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At 11/8/12 08:39 PM, Camarohusky wrote:

This is where the individual mandate comes in. The first shock of covering pre-existing conditions will be covered by a massive (think 20+ million) increase in the number of premium paying clients. After that, the mandatory coverage should eliminate the problem of someone freeloading during their healthy period and then jumping on the insurance pool once things get bad.

I'm not arguing that an individual mandate fails to solve the ex-post-facto claims problem.

I agree that an effective mandate [The PPACA's mandate is not effective, by the way; Judge Roberts ruled the 'mandate' constitutional precisely because it amounted to a tax that was not high enough to prohibit people from taking the option of not paying for insurance.] would bring prices down due to preventing adverse selection. The mandate keeps what is a raw deal for young people for turning into a raw deal for everyone. But just because this is true does not change the "insurance" scheme into a de-facto wealth transfer, i.e. Welfare program.

Insurance is not supposed to KNOWINGLY transfer wealth from one known group to another, at least not if it is designed properly. If we were unaware of which people [or sub-groups of a pool of people] would be part of which groups [those groups being the ones that end up taking out large claims and those that don't], only that a certain percentage of a given population would be part of which group, then we can have everyone pay the same premium without any problems.

But as soon as we know who will be part of which group, then the situation changes.

Take young and old people. If we're comparing younger and older demographic cohorts, we know from observation and medicine that the older people will claim more money for health care expenses than the young; thus, putting both groups into the same insurance pool would entail a conscious transfer of wealth from young to old people; this is why young people rationally chose not to participate in insurance. [among other reasons] Deliberate transfers of wealth for the benefit of one group at the expense of another, by my understanding, is more accurately described as "Welfare" than it is as "Insurance"

Likewise, compelling people who will never be among the "pre-existing conditions group" --> because they've passed the point where such is possible, to pay 'premiums' to cover the risks of said pre-existing condition group, which entails paying for their medical procedures for as long as they live, is no longer about risk; as soon as we know that someone has a pre-existing condition, we know we'll have to fork over some amount of money for life-saving procedures.

Another proof we have that the program amounts to welfare is if we were to simply have a system in place where the government taxed citizens incomes regularly to pay for medical procedures needed for anyone with the kind of medical conditions we are talking about, [if they couldn't pay for it themselves] would we more likely call this welfare or insurance? Given...

1. The taxes levied on individuals have nothing to do with the actual risks of the known attributes of the tax payer
2. The government doesn't need any information on the probability that any member of a group will get the condition, only how many of them do, because the payments for medical care are by nature [As established by the Scenario of the OP] ex-post-facto. It also doesn't need any information on risks because it can always raise taxes.

And given we regard this more as more like welfare than as insurance as it operates in car insurance, life insurance, and property insurance, would we not say the same thing of a program that began as an insurance scheme but was morphed by law into an effective tax on one group by another?

At 11/8/12 11:39 AM, Camarohusky wrote:

At 11/8/12 08:32 AM, SmilezRoyale wrote: Covering the chronically ill is not an insurance problem but a welfare problem, since there's more certainty about having to pay out than risk.

Just because you're certain to payout doesn't make it lose its insurance status. After a car accident you're guaranteed to pay out, so under your logic car insurance is not insurance, but welfare.

With insurance the risks being covered are known before hand, or rather the amount the insurance company will reimburse a claim is known before hand, additionally the insurance company, even for a young driver, can place the individual into a risk pool based on certain attributes.

With the kinds of illnesses we're talking about, it's not like an "accident" where someone breaks their leg and needs coverage for surgery, therapy, and lost wages, etc. As soon as it is known that the person has this condition, it requires repeated payments for medical procedures, and the payments last as long as you live. To make matters worse, we're dealing with a situation [at least that's the impression i got from the op] where the preexisting condition occurs before health insurance can be purchased.

I don't think you would have a situation where people would buy health insurance for their children upon pregnancy and the insurance company would agree to pay life-preserving proceedures for the child if it was found that they had some pre-existing condition; but I say "I don't think" because I'm not terribly confident in saying it.

Mind you health insurance should be purchased at an early ageif and where it exists most effectively [some methods of health care should be paid for not through insurance but through straight up payments], and in a sane society health insurance, premiums for the young would be low and because of paying in at an early age, premium increases would be much more gradual. You see a similar thing in life insurance, if you buy it early you can continue to pay low rates even when you're older; but if you try to buy life insurance at an old age you'll pay very high rates.

At 11/8/12 02:56 PM, Camarohusky wrote:
Just some info here. The 3 strike laws deal with felonies, and if I am not mistaken, some places limit it to person felonies (assault, rape, murder, etc as opposed to theft).

The lowest felony theft cap I have seen is $1000, so it is damn near impossible for someone to get 30 years for stealing a microwave.

There was a bunch of outrage in the news a few years ago about someone who stole a few dollars and was being given life in prison. I BELIEVE because if you commit one felony followed by two misdemeanors, on the 'third strike' you'll be put in prison on a felony charge, or something like that.

But i should look in to this first.

Covering the chronically ill is not an insurance problem but a welfare problem, since there's more certainty about having to pay out than risk.

Within the realm of all acceptable political discourse the only options allowed us are either the status quo or single payer. Single payer being the better of the two, partly because unlike in the status quo they can at least apply some force to prevent pre-existing conditions from becoming a loophole that just causes prices to spiral upwards.

Also because they can engage in outright denial of coverage with less scrutiny. They are already encouraged to deny treatments to people based on obesity and smoking in the name of cost cutting, if the situation demands it they can decide it might be better for someone with an unusual pre-existing condition not to be given continually expensive treatments to keep them alive for a few extra years.

I don't have any data to back this up, so I could be completely wrong, but I do not believe that the pre-existing conditions group that is mentioned specifically here is particularly large or that their circumstances are a large proximate contributor to health care cost increases. At least in the United states, most heath complications seem to be brought on by chosen behaviors OR conditions which occur later in life. And the majority of health care spending is by the elderly.

