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[Heron TSG]

A conservative, a moderate, and a liberal walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Hey, Mitt!", followed by "What's a Mormon doing in a bar, anyway?"

Jokes aside, my emails from the Democrats reveal that Mittens is outspending Lightning Handsome Slightly Bent in several swing states, and now it's a dead even race in most swing states. All sorts of screaming about fundraising, plus more petitions for the original Healthcare Harbinger to release his tax forms.

_{(I guessed at the translation of Obama's name from a Kiswahili name lookup site, and I thought Healthcare Harbinger sounded like a lame wrestling name and it made me giggle. >_>)}

[Flare]

And now you are making a false dichotomy; it isn't "we let everything go to shit, then we either fix it or we don't." The whole point of regulation is to not let everything go to shit to begin with.

Except regulation doesn't do a damn thing to prevent problems, it just creates larger problems in its own right. Again, once you have a single large regulator in charge of things, the first thing companies buy and sell is privilege from the regulator.

Doesn't this happen whether you have regulations or not? It just seems to be businesses wanting to change laws to their own advantage which, unless you remove all law and enforcement, will persist so long as people with great wealth live in a state comprised of people that don't. Making a statement that laws that are enforced not stopping anyone does seem a little extreme. The regulation of traffic for example, it's a little hard to argue that every single dangerous driver doesn't care about the possibility of being caught.

[Nadaka]

And now you are making a false dichotomy; it isn't "we let everything go to shit, then we either fix it or we don't." The whole point of regulation is to not let everything go to shit to begin with.

Except regulation doesn't do a damn thing to prevent problems, it just creates larger problems in its own right. Again, once you have a single large regulator in charge of things, the first thing companies buy and sell is privilege from the regulator.

Good regulation does indeed prevent or reduce a whole host of problems. When you say that regulation doesn't do a damn thing to prevent problems, you are regurgitating a fabrication.

[GreatJustice]

And now you are making a false dichotomy; it isn't "we let everything go to shit, then we either fix it or we don't." The whole point of regulation is to not let everything go to shit to begin with.

Except regulation doesn't do a damn thing to prevent problems, it just creates larger problems in its own right. Again, once you have a single large regulator in charge of things, the first thing companies buy and sell is privilege from the regulator.

Doesn't this happen whether you have regulations or not? It just seems to be businesses wanting to change laws to their own advantage which, unless you remove all law and enforcement, will persist so long as people with great wealth live in a state comprised of people that don't. Making a statement that laws that are enforced not stopping anyone does seem a little extreme. The regulation of traffic for example, it's a little hard to argue that every single dangerous driver doesn't care about the possibility of being caught.

In the context of my argument, there is such a thing as successful regulation, specifically, market regulation. Might I mention that those banks making stupid loans were on the verge of going under, only saved by the intervention of the US government? The vast majority of these problems of which the prescribed solution is "more regulation" would be solved, in fact, with less.

Anyway, traffic regulation is an entirely different matter and if you get me onto the subject of roads then the discussion would be derailed. Suffice to say financial and infrastructural regulations are quite a bit different, not in the least because driving stupidly results in death whereas gambling with vast amounts of other people's money results in a bailout and favourable loans from the Fed.

The Department of Education doesn't educate anyone directly, no. But it does facilitate the learning of students via organizing teachers and teaching standards, as well as overseeing the State boards of education, which build and maintain schools.

Sure doesn't do a very good job of it. I'm not seeing how the states running their own education systems (as is the case in such backward places as Canada) would make things much worse than they are.

I'm not sure what you mean by the Department of the Interior being a larger independent country than France.

It possesses more land than France, and covers an absurd range of duties, most of which could be sent off to other departments.

The Army Corps of Engineers built the Hoover Dam, Grand Coulee Dam, and many other projects, and they continue to do such things. Flooding is a natural part of making a dam, I guess, but well worth producing enough power to light entire cities. (And run the Panama Canal, even!) If anything, we need more of this kind of thing: improving infrastructure creates both short-term and long-term jobs.

