>> ^StukaFox:
Welcome to ALL your food if the Republicans had their way with the FDA. Remember: Industry is the best police of industry!


Although I'm Libertarian and support a modest FDA, arguing about their role right now is like complaining about a leaky roof during a flood. So with that out of the way, I'll point out that the consumer's best friend is always going to be a solid court system. Even the most staunch capitalists aren't in favor of anarchy, protecting rights, upholding contracts, and offering recourse is essential, and I'm not sure China has that. Just recently, some guy here sold peanuts he knew were contaminated, and the socialists came out of the woodwork to claim that this is what capitalists are incentivized to do, make profits. Meanwhile, the company is about to be sued into oblivion, it has already filed for bankruptcy. If he was a good capitalist, he would have done what was profitable, and selling poisoned peanuts was the least profitable decision he could have made under this system. No system, it turns out, can prevent people from being idiots.

Still, the socialists argue that there is a way to protect everyone from idiots: by charging each family $1,000 a day to appoint one government inspector per peanut, and then $1,000 more to hire watchdogs for those inspectors, and so forth. Similarly, a socialist would probably approve regulation that locked us all in our basements to reduce the murder and fraud rate to 0. That's just an extreme example of how socialists fundamentally cannot understand that saving a few human lives simply is not worth incurring a greater, but non-fatal aggregate cost. In this case: the freedom to interact with other human beings. In the food case, the cost of the food itself. How much money should we take from people to ensure the safety of their food.

I think my biggest criticism of the FDA is that any agency which purports to protect you with its powers is subject to corruption. The FDA colludes with businesses all the time to look the other way on things, sort of like how impotent the SEC became (and to what degree were people less skeptical thinking that they were protecting them?). They allow things that have been banned in other countries for years: water fluoridation, bovine growth hormones in milk, nitrates in meat.... they were paid off in the 80s by artificial sweetener interests (billion dollar industry) to ban stevia, a natural patent-less sugar substitute that is far safer. And maybe the most dangerous of all, they have the power to ban promising new drugs they deem "unsafe" or "experimintal." Doesn't matter if you're dying of cancer and have nothing to lose, they won't let you choose.

>> ^Throbbin:
What is it about you Paultards?
This schiff dude predicted it - that IS pretty impressive.
However, so many people have formed a cult around Paul and Schiff. This is not healthy.
Much like the pacificists(looking at you MINK), there is a dramatic and substantial difference between idealogical merit and practical application. The world is too messy to allow for it.
But I guess it's ok on the internet?...


I'm guessing you're referring to military spending, so I'll just leave you to it. It's not like it's even possible to continue doing it, it will either end voluntarily or involuntarily, there's simply no way to fund it without hyperinflation. I'm personally satisfied with nuclear arms, no country with nuclear weapons has ever been invaded. 9/11 was a poor man's stunt that we should be blaming on our own ineptitude. We were lazy on intel, there were no plane sheriffs, and cockpits had no barricades. If any one of those had been addressed, it would have failed.

Keep on believing that "national defense" is Americans sacrificing their kids to defend countries other than America, buddying up with some dictators and overthrowing others, and building bases around the world. As for psychopaths, have fun spending trillions to play terrorist whack-a-mole where your collateral damage produces more terrorists than it kills. That's exactly what Bin Laden wanted, he can inflict so much more damage and recruit so many more people if we're mired in sectarian Islamic strife.

>> ^volumptuous:
I've watched every video clip of Schiff, and listened to Ron Paul in the senate hearings with the banks.
I have yet to hear either one of them to tell the rest of us what they think can help us get out of this mess. Neither of them, as far as I can find, have said anything productive.


I sincerely hope you're joking, because they constantly state that withdrawal symptoms after the inflationary high are unavoidable and can't be fixed, but that the best thing the government can do is see the hangover as the solution and stop administering more drugs and shock therapy. The recovery to a viable economy can happen a lot sooner if the government stops trying to inflate and redistribute its way out. We need to immediately start cutting Federal government excess to reduce the financial burden on our citizens. Their retirement schemes are unsustainable no matter what and need to be phased out over many years. Entire departments like FEMA, Homeland Security, and the Department of Education have to go, along with our military empire, so that we can abolish the 40% of Federal revenue attributed to Federal Income Tax. With a flat tax or no income tax, the IRS is then superfluous and can be abolished. GSEs like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will have to be outlawed, subsidies and marriage debates will be resolved because without an income tax, it will be impossible for government to issue tax differences on particular types of marriage, families, incomes, or investments based on social engineering concepts.

