Donald Trump

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innervation wrote:

Pluralism exists, but there is power and utility in continuing to brand yourself as part of one of two options. Splitting a party right now into 3 or 4 like minded, but unique parties would throw local and national elections to the other side for 20 years or more. Since there is money in politics, I don't think anyone is interested in taking a long term approach based on their ideals - they'd rather just get elected another term.

The voting system that US uses (first past the post) discourages other parties to show and replace the current parties if they fail. That's the reason Democrats are corrupt...and Republican are borderline fascist. They have no competence.

Little Marco is out of the race.

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Xavderion wrote:

Little Marco is out of the race.

And Kasich won Ohio, which still only leaves him with fewer candidates than Rubio had when he quit 129 to 163. =0[.]o=

Is anyone listening to this hillary victory speech? How can people vote for someone like this. Every word coming out of her mouth sounds incredibly scripted. Even if her policies make sense, I wouldn't trust anything to such a unmotivated person like her :\

This post is related because: if sanders is out, then my second choice is trump out of pigeonhole principle lol.

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NeroNoah wrote:

The first welfare theorem shows very well under what conditions laissez faire works. Market failures are a thing.

Send to me like your non-Wikipedia reading disagrees with Wikipedia.

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The ideal conditions of the theorems, however are an abstraction.

I feel the core of my disagreement with you would be on responsibility for preventing market failure.

You are talking as if market failure is the result of the economic system chosen, rather than the fault of economic participants. This view itself almost invariably springs from a "monotheistic" view of markets, a view that a potential plurality of markets are and must necessarily be one market, and that competing markets and market choice cannot exist. This means: when a particular currency or other important economic feature is set to implode on itself, the "monoeconomic" view is that it is impossible to sidestep the issue and offer a competing choice in parallel, while the polyeconomic view is that fools can and will bring ruin upon themselves and little or nothing can, need nor should be done about it except to stay the fuck away.

It is also the monoeconomic view that a market shouldn't be allowed to collapse under its own errors, and those very persons responsible for the worst mistakes should be the target of massive social welfare to prevent economic failure. As opposed to, say, the ending of Fight Club, which I feel is a more deserving end for those fuckers than bailouts.

Such monoeconomic views have been made into reality by Keynesian governmental policies, but such governmental laws are not the natural laws of economic or social theory, but the artifice of man. It wasn't always the case that a dollar's value was entirely based in confidence in the government.

If I could go back in time and add an amendment of my choice to the US Constitution... well, I probably would free the slaves. But if I got two amendments, I'd call for a separation of trade and state. The ability to decide for yourself what market or currencies you choose to deal in is just as important, if not more so, than the ability to decide for itself which entity, or entities, or lack thereof, are deserving of your worship.

Laissez faire only works under those ideal conditions. Else you have problems like information asymmetry, externalities and other stuff that won't be solved by themselves. Things that are not necessarily the fault of participants (or that they don't even comprenhend to begin with, because you need to be a scientist or be truly informed). My interpretation of the conditions of the theorem is not wrong, it's fairly precise about how it works. Not everything can be solved by competition. You need some kind of rules accounting for that failures to level the field when someone tries to do the right thing. Else it's cheaper to do harm.

No, it's not a thing of the system (see statement about not trusting systems, no silver bullet). Government is a system, market is another one, you cannot solve human problems just by systems, at the end of the day it depends on people doing the right thing or failing. Laissez Faire is just another system as vulnerable to corruption as any other. Unless you go full communist you can't do worse.

Confidence in the government was an improvement over gold at their time for many reasons (gold is essentially random, jumps in value everytime goldbugs buy the thing or a new source of gold is discovered, also, it's not really that valuable unless you do electronics), even if flawed. If you think there is better stuff (bitcoin? I don't know), it may be. Money has evolved over time. Trust is not only the basis of money, but also the basis of credit, so it has some validity. You don't earn trust magically.

And market collapse is sometimes undesirable. You make more probable for the fascists and communists of the world to come to power. My country suffered a great depression fifteen years ago, so I know how shit things can be, and how futile is to let it happen (Fun fact, my country tried to balance the budget before the depression). Markets will never recover once you get a fascist at the helm of the government when people get desperated. Hell, South America choose the worst kind of socialists when things went to shit, and that made things worse (You probably heard about Venezuela; see how the place was before Chavez coming to power). Your do nothing position would be harmful, unless you plan on going full anarcho capitalist (so the desperate masses won't vote in a moron), and even then it would suck.

No simple choices.

I recommend you to read about the works of Joseph Stiglitz on information economics if you have time.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

@Dalai: I don't think it's fair to scapegoat Hilary for destabilization of the Middle East, or the failure to stabilize the region. I'd go further and say that it's fundamentally wrong to assume Americans should be responsible for various foreign nations; ambassadors are not colonial governors, and the State Department's job is not to oversee the entire world. Middle East problems have mostly Middle East causes; Middle East solutions are going to need to have mostly Middle East causes, if they're going to stick. International diplomacy should be about communication flow and gently encouraging favorable situations, not strongarming sovereign nations with an overly interventionist foreign policy.

