Ben Stein is no debater, he should stick to acting and game shows. Paul has a Jew chief economic advisor (Peter Schiff) who coincidentally also made Stein look ridiculous.

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

Paul was also inspired by the Jewish economist Murray Rothbard. To say he hates Jewish people is retarded. I think Paul has seen enough evidence to suggest that Israel has undermined our ability to make sovereign decisions on some matters.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWLBhgTQ46o

I have come to agree that each country should really only be concerned about defending itself. We do for Israel what Israel needs to do for itself. No country is another country's sacrificial lamb. It's not the obligation of an American soldier to die so that an Iraqi or Israeli doesn't. At some point we have to accept that our meddling in foreign governments is easy propaganda for radical groups. It's clearly hypocritical that we endorse democracy while propping up dictators like Hussein and Musharraf.

And yet, if that clause truly means the government can do anything so long as it says it is for the common good and people vote for it, then the purpose of the rest of the constitution is... what exactly? I just never understood that interpretation of the clause to be some all-encompassing allowance when the whole point is to implicitly deny privileges that aren't explicitly granted. Our constitution is one of the best ever written, but it has its flaws and ambiguities.

Beck is easy fodder and this segment seems to be implying that gold's price is a result of illegitimate fear and not actual currency debasement worldwide. Not even Beck's massive ego can affect the price of gold. Gold began going up years ago when Greenspan lowered interest rates to 1% and blew up the real estate bubble.

http://www.kitco.com/charts/popup/au3650nyb.html

The Fed's continued policy of inflation, the arbitrary creation of dollar units at no labor or material cost, is what is making dollars less scarce relative to gold. Yes, the real estate bubble was allowed to collapse about halfway, but gold continues to rise in anticipation of the banks eventually loaning all that bailout money they received. It can't just sit on the sidelines forever, either it's retracted and we pay the piper, or it's loaned out. The problem with loaning it out is that we may lose key buyers of our debt. A bond is a promise to pay future dollars, and if we are rapidly decreasing their scarcity relative to goods, it becomes a losing proposition to buy bonds at such a low interest rate. Some of the largest purchasers of gold are foreign central banks, which are currently VASTLY underinvested in gold. China has only 1% of its reserves in gold, the rest is paper. India recently bought 200 metric tons.

I will start believing in the gold bubble crowd when I stop seeing those infomercials getting highly indebted Americans to SELL their gold for paper. You talk to the typical person the street, and they're still oblivious to what gold represents, and those that do are not buying, but selling. This is just the beginning of a huge bull run, and it's kind of hilarious to see some people calling the top over and over again. Peter Schiff wrote a funny article in 2006 about what a gold bubble would actually look like.

http://www.kitco.com/ind/Schiff/apr252006.html

This site would be so much more pleasant if it wasn't completely overwhelmed by 16 year old liberal nutjobs like Nithern who haven't done enough research to realize that both Dems and Repubs have been complete fiscal retards for a really long time. Nithern, you bring up the old Clinton surplus myth. Read this:

http://www.craigsteiner.us/articles/16

If you can't understand it, let me break it down for you: there was never a surplus under Clinton. Ever. There are two parts of the national debt. Imagine you're a household and you have a mortgage and credit card debt. You take out a second mortage on your home and pay down some of your credit card debit. Home debt goes up, credit card debt goes down. Then you go all over the city and tell people you reduced your credit card debt! Whee! You don't tell them you went deeper into debt elsewhere in order to do it. Do you realize how ridiculous of an accomplishment this is?

Moreover, Social Security payments are adjusted for the CPI. The CPI is the government's way of calculating rises in the cost of living. In the 90s, the Boskin commission was formed to look for "bias" in the way the CPI was calculated. Let me translate that for you: hey guys, we need reduce Social Security obligations without anyone noticing by subjectively omitting certain price increases, thereby artificially lowering the CPI against which SS payments are adjusted.

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

Perhaps there is no accurate measure for the underemployed, but discouraged workers (jobless for over a year) are no longer counted when they used to be prior to the Clinton admin. It's a goofy new category created to intentionally make the number look more timid that historical numbers and nothing more. Both the CPI and the way unemployment are calculated changed during the Clinton administration as short term "fixes" of problems that need real solutions that no citizen is ever going to vote for. So if you think Clinton solved jack shit fiscally, I've got news for you: we're going to need something 100x more potent. And it won't happen, because people are retards like you. Think about it. You bitch about the Iraq war, and rightfully so, but before you were born the Democrats started a useless little war called "Vietnam" that led to Nixon severing our currency's last link to gold. Oh, and we lost about 50k soldiers. Which is sad, because you can always count on communism to fail by itself, which is exactly what happened after we pulled out.

You cry about the lack of Republican regulation. We need more regulation like we need a hole in the head. You don't even know what the word means, it's just some magical decree for officiating infractions in a game that can't exist without "subsidy fever". I mean, there's laws against stealing and killing and defrauding, and then there's handing out free money while impossibly trying to stop people from gambling with it. People's hope for gain is NORMALLY offset by their fear of loss. That goes out the window in an economy where anyone can borrow foreign money cheaply for a depreciating asset that they're convinced is an infinitely appreciating piggy bank. It goes out the window WITHIN the government, because politicians are by nature operating with money it appropriated rather than labored for. A "GSE" like Fannie and Freddie need way more regulation that any bankruptcy-fearing company.

