Yes, that is what I meant. The bigots mostly moved to the Republican party. Of course, that sentiment has died down a great deal over the last twenty years or so as society has rightly begun to focus less on race.
That post was merely an explanation of some of the history of the R and D parties, and what is going on now. I'm not sure why it was modded flamebait. Well, I do, R's and D's are uncomfortable with the truth, since both parties fester in partisan lies. Hope on the Republican side comes from people such as Ron Paul, while hope on the Democratic side comes from people like Dennis Kucinich, both of whom have been sadly marginalized by the "mainstream" elements of each party. Paul is making headway, however, and that is why the libertarian side of that party is rising once again.
Yes, but that is California, which is mostly mountains and desert. There are more trees now because water is being diverted there from elsewhere. Check the numbers and you'll probably see a greater decline in tree populations in neighboring states.
Of course, I agree with the thesis of the article. I saw pictures of my hometown from a hundred years ago, and there wasn't a tree in sight, but now it's like living on Kashyyyk. There are huge pine trees everywhere where the land isn't kept clear. I'm sure that 200+ years ago you probably couldn't even walk though the area for the thick undergrowth and close-growing trees. I also know that the paper and logging companies have a lot to do with that, as they long ago instituted a policy of planting two trees for every one they felled. Due to that policy, they have become a lot wealthier.
Liberals are for big government, and these types of government intrusions into the public and private spheres serve no purpose save to increase the size and power of the government. He isn't speaking as a conservative, but as a libertarian.
Currently, libertarians are attempting to regain control of the Republican Party, which used to be the more progressive of the two parties, with Democrats mostly coming from the south, and being filled with bigots and warmongers. During the time between 1970 and 1990, there was a change in that the bigots and warmongers jumped ship, and ran to the Republican Party, which was asserting itself as the dominant power after running on libertarian issues (Goldwater followed by Reagan). Reagan was corrupted by these people, and gave us the Republican party we have today, on filled with neoconservatives, with the word neoconservative being literal, those people used to be liberals, but the meanings got all twisted around.
The issues you mentioned are simply wedge issues that were used to separate the largely libertarian base of the United States into "liberals" and "conservatives", both of which campaign on one half of the good of society (with liberals pushing social freedom, and conservatives pushing economic freedom), but once in office, they instead focus on taking away rights and freedoms (with conservatives attacking social rights and liberals attacking economic freedoms). They are two sides of the same coin, both representing the deep pit of injustice and corruption that US politics has become.
Actually, you can't cite any case involving a corporation, because corporations can't exist in a free market. Corporations come about from an arbitrary law imposed by governments shielding stockholders from liability for the actions of a company beyond what they have invested. In the free market, liability can only be limited by contract, and can NEVER be fully eliminated (ie you buy insurance against it, but if the insurance company goes bankrupt, then you are liable again).
For human trafficking, you had better define your terms. What do you mean that they "leverage against them economically"? That doesn't even mean anything. Rural poor people are poor because their governments take away all of their money, or because they made bad decisions. If it is the former, then you can't blame the free market, and if it's the latter, markets don't make decisions for people. The only real leverage they could have is if they had taken a loan from them for consumption (bad decision), or for a capital project that failed (should have saved rathe than taking a loan from a risky partner). Further, default is an option in a free market, so even if he failed to make his payments, they could only take his daughter by force, and force is by definition NOT a part for the free market!
The only arguments that carry any weight here are arguments that say that we don't have a free market, and that is EXACTLY why I always argue in their favor! Give people freedom, and they will get rich, and they will do so quickly. This happened in Hong Kong, thanks to Britain's policy benign neglect, meaning they enforced laws against rape, murder, theft, etc, but left them alone economically. Otherwise, Hong Kong was just a worthless rock, yet today it is one of the greatest cities in the world. The same policy shaped America into a superpower, and the abandonment of that policy has led us down the path to socialist hell, where we wind up being about as "great" of a nation as Mexico.
The plot of Batman Begins was a crazy person poisoning the water supply. Hardly free market activity. Interestingly, though, Batman would be a product of a free market in police forces, as vigilantes are legitimate where governments do not have a monopoly on police protection. I wager he would likely go bankrupt pretty quick, with all the collateral damage he tends to leave in his wake, though.
Denying reality doesn't make it not so. Free markets recognize participants as humans. When we had slavery, we didn't have a free market, though it was significantly freer than it is today (as we pay almost of our productivity to our "masters" in government as did 18th century slaves, and significantly more than feudal serfs).