Extremely expensive projects that have unintended consequences.

Hoover Dam is probably the best example. Lots of energy, created Lake Mead! However, this led to unsustainable development and the growth of crops requiring lots of water. End result? Lake Mead is drying up and all those people who thought there was lots of water in the area are being royally shafted. That isn't even a direct problem caused by the Corps of Engineers!

The Department of Transportation also improves infrastructure and maintains existing highways. It's messy, but someone has to do it. (It could use some streamlining.)

It also is responsible for such worthwhile projects as the "Bridge to Nowhere" in Alaska and is primarily used for pork barrel spending. As with Education, the states themselves could handle most infrastructure, and so long as the government runs the Interstate highways they could be put under control of the Department of Defense (seeing as how they were originally justified as being for defense purposes).

FEMA makes a smaller mess out of larger messes. If I were living in New Orleans, I would much rather have food and a tent provided by messy FEMA than starve in the flooded streets without them.

FEMA did the following things during Hurricane Katrina:

FEMA won't accept Amtrak's help in evacuations
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/84aa35cc-1da8-11da-b40b-00000e..
 
FEMA turns away experienced firefighters
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/9/5/105538/7048
 
FEMA turns back Wal-Mart supply trucks
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/national/nationalspec..
 
FEMA prevents Coast Guard from delivering diesel fuel
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/national/nationalspec..
 
FEMA won't let Red Cross deliver food
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05246/565143.stm
 
FEMA bars morticians from entering New Orleans
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=15147862&BRD=...
 
FEMA blocks 500-boat citizen flotilla from delivering aid
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/9/3/171718/0826
 
FEMA fails to utilize Navy ship with 600-bed hospital on board
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0509..
 
FEMA to Chicago: Send just one truck
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-050902dale..
 
FEMA turns away generators
http://www.wwltv.com/local/stories/WWLBLOG.ac3fcea.html
 
FEMA: "First Responders Urged Not To Respond"
http://www.fema.gov/news/newsrelease.fema?id=18470

If ever there was an example of the government failing hard, you would be hard pressed to find a better example than FEMA. Unlike a lot of the other examples on the list (most of which aren't terribly bad at their jobs or dangerous), FEMA is something that actively makes things worse and has few to no redeeming qualities.

And... NASA. Challenger blew up, yes. Why we should slash their already meager budget is beyond me. If we're to make a Lunar (or Martian, Cerian, Asteroidian, etc) colony large enough to apply for statehoood (Aaaaand back to the thread topic via Gingrich), we'll need to know more about space and have a program with the wherewithal to start.

Why should the federal government be funding space colonies when it can't keep itself solvent?

----

'29 was when your precious free markets were given the chance to fail and they did miserably.

 Read the damn campaign platform of Herbert Hoover.[/quote]

Certainly. I read some of what Hoover had to say, and here it is:

    We might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin. Instead we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic. We put it into action…. No government in Washington has hitherto considered that it held so broad a responsibility for leadership in such times…. For the first time in the history of depression, dividends, profits, and the cost of living, have been reduced before wages have suffered…. They were maintained until the cost of living had decreased and the profits had practically vanished. They are now the highest real wages in the world.

    Creating new jobs and giving to the whole system a new breath of life; nothing has ever been devised in our history which has done more for … "the common run of men and women." Some of the reactionary economists urged that we should allow the liquidation to take its course until we had found bottom…. We determined that we would not follow the advice of the bitter-end liquidationists and see the whole body of debtors of the United States brought to bankruptcy and the savings of our people brought to destruction.

Instead we met the situation with proposals to private business and to Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic. We put it into action….

HERBERT HOOVER: CHAMPION OF LAISSEZ FAIRE

Besides what he said, what did Herbert Hoover do? Well, here's him slashing federal spending, the laissez faire solution to economic problems:


Note the "1920" point, where Harding drastically cut spending in reaction to the Depression of 1920. Now note 1929-32, when Herbert Hoover was running the show. Whoops! Looks like Herbert actually increased spending!