So the first thing you would need to do is actually calculate the financial impact of trying to keep these people alive [how long is society obligated to keep them alive anyway?] and thus finding out if conventional charity would be able to handle this problem. If pre-existing conditions as it was framed in the first post is not a small part of the health care costs, I wouldn't see it as, IN ITSELF, an impetus for transforming the health care system one way or another.

At 11/5/12 08:35 PM, Camarohusky wrote: With all of this fervor about "Voting being our perogative and duty" the concept of bad voting has gotten lost. By bad voting, I mean using poor and non-political methods of choosing who to vote for. For example, my mother told me that she votes on the smaller races based on who has more signs...

...

... I pause to let you recover for your epic facepalming.

What about bad voting? Is it better to vote improperly or not vote at all?

Definitely not at all. In fact why even let people vote if it is known that the majority of them don't vote for legitimate reasons?

A behavior which, by the way, is rational and predictable.

You've argued yourself that when people are incapable of approaching a problem of theirs with any systematic cool-headedness and impartiality that the decision ought to be made for them by some enlightened other.

I'm not being sarcastic by the way.

That said I don't believe that in modern democracies the voters actually control the outcome of public policy, so the question is irrelevant. The voters might as well be taken to task on what color tie the president should wear, no matter how egregious the fashion sense of the voting mass may be, the system set in places ensures that the voters can never collectively do anything that would set government 'off course'.

So you could say, that are problems are caused by both by and by a lack of democracy.

11. Extant measures are counter productive, especially considering how the terrorists actually pulled 911 off. If I were the God-king of the United States and controlled the army, I would put a bounty on the head of anyone involved in plots to kill American citizens. I would decouple Israel, and I would not care if a foreign country's government I the absence of my involvement became democratic, islamic, or autocratic, as long as it did not pose a threat to my own citizens.

12. Legalize all drugs, ideally through a gradual process. I don't think people ought to do drugs but defenders of the drug war can offer no proof that they have done anything to reduce drug use, all they have to show for their effort is 1 trillion dollars spent and thousands of dead bodies. Naturally apologists are going to defend this system by shoring up fears of what COULD be, which is, of course, unfalsifiable. But you *will* need a culture that is accustomed to dealing with drugs on its own; such a thing is not impossible since these drugs were legal in the past and people were far more responsible back then by my estimation. It might be a good idea to legalize one drug at a time. You would also likely need to agree not to fire any of the drug-warrior bureaucrats so that they don't hamper your efforts at reform.

13. I don't think most forms of IP law are necessary, but if they exist they should be VERY temporary. I believe that current patent and copyright laws do not promote innovation but stifle it.

14. In the context of US Law the death penalty is inefficient; with the appeals process being such that it's cheaper to keep someone in life behind bars than to execute them. In my fascist utopia, the toughest punishment anyone would receive is outlawing or exile. I have nothing against the death penalty per say, but there are always cases where the convicted person is found to be innocent after the fact, so at least exile and outlawing amount to some check on this rarity.

15. I regard Israel as obnoxious, but this is from my perspective as a person who has to live under a state that cares more about the safety of Israel than its own citizens, if I were an Israeli I would probably feel differently.

Personally I think Israel should have been founded in Madagascar where the Nazis had originally intended to deport them. The Israelites picked the worst real-estate on the planet and now they're wasting so much of their energy trying to hold on to it.

16. I don't think Islam is a threat as long as Muslim immigration is kept in check. I personally think efforts to Westernize the Dar Dal Islam have actually encouraged Muslim immigration into the West; effectively Islamifying It. No westerner can in good faith argue to preserve his culture if he doesn't grant others the same privilege in their own respective countries.

17. I'm completely ambivalent about these states.

18. A democratic state presupposes personal responsibility in voting but irresponsibility everywhere else realistically this is impossible. A non democratic state presupposes total irresponsibility and is thus more logical and consistent. As a general rule, everyone should be aware that ultimate protection comes from personal initiative, no fully functional adult is entitled to have someone nanny them from cradle to grave, and anyone who wants to nanny the whole of society is doing it, at best, out of narcissism, and at worst, out of selfish motives. You're free to consult the advise of experts on technical questions, in a world where knowledge is specialized, such a thing is required. But "experts" begs the question of "who is an expert" which presupposes choice; so even here personal responsibility is necessary. There's always a degree of trust and reciprocity involved, and some societies are better at this than others: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/sociology/notes07/Level4/SO4530/Assign ed-Readings/Reading%209%20(new).pdf

19. Non-Believer. Because I do not believe in ["believe in meaning either the goodness or existence of] Democracy, Equality, Rights, Freedom, Good Government, Progress, etc. My views are essentially the antithesis of everything that is respectable in today's society, for the most part.

20 In order of peevyness:

#1 Most annoying People who are not even handed in their skepticism. Atheists are familiar of Creationists who will critique evolutionary theory to the nth degree but express zero skepticism for the idea that a supernatural entity created the earth in seven days. You also see this kind of unfair partial skepticism on issues of human biodiversity, "government regulation", education, etc. Skepticism is a good thing but only if its balanced; so while I might not know with 100 percent certainty that evolution is correct, I know it can withstand better criticism than seven day creationism. And I don't need to know that something is the correct theory with 100% certainty to operate on the assumption of it being true.

#2 People who argue by making largely unfalsifiable anecdotes, largely constructed from slender narratives they remember from school history classes that get repeated throughout society. [Basically an echochamber effect ]

#3 Second most annoying; People who confuse emotions with facts of the real world, I gave the example of "Rights".

#4 People who believe that social proof is an argument.

A few sentences, that's hard to do when you don't speak the same language as other people. Still I'll try to keep it within a single paragraph.

1. Social Policy: I'm not entirely sure what is meant by this, except perhaps as . I'm opposed to the idea of using the force of law to generate change in the culture. Mind you I hate modern culture and would very much like to see it changed, but anyone who thinks that they have both the wisdom and the unique privilege to mold civilization the way they see fit, by any means necessary, is probably a lunatic.

