"Explain to me why people below the poverty line should pay more tax than they do now while the wealthiest pay less."
I don't care much about overall tax rates, but you can fix that by having the IRS cut a lot of checks at the end of the year. On the other hand, it is very easy to see that marginal tax rates(which actually get used for decision making) should be higher for poor people, and lower for rich people, as differing marginal tax rates creates dead-weight loss for society.
"Also explain why you should tax food at the same rate as luxury automobiles"
Why shouldn't it be? Consumption is consumption. If you want to ensure that anyone can buy food, than expand the EITC, but if we do that, can you give me a reason that we shouldn't tax the two goods at the same level?
"or maybe this "Fair Tax" which is actually a tax of about 30% (if 23/100 of what you pay goes to the government, then it's about 30% more than what it costed before tax) should have different rates for different types of goods."
No, it shouldn't. That would heavily distort the economy, as well as create administrative nightmares.
And skip quibbles about the Fair Tax. The Fair Tax is a lunatic idea dreamed up by people with a fanatic hatred of the IRS. That said, replacing the income tax with a consumption tax would be a very good idea.
We don't need a sales tax for this, or even a VAT, instead, suppose that all of your money was automatically deposited in an IRA-type account in holdings of your choosing(Stocks, bonds, CDs, whatever). This account is monitored by the IRS, and your withdrawals are automatically taxed at a flat rate. Checks are sent out in order to preserve whatever degree of progressiveness that you desire.
The effects of such a policy would be exactly the same as a national sales tax, except that enforcement would be a lot easier, and we would be able to recycle the IRS.
Why bother with such a thing?
First, there are no deductions in such a system, so the amount of time and effort currently used to prepare taxes(Estimated to be in the hundreds of billions), is drastically cut. Most people would never file anything resembling a tax return.
Second, it would cut down on dead weight loss, and encourage savings, leading to long term economic growth.
Third, we would become the cheapest first world country to do business in by far. It's not hard to imagine most of the world's corporations relocating to the US, producing a nice clip of short term growth.
Considering such a plan can be made as progressive as you wish, what do you think is wrong with such a plan?
"Now, exactly how many seconds pass before two or more similarly skilled people start pooling their resources to reduce cost/corner the market? You'd go from 0 to Microsoft in no time flat with this method."
Read some game theory, such agreements are heavily unstable. It's a lot like the prisoner's dilemma, each person has an individual incentive to break the monopoly.
If you only have one or two smart people, it might hold up for a while, but beyond that, it will break up near instantly.
"But in the conflict in Darfur, there is a notable absence of an armed Christian militia comprisng Christians from Korea, Kenya, Tonga. Again, YOUR point was that no-one bats an eyelid when Christians rush to arms in religious wars in other places. But we have yet to eyeball an example from you, let alone have it a common occurrence."
Look at Nigeria, Christian militia's kill Muslims there all the time.
"Because we would be essentially applying incentive for slavery. If the only way we can get cheaper products or increase profit is to force people to work below the standards for our own workers, we are in trouble."
How is anyone being forced at any point in this process? Slavery is exceedingly rare in the world(I realize it exists, but as a percentage of overall workforce, it's minuscule). These people are extremely poor, and would vastly prefer low wages to nothing. And how exactly are we in trouble? They build capital through the development of businesses that exploit their low wage labor, until the infrastructure builds as to make their work more valuable. This is how we got rich, how Japan got rich, etc.
"here is nothing about a foreign worker that makes them less productive then an American worker. There may be a learning curve when you change someone's job skills but given enough time they can be just as efficient as we are. The lower wages come from inequalities in living conditions, domestic economies, and currency evaluations. Not because they are slow and retarded. I would like to meet whoever put that idea in your mind."
Thank you for constructing strawmans and accusing me of racism, please re-read what I wrote and apologize. All of those variables you have just mentioned: Inequalities in living conditions, the state of domestic economies, and currency evaluations, are all fundamentally dependent on worker productivity. In the long run, wages are dependent on worker productivity as well.
Workers in the third world are overall less productive then American workers. This has absolutely nothing to do with their personal worth or ability, but simply because they do not have the same infrastructure as Americans. Their machines are worse, their computers are older, their electricity grids are unreliable.
