CrowEpistemologist

Right. And we are 1000% sure that Romney, possessing magic powers and all, would have decided to handle that differently, right? Obviously we know for sure the the decision was made out of incompetence and not that there were other trade-offs of security involved, right? There is nothing fundamental or ideological about operational competence and with and army (including a literal Army) of experts surrounding them, Romney could have done Benghazi the same way as Obama, and he could have nabbed Bin Laden as well. The only question is high-level strategy and the debate saw Romney agreeing with Obama on that.

Both Romney and Obama have the same policy on Israel and Iran and they said as much in the debate. Suddenly, when insane t-party blow-em-all-up crazies are no longer the constituency, Romney sounds exactly like Obama. Both are for a balanced approach that doesn't drag us into more useless wars and doesn't appease anybody and gradually puts pressure on Iran. Romney did not explain how his magic powers would have prevented the Benghazi attack. Clearly looking into a hat in the woods might be his approach, but Romney is smart enough to know that is not the mainstream view.

Romney went out of his way to explain how he is exactly the same as Obama when it comes to FP. The Jon Stewart send-up of the debate was perfect. The only difference between the two last night was the color of their ties. This speaks to what I said before about FP and Romney: he's not going to be any different than Obama. Of course, I don't think there's going to be much defacto difference between the two of them anyhow, but that's another story...

Yeah, I got my links mixed up. Here you go: http://www.dailypaul.com/119914/fractional-reserve-banking-is-fraudulent-ron-paul-on-cnbc And to your point about the "worst venom", well, yeah... I'll take a clear Marxist (one for instance preaching actual dialectical materialism, not higher marginal income taxes for wealthy people) over somebody who is a wolf in Rand's clothing... That latter is far more dangerous...

Okay, let's try this. We're going to search for "ron paul fractional reserve banking" on Google. Here's one of the first ones: http://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2012/07/29/ron-paul-fractional-reserve-banking-and-the-money-multiplier-myth/ Here he's quoted as saying it's "fraudulent". I'm sure he agrees that fraud should be outlawed, and I'm sure he agrees then that FRB should be outlawed. That's insane. I compare this to Michelle Bachmann's fear of vaccines because they are both examples of politicians playing on people's fear of things they do not understand, but sound "bad" when you don't think about it too much. Vaccines give you the disease they supposedly cure, they say. How can that possibly help you, they say. So too FRB creates "money out of thin air" bla bla bla. Sounds bad. Must be bad. Whatever you do, don't rely on science to figure this out. Ron Paul is for legalizing drugs and he's a nice, gentle man. I've been to his rallies. He says other things, unfortunately, which completely undermine himself and the actually good ideas he espouses. I'm for freedom but I don't smoke pot. Many of Ron Paul's supporters are, as near as I can tell, the inverse.

Ron Paul thinks that fractional reserve banking is a government plot to destroy the world. It's no different than Michele Bachmann's fear of vaccinations, and they are both batshit insane. Ron and his ilk will set the cause of freedom back decades by associating freedom--and Ayn Rand for that matter--with their loony nonsense.

I think you missed the point. It's physically impossible to reconcile the absence of an individual mandate with coverage of pre-existing conditions. If you didn't do both, people would simply wait until they were sick to get insurance coverage, basically making a mockery of the entire concept of "insurance" and blowing up it's financial structure. Like I said, this is a somewhat wonky point that only people who understand the policy understand: like Romney understands since he implemented Obamacare in his home state. So Romney's Obamacare solution is a lie. He cannot implement that, and he knows he can't. Hence my theory that he doesn't even want to win anymore--he knows his single biggest promise of the campaign is a logical impossibility. I have heard Romney's statements and I have seen the criticisms of those statements from his right flank. Second-guessing the president on complicated, tactical matters of defense drops every pretense of reasonable decorum. It's perfectly true that in this short-term context we cannot (and, for reasons of national security should not) know all of the details of the situation. Taking a hard-line stance is not necessarily the best thing for our country. If a robber breaks into your home you may be advised to not immediately inform that he should be severely punished for his transgression--you might rationally make all kinds of moves to lessen the potential threat to your values, including deception and appeasement. These physical tactics are not the same as moral sanction. Romney knows this too. He knows that "blow the shit out of all of them" or even, "tit for tat no matter what" is not a policy which is in the best interests of our country and the actual solution is far, far more nuanced. Yet, knowing this, he criticizes a sitting president in a most un-nuanced, populist fashion in the hopes that nobody will care to understand the situation and will just go with his top-level bad-sounding thingies.

