I've said it before. We don't need a military presence there. Just pump the place full of everything that's forbidden by the religious zealots in that area. Give them pork and porn by the busload and watch the area remake itself into a westernized, generally peaceful place.
hmmm. interesting idea.
no joke
Agree or disagree with the war, the country from which the majority of the 9/11 terrorists came from was Saudi Arabia, not Iraq. As far as justifying the war by using 9/11, we may as well have invaded Canada.
Good ideas.
WTF? Here you've lost me. We hardly give any real quantifiable foreign aid to poor countries as it is. We have no problem subsidizing places like Israel though. Welfare? Just dropping millions of poor people on their asses with no increase in jobs or wages will have a positive effect on this country? As for corporate "welfare," it is unequally distributed to major companies but tax incentives and other incentives have been shown to improve a business' chance of survival. The more businesses that can thrive, the more employed this country is and the fewer poor people who need government subsidies, right?
Nice to say you're ending bureaucracies but what will be left in their place? DoD should be focused on defense and part of defending this country is evaluating potential threats to our solidarity and solvency. Part of reducing threats from foreign governments is making agreements with said governments. If anything, our problem as of late (Bushocracy) has been ignoring other countries' opinion in our international decisions. Pissing off the world doesn't work for you, it works against. Isolationism is nice if you want to blind your eyes to anything not directly in front of you.
Huh? It's bad enough that education levels are so low in this country, let's leave education standards to.. who, the states? They do enough of failing at that. The parents? If they were educated under the current poor education standards, who are they to decide what is a good education?
Unions as opposed to the private corporate community in charge? We've seen what happens when corporations run wild. I'll take regulated unionization over the Wal-Mart-ization of this country anyday. You're right about churches, why should they have tax exemption on the portion of their proceeds which are taxable? Freedom from regulating religion should not extend to freedom from the civic responsibility of which churches claim is a major goal.
Ok, so who decides what environmental regulations are "too misguided"? The head of Greenpeace or the president of Dow Corning?
There is more than one way to cook a book. Cost at the shelf would not directly reflect what the government is receiving or what they would be doing with it. This sounds like the opposite of your other suggestions, which involve weakening the Federal government. No income tax at this point means that sales tax goes up to 30 or 40 percent. I hope you have a hell of a P.R. plan in mind for that strategy. You going to be the one to introduce the "democratic peoples" of the U.S. to that idea? Want to see how fast whoever does that is out on their ass?
A nice idea, and I'm sure someone like our friends the Saudis could do a great job of implementing it, in their country.
So the government will now not print any money? Our currency will cease to exist. Sorry, anarchy is not a feasible economic system.
Easier said than done... and with the foreign policy of "Go away, Leave us alone" I'm sure it would work great.
The people who have no say in your foreign, social or economic policies who will suddenly be left in poverty, anarchy and total social disorder will certainly appreciate having the "power" the states allow them. Personally I don't know how a currency-less, unemployed, corporate-run and globally ignorant nation would be much of a world power anymore but maybe I'm missing something.
Well if we take a literal interpretation of your suggestions we won't have to worry about our government for long, since it will likely be taken over shortly by a strong militaristic and nondemocratic power.
The alternative is to keep subsidizing them with more and more money. There is no transition plan for phasing welfare out that would cause less economic damage than simpy ending it. Same with the Fed. The best approach is to end it right then, right there, as you would any other destructive force.
Wrong. Businesses that need government subsidization to survive are a drain on the economy. If they were using their resources wisely and efficiently they would survive without intervention. The government often hampers their ability to do that, but offerring subsidees as a cure for this is like breaking someone's leg to cure their headache.
To quote Mises, "When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?" There will be nothing left. That's the point.
Grant this is true, "give us money or we'll attack you" seems to be the other countries' approach then. We're better off destroying their militaries and annexing them at that point. Otherwise, if Kellog's can figure out how many boxes of Raisin Bran to sell at each Wal Mart in the US, I think they and other businesses can accomplish the same thing in foreign countries without government intervention. There is no need to have any kind of ties with any country any where. Unless of course our goal is to engage in constant quid pro quo with other countries to try and loot as much of the world to the benefit of our politicians and their friends' wallets.
Isolationism does not equal noninterventionism.
No, private industry. I like it, the government completely screws up our educational system, and we should keep it and pour more money into it. Makes sense. The government is the reason our educational system is so screwed up. Get them out of it period. I would actually favor a constitutional ammendment to ban the use of government funds for any and all education, similar to the ammendments many states passed against using tax dollars to build roads after they experienced the massive cock up government road building was early in our country's history.
They are the children's parents, enough said. To that extent the market would decide what constitutes a good education. As with every other product the market delivers, you could expect quantity, quality and variety to go up and costs to go down.
No, we haven't... But, grant that you're correct, exactly what makes you think corporations running wild is the only alternative to our current mixed pseudosocialist state? The answer is because you have a typical liberal mindset, you can't imagine the government not doing something about anything. So, the government either sits on coroporations or helps them rape people, or at least turns a blind eye to such practices. It's never possible the liberal mindset to see the possibility of a government that simply enforces property rights. Mostly this because the concept is a foreign one to most people living today.
