Weapons? That also makes a difference, as opposed to previous spending on jobless hacks to break up good pavement and lay a new one.
To produce viable weapons, *real* infrastructure has to be built. That's another difference.
To compare war spending and New Deal is a huge misunderstanding.
>>and took full control of the economy, even to the point of regulating wages and dictating output. If you want to argue WW2 pulled the US out of the Depression, then you're just saying the New Deal was too small.
Nope. It's not the size that matters, it's the actual policies. How you use it. :-)
"One of the biggest strength of the Chinese government right now is that it can leverage a massive and widespread feeling in the population that the West is treating China unfairly and more like a stupid dog than an equal nation"
People who make claims like "a hundred years of tyranny is better than one day of anarchy" deserve no better.
"FOSS is not capitalism, or communism. Both are economic systems based on scarcity and information by its nature is not scarce."
Oh but it is scarce. The marginal cost of information is zero (for practical purposes), but its production cost is very high.
Had *everything* gone FOSS, we'd instantly experience huge fall in production of certain kinds of IP: popular books, movies, etc.
Sure, FOSS would still run along nicely. But as it is mostly not impacted by financial supply and demand, it would not get produced in significantly higher quantities to make up for loss of IP produced in response to financial stimuli. So, the entire volume / time of information production would have fallen.
"Heh. That's pretty much accurate, and may give headaches to the economic liberals here."
Weird, I'm an economic (classical) liberal, and neither WalMart nor FOSS give me headaches. On the contrary, from my viewpoint both are perfect examples of near-perfect efficiency of markets.
"And "alleged" is key. Thought experiment: In a parallel world, free software never became popular; if somebody wants a website they have to pay thousands of dollars for HTTP servers, compilers, scripting tools, and databases. Is their demand for programmers higher or lower than in our world?"
Overally, the demand would be *lower*.
The structure of demand would have changed: there would be some more people employed in development infrastructural software (compilers, HTTP servers, OS, etc), and *a lot* fewer employed in PHP website development, application servers development, websites, service companies, media, etc.
In the short run, the same amount of money spent on software would go the shorter distance from the bottom of software stack to the top.
In the long run, the economic growth would be dampened and in consequence both total wealth in the society and the total $ going to developers' pockets would be lower.
Does it have Linux onboard? If it's not ran by Linux I don't want it.
And, although I am loath to defend communism, the communist countries at least worked after a fashion (hell, they even managed to put a dude into space). They worked nowhere near as well as ours, but they struggled along like a badly made car.
They didn't work. I was born in one. This is not to say I knew everything, but believe me, there was even less to them than met your eye. Hell, an old-style monarchy wouldn't be as bad. Serious.
On the other hand, there is no example of a modern economy being entirely run on free market principles that has actually managed to sustain itself.
That's only because people are immoral: they *love* political rent-seeking. They crave it, dream about it, want it and prefer it to real opportunity, happiness and professional and personal fulfillment.
This probably has smth to do with Maslow's hierarchy of needs: security is the most basic of needs. So people will take measly and miserly security delivered by feudal-socialist state over happiness derived from hard work and pursuit of happiness in a free-market economy.
Canada's main exports are raw materials (oil and lumber) and its main imports are knowledge and people (immigrants). It's a mix of Third World economy, state simulation of socialist delusion, progressive naiviety and increasing practical problems.
See nice comment here:
"In conclusion, I'm not optimistic about Canada for various reasons--from the recent Chinese enthusiasm for buying up the country's resources to the ongoing brain drain--but also for a reason more profound. The biggest difference between Canada and the U.S. is not that you crazy, violent, psycho Yanks have guns and we caring, progressive Canucks have socialized health care, but that America has a healthy fertility rate and we don't. Americans have 2.1 children per couple, which is enough to maintain a stable population, whereas according to the latest official figures, Canadian couples have only 1.5. This puts us on the brink of steep demographic decline. Consider the math: 10 million parents have 7.5 million children, 5.6 million grandchildren, and 4.2 million great-grandchildren. You can imagine what shape those lavish Canadian social programs will be in under that scenario, and that's before your average teenage burger-flipper gets tired of supporting entire gated communities and decides he'd rather head south than pay 70 percent tax rates.