The constitution will then need to be clarified to abolish the central bank, because congress has no constitutional authority to create a fiat money or delegate such powers to the private industry. This will require some new judicial appointments. I'm also quite certain a Paul presidency would look at every piece of legislature and ask "was this a lobby bill? does it prevent a cheaper product or service from being chosen?" I hear these are prevalent in the medical industry where he was an OBGYN. For example, there are regulations that bar nurses from performing services doctors can. Lots of licensure and red tape protects that industry. And I'm 100% sure he would immediately end the Federal ban on marijuana bought by the drug industry, that would consequently save billions wasted by the FBI and our prison system trying to fight something 10x less harmful than legal drugs.

>> ^chilaxe:
When Asian countries send us products, we give them currency that has a known conversion rate to other currencies. Currency represents labor. There's nothing special about it.


What kind of labor is it backed by? A haircut for another American? A consultation session for the government? An insurance policy? How many service jobs are we going to create before the world demands more basic things like soap, cars, televisions, fuel, food, and washing machines. They're not going to be able to meet future demand of these things if they keep throwing their products and legitimate money into our economy in exchange for our services and illegitimate money.

We aren't legitimately competing with the Yuan either, the Yuan is linked to the dollar. That means other countries inflate in sync with us to artificially suppress the value of their currency. They do so because they follow the Keynesian myth that a weak currency is good for exports. But why would you want to export something you make instead of consume it yourself, unless you felt you were getting something more valuable? Why would you INTENTIONALLY devalue your own currency to obtain a currency whose value wouldn't be high against it unless you did so? It's a paradox, but one that Chinese people were willing to make as wall street convinced them that tech stocks and home growth were legitimate. Now they've been burned twice by demand bubbles that they helped fuel by loaning towards consumption. That's why they're suffering now, not because their economy is unsound, but because they took the money we paid them with and recycled it into ours.

If they ever flooded the world with their 2 trillion dollar reserves, it's game over for the dollar. We don't have 2 trillion worth of their currency sitting in a vault to counteract it. Our labor services would become dirt cheap for us and others, but foreign imports would skyrocket in dollar terms. Domestic products would all get exported to richer countries, our standard of living would disappear overnight.


One of the reasons the US economy maintains the highest GDP per capita PPP in the world for nations above 5 million people is because it has a highly skilled workforce. Denigrating that workforce as "non-factory-working" or "paper" is meaningless as long as the rest of the world needs skilled labor.


GDP numbers are worthless, they're adjusted for the CPI. If the government lies about how much inflation they're creating, which I've already explained to you, they can remarkably overstate GDP. That's how despite this horrific mess last year, you still had dumbass economists coming on tv saying that we're not in a recession because GDP was still above 0%. But if inflation was calculated more honestly like it was 30 years ago, we'd have negative GDP every quarter. Instead, we claim to be growing a fraction of a percent despite being the epicenter of the problem.

If you think that we can deficit spend 100x more on military than anyone else, 50x more on entitlements than anyone else, and perpetually convince foreign savers to finance it in exchange for a negative inflation-adjusted yield, then you are sadly mistaken. Unless the Fed hyperinflates, we are going to have to set interest rates higher than they've ever been, possibly 30%, to lure in foreign buyers. Interest rates that high would make the correction of excesses unfold quicker, but hyperinflation is worse because we never recover from that. It looks like we're going that route, and that's what has Peter concerned. Foreigners have stopped buying bonds at these low interest rates, so the Fed has to buy them with pure inflation, new illegitimate dollars unbacked by labor. This is what's called "monetizing the debt," and it fails in every country that tries it. That picture in the video of the lady stuffing her oven with paper money worth less than firewood is from Weimar Republic Germany, a hyperinflationary episode in the 1920s that made people desperate and willing to follow Hitler.

