A Man In Black's page

1. Yes, although a couple months ago by absentee ballot.
2. I am utterly indifferent.
3. No, they have fairly simple needs and goals and don't form those sorts of societies.
4. No. Heat sinks do not work that way.
5. Have you ever been so far as even to decided look more like?
6. Indifferent. I don't worry about movies that far off.
7. I don't live in the US, but I don't foresee the US annexing my home any time soon.
8. Nope. It's clearly d-g.
9. Are you so unimpressed by flying saucers that you need to slap disintegration beams on them just to be satisfied? I am pro-death-ray-disarmament, you spacewarmonger.
10. No, Texas kind of sucks. I guess maybe if I had a good reason?

"Now we are all sons of b%#$#es." ~ Kenneth Bainbridge

Well, s@*!, AMiB, If you'd known about it before now, you prolly shoulda linked it!

Okay. Do you like sulfur?

This is neat but a year and a half old.

Daily Caller link

The Daily Caller printing baseless conspiracy theories about the Clintons? I'm shocked. Shocked!

This is contempt of court. You don't have the right to refuse to testify when subpoenaed. If you refuse to testify (and you're not one of several exempt cases, such as refusing to incriminate yourself, revealing privileged information, etc.), then that's contempt of court. This doesn't have anything to do with President Obama, and as she's said, she's choosing prison in lieu of testimony.

I know that whenever the FBI goes looking for black clothes and books by Bakunin, my spider sense starts tingling.

Mine too, but it fades when I see that someone is willing to go to prison rather than testify against someone. If her testimony weren't condemning, then she'd be happy to exonerate the people she was being asked to testify against.

Yup.

1870's.

I know that's just a lame zinger, but it just makes you look silly.

There's more than a fair share of open craziness on the democratic side - Nancy Pelosi claiming that we can only understand the largest expansion of government power since the Income Tax after the bill has been passed is notable.

Not this talking point again. I've covered this nonsense in detail.

tl;dr version: The quote is "But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy," and it's from a speech to the National Association of Counties, not Congress. The "you" here is a group of concerned taxpayers, not members of Congress, who at this point have had the bill in their hands for a while. The point of the quote, in context, is that because of all of the proposed amendments and the Congressional reconciliation process, taxpayers are unlikely to see the final version of the bill until it is actually passed and its finalized contents can help to dispel the misinformation about the bill (e.g. false suggestions that death panels, a public option, imprisoning the uninsured, etc. are part of the bill).

Supply-side reforms. I said it several times.

Reforms such as? Because traditionally, it's tax cuts plus austerity. But you're using Germany as an example, and they've doubled down on their safety net, so I'm not sure what you're arguing for.

Bailing out the periphery without some structural reforms (which are not necessarily austerity measures, which you both agree were counter productive at this time) presents a moral hazard because it provides an incentive to take unreasonable risk, since the EU will bail countries out. Not that those periphery countries were immoral. Reforms in banking, public and private spending, tax policy and financial regulations are needed in the long term, however.

And this is (somewhat) reasonable when talking about Greece. (The enforced consequences to somehow correct this moral hazard are not, however.) It's less reasonable when you get to countries like Italy and Portugal, and ridiculous when you're talking about Spain and Ireland. Not all of the countries in trouble mismanaged their economies; they merely did not benefit from free trade making the rich countries richer.

It is also a moral argument. It is the argument that those countries won't learn to...do whatever it is they're supposed to learn, I'm not even clear on that...unless sufficient hardship is inflicted upon them. It's a ridiculous moral argument, since the people who are suffering have only the most tenuous connection to acting on this lesson, but it is still a morality play.

No it isn't, or it only looks that way if you take the sentences out of context. I'm used to your dishonest posting style but that's lazy and obvious, even for you.

No, it still looks like it conflicts, even when you take the whole paragraphs. I just didn't quote all of them.

First, you are confusing the roles of the council of the national governments and the ECB in the bailouts. The ECB isn't bailing any countries out or requiring austerity - it can't. That comes through inter-governmental conferences and is conducted between countries. The ECB perates through lending to banks, as you might expect for a monetary authority. So your comments are garbled.

The ECB is buying government bonds and predicating its actions on the same conditions the EU and IMF are demanding of Greece for bailouts. "I'm not going to help you unless you meet these conditions" is a requirement.

