if there's all this recent commotion about financial trouble due to not raising the debt ceiling and defaulting on payments & losing the AAA bond rating causing more financial panic and hardship, then how in the world can shutting down the federal reserve be good?. and what do we use in its place?. Gold?, do we go back to bartering goods & services?.

Ron Paul seems to be the idealistic choice, but even so either he won't get what he wants put into action (like Obama), or he may not see the ramifications if they are.

Damn. You must be good.>> ^peggedbea:

massages baby, massages. >> ^burdturgler:
>> ^peggedbea:
i learned the art and joy of bartering services with associates.
free medical care, free accounting, free oil changes, free pot, free babysitting, free coffee, free massages, free hair cuts ftw! now all i need is a good dentist!!

I can't get people to do the shit that I actually pay them to do. What services are you exchanging for all of this? The mind wobbles ..

massages baby, massages. >> ^burdturgler:

>> ^peggedbea:
i learned the art and joy of bartering services with associates.
free medical care, free accounting, free oil changes, free pot, free babysitting, free coffee, free massages, free hair cuts ftw! now all i need is a good dentist!!

I can't get people to do the shit that I actually pay them to do. What services are you exchanging for all of this? The mind wobbles ..

>> ^peggedbea:

i learned the art and joy of bartering services with associates.
free medical care, free accounting, free oil changes, free pot, free babysitting, free coffee, free massages, free hair cuts ftw! now all i need is a good dentist!!


I can't get people to do the shit that I actually pay them to do. What services are you exchanging for all of this? The mind wobbles ..

i learned the art and joy of bartering services with associates.

free medical care, free accounting, free oil changes, free pot, free babysitting, free coffee, free massages, free hair cuts ftw! now all i need is a good dentist!!

The thing is people belive in this dumb fuck mith that people with lots of money worked for that money.

they allso belive that fincail succsess is a skilled or something that good people achive , they are totaly ignorent to the fact that the biggest fincail rewards are for people that work out how to best Game the system not people that best contribute to socity.

the perpouse of money in our modern system is to allow for the ruling few to remain in absalut comfort and power , Not as a covenant bartering tool as it was intended.

>> ^peggedbea:

1. the lower income brackets DO pay something. sales tax, excise taxes, property taxes. and disproportionately so. the lower/middle income families spend a greater portion of their monthly incomes on taxable goods and services, where the higher income brackets have a higher rate of savings... they're saving a greater portion of their income, therefore not spending it on taxable goods and services.
states that have no state income tax (like texas) and rely solely on sales, excise and property taxes typically have a regressive taxation system... meaning the bulk of the burden of the state and municipal operating budgets are placed disproportionately on lower/middle income families.
2. i'm a working single mom with 2 kids. i work my ass off. i don't live beyond my means. i take care of my things. if a 15% flat tax rate were implemented guess who'd be (back) on government assistance??? i don't have 15% of my income left over at the end of the month. i typically can put 10-12% of my income back, split between a retirement account and a rainy day fund. a flat tax rate would create more problems than it would solve for the working poor with families to care for. and for 2 years i couldnt even dream of doing that. (i got laid off in 09 and JUST NOW got back to full time work that also pays a living wage)
>> ^bobknight33:
So is you issue with large corporations ( like GE ) not paying any tax due to loopholes or that their tax bracket is or is not high enough?
Would it not make since to cut all loopholes and give a relativity flat tax based on quarterly statements?
I agree with Qm The rich are pitching way more then anyone else. Still they stay filthy rich. But should they pay more? Should not the lower income bracket also pay something? If they would at least pay some tax they would have a better understanding of what is going on with respect to taxes.
Personally I would like a flat tax. I would even say ok to a excessive rate of 23% just to keep politicians from bitching and moaning that the children/ elderly will starve if we go to a flat tax.
Every thing I'm getting at is really for a smaller Government with a Keep it simple stupid mentality.
There is no reason for a person to spend 40 hours in figuring out their federal taxes each year.
And there is no reason for GE to post 14 Billion in profits (would wide) and not pay any taxes in the USA.