Moreover, no one cares what bank they give their money because all bank deposits are insured by the FDIC. No investor gave a shit what loans Freddie and Fannie were spewing out because they were implicitly backed by the federal government. The home bubble got a huge boost from a 97 tax law excepting certain home sales from capital gains taxes. Because politicians like being the candyman. They don't think about the unintended consequences of creating artificial demand and employment in certain sectors with all their subsidy intervention bullshit. TO THIS DAY, FHA loans are being made requiring only 3% down. All the private subprime lenders? Couldn't have happened unless a politically motivated central bank exists to PRICE FIX the cost of borrowing in the market. Spike the punch, see mayhem that ensues, then resolve that the solution isn't to kill the spiker, but rather to hire more police officers to regulate the effects caused by the spiker. That's great logic. I hope you're regulating your regulators, too, because the SEC was told of Madoff's scheme 8 FUCKING TIMES and didn't do jack shit about it. I have more confidence in genuine personal risk of loss regulating behavior than some fucknut at the SEC. If only you would support an economy that wasn't so awash in fucking subsidies.

Social Security is another Democrat timebomb. Why not bring that shit up? It operates like a ponzi scheme and if you know how ponzi schemes work, you know that early investors win at the supreme expense of later investors. Guess who that later investor is? It's you!

How can you not have instant replay in a sport where 1 bad call can give or take 100% of the offensive output?

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

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


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

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

>> ^potchi79:
>> ^entr0py:
I can't help but be reminded of the recent Supreme Court ruling that convicts do not have the constitutional right to request DNA tests on preserved biological evidence. It seems that protecting judges and prosecutors from embarrassment is more impotent then sorting out the innocent from the guilty.
http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE55H4BD20090618

What the.. unfucking believable. This is sad.


What's sad is that we borrow and spend so much god damned money on unconstitutional shit that they can use the excuse "it will cost too much" and not get completely laughed out of town. A solid justice system is one of the few, undeniable, constitutional activities for which the Federal government needs funding, and we've pissed it all away on useless wars, bureaucracies, and welfare ponzi schemes.

also the idea that having a gun makes you free is so dence , I bet you that owning a gun puts your life in more risk than not owning a gun.


I believe that's incorrect. People are far more likely to use force against someone who is unarmed. No fear of being hurt themselves. Gun ownership is a great deterrent against crime. Believe me, if we could wave a magic wand and confiscate firearms only from thieves, rapists, and psychopaths, I would. But that's fairy land.

On a larger level, the amount of guns in this country makes it virtually immune to invasion, too. Unfortunately, we didn't need any help from anyone else to ignore constitution and destroy our economy. I'm a Ron Paul guy, but I prefer to just watch the country unwittingly vote the dollar into oblivion. If people can still convince themselves that it's best to ban competing currencies, price fix interest rates, tax one legal behavior more than another, let them do it. Then there will be no one left to point to but themselves when it comes crashing down for real.

>> ^spoco2:
There's obviously no changing people's minds here.
But to just address one point of QM "Under socialized health care is it "fair" that the healthy guy with no major medical problems gets little return on his health care taxes while the fat smoker spends two years in a hospital bed before expiring?"
Well, we handle the smoking issue here in Australia by taxing the shite out of them. Over 63% of the cost of cigarettes is tax. This is fair... you don't NEED to smoke, you shouldn't really smoke, by doing so you are indeed vastly increasing your chances of becoming ill and costing the rest of us money. So... we make the buying of the product cover the probably cost of taking care of you... the more you smoke, the more you've paid towards your own care.
Seems fair.
Same could be applied to fast food etc. and less tax being put on fresh food and healthy options. It becomes murky as to what you class as what around the edges, but by and large you can make those that chose to be unhealthy pay more to be so.
You're not outlawing such behaviour, you're not stopping people smoking, you're just encouraging people not to in the first place by making it expensive, and if that doesn't stop them at least they are contributing money to the rest of us.


It's not just fast food, though, that can make you unhealthy. It's soda pop, pastries, too much starch, too much sodium, too much hamburger, too many eggs, too much cheese. What the fuck are you going to do, start taxing everything except raw vegetables? Some things are perfectly healthy choices depending on how often you eat them and how much you exercise. The government hasn't a fucking clue what each individual's exercise habits are. This is the most dictatorial, socialist-engineering nonsense I've ever heard anyone say. The only way to dissaude someone who is eating irresponsible amounts of junk food relative to exercise is to penalize people who eat a responsible amount relative to exercise. It's like having a lineup of 10 suspects in which 1 is the murderer, but you don't know which one, and so you shoot them all. I think that's morally bankrupt to punish the innocent to get to the guilty.