>> ^chilaxe:
What's more important, computer manufacturing or software programing ("paper")? One is not much use without the other.
How about the designs ("paper") for the next generation of computer chips? How about anti-terrorism consulting ("paper") for Indian anti-terrorism forces? How about the post-1945 Green Revolution ("paper")?
It's as easy to say that the service economy is the foundation of the world's production as it is to say it the other way around.


You're right that we export a lot of services and IP, but the balance of trade is still grossly inequal. We still have to borrow foreign savings to finance our consumption of their exports. Our trade deficit breaks a new record each month, it's around $70,000,000,000 a month now. That is how much more goods and services the world is providing us than we are providing them EACH MONTH.

In the past, we ran deficits as well. The major difference, and the ones all Keynesians are oblivious to, is that deficits prior to 1960 financed increases in productive capacity. Now we're borrowing money to consume imports on credit cards, absorbing products from the world with nothing to show for it but paper notes and a hot printing press. There's a HUGE difference between borrowing to produce and borrowing to consume. One is mutually beneficial, the other is parasitic.

It's a huge, unsustainable scam, and Austrians like Schiff recognize it.

>> ^chilaxe:
^Austrian economics occupies a fringe position in the marketplace of ideas. If they're really such geniuses, they should be able to find a way into a more central position. That would be the proactive course of action, rather than just railing against economics "dumbasses".
Your argument is supposed to be that unregulated markets are more efficient, but you're conflating that argument with your moral advocacy of small government and low taxes, thereby limiting the appeal of your efficiency argument to people who agree with your moral argument.


But that's exactly what's going to happen. Why assume that this should have happened already? One thing that the Keynesians had in their favor and made it look like their ideas were working was that the dollar retained its reserve currency status in 1971 despite severing from what got it there. For 30 years, our now fiat government could build up these excesses because we had the unique position of being able to export our inflation all around the world. Now, though, the market is getting saturated with paper, but not with goods. You have massive emerging economies like China and India that have happily taken our factories and debt in exchange for a lengthy consumption binge. Now they control the source of the world's wealth and will stop buying our paper. They've already got 2 trillion of our money in reserves, they just announced a stimulus plan where they may use some of it on this rally.

Did you really think this trend could go on forever, where we become 100% service based and foreign producers continually loan us their savings to consume their products so that they can go without them and have bigger reserves of our paper?

Your argument is supposed to be that unregulated markets are more efficient, but you're conflating that argument with your moral advocacy of small government and low taxes, thereby limiting the appeal of your efficiency argument to people who agree with your moral argument.

It's not just moral, it's factual and rational. Nobody spends money with more thrift than its earner, thus you want to limit the amount of money non-earners are controlling to duties which truly lead to more benefits than costs. Also, I love the term regulation. Very popular these days, that's how socialism keeps building on itself. Socialist program causing a problem? Good, shift the blame on spontaneous human evolution into becoming more greedy, and create another socialist program to address it. Rinse and repeat. For example, the predatory lending would have never gotten to the extreme that it did had interest rates not been price fixed far lower than the market would have set them. That false signal caused people to make all kinds of malinvestments that they otherwise would not have. Market got drunk, socialist central bank spiked the punch. Who's to blame? According to socialists, the lack of a designated driver program. Um no, that's not it, the problem was that the 5th plank of the communist manifesto is spiking the punch.

>> ^jwray:
The United States federal government is not paying for its deficit spending by printing excessive amounts of money. It is borrowing instead. Inflation is at 3.66% and falling. It peaked at 5.6% in July, before the economic upheaval.


Oh really, is that why it takes 3x as many dollars to buy an ounce of gold today than it did ten years ago? Of course the government is printing obscene amounts of money. Stop picking and choosing little short term windows of time where the trend is not apparent, nothing goes in a straight line. Do you even know what monetization of debt means? If foreigners are no longer interested in buying our government debt (bonds) that the treasury issues every year, the Fed has to raise interest rates to lure them in, because that's the yield on their loan to us. But they're LOWERING THEM. Yields are NEGATIVE. You loan money to us, you will be paid back in depreciated dollars that buy less than what you had before you loaned. So now that foreigners aren't doing that, guess who has to step in and buy those bonds? The Federal Reserve. Except that money isn't someone's savings, it isn't backed by a product in the world. It's pure inflation, pure funny money. That's what's coming, their balance sheet is going into the TRILLIONS.