>> ^NetRunner:
>> ^quantumushroom:
The "evil rich" pay 38% of all taxes already. The 'bottom' 50% pay less than 2% of taxes yet slurp up plenty of government "services".
Dismissing the moral component for a moment, you could tax the rich at 99% and it wouldn't matter. There isn't enough money to cover a perpetually expanding government and the endless wants of the wish-to-haves.

You didn't define "evil rich", but the bottom 80% only control 15% of the wealth in this country, while the top 1% alone controls over 40% of the wealth.
I'd also disagree on who gets more out of government services. The rich mostly get their payoffs in the form of tax loopholes so they don't show up on lists of "government spending". For example, see how GE got $3.2 billion from the government for filing their taxes this year. That's a hell of a tax credit, and it doesn't show up in anyone's federal budget proposal!

Dude love of money, not money itself. i.e. avarice. Jesus' anger at the money-changers was not because he wished they were bartering...

>> ^Stormsinger:

>> ^JiggaJonson:
If there is one thing the bible got right it's this: the love of money is the root of all evil.

Possibly the one and only thing Ayn Rand actually got right...her refutation of this old saw is amazing. An eleven page (IIRC) monologue by Francisco refuting the claim is actually readable, understandable, and quite logical. Money is a symbol and a tool, and quite a powerful tool at that. It expands our capability far beyond anything that could have been accomplished when limited to a barter economy.
The part she failed to grasp (or refused to admit, I'm not sure) is that unrestrained greed is -not- a virtue. Once you throw away ethical behavior in the pursuit of unbridled acquisition...once you start treating people as tools to be used rather than human beings...once you begin to look at people as sheep to be fleeced rather than trading partners to make mutually profitable deals with...you -are- evil.

>> ^JiggaJonson:

If there is one thing the bible got right it's this: the love of money is the root of all evil.


Possibly the one and only thing Ayn Rand actually got right...her refutation of this old saw is amazing. An eleven page (IIRC) monologue by Francisco refuting the claim is actually readable, understandable, and quite logical. Money is a symbol and a tool, and quite a powerful tool at that. It expands our capability far beyond anything that could have been accomplished when limited to a barter economy.

The part she failed to grasp (or refused to admit, I'm not sure) is that unrestrained greed is -not- a virtue. Once you throw away ethical behavior in the pursuit of unbridled acquisition...once you start treating people as tools to be used rather than human beings...once you begin to look at people as sheep to be fleeced rather than trading partners to make mutually profitable deals with...you -are- evil.

1. My online moniker is the first 8 letters of my high school nickname. The whole thing wouldn't fit on the scoreboard of a late 80s pinball high score board.
2. I was mute for a week with strep throat, and still managed to seduce someone using only physical comedy and facial expressions.
3. I've logged 79 of the 110 Messier Objects.
4. I once killed a groundhog because he was a legitimate threat to my food supply.
5. I can do amazing things with a map and compass.
6. I can do something with my tongue that I've never seen another human do. (This is in no way related to #2)
7. Al Gore once beat me in a foot race.
8. I can sing the theme to Land of the Lost.
9. I live closer to a trailhead than a gorcery store.
10. I am the only member of my family to live more than 25 miles away from where I was born.
11. I owe #10 to my time in the US Marines.
12. When someone asks "are there any questions" I almost always ask "What's the atomic weight of beryllium?"
13. When someone tells me the title of a book they're reading, I almost always ask, "did you get to the part where he dies yet?"
14. I can tell time and navigate by looking at the sky.
15. I love fast, upside down, looping rollercoasters, but the merry go round makes me sick.
16. I once filtered and drank mosquito infested muck as an alternative to dehydrating.
17. I bought my first couch at age 41.
18. I've never purchased a car, although I have bartered for many.
19. I once saw a medical professional use a frozen hotdog to insert a condom into a drunk guy's rectum.
20. I owe #19 to my time in the US Marines.
21. To this very day, I still have dreams about the Leonids Meteor Storm I saw in 2001.
22. I can prove the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus.
23. My favorite number is 23.
24. I brew damn fine apple cider.
25. I have seen many amazing things.