"Do you understand what the link is saying? I'm not really convinced you are. Especially, when it mentions very specific factors like full employment and perfect competition which simply isn't present."
There are plenty of models which extend past those conditions. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_general_equilibrium#Overview if you would like to read more about it. The old comparative" advantage theory is over a hundred years old. The math is now quite a bit more complicated, but we've extended it past those conditions.
"No, it is equally difficult to determine who has gained and lost. You see, your just focusing on the specific trade in and of itself without taking into considerations the economic impacts. And seeing how your specified countries, how do you account for lack of employment, lack of payroll taxes, lack of or deteriorating property taxes when factories sit empty and commercial property goes vacant, lack of social security contributions, the need for increase citizen services like unemployment, employee reeducation, welfare programs, medical costs and so on."
Yeah, hence why I said "The only problem is that it is very difficult to determine who has gained from trade and who has lost.".
"Also, the trade idea presented breaks down when you take the government out of the picture and apply it to companies. You see, it isn't the country doing the trade, it is the companies doing business that is doing it."
So? I don't see how that breaks anything.
"And with a trade deficit, it is obvious that the process collapses on itself. Hence the need for tariffs."
No, the dollar loses value and the deficit disappears. Where do Tarrifs come into this?
"Especially when you consider that a lot of the trade items is economically handicapped by regulation on one side of the isle. If all things were equal, you wouldn't have to worry about it. But that simply isn't the case so it breaks the model."
No! That's my entire point. Regulation is interpreted as an exogenous productivity decrease, the model does not break at all.
"First, not all tariffs are to prop up inefficient companies. Some set to equalize the monetary differences while others intend on compensating for the difference in living conditions, (Read sweat shops and slave labor)."
Why should we compensate for different living conditions? If Indians choose to live in sweatshops and make steel at a price half ours, why shouldn't we buy it and allocate the resources we were going to use toward making the steel somewhere else?
"You can hardly claim that it would be because of inefficient businesses when the labor costs are below not only a minimum wage in the US, but the level of poverty in the US."
Yes I could. The definition of an inefficient company is one that produces things at a cost far higher than competitors. Labor is much cheaper in other countries than it is the US. As a consequence of our well developed infrastructure, workers of a certain skill set are more productive then workers elsewhere. Because of this, workers in other countries make much lower wages. Correspondingly, it's efficient to outsource labor intensive tasks to other countries, and devote our labor supply to more productive works.
"You also can't claim the company is inefficient when currency values take a relatively similar economy and deflate the purchasing parity on one or the other."
Yes I can. I can't blame the company for such an inefficiency, but electric lights were not the fault of candle makers either. Companies that are inefficient because of currency shifts are still inefficient.
"But there are some things that need to be done in order to stop every job from going to india or China just to see the currency and living conditions reverse after a while and end up being a hostage to their whims without any manufacturing or what be it on the main land."
"Voters would baulk at it because it is insane. First, even removing tarrifs is one thing, even though it would cause a loss of jobs in some cases, second, the government can't just pay people. They have to take taxes in to cover their expense. To truly compensate for the effects of tariffs, you would bankrupt the country with pay outs."
Without Tarrifs, country A has $X. With Tarrifs, country A has Y$, it's a standard result in economics that Y
The only problem is that it is very difficult to determine who has gained from trade and who has lost.
"And you think IQ and age has something to do with understanding or rejecting your idea. It has more to do with sanity, IE sane or insane."
I wouldn't say it's a function of IQ, it has more to do with knowledge of Economics. Frankly, you will have trouble finding anyone with post-undegraduate economics training who does not believe in free trade for economic reasons.
I agree with most of your points. And I thank you for your response.
"Being a soldier is not being a monster. Killing an enemy is not being a monster. Fighting for your own life and the life of your squad members is not being a monster. It really doesn't matter if the mission should ever have been undertaken. They're there now."
This might be where I disagree. I believe that occupying an enemy country against the will of the nation's people, is a horrible act. Occupying soldiers become monsters, their lives become forfeit.
