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Old 03-07-2009, 09:31 AM   #41 (permalink)
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Originally Posted by guyy View Post
What does it say about the guy that he thinks outmoded dogma is more important than racial equality? At best, it says that he has poor judgement. Someone less charitable might say he's stupid or is hiding his real motivations. In the end, it doesn't matter, because Ron Paul doesn't matter.
Charity doesn't enter into your remarks. Outmoded dogma? Boy, that sure sounds bad! Of course I'll go for racial equality then! Replace "less charitable" with "even more like Fox News" (to borrow an apt criticism of another).

When relevance tops out at Obama and Limbaugh, irrelevance starts looking pretty good to me.
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Old 03-07-2009, 11:07 AM   #42 (permalink)
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Charity doesn't enter into your remarks.
Nope, no charity whatsoever for people who side with racists, which is what he has done. Where was his charity in the sixties? With the rich and the white. So, with all due respect (i.e., none), fuck Ron Paul.

It's extremely doubtful that he could get elected anywhere besides 3/4 white districts in the sun belt.
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Old 03-07-2009, 11:26 AM   #43 (permalink)
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Nope, no charity whatsoever for people who side with racists, which is what he has done.
I'm sure this isn't merely a way of indirectly smearing a racially-neutral ideology you don't like and that you'll uphold the consistency of your view by taking an equally harsh view of the ACLU. We shouldn't dare defend any right if it means siding with racists. Thus, Fuck the ACLU.

Or am I giving you too much credit?
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Old 03-07-2009, 01:16 PM   #44 (permalink)
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I really don't trust either, but if I'm forced to make a choice I'd choose big government.
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Old 03-07-2009, 01:34 PM   #45 (permalink)
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Originally Posted by guyy View Post
To say that property rights trump the right to be treated equal is effectively racist. Maybe he doesn't hate non-white people, but he might as well.

As we all know, the civil rights movement won and Ron Paul lost. The country has left him way behind on this score. The neoliberal movement came, conquered, and collapsed. Yet there he is, clinging to the flotsam of failed ideologies. At this point, he's not even useful to conservatism.

It's hard to be more irrelevant than Ron Paul.
I don't recall Mr. Paul ever claiming that Americans of different races should be arbitrarily treated differently under the law (which is what equal treatment is actually about).

What you're whining about is the imaginary right to be treated equally by individual members of society. Such a policy would be unenforceable, though I'm sure there are plenty of people who would be willing to trample our freedoms trying to enforce it.

Should we pass a law requiring people on the street to offer an equally cheery greeting to everyone they see?

If Joe is going to the store and holds the door open for a black woman but not an Asian one, should he be charged with a crime?
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Old 03-07-2009, 02:49 PM   #46 (permalink)
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I don't recall Mr. Paul ever claiming that Americans of different races should be arbitrarily treated differently under the law (which is what equal treatment is actually about).

What you're whining about is the imaginary right to be treated equally by individual members of society. Such a policy would be unenforceable, though I'm sure there are plenty of people who would be willing to trample our freedoms trying to enforce it.

Should we pass a law requiring people on the street to offer an equally cheery greeting to everyone they see?

If Joe is going to the store and holds the door open for a black woman but not an Asian one, should he be charged with a crime?
That's an epic jump in logic
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Old 03-07-2009, 11:46 PM   #47 (permalink)
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Nope, no charity whatsoever for people who side with racists, which is what he has done. Where was his charity in the sixties? With the rich and the white. So, with all due respect (i.e., none), fuck Ron Paul.

It's extremely doubtful that he could get elected anywhere besides 3/4 white districts in the sun belt.
Do you support affirmative action?
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Old 03-08-2009, 08:26 AM   #48 (permalink)
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Do you support affirmative action?
How is this relevant?

The Voting Rights Act was not about affirmative action, and neither really was the Civil Rights Act. "Affirmative action" as you know it was an executive policy developed under the Nixon administration, a means of enforcing the Civil Rights Act. There were other means of enforcing the act. Whether by design or accident, "affirmative action" turned out to be a brilliant move politically, because it proved to be an effective wedge issue which broke apart the Democrat's coalition. So, despite the Nixonian origin, the backlash against AA benefitted Republicans like Ron Paul & Ronnie Reagan. I know you guys like to think of him as a maverick, but on this issue RP is totally mainstream Republican.