But it needs to be on a hard-headed assessment of what is in the national interest of the donor countries.

Yeah, you still haven't said what this entails, and everyone else who is talking about "reassessment" and "confidence" and "responsibility" is demanding steep austerity cuts. You keep vaguely hinting at what the periphery countries should be doing differently, then changing the subject when I ask you what exactly that is. So, what exactly should Spain and Ireland be doing differently?

Er, yeah. Bear in mind who is paying - taxpayers. I'm one of those, I want to know my money is spent responsibly. [...] It is certainly the case that an insistence on deep austerity cuts right now is in many ways not helpful.

Your first paragraph is at odds with your second. At the moment, ECB measures that amount to easing and foreign bailouts are predicated on austerity, with the argument that the austerity is necessary to "demonstrate responsibility" and "restore confidence". You are using the exact same rhetoric as those arguing for austerity, while also claiming that you're not calling for austerity. What are you calling for, then? "Responsibility" isn't a course of action.

Overblown fears? First, you are aware of hyper inflation in Germany's past?

Yes. Too much inflation can be dangerous. That said, inflation wasn't the cause of Weimar Germany's problems, but rather a symptom of a completely depressed and destroyed economy. It's confusing an effect for a cause. More practically, artificially low Euro inflation favors Germany over everyone else because inflation inherently favors debtors over creditors, and oh look Germany is much richer than the rest of Europe how about that.

A bit more overblown fear - or, to give you its alternative name, economic responsibility - from other countries might have gone a long way.

Hey look it's the morality argument. Again. Sorry, Spain and Ireland, you suffered a little too much from a global economic downturn without resolving it on your own, despite having responsible government spending. We've found an after-the-fact reason that the downturn that hit everyone is somehow your fault, so you don't deserve help. Sorry!

I wasn't making a moral point, I was making a political point. The southern European governments have all backslid on necessary reforms when the going got less tough - normally after a conference, or intervention by the ECB - repeatedly. They seem to think that they can ride this out with a bit of window-dressing, but they can't as the return of the crises demonstrates. The crisis conditions hold their feet to the fire, to do what is right by their citizens in the long term (albeit that the citizens don't appreciate it much, but then there are vested interests which will resist change, especially in the relatively closed economies of southern Europe). If someone else is stumping up the cash, it is necessary to reciprocate - otherwise that is unfair, immoral even. I understand that they need the transfers. What you don't understand is that, to avoid lurching from crisis to crisis again and again, they need more than just that - genuine reform. If that doesn't happen, the EU will probably break up under domestic political pressure from disgruntled northern European electorates. The crisis helps concentrate minds.

More moralizing. The periphery governments "need" to demonstrate their worthiness for support from the ECB and the interior by slashing government spending, which is just making the problem worse. They're only allowed medicine if they "reciprocate" by tearing their sores open.

No, the ECB couldn't do anything because it simply wasn't allowed to under its constitution. It is not supposed to engage in fiscal policy because that could be inflationary and cause moral hazard - that's in its constitution.

And, of course, it doesn't matter one bit that one of the most powerful interior nations was responsible for dictating that constrained role due to their overblown fears of inflation, eh?

That's not discipline. And if you borrow too much, and then discover you can't afford the bill, it will likely impact on your lifestyle as you point out - but that's a necessary corrective, I would suggest.

And here we are, back at the moralistic handwaving. They deserve austerity and depression and hardship, because their economies are the result of a moral failing. Their failing, however, was Germany's gain. You even hint at it:

In other words, they were borrowing incontinently to buy stuff they couldn't afford from surplus countries like China and Germany due to low productivity at home.

Their moral failing was not having the industrial and economic base that Germany and France had when the EU was formed. So, then, the EU was fine when it was enriching the interior, but now that the interior is doing fine at the expense of the periphery, suddenly the EU is a failure and the periphery nations should leave, to deal with the damage done on their own.

What's more, you even point out that it's only the currency union causing the lasting harm, and that, despite the UK acting the same way, they were able to ride things out relatively unharmed because their currency wasn't beholden to an uninterested foreign power. You have conceded every fact of my argument, but the only reason you can come up with is that Spain deserves to fail to teach them a lesson. (And, admittedly, you weren't arguing for it, as far as I can tell.) It's very easy to wish misery on the Spanish people if you yourself happen not to be Spanish.

