Saffire

The people will get the government they deserve, and the future of Germany is one of higher prices, longer working hours, higher unemployment, and a lower quality of life. If you're perpetually in fear, you might as well not leave the house. But you won't make any friends, and you won't enjoy your life.

Gitta, everyone is egoistic. Everything you do, you do to make yourself happy. Including when you give money to charity, or pick up trash on the ground. This isn't a battle between the greedy electric companies and the "green" citizens. I'm not a socialist, but even if I were one I would be mad about this decision. Here's a better solution (if you are a socialist): Have the government give $1 billion to the business that can discover a better way to dispose of spent nuclear fuel rods. Give participating companies (in this contest) $250,000,000 each and a list of "rules" they must follow so they don't waste the money or give it to the executives. This way, new jobs are created and people are working on new ways to make nuclear energy "clean", and you get to keep your power plants.

The problem of storing spent fuel rods is minor compared to the problems associated with higher energy costs. Everything has a cost/benefit analysis, and in the case of nuclear energy the market has determined the benefits outweigh the costs. Also, governments insist nuclear plants use Uranium instead of Thorium (which is a far more efficient and environmentally-friendly fuel) because they want the leftovers for nuclear bombs. Structural adjustments occur naturally, they don't need to be coerced. Part of the reason nuclear power plants are so prolific (especially in high-frequency-natural-disaster zones) is because governments guarantee all losses insurance companies refuse to cover. In a market for energy, the price of insuring a nuclear power plant on a fault line or near the ocean would be stratospheric. I get the feeling Germany's plants would be much cheaper to insure, but that's only speculation on my part. If the demand really did cease to exist, perhaps the government wouldn't need to point guns at them and force them to shut down the plants. ;) This is not for you, or a handful of politicians to decide. It is something the market will decide through the millions of voluntary exchanges that occur daily. You could give everyone in Germany jobs very simply: Just outlaw electricity. Everyone will be forced to work in the fields, using old-fashioned tools and back-breaking labor. Make toothbrushes illegal, and everyone can be dentists. Germany can "afford" the luxury of destroying its nuclear power industry because it is a relatively prosperous country with a strong exports sector. But eventually the higher cost of energy, coupled with the endless devaluation of the Euro due to Greek bailouts (and soon Spain, Portugal, Italy, etc) will destroy the quality of life in that country.

This is idiocy. As far as I know, Germany isn't even on a fault line. And yes, this is about money - it's about the millions of Euros extra each poor/working family will be paying due to higher energy prices. It's about the longer hours German parents will have to work, and less time they'll get to spend with their kids. What will all those nuclear engineers do for a living now? Don't people think of any of this??

Chuck, all the working droles who make 8 dollars an hour and bust their butts every week without vacation can cut on a TV and see MTV's "Cribs" about billionaires' mansions. The incentive to overthrow the system is low, as long as prices for food and fuel remain low (he has some disposable income to buy drinks), and government abuses are sporadic and isolated. Nobody cares about the other guy as long as he perceives him as "other", and thinks similar abuses committed against himself are unlikely. Just ignore the individuals. Sure, there are bad cops and bad politicians and bad judges and bad rich people. Just like there are bad dentists and bad shoe salesmen. The problem isn't the advertisements. It's what we teach our children - that government can solve all our problems, from slavery to harsh working conditions, to white people treating black people rudely, to the Earth slowly getting warmer, to endangered species, to unsafe cars, to to to to When you look for a single answer for every problem you face, there's a name for that: religion.

A funny thing I see repeated here is this: Whenever a socialist government gives the people "free" stuff (ie monopolizes a sector and extracts revenue coercively via taxation), you praise socialism as the ultimate method of delivering these services to the people. But when you begin to see the inevitable result of monopoly - shortages, higher prices, lower quality services, endless red tape, government violence against complaining customers - you attribute this to infiltration by the rich and elite. It's always an external capitalist greed that ruins your socialist experiment! Look, you guys can call a pile of sh!t a "rose" all you want to. But it doesn't change the fact it's a pile of sh!t. Governments are territorial monopolists of coercion. This poses a huge cognitive dissonance problem for many people. When confronted with this fact, their brains trigger a fast shutdown and dismiss it as invective against their core belief structure. They buy into this religion of "democracy" and complete faith in a group of people who claim to be somehow outside of society, outside of the laws of economics. Governments are just groups of people. They are no wiser than us. The story of human civilization is the story of production. How can we produce what we want? Governments produce nothing of value, because the only way to determine whether a thing is valuable or not is to subject it to the market, voluntary exchange. But you're so caught up in the government mythos that you attribute the peaceful prosperity you see in your everyday life to the violent monopolist acting behind the scenes to hinder trade. [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50FZ0Sz2N6A]YouTube - ‪Market Anarchy Compilation I - Hans-Hermann Hoppe‬‏[/ame]

