"Stuart & Kathryn Fields" wrote in message
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"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
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snip


Like what? Do you mean the "free market"? If that's the case, are you
willing to live with what the "free market" decides?

Yes if it gets rid of BLM, FEMA, BATF, DEA, TSA, and a number of others
that are questionable in terms of "powers explicitly" those of the
federal government. Those agencies are costing us a bunch with
questionable yield. And once an agency is established, it is there for
life.

Then prepare to be turned upside down and have your pockets shaken out.
g Food prices will immediately double without subsidies, oil will
*really* get expensive, and, within a couple of years, every business in
America will be owned by one or two companies.

Ed: Where do the subsidies come from? Who is paying the subsidies?

You, me,....and the farmers of every underdeveloped country that is trying
to sell farm produce here. Our subsidies, and those of the other developed
countries, suppress produce-export prices from Central America and grain and
meat prices from several other parts of the world. Neat, huh? Farm subsidies
are the gift that keeps on giving.

What agency syphons off their operating expenses for handling the
subsidies? What farmers have received subsidies for Not growing rice in a
field on the side of a hill that only grows rocks? Again personal
experience.

They'll wring you dry, because there will be nothing to stop monopolies,
cartels, oligopolies, and other manipulators from taking over.

Sounds a bit like what we've got now.

What we have now is the result of Reaganomics' disbanding of the many
regulations put into place since Standard Oil raped the country a century
ago. Now we have a new raping going on -- everything from lax FCC
regulations leading to NewsCorp. and Clear Channel, to Exxon-Mobil, to a
handful of cable TV companies controlling the market and driving prices up
endlessly. And if you think this stinks, try implementing a libertarian
scheme. It will be Katie-bar-the-doors.

Those alphabet-soup agencies you so despise are what keeps the wolf at bay,
Stu. We learned a harsh lesson over a century ago and then conservative
ideologues pretended that Standard Oil, the coal cartel, toxic drugs and
fouled meat never happened. So now we're paying the price.

The costs versus benefits of these programs are hardly recognized by most
people, which is why there are so many grumblers around. d8-) For example,
US farm subsidies run around $178 billion. Total administrative cost is less
than $0.5 billion. But you may want to include regulatory costs, research,
conservation, and all the other costs, which amount to around $20 billion.
The entire cost of running the Agriculture department, including all of the
school lunch subsidies, the forest service, and all the other bits and
pieces is only a little more than 10% of the direct givebacks in subsidies.

How about BLM? You don't seem to like them, either. Their FY 2009 budget is
almost exactly $1 billion. So, what happens if you get rid of it? How do you
manage the competing interests for federal land? Or do you just sell all of
it? Maybe the Chinese would put in the best bid for our national forests,
which they would then clearcut, libertarian-style. They really need the
lumber and they have a lot or ready cash. Once the trees are cleared they
can build a hell of a lot of golf courses and the Japanese tourists will
pour in. Maybe we can get jobs as greens keepers.

Disney would probably get Yellowstone, eh? It would make a hell of a theme
park. Wolves behind glass. Bison wearing Micky Mouse ears. So cute! They'll
have a waterslide powered by Old Faithful. Brought to you by America's
libertarians. They saved you $3 in annual operating costs for every man,
woman, and child in the US, and all it cost you was every tree and every
square mile of public land in the country. The payoffs will let us live on
that big credit card in the sky for at least another five or ten years.
Whoopie!

And so on. If you don't like the way things are run, maybe you should try to
elect someone who cares. Instead, it sounds like you want to elect someone
who just wants to tank all of it, so we can go back to the bad old days.
Maybe they're nostalgic for the company stores and rotten meat.

The market will sort it all out. When people buy a drug and die from it,
other people will learn the lesson. When there are no more forests, we'll
have room for more cows. Maybe the Japanese will buy our beef. When
financial managers rape the currency and move to the Côte d'Azur, we'll be
praising the free market while we eat beans and squash. It was good enough
for the Indians.



The few such as the highways and national defense are a few of the
problems needing a more global approach offered by the Feds. Even
then look at the military industrial complex and at just one example
of fraud, waste and abuse created by the military being forced to deal
with "expiring funds".

