>> ^kceaton1:

Apples and Oranges. We are an active U.N. member AND on the security council, not to mention a member of NATO. We also have MANY treaties. People are concerned about the semantics here. The rule of law and how they can garner leverage politically.
Meanwhile, we're preventing what could have been a near genocidal event. In the past we sat on our rear ends with such events across the globe. Then a lot of people cried foul that we did nothing (as oil wasn't involved).
Now, we do the right thing and the Republican war machinists cry foul; most likely ONLY, because they didn't tell Obama to do it first.
We have foreign obligations; get over it.


International treaties don't override the constitution, that defeats the whole purpose. Why have a constitution if it can be so easily subverted? "Oh, gee, this international treaty I signed tells me I can do anything my domestic constitution prohibits me from doing!"

The funny thing about fluoride is that it's purported benefits are topical. So even if you (falsely) believe it reduces cavities, you'd be an even bigger moron to deliver it in a format that is ingested, like tap water. They put warning labels on toothpaste telling you not to do this, but not when it's in the water supply. Makes perfect sense, right? Who knows what bodily ailments this stuff is contributing to in our society.

Just because you can find an opponent of something who is trying to scam you afterwards doesn't mean they aren't right about the shit being bad for you. Plenty of good scientists and dentists who aren't homeopaths have been voicing their opposition to fluoridated water for years.

>> ^bobknight33:

The Fed Fucked us.
The Fed is a group of private bankers and not a government entity. They look after themselves not the citizens of America
Let the USA print their own money supply as per the constitution.


Nobody owns the Fed. It's not just "some other private business". It was created in 1913 by law. Their powers are exclusive and granted by congress. In fact, according to most constitutional scholars, the government is not given the power to give powers they don't have to someone else. That would make them all powerful and defeat the purpose of the document. Remember, the constitution is a privilege system. Whatever isn't explicitly granted to the government is implicitly denied. Article I does not say that the government can print money, it says it can coin money. That wording was used at a time when government notes not backed by metal had just blown up in everyone's face. And if the government can't print money, what gives them the authority to create a virtual GSE that can? Somehow, the government got around that article by endowing a bunch of powers it didn't have to a "private" entity, continuing to call it private, and going from there. It doesn't make sense to anyone with a brain, but to a dumbfuck populace, it's plenty complex to achieve subversion. Government have always wanted to spend as much of the people's money as they can without eliciting the resistance of taxation. And inflation is what allows them to do it.

We don't want currency to be counterfeited by its issuer while everyone else has to produce to obtain it. That's the purpose of having 100% gold-backed notes in milligram denominations. The scarcity of gold cannot be reduced like a dollar unit. If the Fed started issuing denominations with extra zeroes, any dollars you hold buy 10% what they did before. They print money, buy government bond debt, and by the time it filters down to you, prices have gone up.

^GenjiKilpatrick:

Number One:
Our government is in debt. How do you cure debt?
Cut spending? Sure. Tho less spending doesn't remove debt you've already accumulated.
To pay off 14 trillion in Debt. You need 14 trillion in Income
Taxes = Income.
Number Two:
No one who MAKES 1 million dollars a year EARNS 1 million dollars a year.
Earning implies you did work.
No single person can physically work to create one million dollars in equivalent value per year. Physically impossible.
The average American only EARNS about 2.4 mill in LIFETIME earnings.
Which means, anyone who MAKES a Million+ a year STOLE the money EARNED by the VALUE of other people's hard WORK in order to write themselves such fat paychecks.
That or they speculated. Which is more luck than work.



The only thing you seem to understand is that for as far as you binge, that's how equally austere you have to become to reverse it. We can't just break even in terms of producing and consuming, we have to start producing MORE than we consume. Which is virtually impossible for any generation to vote at this point, so you are going to see a destruction of the currency almost certainly (informal default).