LoryABjerre, I think Switzerland has the best form of government of any country today. It is very decentralized, and there are ways the people can protect themselves from bad laws. Also, I think a smaller country is superior to larger countries (due to systemic resiliency).

You'll be happy to know I plan on moving to Denmark! Just because I'm against all government in principle doesn't mean I can't identify governments and cultures I think offer a superior quality of life. Denmark is much better than Canada, anyway. ;) Also, where do "rights" come from? God? And do you have compassion for the people getting beaten with nightsticks in Spain and Greece? How about the millions imprisoned around the world for nonviolent crimes? Or the millions killed in unnecessary wars? If you want to talk about compassion, I've got all day.

I'll respond to all these points later today, when I'm back home. But the root of all this misunderstanding is summed up in this article of faith: Every argument that you could possibly devise in defense of government can be used in defense of monopoly, because governments are monopolies.

Sure, in a few places, on a limited scale. Slavery still exists. Segregation was government policy, not a natural result of market activity. Businesses are incentivized to take on as many profitable employees and customers as they can, regardless of their race. Right, but slavery existed in the North as well. Lincoln was quite emphatic about the fact slavery wasn't the driving issue for him. He mainly had his eye on the revenue the Federal government would lose if the South left (from tariffs, as you said). So it was mostly an economic issue, and slavery made for a good moral-cover. Sort of like how Bush used the "liberation" thing when the US invaded Iraq. Anyway, slavery ceases to exist today for a couple reasons. The first is that governments stopped supporting it. Slavery requires a government to socialize the costs of enforcement (runaway slaves were caught by police who gave out rewards). Without this, slavery (on a large scale at least) couldn't be profitable. Second is that people woke up to the fact that it's not very friendly to lock people in non-voluntary labor situations. This is why I'm encouraged. I think in the future, people will view government and taxation the same way, and abolish it.

I don't support slavery. Lincoln conscripted young men to go fight and die for him in his war, which was a form of slavery (arguably worse than just forcing people to pick cotton in 100F heat). I simply think slavery would have ended naturally (due to economic realities) just as it did in other countries. America was the only country to have a massive civil war over the slavery issue.

Yes, bailing out the banks was a bad thing to do. Allowing the banks to fail wouldn't have been the end of the world like they want you to believe. When a company (any company) goes bankrupt, what happens is simply a transfer of its assets to new management. It doesn't explode and fall into a chasm in the ground, lol. So the only people who would have suffered would be the upper-management of the banks, along with the shareholders. (ie Richest guys) All the debts/loans/etc of the banks would have continued to exist, but they would have been reassessed to discover their true value. By bailing them out, it's like a child covering her ears and saying "nanananan I CAN'T HEAR YOU". It doesn't make the debts go away, they still exist. The whole point of bankrupty and recession isn't to punish people. It's just to transfer (as quickly as possible) the means of production (capital) to the smart people who don't make mistakes. So a recession can either be very fast and short (like ripping off a bandaid all at once) or slow and painful (like what we're currently going through with government intervention).

http://mises.org/rothbard/agd/agdtable1.pdf Here's a chart showing the expansion of the money supply in the US from 1921 to 1929. It nearly doubled.