It is, and if you have a solution, a lot of people will be interested.
Libertarians don't have solutions. They have faith.

Hell yes I have a solution: Quit focussing on the accounting process
that likes "Expiring funds" and focus on the problem that needs to be
solved and commit to solving the problem, not making the books look
good. I worked in R&D for years and watched good ideas go down the tube
because of "Expiring" funds. Example: Vertical seeking ejection seat.
Demonstrated in the 70s right where I work. USN still doesn't have
them. Would save lives (expensively trained lives if you want to make it
an matter of economics). I can rattle off a bunch of similar examples
from my experience.

What R&D? What Navy? You're talking about the libertarian world,
remember. Whose going to invest in R&D in a free market? It only happens
because of tax breaks, subsidies, and preferential treatment of certain
business operations. In a free market, those things are gone.

We don't receive a subsidy for our business and R&D is done.

I doubt if there would have been helicopters for another ten years if LePage
and Sikorsky hadn't gotten all kinds of development contracts from the US
military, Stuart. That wasn't payment for production, it was a subsidy. That
whole industry needed a shot in the arm just to get moving.

I don't think that Bill Gates got a subsidy when he started Microsoft. I
know that a bunch of the experimental helo businesses operate without
subsidies and R&D is a part of their business to stay competitive. The
Robinson helicopter "monopoly" is being impacted by a privateer operating
without subsidies. The old idea that businesses can't operate without
government subsidies doesn't hold water.

Most businesses operate without subsidies. Some others wouldn't exist
without them. The microcircuit business, for example, was developed largely
on military purchases with big up-front "development" contracts. Those are
subsidies.

The justification of "Thats the way it has been operating" doesn't justify
its continuance. The syphoning off of monies to support the government
bureaucrats like FEMA , who by the way my wife and I had 2 yrs of direct
interface with them, not just one or two individuals but the entire west
coast operation and the taxpayer in me cried to see the ignorant stupid
actions.

We are being turned upside down now and our pockets shaken. There are
billions of dollars being misspent and wasted by a growing federal
government and candidates standing in line to grow more of these agencies.
Cut the tax exemptions to increase revenue? How about getting more
competent management of the government budget as it presently exists and
use the surplus that could be created by competent management.

How about it? Do you have a plan for running a better government?

Everybody wants better government. I doubt if any of them could begin to
deal with it. It's all wishful thinking and general griping.



But it's a mish-mash of different ideas that just don't fit together.
Basically, self-styled libertarians are pure moralists, who have a
patchwork quilt of moral principles that depend on everyone else
thinking precisely like them.

Yep. Somewhere we need to start with a guiding principle that we can
all agree on. Otherwise we just have a morass not unlike looting.

That's libertarianism: Everyone tries to loot everyone else.

Excuse me if I remember correctly we are not presently being exposed to
libertarianism but the looting is certainly going on right now. The
looting is being done by the Republican administration and the
Democratic congress.

The looting is being done by multinational corporations and financial
manipulators -- just the kind of people who libertarians would leave alone
to practice their craft in the "free market."


If you get a liberatarian government, you ain't seen nothing yet. Looting
will be fully privatized, with real incentives to perform. d8-)

This is of course opinion and not based on personal experience?

We have lots of experience with unregulated finance and corporations that go
monopolistic (or oligopolistic, as with the Big Three US car makers). If I
understand libertarianism, the idea is to get the government out of free
markets, right? Those companies would love it. Banks would be orgasmic about
it. They've already shown us what they can do if you loosen the reigns. Take
the reigns off, and it's payday for them, 365 days a year.


Of course, this is the opposite of what libertarians claim. But look
at the current example: calling a fortuitous profit "profiteering,"
and favoring making it illegal. If those same gas stations got caught
short with long-term oil purchases, while one guy in town was buying
spot-market oil when it was on the way down and dropped prices below
the cost of the other guys, and they all took a bath, the
anti-profiteering "libertarians" would just shrug and say "that's the
market for you."

It's a moralism of convenience. Libertarians will claim that it isn't
true, but few of them think it through sufficiently to recognize what
they're doing.