Romney's promise to get rid of the mandate is bullshit because it cannot be reconciled with his promise to keep the pre-existing condition portion of Obamacare. Long story short (and Romney knows this long story since he implemented it in his state), you can't have one without the other. It has to do with the logic of the system, risk pools, etc. (Anyhow, you were talking about a floating abstraction...?) While I'm not sure of the other items, I have a sinking feeling they have the same problem: that you weave a tangled web when your basic premises are free healthcare yet you want to make a government-run system slightly less government run. It's reminiscent banking "deregulation" which half deregulates leading to even bigger disasters because the basic premise of the government providing the ultimate backstop stays in place. As for foreign policy, yes, I do feel the same way now. More so: Romney is criticizing Obama for making moves that he himself would most definitely make.

"Redistribution" is also known as, "progressive taxation". We've had this here in the USA for oh, 80 years now? Romney believes in "redistribution" every bit as much as Obama does. He's just playing word games here to deflect criticism from his secretly taped remarks (which managed to be both factually idiotic and in no way a defense of freedom and simply an admission that class warfare shall be the norm, and he simply represents the other class). If Romney came out against the welfare state in clear terms, then that would be an honest defense of capitalism. Saying he wants lower taxes and smaller government even though he's in favor of everything that costs lots of money and expands the government is dishonest.

That whole thing sounds like a confidence scam. And here I thought the show, "Sprockets" was a German stereotype...

Well, that's all we have here across the board. You're going to vote on that (and advocate the same) one way or another whether you like it or not. Nobody has facts here that tell you exactly what's going to happen in the next four years for sure. Hence my view is the long view--what is better for us in the long run. I think I can be more certain about what will happen to the philosophical outlook and overall cultural approach to politics than I can about specific policies, mostly because the real delta in the latter will be so small. *** As for the Republican backlash, I think we're already seeing it. Voices like Bill Cristal and Peggy Noonan are questioning what is happening--and you need to listen to that in the context of knowing that they are probably screaming on the inside because they know they can (and will) affect the election. Now as for the answer to this, I think it's too early to tell. They haven't lost yet. I agree there's no guarantee and my theory certainly depends on a lot of hope, but I don't see any hope otherwise, so what the hell. Obviously when it comes to fruition one way or another I can adjust my models. However, a strong victory for the current strategy, to me, will reinforce the current status quo, which is a bad one. Disrupting it enables the possibility it will get better (and worse, sure, but I don't think any worse than now).

I have a rather complicated point to make here, no doubt. Today a great news story came across that underscores what I've been talking about: Rick Santorum tells audience that ‘smart people’ will never be on his [Republican's] side Somehow the Republicans have become the party of stupid people--and this is more important than what policy hairs we're splitting this election. As Romney implodes, this might very well portend be a shift to the reasonable, a shift to the intelligent, a shift to intellectual integrity. Such a spectacular implosion should make Republican leadership re-think the cynical win-at-all-costs mentality. Let's hope so anyhow.

I said this before in another thread: I know it sounds like a stretch, but I truly wonder if he's losing the will to win himself. The example was his latest statement about Obamacare: in that statement, he reiterated that he'd repeal it, but "keep some of the good parts" including prior condition coverage. The problem with that is that even he knows this is a campaign promise that absolutely must be broken since that logically makes no sense (it's a long story about the dynamics of insurance coverage, but Romney's been through all of this in his own state so he knows the deal). Another recent example is the criticism of Obama on foreign policy (middle east events)--one which he has to know he'd almost exactly duplicate. As such, he's currently busy criticizing his own future foreign policy (Obama did this with Guantanamo, but in that case I think he truly thought he would close it--but Romney knows now that the current middle east policy is the same as he'd do). To work the 120 hours per week for six straight months necessary to become president, you have to really want it. The giant contradiction in trying to be a differentiated candidate from a welfare statist when you are yourself a welfare statist is bound to catch up with you. With that set of premises, I don't know why you'd want to do anything.