Hope you like unemployment. One of the worst effects of unions is to drive wages of unionized workers up. In a free economy when wages of say electricians go up it's a signal of increasing demand for those workers. People who go for those jobs are then rewarded, the wages (prices) equalize as supply rises to meet the demand. When unions get involved they force the wages of workers higher than the market price. This causes people to flock to the trade/union and try to get in, however fewer people will end up employed than otherwise would have at that price. You end up with an artificially increased pool of unemployed skilled workers chasing nonunion jobs, which gives employers more power and lowers general wages. Glad you're happy with that situation. The only unions that are successful without government intervention are those whose workers have an inflexible demand for their labor.
How about neither? Is it possible in your world for someone to live and make their own decisions and not have them made for them? If something can be shown to be harmful a tax can be laid on it's emmission relative to the amount emitted. This internalizes the cost and gives the company an incentive to seek alternative, clean methods. It also allows companies that are releasing negligible amounts of the material to not have to change to accomodate some ridiculous law which should not apply to them. The command and control method now used forces everyone to reduce emissions of x, even those companies that release unharmful traces. However, the command and control method gives more power to beauracrats so it's currently the more favored method.
Yup, it's called getting rid of well over 90% of the cost of government by simply stopping it from doing almost everything it's doing.
Despite my generally freedom based views, I would gladly flay to death anyone who actively supports the war on drugs.
Anarchy or your limited vision of the subject? Private money was fairly common and actually still is in some places. As the governments gain control over the currency of a nation they tend to **** it up beyond belief. The government's power to inflate and otherwise manipulate the money supply is their most destructive power.
Look up isolationism and then look up noninterventionism. The two are not the same policy. Once more, military entanglements are not necessary to have economic relations with a country, nor are mercantilist/industrialist treaties necessary. It's a concept called free trade, and despite the fact that it's meaning has been perverted and the monicker adopted by its very enemies, it's still the best way to do things.
You are, quite a bit in fact. A few books that might help explain:
I'm no fan of democracy, so I probably wouldn't mind. The idea that if 50%+1 of the people think something is a good idea, that makes it a good idea, is unbelievably naive and dangerous. I'd suggest you look up a short lecture by Hans Herman Hoppe in which he compared pre social democracy crime rates, tax loads, economic growth, government employments, et al, with post social democracy numbers. Generally speaking the more democratized a country gets the worse it gets. PRice indexes go flying upward. Inflation runs out of control. Government grows at an astounding rate. Military intervention increases at an astounding rate, etc.
Smart men make smart plans. "Workfare"... isn't that what the Republicans called it? Teach people, give them the necessary skills to succeed and help them become proud, well-paid workers. Stop passively encouraging families to have more kids so they can receive a bigger monthly balance. Persons who have more children after enrolling in a public assistance program should be penalized for choosing to continue to procreate without the money to support themselves. "Families First" is a joke. As if being single and not popping out 5 babies makes you a second class citizen. If anything, those that place less of a burden on the state should be treated better. Again, just "ending" all social assistance programs would leave thousands dead of starvation and cause mass rioting. You're thinking in the viewpoint of the rich man in the ivory tower. Try switching to that of the beggar in the street or the family man struggling to feed his family. You'd change tunes real quick.
But it wouldn't work that way in real life. In real life when you eliminate the people in charge of state affairs, treasury, agriculture, commerce, health and human services, housing and urban development, transportation, energy, education, homeland security... you end up with a lot of problems with no "here" for the buck to stop at. Nothing left is what you'd have to govern the U.S..
I'm not talking about giving everyone money not to attack us. I'm talking about peace agreements. Now I'm sorry, but in today's world it's somewhat unrealistic when you are the most powerful country in the world to expect that you can just pursue what you call a "non-interventionist" policy and be looked upon as anything other than selfish and socially irresponsible on a global level. Realistically America can try not to intervene all it wants, sooner or later it's going to happen. The question is, will we have strong allies and world opinion on our side or will we go it alone as in this silly war against Iraq? I prefer to think realistically and not in highly theoretical and excessively optimistic views. Weren't those the kind of opinions that got us into the war in Iraq anyway? "It'll be over in 3 weeks," and "The people there are crying out for freedom." Guess what, it wasn't. Guess what, they weren't.
Wait. Let me stop laughing at that statement a minute.