This is the symbiosis that enabled government excess. A tax is an honest appropriation, people see it and are far more likely to resist it. Inflation is arbitrary money creation in a back room that siphons value from existing dollars. You can pull a curtain over that, lie about how much you're doing it, and watch as people see prices go up 10% in health care, food, per annum with absolutely no idea what hit them. After all, the government weatherman says that prices only went up 3%.

http://www.financialsense.com/stormwatch/2005/0624.html

The calculations are a joke, after we left the gold standard in the 70s, they kept changing them to understate real inflation and welfare obligations so they could spend more and more without it being easily noticed. They no longer include homes, energy, or food. Also, they introduced a subjective concept called hedonics adjustment, which negates price increases as inflation by discounting an assumed increase in quality.

The most galling result of this Keynesian nonsense is it blinds people to where inflation is going. Keynesian economics is the equivalent of teaching astrology instead of astronomy. First, they change the definition of inflation to mean prices instead of money supply. The correct definition of inflation is an increase of the money supply with the common RESULT being higher prices. After doing this, they then categorize inflation (to them: prices) into "asset-based" and "goods-based," and tell us that they don't fight asset-based. But asset-based inflation is what causes bubbles in assets like homes and stocks. We want things we own to go up and things we consume to go down, of course, but we don't want our assets to go up from artificial demand created by inflation. That's an illusion. So when inflation goes into tech stocks or homes, nobody sees it as inflation. Not the Keynesian Fed Chairmen, not the Keynesian financial managers, almost anyone with a degree in economics was less reliable than A COIN FLIP. That's when you know when your "science" has a problem. And then boom, when it starts going into commodities futures after the implosion, it exposes the inflation at all once that people were previously blind to.

And then here's a guy like Schiff, Ron Paul's economic advisor and Austrian economist, who was warning the whole god damned time since 2000, telling people to get into gold when it was $275 and getting laughed at by every confused Keynesian educated retard on television.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucDkoqwflF4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw

>> ^dtmike07:
Austrian economics has about as much credibility as scientology. They don't even believe in empirical evidence, for crissakes. Mainstream economics does't have a much better theory - essentially its an extended and mathematized version of Austrian economics. But at least mainstream economists know what the data says and use statistical techniques to analyze it. You know, like real scientists. And regarding the Austrian "theory" of the Great Depression - they pretty much pulled it out of their asses. Its just an attempt to blame the whole thing on the government, and exempt the free market. Austrian economics is a religion - the free market is God and government is the Devil.

You are 100% dead wrong on this. Keynesian "empirical data" is bogus, I've only scratched the surface on how they try to complicate simple concepts into a symbiotic swindle by redefining inflation, making up new terms, and it keeps blowing up in their face no matter who's in charge because that's the whole point. For you or Stukafox to even compare this problem to the firecrackers of banking panics (from fractional reserve lending, a legalized form of fraud that persists to this day with government backstops, an entirely different debate) is unbelievable, there's no proportion to a decade long depression and a bunch of shitty banks going under to remind people not to carelessly deposit all their money in banks.

Second of all, economics is a study of human behavior. Keynes was an idiot whose theories arose from a complete misunderstanding of what caused the great depression. He basically threw classical knowledge out the window and decided that economies needed central direction and stimulation by government. See, like the dumbfucks in this video, most people thought letting the banks fail was what caused the depression. It wasn't. It was what came before and after it. The inflation of the 20s was what caused the crash in the first place, you don't have a crash without a Fed-created bubble. You don't have withdrawal without being high on drugs.