And this bothers me a great deal, because soldiers have a right to defend themselves, and people have a right to kill occupiers. And so, you have two people shooting each other, while both acting well within their rights. Such a conflict is avoidable.
"That's probably true, but if we're trying to speak from a perspective of morality then a line must be drawn between killing your countrymen because doing so throws the country into further chaos and makes the US look worse, and killing citizens because bombs don't discriminate good versus bad when they explode or because you're afraid for your life based on something they do. "
It's a tempting proposition to draw a line between them, though I don't think the person being killed cares much about the distinction. I believe that they are attacking civilians, for the most part, because it is the only tactic available to them. Israel, pre-independence, attacked Arab civilians and bombed market places as well. And that says nothing about the validity of their cause.
Terrorism is just a tactic, that occasionally furthers the cause of the perpetrator. It usually kills less civilians than conventional war. So I don't really see the moral divide between terrorism and say... cluster bombing. I personally find that without strong justification(that do not come even close to existing in our current age), both are reprehensible.
"Erm, the insurgents are bad but others are worse? Okay, but so what?
If you're suggesting they're better places to have sent our troops, I agree completely. If you're suggesting that even with 200,000+ troops in Iraq that we should send more there, ehhh... maybe, but that's an even more extreme burden on the military."
I'm trying to point out that the moral aspect of this argument, that innocent civilians lives are at stake, is inconsistent. If our goal was to prevent the loss of innocent lives, we would pull troops out of Iraq and send them to Darfur. Unfortunately, bad people do bad things around the world, and we are not in a position to stop it. The best thing we can do for Iraqi welfare would be to accept a great deal of refugees, because our military operation is not likely to stabilize Iraq.
"Because the majority of people attacking Americans are made up of two groups: disaffected minority ruling-class members that used to enjoy special political status over the majority population and who therefore want to destabilize any attempt at representative democracy; and foreign fighters who don't give a fuck about Iraq or Iraqis but hate the West so much that they cannot tolerate a successful American action in the Middle East."
This is a fair point, and I want to commend you for responding. However, this simplistic view of the insurgency is not true anymore. A good deal(and at this point the majority) of the people shooting at American soldiers today are from Shia militias, and even Kurds have occasionally fired on US troops.
Meanwhile, it is no longer true to say that Sunni insurgency is dominated by former Baathists. Not all Sunni's were preferred during Saddam's era, as power runs through tribal lines instead of religious ones.
Instead, most of the Sunni's in the insurgency are out to protect themselves from outright ethnic cleansing from well-armed Shia militias. Meanwhile, they want to expel foreign occupying soldiers, just as we would have. Al-Anbar was never a paradise, and these are not former tyrants. The men in the insurgency right now are brave men who gave up the little that they had to fight for something they believe in.
Foreign fighters always played a small role in the insurgency, and at this point, are irrelevant. Al-Queda made a tactical mistake in attacking civilians a bit too indiscriminately, and now most Sunni groups are fighting against them. The US has tried to exploit this as part of an "Awakening" strategy, but it has not really worked as well as we've hoped.
"The Sunnis are the minority, but Sunnis used to dominate the political process. The were benefiting from and working hand in hand with Saddam Hussein. They lost their privilege and are pissed as hell. That's why they keep boycotting shit, because in a representative democracy they don't get their way 100% of the time anymore. It's also why they blow shit up and kill people, because they hate Americans and they always hated Shiites."
More likely, the Shia have killed more people and blown more shit up. Most Sunni's were very poor under Saddam Hussein as well, as power flows through tribal lines, not religious ones. The reason they boycott stuff is simple: The Shia dominated Iraqi government has been engaging in ethic cleansing and maintaining Shia death squads.
Your mistake is that you are taking sides in a complicated and obscure civil war. But this is irrelevant, as the people who shoot at Americans are represented in every strand of Iraqi society.
"So, I mean on a day to day basis, most US soldiers are trying to hold shit together so they can go the fuck home. In the meantime, the insurgents just want to kill people and fuck up infrastructure so that people beg for a return of the old system and the Americans get out of Dodge."