The problem isn't that the government devises educational plans, it's that the wrong people are put in charge of these plans. The ideal democratic republic government is a halfway mixture of the "pride and responsibility" aspects of Nazi socialism and the "free trade" and more importantly, free speech of a capitalist society. The ideal environment in which to ceate a better country with a lower crime rate is to make them proud and happy. Proud of themselves, proud of their achievements, proud of their town, proud to be American. Dubya had this opportunity to unite Americans after 9/11 and he blew it by bending to capitalism above patriotism. America needed strong leadership and all it got was "go back to your shopping, that'll show 'em". That's why, for all that is said that is bad about John Kerry I really appreciated his ideas on instilling the youth with a sense of community service and pride, and encouraging public service. What your plans lack is balance. A government run as you suggest would be at the mercy of trade and capital even as you talk of private currency. Private industry does everything "on the cheap" just as in the case of the railways inspecting brakes only on failure. You talk of insurance companies catching on but with the relative rarity of major catastrophic failure of brakes the railway takes a calculated risk and would likely fudge the facts to make it appear that they had done nothing wrong in the ensuing investigation. This is what happens when you leave corporations without oversight. They will not oversee themselves in matters of public and social responsibility. This has been proven. Enron didn't. Tyco didn't. WorldCom didn't. Etc., etc. Money and market dominance are the motivating factors of capitalism. Money and control, the motivating factors of government. This is why most economies today are mixed between the two. What matters most in determining how successful that mixture is is who is at the top of the pyramid, not the bottom. I'll post more later.
My theories are not optimistic, nor are they mine per se, as they've been developed in much greater depth by people a lot smarter than me. My opinion, backed up by reality in my view, is that the less government, the better. That is not to say problems wouldn't exist, just that they would be smaller, have less impact and be less troublesome under such a system.
That statement alone suggests a severe misunderstanding of basic economics.
Not ideologically slanted at all...
Bad idea. One, it sucks money out of the private sector which could have been used much more efficiently there. Two, the government does not have some crystal ball as to what the economy needs. No one does. As a result they're as likely to train people in useless skills as useful.
I've been there and done that. Thinking like the beggar in the street is an insanely wrong way to approach the problem: he's a beggar in the street, obviously for whatever reason does not have his act together. His wants and needs aren't relevant to a basic discussion of how they're met in the least destructive way. The least destructive way would be for him to get off his ass and work for himself. If he's incapable, he's got my charity dollar. If in the end that still wasn't enough, then perhaps government support.
Implicit in this statement is that there is absolutely no other way to accomodate these demands of society than through government. Sounds like a very limited view of the world to me.
Sounds like you've bought the party line hook, line and sinker.
That is your limit of view on this issue? Interventionism is what's made us so many enemies the world over. Having strong allies? Making friends with someone else's enemy is a good way to get enemies yourself. I'd suggest a review of works by the old scholastics who were the first to develop international law concepts, more specifically laws that were in large part guiding principles to protect the rights of neutrals. You're stuck in the 20th century ideology of war or nothing, Brooklyn. There was a time, not too long before Woodrow Wilson, where noninterventionism was considered honorable and correct, and it worked. Wars still existed, but they were limited and largely practical in nature. Hans Herman Hoppe has a good lecture and a good many articles out on the differences between pre and post WWI foreign policy, good reads that I'd recommend.
So do I, which I guess makes this a useless reply. It's ever been the call of people engaging in poor practices for everyone just to "be practical" or "be realistic." 'Practicality' and 'realism' have been the excuses for a great number of boondoggles and outright evil acts in history.
I don't support the war in Iraq, so what's the point here?
That's what they kept saying about the Soviet Union. Socialism would work if we could just get the right people in charge. Just like FEMA is supposed to work now Brown is gone. It's not the people, it's the system. It. Can't. Work. Like it or not, there are economic laws that don't simply change based on who is in power. You could take Jesus Christ himself and put him in charge of our government and he'd have fucked it up completely in a few years. It simply can't work.
Nor is anybody suggesting they will. However the government is not the only group capable of making such oversight possible. It is the only group that does so involuntarily and forces everyone to a single standard no matter what their risk reward trade off might be. Plus, by doing so it greatly reduces the viability of alternatives, making people dependent on it for such services. Go back to the schools, we pour twice as much money per student into them than private schools get, and even after any special circumstances are taken into account they quite simply can't get kids educated to the same standard. And don't doubt for a second that some of the most well educated and well meaning people in our country are involved in those schools and the higher administration. The system will not work because there is no incentive for it to work, period. There is no accountability, screw ups bring in more money not less.
The companies you pointed out were working within the frameworks the government gave them to work with. Government makes laws with looholes and vagueries, corporations use them to their advantage, as does every single tax payer in the nation, and when the **** hits the fan we blame... the corporations. Brilliant.
Once more, this statement shows a deep misunderstanding of history, how government works, how economies work, and how the world in general works. It doesn't matter who is in charge. The system itself, full of perverse incentives and no accountability, is the problem. The market at least has accountability. You don't like someone's products, you don't buy them. You don't like someone's trains, you don't ride them. The key aspect of choice is what makes the market superior to other means because no one is forced to live by anyone else's standards. If you want a certain level of safety that's higher than most, it will be available at a premium higher than the average. If you're willing to take risks and aren't endangering anyone else, you'd have that choice too.