Not only is this monstrous, but it's also self-defeating. As I said before, depression is a communicable disease, and no economy is immune. If the interior nations let Spain's debts go septic, they're going to find that the collapse of the banking sector doesn't leave them untouched. Then, there won't be anyone to turn things around.

Also, you were half-right, before, about the overheated political rhetoric and Nazis and whatnot. It is going to teach the periphery nations to hate the interior for inflicting this situation on them. Because, regardless of the initial cause of the crisis, the ECB could have done a great deal to mitigate this but did not, chiefly because of interior interests. You cannot watch your neighbor's house burn down while they plead for help and expect them not to hate you! Honestly, you mentioned Nazis in the same breath that you justified inflicting economic hardship in order to teach a moral lesson to an entire nation. Think about that.

I'm thinking

We both know this isn't true.

Also, while I'm at it, the creator of that video is Sunny Lohmann, a columnist from PJ Media (a right-wing blog/news site), and head of the Minnesota Objectivist Association. She also writes for the Daily Caller.

So not exactly a "disenchanted 2008 Obama voter".

According to a study by a Stanford University research fellow, 80% of DOE Green Energy loans went to Obama backers.

Oh, I missed this. That Stanford University research fellow is Peter Schweitzer, best known for his books Do as I Say (Not as I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy, Architects of Ruin: How a Gang of Radical Activists and Liberal Politicians Destroyed Trillions of Dollars in Wealth in the Pursuit of Social Justice, and my favorite, Reagan's War: The Epic Story of His Forty Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism. He's also a member of the far-right James Madison Institute and a former foreign-policy advisor to Sarah Palin during her vice presidential campaign.

Oh, and he's only a "Stanford University research fellow" in that he's a member of the Hoover Institute, another far-right thinktank. (He shares this distinction with Dinesh D'Souza, creator of 2016: Obama's America, and Condoleezza Rice, co-creator of Iraq War 2: Electric Boogaloo.)

You realize that we can just type this crap into Google, right?

Also, I spent more time and effort debunking that than it deserved, because it's b&!**%#* copypasta pasted on every damn forum.

Solar Trust of America

They were offered a loan guarantee and turned it down. I'm not sure how an example of the government not investing in a company supports your argument.

Bright Source

Still in business.

Energy Conversion Devices

Also declined loan guarantees.

SunPower

Still in business.

Ecotality

Still in business.

A123 Solar

There is no such business, but if you mean A123 Systems (a maker of rechargeable batteries), they're still in business, if ailing.

UniSolar

A subsidiary of Energy Conversion Devices, above.

Azure Dynamics

I can't find any evidence of US loan guarantees for this company other than other copy-pastes of your list. Help me out, here? I see some Canadian stuff.

Evergreen Solar

Received loan guarantees and tax breaks from Massachusetts, not the federal government.

So that leaves four entries from your list that actually received federal green energy loan guarantees and subsequently went out of business, DWD. You sure showed meatrace!

There's no real value in reaching new worlds, though.

It puts no food on anyone's table. It puts no clothes on anyone.

You are posting this on a microcomputer which is the direct result of research done to make the last first-time trip to another world possible.

I like how you can't identify any non-fact.

Now with helpful bolding.

The video raises a lot of facts. For example, Obama's administration has NOT seen a surge of transparency. His administration continues to have high unemployment. He has backed a long list of failed green businesses. His time in office has given us a huge middle class tax hike.

The video raises a lot of facts. For example, Obama's administration has NOT seen a surge of transparency. His administration continues to have high unemployment. He has backed a long list of failed green businesses. His time in office has given us a huge middle class tax hike.

I like how you can't even list examples from the video without at least one non-fact.

How is that difference relevant to what the Founding Fathers said? How does it necessitate changing what the Founding Fathers said?

Because the Founding Fathers had a bunch of lamebrained ideas. For example, Jefferson believed that the highest form of society was agrarian farmer-philosopher citizens. The only way a farmer has the leisure to also be a philosopher, though, is if all the farming is done by slaves.

There have been more than 200 years of philosophical, economic, and political thought since the founding fathers died. Try to keep up.