But while withdrawal symptoms suck, they're actually the solution to the disease of the high. Hoover and Roosevelt saw the hangover as the disease, and began administering shock therapy. Over the course of many years, they raised tariffs, raised taxrates, and nationalized industry. The economy would have recovered, capital and jobs would have reallocated on its own. Instead, anyone who had any money after that crash had no incentive to invest or employ anyone, because now government was promising to take 90% of your profits if you made any. So unemployment got worse. The tax revenue the government did manage to appropriate, it used to pay for new government jobs that were extremely inefficient (being immune to bankruptcy, financed by theft, and having no competition tends to be an unproductive business model, ask the soviets). FDR also ordered livestock slaughtered and fields plowed under because he believed falling food prices were bad for farmers. No, I'm not making this up. Deflation being bad is another Keynesian myth, they think more efficient production lowering prices makes people sit on their money rather than invest it. Which is totally untrue if you look at the computer sector where prices fall IN SPITE of inflation and have never had problems raising capital or selling well despite falling prices and obsolescence. FDR is the same asshole who allowed Pearl Harbor to be a massacre and issued unconstitutional orders to confiscate gold from the poor, hungry citizens who had just seen the banks absolved for destroying their savings. The man was a fucking monster, it took four terms to get rid of him.

What got us out of the depression was a just war and FDR's death. WWII had the entire country up in arms because we were attacked by another country. People were willing to sacrifice their wants and contribute to the war effort, this was no pushover on a third world country, it took everything we had. People were buying warbonds based on patriotic fervor alone. Massive amounts of infrastructure was built to produce wartime materials. That manufacturing base remained after the war for private industry, taxes came down, trade resumed, and we emerged as a leading producer of wealth in the world. By default. Because the rest of world was in shambles, only the Soviets were left to compete and their socialist economy eventually crumbled. We didn't plan it that way, it just happened. We were also still on a semi-gold standard, we still had a savings rate, and we became the largest creditor nation. We've lost ALL OF THAT. It's all gone, we're the direct opposite now. No gold standard, negative savings rate, largest debtor nation in the WORLD.

Keynes main problem is, politicians have no precise idea what all needs to be produced and created to please everyone in a PEACETIME economy, it's impossible. The free market is millions of individuals with diverse wants and needs, there's no way in hell you can centrally manage that. But they think they can and want to spend, that's why they picked Keynes as a replacement for old models, because his theories completely justified what socialist academics had been wanting to do all along. They honestly believed they could spend money more efficiently than its earner. That's impossible, the earner has a stake in the money. If he throws it away, he loses the labor he spent to obtain it, so he has a natural incentive to be thrifty. A politician spending it loses nothing, they have no incentive to be thrifty. They're people motivated by self-interest, just like you and me, their only legitimate job in the economy was to make sure force and deception is not used when we are out here transacting with one another. That's what graphs and "empirical data" doesn't explain, and it's why history will show Keynes to be a failure.

Far from our free market roots, we centrally fix interest rates, we declare lending standards discriminatory with goofy programs like the community reinvestment act, we redistribute capital from good businesses to failed ones, savers to speculators, and pass all kinds of anti-competitive laws. That's what Ron Paul understood and was going to put a stop to. He was going to end the monopoly on currency that forced us all into accepting the bill for government excess. He was going to end the useless military expenditures overseas. He was going to eliminate the income tax and cripple the ability of politicians to engage in collusive campaign dealings, or "engineer" society by issuing special credits to certain types of marriages, incomes, families, or investments. He knew the enablements, he understood how seemingly innocuous program could change human behavior. Politicians are just lawyers spending and accepting millions of dollars to get a low-paying position of controlling other people's money. That's it. And if you think they should be controlling 50% of our money in life, you deserve everything that's coming to you. Your employers are all going to close up shop to avoid the tax, your education is going to suck, your welfare dollars' value is going to be pissed away on foreign entanglements and overpaid execs, your gold is going to get confiscated (again). It's all coming, comrades.

Sometimes I wonder if BillO is a fake account. The things he says are impossibly stupid, he puts zero effort into explaining his positions, he learns nothing from other posters. But the thing that seals it for me is his username and avatar, which makes it clear no matter what he's posting that people can attribute his stupidity to that "side." A genuine Republican poster would not do all of this.

We had a similar person in tech website I moderate who named himself "PLAY STATION THREE" and all he would do is respond to threads in the most arrogant, inflammatory way possible. He would always get rated down to -1 and he pretty much made sure to make everyone hate him. It was so over the top that it couldn't possibly be a real troll who believed what he was saying. I came to believe that it was a clever attempt from a 360 fan to get people to join his side by portraying the other in an embarrassingly stupid light. But it fooled practically everyone. The lengths to which people will go...

