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Downturn

3 (6%)

Recession

20 (40%)

Depression

11 (22%)

Paradigm Shift

6 (12%)

Apocalypse

10 (20%)

Total Members Voted: 50

[Granite26]

I'll admit that the gun thing is a bit of hyperbole.

It specifically refers to my belief that any government action is inherent backed by the threat of force.  I can choose not to buy cheerios, but I can't choose to not pay taxes on roads I don't use.  (or more topical, I can choose FedEx or UPS, but not which letter carrier I use).  It's a bit of an overstatement, but it's still true.  Anytime a law is passed, I can choose to follow it, or I can choose to let the government arrest me for not.

I'm not even against government intervention in the interest of regulation and stabilization, it's just that the examples we're talking about here are back-end.  By back-end I mean they help companies or people who have screwed up at the cost of those who haven't.  The technical term is Moral Hazard.   I have issues with wellfare not because I don't believe in a bare minimum standard of living, but because it creates a situation where people are disinclined to get off of it.  As in they are better on wellfare than getting a job at McDonald's.  (This is my perception of the situation, feel free to counter).

I'm not sure what the government could do to help banks without bailing out the failures at the cost of everybody else, but a solution that rewards failure at the expense of success is unacceptable to me. I feel even more strongly with the car situation, because I feel that my greatest power in this society is my ability to vote with my feet.  In my mind, nationalization will isolate the banks from the effects of their mistakes.

(If you want the high-techy geek talk->  Market Forces find local maxima perfectly.  The role of government is to smooth out the bumps so that the local maxima is ideal, not to force the market into position after it's found an equilibrium.)

[Aqizzar]

While I said it in a really snide way, I meant it completely when I said that no one ever promised you an accommodating life.  Yes, providing people with a safety net means that some people will simply live on that and not try to improve themselves.  No system is perfect.  But there are other was of the doing the same things - just because the current American welfare structure acts as a disincentive to work for some people does not mean that welfare has to work that way.

The trick to avoiding a bailout of banks becoming a reward for failure is twofold.  One, as part of fixing their mistakes this time around, you make new rules and actually enforce your oversight power so that the same mistakes aren't made again.  Two, you make a public example out of the managers who were on watch at the time.  Maybe not even in a truly substantial way, but enough to discourage others from trying to scam out people in a similar way later.

(If you want the high-techy geek talk->  Market Forces find local maxima perfectly.  The role of government is to smooth out the bumps so that the local maxima is ideal, not to force the market into position after it's found an equilibrium.)

My economics professor always stressed that the most important thing to remember is that market theory never perfectly describes how markets actually behave.  They don't 'find' the local maxima, they wander around it in a constant state of flux.  And the most important thing to remember there is that somebody loses out - we decide as a society where to draw the line between personal security and market efficiency, but as countries like Japan prove, they don't have to be mutually exclusive.

And uh, that's one interpretation of the government's role.  The government can certainly try to force a market to a point away from equilibrium, and does all the time in small ways like minimum wage and such.  It can go for much larger shifts too, like command planning, it's just never worked before, and there's never been a good reason to try.

[Granite26]

Yeah, that was mean to be 'my interpretation of the government's role'

I still disagree with the making rules.  I can't help but think of it as government paternalism and post market tinkering.  I can't help but feel that it's the investors job to fix the managers problem as well.  Sure CEOs are overpaid, but it's boards that get to choose how much they are overpaid, and the investors choose the board.  CEOs are overpaid at the expense of the investors...

I think we're pretty firmly into the respectfully agree to disagree.

[mainiac]

That hardly proves your point about a federal postal service putting private post out of business.  Quite the opposite in fact.

USPS parcel shipping is hurting the company due to "unfair" shipping rates.  People want cheap shipping, but they don't realize it's coming out of their taxes, and if they do they are right in assuming that since they pay for it anyway, they might as well use it.  The same could very well happen to banks.  Just because one country pulled it off doesn't mean that our government will release that power when it's time.

That would be a much more compelling case if taxation were actually supporting the postal service.  But they aren't.  The postal service is supported by stamps.

In light of the very high fuel costs last years, the USPS asked congress for a 200 million dollar grant.  That's compared to 75 billion dollars of revenue.  Their request was turned down.

The postal service has a monopoly.  That means they can set the price to whatever level they need to sustain operations.  They only face a shortfall if their predictions aren't optimistic enough.  But the postal service is run by people who are in the job for the public good, not the profit.  They don't gain anything by the USPS making a huge profit.  So they set the rates as low as they can.  The result is we get all the efficiency of a monopoly, but none of the price gouging.  I for one, really like that.