I'm assuming it's just flat numbers but that's half of the point. The dollars we hold in our hands continue to lose value. Government inflates so that they can spend brand new money that they just created out of thin air while the value is still high. By the time we get our paychecks, the buying power of our hard earned work now buys us less. Am I the only one who sees a problem with this?

Yes.

Responsible as in the opposite of irresponsible. The northern European countries are at no fault and are in no way responsible for the PIIGS reckless spending.

Yup. Spain and Ireland need to pay for their reckless and irresponsible...uh...government surpluses before the collapse.

Why the heck should they have to foot the bill or debase their currency to bail them out?

Because all of the nations of the EU entrusted them with control over the currency to serve the best interests of everyone. Not just the best interests of the countries you like. After all, it's a libertarian idea that if you enter into a contract with someone without doing due diligence, it's your own fault when the contract turns out to be unfair. If Germany or France are unhappy with Greece having cooked books, they should have investigated Greece's books better and not allowed them into the EU. Now they're stuck with them.

Libertarians hold everyone, government included, to the same standards. Stealing is stealing; murder is murder; fraud is fraud etc. It makes no difference whether it's the government or a local street thug committing the crime. We aren't collectivists. We don't have different sets of rules for every group.

Non-crazy people are okay with the idea of governments levying taxes, not so much non-governments.

Also, I am going to shoot you in the face because your shoes are my birthright, according to me. It's coercion to use force against me to stop me; that would be assault. So, there is nothing stopping me from shooting you in the face and taking your shoes except your own spurious claim of ownership. Isn't it a shame that you don't believe in some higher authority who is accorded the special power to rule on these sort of things and enforce those rulings with force?

You can't compare early America to modern America. That's not even close to a fair comparison. Yes, life back then kind of sucked ... but life in many if not most other places in the world sucked a lot worse. We weren't known as the Land of Opportunity for nothing.

A) I am talking about why life stopped sucking in that way. The US of the present didn't magically replace the US of the previous 75 years, that happened for reasons. You are talking about going back to the policies that made the world a hellscape at the time.

"When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic." ~Benjamin Franklin

Either I get to talk about how politics in the middle of the 20th century helped change the country into the form that it was in at the end of the 20th century, or you stop talking about 18th century authors. Whichever.

Again, you're comparing it to modern times.

The modern times where productivity has been rising for 30 years but wages haven't? The modern times were weak labor laws have resulted in people working for no pay at all and employers increasingly working people over 40 hours with no additional compensation of any kind? The free market isn't fixing this.

When government starts handing out favors, the poor will always lose. That's a battle we aren't going to win. The government hands out more money now than ever in order to help people and the poverty level keeps growing higher and higher. Why is that?

Because the government is handing out less and less money to help people since about the mid-70s and poverty keeps increasing correspondingly. The programs that have endured untouched are still doing their jobs effectively. You don't see old people being supported entirely by their children any more because of Social Security and Medicare.

People are obviously fine with risking their money by letting banks make investments with it. If they weren't, there would be a market for banks which hold and protect your money for a fee. There would be no risk with such a service. If you risk your money and lose it, then you lose it. You took the risk and lost. The problem is that people didn't (and may still not) understand how banking works and that there was risk involved.

Back when there was risk involved, the lack of confidence in banks caused constant runs and constant banking panics. This is why we have the Fed in the first place! The Federal Reserve System provides the baseline security that instills that confidence in banks. You seriously need to understand how things were before the regulations we have now to understand why rolling back those regulations is a bad thing. There isn't any such thing as a free market. Markets form within the constraints of regulation, and quickly collapse without regulations to keep them stable.

But this is all moot because I can shoot you in the face to take your shoes because you don't believe in regulations that would stop me. It's a shame the hand of the free market can't stop bullets!

Thank you for your review, noted sane person Darkwing Duck.

To Serve Man

Hey look. It's a political YouTube video! These are always educational and not filled with half-truths, misinformation, and straight up lies.

The "parasites" of Objectivism are not the laborers/tillers/etc. Objectivism has no problem with them. Rand's protagonists worked collaboratively with them to everyone's gain. The "parasites" in Objectivism are others - people who "compete" by buying and manipulating government.

For example, the wealthy heir who ran his company into the ground, literally killing countless innocents when buildings built with his company's flawed copper fail, to make a political point?

Oh wait crap that's one of the heroic protagonists.

I guess it's all the rapists in her novels?

