You beat me on this by minutes.

Sounds like he's practically doing a stand-up act. Can't blame him, with that kind of material...

Oh and "this is serious business" made me giggle

Sounds like he's spoiling for a fight. I hope he tears Grampa John a new a-hole in the debates. I wanna see Cassius Clay pummelling Sonny Liston.

If you want lessons in childishness, always look to the republicons.

Their air pressure guage is just like their bandaid with a purple heart on it.

Really funny. How clever. Ha ha.

Oh this is nearly * standup!
When your opponent is being an ass - it unfortunately gives you a hell of a lot to work with!

Being President is Serious Business!!

No, the Internet is!

Will he say "stop eating meat"???

No.

he said fucking fill your tyres up and keep drivin.

He's getting worse and worse, and dangerously close to reminding me of the film Idiocracy.

^Yeah, but wouldn't we rather he be a moderate who wins the election than be a "perfect candidate" who loses?

Mink, you may want sweeping changes, but in the mean time it's good to make small improvements here and there. People aren't going to stop eating meat any time soon.

Obama is serious business.

>> ^chilaxe:
^Yeah, but wouldn't we rather he be a moderate who wins the election than be a "perfect candidate" who loses?


Ron Paul anyone ?

John Stewart is NOT amused, obama is stealing his material!

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

Yes! That's exactly the way you hit 'em. Gobama.

He was too soft. Delete the first two words, and it's far more accurate.

>> ^jwray:
Mink, you may want sweeping changes, but in the mean time it's good to make small improvements here and there. People aren't going to stop eating meat any time soon.


people aren't gonna fill their tyres up any time soon either, it's just fucking rhetoric. i bet you not more than 5% of the people who said "WHOOOOOO!!!!" went home and filled their fucking tires.

Of course he isn't going to say "stop eating meat" but the reason is economic, not social. He needs to keep the meat industry happy. the fact that meat production is the worst thing in the entire environment after asbestos factories just kinda... isn't relevant, right? send people to their local petrol station to fill up their tyres and buy a coke.

so keep voting for these guys who talk bullshit and pretend they care when really their hands are tied.

gobama indeed. at last the USA has a Tony Blair, and we all know how kewl that is.

people aren't gonna fill their tyres up any time soon either, it's just fucking rhetoric. i bet you not more than 5% of the people who said "WHOOOOOO!!!!" went home and filled their fucking tires.

Sooo what do you suggest? A tire-filling gestapo?

How much you wanna bet taht there are one hell of a lot of Obama supporters who *are* filling their tires as we speak. And how much you wanna bet there are a whole lot of McCain supporters who aren't going to fill their tires as some form of self-inflicting protest wound. it's like these people take pride in being stupid.

This guy is good.

I think I'll go fill my tires today.

They should send me a pressure gauge. I need a new one since I lost my old one.

>> ^jwray:
people aren't gonna fill their tyres up any time soon either, it's just fucking rhetoric. i bet you not more than 5% of the people who said "WHOOOOOO!!!!" went home and filled their fucking tires.
Sooo what do you suggest? A tire-filling gestapo?


No, I think he's advocating a Vegetarian gestapo.

"This is serious business".

I KNEW IT!! Obama is Anonymous.

>> ^MINK:
>> ^jwray:
Mink, you may want sweeping changes, but in the mean time it's good to make small improvements here and there. People aren't going to stop eating meat any time soon.

people aren't gonna fill their tyres up any time soon either, it's just fucking rhetoric. i bet you not more than 5% of the people who said "WHOOOOOO!!!!" went home and filled their fucking tires.
Of course he isn't going to say "stop eating meat" but the reason is economic, not social. He needs to keep the meat industry happy. the fact that meat production is the worst thing in the entire environment after asbestos factories just kinda... isn't relevant, right? send people to their local petrol station to fill up their tyres and buy a coke.
so keep voting for these guys who talk bullshit and pretend they care when really their hands are tied.
gobama indeed. at last the USA has a Tony Blair, and we all know how kewl that is.


The problem with your angry stance is that is ANYONE tried to run for office and go straight for the 'stop eating meat', do you think they'd get into office?

Hmm?

Do you?

No, of course they bloody wouldn't, so what would be the friggen point of running with that? What's the point of running with 'Stop eating meat', that will instantly put off a huge number of people (including myself, I'm very, very pro environment, wish the government would start spending some big bloody money on it, don't care if it hurts us financially at the moment, because it'll be a win in the long run)? All that'd do is not get said person elected.

Brilliant plan.

I'd MUCH prefer someone who takes the steps they can get away with, slowly ramping up the scale of changes as people get used to them. You start off small, or start off with big things that don't directly affect people's way of life, and then slowly introduce those things that require people to change their behaviour. It's the only way you're going to be able to be in power and do ANYTHING.

So stop with the 'Well, if he isn't prepared to ban all cars, make everyone vegans and insist that people only breath out on alternating days, then I won't vote for him'. It's insane logic.

And it just smacks of you trying to be a smartass and saying 'look, I think I know something you don't, meat production causes lots of environmental impact'. If you think it's so damn important, you run for office with that as your lead policy and see how far you get.

You know it's funny, when Reagan said the same thing 25 years ago, all the same people calling Obama a moron thought Reagan was a genius.

Obama is going to be four flat tires for the US. Just like his predecessor, Jimmy Carter.

I like that man. Even if i'm not always OK with what he's saying (hey, i'm an european socialist after all, we see things differently over here), he seems like the kind of person who actually believes he can do something for his country, and not just for himself.

Wish we had some politicians like that over here, it would give me an incentive to actually care about politics.

Gobama !

Energy crisis? What energy crisis? ...prices are up, in part, because worldwide demand (supply) is up. What are people basing their entitlement to low energy prices on? Paying $1 a gallon six years ago has absolutely no bearing on current market conditions.

The government should have no role in resolving the "energy crisis"...this "crisis" can only be addressed by the free market. If you don't like our dependence on oil, invest in wind, solar, geothermal, or nuclear--or start your own company. If you don't like paying $4.00 a gallon, buy a car with better fuel efficiency or inflate your tires (ha). If you can't afford a more efficient/appropriately sized car, buy a motorcycle or scooter. If you can't afford your own vehicle, take the bus. If theres no bus, ride a bicycle. If your work is too far, get a second job so you can pay for the gas. If you can't find a second job adjust your finances...

If you don't understand this concept, read a book on economics.
"Economics in One Lesson"
http://www.google.com/search?q=economics+in+one+lesson

Oil should be taxed heavily to bring its private cost in line with its public cost. People who commute 2 hours a day for a 20% higher paying job are enriching themselves at the expense of the entire world.

I wouldn't even consider living/working in such a situation that it would would be more than a 20 minute walk from home to work. Part of the problem is bad city planning that promotes long commutes.

When the real cost of oil, in terms of externalities, is reflected by its market price after taxes, and people see gas selling for $15 a gallon, they will think carefully about conserving it. As long as gas is cheap, people will inevitably waste it. High gas prices are the best way to conserve oil. Regressive-taxation effects of such a plan can be offset by the welfare state.

I've long advocated a simple annual income tax according to this sort of formula:

Income after tax = $15,000 + 0.6 * (Income before tax)

So there is a safety net that guarantees everyone a minimum standard of living, but earned income contributes linearly towards take-home income, unlike other welfare systems that create local maxima in the graph of earned income vs. take home income.

hi guys! seeing as the first thing i said was "is he going to say stop eating meat? No."... it's kinda weird that you are all repeating that back to me and upvoting it as if it's a counterargument.

you are so retarded you jump to a "attack" without reading what i wrote.

my point, darlings, is that Obama pretends to give a shit but his hands are tied. He can't ban meat pollution, even if it is the largest problem, because of the meat industry. He can't say "stop driving" because of the car industry and oil industry. So he says "fill up your tires" as if saying THAT will make a difference (it won't). You all applaud, as if applauding will make a difference (it won't).

Let me ask you this, if we really do need radical lifestyle changes because of warming/cooling/watershortage/desertification whatever.... are you gonna vote for the guy that actually proposes changes or are you gonna vote for the guy who has a poster with "CHANGE" written on it and a few bandaid policies that keep everyone happy until the apocalypse?

>> ^MINK:
my point, darlings, is that Obama pretends to give a shit but his hands are tied. He can't ban meat pollution, even if it is the largest problem, because of the meat industry. He can't say "stop driving" because of the car industry and oil industry. So he says "fill up your tires" as if saying THAT will make a difference (it won't). You all applaud, as if applauding will make a difference (it won't).


That wasn't the point of his speech, the tyre thing was a simple question from an individual about what he could do personally to help the situation...

You're making the same mistake McCain and co. did, inferring that a part of energy policy is filling the tyres. It never was anything but a simple tip, but it drew the ignorant antagonists to him like flies to shit.

Ironic that you watched the video and still made the same mistake...


Let me ask you this, if we really do need radical lifestyle changes because of warming/cooling/watershortage/desertification whatever.... are you gonna vote for the guy that actually proposes changes or are you gonna vote for the guy who has a poster with "CHANGE" written on it and a few bandaid policies that keep everyone happy until the apocalypse?


Hah, or is everyone going to act locally while thinking globally without being led around by a figurehead like an ignorant herd of cattle on the way to said abbatoir...

Highly fucking unlikely imo... People hate change at the best of times, unless an emergency is waved in front of their noses, they don't want to know and/or change, usually until it's too late.