Unfortunately, for him and the Republicans, it's not 1980 anymore. I think the politics of backlash were finished by 2001, but if it wasn't clear at the time, Obama's victory, particulary his showing in NC & Virginia, made it glaringly obvious. RP's "high-minded" stand against renewing the Voting Rights Act etc. is part of the Republican racism-once-removed tactics that began with Nixon's Southern Strategy and ended with Obama's victory last fall. The world has moved on.

But for all that, his racial politics are more up to date than his ideas on the economy, where he's an embarrassment even to neoliberals.
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Old 03-08-2009, 10:22 AM   #49 (permalink)
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Originally Posted by guyy View Post
part of the Republican racism-once-removed tactics
Minus the racism part, of course. I'm still curious as to how much you hate the ACLU.

Quote:
But for all that, his racial politics are more up to date than his ideas on the economy, where he's an embarrassment even to neoliberals.
I'm not inclined to trust you to speak accurately for neoliberals at this point. Source?

And "up to date" is a really silly way to condemn or defend a belief.
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Old 03-08-2009, 11:01 AM   #50 (permalink)
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Originally Posted by FoolThemAll View Post
And "up to date" is a really silly way to condemn or defend a belief.
No it's not. When you are speaking about entire schools of thought, like economics, or medical science, or physics, or any system of ideas which evolves with respect to reality, being up to date is important.

It isn't the only way to evaluate an idea, but it certainly isn't silly.
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Old 03-08-2009, 11:31 AM   #51 (permalink)
 
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I'm still curious as to how much you hate the ACLU.
you seem to be under the mistaken impression that it's necessary for others to take your false equivalence seriously.
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Old 03-08-2009, 12:08 PM   #52 (permalink)
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Originally Posted by filtherton View Post
No it's not. When you are speaking about entire schools of thought, like economics, or medical science, or physics, or any system of ideas which evolves with respect to reality, being up to date is important.

It isn't the only way to evaluate an idea, but it certainly isn't silly.
Ideas can de-evolve, too. Schools of thought can worsen. Reality can worsen. It's a total crapshoot as evaluations go.

---------- Post added at 01:08 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:03 PM ----------

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Originally Posted by roachboy View Post
you seem to be under the mistaken impression that it's necessary for others to take your false equivalence seriously.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that it's necessary for others to take your uninformative jab seriously.

Guyy didn't provide me much more than "I don't like people who side with racists". It's not a false equivalence. At least not until guyy elaborates with more.
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Old 03-08-2009, 12:36 PM   #53 (permalink)
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Ideas can de-evolve, too. Schools of thought can worsen. Reality can worsen. It's a total crapshoot as evaluations go.
You are of course free to think whatever you want. However, most schools of thought get more accurate in their ability to describe reality (provided that is their goal) as time moves on. It isn't a total crapshoot.

Which doctor would you rather go to, the one whose knowledge of your particular malady is out of date, or the one whose knowledge is completely current?

I mean, yeah, of course there are exceptions. There are exceptions to every rule-- pointing that out doesn't invalidate the rule unless you're dealing in absolutes.

Speaking of absolutes, you seemed pretty absolute in your claim that the relative up to datedness of a person with respect to their particular field was a silly metric. You're wrong. Especially when the subject with which someone is out of date is economics, a field which seems to be much better at hindsight than foresight.
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Old 03-08-2009, 01:58 PM   #54 (permalink)
 
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fta: actually, if you want to play the pedantic logical game, which seems to be your preference, the "problem" you are trying to goade guyy into responding to is predicated on an entirely false equivalence--that the aclu is somehow racist first, and secondly that the way in which such logic as there is behind the first statement operates, this "racism" is somehow like that which guyy imputed to ron paul. none of that holds outside of some arbitrary construction of your own.

faced with this, the options are: ignore it altogether; or demonstrate why ignoring it is a reasonable response; or assume that your rickety machinery is legitimate and play along, walking into a poorly reasoned "problem". since 3 is out of the question, 1 seems most likely and reasonable. you should be grateful that someone opted for 2, simply because it required devoting more time and attention to your rickety little machine that it merits.

that help explain the comment?
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Old 03-08-2009, 02:20 PM   #55 (permalink)
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You are of course free to think whatever you want. However, most schools of thought get more accurate in their ability to describe reality (provided that is their goal) as time moves on. It isn't a total crapshoot.
What makes you say 'most'?