>> ^Enzoblue:

Seems funny to me that no one mentions Everquest any more. Now it's like WoW is the only mmo that ever was. Everquest was the first online game to have an economy larger than some 3rd world nations. I played it for 3 yrs or so and I still miss it sometimes.


I'm right with you there! The economy was much more player driven in EQ, without limits/restrictions put in place such as Bind on Equip/Soulbound armor (the most epic of the epic stuff was indeed non-tradable). Once you were done with a piece of armor you could easily resell it to another player. It was really fun to haggle with people/search for deals and just upright barter.

The whole game in general was just more player driven, and less rigorously structured around soloing: especially the PvP servers, with the pro-PK vs the pacifistic non-PK guilds, waging war and providing either their protection to newbs from highway thieves or pillaging certain zones of all players and looting the spoils. Not to mention all the social intrigue of player alliances, betrayals, guild spies and secret plots to overthrow/assassinate and usurp leaders, bounty hunters, and tests of loyalty to your compatriots. Such a dynamic has never existed in any other MMO, to my knowledge. It was a hard, unforgiving place where loyalty was worth more than any piece of gear.

If you're interested in revisiting Classic EQ PVE progression for FREE (Kunark is being beta'd atm and then Velious) I'd check out Project 1999, the finest private server available for purely Classic EQ, no custom modifications just the real deal. I have a level 37 Darkelf necro and have been playing fairly regularly, the server population is pretty good and everyone is friendly, helpful towards newbs as well. You wouldn't believe how happy I was when I discovered P99 and ended up seeing a few people I remember from my dear old Quellious server. It really is everything one could ask for considering Live EQ1, at this state, is an abomination. Well, there it is. Try it out, I'll help you get started right! PM me if you decide to come back to Norrath, this also goes for anyone else on the Sift who would try it/return. It really surprised me how harsh they start you out in that game after years of WoW, one needs all the help they can get.

Great WoW trailer as well, and I love Blizzard, but I just can't get back into the game despite my attempts to literally will myself into playing. I really feel as if I'm just being touted around, top-down style, by Blizzard to do this dungeon or that. My choices feel like they have no real impact on the game world, my actions rarely end up having actual consequences, besides maybe a momentary invconvenience. It's just too damned safe to be exciting! Raids are easy mode, though from all the impressions of Cataclysm is seems like they're trying to return to form of having the content be much more stimulating, brain intensive. If raiding becomes more like pre-BC/BC then I will return. I will most definitely at the very least try Cataclysm and see what happens.

First of all, let me say thank you for the reasoned arguments. As liberalsift's only "conservatarian" a heavy (voluntary) responsibility weigh on my shoulders. I'll attempt to address the talking points.


Native Americans practiced same-sex coupling. Thousands of years even before that, there's evidence of humans pairing off for mutual protection and cooperation - two prehistoric dudes have a better chance of taking down large game than if they worked alone. Two female cave girls have a better chance of surviving and avoiding being raped by cave dudes than if they were separate.

But what you're describing isn't marriage, and even if there were homosexual acts under these circumstances, it's not something the tribe would recognize. Even the ancient Greek pederasts scoffed at the idea of gay marriage.

Same-sex coupling has existed as long as humans have. Hell, even modern day penguins are known to engage in same-sex coupling.

We shouldn't be looking to the animal kingdom for comparisons, where cannibalism and killing other beasts' offspring is normal.

Before people cite the Book of Matthew, let me remind them that "Man shall not lay with another man..." doesn't refer to homosexuality. There wasn't even a word for it when the bible was authored. The line references how we are not to treat men the same way we treat women. And just how were women treated during the days of the bible's authoring? Like cattle - merely objects to be bought, sold, and bartered for. The line speaks that we should not enslave men the way we enslave women. The line speaks to institutionalized misogyny, and has NOTHING to do with homosexuality.

I have never heard this interpretation of Matthew so I remain...neutral.

