“Just so. Just exactly so.”
The chief argument against bailouts is they “privatize profits and socialize costs”. “In the financial language of options, “socializing losses” corresponds to private firms having a put option from the government: if they lose, the government will cover their losses.” For this to happen of course government must be involved in the economy. And a lot of people like it that way. But once certain activities are deemed too important to be left to the market or “too big to fail”, the public purse because commingled with the private.
Then we have bailouts whether they are called that or not. Take Xavier Alvarez.
He is a Democrat Party politician who elected to the Three Valley Water District Board in San Bernardino County, CA and claimed to be a ‘retired marine’ who had been ‘wounded’ in combat and had been awarded the ‘Medal of Honor.’” Here is a picture of Alvarez wearing his supposed decorations. He claimed the Medal of Honor was awarded for rescuing the American ambassador during the Iranian hostage crisis.
Now it may be a sad commentary on the state of education that Mr. Alvarez could actually make such a claim and have anyone believe it, but at any rate someone finally called him out and he was convicted under the Stolen Valor Act.
The Ninth Circuit Court struck down the conviction of Xavier Alvarez. In striking down the conviction, the court cited New York Times vs Sullivan, in which the US Supreme Court held that the NYT could not be held liable for printing falsehoods provided it intended no malice. The decision has been hailed as a cornerstone of Free Speech.
Notice however, that Mr. Alvarez privately gained by his lie. The prestige conferred by the nonexistentMedal of Honor must have significantly enhanced his resume. Therefore whoever believed Mr. Alvarez was defrauded by his claim. Imagine if one hired a bodyguard believing he was Audie Murphy and found he was really Pee-wee Herman. While you might be fond of Pee Wee Herman for his comic ability, you deserve your money back if you expected a man ready to repel 200 fanatic SS troopers intent upon killing you.
But Alvarez will not bear the full costs of his lie. He might yet claim the protection of the First Amendment. He lied, but you can’t call him on it criminally. Perhaps civilly, so go hire a lawyer. As far as the Government’s concerned, there may be no foul.
Just yesterday in the UK, a sting operation revealed that National Health service doctors were approving abortions solely because of the child’s gender. Some ‘patients’ went up to a doctor and said, ‘I want this baby dropped because I don’t want a girl.’ Others said that they wanted the abortion of a boy because they already had one and wanted ‘family balancing’. The doctors said, no problem.
One consultant, Prabha Sivaraman, who works for both private clinics and NHS hospitals in Manchester, was filmed telling a pregnant woman who said she wanted to abort a female foetus: “I don’t ask questions. If you want a termination, you want a termination”.
But whose money was going to be used to provide the abortion? Why the government’s money of course. Or to be more precise, the taxpayers.
Leaving aside all other issues, we still have the question of private gain and socialized costs. Inevitably the children of those who have children are going to be taxed to provide for the couples who decide not to have children once they become too old or sick to work. The people who had children cannot privatize their gains. They cannot reserve the taxes paid by their children for themselves. That will be selfish. The ever caring government has decided that taxes are going to be used to socialize the costs of everybody, including those who had an abortion at taxpayer expense for whatever reason they might have.
Situations like this are bound to occur whenever public and private interests get mixed up. To keep these wholly separate is probably impossible unless man can learn to live without government. But the more government there is, the more conflicts of this nature will arise.
As Richard Epstein at the Hoover Foundation noted, government already believes it is within its power to ask private entities to give away stuff for free. It can withhold the services already paid for by taxes unless certain suggestions are carried out. Citing Obamacare’s contraception and abortion provisions, Epstein wrote:
The political furor has forced the president to back down on the direct command to religious institutions. But now bitten with the statist bug, he just announced that all insurance companies who participate in programs funded through the PPACA will be required to offer the same suite of women’s health-care services for free.
Of course it’s not really free. Somebody has to pay for it. But not the consumer of the service. That consumer can privatize gains and if things go bad, socialize the losses. As the size of government’s role in human life increases, the instances of bailing out behavior correspondingly rise.
How long can this work? In the case of Europe, not long. As Mark Steyn observes, Europe is running out of people, killing off the next generation at taxpayer expense.