In a free market, people are protected from violence. All you need is a good definition of people and you have a nice, free society. If you define it such that only men are people, then you have a deep social problem, but that comes from the government making the definition, not from the market itself. Similarly, it was the GOVERNMENT that allowed slavery to continue. The market merely acted within the confines of reality. Markets aren't magic, they are just REALLY efficient when allowed to run freely.
I suppose you wrote the book on Chinese factory labor? Have you ever even left the country? Have you ever looked beyond the surface of ANY issue? Are you older than 14? I think the answer to all of these questions is a definitive NO. You don't really know anything about the world, or how it works. You just want to use guns to seize things and make everything work the way you think it ought to. You're nothing more than a petulant child.
Yeah, having a 80% chance of dying before adulthood is AWESOME! Having to go long periods surviving on nothing but worms and berries is totally sweet. Breaking your back for during the planting and harvest seasons, possibly to have your entire crop ruined by bad weather is nice and stable. Having to starve and eat rats until the next planting season is the best way to live! If hunting and gathering was better/more comfortable, people would DO IT.
Blaming the past is not constructive. If you want to get ahead, work hard and learn marketable skills. The children working in those factories are likely to grow up to run them. Also, read the comic book. Don't try to cite 1980's comedy as fact.
Maybe if you read this comic book, you'll understand. I doubt it though, since you have demonstrated in the past that you totally unwilling to listen to anyone you don't agree with.
By the way, those children who have been "enslaved" would have wound up either starving in the countryside, or working in the sex industry. Might want to get your priorities straight. In a free market, greed necessarily works to the benefit of everyone (the comic book explains how this works).
There is no such thing as "economic force". Either you have a gun to your head, or your life is otherwise directly threatened, or it isn't. "Wage slavery" is nothing but BS. There are other employers, who will offer higher wages to prevent higher turnover.
You can't reasonably cite the RIAA in this case, because they are relying upon anti-competitive laws to make their cases, in a system which has explicitly limited the number of lawyers (through use of the Bar). Don't make the mistake of thinking we have a free market. In reality, we are just a shade better than North Korea in terms of policy. The only reason our standard is higher than theirs is that we are living off of our free market legacy from a hundred years ago, and the fact that we somehow managed to get the world to accept little pieces of paper as though they were gold.
Yeah, except that simple possession is illegal, so they could prosecute you if they wanted to. Lazy cops would rather just shoot the messenger than actually track down the people who made it. They'd rather spend their time tracking down evil speeders and prosecuting people for downloading music and movies from the internet.
You can't get slaves for sale without using force. Free markets DO NOT allow the application of force without consent. You are thinking of Anarchy, which is a different concept.
Free markets are fully compatible with the concept of government, it's just that the reach of government into the economy is extremely limited.
People might want to kill children, but the free market isn't going to provide shooting ranges filled with toddlers. Free markets respect the rights of individuals. Particularly, the rights to life, liberty, and property.
Of course it happened in TV, compliance with FCC regulations is too expensive!
No such thing has happened with print. It's just that the small guys went onto the internet. Blogs do a pretty damn good job on the whole "investigative journalism" thing, and do it, surprise surprise, cheaper and more efficiently, so much so that the vast majority of them are free!
You can't have slaves in a free market. It is a contradiction in terms. A free market allows no force of arms to be employed save in self defense. Contracts can be broken in a free market, and contracts with unconscionable terms (where one party gets something in exchange for little or nothing) can be torn up by the courts. With those provisions in place, you couldn't have slavery, as slaves could simply walk away, even if they had a "contract".
Besides, it is always cheaper to let people provide for themselves while simply paying them to do a job. This was picked up on in the North, which lead to slavery being abolished there quickly. The only reason slavery was perpetuated in the south is because the whites feared a violent rebellion where they would be outnumbered, which had precedence in Haiti and other colonies with black slaves. Fear leads to nasty things, as those of you who suffered through Star Wars Episode I know all too well.
Get rid of the FCC, and see how long Fox can last against a wave of local television stations that report a wider variety of news, and do so more accurately and more cheaply.
Remember, it's the FCC that has set up the oligopoly (or is it a duopoly now?) of media stations. Large corporations wouldn't exist in a free market without being EXTREMELY good at what they do. In this country, we allow corporations to use regulations as a club to keep themselves from being torn down and devoured by younger stations with better business models.