The first amendment guarantees us freedom of religion. It also guarantees us freedom FROM religion. Every law needs a secular reason for existing. "God says it's wrong" isn't, nor will ever be, reason enough for a law. The 14th amendment guarantees equal rights and freedoms, even to people you don't like.

The First Amendment does NOT guarantee freedom "from" religion, this deliberate distortion is a 'gift' Progressivism. Equal rights and freedoms have very obvious limitations. You're free to ride a bicycle and you're free to drive a car on the freeway, but you're NOT free to ride your bicycle on the freeway.

The Judicial branch did it's job - protecting the people from themselves. Just because the majority voted for something doesn't mean jack shit. If it's unconstitutional, it won't fly, no matter how big the majority.

A judge made up things for a non-existent "right", similar to how abortion was made legal by non-existent privacy rights. Whether you agree with abortion or not, the ruling was inept and corrupt. There was a time when slavery was considered constitutional, so it's true that things change.

And why is it "Small-Government" types always try to use the government to enforce their religious views? Seems HYPOCRITICAL to me.

Some libertarians vouch for the "privatization of marriage" which means the State doesn't recognize any marriage but can only enforce contracts between (any) people. (Unfortunately?) we don't live in a libertarian society---far from it---and the State (with much thanks to Statists) has its tentacles in all manner of arenas and areas in which it has no business. The main reasons governments evolved was to preserve private property rights and keep enemies outside the gates. Marriage is a legal contract, and since it affects taxation and a slew of other things it is the State's business, for better or worse.

For me, the gay "marriage" debate ended with the arrival of civil unions. If a gay couple has the same legal rights as a married couple, then that is, in essence, the libertarian goal. As Elton John put it: "I don't want to be married. I'm very happy with a civil partnership. If gay people want to get married, or get together, they should have a civil partnership. The word 'marriage,' I think, puts a lot of people off. You get the same equal rights that we do when we have a civil partnership. Heterosexual people get married. We can have civil partnerships."

Obviously the 'loudest' gays are not happy with "civil unions", which brings me to my next point: there is indeed something special about the one man/one woman marriage. If there was not, these gay pawns (the latest pawns of Progressive Statist subversives) wouldn't be so adamant. Except for the fundamentalists, no one could care less about people's personal lives....but if you force a majority to recognize something as being on par with what they consider sacrosanct, then it will be received negatively.

I would be personally delighted if some judge ruled---against the will of the people---that all controlled substances drugs be made legal, prostitution be made legal, all excessive federal hurdles to owning firearms be abolished, perhaps the income tax be replaced with something else.......but it's not the way the system works. As a member of society I am as much a "victim" of traditional values as everyone else.

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Society is stupid. A large community of people in Germany decided killing Jews was ok (Godwin seekers you can now leave). It's a big reason we don't have a pure democracy: because people are STUPID. They're ignorant, they're fickle, they're quick to react to things they're afraid of and it is just plain stupid put somebody's rights to a vote, if that right isn't violating another person's rights.

Society is indeed stupid, but not all the time, and therefore the accumulated wisdom of centuries of trial and error shouldn't be readily abandoned.

----------------------------------------------------
Well, this is just one sifter's opinions. At present about 70% of Americans oppose same-sex marriage. Perhaps in 10 years only 30% will be opposed and society's values will radically change.

>> ^quantumushroom:

Same-sex "marriage" remains part and parcel of the "making shit up" argument. It's something that did not exist until very recently, and has never existed in any religion or society except in extremely limited instances with zero far-reaching consequences. ...

WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG.


Native Americans practiced same-sex coupling. Thousands of years even before that, there's evidence of humans pairing off for mutual protection and cooperation - two prehistoric dudes have a better chance of taking down large game than if they worked alone. Two female cave girls have a better chance of surviving and avoiding being raped by cave dudes than if they were separate.

Same-sex coupling has existed as long as humans have. Hell, even modern day penguins are known to engage in same-sex coupling.