2. "Separation of church and state" is a logical impossibility; Religion being simply a combination of views on metaphysics and ethics, with the most virulent religious controversies today concerning the latter of those two [this not always being the case] modern. Imagine if the Sharia Law dictated that an islamic state provide every worshipping Muslim with free healthcare, also imagine if feminists thought that the wearing of burquas was the only way for women to resist patriarchy. Why should those who have no metaphysics be permitted to enforce their view of morality on others when those that do cannot? http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/our-pla net-is-infested-with-pseudo.html

3. I reject all notions of "rights", [and generally of abstract universals, see the above link for more] and so I'm not going to religiously proclaim that a woman can or cannot liquidate a fetus because she or the fetus has "RITEZ" herpaderp. Emotionally I regard having to liquidate a fetus as 'wrong' and people who have to commit abortions [barring rare cases] as irresponsible and society should shame them for NEEDING to commit an abortion. HOWEVER,
Consequentialistically speaking, a society that refused to abort a fetus in all cases would have problems of poverty and crime, and some abortions might prove merciful [especially in the future if we can find out in advance if a born baby will be deformed or become a psychopath], but any society that has to constantly abort fetuses because its women are getting knocked up deserves to be criticized.

4. I've state above my position on rights, I'll add that I don't deal in terms of rights because as of recently I realized that calling something a right is merely a disguised attempt to present one's own subjective emotions about a situation as being some objective property of the universe. I'll also add that I am a homosexual. I also reject the notion of sexual equality. [Yes I know, I'm truly evil]. On the marriage issue; gays have no use for marriage insofar as it is an institution to serve a societal purpose of raising children. Gays either want marriage because they want ego-satisfaction or because of the legal benefits associated with marriage which themselves are hardly justifiable. On making marriage LEGALLY equivalent with living with someone in the same house [barring guardianship], I'll stand by the other gays.

5. Solving problems amongst people that emerge through exchange such as product quality are best when handled horizontally amongst the most relevant of parties. It requires a climate where people are used to living under the assumption that, for adults at least, you are responsible for your actions and for your safety. Laws are fine and necessary must be agreed to directly rather than indirectly through a lawmaker. Traditional vertical enforcement of standards, defined and enforced by state atuhorities amounts to projections of authority on an arbitrarily selected group whose wisdom and beneficence is presupposed and utterly unfalsifiable [if you can falsify something, but are not able to when you try, you know you have the best game in town] in other words, it relies on faith.

6. Certain rare Public goods like defense can be paid for by stipulating a premium be attached to payments for receiving legal services, having a state levy "taxes" to pay for anything else is unnecessary and inefficient. Though in the context of modern states, if we're talking about what are the least bad taxes, any tax that doesn't penalize productive activity such as... 1. Consumption taxes 2. Death taxes [except on farming property] 3. Income taxes with deductions for saving.

7. International trade is not bad in of itself but is problematic in the context of neo-mercantilism+free floating currencies. Global "governance" obviously is bad in my book since the harder it is for people to leave a state the more burdensome the state can become. Finally, unrestricted immigration of Africans and Middle Easterners into Europe going to destroy Western Civilization, and simply turn European countries into copies of the countries which the immigrants originally fled.

8. I would blame the bulk of the increase in health care / health insurance costs on USFG and State government policies, the rest of it I blame on demographic shifts and the growing disparity in wealth between young and old. Instituting a "pure-state" single payer system would probably amount to an improvement since the state authorities could engage in an outright denial of care to citizens, and restrict usage of more expensive health care resources. The current system, by contrast, involves a quasi-private health insurance system where a combination of self-interested and stupid laws causes health care costs and premiums to simply be bid higher and higher; perverse incentives, basically. If you want the best model for health care; cosmetic surgery prices have FALLEN [relative to inflation] despite a massive increase in demand.

9. Most education is a waste of time for most kids, if we're dealing with the popular dogma that kids who learn vast quantities of trivia will be more materially successful in life. There's no proof that **ceteris paribus** better schools lead to better life outcomes on aggregate, the primary function of education in the United states is to employ educators, [teachers, admin, and school construction companies] and to make sure Children know why the USFG is Holier than the Pope. I'm not commenting here on the intrinsic value of literature or science [to a non scientist] As for post secondary, I adhere to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)#A_basic_
job-market_signalling_model signaling model of education, which I've linked to shorten the ammount of time needed to explain it. The TLDR is that there is no benefit to society having so many young people go to college, except perhaps to reduce labor market competition for a short while, and yet again, to employ more professional educators.

10. In order to privatise something you must have an adequate definition of what constitutes private and non private property, a topic too complex to get into here. I think all state-held assets should ideally all be privatized over time, by MY working definition of private property; however this does not involve the state simply bestowing its assets into the hands of a lucky few and calling it 'private', or even auctioning off state assets [though of the two the latter is better]. This is a complicated topic but to provide some insight, if the USFG decided it would end all the post office monopoly and end all subsidies to the post office, the post office would, gradually, become a de-facto private entity.

Continued in part 2.

I recall a one of my youtube channel subscriptions making a video on the number of ways Obama has vindicated the foreign policy of his predecessor [among other things]. Here's the video.

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

It ends asking, given the level of back-stabbery he's gotten away with thus far, what sorts of things he'll be able to do in his second term.

I wouldn't discount the possibility of a war with Iran.

For those who don't know what I'm referring to.

http://bonds.about.com/od/Issues-in-the-News/a/What-Is-The-F iscal-Cliff.htm

To quote the source;

âEUoeFiscal cliffâEU is the popular shorthand term used to describe the conundrum that the U.S. government will face at the end of 2012, when the terms of the Budget Control Act of 2011 are scheduled to go into effect.

Among the laws set to change at midnight on December 31, 2012, are the end of last yearâEUTMs temporary payroll tax cuts (resulting in a 2% tax increase for workers), the end of certain tax breaks for businesses, shifts in the alternative minimum tax that would take a larger bite, the end of the tax cuts from 2001-2003, and the beginning of taxes related to President ObamaâEUTMs health care law. At the same time, the spending cuts agreed upon as part of the debt ceiling deal of 2011 will begin to go into effect. According to Barron's, over 1,000 government programs - including the defense budget and Medicare are in line for "deep, automatic cuts."