If you really do need a radical change in lifestyle it's going to be too fucking late to worry about who you're voting. Because odds on, you've been cloistered away from reality so long that when the change comes, it'll be too late to change and the candidate that wins will be the person that can facilitate your survival.

Note: You/your etc meaning the world and each nation in it, not directly at you Mink.

Yeah, high gas prices, right. Come back when it's $9,11 a gallon like in here.

Let me ask you this, if we really do need radical lifestyle changes because of warming/cooling/watershortage/desertification whatever.... are you gonna vote for the guy that actually proposes changes or are you gonna vote for the guy who has a poster with "CHANGE" written on it and a few bandaid policies that keep everyone happy until the apocalypse?


I was going to vote for Gravel in the caucus, but we weren't anywhere near the 15% threshold required to get a delegate. So it boils down to Obama > Hillary > McCain.

thanks asmo for actually engaging.

but still, the tire filling thing is just a little soundbite he can throw out without annoying his higher ups. that's why he suggested it, rather than saying "if every american ate one less hamburger a month".....

I don't see how "if every American ate one less hamburger a month" is any less a soundbite that wouldn't annoy the higher ups then the line about tires.

I've long advocated a simple annual income tax according to this sort of formula:

Income after tax = $15,000 + 0.6 * (Income before tax)

What do you call someone who is forced to work for no wages?
What do you call someone who has 100% of their wages forcefully taken?
What do you call someone who has 40% of their wages forcefully taken?

I hope you sleep better at night knowing you are "only" 40% slave....or that you "only" spend 40% of your life in slavery.

100% or .01%...there is no moral difference...

>> ^MINK:
...rather than saying "if every american ate one less hamburger a month".....


This is obviously something pretty important to you, Mink, but surely you must realize that, strategically, saying such a thing would be a huge mistake for Obama.

I mean, we'd never hear the end of it.

Some republicon shill-meister would turn it into some kind of nursury rhyme like "flip-flop flip-flop" or "I invented the internet!" and from now till November second, that's all you would hear, twenty times a day, every day.

>> ^MINK:
thanks asmo for actually engaging.
but still, the tire filling thing is just a little soundbite he can throw out without annoying his higher ups. that's why he suggested it, rather than saying "if every american ate one less hamburger a month".....


Np dood, healthy debate is always good... =)

Yeah, I don't honestly think it mattered what he said, it was a trite little suggestion but in context it was appropriate imo.

Either which way, if meat reduction isn't on the agenda (or menu *ba dum tish*), do you prefer offshore drilling or investment in to hybrid energy (or other sources)?

Or more to the point, do you prefer a guy who coughs up tidbits of information that complement his policy or a guy that pays people to try and make a joke of it rather than pushing his own policies?

Lets face it, oil is big news, meat pollution, how many people (at least those who don't live downwind from an abbatoir) even know that it's a big problem? At least the public have their faces rubbed in the oil problem so selling a policy for change to them is going to be far easier than saying "no more prime rib for joo!!!".. = )

>> ^imstellar28:
I've long advocated a simple annual income tax according to this sort of formula:
Income after tax = $15,000 + 0.6 (Income before tax)
What do you call someone who is forced to work for no wages?
What do you call someone who has 100% of their wages forcefully taken?
What do you call someone who has 40% of their wages forcefully taken?
I hope you sleep better at night knowing you are "only" 40% slave....or that you "only" spend 40% of your life in slavery.
100% or .01%...there is no moral difference...


Taxes are the price we pay for any system of government other than anarchy. Comparing a 40% income tax on millionaires to slavery is ridiculous.

This is a foolishly narrow view. You get a lot for those taxes. If you theoretically removed the taxes, your wages would be slashed by at least as much, because there would be no one to regulate wages and set a minimum wage. It's not just taken! If there were no taxes there could be no government, and if there is NO government it is anarchy. In anarchy your life is forfeit.

>> ^imstellar28:
I've long advocated a simple annual income tax according to this sort of formula:
Income after tax = $15,000 + 0.6 (Income before tax)
What do you call someone who is forced to work for no wages?
What do you call someone who has 100% of their wages forcefully taken?
What do you call someone who has 40% of their wages forcefully taken?
I hope you sleep better at night knowing you are "only" 40% slave....or that you "only" spend 40% of your life in slavery.
100% or .01%...there is no moral difference...

Obama - "It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant"

I take pride in pointing out Snobama is an absolute fool.

Campaigning with "Stop eating meat" is like asking for anal on a first date.



... everybody knows you wait till the day after and then text the question while at work. Serious business.

"Taxes are the price we pay for any system of government other than anarchy. "

So what you are telling me is you are not creative enough to think of a solution which does not involve physical force? The government is a servant. You wouldn't expect a servant to force a salary on you, would you? Any form of taxation other than a voluntary one, is immoral.

"If you theoretically removed the taxes, your wages would be slashed by at least as much, because there would be no one to regulate wages and set a minimum wage. It's not just taken! If there were no taxes there could be no government, and if there is NO government it is anarchy."

You should think about what you say before you repeat the misguided notions of others...this is NOT true. 1. minimum wages create unemployment and ultimately reduce wages--research it for yourself 2. again, just because you cannot think of a solution to government regulated slavery, does not mean one does not exist.

The options aren't "obama or mccain" "taxes or anarchy" "40% slavery or 1% slavery" ....all of life is not a two party system.

Although one thing is black and white--you either believe in slavery or you don't.

When everything the government does is voluntary, it's like having no government at all -- just a little underfunded charity program instead. Good luck getting enough money to build roads, put out fires, and catch murderers with only voluntary donations. Governments exist to moderate individual selfishness for the greatest good of the greatest number of people.

The prisoner's dilemma reward structure is analogous to a myriad of real world situations. By default the only stable equilibrium is dual noncooperation, and everybody loses. How do you alter the prisoner's dilemma so that the only stable equilibrium is dual cooperation? By external (governmental) imposition of a penalty for individual noncooperation.

Certain altruistic behaviors -- that people would tend to not do individually if it were completely voluntary -- the same people would wish that a government would impose to make everyone share that responsibility.

Suppose a poor old widow lives next door. You want to help her, but only if absolutely necessary, because you like having more money. If the neighbor helps her out enough, you won't help her, and if you help her out enough, the neighbor won't. Don't you wish you could just sign some agreement with your neighbor to share that cost? That simple idea writ large is the welfare state. And if you don't like the welfare state, you can emigrate elsewhere. There is no income tax in the Bahamas.

Let's take another example: roads. If you take responsibility for building the roads, your neighbor's going to slack off on road building. If your neighbor takes responsiblity for building the roads, you're going to slack off. Or maybe both of you will expect the other to help building the roads, without either of you moving a finger. What you need is a government that will ask everyone to pay a fair share of the cost of building the roads, and back that request with SOMETHING, so that people don't just selfishly refuse to contribute their fair share to the cost of the road. Voluntary charity alone would be unreliable and unfair, resulting in the altruistic few paying more than their fair share while the rest contribute nothing and still benefit from the roads.

Voluntary != charity.

>> ^jwray:
Good luck getting enough money to build roads, put out fires, and catch murderers with only voluntary donations. Governments exist to moderate individual selfishness for the greatest good of the greatest number of people.


Sorry to interrupt your pointless argument with anarchists, but government does have a legitimate duty. A voluntary system works on paper for these things, the problem is that it can't last because other nations won't do the same. If you have ZERO taxation for national defense, you will be bowled over by a country that does. Charity can work for minor problems, but you can't privatize nuclear warheads and so forth. Libertarians like myself understand this and recognize that the government has legitimate duties for protecting the infringement of rights (police/fire/environment), non-preemptive national defense (some roads, military), and offering recourse for disputes (courts).

Most of the people on this site are soft socialists. Where socialists (called liberals or neo-cons today) go wrong, is the belief in policies going beyond this, particularly when it comes to the markets. Good intentions but terrible results because they're not fully understood by the people enacting them. A socialist might say allowing government to bail out bankruptcy is a good thing. A libertarian would say that by sparing true consequence and rewarding risky behavior, you get more of it: that the fear of bankruptcy is one of the pillars of an efficient economy. And the socialist will say: but look, we never bailed them out before and they still took insane risk, therefore we need regulation. And the libertarian will say: the market got drunk, yes, but it was BECAUSE of another socialist policy, thus you cannot justify further socialism based on problems other socialist policies create. Central banking is a socialist policy. If the market got drunk, it was The Federal Reserve that provided the liquor and egged them on. Because of their ability to set interest rates far lower than where the market wanted them, they sent a false signal to profit-driven markets that created enormous artificial demand for housing during what was supposed to be an interest-hiking recession/correction in 2000 when the last bubble they birthed collapsed, the NASDAQ bubble.

Thus, you can see how socialism builds on itself until eventual all-out collapse. Since no one understands economics, and no one wants the pain of a recession, they don't see how a socialist enablement (the central bank) under either party and not the free market was the actual root cause of the problem. So a politician gets on a pedestal and promises to make this impossible by abolishing the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and returning to a full gold standard (Paul), and loses, while a person who promises to bail everyone out with inflation and ease people's fears with even more Federal Reserve powers wins. People want the easy answer, and it will result in hyperinflationary collapse like every other fiat currency before it. It's inevitable, the powers you gave these benevolent dictators can't help but be abused.

