Just what we needed, more regulations making it harder to prove oneself and gain work experience. Minimum wage laws shut young people out of jobs that could lead to the top with no cost other than hard work (leading us to rely on colleges to do all of our training at great cost). Ever hear of those guys who worked thier way up from being a dishwasher to president of a company? Those days are gone, thanks to minimum wage laws, and now you can't even become an unpaid intern to get a foot in the door, and expand your resume.
These types of idiotic laws are what are causing minority communities to fail. It's like taking the first five rungs off of the corporate ladder. Now you have to buy your own ladder to even get in at the lowest position, meaning that only the rich and the heavily subsidized can make it in this world.
What you fail to understand is that the entirety of the problem comes from the government side, using government guns to enforce their rules on everyone, but in a disproportionate manner. If you have a weak government, you can't have fascism. As such, ANY move to weaken government, reducing it's power to both regulate, and to hand out goodies and protections, is good for EVERYONE.
In order to understand the effects that governments have on economies, I like to share this comic book.
Understand that absent the merger of corporate and government power, the only method that a given company has of influencing the behavior of others, or enriching itself, is to provide a good product or service at a cheap price.
You make the mistake of thinking that only Republicans are in the pockets of the corporations. NEWSFLASH! Politicians with a D behind their name are corrupt as well!
NONE of them represent US anymore. Vote third party. The republicrats have to be taken down.
I hate to tell you, but that isn't "capitalism", it's fascism. In capitalism, when companies make mistakes (resulting in a "crash"), they pay for it themselves, or they go bankrupt and their resources are bought up by other better companies and put to more efficient use.
Governments never "reboot" the system, they perpetuate systems that don't work by giving money to TBTF's. This is why governments need to stay out of the markets, no matter how "bad" it gets (because no matter what they do, they make things worse). By not interfering, they don't need to be as large, and as such can reduce or eliminate taxes. In fact, if government were reduced to the size it was in 1990, we wouldn't need an income tax. Things weren't that bad in 1990, were they?
Interventions create unanticipated problems which create interventions, and so on. If they just stay out, and let the market handle it (and let the market KNOW that they are going to stay out permanently), then rather than the Great Depression, we get the Depression of 1920. The market sorted out a set of conditions that were much worse than the imbalances of 1929 (resulting from war spending) within a few months. How did the government help? IT DIDN'T. It stayed out. The next time, Hoover interfered, and FDR compounded Hoover's mistakes, and we got the Great Depression. This time, we had Bush interfere, and Obama is compounding those mistakes again. The difference this time is that we are now the world's largest debtor, rather than the world's largest creditor. It's like losing your job, maxing out your credit cards, and your home equity line of credit, and deciding to go on a spending spree, using bad checks to pay for your purchases. It is making a disastrous situation catastrophic.
So because sometimes politicians act in a fascist manner to "defend" their pals in business, you blame free markets for the violence? IT WAS THE POLITICIANS THAT CALLED OUT THE THUGS! The market is incapable of acting in such a manner.
BY DEFINITION, FREE MARKETS DO NOT INCLUDE USE OF FORCE. If force is applied at ANY POINT EVER, you don't have a free market. You have fascism, even if it is only for a few hours.
The examples you cited were cases where corporate and government power merged. At the time, the governments weren't nearly as large or as powerful as they are today, and they only intervened in certain situations (like strikes), whereas today they are always and at all times intervening in literally thousands of different ways.
If you really want to understand how economies work, here is a primer, in comic book form.
I guess you've been living under a rock for the last decade, and totally missed the enormous and constant erosion of civil and economic rights we have seen in this country during that time.
Go back to sleep. Nothing of importance to think about here. Certainly YOU will never be subjected to extraordinary rendition, I mean, unless of course if you are a member of the "Hated Class of the Week". If you ever have anything bad to say about the government in power, you are free to do so, so long as it is within one of the ten...no six...no three free speech zones, located conveniently behind razor wire fences. Don't worry about being pulled over at an illegal checkpoint that can be set up anywhere within a hundred miles of the border to be arbitrarily searched for "illegals". Don't give the men manning the checkpoints any sass, or they might just "find" a bag of coke in your glovebox. If that happens, you will have all of your assets seized as suspects in a drug investigation, and since they aren't people, they have no right to due process, they simply belong to the police (Civil Asset Forfeiture).