I'm not sure what is meant by deep automatic cuts. Knowing the way the US congress thinks, A deep cut is probably an increase in 1 percent rather than 5, but who knows.

My prediction is that all of the scheduled tax increases and spending cuts will be dropped, and I say this because this is what happened in the past. I would honestly prefer that the congress enact the tax increases without the spending cuts, not because I think this would be a particularly good outcome but because I fewer people could argue in good faith that nothing had been done to address the debt issue.

If my predictions hold true, it also means that debt soon become a larger concern than the economy. Obamacare will have the inadvertent effect of lowering the official unemployment rate, as employers continue to shift from full time to part time labor. [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/09/darden-restaurants -obamacare-part-time_n_1951103.html <-- this is going on elsewhere]

It seems like you'll have a situation where more people are employed working but being forced to work fewer hours than they would like to, and earning less in terms of real income for every hour they work. Young adults will be competing with their grandparents for part time work, trying to pay off massive wasteful college debt.

The deflationary pressures are immense.

This topic should become more prevalent in the news as New Years approaches.

I have to agree with ZG. I don't know if Obama himself became a fanatical drug warrior once assuming office or if the reality of Government as being controlled by the civil service explains why the administration has been tougher on Marijuana than Bush.

Not that I enjoy violence and bloodshed for it's own sake, but I am eager to see a fierce stand off between Colorado and the feds, and I hope that Colorado resists federal pressure as much as it can.

This is an awkward moment for Liberals and Conservatives, since it involves a conflict that doesn't fit neatly into their narrative of the world. Since you have a supposed states rights issue that cannot easily be attributed to motives of racism.

At 11/6/12 10:03 PM, Camarohusky wrote:

It's a 1st person v. 3rd person view.

Fair enough

At 11/6/12 10:44 AM, Camarohusky wrote:

At 11/6/12 09:55 AM, mayeram wrote: So you are saying that a government is typically better able to decide your long-term needs than you are?

Categorically.

I can understand being a cynic and saying that the class of strangers [arbitrarily?] classified as "civil servants" are more enlightened and knowledgeable about the individual lives of the class of strangers who would be classified as "Everyone else" -- But rarely do I see someone include themselves in that group. Not to disparage you personally, it's a pretty consistent and principled stand on an issue.

But it's certainly good cause to make it illegal for people to vote for candidates running for governmental offices.

That said I don't see the whole long term planning thing as relevant to OP, and this is again in response to the OP just to clarify some things.

I can't see a good or bad judgement being passed upon an entire insurance system without knowing...

1. The risk of a disaster occurring
2. the financial impact of that disaster occurring on an individual
3. the premium an individual will have to pay

if #3 is low and #2 is high, and #1 is in the range of between 'virtually impossible' and 'incredibly likely' [but not being either of those particularly] Then the insurance is worth buying. If the premiums are high and the risk-times-financial impact is sufficiently low, then the insurance is not worth buying. And of course in any instance where you can actually save up money to

And, again, of course, it's always possible to do a mix of savings and insurance through the magic of deductibles.

At 11/6/12 12:56 PM, morefngdbs wrote:

;;;
There is a small problem in my opinion with yer link.
One - no one knows how much if any gold is left in Fort Knox ...& they won't let anyone in to find out.

I don't see how unknown quantities of gold affects Shedlock's arguments against hyperinflation. Shedlock, and I also believe Michael Maloney and Chris Martenson all subscribe to roughly the same economic views, they all own gold and other commodities, but are still predicting AGAINST devaluation of the US Dollar.

I know VERY little on this topic and I probably know more about it than most people [since most people know literally nothing]

I'd like to actually sit down once in a while and study the arguments very carefully, but college really gets in the way of that. You simply can't study the things you want to when your tolerance for studying has been squeezed out of you.

I'm guessing Obama will win both popular and electoral votes.

The media will call it a dead heat because they want people to tune in and what not. It's true that most of the polls are within the statistical margin of error, but almost all of those margins lean in Obama's favor so....

I'm not bothered much by this, in fact it's probably a good thing for people outside the social democratic club.

I used to think that the the US's imminent problem was inflation. I'm mostly on the side of the deflationists now. Mostly because of the polite and reasoned arguments put forward by this fellow.

Hyperinflation could only occur as a result of some political event, but it won't be triggered merely by fed action; as long as the Fed can't force banks to lend.

http://lucas2012infos.wordpress.com/2012/08/31/mish-mike-she dlock-reader-questions-on-hyperinflation-would-printing-31-a ugust-2012/

Of course, even shedlock owns gold and talks about it.

At 11/1/12 05:20 PM, mayeram wrote: What is the purpose of insurance companies in our modern times? To me it seems like people pay insurance companies money, insurance companies keep some of that money and give the rest to people that need it that are also paying the insurance company.

With the current views that the republican party has of the purpose of government, how can they support the idea of an insurance company?

It's a valid concern. Insurance is best when it covers something that is 1. Rare 2. Catastrophic 3. Unpredictable [or more specifically, random, you know roughly the probability of it occurring but your models are stochastic and not deterministic]

You can't solve all kinds of insurance fraud, but you can mitigate the problem of people being cheated of their premium dollars by

1. Trying as best as possible to put people of a similar risk-class in the same risk pool.
2. Denying a claim when it is blatantly obvious that there is fraud involved. For example, trying to collect insurance on a house that burned down due to self inflicted arson, or an insurance claim on a valuable piece of property that the customer is unable to prove was ever stolen or was even ever owned. [My mom worked for an insurance company and that latter scenario happened to her once]

Lastly with respect to the republican party, I'm really at a loss for what kinds of economic views an the average republican or the average republican politician holds, In general I think they're more "demokratik-socialiste" than they give themselves credit for; they just don't like taxes. I don't think a free-market person generally speaking would object to the concept of non-state-run insurance since the contracts are voluntarily entered into.

I wouldn't call this a politics-question per-say, but at unlike many posts this one is at least thoughtful.

Interesting story, can't say I'm surprised.