You're totally misunderstanding the effects of voluntary exchange. Everything you're saying is just government propaganda, but I'll try to respond to each point you made. 1. You're confusing me with a conservative. I'm not against unions, as long as they're voluntary. I think individuals have a right to band together to do things. I'm just against non-voluntary unions, which is what socialists support. 2. How would poor people survive in a situation of "social Darwinism"? How do they survive today? The vast majority of people agree that it's good to give money to the poor, and help them out. Why would they stop doing this without socialism? Nobody would starve. There's always some kind hearted person who's willing to help people out. I think it's safe to say more people starved in Mao's China (a socialist experiment) than ever starved in a free market. 3. When has it ever worked? It works all the time. Read some history. You must think progress comes from government. 4. Greed. Are the people in government not greedy? Look who rakes in trillions every year! And they do it with threats of force against peaceful people. At least corporations trade with you. 5. No monopolies in Canada? Your healthcare system is monopolized. I'm sure a lot of your ISP's are, too. Read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking 6. Corporations kick people when they're down? Like when? 7. Middle ground? You got it to work? Canada isn't honky dory now. Your healthcare system is going broke. Give it time, it'll happen. 8. Hitler hated individualism, are you kidding me? He wrote in Mein Kampf against states' rights. He wanted to centralize power as much as he could. 9. I'm not a Randian, I'm more of a Rothbardian anarchist. Rand believed in some government.

The solution is remarkably simple. If you're President, you can peg the dollar to gold. Think of a dollar as being like a measurement. In the same sense 1 yard = 3 feet, 1 dollar = 0.002 ounces of pure gold. What this does is hold the money supply stable, allowing the market to set interest rates naturally. Initially it will cause the value of the dollar to go higher (so people with savings will be richer, and people with debts will either default or have more to pay off). Interest rates will also go higher, to 10 or 15%. The sudden shift will make people work harder, save more, and pay off their debts as quickly as possible. Basically it'll increase productivity and decrease consumption. So it'll hurt, no doubt about it. But you know who it'll hurt the most? Hint: Who's got the most debt of all? $14.3 trillion of it... ;) Now you can see why this solution will never happen. What's more likely to happen is a gradual increase in inflation and unemployment, until you start to see some real angry protesters. Maybe a few riots. Police will use acoustic weapons and tear gas. Maybe even microwave guns and beanbags. Gas prices will go higher and higher. Food will empty off grocery store shelves as people see the inflation and want to "lock in" the current price by buying a few months' worth now. You'll see a lot of dramatic idiots like Glenn Beck talk on TV about price controls and wage fixes, and how evil those damn Chinese people are.

Great point, and this is where you'll see me start to get into more radical territory, so I don't expect you to agree with me on all this. Right now we have a situation where governments have convinced the vast majority of people that they are some how "bound" by constitutions and laws. At least when we had monarchies, the Kings never made such a claim - everybody sort of understood the king was just acting in his own self-interest. In Democracy, we get this childish fairytale that governments are here to protect us and take care of us when we get old, and keep us from ruining the purity of nature and Bambi. Democracy really is pretty funny when you think about it. So no, you can't get rid of an oppressive government via legislation or elections. And laws and constitutions don't matter (they never did). All that matters is the culture in a society. When the culture is very sympathetic to government, it will devolve into fascism. When it's more sympathetic to individuals, it will hold onto a degree of freedom (more or less). And governments understand this point very well. They're not dummies. So the very first thing most governments try to monopolize is schooling. They want to teach their version of history and make the young children associate government with caring, kindhearted, protective female teachers. So later on, when the students grow up, they think of their fun childhood years and extrapolate that to mean government could improve other areas of their adult life. You'll see some violence here in America, within your lifetime. The question is, what will come next? I'm honestly not sure. Maybe the 50 states will assert their authority, and we'll go back to greater freedom and decentralization. Maybe the military will "temporarily" take over the Federal government and hold onto power indefinitely. Who knows? Keep in mind this stuff isn't very sudden or dramatic. Heck, Lincoln was basically a dictator who slaughtered 600,000 Americans. FDR burned down wheat fields and slaughtered cattle in order to hold up the prices of bread and meat during the deflation of the 1930's. America has a history of retards in charge. EDIT: The other point I wanted to add about public schools real fast is that they segregate the children by age. This is entirely unnatural for humans. Humans develop best as children when they're exposed to and interact with others of all different age groups. Funnily enough, the people who invented our way of schooling were the Germans (just before the Nazis took over a few decades later). You can see how quickly it caused those young people to grow up trusting authority.