So, to produce the children we couldn't be bothered having ourselves, we use the developing world as our maternity ward. Between 2001 and 2006, Canada's population increased by 1.6 million. 400,000 came from natural population growth kids, while 1.2 million came from immigration. Thus native Canadians--already only amounting to 25 percent of the country's population growth--will become an ever smaller minority in the Canada of the future. It's like a company in which you hold an ever diminishing percentage of the stock. It might still be a great, successful company in the years ahead, but if it is, it won't have much--if anything--to do with you.
In that most basic sense, American progressives who look to Canada are wrong. Not only is Canada's path not a model for America, it's not a viable model for Canada. As Canadians are about to discover, the future belongs to those who show up for it."
http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis.asp
http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis.asp
Ahh. You begin to understand the meaning of "socialism".
Really? It's about sharing money/costs? And I thought socialism was about "collective ownership of means of production". Do smth to do away with fuzzy thinking.
By spreading the cost out among everybody, rather than just the people who use the service, you can reduce the overall cost for everybody.
Only if you keep quality, worker and company motivation and costs equal between those two systems more or less the same. You implicitly apply a principle called ceteris paribus (given all other things equal...). The problem is it doesn't apply: in political system such as this, ultimately costs are sure to rise, quality and quantity are sure to plummet.
And we all know how evil we canadians are.
You ARE evil, because you are collectivist. Humans are essentially individual, not collective (so called "eusocial") animals. Your culture runs contrary to that principle. That makes you no-funny-face evil.
You've made it pretty clear that you don't understand public goods.
You've made it pretty clear you don't understand consequences of public goods being delivered in POLITICAL way, and consequences of private goods delivery done in MARKET way.
There are critical differences between those two ways. To make long story short, political way doesn't work (iron law of oligarchy, nepotism, rent seeking, corruption, etc make for pretty grim and poisonous social mixture), on top of being totally contrary to liberty, free choice of individual and ultimately tyrannical.
Moral arguments don't matter to collectivists like you which are inherently demoralized, so I'm using arguments focused on social utility, but everyone else, please notice the immoral overhead that politics imposes on practical organization of "public" goods.
Exactly. I'd gladly pay $5 a month to download all the music I want, as long as the supply and quality is there.
Quantity and quality are exactly what would not be there.
Think Soviet-style economy: persistent shortages, govt tax resources distributed to pals, nephews and politically connected, 99% miserly quality punctuated by occasional high quality exceptions produced by total idealists until they run out of steam of running it all only on sentiment, constantly rising prices and confused consumers wondering why they are getting less and less for paying more and more (must be not enough social justice! they typically think in Canada).
That's what e.g. Canadian science and culture already closely resembles.
How about, because one day, I may get sick, and then the health system is going to be there for me when I need it.
The Canadian way makes sure it will _not_ be there:
Remarkably, Kuehl's proposal to socialize California's health care is being made just at the time when the Canadian system it resembles is falling apart at the seams. For instance, Canada's single payer system is projected to absorb more than half the budgets of most Canadian provinces. In addition, the amount of time a Canadian patient must wait before receiving medical care is notorious. "This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years," said Dr. Brian Day in a recent New York Times article on Canada's health care crisis.
http://www.reason.com/news/show/116473.html
"Government should be much more than that. Please explain why it is wrong for the government to do good things."
I elaborated on this but what the hell happened to my comment? Did I forget to push submit or whatever?
Oh, anyway, to summarize quickly - since government is merely superposition of political interests (mostly incumbents), it's inherently reactionary in the sense it exists just to conserve those interests. The business of govt is power & coercion, e.g. war, not happiness of citizens.
To believe that govt exists to represent interests of citizens is a romantic theory of politics. There is no factual reason just why would (not: should) govt do that. Checks and balances would not be necessary had the power that is checked and balanced were fundamentally friendly. And a small group of dogooders that try to pull govt in other direction systematically learns the hard way about perverse operation of law of unintended consequences. This is because politics and reality are totally divorced. E.g. Reagan put it well, talking about Johnson's "war on poverty", "they declared war on poverty and poverty won".
"When you look the meddling in Central and South American affairs, it would appear that's exactly what we have. A conquest perpetrated by the bankers, north and south...well, mostly east."
Oh bullcrap. This is result of Monroe Doctrine, not bankers.
"By the way, if the purpose of goverment is to perpetuate policy, then do you think it was wrong for the US government to abolish slavery? After all, if perpetuation of policy is what they are supposed to do, then discontinuing this policy would be something they shouldn't have done."