So don't talk to me about God damn conspiracy theories. All you fucking fairweather liberals have turned into fucking nazis now that you are in power, while the Republicans are suddenly a bunch of freedom loving libertarians. You people make me sick. You deserve whatever you get. I'm going to move to fucking China, where a man can at least open a business without having to fellate fifty fucking bureaucrats. Enjoy your economic collapse.
It seems to me that you don't really understand what a "free market" is.
Free markets don't allow involuntary application of force. What you are thinking of is fascism, which is what we have in this country. Sadly everything it does is blamed on the free market by socialists claiming to ride to our rescue, who are closet fascists themselves, and prove it the second they get into office.
You feed them. I have better things to do than to interfere with the choices some guy in the third world makes.
If people stopped interfering and pushing their social values on people, and let them be free, people in general wouldn't have to make these hard choices.
That's not free market. If there were a free market, you wouldn't be getting random organs from China, but you would be harvesting the organ in one room, and implanting it next door, in a nice, clean hospital.
Living without a kidney is a lot less lethal than dying in the streets of starvation.
Preventing people (poor or otherwise) from marketing whatever goods or services they have available to them is always harmful. Even child prostitution is often a choice between sex or starvation/neglect.
All I can say is, enjoy the reign of the third coming of Bush. I may just take Somalia over that.
And FYI, every vital and important service you listed there is provided by you LOCAL government, except for the military, and our military is not engaged in protecting us from foreign threats, but instead goes about MAKING NEW ENEMIES, and spending our money abroad killing brown people.
Enjoy your Nazi Party redux. People like you will deserve whatever you get, for spitting in the face of freedom, and allowing any horror to be perpetuated, so long as the ones responsible are a member of your party.
The difference is that you don't have to register to vote. Refusal to cooperate with the census will eventually lead to you being shot by a death sq...SWAT team invading your house, as you rightfully resist arrest.
I bet you thought the idea of habeus corpus being suspended under Clinton's successor was ridiculous back in 1999. What horror do you think the next administration will be capable of? Why are you signing your own death warrant in advance?
If the government didn't know where people lived, then how is it that they were able to MAIL us the census forms? There are other ways to get this data than to force us under implied gunpoint to give it up.
Someone set up a logical matrix to address this problem, which I will try to reproduce here. The two elements are:
Either global warming is real or false
Either we act to prevent it or we don't.
If global warming is real and we act to prevent it, scientists have told us that even capping emissions immediately would only have a minimal effect. We would have to cut our emissions to nearly zero to have a significant effect. The only realistic way to do this is to force the world into a continuing global depression, or cut the population by 90%. Some cuts could be made by conversion to nuclear power, but it wouldn't be enough, and it would take at least a hundred years to implement fully, by which time it would be too late. If we manage to get it done , the best case scenario is that humanity's population is significantly reduced either through war or starvation (or both), and the remaining population is now supported by nuclear reactors, solar power, and the few that can afford them drives electric cars (remember that global depression?).
Next, global warming is real, and we do nothing. By doing nothing, we allow technology and science to progress naturally, as we have for the last several hundred years. As the world warms, the northern passage opens up, reducing the amount of fuel needed for commerce. New farmland opens up in Canada to replace that lost in Africa (which was already marginal). Weather events get more destructive, but with the extra productive capacity we have from not acting to prevent global warming, we are able to build more resistant shelters in at risk areas. Within a hundred years, seas are a foot higher, but the world economy and human technology have advanced to the point that that no longer matters. People are living in space. Poverty is widely eliminated as the remaining backward nations industrialize (we have seen rates of poverty decreasing rapidly in China as it industrializes, matching what has happened everywhere else it has happened). Eventually, poverty is made obsolete by a disruptive technology, like replication devices, cheap energy, or some other technology that I can't think of.