Government is a burden we have to bear. You may want to have a world empire, but that Soldier stationed in Japan is consuming a lot of stuff without producing. Citizens must sacrifice so that he may exist. The same goes for most of government and a huge percentage of the population works for the government now, and they retain their voting rights despite that conflict of interest.

The main thing that you're missing is that tax revenue from production goes up when production goes up, and taxes affect the incentive to produce. How does a state collect a 100% tax on someone's income when that income flees the state or just throws in the towel as a result of that tax increase? You could have had more tax revenue at a lower percentage, no? Clearly, there is a point at which the rate negatively affects the revenue since "rich" people can just sit on their money for lack of incentive in trying to produce more, a portion of which would have been paid to people helping produce it.

>> ^zor:

Reminder: unemployment is insurance that your employer has to buy and so basically you buy it. It is not a government hand-out. It was paid for. Like car insurance. You earned it.


So in other words, money that otherwise would have been given to someone in exchange for aiding production is instead being given to people who aren't producing but would like to. Seems rather ass-backwards. What ever happened to saving money and having a what-if-i-lost-my-job fund?

>> ^tsarsfield:

Yeah, his math is pretty bad to begin with but he goes with the major assumption that companies will drop prices once they are unburdened with taxes.
What a dope.


Wow, are you serious? Please tell me you graduated from high school at the very least? If you were to increase property taxes or business taxes, you would see rent and good prices go up immediately. It makes perfect sense that taxes affect prices. A tax plus the labor needed to comply with it is a cost of production like any other cost that affects how low you can sell to undercut a competitor. Still going over your head?

If every producer's costs are lowered from $.95 to $.75 on a soda by shifting out their tax burden onto consumers directly, how can Pepsi still charge $1.00 when Coke reduces their prices to 0.80? They would make 5 cents a soda and murder them on volume. It's not just how much higher over cost you sell, it's HOW MANY you can sell. That's how competition drives down prices. With the income tax in place and a cost of .95 per soda, no one is capable of going down to .80 to undercut a competitor because that's 10 cents BELOW COST. That changes when the income tax disappears.

That's why the fair tax is actually a slight reduction in terms of its end-cost to consumers. You either pay the tax embedded in the product price, or you pay it externally. The main difference is that the income tax is much more complex and costly in terms of compliance costs, so those costs are eliminated completely. If production and business-to-business sales are not taxed under a fair tax, wealthier people are incentivized to create job-creating businesses and start charities in their name. Because that wouldn't be taxed, only their lavish purchases would. It somewhat reverses the incentive of how rich people use their money.

The fair tax would also prevent any particular category of goods from receiving a lower rate. That would end the corruptive practice of businesses and industries lobbying politicians to receive an unfair advantage over others. For example, in 1997, the housing industry won a capital gains exemption on the first $250k in profit for any home sale. Is it any wonder we radically change human behavior for the worse with incentives like that?

You guys need to do some serious reading, and so does Chris Matthews for that matter. I am absolutely in awe that anyone with a high school education could believe taxes are some sort of ethereal cost that don't affect prices. Wow.... wow! We have a much bigger problem in this country than I ever imagined.

http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_faq_answers#1

All of that aside, the main problem isn't so much how we are taxed, but how much. The government spends way, way, way too much money that it doesn't have. not only that, they don't use it to make products, but to start wars and consume and increasingly, pay shitloads of interest to foreign creditors.

I disagree that this is an "incremental" upgrade over the wiimote. I've used the wiimote and it is laggy, frustratingly inaccurate, and uncomfortable to hold. This looks *significantly* more capable. This is the type of controller we need to make games like Starcraft II and Diablo III portable to consoles. I'm also impressed by the 3d spatial qualities.

>> ^Drachen_Jager:

If they're going to deregulate then they should just scrub all the fraud laws. Hell why stop at economic relationships, why not de-regulate interpersonal relations too? Murder, rape, et al. Get big government out of my mass grave! Nosy bureaucrats, poking their noses into every little murder.
C'mon Libertarians, isn't that what you want? Don't Tea Partiers want the freedom to shoot illegal immigrants, suspected illegal immigrants (ie brown people) and (on a slow day) a few legal immigrants too?