I like pizza, therefore we should impose a new tax and use it to give everyone FREE PIZZA! It doesn't matter if they like it or not. It also doesn't matter whether each one costs $100, or that you have to stand in line for six hours to get one.
Government has no business giving out bread and circuses. That is one of the things that destroyed Rome (the welfare state helped, as did the model of continuous exponential growth and to bring plunder so others would work for them), and it will eventually destroy any other nation that relies on it for too long. Welfare states inevitably collapse. Sweden has a noble history of free markets and trade, and the last few decades of socialism have been living off of that legacy. Look at your country's books, and you'll find that your outlays are well in excess of your revenues. Norway can get away with it due to their wealth of oil, but even that is limited.
My god you're stupid. Car exhaust and industrial smokestacks contain other things than CO2. People have been very successful in suing polluters (ever see the movie "Erin Brockovich"?). You have no idea what you are talking about on interest rates and deregulation (every economist in the world, even the stupid ones, agree with me on that).
You don't even realize that you agree with me about the government being in bed with corporations. Corporations taking over government is the DEFINITION of fascism. What you don't realize is that the government is acting as the enforcement arm of the corporations. Remove the enforcement arm, and they can only deal with people through voluntary exchange. If you can't see that, then you are too stupid for me to waste any more of my time on.
I am well aware that all forms of power production receive subsidies. I would be all for removing every single one of them, and allowing them to stand on their own merits. Government interventions here are like having someone attempting to lift some weight, where government comes along and jumps onto the shoulders of the man lifting the weight and tries to help him by pulling up. All he is doing is adding the weight of his bureaucracy to the burden of providing the service. The net impact on society is always negative, because governments don't operate for free.
I'm going to stop feeding the trolls now. Enjoy your eternal depression if the policies you advocate are kept in place.
"1000's of deaths" Prove it. When you do, sue the companies responsible. This has been done before successfully, and would happen more often if we didn't live in a fascist society (Read: a society where government and corporate power have merged). Further, this has nothing to do with carbon emissions, which are not carcinogenic, so your point is invalid to start with.
"housing speculation" This is most assuredly NOT caused by the free market, but was a result of Greenspan's policy of artificially low interest rates. As stated before, we have not had a free market in this country for almost 100 years. When you have a quasi-governmental organization (again, fascist combination of government and corporation) setting interest rates, this type of thing is bound to happen, and will continue to do so again and again until the market is allowed to set rates. Artificially low interest rates sends a false economic signal, making people think that we have a lot more savings than we do. This is what leads to malinvestment.
"green energy" Green energy is for the most part only economical because of government subsidy. "Dirty" energy is used to create all those solar panels, wind turbines, etc, and is used to maintain them. For the most part, it is also required to fill out the base load of the grid. Spain has attempted to install the Cap and Trade that you crazies love so much, and it has lead them straight into a depression (20+% unemployment).
You don't understand the concept of a tax. You also don't understand that in order for damages to be claimed, damage must be proved with a "preponderance of evidence". That is how polluters pay for the damage they have caused. In general, this means they are forced to pay for the cleanup, pay for the damage they caused to their victims, pay punitive damages. It does not mean that they pay the government a bunch of money that will never be used to address the so called problem.
A question for you: individual people produce CO2 by simply living. Should they be forced to participate in cap and trade? What about other living beings? Do we pay trees for cleaning up the CO2? Where does it end?
Remember, we are talking about limiting the process which life itself depends upon. This is exactly what makes people rich or poor, and you want to use government guns to make them poorer. Remember, this will impact the poor more than the rich, as they have a higher carbon impact proportional to their income. What do you have against poor people?
That's stupid. If slaves are involved, then it isn't a free market by definition.
Further, I would say that you should PROVE that the western "free market" (read: we don't have a free market, and haven't had one for almost 100 years) depends substantially on any form of slave labor. Sure, a few places are run unethically, but the vast majority of foreign employees are working of their own will, and for wages that are negotiated by the labor force in general.
It is indeed a tax when it is a mandatory program that forces private businesses or individuals to pay the government in order to be allowed to continue operations.
You can try to define your way out of uncomfortable truths all you like, but the fact is that any action taken by government in this arena will do nothing but cause more pain, suffering, poverty, and death in the world.
Humans have one method, and one method ONLY of efficiently allocating resources, and that is the free market. Any form of intervention that utilizes physical force or the threat of physical force will act to move resources to areas where they will not be used efficiently, such as housing speculation or so-called green energy, most of which has a larger impact on the environment than existing centralized energy production methods.