Insurgents are not motivated by a return to the Baathist government, if you read their manifestos, they seem to want a lot more decentralization of power, so that the Shia majority can't take control of majority Sunni regions. They are motivated by a fundamental will for self-rule, the same drive that lead our founders to rebel against England.
Don't make the easy mistake of demonizing our enemies.
You are given a choice between attacking weapons sites and killing civilians, or letting them utilize their weapons. I have to admit, unless these weapons are truly destructive(IE, nuclear), I'd go with the letting them utilize their primitive and ineffective weapons.
You know, I don't believe that the troops are doing "the right thing". I have the greatest respect for their sacrifices, but it is a shame we have given them such horrible orders.
But no, I don't think that it's a good thing to help our troops "get it done", because I don't think that the insurgents who are attacking US troops are doing anything wrong. They are attacking foreign occupying troops, just as we would have done if anyone had invaded us. Many of these insurgents believe they are acting honorably, and I don't believe that we should be killing them. In fact in terms of morality, I believe that a US soldier serving in Iraq right now is less worthy of life then these insurgents(And if you are offended, give me one non-racist reason that would say otherwise). And while this is a disgusting thought, it is true. We are making our fine soldiers into monsters, when this is entirely avoidable.
Granted, insurgents certainly doing horrible things when they attack civilians, but truth be told, they are far far behind us in terms of innocent civilians killed. Moreover, there are far worse groups doing killing in the world(Darfur and the Congo jump out), and we silently support countries that torture their people on a wide-scale basis. These groups are doing what is necessary to further their priorities, just like we are. '
So no, I don't think it's a good idea to give the military more tools to help fight the insurgency. I don't think they have a valid mission, and I don't want their mission achieved.
"Seriously though, am I the only one who thinks that we are on the cusp of a breakthrough - the ability of traditionally organized mechanized armed forces to effectively engage guerilla tactics?"
Thats nothing new. Saturation bombing of villages would do the trick. The only way to eliminate a group with massive popular support is to end the support. When you are an occupier, the surest way to do that is to destroy the populace.
Just like every other anti-insurgent measure we've tried, the terrorists will just adopt trivial countermeasures.
No, even with a space elevator, it cannot be done. There is a strict lower-bound imposed by physics on how much energy it takes to get something away from a planet. This is almost certainly more then the energy content of the fuels.
Ok, rather fundamentally, lifting the oil out of Titan's atmosphere and shipping it back here would almost certainly require more energy then could be obtained from burning the hydrocarbons.
For this amount of cost, we could easily just build solar power satellites and beam it down with Masers.
Sorry for the multiple posts, just respond to this one, but one last point. Iraq was not the only country to repeatedly attack it's neighbors. South Africa launched several invasions of neighboring states, as had Chad, Russia, China, and Israel. Is it remotely wise to invade any of them now?
No, because the threat from all of them has been neutralized. In the same vein, Sadaam Hussein was not a threat to anyone in 2003. Even without this caveat, I think you would agree that invasion of countries that we designate as bad would not be wise.
Sadaam did not gas people in Kuwait. Kuwait was a dictatorship, and I doubt that there was too much of a drop in their standard of living during the occupation.
As for your philosophical nitpicking, I think you did not understand my point. A good deal of innocent Iraqi's died in order to liberate them. Estimates vary, but most estimates I have seen are on the order of several hundred thousand. These people did not lose their right to pursuit of happiness, they lost their lives. The truth, is that life trumps liberty, there is no use for freedom if everyone is dead.
Sadaam did not gas people in Kuwait. Kuwait was a dictatorship, and I doubt that there was too much of a drop in their standard of living during the occupation.
"Saddam swung from the gallows, and is no longer ruling the kind of political state that we are afraid america is turning into."
We support military dictatorships around the world. Most notably, we just gave Saudi Arabia 20 billion dollars worth of weaponry. Meanwhile, several hundred thousand people have been killed in our quest to kill Sadaam.
It is often said that freedom is not free, but that implies that sometimes, it is not worth the cost. The right to free speech, free association, and freedom from government persecution are great things. But the pursuit of these freedoms cannot come at the expense of more fundamental rights.
