Gary Fisher

@Michael Marota How to lose all credibility with a single line.

No you don't.

What's wrong with having orphanages and unions?

Yeah, let's just let turn into another Somalia. What could possibly go wrong?

He most certainly does not. We weren't merely "picking at them for thirteen years" like in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda was actually defeated very quickly and efficiently. The remainder of that time was spent a) tracking down and killing Osama bin Laden and b) rebuilding the Afghani state.

Do you honestly believe that anything Obama said told ISIS anything they didn't know already? It's not like he announced the specific locations to be bombed. If he didn't say anything at all, no one would know whether or not he was doing anything at all. If he sought congressional approval and didn't get it, which is the most likely outcome, his hands would be tied. And even if he did get it, he isn't getting anything from it that he didn't have already. Regardless of the outcome, strategically, it was a much smarter idea to not seek approval. Who do you think decides these things?

I must confess that this may be the very first time that anything I've ever said has been called "liberal" and "politically correct".

@Jules Troy Oh really? So the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties were a stupid idea...Maybe you can explain, using your obviously deep knowledge and understanding of strategic warfare, why the enormous costs of building and maintaining nuclear warheads that offer no military advantage whatsoever is a good idea?

I don't even know where to begin describing how stupid this is.

That joke is really lame no matter how you look at it. I'm pretty sure I could do better right off the top of my head. An Objectivist goes to a public library. He picks up a copy of Atlas Shrugged, but is confused by the lack of a price sticker. He asks the librarian how much the book costs. The librarian says that the book is public property and he can check it out at no cost. He then throws the librarian down a stairwell.

@Francisco Ferrer This is false (in fact, I think it borders on nonsense), for a lot of very complicated reasons.Anyway, your quote said: I don't see why this would be any less true of any kind of change in prices that doesn't result from inflation. I don't think you understand inflation. It is the result of an increase in the money supply relative to the goods and services in the economy regardless of whether that increase is caused by government or the result of a trade surplus.

And? You could say the same thing about any kind of price change.

Not to mention Hans-Hermann Hoppe and his "Anarcho-Fascism" (which for all practical purposes is just fascism) and open advocacy of racism justified by the right of "free association".

This infographic is very misleading. As BaalChatzaf points out, you have to look at the purchasing power as well as income and the price index in order to get an accurate picture of how far your money will go.

The French bourgeoisie were capitalists in the sense that they owned capital and used it to make a profit. @Selene The term "bourgeois" predates Marx by about a century.

@Selene I know how to use the quote function. But when I'm posting from my phone, the site crashes when I try to use it.

Do car crashes never happen because the basis of any act of driving is to get from point A to point B safely? Sometimes power leads to profit, and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes profit leads to power, and sometimes it doesn't. For the complete history of when these two things have coincided over the past 1000 years, you can take a look at: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Power-Plenty-Millennium-Princeton-Economic/dp/069111854X

Well actually, this is not the definition of force according to most libertarians. If I'm walking across a field, and you leap out of the bushes with a club and hit me over the head, then it certainly seems like you've initiated force. But! The field is actually yours, and I am trespassing, so you are in fact merely retaliating. So the correct definition of "force" is that it is actually any action which violates the rights of another person. But what kinds of actions violate the rights of others according to libertarians? Well, it's precisely those which involve the initiation of force!

Don't know about Jonathan, but I have. The material is presented so poorly and one-sidedly that it makes me not want to agree even with the stuff I agree with.

Here's an interesting article on the issue from stratfor By George Friedman

I'm drunk.

The 19th century was an era of rapid industrialization and economic growth. Economic policy was dominated by Alexander Hamilton's and Henry Clay's "American School" of economics. It advocated for protectionist tariffs, subsidies to industry, and a central bank. Unfortunately, in the eyes of most libertarians, these sins are unforgivable, and, to hear it from them, one would think that Alexander Hamilton was the worst power-hungry, republic-subverting, dictator-wannabe statist since Julius Caesar. So they throw in their lot with a slaveholder who had a penchant for flowery rhetoric about liberty, *cough* Jefferson *cough*, instead of an abolitionist who preserved his country's economic and political independence from Europe and who laid the foundations of its mighty economy. Why does a founding father's position on slavery count for so little, when slavery is obviously the first thing that has to go in a free society?

As a disclaimer, I'm not a big art expert. What the guy in the video is advocating is bsically nothing more than your standard I-don't-get-it-so-it's-garbage style anti-intellectualism. In order to understand modern art, you have to understand art history, philosophy, as well as the specific artist's previous work and his influences. Before modernism, works of art were comissioned either by the church or the state, or some wealthy patron, for the purpose of promoting and propagating religious, political, and ideological ideas, or just for plain old decoration. This is the context of romanticism and neoclassicism. The modernists rejected these influences and, from what I understand, turned art itself into a criticism of then-contemporary ideas and creating an ongoing discussion, blending art with philosophy.

What the hell is "Prager University"? As far as I can tell it seems to be a neocon propagada mill.