Let's try another one: subsidies. I hear it all the time, "big bad corporations. It's the corporations. Their greed is the problem and we need to regulate it through government." And yet, these same people support subsidies. What is a subsidy? A subsidy is forced payment (tax) by government, which is then dished out by a politician who didn't earn it, to whichever company financed his/her campaign the most. Since it's a bidding contest, the largest companies always beat the smaller ones. The end result is that individuals and small businesses are effectively subsidizing larger ones, eroding the competitive pillar that makes free markets produce better and cheaper products. The idealist objective behind this is, of course, the academic argument that intellectuals in government can decide a product better than the market. In reality, politicians are just as greedy if not moreso than regular individuals, and when given the opportunity to make such a choice, it rarely gets made with any logic or thrift, because it wasn't their hard-earned money being spent. Why would you be thrifty with stolen money? It's true that the companies are doing some bribing here, but it's made possible by subsidies. You can't bribe a politician for a special privilege if that power is made illegal.

Let's try another one: Social Security. The flaws are endless in this one. It started at 2% of wages and has worked its way up to 12%. The retirement age has continually been increased so that more people are dying before they can get anything back. People from one generation were made to pay for existing recipients, creating a weird dependency gap reminiscent of ponzi schemes now that the trust fund annually raided. I'll just post a few videos.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oh-NqdmEDq4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS2fI2p9iVs

Enough said. And again, Ron Paul in one of the debates said that the problem gets worse as time goes on, and it should be phased out immediately in favor of private savings not controlled by government. But no, that would be the "radical" thing to do, say the socialists. Meanwhile, they commit their grandchildren to possibly 30% of wages and a recipient age of 80 as a way of keeping it "solvent."

^ I actually agree with you on most of the actions you're recommending, if not your total rejection of "socialism" (which you seem to define as "anything that restricts businesses from doing as they please") in favor of market fundamentalism.

There is always an implied (and in your case directly stated) belief that anyone who believes in regulating markets doesn't understand economics, and I heartily disagree. If that were the case, all PhD economists would all be endorsing the Libertarian party...and yet, they've got a political spectrum that leans left of the average populace.

My favorite "market regulation" is a ban on slavery. If you follow the Libertarian/market fundamentalist argument -- slavery should be legal. People should be able to sell themselves into permanent servitude, and then be resold by their owners.

Fraud should also be legalized -- if I'm smart enough to dupe a person or corporation out of their money, I should get to keep it.

Violent intimidation should also be legalized. If my competitors think they can open a store in my neighborhood, they better be able to protect it from my guys burning it down.

After all, only a socialist would think we should interfere with the free market.

Those sound silly, but they're along your line of thinking. When us "socialists" talk about regulating the mortgage market, most of us are thinking that the law should require lending companies be upfront about the risks and costs involved in loans to the customer. It shouldn't be "caveat emptor" at all times, and buying a home shouldn't mean you need to hire a lawyer, just to hear the truth about what your obligations will be.

As for the part you're mostly talking about, where there's talk of limiting the amount of risk large financial institutions can take, I somewhat agree that if we weren't giving them a safety net, they'd limit their own risk themselves. Personally, I think the right answer is to make the risk more personal -- the leadership of banks should have the risk be real (resulting in destitution and/or arrest), while the institution itself gets the safety net so consumers don't pay the price for risks that they didn't have control over (and may not have been aware of).

As for the gold standard, I rather like the idea, though to be frank I've not really read up on what economists have to say about it.

Gold is the oldest fiat currency. Its value is an arbitrary function of how much faith people have in it as a currency. Its price is being propped up by that faith alone. As an industrial material, the demand for gold is very low compared to the amount available.

By the way, imposing the gold standard would shrink the money supply so dramatically as to cause deflation, and then deflation would cause loan defaults, and loan defaults would cascade to another great depression.

The current amount of dollar currency in circulation is $800 billion, and the amount of Euro currency in circulation is about $1 trillion. Backing all of that with gold, at the price of $855 per ounce, would require 59.6 MILLION kilograms of gold. That is about double the world's total gold reserves. Because you have to shrink the money supply so dramatically to impose a gold standard, you cannot do it without extreme deflation.

It is the federal reserve's job to prevent inflation by jacking up its interest rates and curtailing the printing of money as needed. Plenty of fiat currencies are doing fine with less than 1% inflation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_currency#18th_and_19th_century

>> ^NetRunner:
^ I actually agree with you on most of the actions you're recommending, if not your total rejection of "socialism" (which you seem to define as "anything that restricts businesses from doing as they please")

No, I define socialism for what it is: any government which controls over 50% of its capital. We are extremely close to that and it's a major problem. Do you understand that in a libertarian society, it is illegal to infringe on a person's rights, whether you're a company or an individual? How do you interpret my post as wanting to let companies do ANYTHING they please? Gimme a break, companies in a truly free market are forced to follow the law and compete in a fair environment or be taken to court. The enablements of inflation, subsidies, and specialized tax breaks erode that fairness. Without that, companies would have only one legitimate way to make money: to convince you to buy their product over their competitor's. And to pay its workers by outbidding its competition and getting you to agree on a price. Oh, the horror! And not even the highest paid lawyers in the world can win cases on outright false advertising and malpractice.


>> ^NetRunner:
^There is always an implied (and in your case directly stated) belief that anyone who believes in regulating markets doesn't understand economics, and I heartily disagree. If that were the case, all PhD economists would all be endorsing the Libertarian party...and yet, they've got a political spectrum that leans left of the average populace.

"Economics" is too vague. There are many different branches, the dominant philosophy changes with time. Currently, it is neo-Keynesian, but that will change after its collapse. It matters not that 90% of current economics doctorates are in this manner of thinking. The Austrians were already proven right from the FIRST great depression, do we really need another one to figure out that the Federal Reserve is the equivalent of the benevolent dictator argument?

>> ^NetRunner:
^My favorite "market regulation" is a ban on slavery. If you follow the Libertarian/market fundamentalist argument -- slavery should be legal. People should be able to sell themselves into permanent servitude, and then be resold by their owners.

I don't think that's going to fly, because no one would know if you were voluntarily doing it or somehow coerced or tricked into doing it. But fundamentally, you're right, people own their own bodies, and that means they are free to inflict themselves with drugs, kill themselves, whatever. If our technology comes to a point where the government is capable of manipulating your body into not doing something with some kind of field under the pretense of protecting you, will you allow them this ability? Or are you smart enough to realize that the power will be abused and incur ultimate costs far greater than the benefits?

>> ^NetRunner
Fraud should also be legalized -- if I'm smart enough to dupe a person or corporation out of their money, I should get to keep it.

Wrong, misrepresentation or not honoring a verbal or contractual agreement is the equivalent of theft. The transaction is not complete until both parties receive what they contractually agreed upon. If some person in Negeria tells you you won a prize and you pay them the collection fee, and they give you no prize, that is an unlawful appropriation of property and an infringement of rights. Not a freely acceptable activity under a libertarian free market, because the federal government has legitimate duties to protect people from infringements of rights and offer a means of recourse through the courts. See, this is the problem. You don't even understand the few government powers that ARE justified, you're so wrapped up in its "regulatory" extensions!

>> ^NetRunner:
^Violent intimidation should also be legalized. If my competitors think they can open a store in my neighborhood, they better be able to protect it from my guys burning it down.

Ummm, arson is destruction property you don't own. Rights derive from property, if you don't own it, you can't take or break it with impunity in a system that protects from such infringements.

>> ^NetRunnerAfter all, only a socialist would think we should interfere with the free market.

The market is millions of people making mutually agreeable transactions. The government is not the market, they're just suppose to protect people's property and settle disputes on a national and domestic level. And it isn't black and white anyway. For example, I disagree with fellow libertarians in that I want to keep the FDA for information, labelling, and enforcement of what constitutes terms like "organic" and "free range," but remove their ability to ban products. That power is currently used for collusive anti-competitive reasons. Go on wikipedia and look up Stevia for one example, the artificial sweetener lobby bribed officials to block its use in products because it was a natural, no-patent substitute to crap like "Aspartame" which would have cost them billions.

>> ^NetRunnerThose sound silly, but they're along your line of thinking. When us "socialists" talk about regulating the mortgage market, most of us are thinking that the law should require lending companies be upfront about the risks and costs involved in loans to the customer. It shouldn't be "caveat emptor" at all times, and buying a home shouldn't mean you need to hire a lawyer, just to hear the truth about what your obligations will be.


I'm not entirely sure what such a law would say, there are risks everywhere to everything. You can't slam your finger in the car door and sue the automaker for not explaining the risks of doors to you. Likewise, if you are speculating on home appreciation and taking a non-standard loan, I have ZERO sympathy for you if you didn't read the paperwork and ask questions beforehand. Many of these people lied about their incomes to get mortgages on homes they knew they couldn't afford, but thought would pay for themselves.

Ultimately, though, their only loss will be their credit and the home they couldn't afford because they can walk away and leave their bank or lender with the unpaid loan and depreciating house. That's what the government is trying to bail out with honest taxpayer money. Instead of letting the chips fall where they may, we're trying to delay a necessary recession AGAIN with inflation. Prices want to come down from these artificial levels, and have those jobs reallocate to manufacturing exports because exports are the only thing a the weak dollar is good for. Yes, that's a painful process, just like a junkie from a high, but you have to come down from it, not shoot up with more heroin until you kill the dollar.See, that's the market's automatic way of healing itself. BUT IT ISN'T BEING ALLOWED TO HAPPEN. We're getting more intervention, full of moral hazard from socialized losses and a systemic destruction of natural deterrents (why would I keep saving prudently if I lose and a speculator wins? Why would banks stop being taking risks if the government will always spare them true consequence?).