Third, we have the case where global warming isn't real, but we act to prevent it. The effects of the above paragraph are basically the same, except it is cooler during this process (we're fixing it! the Pols will proclaim). Since warming isn't happening nearly as fast as was predicted, there is less push to get things done. We still go into a global depression thanks to cap and trade, but there isn't any purposefully genocidal war. We move to nuclear technology. There was less waste of resources due to war, so the people aren't as poor as they would have been, but those who started out this escapade in or near poverty are now starving as the elites have most assuredly moved to defend their own interests. This has caused significant political instability. There will be Civil Wars.
The final option, there is no global warming, and we do nothing about it. Much like the second case, technologies and economies progress rapidly, with no need for investment in weatherproofed homes, the economy grows significantly faster. Moon colonies are likely, and martian colonization is possible within a hundred years. Disruptive new technologies pop up all over the place.
The point is that attempts to artificially manipulate human economies will in all cases do more damage than good, and any government effort to prevent global warming is going to end in death and poverty for a lot of people, just like poor soviet planning lead to the same in the USSR. It's not because the Russians were stupid (they weren't), it's because you can't dictate market forces efficiently. If global warming is real, we can deal with the effects as they come a lot more easily in a free market than we can in a market frozen in place by government mandate.
They said the government could do it, they didn't say that no-one else could compete.
And that competition thing is BS. The USPS gets bailed out every time they get into trouble.
As to reasons for privatization, Rick Geddes argued in 2000:
First, basic economics implies that rural customers are unlikely to be without service under competition; they would simply have to pay the true cost of delivery to them, which may or may not be lower than under monopoly.
Second, basic notions of fairness imply that the cross-subsidy should be eliminated. To the extent that people make choices about where they live, they should assume the costs of that decision.
Third, there is no reason why the government monopoly is necessary to ensure service to sparsely populated areas. The government could easily award competitive contracts to private firms for that service.
Fourth, early concerns that rural residents of the United States would somehow become isolated without federally subsidized mail delivery today are simply unfounded.... Once both sender and receiver have access to a computer, the marginal cost of sending an electronic message is close to zero.
You can give up all the freedoms you want, all you have to do is move to North Korea, the civilization capital of the world! Enjoy!
What happens when the savings vanish like a puff of smoke in the wind? Climate scientists have mostly agreed that there is nothing we can do about global warming at this point. If we take action now, we will do so by stopping production of CO2. The problem with that is that our entire global economy runs off of converting things into CO2 (even your basic life processes). Putting a limit on CO2 emissions does enormous harm, impoverishing nations and retarding technological progress.
A better solution is to simply do nothing, and deal with it at a later date when our technology is more advanced. So what if the seas are a foot higher in a hundred years? We'll be living in cities that float on the Ocean, or in habitats circling the Earth, or on Mars. Ron Smith invented a molecular replication device that solved world hunger overnight, and has made poverty obsolete. Jane LeBaron's genetic research now allows humans to live and work under the sea. Or any of an infinite number of others amazing things that could happen. But a further tax on an already heavily strained economy will do nothing more than sow discord and breed violence. We are almost bankrupt as it is.
Vancouver was the ONLY place where it wasn't snowing (which isn't to say that it wasn't cold--just dry). There was snow as far south as Houston, record snowfall across most of the US, snowstorms in Japan, more record snow and cold in Russia, etc. The whole northern hemisphere had a very odd cooling event that was accompanied by a large amount of moisture.
That doesn't prove anything though. Indeed, the last 40 years of warming don't really prove anything either. It's just a tiny blip in geological in the time frame.
Well, productivity numbers from the government count productivity from foreign workers toward the US number, while not including those worker's salaries. It just doesn't make any sense.
The numbers our government puts out are so far skewed that they aren't worth anything any more. If you want real basic economic numbers, try shadowstats.com
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid to ask what you are fishing for if you are using THIS for bait.
When does Kracken season start, now?
What about those of us who thought they were turning Japanese in the 80's?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEmJ-VWPDM4
Just what we needed, more regulations making it harder to prove oneself and gain work experience. Minimum wage laws shut young people out of jobs that could lead to the top with no cost other than hard work (leading us to rely on colleges to do all of our training at great cost). Ever hear of those guys who worked thier way up from being a dishwasher to president of a company? Those days are gone, thanks to minimum wage laws, and now you can't even become an unpaid intern to get a foot in the door, and expand your resume.