Quote:
Speaking of absolutes, you seemed pretty absolute in your claim that the relative up to datedness of a person with respect to their particular field was a silly metric. You're wrong.
Speaking of absolutes, you don't think it can be? I thought you at least admitted the existence of rare exceptions. I, for one, wasn't up to date with certain schools of thought concerning civil liberties during the Bush administration.

"Total crapshoot" doesn't imply the lack of validation. It's not an absolute. It implies that you can't reliably count on validation. And unless you want to get circular, you can't.

Quote:
Especially when the subject with which someone is out of date is economics, a field which seems to be much better at hindsight than foresight.
That's not even really true, though, considering (for instance) the divide concerning the New Deal. But I'm sure this board considers that debate wholly settled.

---------- Post added at 03:20 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:16 PM ----------

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that the aclu is somehow racist first
Never said. Read before you jab.

Quote:
secondly that the way in which such logic as there is behind the first statement operates, this "racism" is somehow like that which guyy imputed to ron paul.
Guyy didn't specify what kind of racism. Currently, it's very much 'somehow' like that which guyy imputed to ron paul's allies (not reading his posts either?).

Quote:
you should be grateful that someone opted for 2
I'd be a bit more grateful if you had done a decent job of it. A bit.
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Old 03-08-2009, 02:22 PM   #56 (permalink)
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how can you trust people who willfully try to control you?
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Old 03-08-2009, 02:26 PM   #57 (permalink)
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This always happens whenever someone rolls the corpse of Ayn Rand into the room.

---------- Post added at 06:26 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:25 PM ----------

oh, and I would thank you all to refrain from using tired phrases like 'trample our freedoms' before the cocktail hour.
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Old 03-08-2009, 02:45 PM   #58 (permalink)
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View: Food Problems Elude Private Inspectors
Source: Nytimes
posted with the TFP thread generator

Food Problems Elude Private Inspectors   click to show 


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With government inspectors overwhelmed by the task of guarding the nation’s food supply, the job of monitoring food plants has in large part fallen to an army of private auditors like Mr. Hatfield. And the problems go well beyond peanuts.

An examination of the largest food poisoning outbreaks in recent years — in products as varied as spinach, pet food, and a children’s snack, Veggie Booty — show that auditors failed to detect problems at plants whose contaminated products later sickened consumers.

In one case involving hamburgers fed to schoolchildren, the Westland/Hallmark Meat Company in California passed 17 separate audits in 2007, records show. Then an undercover video made that year showed the plant’s workers using forklifts to force sickly cows into the slaughterhouse, which prompted a recall of 143 million pounds of beef in February 2008.

“The contributions of third-party audits to food safety is the same as the contribution of mail-order diploma mills to education,” said Mansour Samadpour, a Seattle consultant who has worked with companies nationwide to improve food safety.

Audits are not required by the government, but food companies are increasingly requiring suppliers to undergo them as a way to ensure safety and minimize liability. The rigor of audits varies widely and many companies choose the cheapest ones, which cost as little as $1,000, in contrast to the $8,000 the Food and Drug Administration spends to inspect a plant.

Typically, the private auditors inspect only manufacturing plants, not the suppliers that feed ingredients to those facilities. Nor do they commonly test the actual food products for pathogens, even though gleaming production lines can turn out poisoned fare.
This is why I cannot trust either.
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Old 03-08-2009, 02:59 PM   #59 (permalink)
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Thank you, cyn. I wanted to come back and at least address the OP since I contributed to the thread in such a trite fashion.

But I don't "trust" either of them and anyone would be a fool to do so. Thus the question of who I trust "more" is like asking me: Who do you trust more, Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy?