But tell me, how many politicians are going to win an election saying that pain is necessary? Zero. They're going to play to people's ignorance and gravy train optimism and propose an easy government solution. And it will be a replay of the FDR administration with Obama, but pretty effing bad under McCain as well.

And I just want to say thank god that you didn't know any myths about gold, because I'm tired of writing today, but I see jwray made up for that. *sigh*

>> ^jwray:
Gold is the oldest fiat currency.

Technically, a gold standard is not fiat, only symbolically. Fiat is generally defined as anything which is forced for use as money. In "declaring" gold as money, governments were merely adopting what people were already using. You see, gold won in the free market as a common means of exchange. Not paper. Of all things on earth, it is especially suited for this task. It is rare, easily divisible, indestructible, has few industrial uses, and requires no upkeep. Since it has to be mined from the earth, a natural limit is placed on government. They are restricted to asking (taxing) its citizens when they want to finance something! They can't just print new money will-nilly, lie about how much they're doing it with flawed CPI measurements, and make its citizens pay higher prices! Imagine that! And our highest rates of real growth were in the late 19th century, a period of no slavery, no income tax, no central bank, and gold-based money. It hasn't been matched since.

>> ^jwray
Its value is an arbitrary function of how much faith people have in it as a currency. Its price is being propped up by that faith alone.

That is the case for ALL things. Value is entirely subjective and depends on the human situation surrounding it, and the scarcity of that good relative to others. If you're alone on a mountain and you're starving, a cow is worth a hell of a lot more than gold or paper. If you're in a massive society where barter is inefficient and you need a common means of exchange and placeholder for wealth, gold fills that role nicely. If your government has done this to your money so that it's worth less than firewood, all faith in it will be lost relative to actual goods, including gold, which CAN'T EVER be made as common as dirt. The possibility doesn't EXIST:

http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/c/ca/Inflation-1923.jpg

>> ^jwray
As an industrial material, the demand for gold is very low compared to the amount available.


Which is exactly why this particular precious metal made such a good monetary asset. Why would you want your money to have volatility from the supply and demand of complex industry products?

>> ^jwray
By the way, imposing the gold standard would shrink the money supply so dramatically as to cause deflation, and then deflation would cause loan defaults, and loan defaults would cascade to another great depression.


Nobody said it would be easy. Remember, depressions can be inflationary, too. Once that happens, people are in bad shape any way looking for a way out. I was afraid you were going to argue that there was a quantitative limit, which there isn't. In a move to monetize gold, it's demand and price will rise substantially to meet those figures, and the people who convert early will be better off than those converting last. But it can be done, particularly in a scenario when the paper money is made worthless anyway. Look at Zimbabwe. In their present situation, if every citizen immediately converted their money to gold, and used gold thenceforth, their long-term situation would improve dramatically as their money could no longer be debased.

car engine runs on better on inflated tyres than soft tyres. if the tyres are soft, you burn more fuel. its just like forcing the vehicle to run on a flat tyres. i've tried it and in runs better than before. it smoothens your driving. you have nothing to loose if you just inflate your tyres.

>> ^MINK:
Will he say "stop eating meat"???


You want me to stop eating meat to save gas? Hell no, crackpot. You stop breathing to save the air, then I'll consider not eating meat.

You want me to make sure my tires are inflated to a certain level, sure thing if it will save me a buck every fillup.

>> ^quantumushroom:
Obama - "It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant"
I take pride in pointing out Snobama is an absolute fool.


Obama is a fool like McCain is young.

Your colon must think you're great fun.

The point is that gold has insufficient actual USES to fall back on as a basis for its high value. The price of gold is subject to the volatile whims of the people, and has fluctuated a great deal over the last 100 years. Platinum, Iridium, and Silver would work just as well as gold. But if a great depression comes I would rather have a stockpile of wheat than a stockpile of gold.

The price of gold fluctuates, as anybody can manipulate the market. We could see 10% inflation one year and 10% deflation the next year.

Under the current federal reserve system, if they set interest rates properly and avoid excess printing, inflation can be kept below 2%. Theoretically, if the fiat money system is done properly, it can be more stable in value than a gold-backed currency. The Euro is doing just fine with an inflation rate of 1.8%.

>> ^BansheeX:
Do you understand that in a libertarian society, it is illegal to infringe on a person's rights, whether you're a company or an individual? How do you interpret my post as wanting to let companies do ANYTHING they please?

Force of habit, I'm used to bumping heads with Republicans, and rarely do Libertarians preach about the need to restrict the power of corporations to infringe on people's individual rights. Most just talk about the tyranny of regulation, and often go so far as to debate the necessity of OSHA, USDA and even the FTC (which seems to have faded from existence in my lifetime).

"Economics" is too vague. There are many different branches, the dominant philosophy changes with time. Currently, it is neo-Keynesian, but that will change after its collapse. It matters not that 90% of current economics doctorates are in this manner of thinking. The Austrians were already proven right from the FIRST great depression, do we really need another one to figure out that the Federal Reserve is the equivalent of the benevolent dictator argument?

Not to lean too heavily on an appeal to authority, but are you saying there's something about Austria in the Great Depression that disproves the underpinnings of what 90% of economists believe? Shouldn't someone at Universities around the world be notified?

I'm just reacting to the insistence that there's something fundamentally flawed with liberal philosophy. Usually that "something flawed" is that "socialism doesn't work" or "the free market fixes everything" or some other nonsensical absolute assertion.

For example, you said I don't understand which powers of government are "justified" and which ones aren't. That's not true, we just have a different concept of what's justified.

You also questioned whether or not I'd go along with letting the government have and use a hypothetical mind control device -- and of course I'd be opposed to such a thing. I'm all for protecting individual rights, and limiting government's power over the individual, I just don't think free markets are always the best way to fulfill every need in society, merely most of them.

The market is millions of people making mutually agreeable transactions. The government is not the market, they're just suppose to protect people's property and settle disputes on a national and domestic level. And it isn't black and white anyway. For example, I disagree with fellow libertarians in that I want to keep the FDA for information, labelling, and enforcement of what constitutes terms like "organic" and "free range," but remove their ability to ban products. That power is currently used for collusive anti-competitive reasons. Go on wikipedia and look up Stevia for one example, the artificial sweetener lobby bribed officials to block its use in products because it was a natural, no-patent substitute to crap like "Aspartame" which would have cost them billions.

I agree on that issue, that there's abuse of the power that needs to stop, but I don't think the solution is to remove government power to ban products.

I'm not entirely sure what such a law would say, there are risks everywhere to everything.

That's easy: show a schedule of payments to potential purchasers, so they know what their obligations will be with regards to the loan.

There's differing opinions out there about who's at fault for the crisis, but part of the problem did start with predatory lending practices, motivated by the hunger for those mortgage backed securities.

Ultimately, though, their only loss will be their credit and the home they couldn't afford because they can walk away and leave their bank or lender with the unpaid loan and depreciating house. That's what the government is trying to bail out with honest taxpayer money.

Actually, since we're still under the auspices of the Bush administration, it's mostly going to help out banks who leveraged themselves to invest in mortgage backed securities. Regular people who got screwed by predatory lending are having to get by with the scraps the Democrats can attach to the legislation.

I know it's all socialism to you, but to me there's a vast difference in those things.

Instead of letting the chips fall where they may, we're trying to delay a necessary recession AGAIN with inflation. Prices want to come down from these artificial levels, and have those jobs reallocate to manufacturing exports because exports are the only thing a the weak dollar is good for.

I agree with the assessment of the current situation, it does seem like we're putting off the inevitable. I'm a cynic though, I think they want to make sure the next President gets the big market crash, and they're intentionally delaying things for that purpose, even at the risk of making that crash worse.

And it will be a replay of the FDR administration with Obama, but pretty effing bad under McCain [snip]

That's exactly how I see it too, and I couldn't be more happy at the thought of a new FDR-style administration, I just hope we don't have another Great Depression and World War to go with it.

Quite the discussion of economic philosophy, in the comments on a video of Obama talking about Republicans being pridefully ignorant on energy.

sorry to interrupt the very interesting stuff about gold.. but i have to repeat that i am not suggesting Obama use an antimeat campaign tactic. i KNOW. He's not gonna do that and it would be suicide.

That's my fucking point. It shows the hypocrisy. If people really cared about pollution they would radically change their lifestyles, but they're not gonna do that, so... how about they fill up their tyres once and we all leave it to the next generation to sort out? Yeah... sounds like that's the best option. I might as well start supporting obama on the internet, even if I have to be a hypocrite to do that. Right. I can see your logic.

>> ^jwray:
The point is that gold has insufficient actual USES to fall back on as a basis for its high value.

It doesn't have to be useful for consumption, it is useful as money. Do you understand what money is and why it's an important good in a modern economy. Do you understand that people can demand and want something for this purpose rather than to consume it or play with it? Do you understand that that's exactly what happened with gold when people were left to their own devices?

>> ^jwray:
The price of gold is subject to the volatile whims of the people, and has fluctuated a great deal over the last 100 years.