These types of idiotic laws are what are causing minority communities to fail. It's like taking the first five rungs off of the corporate ladder. Now you have to buy your own ladder to even get in at the lowest position, meaning that only the rich and the heavily subsidized can make it in this world.
Thanks nanny state!
What you fail to understand is that the entirety of the problem comes from the government side, using government guns to enforce their rules on everyone, but in a disproportionate manner. If you have a weak government, you can't have fascism. As such, ANY move to weaken government, reducing it's power to both regulate, and to hand out goodies and protections, is good for EVERYONE.
In order to understand the effects that governments have on economies, I like to share this comic book.
Understand that absent the merger of corporate and government power, the only method that a given company has of influencing the behavior of others, or enriching itself, is to provide a good product or service at a cheap price.
The owners are real people, and as such, they could just as easily bring suit against the government, and get the same outcomes.
That violates the rights of the owners, who are individuals. Removing corporate personhood simply acknowledges reality.
Except they don't. You do. It either comes out of your dividends, or it comes in the form of higher prices.
We are cutting off our own noses to spite our own faces here.
You make the mistake of thinking that only Republicans are in the pockets of the corporations. NEWSFLASH! Politicians with a D behind their name are corrupt as well!
NONE of them represent US anymore. Vote third party. The republicrats have to be taken down.
I hate to tell you, but that isn't "capitalism", it's fascism. In capitalism, when companies make mistakes (resulting in a "crash"), they pay for it themselves, or they go bankrupt and their resources are bought up by other better companies and put to more efficient use.
Governments never "reboot" the system, they perpetuate systems that don't work by giving money to TBTF's. This is why governments need to stay out of the markets, no matter how "bad" it gets (because no matter what they do, they make things worse). By not interfering, they don't need to be as large, and as such can reduce or eliminate taxes. In fact, if government were reduced to the size it was in 1990, we wouldn't need an income tax. Things weren't that bad in 1990, were they?
Interventions create unanticipated problems which create interventions, and so on. If they just stay out, and let the market handle it (and let the market KNOW that they are going to stay out permanently), then rather than the Great Depression, we get the Depression of 1920. The market sorted out a set of conditions that were much worse than the imbalances of 1929 (resulting from war spending) within a few months. How did the government help? IT DIDN'T. It stayed out. The next time, Hoover interfered, and FDR compounded Hoover's mistakes, and we got the Great Depression. This time, we had Bush interfere, and Obama is compounding those mistakes again. The difference this time is that we are now the world's largest debtor, rather than the world's largest creditor. It's like losing your job, maxing out your credit cards, and your home equity line of credit, and deciding to go on a spending spree, using bad checks to pay for your purchases. It is making a disastrous situation catastrophic.
So because sometimes politicians act in a fascist manner to "defend" their pals in business, you blame free markets for the violence? IT WAS THE POLITICIANS THAT CALLED OUT THE THUGS! The market is incapable of acting in such a manner.
BY DEFINITION, FREE MARKETS DO NOT INCLUDE USE OF FORCE. If force is applied at ANY POINT EVER, you don't have a free market. You have fascism, even if it is only for a few hours.
The examples you cited were cases where corporate and government power merged. At the time, the governments weren't nearly as large or as powerful as they are today, and they only intervened in certain situations (like strikes), whereas today they are always and at all times intervening in literally thousands of different ways.
If you really want to understand how economies work, here is a primer, in comic book form.
I guess you've been living under a rock for the last decade, and totally missed the enormous and constant erosion of civil and economic rights we have seen in this country during that time.