The Billion Prices Project is a great case study in how hard it is to accurately track inflation with any kind of accuracy. I got a little excited about this until I thought it through: simply scraping every price on the Internet doesn't tell you how many people buy which thing and how many they buy. Not knowing that could make the study wildly inaccurate. In short, I'd give any of these measurements a +/- 5% error bar in the short run. Fortunately inflation at this level isn't likely to matter too much to you. Inflation of the dangerous sort will be apparent without sensitive instruments to listen for it. Attempting to predict its imminent arrival may be possible using a ton of science, but as in large Earthquakes--in which small tremors may mean nothing whatsoever--trying to measure "microinflation" very well may not help at all.

Sprial, the best way to get an "eyeballing it" view of overall systemic price inflation is to look to very complicated things like cars, industrial machines, or very simple services you contract out (e.g. your maid or gardener--although you need to back out merit raises and the like). Things like food can be subject to all sorts of dynamics in terms of supply, and looking at things like ice cream is difficult since now days people buy the exotic organic ice-goat's milk hand made by hippies in the mountains of Virginia--because its way cooler than plain old "ice cream" we used to buy years ago. I suspect the smaller portions/same price is the ice cream companies finding out that consumers won't notice and will pay the same. We have an epidemic of obesity here in the USA so its hard to find solid ground when you're talking about food prices: we're so far beyond basic subsistence that prices are tied much closer to people's whims and marketer's skill. So if you look at things that way, you'll probably find a little bit of inflation, yes--but not of the kind that has any meaningful effects on anybody's lives...

They started "the printing presses" about five years ago now and the folks predicting inflation got their butts kicked in the marketplace (except for gold, which made its own wind so to speak). I've predicted flat inflation (or slight real-terms deflation) since the crisis started fwiw. Ten year t-bills are at 1.8% or something so the market agrees with me.

I've been envisioning a sort of stag-deflation: certain commodities rally and make some things cost more (based on lack of investment in the discovery of said commodities, or yeah, some more large-scale speculation) yet no wage leverage leading to no wage inflation, meaning no "overall" inflation to speak of--all +/- a few percentage points based on random events. And I don't expect a "crash" which entails inflation but rather a long "ooze" entailing a long period of real-terms DEflation. Japan is our prototype here.

Obamacare--and the mandate in particular--is something more or less invented by the Heritage Foundation and implemented first by Romney in his own state. Quite the contrary, there is much reason to believe any new administration would do exactly that. They'd spin it differently ("make those deadbeats pay for their own health insurance!") but it would be the same thing. It occurred to me today that part of Romney's current slide in the polls could be due to him losing the will to win: he knows he'd have to backtrack on the Obamacare Mandate because the parts of OC he says he supports logically necessitates it. Well, certainly voting for a candidate is not a sanction of each and everything they ever do--you'd end up voting for nobody in this day and age. Unless that's your point--that we should vote for nobody (that's another discussion and maybe worth having). You see, this is just nonsense. None of that is going to happen--or not anymore than it's already happening and has been for decades here (wherein we've had free healthcare and things akin to the State Exchange since the 1960s). Again, everybody here asserts that as a "not-to-be-questioned", but I just don't see it. No doubt that Obama's rhetoric and promises are more statist, but the net effect in terms of actions between him and another guy will be negligible. I've conceded that Romney will not force everybody to wear wacky underwear or ban abortion birth control, or jail porn stars, etc. etc.--so the least you could do is concede there will be no Obama/socialist equivalent either. Short of that, I guess we'll agree to disagree. For every scary thing you say Obama has said I can find an equally scary thing Romney has said. I guess it gets down to what makes you most afraid. I'm not deeply afraid of either one from the actual policy standpoint...