First question to ask is whether the money sitting in the bank represents anything real in the economy or if it doesn't. If it does, then seizing it entails certain secondary consequences. If it isn't, then why bother going through the trouble to seize those worthless pieces of paper and just make your own instead to service the debt?

And of course herein lies one of the paradoxes of our age. A defense of the need by the Government to recapitalize banks to get lending going again. [But this failed as Banks are not lending not because they lack capital but because they can't actually find anyone besides the treasury department who they think will be able to pay them back if they lend money to them], coupled with a second presumption that any kind of savings by the rich serves no social function.

Liquidating assets to service a debt is USUALLY not a good idea. It's sort of like selling a cow to buy milk, or using furniture for fire-fuel.

Although personally wouldn't mind if the US Government seized those assets to pay for it's debt. The people who would be harmed by such a move would be super-rich Americans who are probably the same ones railing about how "The rich" [i.e. households that earn more than $80,000 per year] need to pay higher income taxes.

That said I'm not inclined to believe the US Government would ever do such a thing. Those people got that money somehow and it probably wasn't from selling freshly squeezed orange juice.

The Drug war issue is an empirical issue.

1. Can any relationship be established between the resources expended on the drug war and the level of drug use in the united state.If there is a 'zero relationship' between resources expended in illegalization with drug use, then by definition the drug war is a waste of time.

2. Can any relationship be established between the resourced expended on the drug war / illegalization itself and the negative consequence / degree of negative consequences that might proceed from it.

3. If the Compare the benefit associated with illegalization and enforcement with the cost of doing so.

_____________________________________________

I tend to side with the legalization crowd because the pro-drug war Crowd has not been able to demonstrate empirically that the drug war has been able to actually reduce drug use. The only thing they are able to do is argue that without illegalization drug use would be higher than it would have been otherwise; which as far as I'm concerned is total un-falsifiable.

Maybe someone on this thread can surprise me with their own knowledge of the drug war.

Whereas the anti-drug war crowd has been able to point to countless deaths, imprisonments, billions in dollars spent, and a wide variety of illegal drug cartels enriched because of illegalization.

So in other words, the war has ostensibly amounted to no benefits at tremendous cost.

This method I prescribe is the same for any crime. First demonstrate that the incidence of crime can be brought down by passing laws against it. Then collect any negative unintended consequences and weight them against the benefit of crime reduction.

The comparison isn't perfect since it deals with comparing apples and oranges, but it works fine when the quantities of one component vastly exceed another. In other words, we might not be able to say whether 1 apple is better than 1 orange, but we can safely say that 100 apples are better than 1 orange.

I see no problem in saying that "If you can't actually prevent murder with the law, don't make it illegal" --> all though more accurately "if you can't actually prevent murder with the law, there's no sense in it being illegal." This argument only seems valid to people who implicitly assume something can be prevented by making it illegal.

Of course I'm not saying you can't [effectively] prevent murders by making them illegal; but just because you can [effectively] prevent one thing by making it illegal doesn't prove the same is true for anything else.

And I'm generally inclined to believe policing theft and murder is much easier than preventing drug use, since drug use involves TWO parties who are interested in prevention and apprehension; the victim and the authorities. Whereas drug use involves no 'victim' and so your local shop keeper will not be making phone calls to the local precinct to warn them that joe-criminal is smoking marijuana in his apartment a mile away.

At 6/5/12 07:48 PM, Warforger wrote: Republic =/= Democracy. A republic just means that there is a senate which supposedly represents segments of the population, it doesn't even mean they will be elected.

Nowadays when people say "democracy" they mean the system that is in place now, A representative democracy. Which itself is not synonymous with a republic.

And as far as I am concerned, most countries which call themselves democracies are genuinely far more 'democratic' than 'republican' [referring to form not political party] There is very in the way of power that it is not believed electoral majorities can give to elected officials. The term "the rule of law" is a catchphrase, basically associated with right wing extremism.

Even if one suspects that all developed governments are ruled by some secret elite, it's still a democracy in the sense that people perceive themselves in charge and for the most part elections are perceived to "function" as they should.

Calling rigged elections [and rigged either because of voter fraud or because "the NWO controls the media"] NOT democratic is sort of like saying that Capitalism requires consumers act with perfect knowledge of, basically everything.

I would genuinely prefer living in a monarchy to a democracy, though I would not enjoy living under any form of feudalism.

Democrats have very strong financial support from public sector unions, but you'll have situations where the percentage of the union dues going to the Democratic party are significantly higher than the actual proportion of those members that are part of the union. This is likely a result of a combination of both ignorance on the part of the union members as to where those dues are going, and also the fact that in some states union membership is compulsory.

I recall that my mother worked as one of those 'security guards' for a middle school I went to, despite not actually being an educator NEA dues were taken from her salary. You can have the case of the Koch industries where a small handful of individuals support Libertarian-Republican candidates, or you can have the case of a Union where the portion of a large pool of workers paying dues lean solidly democratic and so their organization effectively operates for the sake of the democratic party.

If and before anyone hoots and hollers about how I'm demonizing teachers and other Unions, let me point out that there is nothing uniquely evil about a group of people acting in their own self interest. Everybody does it to some extent and I suspect that most people will exploit those whom they have no emotional connection with [i.e. strangers]. I don't hate Unions, I hate the people who sacrilized education, the automotive industry, and so forth. To make an institution sacrosanct is to promote corruption.

15 Million dollars sounds like a lot, but It does pale in Comparision to the money spend by the Rockefeller, ford, and Soros foundations, and the majority of people who might be classified as "The super rich" [People with net worth in excess of 10 million dollars] Tend to support the democrats. Whereas the plain old "rich" tend to support republicans. One half of me is tempted to say that neurology plays a role, i.e. the sorts of people who can amass those fortunes are likely similar in emotional and ideological dispositions. The other side of me says that it's mostly an issue of Tax policy. The democrats posture themselves as wanting to raise income taxes on "the rich", the problem here is that the genuinely wealthiest individuals do not make most of their money from what is classified as "Income",

One *could* say that by supporting higher taxes, those members of the super rich appear both noble and self sacrificial in the eyes of the public whilst simultaneously promoting the erecting of a barrier between them and those who earn in excess of six figures a year and have high savings rates. [The sorts of people that do not occupy the top .1% but do occupy the top 2-1%, i.e. have a few million dollars in net worth]

It is interesting though to see the relative disparity in funding between democrats and republicans, and frankly it's amazing that the republicans are able to win any elections at all.