The value of the dollar relative to other currencies has fallen 70% in the last ten years, and 300% relative to gold. That's not volatile? See, your mistake is you're looking at the value relationship in the wrong way. You see the dollar maintaining its value and everything else flailing wildly against it. Instead, the dollar and people's confidence in it is what's flailing wildly. Look at a chart comparing gold to oil (both priced in dollars) the last thirty years - almost completely flat. If gold was money, gas prices would have gone nowhere.

http://www.kitco.com/ind/saville/may022006.html

Also interesting to note from this chart is what the price for both was in ~1971. Guess what happened in 1971 that caused the chart to start moving up for thirty years? Nixon scratched the bretton woods semi-gold standard, removing the last link of the dollar to gold. A nation that built its country on gold and became the reserve currency of the world on gold, inflated heavily in the 60s to finance pointless activities like Vietnam, The War on Poverty, the Great Society. It got to a point where gold reserves were far less than the debt owed to foreigners by 1971, the equivalent of an fractional reserve bank run. Those foreigners began calling in the debt, and rather than stop inflating and cutting a deal, Nixon got on a podium and broke the contract because it wasn't in "our best interest." Just like that. It later became permanent. Full fiat. Now there was NOTHING backing the dollar but confidence in its scarcity which is controlled by government.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRzr1QU6K1o

We currently lie about inflation and pay foreigners back in devalued dollars, probably more devalued than the interest return on those bonds, but the CPI hides it with hedonics adjustment, substitution, and geometric weighting added during the Clinton years. The bond market is the last major bubble in the U.S. economy.

But since we libertarians understand human behavior and the nature of government, it meant inevitable hyperinflationary collapse. Because like every other fiat currency in history, it will be debased by its spendthrift government and the citizens will stand by and let it happen because they are exactly like you: ignorant of economics and eternally trustful of government. That's why our forefathers tried to illegalize fiat in the constitution after they saw the continental dollar hyperinflated.

http://www.safehaven.com/article-9534.htm

>> ^jwray:
Platinum, Iridium, and Silver would work just as well as gold. But if a great depression comes I would rather have a stockpile of wheat than a stockpile of gold.

How long is that wheat going to last before spoiling? Where are you going to store it? How are you going to carry it around and pay people with it? What if someone already has enough wheat and they want berries, and the guy who has berries doesn't want wheat either, he wants leather? You're reducing yourself to barter. You can't run a modern economy that way.

>> ^jwray:
Under the current federal reserve system, if they set interest rates properly and avoid excess printing, inflation can be kept below 2%. Theoretically, if the fiat money system is done properly, it can be more stable in value than a gold-backed currency.

Welcome to today's powerful neo-Keynesian economic circles. Centralized control curriculums, a sexy interventionist theory financed by the benefactors of inflation, overrides history, human behavior, and all rational skepticism. The benevolent dictator argument, in its truest form. The fallacy that because its possible to have a benevolent dictator more efficient than any system that divides powers and makes it impossible for one man to destroy a country, that we should institute that system. No different than the Federal Reserve, in my opinion. They are THE ROOT CAUSE of most of our problems today. Right down to health care costs, another victim of inflation and HMO legislation, which the socialists are again trying to blame the free market on to build up more socialism. It all comes back to what system preserves wealth, and this ain't it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYZM58dulPE

>> ^jwray:
The Euro is doing just fine with an inflation rate of 1.8%.

Measured by whom, and for how long? We could have said the same thing years ago. Will hyperinflation occur under you or your children or your grandchildren? Who knows, right? All you know is it's happened before in Europe, now it's just more centralized so all countries will be affected when it happens. Congrats.

Do you understand why we're fucked now? Why it's hopeless, why I bury my head every time someone calls Ron Paul a kook. You are just one of 200 million people I have to convince in this country, and it took me five hours with you and I probably still didn't make a dent.

In fact, here's the hilarious trickery of Keynesian economics. China holds over 1 trillion U.S. dollars in their reserves. That's right, we borrow from them, they're the largest creditor nation and we're the largest debtor (we actually used to be the largest creditor, that's how far we've fallen). But the reason they do it: they falsely believe that Americans consuming their products is driving their economy. In the beginning, this was true because they did have a legitimately weak currency relative to ours. But now things are different. They're INTENTIONALLY debasing their money to keep trying to grow this way even though they don't need to: currency appreciation would allow them to consume their own products without us. So they are intentionally devaluing their currency by inflating and buying up our bonds, on a grand scale, essentially paying Americans to consume their exports even though they can only afford them because of these payments. Insanity! If they ever figured this out, the bond bubble will pop. Even the ECB is not hiking rates when they should be. The world has been fooled into thinking that the American consumer is responsible for all their growth and is fearful of letting it collapse. Consumption over production, putting the cart before the horse, the mainstay of Keynesian thinking.

BansheeX: You have all the right ideas on economics, inflation, monetary policy, individual rights, contracts, and the scope and nature of government--why not take it a step futher with taxation? I agree with you wholeheartdly that the government only has three proper functions:
1. national defense, to prevent the infringement of rights from other countries
2. police, to prevent the infringement of rights from other citizens
3. legal system, to settle contractual and criminal disputes, in order to ensure individual rights.

NetRunner: Do you even understand the principles of Keynesian or Austrian economics? If you had actually read anything on either of them--I don't see how you could support what "90% of the economicists believe" . The number of people, or the authority behind them has absolutely nothing to do with the veracity of their arguments. I will paypal you $20 if you read the magnum opus 900 page book on austrian economics "Human Action: A Treatise on Economics" and can explain why it is inferior to Keynesian economics. Even if you COULD explain why it was inferior (which I charge is highly improbable if not impossible) you would still be on the losing end of a philosophical argument--namely that only austrian economics has a moral basis for its implementation.

One also needs to keep in mind that a voluntary taxation is the end goal of a free society, and that given our current level of regluation and budget expenditures--is not possible to immediately implement. However, this is what we should be working towards, and as an end result it is entirely feasible and possible--given some creative solutions. There are many intermediate systems which enable us to get there--of which the best current proposals have been coming from the libertarian party.

Here is an example: the net income of U.S. citizens is around 9,000 billion dollars. If every citizen donated a mere 5% of their income this would amount to 450 billion dollars--roughly 18% of our current 2,500 billion dollar budget. Or to look at it another way, there are 300 million people--if each person donated a mere $1,500 to the government each year, it would support a $450 billion dollar budget. If the richest 50% donated $3,000 and the poorest 50% donated nothing, it would be funded just the same. Or if the richest 10% donated $15,000 and everyone else donated nothing...etc. Keep in mind you are currently losing up to 30-40% of your income to taxation, or probably somewhere between $2,000 and $40,000 a year! There is a motivation for people with higher incomes to donate more money to national defense and police protection--for the very reason that they have more to lose in the event of an emergency. $15,000 is only 1.5% of the net worth of a millionare, and only 0.0015% of the net worth of a billionare! You don't think a millionare would gladly pay such a pittance for the protection of their assets? Also, in a time of crisis, maybe people in general would donate a larger percentage of their incomes. Remember--this is going to be a bare-bones government--no 3,000 billion dollar illegal invasions, or trillion dollar medicare/social security schemes, no subsidies, regulations, or "department of x.."

Even if people decided that national defense or police protection isn't worth 5% of their income and donated 0% of their income--there ARE other ways to **voluntarily** collect taxes. One such system might be legal insurance--where you can protect contracts via the legal system by paying a nominal fee--say 5%. Now nowhere are you forced to make contracts, loans, or other agreements with your fellow citizens--nor are you forced to pay the nominal fee. However, if the contract is broken--you would have no legal recourse to seek compenstation unless you bought the "legal insurance". The credit and loan business alone is a multi-trillion dollar industry...and a 5% "legal insurance" added to loans from the bank could easily fund a government with a 500 billion dollar budget. For example, you want to take out a $200,000 loan from the bank, and the bank only gives out loans that are legally protected, so they add a 5% tax to your loan--so your loan becomes $210,000. Perhaps there is another bank which only gives loans to extremely low-risk individuals such that they don't need to have their contracts legally protected--if you were such an individual, you could get a loan from them for only $200,000 and would have to pay no taxes.

This sytem would be voluntary, and thus, it would be moral--nobody would be forced to pay taxes, although it would be encouraged. It would be entirely up to private business and individuals as to whether to purchase the "legal insurance", or to contribute any portion of their income to the government.

Also, this is only a federal-level proposal--this says nothing of what the states can tax, although one would hope they would come up with similar, voluntary schemes.

You can't eat gold, and when the shit hits the fan, what's to guarantee that anybody around you will have food that you could trade for? Gold is a placeholder with little use but the monetary value induced by people's faith in it, EXACTLY like the dollar. If you want to back the dollar with commodities, diversify the portfolio instead of basing it on one commodity that will make Ron Paul rich when his gold holdings quadruple in value due to government intervention. If you want to protect the fiat currency now, just pass a constitutional amendment limiting its printing.

You can't eat gold...
...if a great depression comes I would rather have a stockpile of wheat than a stockpile of gold.

You can't eat paper either, nor can you survive off wheat alone. What exactly are you proposing?

$1,000 of gold is ~1oz...approximately a single gold coin you can fit in your pocket
$1,000 of wheat is ~50 bushels, or 3000 lbs...

So to store a one year supply of emergency savings, $12,000, you would need 12 gold coins or 36,000 lbs of wheat. If a depression hits, what will you use to pay the storage costs for your 36,000 lb pile of wheat...

...wheat?

If you want to back the dollar with commodities, diversify the portfolio instead of basing it on one commodity that will make Ron Paul rich when his gold holdings quadruple in value due to government intervention.

Actually...his gold holdings have already increased in value by 300% in the last 6 years because of the inflation-based monetary policies you and the current government already support.