I'm all for a smaller government, as in a government with less personal restrictions and less overhead. This is not the same as eliminating government regulation entirely which is essentially what you're proposing. Government is there to do just that- to govern. To establish laws and a viable economic system under which its people can prosper. In the case of the U.S., ideally with the least restrictions necessary to ensure fair practices and a continuously improving financial situation for all.
Not from what I see you suggesting. The rich would, having no government challenges to corporate gain, become richer. The poor, who you claim would work in a "free market" which would "motivate them to gain" is like Reagan's trickle-down theory. It doesn't work. Reaganomics destroyed the middle class and pushed people into upper and lower classes more than ever before. CEOs and high ranking executives now have exponentially higher salaries. Minimum wage hasn't risen much though. In fact most Republicans would like to lower it. Wal Mart is a perfect example of a "free market" corporation. They do everything possible to avoid regulation and take advantage of every break they can get. They import goods created by workers in foreign countries making 20 cents an hour working 12+ hour days. They flout labor laws, immigration work laws, wage laws, trade policies and traditional good practice. To avoid insuring their employees they pass off the cost of health care to state Medicaid and assistance programs and create a financial burden on the proleteriat. They are able to do this because their average employee makes so little that they meet income level requirements for poverty assistance. Yet Wal Mart is among the largest and most profitable corporations in the world. This is the consequence of a free market. You create a country ruled by corporations. The market has accountability? Only to profit. Companies like this are as "interventionist" as the U.S. in foreign affairs. What makes it any different? Everything, whether a Federal government or a corporate board is a governing entity. What incentive does a corporation have to provide safe, effective products to consumers if there is no threat of penalties? Profit? Companies have proven time and again that the can manufacture garbage and make tons of money off it. Slick marketing sells best, not quality or effectiveness. Ask MuscleTech about that.
So you hire independent, well paid commerce experts to plan the trends and chart the country's needs. What does a successful corporation do to determine the needs of its consumers? It's not impossible to achieve. For instance, the country has a statistically verifiable shortage of, say, pharmacists (another example of the effect of slick marketing on other industries). So one job training course might focus on introductory medical jobs, with meaningful job counseling in the right direction. The idea of "workfare" and job training is to give a hand up, not a handout. You're looking at government as a big mess and I'm looking at it as a bloated corporation which needs to reorganize in order to be successful and profitable. Consider the U.S. government a corporation in which its citizens are its minority shareholders. The better off they are, the better off the corporation will be as well.
All you're saying is that poor people don't want to work. They don't want to be successful. They are unmotivated and that is their cause for failure. I'm sorry but I don't believe that. Yes, some poor people are lazy, through ignorance or the lack of hope or belief in themselves that they can achieve better. These circumstances are caused by a cycle of problems. One is lack of jobs. In some places, the best job you can hope for is at McDonalds or Popeye's. If you can't afford a higher education and the lower educational system has failed to provide you with the necessary skills to gain a good-paying job then what are you, an ignorant poor person in a ghetto, supposed to do? Walk out and hope that some Fortune 500 company is dumb enough to hire you with no experience and no education? Many of the poor people in this country just need hope. It's a recurring theme in urban films from Boyz n the Hood to Hustle and Flow. Why does much of our young enlisted military come from poor neighborhoods? Because the military gives poor people hope. A steady paycheck. The promise of funds for education. A way to learn skills and earn honor and respect. It's not much but it is hope. That's what this country needs more of and I don't mean by a bigger military. I mean by giving people real goals and real assistance- the kind that helps them to overcome their situation and teaches them to help others up when they get there. Eliminating the government's role in, well, governing doesn't achieve that. In fact it achieves quite the opposite. Selfish greed and squandering, criminal activity and addictive drug use in poor communities are all by-products of hopelessness. If a young man's career choices lay between Burger King and drug dealing, which do you think he is more likely to gravitate toward? Remember, hand up, not handout. Increasing subsidization wouldn't happen if more people were learning skills, getting good jobs and making more money, would it? No, because those people would be well above the poverty line and no longer need or be eligible for support.
The government can no more "establish a viable economic system" than they can establish a viable physics system. Once again, a deep misunderstanding of how economics works. It is a bottom up order, not top down. It comes into being spontaneously, not by government decree, as a response to scarcity. There is also no way for the government to provide a continuously improving financial situation for all. For one, the removal of risk removes the possiblity for profit. Stopping the momentary financial misfortune of some has to be done at the expense of others and by interfering with the normal market function of resource reallocation for another. This takes the already existing market function and makes it less efficient. "Fair practices" beyond the protection of private property rights are ambiguous and subjective at best for another. A lot of people consider in unfair that they have to pay for anything. A general consensus is meaningless, any such consensus will result in property rights violations, lead to market uncertainty and general market disfunction to varying degrees. That would in fact be how I would characterize government as its best and most accurate description: the mechanism through which some seek to, and often to succeed at screwing others for their own personal benefit.
"[T]he economic policy of laissez-faire is described as "trickle-down" theory. One way to turn the tables on this old canard is to describe the welfare state as based on a "trickle down" theory. Vast amounts of tax revenue are transferred to a gigantic, swollen, wealthy, bureaucratic, inefficient, monolithic state in the naive hope that enough of this revenue will trickle down to the poor and needy."