So Greece has a spending problem, a revenue problem, something along those lines, right? At a superficial level, yes. But the underlying issue is more primal: It has one of the lowest fertility rates on the planet. In Greece, 100 grandparents have 42 grandchildren — i.e., the family tree is upside down. In a social-democratic state where workers in “hazardous” professions (such as, er, hairdressing) retire at 50, there aren’t enough young people around to pay for your three-decade retirement. And there are unlikely ever to be again …
How do you grow your economy in an ever-shrinking market? The developed world, like Elisabeth, is barren. Collectively barren, I hasten to add. Individually, it’s made up of millions of fertile women, who voluntarily opt for no children at all or one designer kid at 39. In Italy, the home of the Church, the birthrate’s somewhere around 1.2, 1.3 children per couple — or about half “replacement rate.” Japan, Germany, and Russia are already in net population decline. Fifty percent of Japanese women born in the Seventies are childless. Between 1990 and 2000, the percentage of Spanish women childless at the age of 30 almost doubled, from just over 30 percent to just shy of 60 percent. In Sweden, Finland, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, 20 percent of 40-year-old women are childless. In a recent poll, invited to state the “ideal” number of children, 16.6 percent of Germans answered “None.”
Far be it for anyone to suggest that Europe should be prevented from choosing demographic extinction. But that’s not really going be the case, is it? When the crunch comes the aging population cohorts will require health care and physical defense — the average age of the Belgian army is 40 and its main human resources problem is that 60% of its soldiers were overweight — not to mention a pension.
It is hardly conceivable that some future American President will say, “yup. Die”. Yet those things — which people opted out of — have got to come from somewhere — the carers will probably come from the Third World, the defense from America, the money from who knows where. But it’s not going to come from Europe.
That situation in macro is the consequence of the micro decisions by the NHS to fund gender-determined abortions for “free”. The former is simply measured in the millions while the latter is measured individually. How long can private gain and socialized cost coexist? How many things are really too big to fail? How many shibboleths are to sacred to question?
The answer maybe is not many more. And not for long. At first it seems it will have less to do with ‘religion’ or ‘morality’ than just the bucks; the slimy, dirty dollars and cents. Or maybe that is to do mammon an injustice. Long term existence is very often the consequence of a value system that favors survival. If your value system doesn’t work, you won’t survive. So maybe it is about morality after all.
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The Left have moved to transfer power from the legislative branch to the judiciary and the executive. They also debase and dilute the power of citizenship by sponsoring illegal immigration and voter fraud. In doing so they can invert the pyramid of sovereign power from a republican to a more aristocratic model. In a functioning republic individuals have three sources of access to power, that is three ways to get their interests protected. First is the market. Second is through their elected representatives. The third is through the judiciary.
After transferring the legislative power from elected bodies to judges and regulators the aristocrats face the problem that persons might seek a redress of grievance through the courts. Cutting off access advances the authoritarian agenda. One way they do that is through the doctrine of Standing. By denying access to the courts they prevent a jury, which is a subset of the militia or the voters, from reversing a decree by a bureaucrat or judge. What we need is something like the Scottish system in which anyone can bring an injury to the attention of the court.
At one time any Englishman could “Cry Harald” and demand official consideration of their claims. The exclusion of people who consider themselves injured, particularly by those who exercise government power, invalidates the constitutional right to “petition for redress of grievances.”
http://www.agoravox.fr/IMG/jpg/illus.jpg
see how many Goldman & Sachs boys are monitoring the US policy too, and this, not from yesterday !
It occurs to me that much of our current troubles with regard to the demographic implosion of the developed world have to do with an ingrained consciousness of the failed, outdated overpopulation theories of Ehrlich and the like from the seventies. The motivations in the moment might be something else – female hypergamy, feminist lust for the appearance of power and “having it all, all at once”, monetary greed, laziness, etc. But the fig leaf to cover it all is the convenient idea that overpopulation is a current existential danger and that the environmental imperative is to reduce the number of people being born going forward. Once again, we see the damage of the Gramscian termite.