Ed: This can certainly be said for all of the political parties and
especially our "Representatives"

Then what's different about libertarianism?

Libertarianism doesn't want the government in our pants everytime we
turn around. It isn't hard to see the effects of the government
contrived agencies designed to protect us from the internal ravages of
our own stupidity example the current mortgage farce where people
borrowed money they couldn't pay back. That situation will take care of
itself by letting the people learn that that kind of stupidity doesn't
work.

Good plan. Do you have plenty of ammo, for when those impoverished,
starving people come knocking at your door? Maybe they'll form mobs and
will have a few guns themselves. After all, what will they have to lose?

This maybe not too far in the future anyway. with gas prices increasing
there are going to be people starting to have to steal to eat. There are
bunches of people that have to commute distances to work. Distances where
a private car is the only way to get there. Stealing gas has begun to
increase in our area.

Wait 'till you see what happens if you take away the safety net. They'll be
pouring off the reservation.


The lenders? They will learn when they have to reposess houses they
can't sell.

No way, Hose-A. They no longer own the houses. They sold the mortgages to
your retirement fund.

If that is true it is another example of government incomptence. My
retirement fund is the Civil Service Retirement System which by the way
fails to honor their own commitments. Didn't the Fed recently bail out
some Wall Street organization that had heavily involved themselves with
cheap mortgages?

So you wouldn't lose your retirement. g If you're Civil Service, that's a
bad example. My 401K is taking a hit. Free-market, you know. That'll l'arn
me, eh?


Will they learn that in the present? No because our government will
borrow money to bail them out and the penalty for their actions will
not be felt. We learn by making mistakes and if someone snatches the
mistakes from us the learning is greatly reduced.

The current state of our society is to a large measure the result of
our society allowing the people who "make things happen" to run loose.
The constantly increasing size of government to do for people what
they should be doing for themselves and the things like the Iraq war,
the War on drugs which is costing a bunch and not yielding any
significant results. Who is thinking their way thru to these results?

What I hear, Stuart, is that you don't like the way things are going
and that you think they'd go better if the government did very little.
As I said, that's faith, not a solution. There is no example in modern
history that supports the libertarian view -- except for tribal
societies run by warlords.

Jesus Ed look where the current system has got us!! We are in hock up to
our gills and it doesn't look like there is any real positive change
available in the future. McCain wants to fight wars and be the world's
policeman, Obama wants to increase the social programs and has indicated a
willingness to provide taxpayer money to religious organizations.

Whatever it is, libertarianism isn't the answer, it's just more fuel on the
fire. Loosen up those markets and watch them take the socks right off your
feet.


I gather from an earlier message that you're on a 75-year flood plain. Is
that right? Have you checked the historical record?

Yep. There is a drainage that comes out of the Sierras to the North of
me. It is aimed for what is now a county road that is over 30' below me in
elevation. There is no history of any significant water flow for the past
75 years based on talks with people who have lived here that long. I used
to do drainage calculations for the USFS for road design. Besides that
when I asked them just what hazard to the public we were trying to avoid
by my raising the structure 1.5' I was totally ignored. I told them I
didn't need or want their flood insurance and would assume the risk to my
structure myself. Seems I don't have the freedom to do that.

You'll have to fight that battle, Stuart. I don't know what to say.
Something tells me there's more to it, but I can't even guess.



I wouldn't know where to begin addressing those points of yours, Stu. But
I believe that you would get the opposite of what you want in most cases.

Well Ed I have come to the belief from watching your postings that you are
one of the brighter bulbs in this string, but I can't imagine that you
believe that the present path being taken by the Federal and State
governments of increased size and increased borrowing and increased
inefficiency is going to lead to a positive sunny future.

Hardly. I think the economic policies we've followed under Reagan and Bush
are absolute disasters. And libertarian policies would be even more extreme,
except that we wouldn't get *any* of it back. With no income taxes, they'd
be unable to pay debts and they would strangle the infrastructure until the
economy collapsed for good.

As I said, Stuart, it's a good program for grumblers and for people who
resent all kinds of things that are going on. It's a lousy program for
running a country.

--
Ed Huntress