>> ^imstellar28:
As far as spending millions of dollars researching this for human benefit, well that would be quite a waste wouldn't it?


>> ^rougy:
But you don't know that, stellar.

...if the government did it, then we all would have the chance to benefit equally from the new technology, and that would be socialism, or communism, and that would be bad.


My, aren't we young and gullible. The government basically takes your money, by force, and then it's hands it out to researchers of its choice. Now, why would we do this? Why would we give the money to someone who didn't earn it and allow them to spend it? They have none of their own labor behind it, so there's no risk of loss to prevent the recipient from being chosen on the basis of campaign financing, friendship, or other conflicts of interest. Socialism expects the politician to be completely impartial and decide with more knowledge and thrift as he who earned the money, but that's an idealist absurdity. Research and invention in the private sector has always blown away USSR distribution models. Nobody spending their own money wants to create a product that utterly fails to be seen as valuable to others, they need voluntary purchases or they'll never offset the costs of making it.

Now, it's true, there's a lot of private funding towards highly experimental and directionless research at universities to "maybe stumble on something major." But philanthropy from wealthier members of society is sufficient for that as well. Priorities dictate that we pursue these interests when we've secured our necessities. Like hell we need to deprive somes families, with a generalized tax, from having a second kid or a better education or more food so that we can blindly finance public research on things no private company sees as having potential.

You should look at monster blunders like corn ethanol, a continuous misallocation of research money that never would have happened in the private sector. The massive subsidies it got made it profitable to reduce field use for food crops, thereby raising the price of food. Doh! Also turns out that ethanol is very inefficient, taking almost as much energy to create as we get out of it.

When oil does become too expensive, you begin to see private research and investment in companies with the best records and most promising ideas. Unfortunately, some of the best ones lose to competitors because their competitors have political connections and win forcibly appropriated money. The oil companies themselves get special tax credits. It's all been manipulated, delaying replacements by subsidizing the price of fuel. Not easy to compete with businesses that never had to convince an earner of a voluntary investment or purchase. I personally think electric cars are the future, with a nuclear infrastructure, always have. Nuclear power is very cheap and safe and independent, but our government has blocked new plants for DECADES. We are such a socialist, interventionist failure at this point economically and with energy policy, it is a disaster waiting to happen.

i would have no problem making less money or paying higher taxes if it actually bought anything. and thanks to my house and my two precious little tax credits, i barely pay any taxes anyway.

the problem with the american health care system isnt completely economic anyhow. there is a culture of abuse in our attitudes towards health. i am certainly not saying this applies to all americans. but i have spent the last 7 years of my life working in an ER and watching the system be ritualisitcally abused, mostly by people ignorant of how to treat or prevent minor illnesses without jacking up a $10,000 ER bill or by dr's needing to make some extra money and ordering needless exams. or by the hospital administration saying "we want to buy a new MRI, order more MRI's so we can justify it!" oh, also when you earn less than you need to take care of yourself, diet, exercise and preventative applications fall by the wayside. its far cheaper to eat cheetos and frozen pizza than it is to eat fruits and vegetables. hooray obesity related illnesses! and besides think of all the money there is too be made off of diabetes and blood pressure medication. and in every town some dr is making a killing off bariatric surgery. fuck it, lets eat our way out of this mess. its time we experimented with an economy based in potato chip and lipitor sales.

I agree with Farhad about infrastructure spending being absolutely necessary, and about productivity sometimes being hard to measure. Public Schools need to be improved, but throwing money at it isn't necessarily the solution, when sometimes lower-funded schools perform better than higher funded schools.

One could argue that public school students in better-performing, richer districts are performing better because of their parents' genes, prenatal environment, and lifestyle habits. The parents on average had some characteristics that increased their propensity to get a house in the richer district. Or you could argue that the performance of the school caused the high property values. Or you could argue that the extra money for the school from high property values accounts for some performance. All three are in play and positive feedback sustains the disparity.

The best way to help personal profit motives coincide with actual productivity is to tax negative externalities and subsidize positive externalities.

For example, all fossil fuels should be taxed at a very high rate, and the income from this tax should be rebated to everyone equally. Thus it provides the incentive to conserve without harming the poor in the way that has previously caused people to oppose such taxes.