I'm actually willing to go along with a few of the things that people on the right want to do to existing laws relating to 'the genders' , though outright bans on abortion are impractical and counterproductive. However since cold reasoning is hard to come by in mainstream discourse, and since the GOP itself isn't interested in cold reasoning, they don't stand a chance at actually convincing people that these laws, with their warm sounding titles, are bad.

If the GOP wanted to strategically pursue a patriarchal agenda, the most effective means of doing so would be to 1. increase female dependence on the state whilst simultaneously causing a US government bankruptcy. I myself would support such a plan though not because I'm particularly interested in patriarchy, which in my mind has a way of limiting the freedom of men. As much as it does the choices of women.

On Free birth control --- Giving out condoms might reduce incidences of pregnancy but the difference here is that the birth control [i'll call it BC for short now] is provided through a mandatory collective insurance pool. This ensures that price ceases to be an object and encourages people to sell birth control to charge otherwise ridiculous prices. BC consumers don't care what the price is because the insurance pays for it. Everyone's rates go up collectively, and we're supposed to call this "free".

And this prediction is not at all unfounded. We know that people using insurance will often choose an expensive drug over a cheaper one even if the expensive one isn't genuinely proven to be any better [and even if it is slightly, doesn't justify the extra price under normal circumstances] because the consumers decision has been corrupted with the knowledge that insurance is paying for it.

I do not buy that it is a health issue, if an insurance company thinks a particular behavior will reduce the risk of getting ill, assuming they are not legally prohibited from doing so, they will typically PAY people [or rather, discount them] for doing so.

In general we can't blame women for voting in their self interest.

If the government offers free X to group Y, group Y collectively was not necessarily up in arms trying to get X beforehand, but if another group Z opposes having to pay for X, then Z is probably going to attract the ire of group Y. The problem isn't X, Y, or Z, it's democracy.

Oh and on this:

"Yeah, welcome to living in a democratic society. You have to pay for shit you don't want. It's the price of entry."

Paying for shit you don't want is also called market failure. [though not very aptly named] This is why I oppose all forms of democracy, both consequentialist and deontological democracy.

As another aside; You can't understand gender politics until you understand how male disposaiblity features in the creation of laws and institutions, both past and present.

It's not the most complicated issue, in fact, it's probably one of the least complicated issues.

That's not to say that there is a simple answer to the abortion problem, but rather in terms of the technical knowledge that is required

And it's also an emotional issue. So high emotions coming into an issue with very little background knowledge required makes abortion a POPULAR debate issue; even if there isn't really MUCH to the debate itself. The more technical a topic the fewer people will have strong opinions on it, as a general rule.

Most people are not in favor of the right of women to kill their five year old children, and most are probably also not in favor of having abortions the moment a woman's water breaks. A few anti-natalists might...

Likewise, most people do not believe that a sperm / egg is a human being with so-called 'rights'.

So the line gets drawn somewhere between those two extremes.

Let's stop and think about the cause of a supposed problem before calling for a cure.

There are a few possible explanations for this distribution, note that they are not mutually exclusive.

1. Voters are consciously or subconsciously prefer male to female candidates.

2. Women as a group have a lower preference for career politicians.

3. The rules of elections are written in such a way as to favor males over females.

Now in the case of #1, you might consider such voter preferences as wrong, but they don't appear to me to be any more wrong than voter preferences which select for people who are attractive looking. Are you going to condone overriding voter opinion because you don't agree with it?

I'm not pro-democracy, just so you know, but I assume that 999/1000 people on NG are pro democracy humanists.

In the case of #2, again, it doesn't seem like there's anything particularly insidious going on. If women as a group decide that they don't want to serve in the marines, it wouldn't appear incumbent upon any of us to forces equal numbers of representation. Maybe one could claim that they are being brainwashed by a patriarchal culture. I would argue that women on average tend to avoid careers which are by nature stressful and competitive. That doesn't mean individual women can never under any circumstances take jobs that are stressful and competitive, but fewer of them will.

I am highly skeptical that #3 is the case, at least as far as the actual rules of elections go. It may be that electoral politics selects for candidates that are well known by people who currently or previously held political power, and so this power tends to be preserved with males. But my understanding of heterosexual males is that they are more willing to throw other men under the bus for the sake of women than they are throwing women under the bus for the sake of other men, even when there are no overt sexual motivations involved.

But supposing that certain rules were in place which disadvantaged women, why not then just find these rules and eliminate them?

Just another reason why egalitarianism needs to gtfo.

I'll also point out that women as a group probably receive the majority of government benefits, and generally have favored status in legal disputes concerning child custody, divorce, . So it's not as if the fact that men are the majority in government guarantees a government that is misogynistic, or one that isn't misandric.

At 4/2/12 10:36 PM, Dawnslayer wrote:

At 4/2/12 12:40 PM, SmilezRoyale wrote: Some people claim that job training and the 'give a man a fish' philosophy is better for Government welfare.

Subtle.

It's not just you, but sorry if I made it feel like I was trying to make "Dickish" insinuations.

Hence my suggestion of worker training on the job, after the person in question is hired, through the company that hired them. No middleman involved.

If a businessman considers it in his interest to train and hire someone he will do so, and very likely a buisessperson would only agree to give someone job training in exchange for their labor services either in the interim or for some specified period afterwards, or both. The presupposed point of state welfare is to do things that it is assumed cannot be done without the state and believed should still be done.

I don't know how much social welfare spending could be considered "Too much" - whether you measure it by society in relative or absolute terms.

However there are usually a few indicators that tell you when your social welfare spending has become problematic.

