Now That Trump's President... (not any more!)

wht a joke thss all is. money is politics + i am nt stupid. thr r no questions, no wonderment if th humans r wrong. we r clearly, completely out ov control. elephants just killd humans in retaliation, india. we bttr step up to r responsibility as a species or (understandably) th other 1's r going to knock us th fck out!!! wht th fck did we think ws going to happen? honestly.

I dunno guys, hasn't it been the end of the country/species/planet for like centuries now? nothing is real innit

  On 3/22/2016 at 8:05 PM, LimpyLoo said:

Adieu, my friend, literally everything you listed would be worse in a right-libertarian society.

 

GMO's

Pollution

Aflatoxin

HFCS

Adulterants in Meat

 

 

You think antibiotics in meat are bad?

Imagine what would get put in meat if there was no FDA, no regulation

First off, you couldn't be sure you weren't eating dog meat

Secondly, your meat would certainly have antibiotics

As well as anything else they felt like putting in there

There's no FDA to protect you from literally being poisoned anymore

But yay, we don't have to pay taxes anymore...."freedom"!

That's actually not true. Antibiotic/hormone free and free-range eggs are not a required by government and they are plentiful.

  On 3/23/2016 at 12:23 AM, luke viia said:

 

  On 3/22/2016 at 5:37 AM, AdieuErsatzEnnui said:

 

  On 3/21/2016 at 7:07 AM, luke viia said:

 

  On 3/21/2016 at 5:11 AM, AdieuErsatzEnnui said:

Money that is not willingly given is money that is taken. You cannot refute this principle. Taxes only work because of the threat of force.

 

Government can be run on voluntary money. It's just that no one is yet smart or daring enough to create a government that functions this way. It's the most efficient and the only moral way.

Who would voluntarily give the government money without wanting something in return?

https://www.kickstarter.com/

Yeah but people kick-start projects to get something in return.

 

Surely you have enough of an imagination to be able to envision incentivization of contributions to proposed public-use/infrastructure projects? As if having access to the proposed projects upon completion isn't incentive enough though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOp9k5WGoIU

Lol so terrible. Trump did NOT want to be there, he was beyond ready to get back on his plane and pop a couple pills.

If Trump becomes president, is his combover technique going to become a state secret?

Adieu, how will antibiotics/hormones situation be improved by loosening regulation?

This is the point you keep tap-dancing over.

  On 3/23/2016 at 5:49 PM, azatoth said:

If Trump becomes president, is his combover technique going to become a state secret?

it'll be applied to all merkin bald-eagles pronto

I wonder just how bad things could get under President Trump

Like, I wonder if America could become a fascist dictatorship

Ratcheted up in small increments, like the old boiling frog

Like, could we get Nazism 2.0 in America?

Or is there something IN PRINCIPLE stopping that from happening

I mean the constitution is only as strong as the people upholding it...

there's the hope that the failsafe plan of impeachment would work.

if u judge the US on its foreign policies & how these affect other global citizens, then its safe to say that whole "dictatorship" thang has been running rampant since Harry Truman got into govt

c'mon Limpy, wake up, its already been happening since the end of WWII ffs

ps: bizarrely, last time i was in DC i had a series of truly grotesque nightmares (ask the psycho ex) about this thing called Skynet in the building walls

voila, idiot savant strikes again:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/21/death-from-above-nia-csa-skynet-algorithm-drones-pakistan

  On 3/23/2016 at 5:55 PM, LimpyLoo said:

Adieu, how will antibiotics/hormones situation be improved by loosening regulation?

 

This is the point you keep tap-dancing over.

What I'm very obviously proving to you is that you can't regulate good behavior into existence. It doesn't work. You think it works, but I've just shown you with the example of food quality that consumer demand drives production techniques. That's what I'm saying.

Stolen money doesn't improve our lives. It's illusory.

The only reason that the food quality situation is better is because consumers became informed and demanded something better. The market responded and now we have high quality food available to us almost everywhere in the USA.

That wasn't regulated into existence.

You're arguing that without regulation things would be worse, but it's very clear that isn't true.

your examples aren't proof of anything. if you look at bad outcomes from medical interventions you'll see that it used to be far far worse, seeing the doctor at all would be a very bad thing once upon a time. only in the last hundred or so years have we started to actually figure health out in any kind of rational manner, and not surprisingly problems with unnecessary interventions have massively decreased. that's not to say it's perfect now, or we can regulate and design our way to perfect health, that's probably impossible in principle, but we can improve. we can also let things get worse if you go back to the bad old ways of doing things.

i think you might've met an unbridgeable ideological fissure here Caze

1) nobody here is advocating for regulating good behavior (on the part of consumers)...I'm certainly not, at least

We're talking about regulation protecting people from predatory corporations

We know for a fact corporations will do some nasty shit if they can get away with it

Again, without regulation, what would prevent monopolies?

Without regulation, what would prevent pollution/sewage being dumped in lakes and rivers?