I'd agree with your overall assessment. I'm not saying she is solely responsible, or even primarily responsible. Other powers were calling the shots on that strategy - but if you look back to some of her visits to the region as First Lady, you will see what I am talking about. It's great to have ideals, and dreams for foreign policy, but when it comes to implementing things, there needs to be a sense of realism and pragmatism. Gradual change over generations should be the long term goal most of the time.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

I understand that view isn't popular since 2001, with the Democrat platform being a rather heavily interventionist foreign policy and the Republican platform being a massively interventionist foreign policy. But look at the fruit of US efforts in trying to control things. 15 years later, we're looking at ISIL as a threat... it's not better. Micromanagement and war has brought insurgence and war. The strategy doesn't work. I mean shit, Teddy fucking Roosevelt understood; how do we forget so quickly?

Now, forgetting the death of personnel, that's bad. But it's not half as bad as stuff Trump has said.

I'm not excusing Trump for anything, and he certainly doesn't have any long term consistency of outlook. Hillary didn't forget, she just figured their deaths really didn't matter much. She didn't care when they asked for help and she let them die. Why should she care afterwards?

This is a woman who ran over the family pet because it was barking too much and then blamed it on the mailman.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Let me be clearer: I don't particularly love the idea of Clinton for President. She has made mistakes, she's further left than I'd like, and I have a vaguely bad feeling about her. However, she is experienced and apparently sane, two things you can't say about any of her competition; the other candidates don't make me feel vaguely bad, but unambiguously afraid if they're elected.

While I don't think she is so corrupt that she would set a bus full of school children on fire to further her own personal goals, anything less I am skeptical of. Hillary does not own her mistakes, and the only thing she seems to learn from them is to get better at covering her tracks for the next round of blunders.

I'm not saying she doesn't have a plan, or that she's not capable. It's what she's capable of that has me concerned.

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jebroni wrote:

Is anyone listening to this hillary victory speech? How can people vote for someone like this. Every word coming out of her mouth sounds incredibly scripted. Even if her policies make sense, I wouldn't trust anything to such a unmotivated person like her :\

This post is related because: if sanders is out, then my second choice is trump out of pigeonhole principle lol.

You'll regret that, trust me.

Nero, I can basically sum up my political philosophy, not by pointing at Adam Smith or some other competition-focused work, but at John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. So less "competition" and more "liberty." Liberty. Libertarian. Get it?

If you haven't read it yet, please do so.

Government should exist, to preserve liberty as Mill describes it (so I don't self-identify as anarcho-anything); government needn't, and shouldn't, have any power beyond the scope of preserving liberty as Mill defines it (so I tend to self-identify as right-wing, although most other right-wingers disgust me). Basically, this means government should be police, courts, military, and not very much else. (I guess it needs some method of ensuring it remains funded.)

The tricky part, of course, is that to ensure liberty, we need to create a bully to bully the bullies so we're not bullied ourselves. What stops this bully we create from bullying us? Whatever the answer, competing police forces clearly would NOT work, so competition isn't the answer there. Also, force costs money, in weapons and in wages; how to pay for it? All tough questions which raise all of the usual politics answers. Unlike a true anarchist, I don't just hand-wave these off. (Within this narrow scope, I might even favor a rather progressive tax scheme.)

However, as soon as governmental power exceeds this scope, whether it's education or health or the Federal Reserve, I feel government has overstepped its bounds. At that point government is no longer about liberty but about impinging on it, demanding your participation (economically, if in no other manner) in activities which the majority approved of, but to which any particular individual may or may not concur. Tyranny of the majority.

Now, you may ask yourself: is forcing someone to do something good really a bad thing? Of course it is; you shouldn't need to force them to do it, and if you must, then clearly they disagree about the whole "good" thing. As long as they have liberty, they should have some incentive to pursue actions in line with rational self interest. And if they don't, and everyone else has liberty, who cares?

Pretty much every non-police, non-military, non-court, and non-legislative function of government (in other words, not the three actual branches of government) should be privatized. Yes, that would create competition, but that's not the motive. Instead of supporting the state-sanctioned monopoly school with your money whether you want to or not, you could still support it, or support a different one, or support none at all. Freedom of choice. Liberty. Competition would just be a nice little thing to ensure that, if you do end up supporting a school with your money, the services probably wouldn't suck too much.

I really like PoE's economy. Any trade is okay, provided both players press that Confirm button. No coercion there. Still plenty of people ripping themselves off, but they deserve it.

Also, re: "market collapse is sometimes undesirable," I mean, I desire a brand new car but that doesn't mean I should steal it. As far as I'm concerned, desire has almost no relevance to this topic, while justice and liberty do.