Oh. Those are the protagonists too.

What exactly was the difference between the protagonists and the antagonists again? Because I can't seem to remember any differences other than that it was a tragedy that the protagonist a+*@!&@s left with their magic spells, because the antagonist a@+#&*~s couldn't cast those spells (and thus society fell apart).

To argue that "there is no Galt's Gulch for people to run off to anyway" is like arguing that there is no Lilliput. While factually correct, it misses the point.

The point is that if Rand's creative class neglects the needs of everyone else, they have to till the soil themselves. All of the "parasites" of Objectivism are laborers and consumers, and nobody gives a damn what magical properties Rearden Metal has if there's nobody to smelt it, nobody to build with it, and nobody to buy things made with it. The only way you have have the luxury to invent alloys is if you're not one of the people who spends their entire life exhausted from working in a refinery. "Individuals versus the collective" is a false dichotomy, because nobody is separate from the collective whole.

There is no Galt's Gulch because there is no separate class of singular individuals who could leave and devastate the collective with their absence. If you stop participating in society, nothing changes except for you. Science isn't predicated on singular individual inventions that were the work of one person and cannot be duplicated. (Remember, the main plot devices in Atlas Shrugged are perpetual motion and mithril.) They are less genius industrialists and more Tolkien Elves: we're expected to value their superhuman nobility, with only the sketchiest reasons to feel that they're noble or superhuman. Without those magical, superhuman inventions, the protagonists of Atlas Shrugged are just a bunch of self-absorbed a$~@%++s who moved to the desert and starved to death shortly after the ending of the novel.

The moral of Atlas Shrugged is that we have to cater to the selfishness of selfish people, or else they'll go somewhere that their selfishness is better catered to. This is nonsense. There's nowhere for them to go.

Also Bob the Angry Flower is amazing and you should be reading it.

Jonathan Swift died 120 years before the Gilded Age began, AMiB.

History is also hard.

So, its not that there is anything wrong with objectivism, you just don't agree with it. Specifically, you disagree with its notion that the individual is given priority over the group.

It's science fiction, dude. Atlas Shrugged is literally based on magic. It pretends that it's somehow meaningful if an entire class of people just pick up and leave for the Lands of the Valar, because they take their design for an elven magic perpetual motion machine with them. In the real world, science is advanced incrementally by many hands, industry doesn't revolve around a handful of singular actors (and, indeed, industry didn't work that way when Rand was writing, either), and there is no Galt's Gulch for people to run off to anyway.

But Objectivism? Objectivism is untenable (which is a nice way of saying completely insane nonsense) because it exalts perfect selfishness. Any time this runs into any problems they are handwaved away by claiming "rational" people wouldn't have those problems. "Rationality" is never clearly defined.

It's not anything like a coherent philosophy. Basing your life on it is as silly as basing your life on the philosophy of Valentine Michael Smith in Stranger in a Strange Land.

Also, this is a good excuse to post this.

You're arguing with Darkwing Duck about Ayn Rand.

Give me a break, I don't get a chance to compare Atlas Shrugged to Lord of the Rings very often.

Guam doesn't have a senator.

They have fifteen of them. He's lieutenant governor now, that's what I was thinking when I said "the".

With 80 hour work weeks, workers being maimed and crippled left and right, strikes broken up by the federal government, toxic pollution that the average citizen had no recourse to stop, people crammed into tenement housing that caught on fire...

Indeed. In fact, one of the main forces in getting this changed was unionization, which is remarkable because unionists spent a good chunk of the first third of the 20th century getting shot in the face. The '30s are marked by unprecedented (before or since) government investment in social safety nets and infrastructure, and a raft of government regulations on workplace safety and labor relations.

How on earth is this compatible with libertarianism?

Also!

When was the last time the government cut spending?

You know what's neat? Some of that spending goes to a totally awesome graphing tool to look at that data.

For example, here's your data, adjusted so it's not just raw dollar totals.

The red line is inflation-adjusted expenditures, in 2005 USD. The blue line is per-capita inflation-adjusted expenditures, also in 2005 USD. I'll leave it to you to figure out who was president when, though!

For instance would a kind person not kill someone even knowing that the person will live in physical and spiritual agony for the rest of their life or break the legs of a crucified person knowing that it will kill them quicker*?

