sjw

It's not just a next door perspective and it is not a "conspiracy"; it is literally their doctrine. George and Bob are just behaving like Morons. Shayne

If by "conspiracy" you mean "openly declared intent for Mormons to dictate what the law of the land is", then yes. If by "conspiracy" you mean "let's see if we can find some way to make Shayne looks smaller than me", then no. I'm simply pointing out that it's part of the Mormon doctrine that they feel they have the prerogative (and are predestined) to preempt secular rule of law and institute theocracy. It's no secret. Shayne

Nope, not offended, just annoyed by your pettiness. Is this a reasonable representation of your view?: "It is hopeless, pointless, and even perverse to expect a political system to ever be instituted that, as a matter of principle (exceptions only due to individual error and rare corruption), respects individual rights." Feel free to rephrase to match your view. Shayne

Perhaps you are unaware George of the open Mormon plot to get control of the Federal Government. It's part of their prophesies. I appreciate your rationale, but please, anyone but Romney (even Huntsman would be OK -- he's Mormon but he's not orthodox). Edit: OK, Romney is better than Santorum... Shayne

I won't continue replying to your dishonest spin. I will discuss why you feel the urge to spin (which is evidently unstoppable and perhaps even bordering on psychosis). It seems important for you to believe that modern society is reasonably just and fair, that all individuals have a reasonable amount of liberty to achieve their chosen purpose if it is a reasonable one, yes? If you were to learn that this was not the case, that would be a rather severe blow, yes? I can't help you if you won't be honest here. Shayne

Thanks for bringing your motivations out into the open. This is something that we can work with. Your other nonsense was just your passive-aggressive method of furthering this motive, so that explains why it didn't make any sense. Let's see if we can nail down your premises here. Please try to be direct and honest and not passive-aggressive. Let's start with something simple. Is your position is that there are not gross injustices against the individual in modern society? Is it your position that there's really just not much to complain about? Shayne

My position is that crony capitalism creates conditions that 1: provides political energy to OWS; 2: gives at least some appearance of OWS being in some regards based in legitimate grievance. I think the best response to this is to first recognize that yes, there is crony capitalism, and that it's bad, that it leads to all of the actually bad effects OWS is complaining about, and then to point out how communism is not the right solution for those problems. Selene: please don't read too much into my posting of that diagram, I just threw it in here because I saw it and thought it was mildly relevant. I don't think in terms of Venn diagrams myself, I just think in terms of how things ought to be vs. the various ways in which things aren't that way. Categorizing how people react to a big mess isn't particularly interesting to me. Identifying what wouldn't be a mess is more interesting. Shayne

Risk in a particular small business can be high, but when averaged over enough of them to be economically equivalent to a big corporation, I don't see how you know that, especially if we abolish the corporate welfare legislation. Again, you're comparing apples to oranges regarding risk. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm quite sure you can't just issue stock to all-comers in whatever venue and amounts and terms and conditions you prefer. Regardless, you certainly can't do it without going through an arbitrary process, paying hefty bills to arbitrary authorities, and complying to certain arbitrary terms. This kind of thing is of course inherently more onerous for a small business than it is for a large one, ergo the criticism I gave earlier applies, ergo, you are again talking with no apparent purpose, leading one to conclude something about your unstated purpose. The "goalpost" is to show that the laws tend to favor big business. I recognize that your motive is to ignore that and pursue some untoward agenda of your own, ergo you pretend that the goalpost was ever something other than that and hope people don't notice what you're doing. OK, you're too thick-headed to waste any more time on. I'll probably just ignore your future posts. Shayne

Selene, put a different way, I don't expect the fascist right to dig up these facts. Nor even right-libertarians. Only left-libertarians might be interested in them. (I'm neither left nor right but I see elements of truth on both sides). Shayne

I'm suspicious of both the left and the right, but I see no reason to question the facts listed. If you see a reason (beyond political leanings) to question them, then I am interested in it. Shayne

I'm not in favor of big fast (and poorly-engineered) changes Michael. If we had the will, I think we could change things in about 20 years time without causing a lot of unintended bad consequences, but that's not the problem. The problem is that people generally can't fit in their minds the ideal you'd be moving toward. Ergo you don't really move toward it. The main solution I advocate is to re-open the Frontier and let people exercise their right of self-determination again. These people would show the rest of the world how it's done, just as America showed how it could be done better than before. So the main problem as I see it is that whole planet is locked down into a totalitarian scheme and that prevents humanity from moving forward politically. Shayne

http://politicaltick...bate/?hpt=hp_t1 Shayne

I see the two more as perspectives than as two different entities. The difference if any seems to be in what psychologically motivates in either case. With fascism the motivation seems to be nationalism/patriotism, a "we should all be strong as a nation" ethic; communism's motivation seems to be altruistic, some kind of "we should all share" ethic. But they both wind up in the same place relative to the individual. So to me it seems to be a matter of what trick is used on the individual to get him to yield political power to a central dictatorship, and not so much about the kind of dictatorship you wind up with, because really there is only one kind: the kind that attacks the individual qua individual. So according to this analysis, when people want the government to create a strong economy, that's a fascist motivation. When they see the result and want more "fairness" about who is deciding what regarding the economic units created, that's a communist motivation. But they're all just haggling over details. It's not the rich vs. the poor, it's the individual vs. the collective. I am of course preaching to the choir. Shayne

I wouldn't have guessed this myself but one doesn't have to look very far to find that Walmart is indeed benefiting qua big business from fascist interventions: http://money.cnn.com/2004/05/24/news/fortune500/walmart_subsidies/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/03/small-retailers-being-forced-out-by-government-subsidies-to-big-chains/ http://www.walmartsubsidywatch.org/state_tallies.html While one can't necessarily blame Walmart for taking advantage of the situation, one can definitely infer that a substantial part of their bigness is subsidized. As I said -- one neck ready for one leash. Shayne