The government should also subsidize the placement of copyrighted work into the public domain voluntarily by copyright holders.

Health computerization is a nice goal. Such a database would be a gold mine for research that could save millions of lives if only the privacy paranoia could be dealt with by anonymizing the data like Google Trends.

All subsidies and safety nets of the form "If x>y you get nothing, otherwise you get something greater than epsilon" (also, atomic tax credits and atomic scholarships) should be eliminated because they create local maxima where there is no incentive to earn slightly more. They should be replaced with smooth linear subsidies such as "take home income = 10k plus 3/5 of earned income".

One reason for the decrease in demand for goods is that most of the money is in the hands of those who use it least, and not in the hands of those who would use it. Supply side economics is crap when clearly there's an excess supply and not enough demand in most industries. The amount of money they've already spent on stimulus and bailouts is more than enough to send a flat $10,000 rebate to every adult citizen (perhaps split up into a smoother schedule), which would surely increase consumer spending back to pre-recession levels without negatively impacting anyone's profit motive. Mortgage-default bailouts conditioned upon being in default should be avoided because of the perverse incentives they create. More generally, any policy of help being conditioned upon something bad happening should be eliminated because of the perverse incentive to create the bad occurrence. Unconditional yet meager help is better because it keeps the incentives straight. Many forms of insurance should be abolished because of the perverse incentives they create.

People can only be really counted on to do the right thing when the the situation is such that doing the right thing is in their own personal interest. Primary purpose of all governance is to change the way the game is played so that individual interests become more congruent with each other (metaphorically, congruent with the public good). This includes punishment, which can only be justified as a disincentive to future crime.

The stimulus package contains less than $150 billion in infrastructure spending, out of over 3 trillion that has been spent on stimulus and bailouts. Most of the stimulus package consists of reckless tax cuts.

>> ^RedSky:
What does marriage, in it's current context as a figurative and binding resolution of love and commitment have to do with procreation though? If you want to promote population growth then by all means provide tax credits to responsible child bearing couples.


I agree with you, the exclusivity of the concept of marriage to hetero couples doesn't affect reproduction rates. It's the financial incentives associated with it that affect responsible couples' ability to have kids, and increase the chance of kids being raised responsibly in general.

Not to mention birth rates have far less to do with whether couples tie the knot or not (ahaha), as negatively in relation with affluence and living standards, and cultural influences among many others factors.

>> ^jwray:
A country's power relative to other countries may be correlated with population, but the quality of life of the individuals in that country tends to increase dramatically when the fertility rate drops.


As RedSky was saying, affluent people or people with high living standards tend to procreate less than those living in poor conditions. Which comes first, increase in quality of life or decline in birth rate? I think quality of life increase comes first, because the more affluent societies seem to be the ones that start seeing negative growth rates.

>> ^Lodurr:
I'm an open-minded guy, and non-religious, and I've been doubtful of my own position based on who else has the same position I do. I agree with Huckabee, but for none of the reasons he gave.
I look at the argument differently than both Stewart and Huckabee. We have to examine what the purpose of our government recognizing marriages and unions is in the first place. I think its purpose was to help couples procreate by giving them the money to support children. We still have positive population growth in the US, but all the countries that have or are moving towards negative population growth have a real need to grant incentives for couples to procreate.
With that in mind, why should the government grant the same financial incentives to same-sex couples?


What does marriage, in it's current context as a figurative and binding resolution of love and commitment have to do with procreation though? If you want to promote population growth then by all means provide tax credits to responsible child bearing couples. Not to mention birth rates have far less to do with whether couples tie the knot or not (ahaha), as negatively in relation with affluence and living standards, and cultural influences among many others factors.

From what I understand, not only is the plan almost entirely voluntary (except where it concerns education), it is also designed to give students a chance to better themselves through a college education. I can tell you with absolute certainty that if I could get a $4,000 per year tax credit toward my Master's Degree just for putting in 100 hours of service, I would do it in a heartbeat.

I'm holding out hope that the 50 hours per year required of middle- and high-schoolers will also count as an education credit, because a $12,000 education credit, coupled with continued service throughout college, would be a tremendous benefit to students who might otherwise never be able to go to college.