In other words, you know state welfare spending has become problematic when;

1. People from other countries [or sometimes other states in the case of the US which has federal and state welfare] are going to your country not for employment but for welfare benefits

2. A permanent underclass has been created that represents a significant bloc of subsidized voting-power.

3. State middlemen and social workers are so numerous as to become a secondary boc of subsidized voting-power. The benefits to the taxpayer [and in some case, the abstract benefits to the working poor] are diffused compared to the concentrated losses born by these people if programs were to ever be scaled back [or even had their growth slowed]

4. People don't look for employment because of unemployment benefits.

Basically, you know when you're spending too much on welfare when you've created a political situation where cutting welfare benefits is politically impossible.

Some people claim that job training and the 'give a man a fish' philosophy is better for Government welfare. I could not disagree more. Straight-up welfare at least avoids the problem of creating a managerial class that exists to the extent that the poor are dysfunctional. Job training programs have existed, at least in the United States, with questionable success.

At 3/23/12 03:48 PM, SmilezRoyale wrote:

How so? We had a brilliant system when Gordon Brown was running the show as Chancellor for 10 years. The worst political decision he made was to step into number 10. He has a great head for fiscal policy and I believe that we would not be in this position, were he still in charge of the coffers.

I have no knowledge of Gordon brown so i can't verify any of what you said. I'm asking you if you would regard as 'competitive' a market controlled by two [I suppose in your case it's technically three] parties.

At 2 days ago, Camarohusky wrote:

At 1 minute ago, Famas wrote: Why should the US government be responsible for sleeping deustschland babies???

I was being facetious, but was also making a point. The attacking of civilians is a part of the total war concept pioneered in WWI and perfected in WWII.

The German U-Boat policy was technically not *initiated* by the Germans. The Germans declared the high seas to be a war zone because Britain had a blockade policy of preventing any food from getting to Germany. Food for civilian use was originally not considered an instrument of war, but Britain prevented it from getting through either way. Quite alot more german civilians were starved to death because of this than non-german civilians killed by U boats.

At 6 hours ago, Coop wrote:

At 1 day ago, SmilezRoyale wrote: You know it is possible, accounting wise, to balance a budget without any spending cuts or nominal-tax increases? Simply set projections for employment, inflation, and growth such that you project more in revenues than in outlays.

Yes, but when you predict growth and nothing happens, people look back at your track record and realise that you've just been making it up as you go along, so you get a very bad reputation and your political life is over.

Well first of all my statement was meant to be, for the most part, Satirical. Secondly, The government cooks the books with economic figures all the time. Albeit not to such an *extreme* degree as has been described above. Basically, they cook books just so much as to appear believable.

Here's How: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPkTItOXuN0

Second, you place too much faith in a democratic process where there are only two competitors. An economic system where [de facto-legally] only two companies were allowed to compete in a market with no close substitutes, would not be competitive enough to justify any optimistic outcomes.

Or in other words, it doesn't matter how much one politician or another is a scoundrel, because he can always accuse the people around him of being bigger scoundrels, and he'll probably be right.

If you do this each year, you can spend and tax at whatever level you please and never run a deficit.

I'm glad you're not a politician. You can't just tax at whatever level you please. Unfortunately, there is a mess and the national debt has been around for longer than the previous Labour government. I understand that this needs to be brought down to a more manageable level, but creating more jobs and therefore generating more income for the state, via income tax and VAT on goods purchased (people with more money have more consumer confidence - standard fiscal fact) is what is needed. George Osbourne hasn't got a clue, because he lives on Millionaire's row, with Cameron and the other Tory grey suits.

Again it was a joke.

The problem with the Value Added tax is that by taxing each stage of the productive process, you're going to end up imposing higher taxes on certain items depending on the number of productive stages involved. Imposing higher income taxes on higher earners at least has a justification because you can claim higher income earners can afford it. But making goods with more productive stages more expensive than those without

The other problem is that, unlike sales taxes, VAT taxes are hidden in the price of goods. Consumers have no idea how much they're actually paying to the Government. Aside from the fact that voters will end up blaming businesses for what is being imposed upon them by Government; there's also the importance of voters needing to be able to actually weigh the benefits of spending with the taxes they have to pay. If taxes are hidden either through inflation or things like VAT, decision making is impaired.

Even with a perfect tax system, this is technically impossible. [In theory 51% of the voting population could opt for 0% taxes for themselves, and 99% tax rates for the 49%] but it's still possible to have better and worse situations of the non-ideal.

If you want to raise taxes, the fairest way to do it is by either by announcing an increase in sales taxes [which can be seen in sales receipts] or by income tax increases. [progressive or otherwise] Most preferably the income tax increases should be paid out of pocket by the employees rather than the employers; though less efficient than withholding taxes, it helps give voters an idea of just how much they are paying to the government.

FIRST let's try and distinguish between the extremity of a person's views and the degree to which they are a partisan.

"Partisan" simply means loyalty to one's political party, often times regardless of what 'position' the party takes and what issue is being discussed.

Here's an example.

Let's assume Advocating for reductions in absolute government spending is taken to be an extremist position [By absolute government spending, I mean spending less in real dollars in one year than in the year previously]. Now this might beg the question of what the moderate position is, but let's ignore that issue for now.

So if a presumably Republican representative votes against a Democratic President's budget proposals on the grounds they fail to meet his extremist position, is he an extremist or a partisan or both? Was the decision motivated by the fact that the president was a democrat or because the bill did not meet his criteria of acceptability?

We can only answer that question by looking at a situation where a Republican president or a Republican congress was voting on a budget which did not satisfy the above conditions. If the same Republican votes against the proposal he is probably not a partisan; Party allegiance had nothing to do with his decision. If he DID vote in favor of the bill, then he is probably a partisan.

"Moderate" is not the proper antonym to "Partisan". "Independent" MIGHT be a better word, in the sense that a person like Ralph Nader or Ross Perot do not take positions on the basis of the positions of a particular political party, but their positions often times fall outside the acceptable range of argumentation between what is called "The left" and "the right" [Which in actuality should be referred to as the range between democratic socialism and neoconservatism]

_________________________________

SECOND... in political dialogue, the word "Moderate" applied to yourself is typically used as a way of calling yourself "sane" and, by virtue of natural binary thinking, accusing the people around you as being insane.