>> ^thinker247:
Of course! Jesus was a socialist, as we all know. Sell everything you own and give it to the poor? That is the KARL MARX type of communism! The neocons would tear his throat out.


First of all, neo-cons are bigtime socialists, that was sort of the problem. Second of all, voluntarily donating your own things to someone else is charity. Volunteering someone else's by force is socialism. And when 50% of a country's capital is distributed in that way, it's a huge problem. Learn the difference.

>> ^DrPawn:
Very nice. Why can we not have a CEO like that ?


They don't get a lot of attention, but we do. We'd have a lot more, unfortunately our socialist government feels it necessary to subsidize overpaid and corrupt companies with money appropriated from underpaid ones. The beauty of free market capitalism is that when a company leader abuses precious capital by using it to simply overpay themselves for no additional production, a competitor will invariably take that opportunity to invest or lower prices rather than give it to themselves, thereby forcing the other company to do the same or fail.

This would happen a lot more often if we didn't have what has become known as "corporate welfare." Since people continue to enable the appropriation and redistribution of taxes/inflation on vast levels by voting for socialist republicrats every election cycle, we see a tremendous amount of subsidization that begets self-perpetuating fraud and excess. This is the act in which a socialist government engages: a tax is forcibly appropriated money, and it is levied on all, but distributed to select entities. Those entities tend to be the ones who are the most overpaid and corrupt, because those are the types of entities that bribe politicians into doing so. Without income taxes or a fiat reserve currency, this would all be impossible.

Unfortunately, only 3% of America understands libertarian concepts fully, so we're essentially doomed to another lengthy depression. Europe is somewhat spared from this because

(a) their fiat currency is not the reserve currency. They did not have the capacity to export their inflation abroad and distort the direction of their economies into a service sector, non-manufacturing house of cards dependent on foreign credit to consume foreign production. If they're smart, they will only suffer to extent that they loaned us money that we are trying to pay back with a printing press instead of a manufactured product.
(b) they don't have a gargantuan military empire.

All else is practically equal, they suffer from the same tax-and-inflate socialist policies that plague us today. It's just that we've taken it a step further. It's a complete U-turn from our original principles that got us from nothing to world power. And socialism will lead us back down to third-world status when the dollar finally collapses and the trillions sitting in foreign vaults comes home to roost.

The word "democracy" appears nowhere in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Instead of a democracy, the Constitution's Article IV, Section 4, guarantees "to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government." The pledge of allegiance to the flag says "...to the republic for which it stands" Someone asked Ben Franklin what form of government we were. He said "a republic, if you can keep it."

The fact of the matter is, academia introduced a plethora of new terms and redefined old ones to the point that people are completely confused what they really mean. There is no such thing as a constitutional democracy, it's a god-damned oxymoron. The proper term is "republic" for a nation that has plurality votes, but institutes a constitution to prevent majority consensus from infringing on rights. Democracy is unrestricted plurality votes. Political science profs have completely fucked this one up.

Adding to the confusion is that our two major parties are called "Democratic" and "Republican." They're just names of parties with different social platforms, people, they don't correspond to the lower case terms.

Nope, the driver coming from the right knew it would turn green. Whatever country this is, the traffic lights are giving a warning before they turn green. You can see it in the traffic light facing the camera - the light goes from red, to red and yellow at the same time. You could argue that such a traffic signal system encourages these types of accidents. But don't we all watch for the yellow lights on the perpendicular signals?

Most of the time, I can't see the perpendiculars from the angle I'm at. If you're behind someone else, it's pointless to do so anyway.

But let's get back to the topic of the lights. This amazes me as an American. Over here, it just goes from red to green. The only warning signal insertion is between green and red. It's a "slow-down" or "speed-up" gauge. This foreign system with multiple lights shining at one time seems unnecessarily confusing. There's absolutely no point in doing this for both ends.

The unfortunate part about all this is that Obama is a false prophet, there is so much hope being poured into him by people who have absolutely no understanding of our current economic situation, how we got here, what caused the previous depression to last so long, or what the least painful exit strategy really is. As the next eight years pass and things get remarkably worse, I really hope people get off the Republicrat see-saw. But they won't, the ignorant masses, who think the parties have substantive differences will conclude that the Republicans were right all along and go back to them, and so on and so forth.