There is so much fail in this post, I don't even know where to begin. First of all, the tea parties were started by libertarians but have since been hijacked by typical party-line neocons. Only a fraction of people there are libertarians.

Second, fraud is illegal and has been for a long time. Misrepresenting a product is fraud, which is exactly what Goldman did. You seem to think libertarians are anarchists who don't want contract laws to penalize fraud and other laws to penalize coercive behavior like murder. You are incorrect, sir.

Concerning regulations, the problem is quite simple:

If the government insures commercial bank deposits, the risk of losing one's deposit is offloaded onto holder's of dollars (mainly foreign central banks now) not involved in the transaction. With depositors having no skin in the game, banks wanting to make risky investments are more easily able to obtain deposits with which to speculate. To prevent that from happening, the banks have to be restricted on what they can do with deposits when they take FDIC.

Glass-Steagall was a 1933 Roosevelt bill that provided FDIC with restrictions. Clinton and most politicians from both parties were heavily lobbied by banks to keep the FDIC but remove the restrictions, and that's exactly what they did with the "Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999". No longer restricted from doing investment banking and unfearful of losing customers on deposit safety concerns, rampant speculation ensued.

Libertarians want FDIC eliminated because offloading risk onto other parties changes human behavior. Greed is normally offset by the fear of loss. When you eliminate the fear, all that's left is the greed and shit happens. We only support Glass-Steagall on the condition that we can't get rid of both FDIC and interest rate price fixing. Understanding now? Good, only 97% of the population left to go.

^rougy: what are you talking about?
Pissed off protesters are what defines the Tea Party.
Reason? Intelligence? Tact? All conspicuously absent.
Pissed off idiots who think Obama's a communist and a nazi at the same time: that's the Tea Party in its entirety.



The only idiocy in the tea party movement are dumb party-line tards like you who think everything is the fault of "the other side" and then generalize everyone from a cherrypicked example. This guy doesn't look at the fact that Bush promised 14 trillion in prescription drugs with no way to pay for it any more than you look at the fact that Democrats started Vietnam. You think I don't go to gun shows and laugh at all the "conservatives" displaying their Obama Socialist signs when all he's done is continued Bush's policies on a grander scale?

Here, it's my turn. This is 1% as intelligent as anything that moron spat out, or even Sarah Palin, who I consider a total puppet. And it came from a Democratic congressman, not some random disgruntled civilian. Clearly, he typifies the intelligence of liberals! Touche!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNZczIgVXjg

>> ^CreamKreatorAlong with handicapped, mentally ill, anybody really who can't be a good capitalist and take care of them selves without any help from anybody.

First of all, it is the noobiest of noob mistakes to say that capitalists can't be charitable. Charity can ONLY occur from capitalist money because it is a voluntary relinquishment by definition. Second, the only systems in which people become that destitute on average are socialist systems where production is punished and idleness is rewarded until there is very little productivity to actually be divided. Even I might feign illness and take from the pot you're so eager to fill for me. What are you going to do to stop people from doing that? Who is this grand assessor of value of which you speak?

I know, let's copy Finland, people who live much more modestly, spend 1% what we do on national defense, and don't have reserve currency priveleges, a truly insane example of socialism that could "work for us".

Where does that lead us? Education is the next victim. No more decent public schools, everything is privatized, that's capitalism!

Good, the whole problem with public schools is that it is a complex service financed on forcible appropriations. Normal businesses fear losing customers. These people don't. I've read articles of California superintendents embezzling thousands and then keep their pensions when they get out of prison. That's just the worst of the worst. The union collusion and retained voting rights has made it almost impossible to get teachers to eliminate themselves or take pay cuts. People are forced to pay their salaries and moving away from a good job is an uncertain substitute for true choice. Vouchers would be a huge step forward because it puts the spending power with the consumer instead of the provider. Teachers and those who hire them would suddenly fear losing business to other schools and would no longer be able to suck with impunity.