You might want to brush up on your grammar (not to mention re-examining your self destructive ideology) before calling other people idiots.
Certainly, the capitalists must have built some sort of device that forced perfectly happy and well fed rural laborers and their well educated children to leave their rural squalor without offering a demonstrably better life, including such aspects as not forcing their children into prostitution or starvation. Because, you know, people can just point a finger at a hunk of metal, and a vast factory will spring up without any need for sacrifice or thought, mere muscular action is all it takes. If it weren't for those evil capitalists, we'd all be living in paradise right now, just like we were before they poked their heads into the loomhouses of feudal England.
Unions have done nothing that basic economics and group preference wouldn't have brought about on their own. The only real benefit of unions is that they make it more difficult for employers to break the law in their dealings with their employees (though they make it far more likely that employees will break the law when dealing with their employers, so the social gain is a wash in most cases). In the end, when you have strong unions, you have an unsustainable system that feeds on increased regulation and tax revenue (think United Autoworkers and the auto bailout).
Sorry, Red, but you don't know anything about industry or economics. When you tax production (or anything) you get less of it. Tax production of food resources, and you will have less food resources. Don't think that you know what is best for every single person on the earth better than those individuals. That type of thinking has ALWAYS failed, and will always fail, leaving nothing but death, poverty, and devastation in their wake. Otherwise, I would invite you to move to North Korea and see what happens when you intervene into the economy on a massive scale.
If you are going to say that children in Africa must go without food due to lowered industrial and agricultural production from carbon caps, they YOU had better prove beyond a doubt that this ISN'T a normal part of the climate cycle. Indeed, I'm not sure that even if you could say that, that you or anyone else is qualified to make the choice. A child starving in Africa, or a child drowning in Bangladesh--this is an impossible choice, and in such situations, one should err on the side of individual freedom. We don't have any right to say who lives and who dies, who gets rich, and who is impoverished.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that is what I meant. The bigots mostly moved to the Republican party. Of course, that sentiment has died down a great deal over the last twenty years or so as society has rightly begun to focus less on race.
That post was merely an explanation of some of the history of the R and D parties, and what is going on now. I'm not sure why it was modded flamebait. Well, I do, R's and D's are uncomfortable with the truth, since both parties fester in partisan lies. Hope on the Republican side comes from people such as Ron Paul, while hope on the Democratic side comes from people like Dennis Kucinich, both of whom have been sadly marginalized by the "mainstream" elements of each party. Paul is making headway, however, and that is why the libertarian side of that party is rising once again.
Yes, but that is California, which is mostly mountains and desert. There are more trees now because water is being diverted there from elsewhere. Check the numbers and you'll probably see a greater decline in tree populations in neighboring states.
Of course, I agree with the thesis of the article. I saw pictures of my hometown from a hundred years ago, and there wasn't a tree in sight, but now it's like living on Kashyyyk. There are huge pine trees everywhere where the land isn't kept clear. I'm sure that 200+ years ago you probably couldn't even walk though the area for the thick undergrowth and close-growing trees. I also know that the paper and logging companies have a lot to do with that, as they long ago instituted a policy of planting two trees for every one they felled. Due to that policy, they have become a lot wealthier.
Liberals are for big government, and these types of government intrusions into the public and private spheres serve no purpose save to increase the size and power of the government. He isn't speaking as a conservative, but as a libertarian.
Currently, libertarians are attempting to regain control of the Republican Party, which used to be the more progressive of the two parties, with Democrats mostly coming from the south, and being filled with bigots and warmongers. During the time between 1970 and 1990, there was a change in that the bigots and warmongers jumped ship, and ran to the Republican Party, which was asserting itself as the dominant power after running on libertarian issues (Goldwater followed by Reagan). Reagan was corrupted by these people, and gave us the Republican party we have today, on filled with neoconservatives, with the word neoconservative being literal, those people used to be liberals, but the meanings got all twisted around.
The issues you mentioned are simply wedge issues that were used to separate the largely libertarian base of the United States into "liberals" and "conservatives", both of which campaign on one half of the good of society (with liberals pushing social freedom, and conservatives pushing economic freedom), but once in office, they instead focus on taking away rights and freedoms (with conservatives attacking social rights and liberals attacking economic freedoms). They are two sides of the same coin, both representing the deep pit of injustice and corruption that US politics has become.