Thomas Jefferson said that man has the right to Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness. But in our quest to grant Iraqi's liberty, we have infringed upon their right to life and the pursuit of happiness.
Your perception seems correct, but he has a roughly 40% chance of being the next president, and even then, there are powerful vested interests in the status quo. I suspect the CIA would simply kill any president who tried to curtail covert ops.
"Saying you have a bomb will scare people, but they'll go down thinking of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.
I don't think you can hold a plane hostage with a bomb anymore. I think people would just as soon go down with the plane instead of taking out a building with the plane."
I strongly doubt that. Nearly all hijackings end with most of the hostages safely escaping, and the airforce knows now to shoot down any rogue plane that gets too close to major cities. Terrorists know this as well.
So a quick and cursory explanation to the crew, that if the plane strayed too close to a building it would be shot down, would be enough to pacify them.
Why didn't the zoo have anyone on staff with tranquilizers? I don't blame the cops, but it doesn't seem like too much to ask for a local precinct near a zoo to have special equipment.
Slashdot Mirror
But so you know, VAT taxes completely avoid the consolidation incentive you mentioned.
I don't care much about overall tax rates, but you can fix that by having the IRS cut a lot of checks at the end of the year. On the other hand, it is very easy to see that marginal tax rates(which actually get used for decision making) should be higher for poor people, and lower for rich people, as differing marginal tax rates creates dead-weight loss for society.
"Also explain why you should tax food at the same rate as luxury automobiles"
Why shouldn't it be? Consumption is consumption. If you want to ensure that anyone can buy food, than expand the EITC, but if we do that, can you give me a reason that we shouldn't tax the two goods at the same level?
"or maybe this "Fair Tax" which is actually a tax of about 30% (if 23/100 of what you pay goes to the government, then it's about 30% more than what it costed before tax) should have different rates for different types of goods."
No, it shouldn't. That would heavily distort the economy, as well as create administrative nightmares.
And skip quibbles about the Fair Tax. The Fair Tax is a lunatic idea dreamed up by people with a fanatic hatred of the IRS. That said, replacing the income tax with a consumption tax would be a very good idea.
We don't need a sales tax for this, or even a VAT, instead, suppose that all of your money was automatically deposited in an IRA-type account in holdings of your choosing(Stocks, bonds, CDs, whatever). This account is monitored by the IRS, and your withdrawals are automatically taxed at a flat rate. Checks are sent out in order to preserve whatever degree of progressiveness that you desire.
The effects of such a policy would be exactly the same as a national sales tax, except that enforcement would be a lot easier, and we would be able to recycle the IRS.
Why bother with such a thing?
First, there are no deductions in such a system, so the amount of time and effort currently used to prepare taxes(Estimated to be in the hundreds of billions), is drastically cut. Most people would never file anything resembling a tax return.
Second, it would cut down on dead weight loss, and encourage savings, leading to long term economic growth.
Third, we would become the cheapest first world country to do business in by far. It's not hard to imagine most of the world's corporations relocating to the US, producing a nice clip of short term growth.
Considering such a plan can be made as progressive as you wish, what do you think is wrong with such a plan?
Read some game theory, such agreements are heavily unstable. It's a lot like the prisoner's dilemma, each person has an individual incentive to break the monopoly.
If you only have one or two smart people, it might hold up for a while, but beyond that, it will break up near instantly.
Yes. These deals are bad for the general economy, and society would collectively be better off if such deals were banned.
Look at Nigeria, Christian militia's kill Muslims there all the time.
How is anyone being forced at any point in this process? Slavery is exceedingly rare in the world(I realize it exists, but as a percentage of overall workforce, it's minuscule). These people are extremely poor, and would vastly prefer low wages to nothing. And how exactly are we in trouble? They build capital through the development of businesses that exploit their low wage labor, until the infrastructure builds as to make their work more valuable. This is how we got rich, how Japan got rich, etc.
"here is nothing about a foreign worker that makes them less productive then an American worker. There may be a learning curve when you change someone's job skills but given enough time they can be just as efficient as we are. The lower wages come from inequalities in living conditions, domestic economies, and currency evaluations. Not because they are slow and retarded. I would like to meet whoever put that idea in your mind."