Capitalism doesn't work. Communism didn't work. Even pure socialism won't work. Any political ideology won't work by itself. They need to be mixed up, democratic capitalist socialism would be somewhere closer to perfect society.


Capitalism isn't a system of government, it's simply a term referring to the percentage of earnings controlled by earners. Socialism is the percentage of earnings controlled by non-earners. Nobody who advocates capitalism truly believes in taxless anarchy without courts or national defense. What we don't want is the government being used as a conduit to incentivize one legal behavior over another or benefit one business at the expense of another. You and everyone on this forum continue to vote for obvious corporatists, not me.

Then you throw around the term "democracy," big red flag for anyone who truly understands government. Democracy is mob rule. Clearly, some things should not be decided on a majority vote. That's why we are a REPUBLIC with a paper dictator called a constitution. The more we keep disobeying it, the more miserable we're going to become.

Or you can take the one thing out of that equation that causes pain and suffering more than any idea in the history of man: Money.



That's nonsense. Money is a commonly accepted medium of exchange to defeat the inefficiency of barter. It is, in essence, a product that is a placeholder for other products. That was truer when we were on gold than now, but still... Are you saying you don't want people to make stuff and trade with each other? Stop watching TV and read "Economics in One Lesson." It's only $10 on amazon.

All you people do is post videos of pissed off protesters who take positions without understanding them. Weaksauce.

Holy hell, manufacturers are really trying hard to make 3d the next fad. I guess I don't understand the following:

(1) who wants to wear glasses constantly?
(2) hidden information visible by looking from extreme angles: how is that even possible? The additional space/bandwidth required to deliver that would be staggering.
(3) presuming they were able to do 2, who would want to move side to side constantly in order to see this stuff, especially when it means occluding the immediate background? People sitting at extreme angles wouldn't be able to see the most important info.

Seems like false advertising to generate hype and sales.

>> ^Psychologic:

I can see why the Tea Partiers dislike Paul... his speeches must confuse the hell out of them.
Free Market = Good
Corporations = Bad
Corporations -> part of the Free Market
More Regulation = Larger Government
Less Regulation = Stronger Corporations?
Medicare/Social Security = Bad?
It's much simpler to think that corporations are the victims of big government and that the budget can be cut significantly without touching entitlement programs.


You and several people in this thread seem terribly confused about his viewpoint, so maybe a libertarian like myself can help you. The "free market" is a term tossed around a lot. What we mean is essentially mutually agreeable trade between producers and the right to make contracts. We believe in courts to adjudicate disputes, penalize and deter fraud, enforce (not interpret) the constitution, etc.

The key oversight for most Dems I talk to is that they want to police/regulate effects rather than eliminate the policy that is producing those effects. I despise "goosing" laws that attempt to reward/induce one legal behavior over another legal behavior, indiscriminately, across an entire populace. I also despise laws that offload one party's risk onto another. Most of the time, I think they're created by well-meaning people who think goosing the populace is their job only to have their goosing backfire. Even if they recognize it was their fault after the fact, a politician will always say the problem is not what they did, but what they didn't also do.

The best analogy I can think of is some cops throwing a bunch of candy on the street, then using the subsequent accidents to justify full-time crossing guards at every intersection. Those are unproductive jobs which can only exist at the expense of private ones. A libertarian sees that the ROOT problem is the policy of throwing the candy in the street, not the accidents it begets. Without a central bank price fixing interest rates well below where the market would have had them, the true risk of borrowing would have been realized, and demand which fueled creative lending wouldn't have existed. Banks naturally do not want to loan money unless they believe they are going to be paid pack, but the GSEs called Fannie May and Freddie Mac were buying and standing behind subprime loans on a massive scale from the commercial banks originating them. The whole concept behind those GSEs is based on the socialist policy that home ownership is more American than renting. That needing a downpayment and good credit before an institution will lend is discriminatory to poorer people. Which is just ridiculous, because that's prudent lending.