George W Bush asked what a gigabyte was.
Technically, he asked what a jiggabyte is. He then asked if it had anything to do with nukeular bombs.
Actually, you can't cite any case involving a corporation, because corporations can't exist in a free market. Corporations come about from an arbitrary law imposed by governments shielding stockholders from liability for the actions of a company beyond what they have invested. In the free market, liability can only be limited by contract, and can NEVER be fully eliminated (ie you buy insurance against it, but if the insurance company goes bankrupt, then you are liable again).
For human trafficking, you had better define your terms. What do you mean that they "leverage against them economically"? That doesn't even mean anything. Rural poor people are poor because their governments take away all of their money, or because they made bad decisions. If it is the former, then you can't blame the free market, and if it's the latter, markets don't make decisions for people. The only real leverage they could have is if they had taken a loan from them for consumption (bad decision), or for a capital project that failed (should have saved rathe than taking a loan from a risky partner). Further, default is an option in a free market, so even if he failed to make his payments, they could only take his daughter by force, and force is by definition NOT a part for the free market!
The only arguments that carry any weight here are arguments that say that we don't have a free market, and that is EXACTLY why I always argue in their favor! Give people freedom, and they will get rich, and they will do so quickly. This happened in Hong Kong, thanks to Britain's policy benign neglect, meaning they enforced laws against rape, murder, theft, etc, but left them alone economically. Otherwise, Hong Kong was just a worthless rock, yet today it is one of the greatest cities in the world. The same policy shaped America into a superpower, and the abandonment of that policy has led us down the path to socialist hell, where we wind up being about as "great" of a nation as Mexico.
The plot of Batman Begins was a crazy person poisoning the water supply. Hardly free market activity. Interestingly, though, Batman would be a product of a free market in police forces, as vigilantes are legitimate where governments do not have a monopoly on police protection. I wager he would likely go bankrupt pretty quick, with all the collateral damage he tends to leave in his wake, though.
Denying reality doesn't make it not so. Free markets recognize participants as humans. When we had slavery, we didn't have a free market, though it was significantly freer than it is today (as we pay almost of our productivity to our "masters" in government as did 18th century slaves, and significantly more than feudal serfs).
In a free market, people are protected from violence. All you need is a good definition of people and you have a nice, free society. If you define it such that only men are people, then you have a deep social problem, but that comes from the government making the definition, not from the market itself. Similarly, it was the GOVERNMENT that allowed slavery to continue. The market merely acted within the confines of reality. Markets aren't magic, they are just REALLY efficient when allowed to run freely.
I suppose you wrote the book on Chinese factory labor? Have you ever even left the country? Have you ever looked beyond the surface of ANY issue? Are you older than 14? I think the answer to all of these questions is a definitive NO. You don't really know anything about the world, or how it works. You just want to use guns to seize things and make everything work the way you think it ought to. You're nothing more than a petulant child.
Yeah, having a 80% chance of dying before adulthood is AWESOME! Having to go long periods surviving on nothing but worms and berries is totally sweet. Breaking your back for during the planting and harvest seasons, possibly to have your entire crop ruined by bad weather is nice and stable. Having to starve and eat rats until the next planting season is the best way to live! If hunting and gathering was better/more comfortable, people would DO IT.
Blaming the past is not constructive. If you want to get ahead, work hard and learn marketable skills. The children working in those factories are likely to grow up to run them. Also, read the comic book. Don't try to cite 1980's comedy as fact.
Maybe if you read this comic book, you'll understand. I doubt it though, since you have demonstrated in the past that you totally unwilling to listen to anyone you don't agree with.
By the way, those children who have been "enslaved" would have wound up either starving in the countryside, or working in the sex industry. Might want to get your priorities straight. In a free market, greed necessarily works to the benefit of everyone (the comic book explains how this works).
Cows aren't people.
There is no such thing as "economic force". Either you have a gun to your head, or your life is otherwise directly threatened, or it isn't. "Wage slavery" is nothing but BS. There are other employers, who will offer higher wages to prevent higher turnover.
You can't reasonably cite the RIAA in this case, because they are relying upon anti-competitive laws to make their cases, in a system which has explicitly limited the number of lawyers (through use of the Bar). Don't make the mistake of thinking we have a free market. In reality, we are just a shade better than North Korea in terms of policy. The only reason our standard is higher than theirs is that we are living off of our free market legacy from a hundred years ago, and the fact that we somehow managed to get the world to accept little pieces of paper as though they were gold.