If a politician or an individual described his views as follows: "I take the two most extreme views I can find and place myself between them" - That description would be far less respectable than saying "I'm a moderate". In fact, while the idea of the middle ground sounds reasonable in theory, the notion of taking a position on the basis of its relative location rather than its actual truth value.

Here's my favorite example from Wikipedia!

"Some would say that hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet, but others claim it is a toxic and dangerous substance. The truth must therefore be somewhere in between."

It's a silly example, but it's what happens when proximity takes precedence over truth-seeking.

____________________

THIRD, understand the difference between party and between political views. Fewer Americans classify themselves as Democratic or Republican then they have in times past. Is this because the people who do call themselves democratic and Republican have more 'Extremist' views than they did in the past? Or because popular opinion of the congress has fallen significantly, as such people are less proud to give themselves particular titles associated with bad individuals, regardless of their rhetoric or their positions.

Saying more Americans are "Moderates" because republicans and democrats are becoming more extreme is also somewhat deceptive even if it's true in a limited sense, because it does not distinguish between rhetoric and actual policy. So while Political Rhetoric can shift wildly in the short term, the long term trends of what activities the Government is engaged in [compared to in times past] tend to move more consistently in a single direction, with a few issues being left to variation.

So things like Federal spending on entitlements, War, control over economic activity, [as measured by the federal register and the total financial burden of those controls specified in the register] Have increased unambiguously since 1946. The GENERAL Trend of the last 70 years has been a nearly unqualified expansion of the power of the Federal Government, Republicans and democrats notwithstanding.

So if a guy like Ron Paul advocates returning to 2006 spending levels and staying there for a few years, this is regarded as an EXTREMIST position. Why? Because it entails absolute cuts to federal spending to a degree that no other politician [except for maybe Rand Paul] is willing to entertain [or even come close to entertaining]

BUT was advocating for 2006 spending levels in 2006 an extremist position? Obviously not.

The fact that the RHETORIC of a Republican sounds more free market [Capitalist, Plutocratic, or whatever derogatory term you prefer] , or the Rhetoric of a democrat sounds more Egalitarian [Class warfare, marxist, whatever derogatory term you prefer] Doesn't say much about the actual direction of the Government. Nor does it say whether public opinion
________________________________________

And this brings me to FOUR,

As the OP suggests, the danger of placing stock in "Moderation" and "Moderates" is that Public Opinion can be manufactured by powerful opinion molders too easily.

If people are lead to agree that "Moderate" is synonymous with 'correct', To describe a position as "Moderate" and others as "extreme" makes it possible for anyone with a wide enough audience to attack good ideas and promote bad ones purely by making a subjective claim about it. The prophesy of moderation tends to be self-fulfilling and hence self-validating. In other words, a claim which in reality should have no bearing on the truth, influences what is seen as truth because it BECOMES true merely by being stated by a large enough group of people.

This isn't to say that removing the obsession with being moderate will completely eliminate the fact that Academia and the "big-media" can influence public opinion so strongly [absent the internet, possibly now more than ever]. However if people stopped being ashamed of taking positions other people called 'extreme', it remove one arrow in the quiver of institutional opinion molders.

At 17 hours ago, Camarohusky wrote:

At 1 hour ago, SmilezRoyale wrote: Eugenics was an idea held by many prominent individuals in the academic community; It was the climate change of its day.

Um... not the best analogy, but good attempt to jab at something you don't like. ;) climate change is hotly debated on its purely academic and scientific credentials. Eugenics is more like slavery of its day. It was generally accepted as sound at the time, but was rejected for social reasons.

The point about Climate change was;

1. Both ideas are/were [at least presumed to be] A consensus view among academia.
2. Both ideas were based on the idea that a phenomenon was going on that was alarming and needed to be stopped. Eugenics was based on the idea that those of inferior genetics were no longer under any selection pressures and so their populations had to be kept in check by technocrats with sterilization and the like, [for the sake of oversimplifying]. And You know the basic tenants of climate change.

My understanding of Climate change is that among scientists there is universal agreement that 1. The earth is warming 2. It is caused in part by human activity 3. Human activity causing this change can be controlled/reduced by state authorities. Or at least this is what climate change / global warming advocates claim.

I'm not particularly hostile to the idea of climate change or eugenics specifically... It may be that the earth is getting warmer and humans are partially to blame, but I'm skeptical of state attempts to solve the problem.

As for Eugenics, Subjective notions of superiority aside, the only thing to really be worried about is if you have "White" natives of a given Democratic state, by birth rates over time, going from being a majority to a minority of the population. If the "White" population is still considered liable for the problems of "non-white" populations, you run an increased risk of potentially crippling legal racial discrimination.

You might argue that we already have something like this in the form of affirmative action, and calls for reparations, etc. The kinds of deliberate legal discrimination I'm talking about could be much more severe depending upon how much animosity there is between the populations.

Also keep in mind that this applies to any majority-minority population where the former dislikes the latter, but the opportunity for a 'once minority now majority' population to get 'payback' on a 'once majority now minority' population, increases precisely because in a democracy, presumably, power lies with numbers. So if African Americans were currently the majority, but "whites" were soon to become a majority, and the white population disliked the black population, you would have the same problem.

You have a microcosm of this dynamic occurring in South Africa. South African White farmers who may or may not have had anything to do with apartheid being killed by gangs, and the South African government turning a blind eye to the violence.

Technically south Africa didn't have the change in the political situation due to changing demographics, rather the change in political control occurred presumably due to the end of apartheid. But in a democratic state, one group going from majority to minority can result in the same sort of shift in political power.

Another example of this is the dynamic between native Malaysians and Chinese/Indian Malaysians. The native Malaysians were disgruntled at the economic success of Indian and Chinese immigrants [economically speaking] and so had laws passed to correct the supposed injustice.

Sources if you need it

http://www.genocidewatch.org/southafrica.html
http://www.worldpress.org/2298.cfm - on malaysia