Transactions don't take place between individuals unless they are mutually agreed upon, the government is simply supposed to be there to protect property rights and offer recourse through courts. That is the principle scope of government.

In socialist programs, payment is forced. What is a government paid teacher beholden to? The consumer, the parents? Certainly not. Does someone vote that teacher out or in? No, they are appointed by a chain of other government officials voted in by the MAJORITY, all financed with taxes. Taxes are FORCED PAYMENTS. You don't get any say for the product you get. That people could actually come on this board and be stupid enough to equate profit with bad service is a real laugh. So many things around them, all the products you use came about from free people mutually transacting with one another. That orange you bought at the local market is a transaction as much as that computer you're using. And somehow profit and self-interest is bad? That's what incentivizes people into these transactions. But you people can't even figure out that without the taxes to fund public schools, people would HAVE more money to afford private education. It only looks unaffordable in an environment where you're getting reamed by the inflation and taxes that provide this socialist nonsense, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Famed libertarian Harry Reid once said "Government breaks your leg, hands you a crutch and says, see, without us you couldn't walk!"

The least regulated market in the world is computers, and we can easily compare what its done to advance society over some utopian ideal where people pay a king to dish out orders demanding innovation and self-sacrifice purely for the good of society. It doesn't fucking work that way. Nobody invents cool shit that helps society under some government edict, someone creates something in their self-interest that someone else might want with the end EFFECT of benefiting both parties. Yes, Henry Ford was a millionaire at the end of the day, but that money was from selling millions of people cars. That's a bit different from some despot who has a million from taxes. Unless a company in a truly free market can convince other self-interested people that their product will improve their lives, they're not going to get their money. If they lie about the product or infringe on rights, they can be taken to court. That's a desirable function of government. Not to engage in the market itself and make products or dish out subsidies to people with forcibly appropriated money, but 50% of GDP is controlled in this way.

Here's the government programs that are fairly simple in task and don't do much damage: delivering mail, picking up garbage, laying concrete. Here are the extremely complex market services that don't operate in the consumer's advantage: operating on your body, teaching and caring for your children, "managing" everyone's retirement, building and maintaining power plants. These things have impoverished an entire sector of society with the taxes needed to fund their inefficient operations. You can't opt out, you can't avoid it, even if you don't want the service. Not to mention the trillions stolen and redistributed to some companies and not others in this corporatist atmosphere we've accepted (subsidies, bailouts, tax credits). How does a company get an anti-competitive special advantage from government if it doesn't have anything to give? You idealist idiots who think your politicians are selfless angels in no one's pocket all these years need to wake up and stop entrusting them with you and your children's wealth. THEY BLOW IT. On themselves, and their corporate buddies. And it was all forced, they never had to convince you with a product on a shelf, all they had to do was get on a podium, appeal to your sense of being under-appreciated and underpaid, and promise you the mother-fucking world. Then they tax and inflate the bejesus out of you, only to hand it off to some dick providing you a "service." Then, now that they've impoverished you and made you dependent on welfare, they get on the podium again and tell you the answer is that it simply wasn't enough. That the private sector went crazy and their price fixing and interventions had nothing to with it. They need more. More power, more redistribution, more bailouts. Manchausen syndrome.

And every time some fistfuck runs his company into the ground for a million dollars, so fucking what? That allows a better company to rise up and take its place. Better than the USSR. It's not a perfect system, there's a lot of incestuous activity in the bigger companies for sure. But if you bail any of them out, it will be a merry-go-round for these fuckers. Some of the worst payouts recently have gone to Fannie and Freddie CEOs, these are pseudo-government institutions that were designed with the INTENTION of making housing more affordable, in reality leading us to the exact opposite. Their CEOs were former Clinton advisors, they're in bed with the Dodd's and Frank's of the world, they've channeled millions into Democratic and Republican campaigns alike. There are crooks everywhere, you need to figure this out already.