That's not to say that there are not individuals in both government and business who I do trust. Just that the natures of business and government (two-party or not) are largely synonymous - to persuade, to proliferate cash flow, and to conform into inaccessible and efficient beasts. Not only do I not trust them, sometimes I despise them.
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Old 03-08-2009, 03:32 PM   #60 (permalink)
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Originally Posted by FoolThemAll View Post
What makes you say 'most'?
Because if part of the purpose of a school of thought is to incorporate new information, then they typically do so. You're free to disagree with me. With respect to economics, clearly there is effort to learn from the past.

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Speaking of absolutes, you don't think it can be? I thought you at least admitted the existence of rare exceptions. I, for one, wasn't up to date with certain schools of thought concerning civil liberties during the Bush administration.
I wasn't being absolute. You were. Don't try to turn this around. You might get confused and try and call me out for something that you were doing, and that I was not doing.

Quote:
"Total crapshoot" doesn't imply the lack of validation. It's not an absolute. It implies that you can't reliably count on validation. And unless you want to get circular, you can't.
If you think that anyone who has participated in this thread thinks the all of the problems with RP's perspective stem from the fact that it is out of date then you've been misreading. Out-of-date is an adjective. It isn't the whole of why RP is wrong.

It is as if someone said "That rusty car is broken." and your response was to scoffingly point out that "Well, just because a car is rusty, that doesn't mean it's broken." And you were right. But in your rightness you also missed the point. You turned a discussion about a broken car into a discussion about the meaning of rustiness.

And you also made a claim equivalent to "Gauging the condition of a car by the amount of rust on it is silly."

You're trying to reduce guyy's perspective to a single adjective-- you shouldn't be surprised if you can't make sense of it.

Quote:
That's not even really true, though, considering (for instance) the divide concerning the New Deal. But I'm sure this board considers that debate wholly settled.
It is true. If you ever find an economist who thinks there's nothing to learn from the Great Depression, let me know.
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Old 03-08-2009, 04:55 PM   #61 (permalink)
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Originally Posted by FoolThemAll View Post

I'm not inclined to trust you to speak accurately for neoliberals at this point. Source?

And "up to date" is a really silly way to condemn or defend a belief.
The source is the horse's mouth. Shiny stuff is the One True Value. It's a magpie's understanding of the economy. If you look at his stuff, it's clear that he doesn't understand how the banking system or credit work, or why banks are crucial to a modern capitalist economy. It's laughable, even from a Freidmanite perspective.
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Old 03-08-2009, 06:38 PM   #62 (permalink)
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Because if part of the purpose of a school of thought is to incorporate new information, then they typically do so. You're free to disagree with me. With respect to economics, clearly there is effort to learn from the past.
Sometimes, sometimes not. Sometimes there are overriding biases. Sometimes reality is misinterpreted. Sometimes exceptions appear to be rules.

Which is why, while I would understand 'often,', I haven't quite made the jump to 'most'.

Quote:
I wasn't being absolute. You were. Don't try to turn this around. You might get confused and try and call me out for something that you were doing, and that I was not doing.
I call "up to date" a crapshoot not because it's never true, but because it often isn't and is not reliable as a result. Meanwhile, I'm unequivocally 'wrong'. Do I need to point you to a dictionary.com definition for 'absolute' or can you manage that yourself?

Quote:
If you think that anyone who has participated in this thread thinks the all of the problems with RP's perspective stem from the fact that it is out of date then you've been misreading. Out-of-date is an adjective. It isn't the whole of why RP is wrong.
It's a good thing I don't think or say that.

Quote:
It is as if someone said "That rusty car is broken." and your response was to scoffingly point out that "Well, just because a car is rusty, that doesn't mean it's broken." And you were right.
For clarification: right about what? That it's silly to slam Ron Paul's ideas for not being "up to date"?

Quote:
But in your rightness you also missed the point. You turned a discussion about a broken car into a discussion about the meaning of rustiness.
To speak from your analogy, guyy already introduced the issue of rustiness. I'm aware that it wasn't the only part of his paltry attack and I never said otherwise.

Quote:
You're trying to reduce guyy's perspective to a single adjective-- you shouldn't be surprised if you can't make sense of it.
Jesus Christ. Are you really making a good-faith effort to read my posts? I attacked his single adjective as a single adjective. I did not ignore the rest of his position - I responded to those sentences as well. Do you have some sort of issue with divide and conquer? Am I not allowed to address one thing at a time?