Part of living in a free country is to be able to take personal responsibility for one's own health choices. There's a huge difference between having a public option for car accidents and crack babies vs having a public option for conditions that may have been the result of that individual's own poor life habits. I think that people should be on their own to finance health problems that they incur past the age of 30. It is impossible for the government to distinguish whether the condition was the result of such choices, thus is cannot fairly administer a general tax to provide unlimited coverage without disproportionately benefiting those who made bad choices. And I think individuals need to be the customer for insurance companies, not employers.

>> ^dag:
^with these kinds of comments I fear the US will once again get the healthcare it deserves. Now is not the time for quoting Locke. And if you disparage the elderly getting quality healthcare- I'd say your heart is two sizes too small. There should be a "common good" and care for the elderly falls into it.


I'm not disparaging the elderly, I'm telling you straight up that there is a larger dynamic here than what you are suggesting. If given the choice between no SS/Medicare taxes throughout life or a million dollars worth of procedures when I'm 85, brother, I'm choosing the less taxes. That's an even easier choice for my generation than ones before it since SS/Medicare will implode long before we retire. But even if those were sustainable systems, the point is that some people would rather live a better life than a longer life. In the old days, people made these kinds of decisions and accepted the tradeoff. Now we run a giant ponzi scheme called Social Security (of which Medicare is a part) where the choice is made for us to live a longer life at the expense of a better one. Even that is debatable since a prudent investor would be able to get both. SS/Medicare intake isn't invested at all, just transferred from one generation to another, with a "trust fund" spent by congress decades ago and replaced with IOU bonds.

We don't have a 100% private system, far from it. The high prices are because of government involvement interfering with the market's pricing mechanism. What I fear most is idealist people like you who have zero understanding of what costs are incurred by such systems despite the fixed prices. The costs in the quality of life, the costs on your currency's value, the cost in being unable to compete with foreign production whose employers aren't strapped with paying for the abuse and fraud borne by a system in which people are spending other people's money on services. Like I said before, our economic wellbeing has changed dramatically since leaving the gold standard and borrowing at interest well in excess of our productive capacity. People like you don't understand how ugly our bond market looks, how it went from a normal mortgage to an ARM equivalent. You can't even figure out how to fix Medicare without cutting into some other socialist program you want, and you want more? Figure out how to pay for all the imports, interest obligations, military empire, and socialist services you currently have before dreaming up new ones and adding to the deficit. You think you can add to it in perpetuity, but one day foreigners really will scoff at the notion of buying our debt and we'll be SOL.

Would you trade your current public health care for the American one?

This is exactly the mentality I am talking about. You act as though health care systems exist in a vacuum. In reality, every country that has socialized medicine has to try and budget it AT THE EXPENSE OF OTHER THINGS. And each country has different OTHER THINGS. We have a shitload of OTHER THINGS we already have to borrow trillions year over year for. I blame our socialist education system if people spent all those years in school and can't figure out basic economics. Sure, Cuba spends a shitload on socialized medicine and manages to achieve a lower infant mortality rate, BUT AT WHAT COST ELSEWHERE? Cuba has little else to spend on other things and has a relatively poor standard of living compared to America. That's why people die on banana boats trying to get here, not the other way around. They don't have the privilege of being the reserve currency of the world where central banks will buy their debt in the most absurd circumstances.

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

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

Non-whites are not homo sapiens? lol. That's pretty racist.

>> ^chilaxe:
Coal is disgusting and technologically obsolete.


It was technologically obsolete a long time ago, but the environazis irrationally fearmongered nuclear power for decades, a highly efficient and emission-free source of power generation that remains at about 20% here while places like France are at 80%.

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

TVA is a creature borne of government, by the way. It was a part of FDR's new deal and a total failure. You reap what you sow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker
This discussion essentially follows the traditional fallacious nature of most atheist vs. God debates. The atheist premise is that if God existed, he would prevent human suffering. Or - phrased a different way - God must not exist otherwise he would not allow people to suffer. Or - a different way - "Hahaha your 'loving' Christian God is really a cruel sadist because he allows & creates suffering."

First of all, I only thus far worked to disprove a TYPE of God, namely the one that 99% of theists believe in.

This is the fundamental flaw in the atheist position. The existence of suffering does not mean that God created the suffering or that he enjoys it. It displays a fundamental lack of understanding about the very basic nature of what God is, and what he wants.


This is not an acceptable form of debate. You are not giving reasons, you are just saying "nope, your argument is fallacious. You don't understand God. I win." I perfectly well understand your concept of God, an omnipotent and benevolent God, and I'll repeat it again: he cannot logically exist in that format. That there is human suffering proves that God either:

(a) is not omnipotent and can't stop it.
(b) allows it to happen and is thus, a distant, stoic being that does not particularly favor or seek to reward humans over other creations.
(c) is not there.

If you argue that the suffering is due punishment for sins, I've already argued that his ethics model would have to be inferior to his creations, which is impossible of a creature intelligent enough to create life and the universe. So that choice is invalid and equivalent to (c).

So which one is it? Those are the only choices that make sense. You must concede to one of these if you consider yourself a rational person, period.