Go back to sleep. Nothing of importance to think about here. Certainly YOU will never be subjected to extraordinary rendition, I mean, unless of course if you are a member of the "Hated Class of the Week". If you ever have anything bad to say about the government in power, you are free to do so, so long as it is within one of the ten...no six...no three free speech zones, located conveniently behind razor wire fences. Don't worry about being pulled over at an illegal checkpoint that can be set up anywhere within a hundred miles of the border to be arbitrarily searched for "illegals". Don't give the men manning the checkpoints any sass, or they might just "find" a bag of coke in your glovebox. If that happens, you will have all of your assets seized as suspects in a drug investigation, and since they aren't people, they have no right to due process, they simply belong to the police (Civil Asset Forfeiture).
So don't talk to me about God damn conspiracy theories. All you fucking fairweather liberals have turned into fucking nazis now that you are in power, while the Republicans are suddenly a bunch of freedom loving libertarians. You people make me sick. You deserve whatever you get. I'm going to move to fucking China, where a man can at least open a business without having to fellate fifty fucking bureaucrats. Enjoy your economic collapse.
It seems to me that you don't really understand what a "free market" is.
Free markets don't allow involuntary application of force. What you are thinking of is fascism, which is what we have in this country. Sadly everything it does is blamed on the free market by socialists claiming to ride to our rescue, who are closet fascists themselves, and prove it the second they get into office.
You feed them. I have better things to do than to interfere with the choices some guy in the third world makes.
If people stopped interfering and pushing their social values on people, and let them be free, people in general wouldn't have to make these hard choices.
You're right. Their society has failed, so all the children deserve to starve to death. Lets send soldiers there to enforce that.
That's not free market. If there were a free market, you wouldn't be getting random organs from China, but you would be harvesting the organ in one room, and implanting it next door, in a nice, clean hospital.
Living without a kidney is a lot less lethal than dying in the streets of starvation.
Preventing people (poor or otherwise) from marketing whatever goods or services they have available to them is always harmful. Even child prostitution is often a choice between sex or starvation/neglect.
All I can say is, enjoy the reign of the third coming of Bush. I may just take Somalia over that.
And FYI, every vital and important service you listed there is provided by you LOCAL government, except for the military, and our military is not engaged in protecting us from foreign threats, but instead goes about MAKING NEW ENEMIES, and spending our money abroad killing brown people.
Enjoy your Nazi Party redux. People like you will deserve whatever you get, for spitting in the face of freedom, and allowing any horror to be perpetuated, so long as the ones responsible are a member of your party.
The difference is that you don't have to register to vote. Refusal to cooperate with the census will eventually lead to you being shot by a death sq...SWAT team invading your house, as you rightfully resist arrest.
I bet you thought the idea of habeus corpus being suspended under Clinton's successor was ridiculous back in 1999. What horror do you think the next administration will be capable of? Why are you signing your own death warrant in advance?
If the government didn't know where people lived, then how is it that they were able to MAIL us the census forms? There are other ways to get this data than to force us under implied gunpoint to give it up.
Someone set up a logical matrix to address this problem, which I will try to reproduce here. The two elements are:
Either global warming is real or false
Either we act to prevent it or we don't.
If global warming is real and we act to prevent it, scientists have told us that even capping emissions immediately would only have a minimal effect. We would have to cut our emissions to nearly zero to have a significant effect. The only realistic way to do this is to force the world into a continuing global depression, or cut the population by 90%. Some cuts could be made by conversion to nuclear power, but it wouldn't be enough, and it would take at least a hundred years to implement fully, by which time it would be too late. If we manage to get it done , the best case scenario is that humanity's population is significantly reduced either through war or starvation (or both), and the remaining population is now supported by nuclear reactors, solar power, and the few that can afford them drives electric cars (remember that global depression?).
Next, global warming is real, and we do nothing. By doing nothing, we allow technology and science to progress naturally, as we have for the last several hundred years. As the world warms, the northern passage opens up, reducing the amount of fuel needed for commerce. New farmland opens up in Canada to replace that lost in Africa (which was already marginal). Weather events get more destructive, but with the extra productive capacity we have from not acting to prevent global warming, we are able to build more resistant shelters in at risk areas. Within a hundred years, seas are a foot higher, but the world economy and human technology have advanced to the point that that no longer matters. People are living in space. Poverty is widely eliminated as the remaining backward nations industrialize (we have seen rates of poverty decreasing rapidly in China as it industrializes, matching what has happened everywhere else it has happened). Eventually, poverty is made obsolete by a disruptive technology, like replication devices, cheap energy, or some other technology that I can't think of.