$1,000 of gold is ~1oz...approximately a single gold coin you can fit in your pocket
$1,000 of wheat is ~50 bushels, or 3000 lbs...
So to store a one year supply of emergency savings, $12,000, you would need 12 gold coins or 36,000 lbs of wheat.

If oil becomes very scarce, farmers won't be able to transport their crops, and the price of food relative to gold will go way up. An average house could easily hold 20 cubic meters of grain, or other foodstuffs. In the worst case scenario, nearly everyone's top priority would be acquiring essential housing and food, and having your own stockpile is safer than relying on trade for your food. Everything but food and shelter is just a luxury. I wouldn't have to barter because I would have all the food I need for a year in case transportation infrastructure breaks down. And when my neighbors are starving, they will pay anything for food. Even under a gold standard, inflation is possible when the amount of goods in the market decreases (while the money supply remains constant). Inflation is based primarily on the ratio between the money supply and the amount of real goods and services available. Any war can reduce the supply of goods and services, thereby reducing the amount of goods and services you can buy with a fixed quantity of gold.

You presume that the price of food isn't going to go through the roof when the shit hits the fan. An average house could easily hold 20 cubic meters of grain, or other foodstuffs. In the worst case scenario, nearly everyone's top priority would be acquiring essential housing and food. Everything else is just a luxury.

So if you honestly believe this, we can expect to see a video on the sift, starring you, where you liquidate your bank account and fill your house with several tons of wheat? Or is this one of those things where you don't really believe what you say, but keep saying it so you don't have to admit your beliefs are incompatible with reality?

>> ^jwray:
You presume that the price of food isn't going to go through the roof when the shit hits the fan. An average house could easily hold 20 cubic meters of grain, or other foodstuffs. In the worst case scenario, nearly everyone's top priority would be acquiring essential housing and food. Everything else is just a luxury.


No, I'm pretty sure he's accounting for that. When the dollar unit gets inflated and made less scarce, the price measured in those dollar units goes up by that debasement, including gold. That gold/oil chart I showed you earlier should have convinced you of that. The value of oil relative to gold never changed much, but both went up relative to dollars because that was what was being debased. Gold CAN'T be debased. You can't print 1 billion ounces of gold in a back room at the drop of a hat. You can do that with a fiat monetary unit. You can't do it with an inherently rare physical product which has to be mined from the Earth.

You're also not understanding what a depression is. It isn't armageddon in a vacuum. People are still employing each other and needing to pay each other, and trading with each other for a variety of products and services. Barter is ridiculously inefficient and cannot lead you back to the modern economy you once knew and stay there, you have to have money, a common means of exchange. In the Weimar hyperinflation of the 20s, many people were using cigarettes as money. Lastly, I tried to point out to you that food spoils, livestock requires upkeep and can die (lol, how'd you like to have your life savings in chickens wiped out by foxes, or a tornado, or disease), both are difficult to transport and have very high weight to value ratios, and frankly you can't hide them very well. If you hadn't paid someone to store it (provided you had what they wanted), someone could easily see you had craploads of wheat in your house (provided you had one) and raid it, killing you and your family. It is, after all, a depression full of desperate poor people. Not a smart idea. Or hey, what if there was a fire? Gold would survive it. Paper wouldn't, food wouldn't, oil wouldn't.

And imstellar, I appreciate your response and I generally think you have a good argument, but I think we need to focus on getting rid of the obvious first. It's a bit early to argue for voluntary taxation when we can't get rid of inflation and mandatory social programs for what should be market services. I find them unpalatable and dishonest relative to taxes.

And imstellar, I appreciate your response and I generally think you have a good argument, but I think we need to focus on getting rid of the obvious first. It's a bit early to argue for voluntary taxation when we can't get rid of inflation and mandatory ponzi schemes. I find them unpalatable and dishonest relative to taxes.

It is too early to focus on it as a goal, but I think it is extremely important to focus on its underlying princples--while there is a clear economic benefit in combating inflation and government regulation of the economy--perhaps what is more important is that there is a moral imperative as well. To me, freedom is an even more powerful message than economics, and I would like for people to realize that unregulated capitalism, and only unregulated capitalism, can be synonymous with freedom.

What I was most impressed with about Ron Paul's book "The Revolution: A Manifesto" is that he derives his economic and governmental policies from an individual (human) rights perspective.

Governments exist to moderate individual selfishness for the greatest good of the greatest number of people.

Almost missed this one...For the record, I am not an anarchist, a government is absolutely necessary in a modern society--however, it has but a single rational function: to project individual rights. By extension this implies a national defense, police force, and legal system.

This tangent stemmed from the fact that Obama is trying to sell a change in market prices as an economic/governmental crisis in order to offer a governmental solution......to generate votes for his candidacy.

>> ^MINK:
sorry to interrupt the very interesting stuff about gold.. but i have to repeat that i am not suggesting Obama use an antimeat campaign tactic. i KNOW. He's not gonna do that and it would be suicide.
That's my fucking point. It shows the hypocrisy. If people really cared about pollution they would radically change their lifestyles, but they're not gonna do that, so... how about they fill up their tyres once and we all leave it to the next generation to sort out? Yeah... sounds like that's the best option. I might as well start supporting obama on the internet, even if I have to be a hypocrite to do that. Right. I can see your logic.


I'm not sure I understand your point, since this would appear to be a shortcoming of democracy, that leaders can't force a populace to take radical action, even if it's for their own good (not that I'd change that, mind you).

I'm frustrated with how hard it is to get action on environmental issues too, but that's not Obama's fault, it's the entire American society's fault.

If you believe it's the President's responsibility to shift public opinion, blame Bush for the current state of affairs.

To witness the noble virtues of pure unregulated free market capitalism firsthand, all one need do is visit the only place it's practiced today: the ghetto street corner. The ebb and flow of goods and services is self-regulating, guided by whoever is most viscious, most ruthless, most willing to murder the competition and/or anyone else who gets in the way.

Seriously, you lemonade stand academics need to venture out into the real world occasionally and see how working class people suffer terribly under your beloved free market capitalist abomination.

>> ^imstellar28:
NetRunner: Do you even understand the principles of Keynesian or Austrian economics? If you had actually read anything on either of them--I don't see how you could support what "90% of the economicists believe" . The number of people, or the authority behind them has absolutely nothing to do with the veracity of their arguments. I will paypal you $20 if you read the magnum opus 900 page book on austrian economics "Human Action: A Treatise on Economics" and can explain why it is inferior to Keynesian economics. Even if you COULD explain why it was inferior (which I charge is highly improbable if not impossible) you would still be on the losing end of a philosophical argument--namely that only austrian economics has a moral basis for its implementation.

Newp, can't say I've read up on either Keynesian or Austrian economics, but I wasn't really trying to wade into the middle of the "gold standard" argument beyond pointing out that a lot of people who are familiar with both don't agree with you and BansheeX.

I agree that has nothing to do with which philosophy is correct, but it does mean that there shouldn't be some assumption that it's the obvious or only way to do things.

Mark me as being in the "not opposed, but not convinced" column on a gold standard.

Oh, and I'll happily take your $20, though I'll probably just use it to take my wife to the movies.

>> ^imstellar28:
This tangent stemmed from the fact that Obama is trying to sell a change in market prices as an economic/governmental crisis in order to offer a governmental solution......to generate votes for his candidacy.


I'm gonna echo Memorare here and say you need to get out more. I'm no pauper, and $4/gal gas bites me plenty hard. It's not a true crisis yet, but I don't expect it to stabilize at $4/gal, I fully expect it to march on upward from here, probably at an accelerating rate.

Market solutions will be the answer, and all Obama wants to do with government is a) make the transition easier on the people for whom $4/gal is crippling, and b) provide increased incentives for the market to develop alternatives to oil.

Leasing environmentally protected land to the oil companies when they already have 68 million acres of land already available to them to drill on...now that is a gimmick designed to win you votes.

a government is absolutely necessary in a modern society--however, it has but a single rational function: to project individual rights. By extension this implies a national defense, police force, and legal system.


I agree with you completely on this. However you've failed to consider the full range of interventions that may be necessary to protect individual rights.
1. Would you say you have a right to not starve to death on the street according to the whims of a few local employers?
2. Would you say you have a right to know what is in food that you buy?
3. Would you say you have a right to know how much electricity will be used by an appliance that you buy?
4. Would you say you have a right to be told the truth about the efficacy and side effects of any medication that you buy?
5. Would you say that when you are trying to buy an essential product, which is not a very new invention, you have the right to choose between two or more competitors instead of paying an extortionary price to a monopoly? (And certain utility markets tend towards monopolies without any regulation, such as water, telephone, and electricity)
6. Would you say you have the right to pay a competitive market price for any good, which is not inflated by conspiracy of the suppliers of that good (OPEC, for example)
7. Would you say certain proactive regulations are necessary to prevent the creation of monopolies, such as prohibition against exclusive supply contracts, where for example a computer vendor who wants to sell Microsoft Windows computers won't have to sign a contract with Microsoft promising to never sell any Linux computers.

How are you going to enforce all of those rights without some department of ___ regulatory agencies?

>> ^Memorare:
To witness the noble virtues of pure unregulated free market capitalism firsthand, all one need do is visit the only place it's practiced today: the ghetto street corner. The ebb and flow of goods and services is self-regulating, guided by whoever is most viscious, most ruthless, most willing to murder the competition and/or anyone else who gets in the way.
Seriously, you lemonade stand academics need to venture out into the real world occasionally and see how working class people suffer terribly under your beloved free market capitalist abomination.