Gasp!? God forbid...!
This ignores the government's primary role in destroying our health care system, making the costs so ridiculously high. One example, ER visits. By forcing ERs as far as they can to accept patients regardless of whether or not they can pay, the cost goes up for everyone. Another example would be the AMA and the near monopoly status handed to them by the government late in the 19th century. This plus the continuous flow of costly regulations, costs which the medical community needs to recoup somehow, cause an unending increase in the cost of health care to the point where we now have pseudo rationing through HMOs.
You are so off base here it is ridiculous, but it's a typical liberal ploy. Look at the world today that the government screwed up and blame it on capitalism. And your claim that Wal Mart disemploys people is ridiculous as well. For one, the economy is not static. If you can't deal with the fact that your job is not guaranteed become a priest and live in poverty. That's life. Two, you're arguing against productivity, which is the same arguments put forward against automation of all kinds. After all, when railroads were invented the stage coach business sufferred. Think of all those poor, unemployed people who used to drive the stages, the people who raised the horses, etc. What about when looms were invented, or the printing press, and the jobs those machines replaced and made unnecessary? All those poor people who were unemployed...
Where do they get that profit? From consumers. Are consumers forced to give it? No, they have a choice. That's the only accountability that's needed. The only way a company can continue to profit is to continue to please consumers. That is, absent government intervention and government granted monopolies.
Just a thought, but killing your customers tends to lower your profit potential. If a company knowingly does something to hurt someone, knowingly puts a product on the market that is inherently harmful and lies about it, there are basic common law traditions, criminal and civil, that can take care of those situations. There's rarely a need for extra 'regulation,' especially since such regulation adds a cost to products which is not necessary, and can even become ridiculously outdated but will still be enforced even when it is irrelevant.
Corporations guess. There is no way to know beforehand what consumers want. It's the risk that creates the possibility for profit. You CAN'T plan the economy. No one knows "the country's needs." It is a continual process of discovery over time, and when the task is undertaken by the government there is no way to weed out the failures. Even the country's most successful entrepreneaurs have a past riddled with failures. But the risk of those failure was taken on by them and their investors alone. Were they to have worked for the government those failures would have led to more money infusions to follow the same exact business plan and wasted resources.
This is exactly what the USSR did. Witness their vast success. Once more, you clearly have a massively deep misunderstanding of economics. No one has access to the type of information needed to plan the economy on that level. Attempts to do so are what LEAD to massive shortages and surplusses. You don't get shortages and surpluses in a free market because there is a built in mechanism to deal with them. If there is a surplus the price(wage) for a given trade goes down and the job attracts less people. If there is a pronounced scarcity the price(wage) goes up and this attracts more people to the trade.
Some are, some aren't. Most I've met want to work more than any other people I've know, but can't for various reasons. One of my functions at my job is to help such people find work by getting the employment openings from our clients to various charity and state organizations. The charities are more than willing to help. Last time we tried to hire in Jersey we had to spend Christ knows how much time and money to aquire a license of some kind to, of all things, get the government to post a job flyer in their state employment office and on their internet site. With the time and money we spent getting that license we could have hired a guy off the street to paper the flyers all over northern Jersey. But, that likely would have gotten us a fine or two thousand under some ridiculous law against public displays of that kind. Another great bit of nonsense recently took place with my Gulf Coast clients. Jobs aplenty down there that I could advertise until I'm blue in the face. What happens when we communicate these jobs to the local schools and organizations? Well, I get about 75-100 calls a day because of the wide area we're dealing with telling me that unless we have an Equal Opportunity Employer statement on file from our clients, the jobs can't be posted. So I have to waste literally days of my time, putting of other productive work I could be doing, faxing and emailling EOE forms back and forth all day. Companies have to swear a solemn oath before the altar of the government that they will hire blacks and hispanics before a job can be posted. And of course, each company has to allocate some of it's capital to make sure it's "in compliance" with this another ridiculous regulations. Capital that could have been invested in the company and its workforce. Great way to help poor people, I hope we follow this model you suggest because it works soooo well. I love the fact that we're talking about this particular issue, because the biggest obstacle in my line of work - recruiting, sourcing, workforce consulting, etc. - is always the frigging government. We have to swear to be nice, to be pretty, to treat with respect, any and all people who come before us looking for a job, and spend all the necessary money to comply with the respective regulations of that process. We have to collect their info, report it to the state, make sure they're paying their taxes now!, keep ridiculously detailed records for ridiculous lengths of time just in case we get audited by some government busybody, etc., and spend all the necessary money to comply with the respective regulations of those processes.
See above. Arguing against productivity increases, which NECESSITATE a reallocation of labor, is arguing against the very advancement of the economy itself. Look up Paul Krugman's work and then the refutations of his nonsense, which are many and numerous, as he's one the main proponents of this kind of thinking. Once again, you have a very deep and blatantly obvious misunderstanding of how an economy works. It CAN'T be managed, it CAN'T be planned, it CAN'T be nudged in one direction or another without negative consequences of varying severity.