This is deontology versus consequentialism. "Can the ends justify the means?" is the basic ethical dilemma. You're not going to get a solid answer for this. (Although, since your question presumes that the consequences are certain, you've slanted it towards consequentialist answers. Who's to say breaking the legs of a crucified person isn't just an additional pointless misery inflicted upon them, instead of hastening their death?)

What are some notable physical effects of extreme (war caused) guilt?

Look up physical effects of depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome.

This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed—run over, maimed, destroyed—but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just b#%*$+&*ting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it.... For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each.

Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying." But the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years. "Take the cash and let the credit go," as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit a whole lifetime.

There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were. In Greek drama they were beginning, as a society, to discover science, which means causal law. Here in this novel there is Nemesis: not fate, because any one of us could have chosen to stop playing in the street, but, as I narrate from the deepest part of my life and heart, a dreadful Nemesis for those who kept on playing. So, though, was our entire nation at this time. This novel is about more people than I knew personally. Some we all read about in the newspapers. It was, this sitting around with our buddies and b%@@$@&@ting while making tape-recordings, the bad decision of the decade, the sixties, both in and out of the establishment. And nature cracked down on us. We were forced to stop by things dreadful.

If there was any 'sin', it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect. I loved them all. Here is the list, to whom I dedicate my love:

• To Gaylene, deceased
  
• To Ray, deceased
  
• To Francy, permanent psychosis
  
• To Kathy, permanent brain damage
  
• To Jim, deceased
  
• To Val, massive permanent brain damage
  
• To Nancy, permanent psychosis
  
• To Joanne, permanent brain damage
  
• To Maren, deceased
  
• To Nick, deceased
  
• To Terry, deceased
  
• To Dennis, deceased
  
• To Phil, permanent pancreatic damage
  
• To Sue, permanent vascular damage
  
• To Jerri, permanent psychosis and vascular damage

...and so forth.

In Memoriam. These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The 'enemy' was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.

The problem is that it is very easy to say this from across the Atlantic, especially as it doesn't take into account (a) the politics of the situation and (b) moral hazard. [...] And that's before we get to the issue of how, if you just bail out flagrant nations that waste their resources, they'll actually gain the discipline to reform.

Spain and Ireland were running surpluses. Spain's public debt was smaller than Germany's in both absolute numbers and relative to their GDP. Spain is slashing government spending and it is making things worse. What lesson are they to take from this? It's justifiable to be angry at Greek government for cooking their books and having a completely incompetent tax collection apparatus, but at this point there is no way to justify the woes of all of the periphery nations as somehow their own fault. The demanded austerity programs are actively making people's lives worse in Spain, Italy, Portugal, and, yes, Greece, while also aggravating the underlying problems that cause the need for bailouts in the first place.

The ECB is demanding that the periphery nations make their situation worse, and offering only the minimum support to prevent a full-blown collapse. They are fighting the fire with gasoline, and you are complaining about the cost of the gasoline.

I used to play WOW with the senator of Guam. Nice guy.

Because you can't easily predict human behavior!

Oh. Well. It's hard. Pack it in, economics, psychology, and sociology. The Austrian economists are here to tell us that we can't make predictions about human behavior because it's not easy, and therefore their predictions are the only correct ones I guess.

Yes, blame and villainize the responsible people. It's all their fault. That seems to be a growing trend in the Western world. And people wonder why society is degrading.

Blaming people who are responsible for doing things is causing the downfall of western civilization.

what.

Stealing is not evil or destructive. There, I fixed that for you.

When the government does it, it's not stealing.

That's a glib as hell response, but it's also true. (Also, if you quote it without replying to the rest of this, I will shoot you in the face, since laws preventing me from shooting you in the face are government coercion.) The only reason property "rights" exist is because the government defines them and protects them. Monetary policy (which is a fancy way of saying "controlling inflation") is a hugely useful tool to help keep the economy from stagnating or crashing. So the government "steals" from people who act in their own best short-term interest in a way that harms everyone long-term, because it turns out that individual actors acting in their own short-term interest, taken collectively, can't run a society very well.

Yes, losing all faith in humanity will produce much better results.

Except that charity didn't fix things before governments stepped in to fix them. It was called the Gilded Age, it kind of sucked unless you were one of the super-rich. Yanno, Charles Dickens, Jonathan Swift, Upton Sinclair? That's what they were writing about. You may have learned about these authors in your publicly-funded, publicly-regulated schooling.