And what do they do after the whole thing? Another goosing. Bailing out the failed banks with money from everyone, including their small competitors who were looking to replace them. When you penalize good behavior and reward bad behavior, you create a self-fulfilling loop. I see people who voted for the heavily lobbied, popular, liar candidates and they are POed at CEOs of TARP recipients giving themselves huge golden parachutes. What did they think was going to happen when you gave these idiots MORE money? They are compounding the mistake, over and over and over again.

If you understand Paul's perspective, then you believe that most of our problems, our debt, our military empire, our recurring speculative bubbles, is not from a lack of government intervention, but too much of it in key places. No domestic currency is allowed to compete with the dollar, interest rates aren't set by the market, banks get blanket federal insurance on deposits so they don't have to compete on safety of those deposits. We have subsidies, a concept that presumes a politician spending someone else's production is more effective than the producer himself. We have different tariffs for different industries. It's not that companies are innately bad, it's that we have failed to create a constitution that could not be subverted by rogue judges. You can't be influenced into exercising a power you don't have. Once a judge interprets something to say "yeah, you can do that so as long as you say it's for the general welfare," then the government becomes a conduit for corporate welfare that it wasn't beforehand. People don't understand how powerful the government is. They literally have the power to take money from you by force. It's a necessary evil that they have that ability. That is why it is so god damned important to define and restrict its functions so that groups or businesses don't use it as a conduit to gain an unfair advantage, tapping into involuntary appropriations in what is supposed to be a free/voluntary marketplace.

>> ^rougy:
Our government is corrupt and ineffectual. Our military is bloated and not really ours as a nation but "ours" in the multi-national corporate sense. If you have no money, you have no justice. A fraction of a percentage of people are allowed to get rich, and everybody else has to fight it out and claw their way through life just to stay alive. Financiers like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan make a living out of figuring out ever better ways to fuck people over and get a slap on the wrist when they're caught, if that. We torture people. We murder innocents overseas for the sake of convenience. We overthrow governments that we don't like, that won't march to our tune, and call it spreading democracy.
Worst of all, nobody here knows anything. We have to be some of the dumbest people on earth, especially in regards to what's being done overseas on our name.
And I'm supposed to swear my blind, undying allegiance to that? I'm supposed to point to Mexico and exclaim proudly "Things could be worse!"


You forgot to mention how you continuously vote for people who believe in continuing all of those things, either directly or through policies that enable it. And then you spend the rest of your time trying to convince everyone that the problem is we're not all registered Democrats. The real problem is that we allow people to vote on things they shouldn't. The constitution sealed its fate with the general welfare clause.

When America defaults on its debt, it will be because the constitution failed to prevent idiots from trying to steal from each other or borrow money that they would benefit from, but that future generations would have to pay. Because it failed to ban the public sector from voting in elections. Because it failed to prevent a central bank from price fixing interest rates and monopolizing the money supply with unbacked paper they can print for themselves while we work to obtain it and watch it's scarcity/value siphoned. It is so much easier to just print more money and redirect its value than appropriate the money itself. Whatever you think you got out of this is crumbs compared to government employees and politically connected companies.

People like you are constantly fooled into enabling what you despise. Government destroys free market self-regulation and then claims lack of regulation is the problem. They loan banks money well below realistic interest rates. They insure every bank's deposits so banks don't have to compete on the safety of those deposits. GSEs like FM&FM implicitly backed subprime and so everyone thought that was a riskless bet as well. The tax code encouraged flipping property over real investment by making certain home sales completely exempt from capital gains. You may as well dump candy into a busy intersection and blame people for getting hit by passing cars. And instead of stopping the candy dumpage, your solution is to borrow even more money from China at interest to hire 10,000 full-time crossing guards. That is how insane the socialist rhetoric has gotten. When their social engineering fails, the problem isn't something they did, but something else they didn't do. Well, it's only going to last until China realizes that dollars are no asset, no product placeholder, when you're accumulating them in perpetuity.