That said, I'm a little nervous about the service as well...I want to see what will come of it, but Obama has expressed interest in this being like Americorps or the Peace Corps...that's hardly the Hitler Youth.

Actually, it's not so much two perspectives on Obama's plan so much as the main video is an Obama campaign staffer explaining Obama's plan (with the usual stump speech language), and Steve Forbes distorting it.

Obama's tax middle class tax cuts are structured as fixed-dollar tax credits. That doesn't make them one-shot. One-shot means a Bush-style "rebate" where you cut people a bribe check for a fixed amount...once. New tax credits that people get every year doesn't sound one-shot to me.

Forbes (and other Republican supporters) insist that tax cuts for middle and lower classes won't have a stimulative effect on the economy. I don't understand, didn't even Fred Thompson make a joke about only taking water out of one half of the bucket, as if it didn't matter who got tax cuts, as long as they got cut?

So how's this, what if the Obama plan is an overall reduction of tax revenue, but it raises taxes on those making over $250,000, and cuts it for everyone else? Won't all that magic free-market mojo make our economy grow, no matter who gets the money?

I guess that's where the noise about redistribution of wealth comes in. Better when it's like Forbes' famed Flat Tax -- raise taxes on the poor and middle class, but cut it for the rich. More fair that way for sure. No redistribution in that idea, nosiree.

That was my point of putting it there.

>> ^NetRunner:
>> Fair and Balanced would've meant realizing that William Ayers barely knew Obama, or realizing that Gordon Liddy had both committed worse crimes, and had a closer relationship to John McCain than Ayers had to Obama.
Fair and Balanced would've meant admitting that a progressive tax system was implemented by Theodore Roosevelt (Republican), and the Earned Income Tax Credit was implemented by Ronald Reagan (the Republican "Messiah"), and that if either are socialism, then it was the Republicans who made us socialist a long time ago.

>> ^Duckman33:
Um, if I remember correctly. It was Fox News (Fair and Balanced) that started breaking all the negative news on Sara Palin after the election. Now all of a sudden it's a bad thing?


Fair and Balanced would've meant reporting it before the election, not after.

Fair and Balanced would've meant realizing that William Ayers barely knew Obama, or realizing that Gordon Liddy had both committed worse crimes, and had a closer relationship to John McCain than Ayers had to Obama.

Fair and Balanced would've meant admitting that a progressive tax system was implemented by Theodore Roosevelt (Republican), and the Earned Income Tax Credit was implemented by Ronald Reagan (the Republican "Messiah"), and that if either are socialism, then it was the Republicans who made us socialist a long time ago.

What conversation is here, is better than the clip from Fox and Friends that raises these kinds of silly aspersions.

First we need to point out that McCain's $5000 refundable tax credit for "healthcare" would work in much the same way. It's $5k into the pockets of people who aren't paying any taxes at all. McCain is clearly the socialist here.

I think, deedub, ya need to go looking for facts elsewhere than the Heritage Foundation, which is just another one of these think tanks whose raison d'etre is to support Republican/conservative policy.

There are two schools of thought about what makes an economy grow. Conservatives say that lessening government spending, and making sure that the rich bear less tax burden is the best/only way to create jobs.

The other school of thought is that more money in the hands of the lower & middle class creates more demand, and more lucrative possibilities for the rich to invest in -- only now they have to cater to the desires of the people of the lower/middle classes, instead of whatever the investor class feels like doing (like Credit Default Swaps, say).

Additionally, there's a dual benefit to government spending -- short term, it creates jobs, and pumps money into the economy, just like any other kind of spending. The other is that government can invest in things that have very long-term returns, like improved education, environmental protection, and improved infrastructure. In the short run, they can create deficits, but in the long run they make us all more wealthy as private industry takes advantage of the fruits of that public infrastructure (like with the Interstate Highways program).

Finally, we have an enormous national debt, largely created by Presidents Reagan, H.W. Bush, and Dubyah Bush. Now isn't a good time to try to pay it down, but tax increases are guaranteed during our lifetimes, and it's better they happen sooner rather than later. When it comes to asking who should pay those increased taxes, do you really think the poorest people should be asked to give the same portion as the people who've taken the lion's share of the growth over the last decade?