When was the last time the government cut spending?

2010 and projected spending for 2013. 2012 is also going to see spending rise less than inflation.

I'm not particularly happy about this for a variety of reasons, but there you go.

It worked well for a long time. We didn't just all of a sudden become a rich and powerful nation right before WWII. We built that.

Yeah, there was this whole program that did that. It had a catchy name, too. The New...Arrangement? Negotiation? Something like that.

Just to put this in perspective, this is a sailing ship. While it is technically a part of the Argentine navy, it is only used for training and ceremonial functions, and its only armament is ceremonial 19th century cannon.

He might, tomorrow. And I misspoke. Reagan's lead spiked after the debates.

So, my initial point remains, as always, correct.

"There you go again."

The single Carter-Reagan debate was a singular accomplishment. Reagan outperformed Carter in a way which was and is basically unprecedented in televised debates, and had a single, repeatedly-played line that encapsulated how badly Reagan outshone Carter.

Since then, the debates have had less and less impact. Partially because of greater coverage of the candidates, partially because candidates are much more conservative in debating. Only eight years after Carter-Reagan, even "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy" didn't make a noticeable impact on the election. So no, I don't particularly expect Romney to gain a significant amount of ground in the polls over the next few weeks, barring a "There you go again" moment.

My short argument is why should we pay for this out of our pockets ?

Depression is a communicable disease. Even if it wasn't a matter of justice, as Germany and France have seen two decades of prosperity from what was basically a wealth transfer from the periphery to the central nations, letting Greece and Italy and Iceland and Ireland and Spain default and collapse spreads to other countries. Trade dries up, banks fold, refugees seek refuge, unrest and extremism spread.

Ask yourself why you would let your neighbor's house burn, regardless of whose fault the fire is.

Perhaps "pulling a Carter" would work better.

He enjoyed a slight lead against Reagan until the debates.

No, he didn't. Reagan led Carter from June to the election. By contrast, Romney has not led in the polls at any point.

If it were not for the cost of maintaining them AFTER they are built.

Which they have not managed with anything so far.

It's almost as if there's some sort of group—of banks, perhaps—forcing them to slash costs, regardless of whether those expenditures are necessary!

AAAnnnd : Greece just spends 28million euros on a Formula 1 race track.

I really appreciate the usefulness of it, especially after seeing press reports that the stadium from the Olympic games are mostly now derelict due to negligence, lack of use and hooliganism.

Way to go, guys !

Greece's national federal budget is ~€108b annually. So, while this may or may not be a wasteful project, it's nothing compared to the fact that Greece's GDP has dropped more than 12% in the last three years. Frankly, these sorts of investments in infrastructure would be what Greece should do to turn their economy around, if they weren't at the mercy of the ECB.

Because the fanbase for them is tiny and obsessive and basically a captive audience.

I concede that a degree of deficit spending in certain situations works towards putting people to work. That is the Democratic party's answer to these situations and it works. And it increases the national debt. Every time. The temporary measure part does not exist in our recent history. Which is the problem. We've been deficit spending through good times and bad. Both democrat and republican.

This is true, but it isn't an argument to reduce spending when the economy is weak, and it still is weak.

You're overfocused on the national debt. The national debt is essentially a meaningless number. It only matters because of its effects: its existence naturally pushes inflation up. However! There is a much stronger force currently pushing inflation down: the weak US economy. Addressing the national debt is important as a way to reduce inflation, but only when other factors combine to make inflation an issue.

Also, the US federal government has run a surplus in our lifetime. It's possible, but it's caused by a strong economy, not by austerity measures.

In the US it was shaky monetary policy coupled with politicians being in bed with the large banks.

No, it wasn't. Monetary policy and politicians don't really enter into it (other than the Glass-Steagall revisions that allowed banks and investment banks to work together more closely). The main contributors were credit default swaps allowing banks to lend without being exposed to risk (making money both coming and going), a poorly-regulated "shadow banking" sector of hedges, and decreasing real wages masked by increased borrowing against homes. The government failed to intervene to stop this, and in some ways made it easier by deregulating, but ultimately it was a fundamental failure of the private sector to evaluate risk, aggravated by the short-term thinking of people who refused to consider the consequences of predatory lending and wage stagnation.