Realistic outlook going forward from a brilliant Libertarian economist if you want to protect yourself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TP_aJ7LcAAA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px0RuriBrVA

Politicians taking money they didn't earn by force and redistributing it is a little different from people choosing to be charitable with their own money. Ever so slight of a difference.

I'm not defending McCain either, he's as socialist as the rest of them. I don't think the neo-cons understand that purchasing power appropriations (inflation) and nominal appropriations (taxes) are two sides of the same coin. What have we been doing since 71 when Nixon scratched the discipline of the gold standard? Borrowing money we can't pay back and then trying to pay it back with a printing press. Too bad printing presses don't create wealth, they just siphon the value of labor-backed money to the new printing press money. Last time it happened, we had a monetarist (Volcker) raise interest rates to 20%. What are we doing today? We have a neo-Keynesian (Bernanke) who has a complete misunderstanding of great depression lowering them to 0% and expanding the Fed balance sheet to unprecedented levels. Get your wheelbarrows ready.

The American worker has lost so much to inflationary currency and collusive subsidies, it's a complete joke if he gives one iota about this tax bracket nonsense. You are getting your wages debased daily, overpromised and underdelivered, for years and years, and if you can't figure this out and vote in a libertarian guy like Paul next round, we are deeply screwed for at least two more generations.

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:
^I don't want to see you calling the fire department when your home catches fire, Señor rugged individualist.


Can you not read or something? I want government funding to the extent that they're preventing the infringement of rights and offering recourse, not "directing industry" with forcibly appropriated money or providing services any more complex than laying pavement. Any fire could be arson, you need a fire department to protect private property. Full-blown state health care addressing self-inflicted conditions with other people's money is garbage.

Ever hear about the guy in Sweden with the brain tumor? The state didn't like his chances and declared it inoperable to save money. He flew to private facility and paid for the operation, and lived for many more years. How kind and wonderful socialist health care is.

Learn what Socialism is.. do you really want to Live in CUBA or Russia? for the next 4 years.

Surely not, but it's worth nothing that economic and political freedom are two completely different things and they don't even have elections in Cuba. And yes, economically, Cuba is even more socialist than we are. Just this year they ALLOWED their citizens to buy computers. People don't risk their lives fleeing to America on rafts and banana boats for nothing, they're trying to escape living life as just another lowest common denominator. They want the opportunity to live, not merely survive in a so-called socialist utopia. Unfortunately, they don't realize the hyperinflationary depression brought on by our socialist interventions they're now stepping into. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, as they might say.

downvote banshee for ignoring what i wrote and telling me the definition of a word.

Are you on drugs or something?!! I totally answered your question. If you aren't socialist, you're capitalist. The terms are a reference to where the majority of the capital is controlled, politicians or its earner. There is no other place for it to be. Just like if you're not feeling good, you're feeling bad. Not anti-good.

YES, THAT MEANS GEORGE BUSH AND NEO-CONS ARE SOCIALISTS, EVEN MORESO THAN CLINTON WHO ENJOYED POPULARITY UNDER THE FED-INDUCED TECH BUBBLE OF THE 90S. Instead of having that bubble burst on Bush's first term and making him a one-term president, he delayed a severe recession by having Greenspan artificially lower interest rates to 1% for an entire year. The inflationary effects of that filtered into real estate. Amazing revelation, here for you?

then you only have one problem left, and for me it's a big one: The Arts. I cannot figure out a way that art can be compatible with capitalism. It doesn't work like that.

It's the complete opposite, art is hurt by socialism. What funds advanced types of art and entertainment like video games and movies is the personal tastes of a private earner who has in his possession excess capital after buying things to merely survive. Socialism could try to provide for that, but tastes vary far too much for a central office to know the millions of places that the capital would have flowed to if it had been spent by its earner. Or even how much is appropriate to distribute to each person. Invariably, there will be people who don't care much about art and just want a bigger family. Do you then take from one person's art fund to finance the cost of those kids? That will gut the art fund very quickly. As will the corruption inherent in having capital controlled by someone who didn't earn it. And when your government is involved in banning computers and censoring speech, good luck with damn near anything.