Given the interest of slaveowners - factual and prospective, don't forget them - and given that the govt represented them as well, it definitely should have continued support for slavery. Which it did, until it was forced by northern military not to. In our eyes that was evil. In their eyes, complicated and bizarre explanations were made why it was justified.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FB10Aa03.html
"The first lie addresses a glaring question: If the South fought the war to preserve chattel slavery, what possessed the 80-90 percent of southerners who owned no slaves to die for a practice from which they drew no immediate benefit? Professor Gary W Gallagher (The Confederate War, Cambridge 1997) represents the scholarly side of this myth, while popular fiction and films such as Gods and Generals dish it out to the broad public. That does not wash; one does not register 40 percent casualty rates for sentimental reasons. Catastrophic casualties pile up when a conqueror rallies greedy men to his banner. Ask the half-million men who marched to Moscow in 1812 under Napoleon Bonaparte's banner why they fought for an emperor, although they had no empire of their own. Napoleon said it best: Every soldier carried a field marshal's baton in his rucksack. The same apples to Alexander of Macedonia, Mohammed and his successors, the Thirty Years' War General Albrecht von Wallenstein (1583-1634), Francisco Villa during the Mexican civil war of 1910-18, the Germans during World War II, and so forth.
The unpleasant fact is that Southerners who had no slaves hoped eventually to get some, and fought for the Confederacy for the same reason that Napoleon's freebooters fought for the emperor. In fact, Southerners had been fighting for the right to bring slaves to new territories for a generation prior to the outbreak of war, in Kansas and elsewhere. Cotton, their principal cash crop, exhausted the soil in a decade's planting, and the planter took his slaves and moved on. Slavery and the Southern economic system would choke to death without expansion. Had the South formed an independent state, it would have embarked on a campaign of conquest and imposed slavery on the whole southern half of the Western Hemisphere. "
Acheson's rule of bureaucracy - the report is not supposed to inform the reader, but to protect the author.
From there, it only gets worse.
"Sure, there is plenty of work to do to make Linux (or *BSD) a more competitive alternative to Windows or OS X, but AFAIAC, the groundwork is nearly finished."
What's missing is some sort of self-repair functionality - one guy for whom I installed Linux for free gave it up (it was Mandriva I think) because a link to floppy disk on his desktop broke and he didn't know how to fix that, which pretty much made him dislike the entire package.
Self-repair for Linux desktop would be cool and relatively simple to program, if tedious - say, make some "diagnostics-oriented mini-language" and run scripts to fix broken video driver, KDE settings, broken floppy drive shortcut, missing FUSE group ownership, etc.
And you probably think that bulshitter Gramsci is insightful.
Everyone has their favorite narcotic. Your evident sentiments aren't any better, they are worse than The Economist, which is often boring exactly because it is so true.
"We have the perfect Unix based desktop already and it's called Mac OS. It's not free but it's better than any of the crap Linux ppl put out."
Except 20% of the market, the 80% doesn't give a damn if it's better, only if it's 1. _good enough_ 2. cheaper.
And Linux is those two things.
"Worse is better" applies to economics, too, not just to purely technological merits.
"I've heard that it's "the year of desktop Linux" since Redhat 5 and experience has taught me to wait for actual proof on that claim."
What you say is true but not the whole picture - I've heard it since the days of Abiword and Gnumeric that it's alternative for MS Office. Sure it's been wishful thinking. But, and it's a big but, things are definitely and demonstrably going up -- just because things are at level of OO 2 and Kubuntu doesn't mean they'll stay there. Since things are going up, some day in future they will reach the point of "good enough". OO2 at the moment has the problem of slow recalculating graphs. Some people I know gave it up for Excel just for this single reason. Had things stayed static, what you write would have been true. But things are not static.
In many cases good enough & cheap kills better. Sure I like Mac OS X better, but I'm not willing to pay enough, so I run Kubuntu at my home (not at the moment though).
This "el cheapo" prediction just might become true, because trends certainly indicate that. Linux on desktop used to be wishful thinking, but it just might become true.
To summarize, the typical market formation of oligopoly will probably be formed, with, say 80% of "good enough, cheap" market belonging to smth like Ubuntu/x86, and 20% of market belonging to "fancy, polished and pricey" belonging to Mac OS X.