That's part of the reason, yes. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were the two government loan agencies that were making it easy for anyone to get a mortgage (and still do). This is normally considered a good thing (after all, easy loans is great for people to buy houses!). But, you have to understand why interest rates exist in the first place. An interest rate is the "price" having money now, rather than later. Everybody has a different "time preference" - some people really need money today (so they'd be willing to pay a high interest rate), and some people don't care so much about buying the newest iPad or whatever (so they'll only borrow at low interest). An economy is a yin & yang balance between production (savers) and consumption (borrowers). In a free market, these two groups of people balance each other out. Think about supply and demand. When the supply of loanable funds increases (because a lot of people are saving), the "price" of borrowing money (interest rate) falls. It makes sense. Similarly, the opposite is true: when everyone is borrowing money, the supply of loanable funds shrinks. So interest rates naturally rise (just like the price of anything else that's scarce). Higher interest rates reward savers. What the government has been doing is to artificially lower interest rates by printing money (they call it "quantitative easing" and some other technical mumbo jumbo). The extra printed money increases the supply of loanable funds, which reduces interest rates. The problem is, it's fake savings. The market is demanding higher rates so people stop consuming so much and focus more on producing. This is how a "bubble" is formed. We grow accustomed to the boom period and think that's a "normal" economy. Then, when production can no longer keep up with consumption, you get a recession/depression. This is the period where the economy is trying to heal itself, by eliminating debts and shifting capital away from the borrowers and back to the savers. The government is currently pumping out as much extra money as possible, in order to delay the inevitable recession. But that'll only make it worse in the end. So what I've given you is a rundown of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABC). The point is, we don't need regulation. What we need is a stable currency without credit expansion. That will naturally make banks afraid to lend money to untrustworthy borrowers. Second, ask yourself this question: Why are falling home prices a bad thing? I thought the politicians used to talk about everyone owning a home, and it being the "American Dream"! ;) If they really cared about us, wouldn't they want everyone to own a house? Shouldn't prices fall further?

While I don't agree with Ayn Rand on everything, this is a great quote by her on that subject: "There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws." This is how regulatory democracy works today. They pass so many laws that nobody knows them all, and selectively enforce them against their enemies. Also, you'll notice governments stop putting people in jail so much during recessions and depressions. Why? To increase the number of fines, of course! The State can never be satisfied... it always needs more money.

Poor Andy Murray always seems to have bad luck.

Not praxeologically, no. The differences are in your head.

Oh Cobalt, I love this stuff! Don't get mad. As for those socialists stepping up to the fascists: NAZI = The National Socialist German Workers' Party Whoops.

Most people have this idea that a certain golden harmony can be struck between government intervention and freedom. What I'm saying is, it's impossible. All government interference in markets destroys the price-signals that allocate scarce resources based on consumer demand. It's either the market, or government. There is no third way. EDIT: A lot of people attribute massive wealth concentration and corporations with capitalism. These things are not the result of free markets. Take a look at the Forbes 400 richest people. You'll see most of them made their money by using government to shut out their competitors. Lobbyists for big corporations regularly work to have legislation passed that ADDS regulations to their industry. Why? To make it harder for the little guy to start a competitor. Trademarks, patents, and various other government-enforced monopolies make competition impossible in many sectors, too. Corporations aren't a product of the free market. They are unaccountable legal constructs created by governments to more-efficiently tax the people via withholding. In a truly competitive free market, you would still have rich people - but they wouldn't be nearly as rich as they are today. Wealth would be more spread out. You wouldn't have a fiat currency that's constantly being printed, so the poor would be able to save their money without fear of prices rising in the future due to inflation. You wouldn't have endless wars, or wasteful government spending. You wouldn't have millions of peaceful people locked up in government jails for smoking a plant or taking recreational drugs. Human potential could be unlocked, and productivity would skyrocket.

First, you explain to me how a country with a monopoly banking cartel (the Federal Reserve) that prints and fixes the price of money (via the bond market and interest rates) is "laissez-faire". If you can find a price that is too high, I can show you the government intervention that caused it. Try me. Second, Denmark and Canada have more-free markets than America: http://www.heritage.org/index/ Denmark places at #8 and the US places at #9. Canada is #6. So poof, there goes your critique of capitalism. No group of humans is perfect. Not even the monopoly security corporations you refer to as "governments". At least I support the peoples' ability to choose.

Also take a little PCP, it'll help you to have no fear! ;)

Three things for the protestors to know: 1. Dress like nuns and priests. It isn't illegal, and it will create great images of police beating religious people. 2. Bring balloons full of paint. When they break on the police helmets, they can't see anymore. 3. Bring ball bearings in buckets. Roll them under the cop's feet. 4. Wear foam core around your ankles and knees. The police are trained to hit you here, because it is most painful.