All true to varying degrees. In which case he's no different than most of our presidents since Lincoln, and so I guess relatively speaking that might make him "not bad" to some people. And as long as he's bombing brown people in an arguably inconsequential foreign country, that will keep some segment of the population happy too. There have been positives to his time in office as well. He finally touched the social security third rail in a major way. No major response, but at least he got his feet wet. People will hopefully be less afraid to approach this and other once touchy, third rail issues in the future, like for example the war on drugs. He's a polarizing figure to most people. They either hate him or love him. Me, I don't give a ****. One president either way isn't going to improve or screw my life up in any significant way for the most part. But, because he's polarizing Republicans overlook his massive spending and Democrats blame him for every evil on the Earth. Both are wrong, but to me at least on this issue the Democrats are more amusing.
:toofunny:
That wasn't your claim. You said Bush had undertaken "[a]lmost a complete deregulation of businesses." This is complete nonsense on its face and not worth more than a laugh at its lunacy.
The surplus could pay off some national debt for one. A tax cut wasn't really needed and all the future tax cuts were really unnecessary.
Uh oh, I'm afraid I agree with you on something :blink: Just kidding. I think that the quality of education should get better but the opportunities are there for teenagers to better themselves. At my High School, the drop out rate was extremely high; so high that your driver's license was suspended for six months for dropping out.
Whats funny about this is that now it seems like jobs (Engineering ones anyway) send you right back to Graduate School once you get hired. I have no problem with people failing either. The problem with College is that its not about higher education any more. Now its about quotas. People don't give a **** about education as much as they care about how many women are in Mathematics or Sciences.
$8.8 billion.
I agree but my point is I want America to be respected by everyone; an example of a country where people can aspire to be. They don't have to be afraid of getting tortured if they mentioned they don't like Kim Jong-Il or all those doctors in Turkmenistan who promised to help out the leader, not the citizens there. Thats the way I want America to be seen. As inspiration.
Of course, as long as the money is right, political parties will turn against their principles.
:icon_lol:
This is news indeed since the private economy has managed to take once massively costly items like TVs, computers and cars and essentially made them available to anyone at prices almost anyone can afford. Either there is something incredible and magical about education that makes it immune to the market forces that affect every single other product or service in the exact same way, or your statement is incorrect. I'm inclided to think the latter is the correct option. After all the manufacturers of TVs, basketballs and footballs, boomboxes, snazzy sneakers, fast food services and chrome spinner rims don't take into account the relative paucity of the people in those districts, but in my last trip into the ghetto for a client I saw no shortage of those items.
Many state laws require people take out insurance policies on their cars, but this doesn't mean the state or federal government needs to own the insurance companies too.
Do you noticed how all of your examples of private industry making things affordable are all products produced overseas by cheap labor? And fast food? Why is fast food so cheap and fast? Because its filled with CRAP. I don't think anybody on here is going to step up and say McDonald's makes quality food.
So where is this money going to come from? I mean seriously, if you cut out all taxes, then only people attending would pay right? So it'd be tuition. The school I work at has 700 students. 41% are low income. This is a former factory town (Amaco/Standard and Clark) not an inner city. There are no fancy suburbs or subdivisions. It's a basic middle income town. So how would this be affordable? You would still need quality teachers, so you need competive pay. You still need secratarial, maintance, janitorial, cafeteria workers, bus drivers, etc. That's a lot of people and their money has to come from somewhere. Plus you have the overhead costs of supplies and utilities bills.
Yes but driving a car is a privelage not a right. Also the government controls, regulates and pays for the highways. So I am to assume that you think an education is a product and not a right?
No, but that's not my point. If there is a demand for something and it can be done, it will be delivered by the market. It's the profit incentive. As for the cheap labor, you're assuming the only business model for education is the current one used by public education. That's blaming the problems of the government on the private sector. The private market would provide a variety of choices, from things similar to what we have now to targetted courses for learning trades or specific subjects. There can be distance learning, at home learning, predesigned packages, endless options requiring different amounts of resources and labor.
See above. You're limiting possiblities to the current model of education. Of course it would be impossible to fund our current public education system privately, because no private investor in his right mind would pour a cent into such a wasteful, ridiculously inefficient structure. That is not the only option there is, unless of course the private market is stopped from discovering and developing other options for people. Yes, lower income families would have differnt options than rich people. I'd rather they had more and different options than being forced into the one size fits all failure we currently have.
No, I do not belive education is a right, not in the sense you seem to imply. Rights do not impose costs on other people. The right to free speech doesn't mean everyone gets their own subsidized daily newspaper. Nor should the right to do something be confused with the ability to do something. I have the right to buy a Lexus, but I have no right to force anyone else to pay for it if i can't afford it myself. People certainly have the right to persue an education for themselves or their children, but definitely not to force others to hand it to them. At least in my opinion, I admit people can disagree on this issue and the fact that kids didn't exactly ask to be here kind of greys it a bit.
