I'm sure future generations with thank us for all this lovely pollution. I also predict they will honour those who fought to protect them from the vast, corporate, green conpiracy seeking to rob them of their rightful inheritance

"But who cares as long as the future generations are footing the bill."

Yeah, quite unlike future generations of Americans, right?

"In God We Trust" predates the Red Scare by a long time. It was suggested during the Civil War as a way to indicate to future generations that despite the country being "shattered beyond reconstruction", no, we were not a "heathen nation."

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_God_We_Trust for the text of the letter making that suggestion.

Not quite related, but it strikes me as funny that the pagan goddess, Libertas, gets so much stage time along side "In God We Trust" given that whole First Commandment (Second in Judaism) deal.

"In France you can go to the hospital without going broke."

Not true. There's a 12-14 billion dollar deficit. That means the system is already broke. But who cares as long as the future generations are footing the bill.

^I maintain that the original framers wanted the document to be taken as a steadfast document based on original meaning, but they allowed for the Amendment process to ensure future generations the ability to modify their government.

Those who believe in judicial interpretation or informal amendments would probably agree with you, rasch, but it's a colloquial belief that has nothing to do with how the Constitution was and is supposed to be interpreted, I'm afraid.

Sincerely yours,
blankfist, Master Baiter.

Congratulations from sunny Madrid!

In celebration of your nuptials I started drinking an hour ago and promise to take the celebration on until the early warm hours!

You do realise that if you reproduce your offspring will set an impossibly high standard of attractivenes that future generations of sift-ups will not be able to compete with!

Truly best wishes!

Oh no no no. I do not embrace the idea of generational sovereignty, but like the idyllic message it tries to convey over it practical application. Especially how debt shouldn't be created and passed on to future generations, though you disagree with that. I also like the idea of not passing the laws of one generation onto another, or at the very least having a review process for them or something. Who knows, but I can't imagine a law against talking on a cell phone while driving will do the people much good in 2960 AD.

I don't understand your definition of liberty. Disenfranchise? Having more personal liberty doesn't disenfranchise. Having less of it does.

Wait... when did we start talking about health care reform? I thought this was about a man showing up in the town hall carrying an AR15.

If an HBO subscription meant saving your life, I'd hope those cable outlets offering it would consider lowering it enough to make it affordable to all. But, you ask they offer it for free at the point of a gun. Who then pays for their labor? Surely their labor is worth something?

If your answer isn't for them to offer it for free, then your answer must be government subsidy. In this case, the cable providers wouldn't need to lower the price... in fact they could certainly raise the price because the government has deep pockets and is very comfortable with paying top dollar for goods and services they subsidize.

Just to be clear, we'd all be paying for that government subsidy. And quite honestly future generations will continue to bear the debt we create in order to ensure we all live to be 130. That alone, in my opinion, proves this to be a selfish idea... just as selfish as the wars and corporate bailouts we've forced future generations to pay for during our lifetime.

>> ^rougy:
>> ^blankfist:
No one ever criticizes the little guy for stacking the system so he can have a free lunch.

Hey, he's just following the precepts of the free market.
He's just being selfish, and selfishness is good, right?
This piece of shit country will never change.
People can't afford preventative medicine, that's why so many people don't go and see a doctor until it's too late.
Most bankruptcies are due to medical events, and most of those people were insured. Yeah, great fucking country. The free market wins again.
But let's bitch and moan about preventative care. Ron Paul would be proud.
Eat the rich.


Epic fucking fail, rougy. People have been trying to teach you this point countless times on this website. Libertarians draw a major distinction between wanting to do something with what you own, and wanting to do something with what someone else owns against their will. That's why a constitution and courts to enforce it is necessary, and ours ultimately failed. Everybody knows that true democracy is just people trying to vote themselves other people's shit, even shit that doesn't even exist yet. One generation could borrow from Chinese savers at interest well in excess of productive capacity and leave future generations holding the interest burden. That is THEFT. And unless you can somehow vendor finance trillion dollar deficits in perpetuity at 1% interest rates, we are going to have to raise interest rates to 30% or devalue the living shit out of the dollar and inflate the debt away.