The point is that a major cause of OWS is fascism, and if you don't like the effect (OWS and its attending political action toward communism), remove the major cause (fascism). I can't believe these simple cause and effect relations are so difficult for you to grasp. Of course, I am an engineer and took a lot of courses in physics and engineering, so perhaps this stuff is just far more sophisticated than I realize, because compared to information theory this stuff is trivial. Shayne

Not relevant. Most Americans don't make those distinctions either. It's not "hazardous" to speculate on what would happen in a free market, it's impossible to know. What we can know is where there are non-free-market pressures that are supporting some things and harming others, and we can predict initial probable market motion when those pressures are removed, but we can't predict long-term results. Walmart too enjoys non-free-market pressures, and I'm sure you could identify them George if you wanted to. But of course, Walmart is much more benevolent than a patent troll, or an FDA-backed drug company. Shayne

A 'useful idiot' is someone who unwittingly supports a malignant cause through their naive attempts to interpret that cause benevolently. I do not interpret this cause benevolently (note how I said "storm clouds are gathering"), I merely report that the widespread support is partly stemming from fascist/corporatist factors you blithely ignore. Ironically, you're the useful idiot for both the fascist and communist side. I'm the one who sees both as they are, and wants them both eradicated and replaced with an authentic respect for individual rights. Shayne

As an anarchist, do you believe that a free market would result in mega-corps, or do you think they would tend toward smaller businesses and less conglomerates? As supporters of the free market, neither of us is against big nor large business per se, but we're going to have opinions on what the motivations of "one neck ready for one leash" big government will lead to in the business realm, and I suspect you rather agree more with me than with Bob. Also, as one who does not support the patent regime, I don't see how you can but conclude that many big businesses are engorged from unjustified propping up, as opposed to just being naturally large. Shayne

Well, your one remark is remarkably wrong. Just because some big businesses fail obviously doesn't mean they're a higher risk as a group. You don't need to be an economist to know that the small business failure rate is astronomically higher than Big Business. Oh, a few companies get a bailout (0.01%) so that alters the risk profile? I think you're just screwing around and can't be serious. You don't see millions of rational people investing all their retirement funds in Joe's discount dog grooming service. Blue chip companies fail much more rarely and they're certainly not protected by bailouts (vast majority). Do I really need to point this out??? You're hopelessly confused. The point was that if you remove those things propping up big business, many of them will fall like a house of cards (or shrink, which is fine too). Their "low risk" is only coming from the unjustified propping up. Also, if you want to measure risk for a given pile of money you need to spread it around. Obviously it'd be dumb to invest all you money into a single mom and pop, you want to diversify. A big conglomerate is in effect a kind of diversification; but so too would be a means of investing in a thousand small businesses. But you can't do that now, can you? It's illegal. You can't form a "small business stock market" and invest by buying their stocks. Anyway, I don't see how you can apriori know how risky big business is vs. small given a sane investment strategy and a free-market determination of risk. This is why I don't want to go into your other details, you're too "high maintenance" even on this one. Shayne

Bob, given your lack of interest in the overall point, your motive to just pick at details to some untoward end, I have no inclination to cure you of your various other delusions. How do I know whether your delusions are genuine, or whether you are just faking them in order to pursue some other unspecified end? I can't. You're a waste of time. I will mention one thing: your remark about "smaller = higher risk" is particularly stupid given that it was failed big businesses that were bailed out. There's a circular logic there: they're too big to fail, ergo they're lower risk. Well of course they're lower risk, they're not allowed to fail. Abolish legal tender laws and the other things I'm talking about and many of these corporations would fall completely apart and be replaced by smaller and better businesses. Shayne

No, your assertions are false. Every one of them is either wrong on its face or represents confusion and distortion on your part. Further, you admit that I am possibly right about the matter that settles the overall point, and yet like a little gnat you continue to pester me over silly details. Why? I think your motive is hinted at here: So, your only motive here is to support George in his deranged quest. Your pointless and misguided quibbling makes a lot more sense now. Shayne

Actually no, all you did was say that you know a guy who knows a guy. All you're talking about is hearsay. You are biased to want to make the case that big business has it harder, or at least about as hard. You haven't made that case, nor have you undercut my case in the slightest; on the contrary, a number of the things you said only confirm my case. The patent system and regulations alone are enough to make my case. The points about fiat money are just bonus material. Here's some more bonus material: Try setting up a lemonade stand or a small pub nearby your neighborhood. You'll find that you can't do it. The zoning laws corral us into big locations with huge expensive buildings that only big business can fund. We're not allowed to do the smaller stuff that individuals and small businesses could handle. Try going downtown and selling some wares. You'll find you generally can't do that either. We're mostly blocked and corralled such that we wind up working for some big employer. We're not 100% blocked, but there are very strong forces leaning that way. The current system is a kind of neo-feudalism. Shayne

I'd rather you just stuck to discussing ideas rather than carrying out this petty and unseemly agenda of yours. Why don't you grow up, give it a rest, get over it... Shayne

Yes, and combined with the patent system this is leading to a situation where people are dying, and will be: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/snakebites-about-to-get-more-deadly Every individual has the moral right to obtain the materials of the earth and convert them into any product they choose, including drugs, and sell them to any other human being, so long as he does not misrepresent the product. And yet consider what it would take if you were an individual who knew how to make a given drug and wanted to bring it to market. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/foremski/how-a-software-engineer-tried-to-save-his-sister-and-invented-a-breakthrough-medical-device/760 "It took us two years to do the engineering. And it has taken the FDA seven years and two months to approve the product for sale." Much more of this kind of life-saving invention would be going on if not for the FDA and the patent system. Shayne