I'm not even going to get into all the programs that Hoover started or the details of his own New Deal, but believe me, I can if you want.

Look at the size of government under him.  Read his speech against giving the bonus marchers their money.  Saying his interventionist policies were sabotaging the economy just shows that when your ideas failed in history you change history to suit your ideas.

Yeah. Uh-huh. He sure cut the size of government when he increased federal spending by nearly 25%.

Again, every piece of actual evidence here says Hoover was an interventionist. I provided a counter example, the Depression of 1920, in which the government actually DID undertake a Laissez Faire policy to ending the depression which actually worked completely and you ignored it. Just looking at charts of government spending and unemployment from those twenty years makes it woefully clear which way worked better.

Good regulation does indeed prevent or reduce a whole host of problems. When you say that regulation doesn't do a damn thing to prevent problems, you are regurgitating a fabrication.

Good regulation does not stem from the government, it stems from market corrections that the government won't allow to happen.

[Aqizzar]

As thread proprietor, I'm going to ask that you stop making posts like that.  Not that I'm arguing with you, I didn't read half of it, but because massive uncredited line-by-line quotewalls are ugly to look at, usually pretty inflammatory and prone to starting or continuing arguments, and impossible to coherently respond to.  If you can't surmise an argument in a more contiguous form, you may not have as much of a point to make as you think you do.

And holy crap that's a big image.

[GreatJustice]

The forum software doesn't lend itself to image downsizing unfortunately. I'll try to find a smaller one

[Urist Imiknorris]

The forum software doesn't lend itself to image downsizing unfortunately. I'll try to find a smaller one

Code: [Select]

[img width=bluh][/img] or [img height=bluh][/img] scales the image to fit the selected dimension.

[GreatJustice]

The forum software doesn't lend itself to image downsizing unfortunately. I'll try to find a smaller one

Code: [Select]

[img width=bluh][/img] or [img height=bluh][/img] scales the image to fit the selected dimension.

You, good sir, are hero.

Now, I'll go back and trim the post a bit.

[Aqizzar]

You can also just put big images in spoiler tags, that works fine.

[Sheb]

I don't want to do your job Aqizzar, but if the communist-baby-eater and the libertarian-fachist-puppies-rapers want to have an argument on economic policy, should'nt they start their own thread?

[Aqizzar]

I don't want to do your job Aqizzar, but if the communist-baby-eater and the libertarian-fachist-puppies-rapers want to have an argument on economic policy, should'nt they start their own thread?

I would appreciate it, but it's not like there's not already a billion of them sunk down in the depths of the boards, all stuffed with the exact same arguments.  I'd say at least there's a hint of context to the argument if its here, but there never is, just people arguing back and forth about the merits of government spending with increasingly thin sources of information.

Besides, it's not like there's much in the way of politics to talk about, aside from posting bootleg videos of Daily Show clips.  Like that one of Romney criticizing Obama's speech the other day, intercut with Romney giving an almost verbatim speech a few weeks prior.

[Sirus]

Well, I saw my first Obama advert the other day, featuring the man himself. Kinda interesting when most political ads just have that "I'm X and I approve this message" tacked on the end.

That's relevant, right? :I

[Mego]

This Doonesbury comic made me laugh. Discuss.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Karlito]

I feel that the President's children, being minors, should probably be kept out of politics as much as possible, so good on Obama if he actually does hate using his family for ads and stuff.

[Flare]

In the context of my argument

That's what I get for jumping into discussions in the middle .

Anyway, traffic regulation is an entirely different matter and if you get me onto the subject of roads then the discussion would be derailed. Suffice to say financial and infrastructural regulations are quite a bit different, not in the least because driving stupidly results in death whereas gambling with vast amounts of other people's money results in a bailout and favourable loans from the Fed.

Driving stupidly doesn't necessarily result in death though, it might mean the death of someone else, and, assuming you survive, landing yourself in a jail cell which does seem to be the case for only a few people that brought about the banking crisis.