God, this site just has the same uneducated people spewing socialist nonsense and even going so far as to smear mostly agreeable libertarians like Friedman. The Shock Doctrine is complete poop, there is no other way to say it. Anyone who recommends that book has probably read absolutely nothing from any libertarian ever. Here's a crash course on how utterly illogical and distorted that book is:

http://reason.com/archives/2008/09/26/defaming-milton-friedman/

GeeSussFreeK: People whom desire power to rule over others are usually of the type that are corruptible; even Obama is a professed pragmatist (as opposed to an idealist). It isn't a new problem either.



Looks like someone is dangerously close to understanding the best political system. We're not supposed to be a democracy, because there are some things that no one should be able to vote on. 99 people shouldn't be able to vote away 1 guy's property because they don't like him. That basic truth gives way to the realization that we need to be ruled in some form by a benevolent dictator that can't easily be corrupted. That is the idea behind a republic: the constitution is nothing more than a paper dictator. Our dictators were highly intelligent people for their time, battled tyranny, and debated lengthily about how much power the Federal government should have over the states. Read the Federalist Papers, sometime. I don't think our schools bother to assign it anymore. People and judges still have to obey the paper dictator, however, and it's largely been subverted over time because it isn't clear enough in places. You can spend years studying how and why and dream of a replacement knowing what we know today. That most of the people on this forum still don't understand anything I've said in this paragraph is just flipping amazing. I would pay money to watch Friedman's zombie corpse debate the likes of anyone on this forum, because you're clearly not even 1% as capable of rational thought.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMb_72hgkJk

It's fucking scary how people on this forum associate neocons and libertarians. Modern day liberals and neocons are practically the same, it's the libertarians who are different. It's the libertarians who are saying "no, we don't think corporations should influence elections, but it's THIS unconstitutional power being exercised that's enabling that kind of influence." We understand that the market largely self-regulates because greed is offset by fear of loss. But when the government tries to eliminate fear by bailing out failed management with money appropriated from healthy businesses, insuring deposits on every bank, price fixing interest rates, and guaranteeing loans, rampant fraud and speculation ensues. DUH. Certain groups are always trying to offload their risk to someone else through the government, including debt to a future generation that hasn't been born yet. DISABLE IT ALREADY. FUCK. Politicians aren't efficient with money because they have no fear of losing what they didn't have to work to obtain. Again, DUH.

As usual, a libertarian speaks simple logic and people like rougy just don't get it. All companies would have to have limitless profits for minimum wage to not cause unemployment, but we know that most companies operate on razor thin margins. Minimum wage is just price fixing, just like how the Fed price fixes interest rates. If you raised the minimum wage to $100, for example, you cannot deny that it would cause 50+% unemployment and civil unrest because it's so much higher than a naturally arrived average. Labor is a cost in the production of a product, so if a product's costs rise above it's revenue, you're going to go bankrupt or close shop. And since you failed because of indiscriminate artificial price controls rather than your own incompetence, it's unlikely new jobs are popping up elsewhere for the unemployed to migrate to.

The price of labor is set in the market the same way as any other product: competitive bidding. Company A wants the same labor as Company B and labor is finite and very mobile. Millions of businesses need low-skill labor, there is no way that many business could simultaneously collude to suppress wages by agreeing to not offer more than the other. What's hilarious is that Peter is giving an example of a job that is so low-skilled and niche that it becomes less economical than an inferior robot. The next time you guys slam the phone on the desk because you're talking to a foreigner or robot CSR, blame the minimum wage because that's what made it impossible to hire a 16 year old kid here at $4.50 to do that menial job. The next time you stumble around a dark movie theater trying to find a seat, blame the MW for killing off that job, too. The list goes on.