Third, we have the case where global warming isn't real, but we act to prevent it. The effects of the above paragraph are basically the same, except it is cooler during this process (we're fixing it! the Pols will proclaim). Since warming isn't happening nearly as fast as was predicted, there is less push to get things done. We still go into a global depression thanks to cap and trade, but there isn't any purposefully genocidal war. We move to nuclear technology. There was less waste of resources due to war, so the people aren't as poor as they would have been, but those who started out this escapade in or near poverty are now starving as the elites have most assuredly moved to defend their own interests. This has caused significant political instability. There will be Civil Wars.
The final option, there is no global warming, and we do nothing about it. Much like the second case, technologies and economies progress rapidly, with no need for investment in weatherproofed homes, the economy grows significantly faster. Moon colonies are likely, and martian colonization is possible within a hundred years. Disruptive new technologies pop up all over the place.
The point is that attempts to artificially manipulate human economies will in all cases do more damage than good, and any government effort to prevent global warming is going to end in death and poverty for a lot of people, just like poor soviet planning lead to the same in the USSR. It's not because the Russians were stupid (they weren't), it's because you can't dictate market forces efficiently. If global warming is real, we can deal with the effects as they come a lot more easily in a free market than we can in a market frozen in place by government mandate.
They said the government could do it, they didn't say that no-one else could compete.
... Once both sender and receiver have access to a computer, the marginal cost of sending an electronic message is close to zero.
And that competition thing is BS. The USPS gets bailed out every time they get into trouble.
As to reasons for privatization, Rick Geddes argued in 2000: First, basic economics implies that rural customers are unlikely to be without service under competition; they would simply have to pay the true cost of delivery to them, which may or may not be lower than under monopoly. Second, basic notions of fairness imply that the cross-subsidy should be eliminated. To the extent that people make choices about where they live, they should assume the costs of that decision. Third, there is no reason why the government monopoly is necessary to ensure service to sparsely populated areas. The government could easily award competitive contracts to private firms for that service. Fourth, early concerns that rural residents of the United States would somehow become isolated without federally subsidized mail delivery today are simply unfounded.
You can give up all the freedoms you want, all you have to do is move to North Korea, the civilization capital of the world! Enjoy!
What are you, 48?
What happens when the savings vanish like a puff of smoke in the wind? Climate scientists have mostly agreed that there is nothing we can do about global warming at this point. If we take action now, we will do so by stopping production of CO2. The problem with that is that our entire global economy runs off of converting things into CO2 (even your basic life processes). Putting a limit on CO2 emissions does enormous harm, impoverishing nations and retarding technological progress.
A better solution is to simply do nothing, and deal with it at a later date when our technology is more advanced. So what if the seas are a foot higher in a hundred years? We'll be living in cities that float on the Ocean, or in habitats circling the Earth, or on Mars. Ron Smith invented a molecular replication device that solved world hunger overnight, and has made poverty obsolete. Jane LeBaron's genetic research now allows humans to live and work under the sea. Or any of an infinite number of others amazing things that could happen. But a further tax on an already heavily strained economy will do nothing more than sow discord and breed violence. We are almost bankrupt as it is.
Vancouver was the ONLY place where it wasn't snowing (which isn't to say that it wasn't cold--just dry). There was snow as far south as Houston, record snowfall across most of the US, snowstorms in Japan, more record snow and cold in Russia, etc. The whole northern hemisphere had a very odd cooling event that was accompanied by a large amount of moisture.
That doesn't prove anything though. Indeed, the last 40 years of warming don't really prove anything either. It's just a tiny blip in geological in the time frame.
Well, productivity numbers from the government count productivity from foreign workers toward the US number, while not including those worker's salaries. It just doesn't make any sense.
The numbers our government puts out are so far skewed that they aren't worth anything any more. If you want real basic economic numbers, try shadowstats.com
I'm sure your grandkids will need to know your phone number.