Thank you for constructing strawmans and accusing me of racism, please re-read what I wrote and apologize. All of those variables you have just mentioned: Inequalities in living conditions, the state of domestic economies, and currency evaluations, are all fundamentally dependent on worker productivity. In the long run, wages are dependent on worker productivity as well.
Workers in the third world are overall less productive then American workers. This has absolutely nothing to do with their personal worth or ability, but simply because they do not have the same infrastructure as Americans. Their machines are worse, their computers are older, their electricity grids are unreliable.
"Do you understand what the link is saying? I'm not really convinced you are. Especially, when it mentions very specific factors like full employment and perfect competition which simply isn't present."
There are plenty of models which extend past those conditions. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_general_equilibrium#Overview if you would like to read more about it. The old comparative" advantage theory is over a hundred years old. The math is now quite a bit more complicated, but we've extended it past those conditions.
"No, it is equally difficult to determine who has gained and lost. You see, your just focusing on the specific trade in and of itself without taking into considerations the economic impacts. And seeing how your specified countries, how do you account for lack of employment, lack of payroll taxes, lack of or deteriorating property taxes when factories sit empty and commercial property goes vacant, lack of social security contributions, the need for increase citizen services like unemployment, employee reeducation, welfare programs, medical costs and so on."
Yeah, hence why I said "The only problem is that it is very difficult to determine who has gained from trade and who has lost.".
"Also, the trade idea presented breaks down when you take the government out of the picture and apply it to companies. You see, it isn't the country doing the trade, it is the companies doing business that is doing it."
So? I don't see how that breaks anything.
"And with a trade deficit, it is obvious that the process collapses on itself. Hence the need for tariffs."
No, the dollar loses value and the deficit disappears. Where do Tarrifs come into this?
"Especially when you consider that a lot of the trade items is economically handicapped by regulation on one side of the isle. If all things were equal, you wouldn't have to worry about it. But that simply isn't the case so it breaks the model."
No! That's my entire point. Regulation is interpreted as an exogenous productivity decrease, the model does not break at all.
Why should we compensate for different living conditions? If Indians choose to live in sweatshops and make steel at a price half ours, why shouldn't we buy it and allocate the resources we were going to use toward making the steel somewhere else?
"You can hardly claim that it would be because of inefficient businesses when the labor costs are below not only a minimum wage in the US, but the level of poverty in the US."
Yes I could. The definition of an inefficient company is one that produces things at a cost far higher than competitors. Labor is much cheaper in other countries than it is the US. As a consequence of our well developed infrastructure, workers of a certain skill set are more productive then workers elsewhere. Because of this, workers in other countries make much lower wages. Correspondingly, it's efficient to outsource labor intensive tasks to other countries, and devote our labor supply to more productive works.
"You also can't claim the company is inefficient when currency values take a relatively similar economy and deflate the purchasing parity on one or the other."
Yes I can. I can't blame the company for such an inefficiency, but electric lights were not the fault of candle makers either. Companies that are inefficient because of currency shifts are still inefficient.
"But there are some things that need to be done in order to stop every job from going to india or China just to see the currency and living conditions reverse after a while and end up being a hostage to their whims without any manufacturing or what be it on the main land."
Please read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage .
"Voters would baulk at it because it is insane. First, even removing tarrifs is one thing, even though it would cause a loss of jobs in some cases, second, the government can't just pay people. They have to take taxes in to cover their expense. To truly compensate for the effects of tariffs, you would bankrupt the country with pay outs."
Without Tarrifs, country A has $X. With Tarrifs, country A has Y$, it's a standard result in economics that Y The only problem is that it is very difficult to determine who has gained from trade and who has lost.
"And you think IQ and age has something to do with understanding or rejecting your idea. It has more to do with sanity, IE sane or insane."
I wouldn't say it's a function of IQ, it has more to do with knowledge of Economics. Frankly, you will have trouble finding anyone with post-undegraduate economics training who does not believe in free trade for economic reasons.
"Being a soldier is not being a monster. Killing an enemy is not being a monster. Fighting for your own life and the life of your squad members is not being a monster. It really doesn't matter if the mission should ever have been undertaken. They're there now."