I get the argument that conservatives make, I just think, like theaceofclubz said, there's diminishing returns.

Think of the extreme case, the elimination of all income tax. Will that increase tax revenue? Certainly 100% tax would be similarly fruitless. I think Bush cut taxes to a level below the optimal level. Obama's supposed "largest tax increase in history" is to restore the capital gains tax to the level we had under Clinton, and raise taxes from 36% to 39% on net income above $250K, while cutting them on all income (including capital gains) below $250K.

I also think companies are too shortsighted with how they invest their money, so government programs can do things that corporations won't, because the ROI would take decades, or worse, might not produce a direct return for them.

"Rich people are going to have to pay taxes again."

More brilliance from some liberal quack who obviously knows nothing about the tax system. I have no love for rich people, but even I admit that they're the ones who pay the highest tax percentage, they're the ones who pay the workers, they're the ones who own the businesses, etc...

Meanwhile the "poor" get a free ride, and many in this country not only pay NO taxes, they actually MAKE money off the tax system. Ever heard of EIC? Multiple dependents? Child care tax credits? The list goes on and on of abuses to the system. Sure, some lower-middle class work hard and use these to make ends meet, but far too often, people take advantage just like they do with welfare, government housing, food stamps, etc...

Obama can tax the rich more if he wants, while Latisha with her 8 kids and crack habit holds no job and makes money off of me and you, but it's not good for this country. Period.

Reading jwray's stuff makes me want to hurl.

Absolute capitalism without any welfare, inheritance/gift tax, or income tax would become practically indistinguishable from the worst sort of absolute monarchy as the vasy majority of the wealth is concentrated in a smaller and smaller percentage of the population.

Actually, socialist policies have done nothing but increase, and the problems you describe have gotten worse. Still waiting for that socialist idea that actually increases the wealth of the bottom. Prior to 1913 we never had an income tax. Special tax credits as a form of anti-competitive subsidy were thus impossible, and charity was at its highest in American history. Actually, the funniest part is just the idea that increases taxes on the rich helps in some way. All it does is incentivize those people to sit on their money, or move it into a tax haven, or leave the country altogether. Precisely what happened when Hoover raised marginal rates to 63% and FDR to 90% succeeding him. Would you go through the trouble of running a business if government is taking 90% of what you make if you make anything? Didn't think so.

Whoever owns all the means of living could dictate the terms of their use down to every detail such as what you're allowed to read in your apartment.

Epic fail. In a republic, a constitution prevents rights from being infringed, regardless of how much money one person has over the other. You can't even vote it away with a majority, that's the difference between a republic and a democracy. Who is responsible for electing politicians who follow it and punishing those who don't? You. You are the regulator for the regulators. 98% of the public didn't vote for Ron Paul, therefore 98% of the people don't believe the supreme law is important or should be followed. The end. You have no one but yourself to blame. You've chosen the benevolent dictator route, no law, no concept of barring certain powers under any circumstances. Good luck with that.

Ayn Rand fails to consider that if her pure capitalist system were followed absolutely, someone with enough money could have the same power over everyone as a fascist police state via owning all the media, owning all the land upon which the food is grown, etc.

In order to make that kind of money in a free market system that protects rights, the person to whom you're referring would essentially have to create every product and service with the utmost quality and awesomeness. Remember, with small government, he can't bribe a politician for forcibly appropriated money because the politician doesn't have it. He can't get an anti-competitive tax credit, because income taxes don't even exist for anyone, just like pre-1913. Fraud isn't an option because he would be taken to government courts and lose. False advertising either. Theft either. Rights are protected. What the hell does this person do to get wads and wads of money? Well... they essentially have to create a product or service that millions and millions of people will buy. Need workers for that. No problem, let's hire some workers for a penny a piece. What? They won't work for a penny because someone else is offering them a nickel? Shit, we'll offer them a quarter and still make money! WHAT YOU SAY, HE OUTBID ME ON THAT SKILLED LABOR AGAIN. CHRIST, THIS IS GOING TO TAKE FOREVER, MY PROFIT MARGINS ARE GETTING KILLED BY GODDAMN COMPETITORS TRYING TO DO WHAT I'M DOING AND BIDDING UP WAGES.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUFdj103G60