You should be kissing Ron Paul's ass. Here's a fucking guy who has wasted 30 years trying to keep SPENDING in this dipshit country constrained to what it could PRODUCE by tying the dollar to something which always takes labor and material to produce. Instead, we now have a currency whose scarcity can be diminished at will by its issuer and is given a government-mandated monopoly. Instead, we went from the richest creditor nation to the world's largest debtor nation because we allowed the government to sell us the idea that it needs no discipline. If it wasn't for brainwashed foreigners too scared to stop giving us money to buy their products, and a dickless American populace willing to go along with anything to keep the party going, we wouldn't have deferred the inevitable collapse again last year.

Unfortunately, spoco's example is playing the fiddle a bit. On one hand, I can see a need for public taxes to cover things like premature birth or kids born with major defects and handicaps, or total accidents, or random victims of violence. The reason is because it's something that is relatively rare and that we could all have happen to us with no way to prevent it from happening. But that's not the major cost culprit of public options by a long shot. The big spender is giving 85 year olds life-extending operations so they live to 90. It's giving retired people who decided to live a life without saving unlimited health care financed by some future generation. That's the type of ponzi mentality that turns every country who attempts things like Medicare upside-down fiscally. Our desire for life-extending procedures is infinite, but our productive capacity to finance it is not. Thus we borrow the difference until our national debt has gone from majority 30 year bonds to t-bills, majority domestic financed to foreign financed. Countries like Sweden and Australia and Canada pretend as though they can do it, but suffer huge wait times and have practically nothing left over for national defense. Countries like Britain and America tried to have their cake and eat it, too, and clobbered their economies and currencies.

And we have to remember also that any service in which the customer is spending someone else's money and not their own is going to be of higher cost and far more susceptible to fraud. Trust me, I have witness many older family members get unnecessary procedures and equipment sent to our house that is never used on the medicare bill. And Grandma didn't care because she paid virtually nothing out of her own pocket. Thus the high cost of these procedures is precisely because doctors can just charge the public whatever the hell they want since their patient has no premiums or deductible to pay. Without the fear of loss, the patient won't say no, and if the patient won't say no, then there's nothing holding doctors to a lower price.

If:

Your life can only be better if OTHER people would change their behavior...

...But you're in agreement that no one can EVER tell another what to do...

... and you can NEVER be allowed to force a change in someone's behavior.

Then:

YOU must AGREE to change YOUR OWN.



The only way to facilitate a better future for yourself and coming generations, is to volunteer -- to sacrifice --, willingly, with the understanding of the positive impacts you can have.

We know these impacts. We've seen them. If we can't fully heal ourselves, we CAN set it up so that future generations don't have the hurt to begin with.

This requires a broad vision. This requires planning, and dedication, and hard work, and persistency... because you must balance living now with living later.



Is there any way for your future to be better? Yes. Through our efforts.

Is there any way the future of coming generations can be shaped by our presence? Yes. Through our same efforts.

Therein lies inherent responsibility.

>> ^jerryku:
.


Honestly, I have no idea what you’re talking about here, as much of it seems to bear nothing even close to what I wrote. Maybe you didn’t read my post, or perhaps I didn’t make my self clear. Let me try again. The idea that democracy and science don’t work well together is simply not born out by the existing facts. If democracy and science don’t work well together, then how do we account for the disproportionate number of patents awarded to scientists working in democratic societies, the overwhelming number of advances in science made in the last hundred plus years by Americans and/or people living here under a democratic system? You don’t see how science and democracies are compatible? Fine. I’m just pointing out that there is no evidence for this claim, if anything there is a wealth of proof showing the opposite.

I listed the “intellectuals/scientists of the past” simply to point out that these egghead elites have done great work and done tremendous good in raising America’s prestige the world over.

As far as “intellectuals/scientists of the past who would be pretty upset about modern day America's current situation.” Unless you are in possession of a flux capacitor, assigning the thoughts on present day situations to people that have long been dead and were the product of a far different time and environment is a foolish endeavor. (I will concede however that Thomas Jefferson would most likely be mortified to learn that thanks to science, and a science he helped pioneer, future generations uncovered his little secret regarding Sally Hemmings) I’m sure that some of the founding fathers did not want to give political power to the common man. But I suspect they may have been the same people that had no issue with owning slaves, or treating women as second class citizens, so what they thought then bears little relevance to what we have now.