This might be where I disagree. I believe that occupying an enemy country against the will of the nation's people, is a horrible act. Occupying soldiers become monsters, their lives become forfeit.
And this bothers me a great deal, because soldiers have a right to defend themselves, and people have a right to kill occupiers. And so, you have two people shooting each other, while both acting well within their rights. Such a conflict is avoidable.
"That's probably true, but if we're trying to speak from a perspective of morality then a line must be drawn between killing your countrymen because doing so throws the country into further chaos and makes the US look worse, and killing citizens because bombs don't discriminate good versus bad when they explode or because you're afraid for your life based on something they do. "
It's a tempting proposition to draw a line between them, though I don't think the person being killed cares much about the distinction. I believe that they are attacking civilians, for the most part, because it is the only tactic available to them. Israel, pre-independence, attacked Arab civilians and bombed market places as well. And that says nothing about the validity of their cause.
Terrorism is just a tactic, that occasionally furthers the cause of the perpetrator. It usually kills less civilians than conventional war. So I don't really see the moral divide between terrorism and say... cluster bombing. I personally find that without strong justification(that do not come even close to existing in our current age), both are reprehensible.
"Erm, the insurgents are bad but others are worse? Okay, but so what? If you're suggesting they're better places to have sent our troops, I agree completely. If you're suggesting that even with 200,000+ troops in Iraq that we should send more there, ehhh... maybe, but that's an even more extreme burden on the military."
I'm trying to point out that the moral aspect of this argument, that innocent civilians lives are at stake, is inconsistent. If our goal was to prevent the loss of innocent lives, we would pull troops out of Iraq and send them to Darfur. Unfortunately, bad people do bad things around the world, and we are not in a position to stop it. The best thing we can do for Iraqi welfare would be to accept a great deal of refugees, because our military operation is not likely to stabilize Iraq.
This is a fair point, and I want to commend you for responding. However, this simplistic view of the insurgency is not true anymore. A good deal(and at this point the majority) of the people shooting at American soldiers today are from Shia militias, and even Kurds have occasionally fired on US troops.
Meanwhile, it is no longer true to say that Sunni insurgency is dominated by former Baathists. Not all Sunni's were preferred during Saddam's era, as power runs through tribal lines instead of religious ones.
Instead, most of the Sunni's in the insurgency are out to protect themselves from outright ethnic cleansing from well-armed Shia militias. Meanwhile, they want to expel foreign occupying soldiers, just as we would have. Al-Anbar was never a paradise, and these are not former tyrants. The men in the insurgency right now are brave men who gave up the little that they had to fight for something they believe in.
Foreign fighters always played a small role in the insurgency, and at this point, are irrelevant. Al-Queda made a tactical mistake in attacking civilians a bit too indiscriminately, and now most Sunni groups are fighting against them. The US has tried to exploit this as part of an "Awakening" strategy, but it has not really worked as well as we've hoped.
"The Sunnis are the minority, but Sunnis used to dominate the political process. The were benefiting from and working hand in hand with Saddam Hussein. They lost their privilege and are pissed as hell. That's why they keep boycotting shit, because in a representative democracy they don't get their way 100% of the time anymore. It's also why they blow shit up and kill people, because they hate Americans and they always hated Shiites."
More likely, the Shia have killed more people and blown more shit up. Most Sunni's were very poor under Saddam Hussein as well, as power flows through tribal lines, not religious ones. The reason they boycott stuff is simple: The Shia dominated Iraqi government has been engaging in ethic cleansing and maintaining Shia death squads.
Your mistake is that you are taking sides in a complicated and obscure civil war. But this is irrelevant, as the people who shoot at Americans are represented in every strand of Iraqi society.
"So, I mean on a day to day basis, most US soldiers are trying to hold shit together so they can go the fuck home. In the meantime, the insurgents just want to kill people and fuck up infrastructure so that people beg for a return of the old system and the Americans get out of Dodge."
Insurgents are not motivated by a return to the Baathist government, if you read their manifestos, they seem to want a lot more decentralization of power, so that the Shia majority can't take control of majority Sunni regions. They are motivated by a fundamental will for self-rule, the same drive that lead our founders to rebel against England.