I know what you mean, but you ignore the fact that the "ghetto" doesn't have any policing, and the "goods" and "services" are illegal and mafia controlled, instead of governed by the rule of law.

Legalise drugs and prostitution, and your "ghetto" will be a marble covered shopping mall in about 10 days.

jwray... i am with you .. i also think that there are many things that "the market" cannot solve, especially education.

Actually I think the biggest problem is conglomerates... if you have the same company investing in fatty foods AND heart disease hospitals.... you know... that is bad.

Some things have to be insulated from the idea that they lead to a purchase. Only economists see the world in terms of money.

>> ^jwray:
I agree with you completely on this. However you've failed to consider the full range of interventions that may be necessary to protect individual rights.
1. Would you say you have a right to not starve to death on the street according to the whims of a few local employers?


I don't understand what you're implying here. Is this person capable of working, why wouldn't someone hire him unless some socialist policy destroyed the economy? Remember when the Federal Reserve sat on the inflow of gold in the thirties and caused a hyperdeflationary depression where money stopped getting loaned out, therefore people couldn't get paid and businesses which relied on the inflated credit of the 20s all went belly up? You wouldn't, would you, because you're just a sheep with no actual understanding of the driving forces of poverty. Do you realize that charity was at it's highest when there was no income tax and gold backed money? See, there's nothing wrong with helping someone voluntarily. There is something wrong with you believing that I or anyone else is OBLIGATED to give up their wealth to this person just because he is starving. And why would anyone work if we're all entitled to each other's production? You must also believe that he is morally within his rights to steal from the grocery store if he's "helpless" like you say. It's the same thing when you legislate redistribution of wealth schemes. You need to get off your Marxist boat already.

2. Would you say you have a right to know what is in food that you buy? 3. Would you say you have a right to know how much electricity will be used by an appliance that you buy?


In most cases, if the consumer demands it, the consumer gets it. Because how do companies make money? By reaching out to demand in the market. But I don't really have a problem with information gathering, even though it could easily be done by independent consumer groups.


5. Would you say that when you are trying to buy an essential product, which is not a very new invention, you have the right to choose between two or more competitors instead of paying an extortionary price to a monopoly?

Monopolies are not self-sustaining unless the enablements exist within government for companies to collude with and benefit from government specific powers. Remember, the government is the largest and most powerful monopoly of all. They can do things a private company can only DREAM of doing: force payment (tax), create new money (inflate), and ban competing products.

6. Would you say you have the right to pay a competitive market price for any good, which is not inflated by conspiracy of the suppliers of that good (OPEC, for example)

You are getting a competitive price, tinfoil man. The dollar is being crushed by socialist policies and foreign currencies are gaining relative to it by definition. That increases their buying power in this international bidding contest for a finite resource. So sorry it's become unpleasant for you, but maybe you also shouldn't have supported blocking domestic drilling and nuclear power for thirty years. Kinda hard to reduce prices when you intentionally decrease supply and competition. You want the energy, you just refuse to allow anyone to make it in your backyard. So suffer the consequences and ride your bike and stop whining like an entitlement freak. There are people in Africa who would kill to drive around in a car all day.

Would you say certain proactive regulations are necessary to prevent the creation of monopolies, such as prohibition against exclusive supply contracts, where for example a computer vendor who wants to sell Microsoft Windows computers won't have to sign a contract with Microsoft promising to never sell any Linux computers.

Exclusive contracts are made all the time. Bidding contests are real competition. McDonald's contracted with Heinz for ketchup and mustard supplies. The Olympics only accepts Visa credit cards. If an OEM contracts with someone exclusively, they have to gauge if that payout is going to be worth the loss to competitor's offering the supposedly superior product which will inevitably be used by other OEMs. It's not like Microsoft can put poop in a box and stay a monopoly, they STILL have to deliver or it opens a window for competition.

Clearly, you are locked in to the corporate blame game that marxists play to gain power. The only thing you need to worry about is removing the collusive enablements that allow private companies to gain unfair advantages over their competition through bribery: subsidies, special tax breaks, inflation, and banned choice under the pretense of protecting you.

jwray... i am with you .. i also think that there are many things that "the market" cannot solve, especially education.

Education is a service like any other, in which case the optimal result will be from consumers spending their own money, not politicians dishing it out to government teachers. This is a terribly uninvolved system where the parents just expect the best and do no research, it's all "provided" for you. Education has become daycare. We used to be first in the world before the Department of Education was created. Now we're not, though. Any department has to be fed with money that otherwise would have gone to the people themselves. The funny thing is that even if you support some kind of socialized education, libertarians have proposed a voucher system where the money is going to parents to make choices instead of to the providers directly. The latter strategy is what we currently do and it's the equivalent of giving food stamps to the grocery stores.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxeP-krUrdU&feature=related

Nice video. I agree with most of it.

I'd like to remind you that plenty of immigrants starved to death in the United States around 1900 without any "socialist policy destroying the economy". With the exception of railroad land grants, the USA was nearly laissez-faire until 1906. Monopolies thrived anyway.

If you want a recent example of price-fixing by suppliers whose initiation did not require government help (but ending it did require government help), look up the SDRAM collusion scandal of the early 2000s.

OPEC's openly stated goal is to control oil prices by collusive production-limiting, so it's ridiculous to call that a "tinfoil hat" allegation. They succeed because demand for oil is not very elastic and their competitors cannot easily increase production. Also, irrespective of OPEC, the price of oil will continue to rise as the limited worldwide reserves are consumed and demand continues to rise. OPEC and the United States are playing it well by conserving their reserves. The price of oil, relative to gold, will probably double by 2020.

And I do support nuclear power. Don't be so insolent as to presume that any left-leaning person you meet online supports every plank of the Green Party Platform.

A large conglomerate can drive all its competition in a particular niche out of business by selling at a slight loss. Or the conglomerate offer to buy the competitors first, and then run the holdouts out of business. Then they can raise prices to whatever they want and make a profit more than enough to compensate for the earlier loss. Some new capitalist will presume that he can sell the product cheaper, so he will waste the overhead cost of market entry before getting run out of business by the larger company selling at a loss again. Then the larger company goes back to selling at very high prices without any competitors. In any market with high entry overhead costs and impracticality of long-term temporal arbitrage, a monopoly can thrive without government help.

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." - Adam Smith


Industries such as tap water, sewers, and electical grids are natural monopolies. There is not one place in the world where you have a choice of which tap water grid to connect to, or which sewer network to connect to, or which power grid to connect to.

I'm gonna echo Memorare here and say you need to get out more. I'm no pauper, and $4/gal gas bites me plenty hard. It's not a true crisis yet, but I don't expect it to stabilize at $4/gal, I fully expect it to march on upward from here, probably at an accelerating rate.

I don't have a car. I have a motorcycle. It cost over 50% less, brand new, than a car. It gets 65 mpg and goes 0-60 in under 4 seconds and can carry 6 bags of groceries. why the hell would I care about $4 a gallon for gas? If you don't like paying $4 a gallon...figure out a solution.

I only believe humans have a single right. One. Here it is:

"A 'right' is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom
of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the
others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life
is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life
means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action—
which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a
rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the
enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness.)"
-Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness

In other words, your only right as a human being is the freedom to think and act, free of coercion--physical or otherwise.

Now, let me answer each of your points by asserting this right, and only this right:

1. Would you say you have a right to not starve to death on the street according to the whims of a few local employers?
NO! Life is a self generating action, you do not have the right to survive, you only have the right to pursue the means to survive. How can you have the right to not starve to death without infringing on someone elses rights? Who will the food be taken from? When you ensure that one man is kept alive, you ensure that another is his slave.

2. Would you say you have a right to know what is in food that you buy?
NO! It is your choice to purchase an item or not, and part of this choice is a rational assessment on the quality of the goods and trustworthiness of the seller. However, fraud is a violation of this basic right--in that it involves an indirect use of force: it consists of obtaining material values without their owner’s consent, under false pretenses or false promises. Extortion is another variant of an indirect use of force: it consists of obtaining material values, not in exchange for values, but by the threat of force, violence or injury. This is the role of the legal system: to settle contractual disputes.

3. Would you say you have a right to know how much electricity will be used by an appliance that you buy?
NO! Same thing, it is your choice to purchase the appliance or not. If however, the power rating stated is different than the power rating in actuality--again you have legal recourse to be compensated for fraud. There is nothing about selling an item which requires the seller to give full disclosure.

4. Would you say you have a right to be told the truth about the efficacy and side effects of any medication that you buy?
YES-If the product does not perform as claimed, then yes, this is a case of fraud.
NO! If you do not receive full disclosure, but the seller makes no false claims.

5. Would you say that when you are trying to buy an essential product, which is not a very new invention, you have the right to choose between two or more competitors instead of paying an extortionary price to a monopoly? (And certain utility markets tend towards monopolies without any regulation, such as water, telephone, and electricity)
NO! How can you remove a monopoly, other than action in the free market, without resorting to physical force, and thus the infringement of the business owners rights?

6. Would you say you have the right to pay a competitive market price for any good, which is not inflated by conspiracy of the suppliers of that good (OPEC, for example)
NO! Again...these are all the same principle. The market price is set by supply and demand. period. How can you fix prices without infringing on the rights of the business owner? You realize that supply and demand are the exact same thing--only seen from two sides of the transaction? How can you force a "competitive" price for the buyer, without forcing an "uncompetitive" price on the seller?