I'm still lost. I didn't ask any questions in that post, I just answered a bunch. I'm always interested in rational discussion, yes...

I guess I am not sure what "credit" means in this context. I'm happy when politicians say true things. I reiterate those things when I hear them said... Um, I'm lost...

What things are those? Yes, Obamacare. We've discussed that--it's a wash. What else? What should be afraid of? Where is the imminent threat? Recall that the government is going to expand in dollar terms, massively, no matter who gets elected since the policies driving the expansion were put there by Obama, sorry Clinton, sorry JFK, sorry, FDR. So where's the cliff we're driving off of? Again, the unique cliff to Obama, not all of the things that are going to happen regardless...

I'm unclear on what the first paragraph means... And yes, I am making the assumption that the Obama campaign deals in facts much more so than the Romney side. I am, of course, talking only about the top-most issues (which are the only issues I track and generally mean anything in this context). Those two central issues are the economy and health care. In both cases the democrats offer more-of-the-same welfare statism and the Republicans offer the same in actuality but lie about it. Romney's recent re-re-re-backtracking about what he'll want to do about Obamacare is case and point: coverage of pre-existing conditions is logically impossible without the other parts of Obamacare. It makes no logical sense. It cannot work, and no honest person who has thought the matter through could possibly say it could. Ryan's, "insert belief suspension here" plan to cut the deficit is another example: he basically says we can have the same old welfare state, not cut anything than costs real money, have the inevitable population and demographic growth, make giant tax cuts--and still balance the budget. That's not a fight against statism, it's a war on math. *** By the way, it's clear that I'm cutting across the grain of many people's assessment of the current state of things, so humor me: what specific implemented policies have made Obama so incredibly bad? I'm not saying he's great or anything, I'm saying he's a middle-of-the-road welfare statist and hasn't done anything significant the other guy wouldn't have done when it comes to actual implemented policy. All I've heard thus far is how he has socialism in his heart (see: the original subject of this thread) and that's bad. And to be clear, somebody who has a deep-seated belief in socialism and somebody who has deep-seated beliefs that even religious kooks call religious kookery is a toss-up for me. In both cases you have to assume they are just going to shelve those views and just govern from the center. So convince me. How is Obama going to change things so drastically? What will he do?

I believe that anything very popular and focused on by lots of people will change culture (to a greater or lesser extent). The campaign for the presidency is one of those things. That is what I am reacting to. I do not, however, think that Romney's policies will change things one iota, and as such I do not judge him on that. The Republicans are putting on a spectacle of unreason. This should be met with scorn. They are advocating, politically, virtually the same mix of welfare state policies as the other guys. This should be met with indifference. They are advocating it while paying lip service to a few distant ideas that have nothing to do with the welfare state they are supporting it. This should be met with scorn. The Republicans should lose this time in order to show people that facts still matter. A victory for them will demonstrate the opposite. That will be a defeat for reason, and ultimately a setback for freedom.

What exactly does "overconsumption" mean? You seem to indicate its a bad thing. Why?

I understand you don't agree with my conclusions, but where is the hypocrisy? I find the Democrats a symbol of reasonableness in this election cycle and Republicans a symbol of an abandonment of all facts from public discourse. Fine, you disagree with that opinion (and this is, let's be clear, a far-flung opinion or estimate of the current state of things, not some statement of obvious, verifiable fact). But given my premise, my conclusion is perfectly reasonable. Also, I should be clear, I did discuss the pointlessness of people like us voting or thinking it might make a difference. Insofar as anybody (even dumb dumbs like ******* and **********) are in this discussion, they are hundreds of times more influential than their mere vote, and potentially thousands and thousands of times more. By saying, "vote Obama" I am saying (and yes, I should have been more clear) "advocate a vote for Obama with a detailed explanation as to why in order to make a broader point". I am saying that the current--and to be sure the last--frontier we're defending as rational discourse and fact-based discussion. Once that goes, everything else is moot.