Don't make the easy mistake of demonizing our enemies.
You are given a choice between attacking weapons sites and killing civilians, or letting them utilize their weapons. I have to admit, unless these weapons are truly destructive(IE, nuclear), I'd go with the letting them utilize their primitive and ineffective weapons.
But no, I don't think that it's a good thing to help our troops "get it done", because I don't think that the insurgents who are attacking US troops are doing anything wrong. They are attacking foreign occupying troops, just as we would have done if anyone had invaded us. Many of these insurgents believe they are acting honorably, and I don't believe that we should be killing them. In fact in terms of morality, I believe that a US soldier serving in Iraq right now is less worthy of life then these insurgents(And if you are offended, give me one non-racist reason that would say otherwise). And while this is a disgusting thought, it is true. We are making our fine soldiers into monsters, when this is entirely avoidable.
Granted, insurgents certainly doing horrible things when they attack civilians, but truth be told, they are far far behind us in terms of innocent civilians killed. Moreover, there are far worse groups doing killing in the world(Darfur and the Congo jump out), and we silently support countries that torture their people on a wide-scale basis. These groups are doing what is necessary to further their priorities, just like we are. '
So no, I don't think it's a good idea to give the military more tools to help fight the insurgency. I don't think they have a valid mission, and I don't want their mission achieved.
Then terrorists will start rolling dice. They aren't idiots, and they have a bigger stake in this then we do.
Thats nothing new. Saturation bombing of villages would do the trick. The only way to eliminate a group with massive popular support is to end the support. When you are an occupier, the surest way to do that is to destroy the populace.
Just like every other anti-insurgent measure we've tried, the terrorists will just adopt trivial countermeasures.
Right, because the Buddhists in Thailand and the Hindu's in Sri Lanka don't count. Of course.
No, even with a space elevator, it cannot be done. There is a strict lower-bound imposed by physics on how much energy it takes to get something away from a planet. This is almost certainly more then the energy content of the fuels.
The amount of mass is completely negligible in comparison to the Moon's mass. Helium is extremely light, and energy dense.
For this amount of cost, we could easily just build solar power satellites and beam it down with Masers.
No, because the threat from all of them has been neutralized. In the same vein, Sadaam Hussein was not a threat to anyone in 2003. Even without this caveat, I think you would agree that invasion of countries that we designate as bad would not be wise.
As for your philosophical nitpicking, I think you did not understand my point. A good deal of innocent Iraqi's died in order to liberate them. Estimates vary, but most estimates I have seen are on the order of several hundred thousand. These people did not lose their right to pursuit of happiness, they lost their lives. The truth, is that life trumps liberty, there is no use for freedom if everyone is dead.
Sadaam did not gas people in Kuwait. Kuwait was a dictatorship, and I doubt that there was too much of a drop in their standard of living during the occupation.
We support military dictatorships around the world. Most notably, we just gave Saudi Arabia 20 billion dollars worth of weaponry. Meanwhile, several hundred thousand people have been killed in our quest to kill Sadaam.
It is often said that freedom is not free, but that implies that sometimes, it is not worth the cost. The right to free speech, free association, and freedom from government persecution are great things. But the pursuit of these freedoms cannot come at the expense of more fundamental rights.
Thomas Jefferson said that man has the right to Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness. But in our quest to grant Iraqi's liberty, we have infringed upon their right to life and the pursuit of happiness.
Your perception seems correct, but he has a roughly 40% chance of being the next president, and even then, there are powerful vested interests in the status quo. I suspect the CIA would simply kill any president who tried to curtail covert ops.
How much would you pay to opt out of security?
I strongly doubt that. Nearly all hijackings end with most of the hostages safely escaping, and the airforce knows now to shoot down any rogue plane that gets too close to major cities. Terrorists know this as well.
So a quick and cursory explanation to the crew, that if the plane strayed too close to a building it would be shot down, would be enough to pacify them.
Why didn't the zoo have anyone on staff with tranquilizers? I don't blame the cops, but it doesn't seem like too much to ask for a local precinct near a zoo to have special equipment.