That's because no one knows. I would say you're approaching the idea from the wrong mindset. There are, or ideally should be no rules other than don't steal and don't hurt in the private sector. Any plan that works would be acceptable, any plan that turns enough of a profit for someone in some way will succeed. And profits doesn't mean money, it just means a person is marginally satisfied with the trade/how they spent their time for whatever reason. The basic model is there's a demand for a product or a product someone thinks there is a demand for, they solicit investors and get going on delivering it. It's what happened for example in the PC market. A lot of the people most deeply involved in the computer business before PCs thought there was no real reason for regular people to have them. Now there are people who couldn't see living without them. The whole point of the private sector is that it doesn't have to stick to strict rules of how you do this, and how you deliver that. There is no plan per se. There's just the demand, the possible demand, and the risk, and people can deal with those in countless ways. For existing models I'd point to existing distance learning programs. Some schools offer lectures on DVD, CD, etc. Some schools exist for the teaching of specific trades, business skills, languages, etc.
Sounds like you're biased against the idea to begin with. Since there are already a decent amount of private schools of all types thriving right now, even in light of a virtual government monopoly on education, it seems a lot less insanely optimistic than you would indicate. After all, those schools are still managing to pull in profits when there is a "free" alternative available. There are however lots of government rules that make competition hard.
Nothing but their own ability to keep their customers satisfied. That's the point.
Who guarantees there are enough TVs to go around, or cars? Who guarantees there are enough tomatoes on the shelves at the super market, or apples or steaks? Somehow those things manage to stay stocked at a reasonable level to satisfy everyone's demand for them. It isn't magic, just economics.
The market going up and down isn't a general reflection of its stability. It is a general reflection of government intervention however. On any given day, when the market is up or down, when you look at a snap shot of business conditions the vast majority are pulling in profits. They might not be making a killing but they are surviving and usually thriving. That's the weeding mechanism of the market in place, generally speaking people who run their businesses poorly lose and don't get another chance, unless the government subsidizes them with easy credit and similar things. There can be ups and downs depending on market conditions, but when those are general responses to consumer demand, investors, etc., they are good things because they represent the self balancing of the market. The wave like movement of the market in boom in bust cycles is generally the result of government intervention, credit expansion and investment misallocation. While this can make investment projects temporally far from the retail/consumer market very iffy, generally the business cycle does not hit the retail markets hard if at all. Even during the great depression those markets only went down 10-20%. When a business does go under in the retail market it would generally be because of competition, which means some other business is satisfying consumers' demands better, cheaper or both. That's a good thing.
How have the public schools done that, except by making it equally horrible for everyone? That education would not be the same for everyone is, once more, the point. Not everyone has a Rolls Royce or a plasma TV. But, almost everyone does have access to various versions of cars and TVs that are within their price ranges.
If the government employs them they are not private sector jobs, plain and simple. No matter what calculations the government might use to try and fool people into believing they are being paid in line with their demand, it is essentially economic nonsense. Such things can't be calculated aprior, only discovered through the market. Even if the government just owned the institutions and contracted out the jobs, the amount of educational facilities is not market determined and so therefore neither are the amounts of administrators needed nor are their salaries. Further points on this below.
Wrong. That's like saying contractors compete for each other for defense contracts. Technically true, but competing for a government contract or a government job is not the same as competing for a private contract or job. If anything the tax resources used to pay the salary of such people have been pulled out of the private sector and have destroyed other potential productive options for the use of the capital. That's opportunity cost. There is also no guarantee of productivity once in the position because of the perverse incentive structure of public sector jobs. If the market justification for the position is interrupted at any step of the way by public intervention and decision making, it basically destroys the whole process.
I find that and 'interesting' view of supply and demand to say the least, given the above.
Which, granting your above argument which I don't but let's do so for argument's sake here, will cause an even greater shortage of such people. That's what price caps do.
Yes. I've already said there will be a variety of choices, and that includes low income choices and it stands to reason those would not be the best of options, but they would be options that weren't there before. And the incentive structure inherent in the market would ensure they would be the best for the price. Everyone would be able to get the best they could afford, and they would have more options too, unlike now where everyone gets the mediocre to the worst, and the rich are the only ones who can make an actual choice. It's that ability to choose which will give the greatest advantage. Once the middle and lower income people have the option to choose the market can begin the process of honing in on their actual needs and wants as well, instead of the government imposed one size fits all curriculum there is now. There's also a virtual guarantee the methods used would improve because there's no unions or voters to please or consciences to salve, just consumer demand for better and better products at each given price point. That everyone cannot afford a Rolls Royce isn't justification for nationalizing the automotive industry, especially since everyone knows the end result will be cars similar to those once made in Russia and East Germany; unreliable oil burning gas-guzzlers in bland designs that necessitate a huge tax burden.
This makes no sense. So you are saying just because state/federal money is involved in paying for a job it somehow automatically erases a competetive job market?