Quote:
It is true. If you ever find an economist who thinks there's nothing to learn from the Great Depression, let me know.
Admittedly, I was vague here. I meant that our economic hindsight is not always and forever necessarily better than our foresight. Of course economists learned from the Great Depression. But their findings were not uniform. Someone's wrong. At least some schools of thought devolved.

---------- Post added at 07:38 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:36 PM ----------

Quote:
Originally Posted by guyy View Post
The source is the horse's mouth. Shiny stuff is the One True Value. It's a magpie's understanding of the economy. If you look at his stuff, it's clear that he doesn't understand how the banking system or credit work, or why banks are crucial to a modern capitalist economy. It's laughable, even from a Freidmanite perspective.
What's One True Value? Which instance of the horse's mouth opening?

Do you have anything to give me?
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Old 03-09-2009, 02:03 PM   #63 (permalink)
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this is the kind of statement that simply vaporizes any credibility you might have had.
People who understand the problem faced by GM today know the seeds were sown during labor negotiations in the 1970's and 1980's. The management teams who negotiated those contracts are no longer in place. The impact of those contracts are being felt today and is the difference between GM being competitive and being on the threshold of failure. Just because you don't understand the issues does not mean those issues are not real.
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Old 04-07-2009, 01:59 PM   #64 (permalink)
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I also cannot answer this question as I don't trust either one more than I have to. As others have pointed out there is very little difference between the two anymore when they work in such close concert with each other.
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Old 04-08-2009, 04:41 AM   #65 (permalink)
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I only trust King Bhumibol Adulyadej.
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Old 04-08-2009, 05:06 AM   #66 (permalink)
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"Trust"--what an appropriate word.
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Old 04-13-2009, 10:24 AM   #67 (permalink)
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The problem that I have with the question as phrased -- who do you trust more -- (should be "whom," BTW - not to be pedantic) -- is that it's missing a piece of information: trust to do what? trust with what? There are certain things govt is good at, others that businesses are good at. Would I trust govt to keep a secret? Heck no, the govt leaks like a sieve and the workers who have political axes to grind would shit all over a citizen in a minute if it helped them or their union or their preferred candidate (Joe the Plumber, anyone?). A business? Only if it was in the business's interest to do it, in which case they'd be much better than the govt. Provide security? I'll go with the govt and the armed forces; Blackwater's experience shows that private security isn't always as reliable as we'd like.

The point being that we shouldn't delude ourselves that businesses can act like govts and still do their jobs well (watch what a business does when it has no or negligible competition), nor that the govt can run a business worth a lick. The comparison doesn't make much sense.
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Old 04-15-2009, 02:18 PM   #68 (permalink)
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I think themain reason I asked this was it was when Oregon announce the GPS tracking for cars instead of a gas tax. Now, I think the gas tax is better and should be higher, but people were afraid of the government having access to GPS information of where you've been (not even real-time GPS info). I can see this as being an issue, but it isn't close to what my phone company can do. I carry around a cell phone that broadcasts my exact position in real time(through triangulation). Nobody thinks twice about giving that info to the cell phone companies.

And I've had plenty of debates over who I would rather have as an ISP. And neither are good. The local computer nerd group would be the ideal ISP, but they don't have the resources. The government can be good, if they aren't monitoring it and allowing anonymous access. But, the same can be said for a business, except that they will limit who can get on to paying costumers. I don't deal with any one of them and get it through open wifi ap's.

And it's a tossup for managing natural resources, pollution, and progress.
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Old 04-17-2009, 10:05 AM   #69 (permalink)
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Well, sure, ASU, but a phone company can't toss you in jail or bring you up on charges based on the information it has about you. Sure, it could abuse that information in other ways, but any abuse the phone co could make of that info could also be made by some unscrupulous govt bureaucrat if s/he had the same info. The unique diff btw the govt and the phone co is that the govt has coercive power and the phone co doesn't. The phone co can only coerce you if it gets govt backup.
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Old 04-17-2009, 10:40 AM   #70 (permalink)
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Here we go again! Barney Frank is an example of a man with a little knowledge thinking he understands a complex issue and is then going to "fix" things. He is definitely a person not to trust, meddling in "big business".