Anyway, Ayn Rand's brand of libertarianism is not the popular brand. You're dreadfully confused to be building up this kind of strawman in your fearmongering of capitalism. I think this Milton Friedman link ought to clear it up for you, as well as some other things, such as how dirty technology invariably contributes to its cleaner successor, and how government cannot possibly spend other people's money with as much thrift as people would spend their own. This stuff seems so obvious once you hear it, but you'd be amazed at how clueless most people are at these basic fundamental behaviors. They assume that because 100% capitalism doesn't work, that the optimal system must be 50% or even less capitalism. In reality, just a little bit of government force is necessary and it should require no more than 10% of a people's capital in order to exercise the functions of defending rights and offering courts. It was never intended to appropriate 50% of our money for undeclared wars like Vietnam and Iraq, or subsidize industries in exchange for campaign financing, or fund pet projects, or forcibly manage retirement and health care via unsustainable ponzi schemes.

Remember, outside of nominal appropriations (taxes), the government inflates with a non-market determined money that it is capable of duplicating at no labor or material cost. Even a poor family not paying any income tax and getting welfare payments is having their wages and purchasing power diminished by the inflation tax. This is the key. This is the root cause, it's how despite everything they are getting with the left hand, government is taking more from the right via inflation. This is how our economy came to be in shambles, how markets distorted, how wealth started to transfer from the bottom to the top, like every fiat economy before it. Because those who use the money the Fed is creating increase their bidding power with it while those who have no money can't get their themselves because their wages and savings are being perpetually debased by it. How do you accumulate so much money that you can live off interest on stock for a living when your cost of living continues to rise faster than your wages? Bingo, you've figured it out. Congrats. Inflation is how government finances most of its activities today and this is how our economy has been destroyed. We let go of the gold limit in 71, we had one decent Fed chairman that took away the punch bowl to wipe the slate for another bull run, and that was it, the inevitable collapse of our fiat money is assured from the current hole we've dug. We now abuse our reserve currency status of the world gained under gold to export our inflation worldwide, which is why the problems today are so global. 10 trillion national debt, 70 billion a month trade deficit, 60 trillion in unfunded liabilities, a negative savings rate, two income households barely making ends meet, and an economy that since the early 90s has depended on perpetual credit extensions from the savings of the world to consume imported products that those creditors make in exchange for paper interest that they can recycle back into us or lock in a vault. They get paper, we get products. Yay for them. Yeah, don't delink from the dollar, don't use those savings to invest in production, keep loaning it to us to consume products you can't afford because of it.

These, of course, are policies you support. Libertarians don't want government to have the ability to inflate, because it makes no sense. You can't give government instant access to every person's purchasing power and expect them not to mortgage it. That's precisely what fiat money enables. And chances are that some lawyer spending millions of dollars to get in a low-paying position of legislating and distributing other people's forcibly appropriated money isn't going to be a very honest or incorruptible individual. Not sure why you haven't figured this out yet or why you think this is more efficient or moral than an individual trying to convince you give him your money in exchange for a product or service you want and think might improve your life.

The threat of starvation is just as effective as the threat of violence.

Where are people most starving today and throughout history? Exactly in the types of places where people are least able to keep and spend their own money as they see fit. Did China have to build walls to keep people from going into Hong Kong, or did Hong Kong have to build walls to keep people from going into China?

>> ^MINK:
lithuania has a fairly free market because it's fucking corrupt, and i can tell you it's not beneficial to the consumer. the lies they get away with in unregulated advertising are shocking. of course they do it, because they can and it works.
corruption is what humans do unless someone with a bigger gun tells them not to.
individual freedom will always fuck up the common good. crime does pay. if you legalise business practices which are currently criminal, you'll get more of it, not a magical balanced free utopia.
Imstellar, in your version of a free market, who would stop Microsoft dominating the place with shitty software? I think we need MORE regulation there, not less. How is it efficient for microsoft to keep churning out that crap? you are asking for everything to be a marketing, bribery and advertising contest.
here on the sift we have a free market of ideas and video uploads, and look what happens, a bunch of cliques and lolcats and vote whores and the noise level is so high that you can't find the good shit without watching 10 crappy videos. Can you imagine what it would be like here if siftbot stopped checking for sock puppet accounts?