In many cases I suspect this duopoly will even be present in many homes, say, Mac OS X on father's workstation used for professional purposes and cheap Linux box for a kid, or some other combo of this kind.
"It's the gridlock that gives the illusion of safety, and allows perpetuation bad policy"
Excuse me, but _policy perpetuation_ is exactly the point and purpose of govt. It's called stability, or "not exchanging bad for worse".
Whether policy is good or bad depends on whom you ask. Almost never you get agreement on that. Everyone goes after their gut reflexes, not after "good laws". Trying to make good laws is pointless. What one should be trying is making the laws that don't harm.
"I'm skeptical about that. I would think that it results in only the creation of bad, authoritarian laws - and prevents the creation of good ones. "
There's no such thing as a good law.
Laws are supposedly about survival, about keeping something bad from developing, say, tyranny, war, military coup'd etat, white collar crime, stealing tax money, etc. Laws are reactive, not proactive, and they are about keeping safe locked, not building something new. If laws were productive, Soviet Union which had a lot of laws, would be functioning better than US.
It is fundamental misunderstanding that laws are created for sake of your wellbeing, satisfaction or happiness. Most that can be said about laws is that they try to limit damage.
It's only the left that in their near-infinite stupidity try to make social mechs out of law and treat law as prerequisite to social utility.
"They never adhere to a fundamentally fallacious economic policy which ignores such basic concepts as moral hazard."
This is favorite gut reflex of left-liberals (there's nothing classically liberal about contemporary "liberals", they are sort of libertines in favor of government regulating hedonism, everyone gets their share of tax-funded orgasmic experiences).
"They never try to mingle church and state."
Ever met conservatives that _really, actually try or argue_ to do that? You just wrote vague innuendo. And I'm not even conservative, just a plain vanilla libertarian.
As someone insightfully noted, western theocrats do happen, but they are rarer than hen's teeth. State your facts, not your hysteries and hatreds.
"They never try to "protect us from ourselves" by outlawing common everyday activities"
Like what? Riding a bike without a helmet? Smoking? Eating fat foods? Doing a business? Drinking, except for adolescents?
About the only common activity that conservatives try to outlaw is dope.
Again, you're just a gut-motivated maniac, not a fact researcher.
"They never try to protect our freedom by destroying it through such authoritarian policies as:
----requiring permits for protests and limiting them to "free speech zones".
----allowing warrantless wiretaps and sifting of people's emails, then trying to pass ex post facto laws to protect a president who performed them.
----blackballing dissenters/opposition to their policies, and even going so far as to label them as "enemy combatants" and "disappear" them to gitmo.
----demanding the establishment of a "papers please" society."
This is what the left wants. Tony Blair in UK has established exactly such a society, perfectly controlled so the kid's parents could be fined if they don't give the kid fruits three times a day. The left is after social utility, "social justice", not liberty, freedom of speech, etc. These are all secondary or tertiary priorities to the left, what matters to the left is that everyone behaves in a manner loved and prescribed by the left. They are after the full stomach of their beloved puppies, so tyranny and totalitarianism are not a measure that the left will abstain from.
In contrast, conservatives are after _small_ govt, limited to military and security, domestic and external. So their state is limited, so like a typical liar you ignore the totalitarian tendencies of left and overblow conservatives' tendencies.
Most of this "homeland security" nonsense was done by Bush only because unfortunately, voters expected security first and foremost. So it was done by conservatives for political reasons, but exactly opposite to what you try to suggest, they don't really like it.
"In truth, I see the government as a rather accurate reflection of our collective selves and is actually serving us quite well."
Neat theory, except I don't see how it's based on any facts really. Just _why_ should it be a reflection? Elections alone can't provide this, words are cheap. Checks and balances are not set upon something that is fundamentally friendly to you, they wouldn't need to be there in the first place had this power been friendly. Fact is, they are necessary exactly because power corrupts, and today govts have a lot of power.
"It makes a very good mirror."
Really? Do you know many replicas of Billary Clinton? Or Hillary? Or, say, George W. Bush around? People who act and are in positions of power like that? Apparently we are all power brokers?
Note: my personal hero is Ronald Reagan. But I don't pretend he was a reflection of "us all". On domestic front he didn't even do much that was expected by his supporters that elected him.
"As such I can't complain about the job it is doing."
Except your premise is incorrect.
"I give it an A+."
Oh please... That's just pretending bad cards you're holding in your hand are good just because you don't have it any better.