Quote:
Barney Frank's track record as a financial analyst is, shall we say, mixed. The House Financial Services Chairman said for years that a collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would pose zero risk to taxpayers. For most people, a mistake of that magnitude would trigger introspection, if not humility. But not the sage of Massachusetts. He's cooking up another fantastic subsidy -- and like the last one, he swears taxpayers won't feel a thing. In his words, "it would cost the federal government zero." Uh oh.

Mr. Frank believes state and local governments are paying too much when they issue debt because rating agencies don't give them the ratings Mr. Frank feels they deserve. So last year he pushed a bill to effectively force Standard &Poor's, Moody's and Fitch to raise their ratings on municipal bonds, but the legislation got sidetracked amid the financial turmoil. Now Mr. Frank is back, bigger than ever.

He'd like to create what he calls an FDIC-like federal insurance program for municipal bonds. Jurisdictions issuing debt would pay premiums into the insurance fund, and in return the federal government would guarantee the debt against default. Private companies already insure municipal bonds -- companies such as MBIA, Ambac and Berkshire Hathaway. And you may recall that last year the big bond insurers caused considerable angst when their exposure to mortgage-related debt called into question their ability to meet their muni-bond obligations. MBIA, in response, recently fenced off its muni-bond business from its other obligations.

If Mr. Frank really believes that state and local governments have been forced to overpay for this insurance, one has to assume his federal program would charge lower premiums and so undercut its private-sector competitors. The government can charge low premiums without putting taxpayers on the hook, he argues, because the risk of default is so low.

Or is it? The payment history of municipal bonds seems to support Mr. Frank. But then the triple-A ratings assigned to many mortgage-backed securities were also based on backward-looking models that failed to anticipate today's housing bust. The muni-bond performance record is also mostly the history of uninsured bonds. But the very existence of insurance can change the behavior of the policyholder or beneficiary -- watch Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in the 1944 classic "Double Indemnity." If a state or locality knows someone else will make bondholders whole, they are far more likely to default than an uninsured issuer would be.

Many states and localities have run up huge pension and health-care obligations to retirees that will come due over the next few decades. And many of those obligations were underfunded even before the bottom fell out of the stock market. When those bills hit, cities will have to choose among raising taxes, cutting benefits or stiffing bondholders. In some states, such as New York, retiree benefits are constitutionally protected, and taxes are already chokingly high. So stiffing the bond insurers will look pretty attractive.

None other than Warren Buffett devoted several pages in his latest Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter to precisely this kind of risk: "When faced with large revenue shortfalls, communities that have all of their bonds insured will be more prone to develop 'solutions' less favorable to bondholders than those communities that have uninsured bonds held by local banks and residents."

He continues: "Losses in the tax-exempt arena, when they come, are also likely to be highly correlated among issuers. If a few communities stiff their creditors and get away with it, the chance that others will follow in their footsteps will grow. What mayor or city council is going to choose pain to local citizens in the form of major tax increases over pain to a far-away bond insurer?" This goes double if the insurer is Uncle Sugar.

Mr. Buffett concludes: "Insuring tax-exempts, therefore, has the look today of a dangerous business -- one with similarities, in fact, to the insuring of natural catastrophes. In both cases, a string of loss-free years can be followed by a devastating experience that more than wipes out all earlier profits."

The difference, in this case, is that bond insurance, and especially federal bond insurance, would have helped create the "natural" catastrophe by encouraging jurisdictions to rack up obligations that taxpayers would be forced to make good on down the road. As for Mr. Frank's contention that muni-bond insurance is too expensive, Berkshire Hathaway is charging two and three times historical rates -- and Mr. Buffett is still worried.

One Fannie Mae debacle ought to be enough for any career, but Mr. Frank wants taxpayers to double down on his political guarantees. There are currently some $1.7 trillion in municipal bonds held by the public, and Barney thinks we can insure them at "zero cost." Considering the source, and the potential size of the bill, someone in Congress needs to sound the alarm.
Barney Frank's Double Indemnity - WSJ.com

If Frank has his way, remember you heard it here first, tax payers are going to get hammered with another bailout crisis in about 5 to 10 years.
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