2) Taxes are for implementing policies decided by our representative democracy...it only feels like stealing because the gov't currently isn't very 'representative'

  On 3/23/2016 at 6:41 PM, caze said:

your examples aren't proof of anything. if you look at bad outcomes from medical interventions you'll see that it used to be far far worse, seeing the doctor at all would be a very bad thing once upon a time. only in the last hundred or so years have we started to actually figure health out in any kind of rational manner, and not surprisingly problems with unnecessary interventions have massively decreased. that's not to say it's perfect now, or we can regulate and design our way to perfect health, that's probably impossible in principle, but we can improve. we can also let things get worse if you go back to the bad old ways of doing things.

How many people could have received successful treatment for whatever ailment if the laws were relaxed, but instead they are in massive debt now, not healed, injured or dead due to malpractice, etc., etc.

It's not perfect and it still exists, and many shit doctors still practice medicine and do fuck all to heal people. Licensed doctors. Mostly drug pushers.

Even the entire system of medicine is convoluted and unnecessary when holistic approaches are extremely effective and much more appropriate than many of the sloppy pharmacological approaches being used that often do not heal at all, but merely mask a problem or delay death for a period of time.

With relaxed regulations the entire market changes and the approaches change for the better. And we save money. All of us.

Right now we have a massive structure regarding health and medicine that is difficult to navigate and even sustain, because of the authoritarian enforcement by the government.

These protections are illusory.

You guys don't understand that the trade-off of some possible incremental improvement in your safety, which by the way is impossible to guarantee in anyway, because even safety is an illusion, is not worth it at all. Having your money stolen from you with these very poor justifications is a bad approach to society. Give me my 30% of my money back and I will make the decision on how to treat myself. Thanks.

also, if you're upset about the theft of a government tax, you're going to be really pissed off when some roving band of thugs shows up and steals all your shit and leaves you dying in a puddle somewhere because there's no cops.

  On 3/23/2016 at 6:58 PM, LimpyLoo said:

1) nobody here is advocating for regulating good behavior (on the part of consumers)...I'm certainly not, at least

 

We're talking about regulation protecting people from predatory corporations

We know for a fact corporations will do some nasty shit if they can get away with it

 

Again, without regulation, what would prevent monopolies?

Without regulation, what would prevent pollution/sewage being dumped in lakes and rivers?

 

 

2) Taxes are for implementing policies decided by our representative democracy...it only feels like stealing because the gov't currently isn't very 'representative'

No, it is stealing. If I don't pay my taxes I go to jail. That's the threat of force to acquire my money.

In what other situation is it even remotely reasonable that someone might use the threat of force to improve your life?

Things that function off a basic principle of wrongdoing cannot ever be positive.

It's like your best friend holding a gun to your head, "hey man, give me all the money in your wallet. I promise I will make our lives better with it."

  On 3/23/2016 at 7:01 PM, caze said:

also, if you're upset about the theft of a government tax, you're going to be really pissed off when some roving band of thugs shows up and steals all your shit and leaves you dying in a puddle somewhere because there's no cops.

Communities would hire private protection in lieu of police. They would have the ability to choose the quality of protection they are being provided, and they would have someone to hold accountable, because private companies are much easier to hold accountable than a government structure. The situation would be improved.

As if police even prevent crime. They are mostly a structure that enforces punishment.

whats about interstates/motorways, bridges, natural disasters.....u know, things like infrastructure?

  On 3/23/2016 at 7:09 PM, cwmbrancity said:

whats about interstates/motorways, bridges, natural disasters.....u know, things like infrastructure?

So this already exists in Texas. We have tollways which is a pay-per-use roadway system that funds new roads, we also have express lanes that are higher mph and separate lanes than the basic highways which allow one the convenience of traveling faster with less people around. Private companies fund the roads and then use tolls to make a profit off them. Almost all infrastructure can work this way, but you could also acquire funding for any infrastructure type of project via a modified version of kickstarter.com

In a lot of instances the government just hires private companies to use public funds to do work. So instead of allowing a government structure to decide who gets the contracts, which is often left to cronyism, we can choose for ourselves, because we have all our money not being stolen from us, and our fate left to the choices of a representative or corrupt power structure.

the road you live on works this way too, yes?

this whole "the market" can decide everything is as big a disillusion as believing the state can do likewise

there has to be a middle ground, surely?

more to the point, why is it that Europeans rarely use these kinda "market-faith" derived positions as core principals?

not being a culture snob, just curious, having lived in the US for a while and visited regularly.

describing how the NHS works would make some folks i talked with metaphorically spew

I don't have the answer to every function the government serves, and I stated merely that the government should be as minimal as possible, not that it shouldn't exist at all, because there are complex problems that might be difficult to solve.

Military is one of them, but even then, the military hires private contractors to do some work for them during conflicts too.

what happens if roads get fully privatized and you're not granted access to actually travel on them?

not cos you couldnt afford to, more that some oligarch just feels like telling the peasantry to find alternative routes?

call in the military?

channel Ayn Rand?

also, if u look at the Severn Bridge toll charges here in deepest Britannia, u'll find they cause a great deal of harm to the local economy on both sides of the border (just 1 counter-example).

a US example - an ex used to "borrow" her relative's bridge payment waiver thingy all the time = technically a crime, but folks just used to shrug "but every1 else does it too!"

the Danes pay approx 50% income tax and they're (technically) the happiest folks on the planet

just a thought