There was a housing bubble, true, but the real bubble was an inverse one: real wages have been more or less flat since the 1970s, despite productivity continuing to increase. In short, the rich got richer, by sucking all of the fuel out of the economy. That was masked by personal debt spending, but personal debt has its limits.

What I do know is that now Spain can't meet their obligations and nobody wants their paper.

Spain doesn't have any paper. That's the whole problem! Their money is regulated by an outside entity that doesn't have Spain's interests at heart. The normal way of solving this problem is for the government to deficit spend to jumpstart the economy while offsetting that deficit spending with inflation, but Spain can't do that because they can't inflate the Euro.

Eventually, if we continue on the current path, the government will be forced to either 1) raise taxes to very high rates or 2) print more money, or 3) a combination of the two, in order to meet its obligations. I think we agree.

If we continue on the current path with no changes, sure, but things are going to change. Chiefly, the US economy is already improving. While it could be doing better, the ship is still righting itself. To project short-term effects infinitely in the future is as silly as saying that you should never fill the tank in your car because pouring gasoline will eventually make a pool and burst into flames. Steep deficit spending is a temporary measure to fix a temporary problem.

None of these options appeal to me. I would say that a better option is to get spending under control and raising some taxes thereby balancing the budget and then paying down the national debt.

Reducing spending won't balance the budget, though. Government budgets do not work like personal or business budgets. Reducing spending harms the economy and reduces tax income. It creates the austerity trap, where governments reduce spending, then reduce spending more in response to reduced tax income, then reduce spending more, etc. All the while, the economy crashes around everyone's ears.

If you want to balance the budget, you need to fix the economy. Deficit spending is part of doing that.

If our debt to income ratios continue to rise as they are projected to, we will be faced with similar circumstances as these other countries are today.

This is incorrect, because those other countries didn't get into the position they are today because of their debt:anything ratios. In particular, Spain was running a federal budget surplus.

"I wish in the past I had tried more things 'cause now I know that being in trouble is a fake idea" ~ Ray Smuckles

Greece, Spain, Italy and Ireland all have problems selling bonds to finance their budget deficits (which at the end of the fiscal year get added to their national debts). These countries are part of the EU and use the Euro for currency. Could not one or all of them drop out of the EU, go back to their old currencies and print money to monetize the debt. They're still going to have trouble (if not more) selling bonds.

They'd have trouble selling bonds because the damage is already done. Spain and arguably Italy could have taken that course without a great deal of trouble three years ago if they were still on the peseta/lira, but by now the damage is done and their economies are well tanked.

Greece is a special case, but it's a special case because its economy has always been fundamentally weak and because its tax collection infrastructure is basically f#%&ed.

The US is not there yet but the projected growth of our debt to GDP is going to continue to drive the value of our debt lower (investors will see it become more of a likelihood that the US government will be forced to decide whether or not pay for social security one month so they can pay on bonds that are coming due. I do not think monetization is a viable option. Were you suggesting something different?

The only reason that the US government could be forced to make that decision is because they were somehow prevented from deficit spending in Congress. That is what it means to have monetary sovereignty. The consequence of doing both without corresponding tax increases is inflation, but inflation is not a significant problem without the economy being fixed.

The value of US debt has less to do with inflation and more to do with economic stability. The US's economy isn't likely to crash, relative to China (where there is a lot of uncertainty due to a lack of transparency) and Europe (where the whole periphery crisis isn't fixed yet). Right now, the US isn't expected to crash, so US federal bonds and dollars are considered to be safe relative to the alternatives.

I enjoy the juxtaposition of Heathansson declaring that he doesn't care about embarrassing himself, posted in a thread where he came out strongly for Mitt Romney.

Wow. I can't believe the CIA hasn't swiped you up, Neo.

It's almost as if that function exists specifically to embarrass people who agree with themselves using sockpuppets.

ASTOUNDING, HOLMES!!! HOW DID YOU DO THAT?!?!?!

Like so.

Romulan Don Freakin Rickles's page

65 posts. Alias of Heathansson.

In short, if the election were tomorrow, the majority of Americans would lead the country down the road after an empty-promising corporate shark with no vision, just because he looked good and was louder.

Obama still has a considerable lead in the polls. It remains to be seen if the debates will make any difference at all.