You're confused, I blame the all-encompassing buzzword of the day "regulation" for this, people don't understand the markets and have come to take it as meaning "government making it all better and overseeing greed." Government indeed has desirable functions in law enforcement and offering recourse through courts for disputes. They should NOT be price-fixing, monopolizing money, or handing out taxpayer money under socialist ideals of directing industry or "enhancing market confidence," this has collusion and corruption written all over it. Politicians are humans and someone spending millions of his own money to get in a low-salary position of controlling other people's money is probably going to be a more harmful source of greed than any businessman. Because even though Henry Ford became a millionaire, thousands of people got cars out of the deal. Not sure the same would have come from government expenditures...

But many would consider this form of corporate wealth redistribution "regulating" the market. I don't.

Your example of false advertising is an example of where law enforcement should take place. Can I sell a product that purports to do something it doesn't? No, that's a swindle, the contract was not upheld, and you can go to government-provided courts to be compensated. Similar things apply to other swindles, though in most cases even the government can't prevent you from falling for some e-mail scam to a Nigerian clearing house. Unless, of course, you agree to have them snoop all your incoming e-mail to check for this stuff. I'd hope you understand that that's a pretty stupid of you, though, for giving up your privacy in order to protect yourself from being gullible. Not understanding cost/benefit ratios is a huge socialist mistake. They're always missing the potential costs and focusing on the benefit.

Gun bans, for example, have the intention of reducing violence but in reality remove the deterrent criminals otherwise have against a society that does have them, causing crime to increase. Plus, it makes you defenseless to oppressive government. The utopian allure of creating a "perfect" society where no gun crime exists and everyone can live in peace and trust is what gets them to miss the greater cost incurred that any thinking man would have foreseen.

The Fed is another one. Fractional reserves caused a lot of bank runs in the old days. Instead of banning this practice, they backstopped it with a central bank, but the central bank price fixed interest rates, causing a crash in 29. Further temporary socialist measures turned it into a fifteen year depression, a nuclear explosion compared to the firecrackers of the original problem. Then the FDIC was created. This incentivized a lot of risk and borrowing, which has helped the current problem fester. See how the failure to correctly solve one problem has led to a cascade of "solutions" that create even more problems that beget even more solutions? That's socialism, my friends. It just builds and builds until eventual collapse.

I would say that another socialist mistake you are making is that law enforcement itself is a proper regulatory measure. Not when they're selective, they're not. There is plenty of legislation out there that legalizes something for one industry, but not the other. Banks can loan out money they don't have at interest. Any other industry, and you're thrown in jail for fraudulent lending practices.

LOLskers at your Microsoft argument, too. Who prevents Microsoft from churning out crap? Consumers, mayhaps? People were free to not adopt Windows ME or Vista, and that's exactly what happened, their sales were disappointing for both. Anyone investing in Microsoft don't like failures leading to lost earnings. But Microsoft is smart and continues to sell XP, which is a perfectly good OS even today. But if they currently get any tax credits or subsidies, they shouldn't. No company should have access to forcibly appropriated money, period.

I think the real scary thing about all this, besides the fact that you don't understand it, is that you seem to be implying that a government office operating on forcibly appropriated money is capable of greater efficiency than the private sector. Maybe it comes close for laying pavement and picking up garbage. But in the grander scheme, no. It wasn't the case with Chernobyl and it ain't today, buddy. You take a hell of lot of innovations and products for granted if you believe that.

>> ^jwray:
^ Downvoted for inability to put a coherent sentence together.
Income has diminishing returns. The difference between making 2 million a year and making 1 million a year is a very small amount of happiness compared to the difference between making $15K a year and making $30K a year. The poor have a lot to gain from socialism, and 60% income taxes in the top bracket would hardly affect the lifestyles of the super-rich. Market fundamentalists need to take a real economics course that deals with externalities. Not being able to afford healthy food, education, or doctors causes loss of productivity.