7. Would you say certain proactive regulations are necessary to prevent the creation of monopolies, such as prohibition
NO! For the last time, the only moral action is boycott in the free market. Any regulation will infringe on the rights of the business owner.

It doesn't matter if you think you are doing "good for the people" or "whats best for everyone", all you are really doing is acting as a dictator by using physical violence (jail) to enforce your polices. However "benevolently" you think you are acting--in everyone one of the above cases someones rights would be violated. Thus, whatever arguments you can make for such a policy, you cannot make a moral one.

jwray... i am with you .. i also think that there are many things that "the market" cannot solve, especially education.

Guess we'll have to add this to the list of "problems I'm not personally creative enough to solve, therefore i will declare impossible to solve". I will gladly sit here and type out a free market solution to EVERY SINGLE problem you can come up with (short of a national defense, police, or legal system).

Our department of education boasts a 65% high school graduation rate...read....35% fail rate. Last I checked that was an "F". Not to mention the system churns out people with no basic understanding of economics, biology, government, mathematics, rational thought (yes this is a subject), philosophy, etc. I know because I graduated high school and didn't know sh*t about any of these subjects. If our education system was worth half of what we put into it, we wouldn't need to be having this discussion right now. There ARE aleternatives. Heres one: how about offering online lectures, videos, class notes, compiled by some of the best teachers and professors on the entire planet? Heres a hint..this already exists. In fact you can get an MIT level education in a dozen disciplines for FREE: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm. How hard would this be to implement for the K-12 curriculum? Not hard, considering people have already successfully done it: http://www.google.com/search?q=k-12+education. How much would it cost for a internet connection, bandwidth, and a laptop? How many of these things are free at the public library? "But I wouldn't have a degree, just the information" Okay...valid point, but whats stopping a business startup which offers the services of rigorous curriculum testing--similar to the SAT or GRE? This way students study and learn on their own, and test through a private company when they are ready. So your total cost for K-college education becomes:

computer: $500
K-12 dvds: $100
Private tutors, 500 hours, $10/hr: $5000
High school accreditation: $300
MIT courseware: $0
General college accreditation: $400
Specialized college accreditation: $500
Total cost for education: $6800

Notice the bulk of the cost would be private tutors, whose role could be filled by parents. Also remember, that there would still be traditional, private schools and colleges for people to attend--if they so desire. The point is that a higher quality education can be sold at a much lower cost than is currently offered.

The reality is that the only essential tool you need in life, you were born with: your ability for rational thought. And you were already taught the only ability you need to develop it: reading--which you probably started to learn from you parents. Yet how many books have you read in the past year? The past decade? The average college student reads approximately 6 books/semester, or 48 books. The average person, reading a book a week, or approximately 30 pages per day, will read over 200 books in four years--an amount equal to four college degrees--and over 2600 books in their lifetime--an amount of knowledge equal to over 50 college degrees.

^ Like making sure I properly inflate my tires?

I'm not advocating people sit on their hands and wait for government to solve their problems, but I am advocating that government create incentives for businesses to develop alternatives to gasoline-fueled cars, and do something to help people who were barely making ends meet.

If you know no one who's feeling squeezed by fuel prices, you need to get out more. If it's just that you don't care about other people's troubles, that's a much bigger problem, but getting out more might help with that too.

You seem so assured of your own self-sufficiency that you're arguing no one else should need to be dependent on anyone else, to the point where you said I'm "at the losing end of the moral argument" before presenting any argument at all...and you don't know me from Adam.

No one goes through life without getting help from someone else, and I happily advocate a governmental philosophy that forces people like you and me who don't (currently) need anyone's help...to help people who aren't as capable.

You see things differently *shrug*. No reason to act like I'd never heard of a motorcycle before. I'm sure it's great for taking kids to school in winter.

advocating that government create incentives for businesses to develop alternatives to gasoline-fueled

Why not create incentives as a consumer? The consumer is infinitely more powerful than the government.

to the point where you said I'm "at the losing end of the moral argument" before presenting any argument at all

I never said you were, I said Keynesian economics was--and an understanding of its principles makes it very clear why this is an indisputable fact.

No one goes through life without getting help from someone else, and I happily advocate a governmental philosophy that forces people like you and me who don't (currently) need anyone's help...to help people who aren't as capable.

Why are you painting me as a recluse who knows nothing about society? I am all for free trade and mutual collaboration among people. It is ridiculous to expect everyone to be entirely self-sufficient, to make their own bread, food, clothes, goods, etc. I am merely renouncing physical violence and slavery--how does that make me out of touch? Why not advocate a social philosophy which encourages people to help those who aren't as capable? I never once argued against helping your neighbor, friend, or family member in a time of crisis.

>> ^imstellar28:
Why not create incentives as a consumer? The consumer is infinitely more powerful than the government.

I agree, if I could call a do-over on American energy policy I'd have slowly cranked up gasoline tax over the last 3 decades so that it was something like $8-$9 dollars a gallon in 2000. The marketplace would've slowly adapted to that over the years, and we could have used the extra revenue for public transportation, or incentives for consumers and business to come up with alternatives (though high gas prices probably would've done the trick).

Right now there are incentives (in the form of tax breaks) for consumers to buy hybrid cars, and I'd love to see more things like that encouraging other conservationist behavior. However, the main problem with (positive) consumer incentives like those is that it doesn't help generate new product offerings. Disincentives like a gas tax would help with that, but right now that would only make things harder for regular people -- $4/gal seems to have finally made auto manufacturers change their tune, I just wish we'd gotten there before we'd hit peak oil because it would've saved a lot of environmental damage.

Why are you painting me as a recluse who knows nothing about society?

Because you're acting like one. Your rejoinder to a fairly mild statement of mine about government trying to put useful pressure on the market to solve economic strife caused by high gas prices was to essentially say "it's not a crisis, it's an excuse for more government control", and "figure it out yourself, try using a motorcycle instead of a car".

People don't need our permission to try to solve their own problems. That doesn't mean that rising food & gas prices are going to pose major problems for a lot of people. Making the case that it's somehow a simple fix for everyone is pretty ignorant (perhaps even pridefully ignorant, since you were describing how you solved it).

Besides, it's not as if you've been meticulously polite and respectful yourself.

I am all for free trade and mutual collaboration among people. It is ridiculous to expect everyone to be entirely self-sufficient, to make their own bread, food, clothes, goods, etc.

I'm with you so far...

I am merely renouncing physical violence and slavery--how does that make me out of touch?

Wha?

I understand the argument you make for this, but it seems an awfully long stretch. Have you been beaten for not paying taxes? Have you heard of someone who has? As for slavery, I think if there were someone around who'd been through the real deal, they'd beat you silly for trying to equate taxation with slavery. You don't get whipped for talking sass at your government, for example.

If taxation bothers you so much, think of it like membership dues in the country club called the United States of America. You're free to leave the club grounds anytime you like, renounce your citizenship, and stop paying taxes.

Why not advocate a social philosophy which encourages people to help those who aren't as capable? I never once argued against helping your neighbor, friend, or family member in a time of crisis.

Doesn't have to be an either/or thing, I encourage both a social and governmental philosophy that encourages people to help each other.

http://www.videosift.com/video/Milton-Friedman-on-Education

How should the government deal with externalities? Clearly the government needs to regulate pollution, because pollution risks the health of others without their consent. The fact that I have no choice but to breathe polluted air is at least as bad as being taxed.

Secondly, is there any rational way in which an individual can spend a billion dollars, that does not involve either some form of philanthropy or the gratuitous acquisition of unnecessary wealth? Can you even imagine yourself having a billion dollars (at their current value) but still wanting more money for yourself?

I agree, if I could call a do-over on American energy policy I'd have slowly cranked up gasoline tax over the last 3 decades so that it was something like $8-$9 dollars a gallon in 2000. The marketplace would've slowly adapted to that over the years, and we could have used the extra revenue for public transportation, or incentives for consumers and business to come up with alternatives (though high gas prices probably would've done the trick).

These aren't consumer incentives, thats government regulation. What I mean is as a consumer choosing not to buy inefficient cars, or seeking alternatives to gasoline dependence such as public transportation or carpooling, or inflating your tires (ha)--in order to reduce demand and thus reduce the price of gas.

Have you been beaten for not paying taxes? Have you heard of someone who has

Try not paying taxes next year....see how long it takes IRS agents with fully automatic weapons to enter your residence and confiscate your belongings and take you to jail.

Try not paying taxes next year....see how long it takes IRS agents with fully automatic weapons to enter your residence and confiscate your belongings and take you to jail.


Generally they try garnishing wages first. The showing up with weapons and hauling you off bit happens when you don't show up in court and then disregard a court order and then they give you a "contempt of court" citation.

"Generally they try garnishing wages first. The showing up with weapons and hauling you off bit happens when you don't show up in court and then disregard a court order and then they give you a "contempt of court" citation."

so.....we agree?

Prisons guarantee that their inmates won't starve to death, and provide inmates with basic medical care. It seems to me that, to avoid providing an incentive for poor people to commit crimes, law abiding citizens should get a better deal than criminals. If there is no welfare, then the poorest of the poor are practically rewarded for committing crimes, by being sent to prison where they will get free food, shelter, and medical care. That is why there should still be a welfare system.

*wheels, hehe

Invocations (wheels) cannot be called by ravioli because ravioli is not privileged - sorry.