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aequalsa

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Everything posted by aequalsa

  1. I'm not exactly sure what you are looking for; Definitions can be found on the internet quite easily. It's a historical term that references a particular historical party in a particular place. As such, it has meaning, in the same way that Republicans and Democrats have meaning in spite of the ambiguity that must necessarily occur when referencing a large group of people. Differences between individuals in the party does not mean that no similarities exist or no guiding principles can be found. And it does not for example, imply that I can't listen to a policy maker like Mccain or Romney and think that they seem to be quite democratic in their views.This ambiguity does not equate to meaninglessness. It's just ambiguity.
  2. That's not true, but it is an understandable conclusion since it is often used incorrectly, in the same was that "National Socialism" has been. The ambiguity stems from the facts of its creation in early 1900's Italy. It was a conglomeration of left and right wing ideas and methods on a backdrop of statism and extreme nationalism. This allows people to find an aspect of fascism in either of the parties in the US, quite easily, and then accurately make a comparison. So, for example, you could look at the way that Bush's prescription drug program "protects" the private property of drug companies and properly call it a fascist policy or you could look at Obama's mandate that we purchase health insurance for the good of the country and likewise, accurately call it a fascist policy. Neither are policies that would have given Mussolini any pause. A perfect example would be the Kilo Supreme Court decision that held it as proper to use eminent domain to take people's homes away at a court mandated price to give the land to Walmart, since this increase in taxes was better for the country. You can see elements of free markets, state control, the good of the nation, and elitist pull pedaling ensconced neatly inside the one act. The US for the past 50 years has been mostly indistinguishable from Fascist Italy with the exception of the nationalism. The US seems to have little patriotism left in it, let alone Nationalism but utilizes most of the same policies of psuedocapitalism where markets are allowed to exist at the descetion of the government so long as they are politically relevent and hand most of the proceeds over.
  3. I'm usually behind on this sort of thing, but on the off chance that someone is even more behind than I, I decided to post this for you to check out Fortunately, "Objectivism" has been doing much better since the 1860's.. http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=objectivism&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3 Capitalism seemed to recover from its low dip in the 60s but has now, once again nearly dropped off of the intellectual radar. http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=capitalsim&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3 Not only did the 60's fill the world with hedonists, it also filled the world with potty mouths. http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=shit&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3 Enjoy
  4. Some trouble with this sort of question is that one is hard pressed to find someone who consciously, purposefully, with full admission, wishes to do evil. Hitler didn't want to do evil. Stalin didn't want to do evil. It happened though, as an ultimate effect of their misshapen values. Obama may not want to destroy America either, but maybe he's a globalist who believes that for the rest of the world to do better, the US needs to consume less and the destruction of our economy is a way to accomplish that. Or maybe he believes that the injustice of 43 million Americans without healthcare is so great, that it trumps all of our negative liberties and even our overall economic well being. The measure of a man can only be the effects of his actions. If what he does causes great evil, then he is greatly evil. Only large amounts of dishonesty allow them to evade the knowledge of the results of their actions, so what you are left with is either, that he is wretched, or he's dishonest. Probably, in his case, a fair amount of both.
  5. "Make good choices"...but that may be my inner Montessorian taking over.
  6. I think he's been pretty clear about that intention from the beginning. ..
  7. But....did you see his hair?!?! It's dreamy... Edit...in fairness though, i think some of his other stuff is funny. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC6vFA8Mqvc
  8. It is small now, but there is no way of knowing that it will stay that way. The interest rates are artificially low right now for several reasons one as unpredictable as the next. Sure, we can currently finance our whole massive debt for pennies on the dollar, but what happens if they run out of willing lenders at the current rates and they rise to 20% again like it did in the 70's or even higher? Depending on the loan terms, that could amount to the total federal budget being spent to service the loans. Think some serious inflation might happen then? Or what if China decides to amp up their current unloading of our currency? A lot of our lack of perceived inflation is due to Bretton woods and our status as the reserve currency. If that ends...all those locked away dollars could be rushing in, in short order. There way too many uncertainties in most of the variables and any or all of these could come about over the course of a few years. Since the fed took over, this has happened every 20 or so years. Bursts of inflation happen all at once every couple decades with periods of relatively low inflation and relative stability in between. I think looking at 10 or even 20 years of this system as a basis for your decisions is foolish. If I flip a coin 23 times and the last 3 are heads, it doesn't mean the tails have been beaten back forever. That said, income tax is a huge concern, but only worse in the sense that one person cutting off my leg is more of a problem than someone else cutting off my hand. Neither should be disregarded.