Before people cite the Book of Matthew, let me remind them that "Man shall not lay with another man..." doesn't refer to homosexuality. There wasn't even a word for it when the bible was authored. The line references how we are not to treat men the same way we treat women. And just how were women treated during the days of the bible's authoring? Like cattle - merely objects to be bought, sold, and bartered for. The line speaks that we should not enslave men the way we enslave women. The line speaks to institutionalized misogyny, and has NOTHING to do with homosexuality.

The first amendment guarantees us freedom of religion. It also guarantees us freedom FROM religion. Every law needs a secular reason for existing. "God says it's wrong" isn't, nor will ever be, reason enough for a law. The 14th amendment guarantees equal rights and freedoms, even to people you don't like.

The Judicial branch did it's job - protecting the people from themselves. Just because the majority voted for something doesn't mean jack shit. If it's unconstitutional, it won't fly, no matter how big the majority.

And why is it "Small-Government" types always try to use the government to enforce their religious views? Seems HYPOCRITICAL to me.

@NordlichReiter well, it seems like a pretty useful concept that improves on bartering, doesn't it?

The value of a unit of any currency is always going to be relative to whatever someone wants to buy. That's true whether your currency is also arbitrarily fixed relative to a specific commodity (e.g. gold), or not.

>> ^zombieater:

This seems like a shaky argument to me. Just because a central authority does not know all the facts about society - I'm reading that as population demographics and needs - does not mean that it cannot attempt to satisfy those areas of need of which it does have knowledge.
His argument seems to rest on the counterpoint that capitalism does know all the facts about a society, by which it gathers this wealth of information through the profit motive. However, may not a central authority also gather feedback from a changing population much like how profit levels works for a corporation? Does a government not change based on the whims of the population?


his main point is the central flaw for a socialist society.just like capitalism and communism have their respective flaws, a truly socialist society will eventually break down due to the weight of its own inadequacies concerning growth,prosperity and innovation.

it is the "selfish quotient" he is referring to."profit" does not always have to represent money but it does represent a singular advantage for one person by means of a beneficial transaction.this is the impetus that will give a person the drive to do work for someone he does not know and therefore does not actually "care" about.he does it for the simple fact he and those he cares about will benefit.so his argument does not exclusively refer to capitalism,his points could just as easily refer to a bartering system.

i am with DFT on this one.no one economic system is without its flaws and if taken to their extremes are all bound to fail predicated on their respective inadequacies.yet if balanced together using their strengths i believe a strong,fair and fruitful society can emerge.

a socialist structure for the basic necessities of human life i.e:education,health and safety while allowing a capitalistic structure for commerce where competition and desire for profit drive innovation and expansion.
of course we will have to get rid if the central banking system due to the fact that they produce nothing,create nothing and are..by definition..a parasitic entity.
so..we execute all the bankers and the lawyers who work for them and re-install the line "for the good of the people" in the corporate charter and look to the stars to colonize the galaxy.
and by law the first starship captain muct be renamed "james tiberious kirk".

thats my take on it anyways.
good night..and good luck.

@blankfist, if you're talking about the history presented in Life, Inc., I think you're misrepresenting it a bit. It wasn't "corporate charters" they invented (as in legally recognized business entities that can own property), but charter corporations, as in the nobility picks a company and makes them a state-sanctioned monopoly.

Basically it's a great liberal thesis of history -- corporations were invented to be tools of the aristocracy, but then the aristocracy became their tools (at which point the corporations became the new, real, aristocracy), and the main way they've kept rebellion to a minimum is through the promotion of the ideology of individualism, selfishness, and viewing society through the lens of the market, all while demonizing unions, sharing, community social interaction, and anything that might lead to collective solidarity at all.

Also, his argument against central currency is essentially that it lowered the barriers on long distance trade too much, and removes the strong incentive for people to make purchases of locally produced goods that they had under the barter system.

He's not talking about Ending the Fed and returning to the gold standard, or even returning to gold coins -- he's talking about ending the concept of legal tender itself. Again, this is not because of a general suspicion of government influence, but because he fears that common currency encourages globalization of our economy, which he sees as a cultural illness.

He's also not an authority on either history or economics. His background is in fine arts, and media.