As far as your claim that so many scientists were communists, your post listed only two. How does two translate to “so many” in a vocation that has millions the world over? Additionally, as the Communist Manifesto was published only 150 years ago, and men have been practicing science for centuries, the idea that “so many scientists of the past supported Communism” is to put it kindly, a little hard to swallow. Considering how much scientists and researchers depend on the free market system to fund their work, I would hazard to guess they would be more interested in living under that system than not.

In regards to “There's nothing about democracy that requires free speech, and free speech does not require democracy.” I really have no clue as to how this relates to anything I posted, or where you felt such a statement fit in to the overall argument.

She's certainly one for the history books. In fact I bet future generations will have people devoted to studying her mishaps.

I guess they'd be called... Palintologists!! HA! Get it...?! It's like... paleonto-... nm.

Sorry NetRunner, but Schiff is a brilliant libertarian and Keynesian economics is junk science. Krugman's belief that deficit spending is a solution, that we can administer new shots of heroine in perpetuity to avoid withdrawals, is the same as Madoff saying his scheme would never end at its height. It only lasts for as long as you can find new and larger investments. The Fed cannot control long-term interest rates, they can only price fix in the short term in exchange for higher long-term rates. His forecast of perma deflation is pure crap, that would require the Federal Reserve to raise rates higher than Volcker did in a far more dire situation than we were in then. No longer is the majority of our debt financed long-term or domestically. It's majority owned by foreigners in T-bills. There is no exit strategy for the money being pumped in today. This is going to turn into a currency crisis when the debt is monetized and productive foreigners refuse to keep throwing good money after bad into our bond market. "Free Lunch" guys like Krugman who put the cart before the horse, consumption before production, just don't get it in the endgame.

Mish's criticisms are even more laughable. Schiff is a long-term investor, not a trader like Mish. The dollar headfake in the last year where people ran toward the blast initially is not a sustainable trend and totally meaningless. When you know the Titanic is going to sink, you don't stick around because you think you can get one last dance in, and that seems to be what Mish thinks people should do. Decoupling is going to happen whether Mish likes it or not. Our treasury secretary is getting laughed at by Asian students when he tries to reassure them of dollar integrity.

(1) From the creditor's perspective, there's no point in loaning money to someone to consume your production. You don't devalue your currency to export for the sake of exporting, you export for imports or keep your currency strong so that you can consume your own production. Otherwise, you're exchanging products for stashes of paper IOUs that we show no intention of replacing with real products. When the Asian countries figure out how easy it would be to consume their own products, our economy is toast. The only problem for someone like a China is how to head for the exit without causing a stampede. The minute such a large holder of dollars starts spending them, their value relative to goods will diminish substantially. Avoiding a hit now is going to be impossible, but they know that continuing to accumulate dollars is simply creating a larger future hit.
(2) From our perspective, politicians will always do what is expedient in the short-term. Telling the truth and saying you have to cut spending and entitlements by massive amounts for the sake of future generations isn't politically profitable. Not just because of all the people expecting things like unlimited health care regardless of our productive capacity to finance it, but because such a high percentage of our voting population now have overpaid government positions that they don't want to lose. Someone like a Ron Paul tells the truth at the expense of having an chance of winning. Winning requires that you be a candyman.

Savings is underconsumption and required for loans to exist. Ideally, people borrow that finite capital to increase productive capacity, to turn a shovel into a bulldozer and pay the loan off with more production. That is the kind of borrowing that benefits the creditor, the debtor, and society. It's not supposed to be a tool for consumption and winning elections, and that's where this country derailed from the sustainable and healthy growth it had in the 19th century. Whatever "success" we had from things like Medicare and Social Security came at an equal or greater long term cost. It's generational theft in its purest form, borrow to consume in the present to leave each successive generation with a higher and higher interest burden that will have to be paid for with higher taxes or currency devaluation. I say this because it is the fundamental oversight of people like Steve Forbes and Art Laffer who try to cast off trade deficits as "meaningless because it's something we've always had" in debating the resiliency of the bond market without distinguishing how we spent our loans then vs now.

Defaulting on our debt through inflation is a certainty. If you listen to Financial Sense or Schiff's weekly radio show, you'll learn how obvious that conclusion is very quickly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGdj3Gx4A8w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgMclXX5msc

Dear Mr. Beck, paper bags "went out" because they cost more than plastic bags. But the cost of the environmental damages done by plastic is "externalized", as they say. Future generations will love you.