  9. I can see that you're still trying to paint me as a conspiracy theorist by putting words and ideas in my mouth. Not sure if you're trolling or just unaccustomed to honest disagreement on the subject, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. There is no conspiracy to be covered up. None that, I'm aware of, leastwise. I never said it all went to those 70k or so millionaires. It gets spent along the way by various levels of governments. Remember all of the public employees I mentioned at the state, local, and federal levels? Federal contracts for politically connected folks account for a lot. Public employees unions and pension plans. All those people have a vested interest in maintaining this system. You don't need a conspiracy as long as enough people in enough positions of power, from a voter on up, benefit by the system. There doesn't have to be a conspiracy for two wolves to decide to eat a lamb. The evil is built into the system. It's immoral, top to bottom, which is why objectivism opposes it. My point was, once again, the closer you are to the source of origin, the more of a beneficiary you are, at the expense of the actually productive people at the end of the line. Mostly that's governments and large banks. I am getting the impression that you are looking at this from a pragmatic or utilitarian stance? Is that the case?
  10. I'm really not certain what you're getting at here. I haven't heard of anyone advocating slavery, but growing the currency supply is a given and has been for quite some time. Sooo...our currency losing value relative to goods and services is a legitamate concern while slavery is not. Unless there is some context that I am missing which you would like to explain about this comment, i am left to assume that your daft, or, and more likely, you want to paint me as such. It is an actuality that the money supply rose in any measure you care to use. I don't buy into, pardon the pun, any measure of prices, anecdotal or otherwise. That's useful information about the Earth. On Venus, where I reside, a symbol A that represents a quantity B, which is then increased in amount, decreases the value of B relative to its self. Even if B is growing in such a way that it is disguised. Of course....there's a lot of sulfuric acid here, so maybe that affects it. I thought you would agree with the title I bestowed. Is there some part of this thread where you are opposed to an entity whose job it is to manipulate the money supply? Maybe I missed that. As far as your implication that I'm advocating a conspiracy theory of some sort, I regret to inform you that you are mistaken. The way this works is that the closer you are to the source the more your money is worth when you spend it. They are able to buy today's goods at yesterday's prices because "todays" prices are created by the act of money creation whether through credit or M1. If you wanted a break down it goes something like this...Federal reserve banks->Federal Government->Federal employees and state governments->Smaller banks and state employes->County governments->County employees and Cities-city employees-local banks-> Ass raped private sector business owners->Even more ass raped private sector 1040ez employees->taxes to federal,state,and local governments who collect what's left of the new yesterdays prices to move on to the next round of pillaging. So more simply, large banks and the government mostly. It's not sitting anywhere since it trickles down to all the appropriate political connections needed to maintain the corruption. It does make sure that 50% of the millionaires in the US live within 100 miles of DC wile the other 50% who actually are producers in spite of the graft, regulation and weight that ties them down are spread out a little more.
  11. Giving your numbers the benefit of the doubt, don't you think it dangerous to come to a conclusion on the effects of fed policy by analyzing 1 cherry picked, 10 or 20 year period? If you were to go back a mere 25 years you find a world where a nice, average home in orange county, Ca could be bought for 60k and a new Toyota for 2 grand. This with only a %50 decrease in minimum wage. The differences are more stark as you go back. In the 1940's my grandfather payed .09/gallon for gas and bought running, used cars for $25. And of course, as usual for defenders of inflation, you ignore the the massive value gained by a technologically advancing civilization. Even if there was 0% perceived inflation on all goods and services, there still remains a massive transfer of value, from everyone else, directly to the owners of the printing press when the world is increasing its productivity through technological advance. When a washing machine is invented, the hours of labor required to perform that work is reduced by maybe 90% versus a washboard in the river? If the price to have clothes washed remains unchanged, where did the extra value of that labor go? The theft is even more magnificent when you consider the value created for all businesses when industrial geniuses like Al Gore in vent the internet for us. What more is produced by the use of computers? 10, 20, 50% of the US economy in terms of true labor? A lack of deflation alone, is a sign of theft on a grand scale in our current world. Inflation is just their refusal to even give us a reach around.
  12. Thanks, although, rereading it I notice a bunch of embarrassing grammatical errors. Wiser people than me edit before posting.
  13. I'd take it a good deal further and say that if a company could be shown to be causing a neighbor direct physical harm they should be responsible for any and all costs associated with returning the individual to their original state or compensating them directly when that is not possible. In fact, that is was our legal system does. Of course, you need to actually prove your case against an individual entity. So this is only accomplished in a specific and objective way. What you seem more interested in, though, is to avoid the impossible task of tracing actual harm and lump all businesses into one category and label it "damaging to our health." This would affect software companies with 15 employees and virtually no "carbon(or any other) footprint" and large car factories with thousands of employees bunches of smokestacks responsible for this same harm. Doing so, vaguely holding all businesses and wealth producing individuals responsible for every harm that occurs to anyone is capricious and myopic in nature. This could be fair, but first you would need to add up all of the values they produce and subtract the cost from them. So for example, the car factory where you purchase your car might be able to be shown to produce enough poisonous fumes to take 5 years off of your average lifespan. So if that was determined to be 100 years based on your healthy lifestyle and long lived grandparents then they would be responsible for compensating you, at least financially for 5% of your life...or roughly $165k in the US plus some reasonably determined amount for the emotional cost of that lost year. But then we would need to factor in your gains from being able to drive a car rather than walk to places which would amount to around 14 years of your life or around $462k. Also we would need to add in the lessened cost of all of the material items you consumed due to the mechanization of jobs over your whole life so, maybe $974k for that. Also some reasonably determined amount for the emotional value gained by having access to so many products and services that would be unavailable without those dirty factories. We can just say that those cancel out, for the sake of argument. So...$1.436 million - $165,000 comes out to $1,271,000 that you would owe to them. You know, if you wanted to be fair. As a side note, this myopic-ness is one of the most frustrating things that I routinely come across in interacting with leftists. Opportunity cost is impossible to measure and always massive. So taking 50% out of everyone's pay has a cost that will end in being orders of magnitude higher than those actual dollars because there is no telling what businesses may have gotten started, what ideas could have been pursued, or what technologies invented had that money stayed in the capable, productive hands of them that created it.