The banks, our money system, the lifeblood of an economy, are heavily, heavily connected to the government because of its desire to inflate rather than tax. We allow banks and only banks to loan out money they don't have AT INTEREST via fractional reserve banking. We have a non-market determined monopolized money, we allow the banking industry to centralize and price fix interest rates, THE ROOT CAUSE of credit malinvestment bubbles worldwide. You can't regulate this stuff any more than you can regulate murder, because it is inherently fraudulent what we are allowing them to be doing.

Your money is like a vote with far more overt benefits. As a consumer, that's the best vote you've got. If you want to switch off your brain and just have prosperity come down to whether the majority correctly chooses the best dictator or not, I guarantee you we are on the road to hell as we speak. There are some powers that GOVERNMENT SHOULD NOT HAVE, because it matters not how long you can correctly choose the upstanding citizen to exercise them in YOUR rather than THEIR best interest if eventually someone comes in and abuses it, causing the whole damn thing to implode on itself. That is the importance of the constitution, it was supposed to stop this from happening, but as soon as they realized they could ignore it with impunity, they just use as toilet paper. Forget laws for politicians, right? Who needs regulation for the regulators? They're all angels out to save us from our greedy selves. Gimme an effing break.

>> ^NetRunner:
That's funny, 70 years before GM killed the electric car, GM killed the electric streetcar.


apparently someone also killed the hemp car
http://www.videosift.com/video/Henry-Fords-Hemp-Car

Tags for this video have been changed from 'kids in the hall, kith, car fuckers, henry ford, cars' to 'kids in the hall, kith, car fuckers, henry ford, cars, rhombus shaped' - edited by calvados

I think he is a key person in human history. Looking back 1000 years from now, I expect he will be remembered. Sure its being in the right place at the right time, but computers are a major development for mankind, and he has played the largest role in the PCs development. I guess a bit like Henry Ford, the Wright brothers or Madam Curie.

You continue to avoid my questions... are you Jewish with some sort of mental hangup on "International Bankers".. is that why your so fixated on this? Are you calling Admiral Ward a racist conspiracy theorist because he stated such a thing?

Also.. You left out the following:
More modern theories transcend the religious overtones of the earlier theories. They purport that a clique of international banking houses which exercised financial control through ownership of the Bank of England and Federal Reserve, run by the Rothschilds, Warburgs, Morgans, and Rockefellers then bought up political control and media control to create an invisible government which usurps the Constitutional government and creates wars and depressions in order to gain more control. For more about this theory see the documentary The Money Masters

also... since you took these two small words from one statement made by an insider of the CFR that was exposing it and are subverting the topic to call him a racist.... here are some statements regarding "International Bankers" and the U.S.:

Capital must protect itself in every way... Debts must be collected and loans and mortgages foreclosed as soon as possible. When through a process of law the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed by the strong arm of the law applied by the central power of leading financiers. People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders. This is well known among our principle men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capitalism to govern the world. By dividing the people we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers of the common herd.
-- J.P. Morgan (American born private International Banker)

History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance.
-- James Madison (4th President of the United States)

I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world. No longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.
-- Woodrow Wilson (28th President of the United States)

Banks have done more injury to the religion, morality, tranquility, prosperity, and even wealth of the nation than they can have done or ever will do good.
-- John Adams (2nd President of the United States)

When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.
-- Napolean Bonaparte (Tyrant - attempted ruler of the world)

It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
-- Henry Ford (Auto manufacturer and inventor of the assembly line)

Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws.
-- Mayer Amschel Rothschild (German-born Jewish International Banker that changed his last name to a British sounding name)

This country has been fighting against International and Central banking since it's initial colonization. The banking legacy is that they keep systematically establishing a central banking system which dominates the people in many ways.

Your attempt to label those of us that realize this fact as racists is pathetic and futile. Go crawl back under your rock and leave your race card at home.

International financiers
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The international financiers or international bankers may refer to international finance institutions such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, or national investment banks.

[edit] Conspiracy theories referring to international financiers

The term found some currency in conspiracy theorism. Adolf Hitler often blamed "international financiers" or explicitly "Jewish international financiers" for Germany's debt after the First World War. In a similar vein, Henry Ford's antisemitic writings (among them The International Jew) which referred to "international bankers", were used by Charles Coughlin for the same purposes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_financiers