Police get to break the law in a police state. We're living in one.
Yeah, except that simple possession is illegal, so they could prosecute you if they wanted to. Lazy cops would rather just shoot the messenger than actually track down the people who made it. They'd rather spend their time tracking down evil speeders and prosecuting people for downloading music and movies from the internet.
Don't talk to the police. It's too risky.
You can't get slaves for sale without using force. Free markets DO NOT allow the application of force without consent. You are thinking of Anarchy, which is a different concept.
Free markets are fully compatible with the concept of government, it's just that the reach of government into the economy is extremely limited.
People might want to kill children, but the free market isn't going to provide shooting ranges filled with toddlers. Free markets respect the rights of individuals. Particularly, the rights to life, liberty, and property.
Of course it happened in TV, compliance with FCC regulations is too expensive!
No such thing has happened with print. It's just that the small guys went onto the internet. Blogs do a pretty damn good job on the whole "investigative journalism" thing, and do it, surprise surprise, cheaper and more efficiently, so much so that the vast majority of them are free!
You can't have slaves in a free market. It is a contradiction in terms. A free market allows no force of arms to be employed save in self defense. Contracts can be broken in a free market, and contracts with unconscionable terms (where one party gets something in exchange for little or nothing) can be torn up by the courts. With those provisions in place, you couldn't have slavery, as slaves could simply walk away, even if they had a "contract".
Besides, it is always cheaper to let people provide for themselves while simply paying them to do a job. This was picked up on in the North, which lead to slavery being abolished there quickly. The only reason slavery was perpetuated in the south is because the whites feared a violent rebellion where they would be outnumbered, which had precedence in Haiti and other colonies with black slaves. Fear leads to nasty things, as those of you who suffered through Star Wars Episode I know all too well.
Get rid of the FCC, and see how long Fox can last against a wave of local television stations that report a wider variety of news, and do so more accurately and more cheaply.
Remember, it's the FCC that has set up the oligopoly (or is it a duopoly now?) of media stations. Large corporations wouldn't exist in a free market without being EXTREMELY good at what they do. In this country, we allow corporations to use regulations as a club to keep themselves from being torn down and devoured by younger stations with better business models.
I like pizza, therefore we should impose a new tax and use it to give everyone FREE PIZZA! It doesn't matter if they like it or not. It also doesn't matter whether each one costs $100, or that you have to stand in line for six hours to get one.
Government has no business giving out bread and circuses. That is one of the things that destroyed Rome (the welfare state helped, as did the model of continuous exponential growth and to bring plunder so others would work for them), and it will eventually destroy any other nation that relies on it for too long. Welfare states inevitably collapse. Sweden has a noble history of free markets and trade, and the last few decades of socialism have been living off of that legacy. Look at your country's books, and you'll find that your outlays are well in excess of your revenues. Norway can get away with it due to their wealth of oil, but even that is limited.
My god you're stupid. Car exhaust and industrial smokestacks contain other things than CO2. People have been very successful in suing polluters (ever see the movie "Erin Brockovich"?). You have no idea what you are talking about on interest rates and deregulation (every economist in the world, even the stupid ones, agree with me on that).
You don't even realize that you agree with me about the government being in bed with corporations. Corporations taking over government is the DEFINITION of fascism. What you don't realize is that the government is acting as the enforcement arm of the corporations. Remove the enforcement arm, and they can only deal with people through voluntary exchange. If you can't see that, then you are too stupid for me to waste any more of my time on.
I am well aware that all forms of power production receive subsidies. I would be all for removing every single one of them, and allowing them to stand on their own merits. Government interventions here are like having someone attempting to lift some weight, where government comes along and jumps onto the shoulders of the man lifting the weight and tries to help him by pulling up. All he is doing is adding the weight of his bureaucracy to the burden of providing the service. The net impact on society is always negative, because governments don't operate for free.
I'm going to stop feeding the trolls now. Enjoy your eternal depression if the policies you advocate are kept in place.
"1000's of deaths" Prove it. When you do, sue the companies responsible. This has been done before successfully, and would happen more often if we didn't live in a fascist society (Read: a society where government and corporate power have merged). Further, this has nothing to do with carbon emissions, which are not carcinogenic, so your point is invalid to start with.