Not being able to afford those things is the result of inflation debasing wages, and price fixing of interest rates by the Federal Reserve. Not to mention utter irresponsibility of citizens to stop parroting for their party for a second to go do some real research to learn about this nonsense. Both of these are socialist policies embraced by most politicians of either camp calling themselves whatever and far from free market ideals. This borrow and spend economy full of business/government collusion simply would not have been possible in an environment with gold-backed money and no Federal Reserve. Some crooked old CEO somewhere driving his company into bankruptcy only benefits the companies who didn't going forward, and it pales in comparison to trillions of dollars being created at no labor or material cost, and repeatedly spiking the punchbowl with artificial interest rates as our communist central bank has done for decades now. This time, there's no Volcker or creditor base to get them out of their mistake. As the market has become less and less free, we've gone from the world's largest creditor nation with savings and the highest rate of individual charity to a nation with the most debt, unfunded liabilities, a negative savings rate, and a 70 billion a month trade deficit. If foreigners finally bail out of our bonds, they will sell products to themselves and reduce us to squalor. Socialist enablements like price fixing and monopolization of money and industry have turned this country's money in confetti and driven companies overseas to avoid the taxrates and anti-competitive redistribution of those taxes through subsidies and tax credits. This economy IS your government "directed, regulated" economy. And like the USSR before it, it has come tumbling down. The whole risk/reward system has been perverted. We reward bad behavior and punish savers, incentivize risk by backstopping it with the unlimited promises of inflation via the FDIC, the whole damn thing just distorts normal self-regulatory thinking. There's no fear of bankruptcy anymore, you may as well just load up with toxic debt for short term profits.

Do yourself a favor and listen to these clips of Ron Paul's brilliant economics advisor from years ago. Stop listening to the people who didn't see it coming in any way, shape, or form. Because as John Loeffler says, "if they didn't see it coming, they won't know what to do when it gets here."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhJaVEWAG24

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucDkoqwflF4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G3Qefbt0n4

>> ^vermeulen:
Monopoly and price fixing would can hurt the free market, and is possible under a free system.... how can you deny that.
Do you not think it is possible for the government to aid in the free market?
Such as to enhance competition?
I consider myself a libertarian, but I do think it is possible for some type of control of the markets to be beneficial.


"Monopolies" are one of the popular scapegoats for politicians to use to gain power, and one of the most misunderstood talking point for socialists. In truth, the only "true" monopolies around the world and throughout history are borne of government. I tend to draw a distinction by calling these "self-sustaining monopolies" because of way in which they are financed: with an unlimited stream of forcibly appropriated money rather than a choice to pay by consumers.

First, let's agree on one thing: in order to become a monopoly in a free market where every transaction is mutually agreeable rather than forced by the will of the clueless majority (like a tax or inflation), a company had to offer a great product that people wanted and that benefited them. As much as you may hate Microsoft, for example, Windows has changed the world for the better. As have Intel's processors. Now, many would consider these companies monopolistic. According to socialist theory, AMD should not exist. Intel was so large and dominant, that being such disabled any competition from forming without government intervention. What happened in the real world was that as a result of being large and dominant, and perhaps overcharging and under-delivering, a window of opportunity was created that allowed an AMD to come in and kick netburst's ass with the athlon series. They exist because of what Intel tried to do, not the opposite.

Here's the part that really busts the socialist's brains: If Intel had chosen not to overcharge and under-deliver, no window of opportunity would have existed. They would have effectively become a monopoly that was delivering a great product at a price no one could better. So... what's the problem with that? There isn't one. And while I agree that it can't last, socialists erroneously assume that a monopoly is inherently bad. It isn't, it just can't stay good. And when it doesn't stay good, it can't preserve it. Because even a monopoly can't put poop in a box and sell it, they are not immortal and all-powerful where they no longer need to deliver a product to service or prevent private capital not available for buyout from coming in and supplanting their marketshare.

The monopolies you need to be afraid of are the ones that are self-sustaining or government helped and enabled. Get companies AWAY from colluding with or taking advantage of government specific powers. When a company lobbies for a tax credit that another company or industry doesn't get, or a subsidy, or no-bid contract, or a bailout, or legislation crippling their competitor, that's when you need to be alarmed. So... be alarmed now, because this is everywhere and people are stupidly blaming the market when it is enablements in government like high taxes and an inflationary money making it possible.