Yes. Competition for manufactured demand is not a free market by any stretch of the imagination, and it's barely a competitive market.
Price caps cause shortages, yes. Honestly trying to argue otherwise is like arguing 2+2 doesn't equal 4. It's an economic certainty. They will generally appear at the margins first, which you can see to a degree in the recent free agent fiasco if football. Cap their salaries they will go somewhere else or not work. Admitedly the salaries in professional sports are very high and it is possible that even capped there might not be an immediate shortage because the cap is high enough that there is no pronounced effect at first; the salaries still available satisify most player's demands. It would be lik government capping the price of gas at 50 dollars a gallon. Meaningless now, but it would start to manifest itself as a shortage if the market price every wanted to push above that amount. That a similar cap be placed on a much lower salaried position would lead to a more pronounced and immediate effect is basically a given.
Not by any stretch, but I'd say it's just as disappointing that so many people refuse to see the possibilities and many benefits of a free system and keep forcing everyone to throw money into the hole public education has become, to the point where any attempt at change and more specifically change to allow the least fortunate to have some option is opposed with such vehement force by the very teachers and administrators who are supposed to be educating those kids. At the very least that indicates to me there are some conflicting interests involved in the system. In a free system there is one interest: keep your customers happy so they don't go anywhere else. With public education the approach is not to outperform other options, but to outlaw them.
Not really. It's to make money. If public education is private, you would have one of the largest corporations in America. It would also be one of the most influential institutions in the country. You will have advertising in schools. You will have food courts with fast food. Maybe you don't think this is a big deal, but I think it's horrible now, the amount of "sponsorship" that goes on currently. I can't imagine what it would be like when actual companies have a stake in the schools. If Pepsi owns Lay's and Pizza Hut/Taco Bell/KFC, it's not a far stretch to imagine them wanting to get "involved" in education.
You accomplish the latter by accomplishing the former though. That's how the system works. Companies don't make money if people don't buy their products. Not unless they use the government to force purchases or limit alternatives to a product with inflexible demand.
Jeff, you have to start seeing other options than the current model. One institution? There's isn't one manufacturer/distributor of any other good or service in the world unless such an arrangement is government enforced. Why do you think education would be any different? It's like people in the former USSR saying they shouldn't privatize television because there'd only be one network, it ignores the reality that in a free system it just doesn't work that way.
Unless of course the customers didn't want it. And if they didn't mind, who honestly cares?
That is all happening under the government run system...
What you're missing though is that the main profit they get from the schools would be based on the kids' educations, not how many bags of chips and bottles of soda they sold. While that might be an additional way to earn a profit and some companies might try it, it isn't guaranteed to happen.
No, it's not. But Honda's ATV business doesn't necessarily intrude on their auto business, despite some crossover I'm sure, because those in charge are aware they are seperate. I'm sure the ATV business comes it at appropriate times, like some info ater buying a trailer for a Ridgeline, etc. Right now those companies see schools as a source of juicy government contracts, which is basically a guaranteed overpayment for products and services. Even if Pepsi owned and ran education institutions of some kind the involvement of the soft drink/fast food arm of its business would only enter into the realm of their education business to the extent the customers of the education business would tolerate.
Eliminate the "free" option and I'm so sure you'd be surprised by the sudden surge of business in this area that I'd literally be willing to bet my car you're wrong. What you're ignoring is companies also had a problem thriving in the old USSR, not because people didn't want the products and not because the companies weren't capable of delivering them, but because of the debilitating blow a 'free' option delivers to the private market. There's also the compounded problem that the 'free' option isn't free but is paid for with taxes, which means capital getting sucked out of the private sector en masse, used in ways where efficiency is not guaranteed by the profit incentive, and causing countless opportunity costs.
Yes, and they do technically cause shortages which is why companies are always hiring new people to replenish their stock. The thing with employees is that they are human and develop and are worth more skillwise over time generally speaking. Once a skilled worker hits the cap of their current position they either stay happy with that pay/job or move up or out of the company. That people often do move up and out makes it not a true price control cap, however a 'shortage' still manifests at the upper margin in that position, which is why a company will have to rehire people, train them and have them work their way up as others did. The shortage is in a sense unseen because out of everyone who left the system after they hit the cap, a percentage would likely still be there if it was not in place to begin with. It's a shifting pattern and manifests to varying degrees over time due to shifting skill sets, the introduction of new workers, etc. The lower the cap on salary, the more pornounced and immediate the effect is likely to be. You can be sure that, should a company cap the salary for any position below the market rate for such a job, they would experience an immediate and profound shortage. While normal caps you see across companies are common, they do technically cause shortages at the margins and could disrupt employee flow/turnover to a certain extent. They have an advantage though in that through competition the upper and lower levels for certain positions have been discovered and are also allowed to flex over time to incorporate changing market conditions. Government schools have no such advantage nor comparable market discovered price to rely on. A dictated salary cap would be just that, a beauracratic decision.
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