"housing speculation" This is most assuredly NOT caused by the free market, but was a result of Greenspan's policy of artificially low interest rates. As stated before, we have not had a free market in this country for almost 100 years. When you have a quasi-governmental organization (again, fascist combination of government and corporation) setting interest rates, this type of thing is bound to happen, and will continue to do so again and again until the market is allowed to set rates. Artificially low interest rates sends a false economic signal, making people think that we have a lot more savings than we do. This is what leads to malinvestment.
"green energy" Green energy is for the most part only economical because of government subsidy. "Dirty" energy is used to create all those solar panels, wind turbines, etc, and is used to maintain them. For the most part, it is also required to fill out the base load of the grid. Spain has attempted to install the Cap and Trade that you crazies love so much, and it has lead them straight into a depression (20+% unemployment).
You don't understand the concept of a tax. You also don't understand that in order for damages to be claimed, damage must be proved with a "preponderance of evidence". That is how polluters pay for the damage they have caused. In general, this means they are forced to pay for the cleanup, pay for the damage they caused to their victims, pay punitive damages. It does not mean that they pay the government a bunch of money that will never be used to address the so called problem.
A question for you: individual people produce CO2 by simply living. Should they be forced to participate in cap and trade? What about other living beings? Do we pay trees for cleaning up the CO2? Where does it end?
Remember, we are talking about limiting the process which life itself depends upon. This is exactly what makes people rich or poor, and you want to use government guns to make them poorer. Remember, this will impact the poor more than the rich, as they have a higher carbon impact proportional to their income. What do you have against poor people?
That's stupid. If slaves are involved, then it isn't a free market by definition.
Further, I would say that you should PROVE that the western "free market" (read: we don't have a free market, and haven't had one for almost 100 years) depends substantially on any form of slave labor. Sure, a few places are run unethically, but the vast majority of foreign employees are working of their own will, and for wages that are negotiated by the labor force in general.
It is indeed a tax when it is a mandatory program that forces private businesses or individuals to pay the government in order to be allowed to continue operations.
You can try to define your way out of uncomfortable truths all you like, but the fact is that any action taken by government in this arena will do nothing but cause more pain, suffering, poverty, and death in the world.
Humans have one method, and one method ONLY of efficiently allocating resources, and that is the free market. Any form of intervention that utilizes physical force or the threat of physical force will act to move resources to areas where they will not be used efficiently, such as housing speculation or so-called green energy, most of which has a larger impact on the environment than existing centralized energy production methods.
You might want to brush up on your grammar (not to mention re-examining your self destructive ideology) before calling other people idiots.
Yeah, I'm sure it was the unions that brought that about, and had nothing to do with the rising productivity brought about by those evil child employing capitalists.
Certainly, the capitalists must have built some sort of device that forced perfectly happy and well fed rural laborers and their well educated children to leave their rural squalor without offering a demonstrably better life, including such aspects as not forcing their children into prostitution or starvation. Because, you know, people can just point a finger at a hunk of metal, and a vast factory will spring up without any need for sacrifice or thought, mere muscular action is all it takes. If it weren't for those evil capitalists, we'd all be living in paradise right now, just like we were before they poked their heads into the loomhouses of feudal England.
Unions have done nothing that basic economics and group preference wouldn't have brought about on their own. The only real benefit of unions is that they make it more difficult for employers to break the law in their dealings with their employees (though they make it far more likely that employees will break the law when dealing with their employers, so the social gain is a wash in most cases). In the end, when you have strong unions, you have an unsustainable system that feeds on increased regulation and tax revenue (think United Autoworkers and the auto bailout).
Sorry, Red, but you don't know anything about industry or economics. When you tax production (or anything) you get less of it. Tax production of food resources, and you will have less food resources. Don't think that you know what is best for every single person on the earth better than those individuals. That type of thinking has ALWAYS failed, and will always fail, leaving nothing but death, poverty, and devastation in their wake. Otherwise, I would invite you to move to North Korea and see what happens when you intervene into the economy on a massive scale.
If you are going to say that children in Africa must go without food due to lowered industrial and agricultural production from carbon caps, they YOU had better prove beyond a doubt that this ISN'T a normal part of the climate cycle. Indeed, I'm not sure that even if you could say that, that you or anyone else is qualified to make the choice. A child starving in Africa, or a child drowning in Bangladesh--this is an impossible choice, and in such situations, one should err on the side of individual freedom. We don't have any right to say who lives and who dies, who gets rich, and who is impoverished.