  14. Oh, that's right! I second anything by Jean Moroney. Also, Peikoff, obviously.
  15. Thomas Jefferson's advice to "never use two words where one will do," is a good place to start. Even in the above, short though it was, you really could have gotten away with the first sentence, "I would greatly appreciate it if anyone would suggest reading material about how to better ones thinking." The rest, if that particular direction is important to you, could be summed up as, "particularly in regards to communication." A second mistake that I feel confused by with speakers is stream of consciousness drift. Staying more directly on the subject, or at least acknowledging it directly when you do leave the subject, helps keep others with you. A study of grammar could be helpful. Also anything on critical thinking. I got quite a lot out of http://www.amazon.com/How-Think-About-Weird-Things/dp/0767400135
  16. I do not see committing suicide at your realization of your own dishonesty an noble act and I do not see Leo giving up after a lifetime of effort and being repeatedly crushed by forces of destruction(Anderei and the party he is devoted to) as dishonest. It was a rational realization that it is a force that he cannot live with or fight against. I think his view, in fact, was the reality he was confronted with. I think this may be a personal experience thing, but I've never met a leftest who wasn't a complete hypocrite with regard to their allegedly sincere beliefs. The most intellectual among them will avoid the issue by claiming that the generous behavior they wish to enforce in me, at the point of a gun, would be supererogatory to expect of them on their own accord. I realize that Rand presented him as a sincere proponent of communist ideology, but my experience has been that there is no such thing. Leo, on the other hand, tried to live life on his own terms. He failed, of course, but I thought he gave it a pretty good go considering he had to work with Andrei riding on his shoulders the whole time. Half of the population of the US are well meaning, sincere public officials and bureaucrats like Andrei sucking on the rest of us. I'm not the least bit impressed by their sincerity, either. I am impressed by the 90% of business owners who go out of business each year, due in part to regulations that those sincere people strap them down with. What was it that Andrei arrested Leo for? "Crimes against the state," or some such? He was handing out death penalties for trading goods. Fuck him and his sincerity.
  17. I have to disagree. Leo was an essentially moral person broken by the system. Andrei, and people like him, were the system. I realize that he was presented as sincere in his beliefs about communism, and that he was somewhat productive as a bureaucrat but that's a long way from being moral or justifying all of the free spirits like Leo, that he helped to destroy. If he is a victim, then he's a victim of his own philosophy.
  18. I would clarify that "the question" is, in what direction? The wrongness is a certainty. I can't see them pushing deflation in anything but the short to medium term. Any debtor is necessarily a fan of inflation.
  19. Sorry, I wasn't clear...or maybe I don't understand. 3%/year compounding gets to 2000, which /100 is 20% of the original value per year, that is lost with the later ones being much, much higher.
  20. I understand what your saying, and by those numbers, I'd agree, but what I was trying to get at was that the true numbers are cumulative and also difficult to meaningfully measure. In the past 100 years of being robbed blind by the FED and US Govt, there has been more than a 2000%(so say 20%/year for 100 years) decrease in value. It is not apparent due to their measuring year by year, effectually hiding it's cumulative nature as well as technological advance and market manipulation which helps hide it even more in the short term. My thought is that this has allowed them to take the vast majority of the discretionary wealth produced by capitalistic advance. With a removal of regulation and subsidies, the cost of living should be rapidly approaching free, but instead the medium income in the US, after taxes(say24k/year) is barely enough to get by with a lifestyle not insignificantly, but not significantly enough different from what it was 100 years ago. Obviously a number of other factors are at play in this morass, but I think inflation is a much larger one than most suspect, do in large part to this intentional blurring through redefinition and recalculation.
  21. Thanks for the information. I appreciate it!
  22. Right? If I recall correctly, that was with his(the ceo's) plan to hire a little over 100 people. $400k(ironically, the same pay as the president) as a straight check for a make work program would have made more sense. I never cease to be amazed at how little the meddlers understand business. Assuming that it's true that they don't and they are not intentionally evil, of course.
  23. Andrei??? Kira's naive misguided communist john??? Ewe...No thanks...I thought him barely a step above Javert from Les Mis. His death was one of my favorite parts.
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