If you introduced private competition, they would move in one the most profitable routes, but ignore the less profitable one.  The government would be forced to pick up the slack.  Then we would have to pay for the post office with tax dollars, because we stripped away it's ability to sustain itself.  So taxpayer dollars would be pissed away while private companies leach off all the profits.  Would that be better?

Moral Hazard

Sure, there's a moral hazard to all sorts of things the government does.  But in this country, we lean heavily in favor of inaction.  Fear of the harm from a moral hazard compels us to accept a much greater harm through inaction.

[Granite26]

Not far enough, IMNSHO...

[Andir]

That would be a much more compelling case if taxation were actually supporting the postal service.  But they aren't.  The postal service is supported by stamps.

In light of the very high fuel costs last years, the USPS asked congress for a 200 million dollar grant.  That's compared to 75 billion dollars of revenue.  Their request was turned down.

It must also be nice to have a fleet of government owned vehicles, and assets written against the federal reserve.  Not having to worry about that is a major part of operating cost.  You may not pay for the services directly, but you do pay for it.  Also, that's the first grant I've seen turned down in years.  Up until the Bush (first) administration a good part of the benefits were covered by federal sources as well.

[mainiac]

Written against the federal reserve?  The postal service issues it's own bonds.

Even if the federal reserve did back the bonds, your talking about lowered interest payments that would save the department tens of millions and cost the government even less then that.  That's compared to a seventy five billion dollars in income the postal service had last year.  That's hardly working on the taxpayers dollar.

Please explain to me how prices being high enough to support competing private firms would be better then the feds losing a few million dollars in interest.

Also: Gee, must be nice for trucking companies to use government roads.  Gee, must be nice for corporations to use utilities kept cheap by municipal subsidies.  Gee, must be nice to live in a country that maintains a basic goddamn infrastructure.

[Bromor Neckbeard]

I didn't need anyone to tell me that...

Yes, but you play Dwarf Fortress and are therefore intellectually superior to, probably, 95% of Americans.  I'm convinced that most Americans DO need somebody to tell them that.  Since we're in this mess, clearly, somebody should have said it.

Saying that the president needs to play father figure just shows how juvenile we've become as a society.  You're right... people need to be responsible, but it's not the governments job to tell them or make them, unless by make them you mean take away the other options

Well, I don't necessarily think it's the government's job to MAKE them (although I would be perfectly fine with requiring personal responsibility and the ability to differentiate fantasy from reality for somebody to be considered a legal adult), but there's nothing wrong with the government TELLING people to be responsible.  It doesn't have to be Obama, I just used him because he was the first famous guy I thought of.  It could be Chuck Norris saying, "I'll roundhouse kick your head off your shoulders if you take out loans you can't afford" or Jessica Alba saying, "I'll do an explicit nude scene in my next movie if every American not in the military trades in their Hummer for a compact car".  Whatever would get Americans to stop acting like goddamn morons.

*Completely ignores the entire "post office" discussion, because Aqizzar and mainiac are doing a fine job with it, and JSF corrected Aqizzar on the single omission that I caught*

[mainiac]

It can go for much larger shifts too, like command planning, it's just never worked before, and there's never been a good reason to try.

The French railway system was done under command planning.  Government money built the rails.  Private firms rented the rails.  The American system most definitely not built on command planning.

Compare these rail systems sometime.

[Creamcorn]

I wanna throw something into this fire! It's not more fuel btw.

Talk is cheap and so are many other things in this world, world because we have not found any cheap/effective single way to get off of this giant ball of water. Of course that means that we won't be going anywhere for a long time, sure you can still move onto some distant island. But that dosn't mean that problems will still follow you, the world is imperfect and it can't help being this way. The only reasons problems exisit is because you happen to be in it, you can still do things about them but you can't get rid of what makes them: anything. As long as your here problems will always be here but bear in mind that it was never really your fault, like I said earlier you can still do something about it.

And getting others involved gets thing done faster, of course there always complacations, so think about them like everything else. I also notice many of us don't like the people we work with becuase of their beliefs, get over it; find common ground for a start.

But some of us like to hypocrites, (like me: lazy) and never really do much of anything, so that really makes me cheap too.

tl;dr Common, uncommon sense and the crap I wrote aside. We all need to really work together to get a big job done.

[Armok]

we have not found any cheap/effective single way to get off of this giant ball of water.

I have, it's called "fiction". I'm still tackling how to make it permanent and not get dragged back into this cesspool thou.