Indeed, despite the fact that evidence to the otherwise is readily and frequently available and presented, the credentialed but not educated, self-styled cultural elite in academia and the NPR/PBS listening set have accepted this forty-year old discredited (by any statistically meaningful yardstick) theory as one of their great shibboleths. Anyone who dares to question it isn’t to be taken seriously, and probably shouldn’t be viewed as fully human. When I’ve attempted to disabuse these individuals of their attachment to the overpopulation myth, when I’ve told them that the only culture left standing 150 years from now will be the one where every woman who is fertile enough to do so wants to have three or more kids in a stable family, and has those kids, and has them in a society where the family, not the apparatus of state, is the basic framework of life, they look at me like I’m insane. Maybe they have no math skills, I don’t know.
“While you might be fond of Pee Wee Herman for his comic ability, you deserve your money back if you expected a man ready to repel 200 fanatic SS troopers intent upon killing you.”
Yes but the comedic opportunities would be to die for.
Will the 21 Century (Man) Civilization outlaw Contraception’s of any kind before its complete collapse or will God? (the complete collapse makes contraception nonexistent) I am voting God! Man is unreliable.
Proabably most BCers accept that the current path of civilization is unsustainable, and must therefore come to an end. The big question is — When? Is the remaining time measured in decades or weeks? There are straight-faced arguments in favor of both ends of that spectrum.
What we do know for sure is that we are not facing the end of the world, only the end of the world as we currently know it. Humanity survived the Dark Ages, the Black Death, and World War II. Even the worst imaginable scenarios — all out nuclear war, mass starvation, and rampant disease — would still leave a human population numbered in billions.
The real issues are:
(1) how best to pass the expensive lessons of the last few hundred years on to those survivors, and
(2) how much time do we have left to put that mechanism in place.
The meek will inherit the earth and under time and pressure the scum will again rise to the top and offer decadent infotainment in primetime. Rinse, lather, repeat. Humility isn’t something you can pass on generation to generation. Not through public school anyhow.
Off topic but I notice that Alvarez, the retired Marine, is pictured wearing an Army blouse. He’s not only reprehensible, but stupid as well. Actually, I suppose those do go together.
It seems to me that the real trick to a sustainable government is finding a way to ensure that it will uphold the interests of people who don’t organize. Groups who do organize – labor unions, “rights” groups, corporate welfarists, bailout seekers, etc., constantly push to socialize their costs.
In ordinary times, there’s no counterweight of organized productive citizens, because the very concept – organized productive citizen – is an oxymoron. The more time the citizens spend organizing, the less time they spend being productive. If a government cannot uphold their interests while they’re being productive, it will eventually force them to set aside their productivity to take up organizing. Then who will pay the bills?
#6. Kinuachdrach,
I believe what we in the western world will experience will resemble something like what happened to Argentina in the early 2000s, only deeper and more profound. There’s a blogger, FerFAL, who writes about his experience in this time and how he managed. The biggest insight I can draw is that unless we’re talking an asteroid strike, there will still be a government.
It may be an incompetent, corrupt and inefficient one, but it will still be there. It will spend its limited funds to protect its sources of power, but the middle class (or what is left of it) will be on its own. Bribery will return, and will be necessary to make a go of things. Someone breaks into your house? Bribe a cop so that he looks the other way when you defend yourself. Otherwise you may find yourself in a dilapidated prison with little to no hope of salvation.
This means that any methods you consider must be considered in that light. The taxman will still cometh, the various apparatchiks will still oversee all sorts of stupid rules. We may start seeing genuine poverty, however- and just the sight of that will help you when you point out a better way.
As for those methods, I am not sure. The family is always a good place to start, and some sort of “information clearinghouse” online will be of benefit. Wikipedia would be a great source if it weren’t so riven by political fights and full of unbalanced information.
This comes close to expositing an important hypothesis which, to my knowledge, has not been adequately explored. That is, anytime government meddles in activities that are beyond the concepts proscribed in the limited powers, government is obliged to execute injustice.
More succinctly, when government wanders off the reservation, the trespass creates injustice. We the people must suffer government endorsed unfairness.
I wish someone more eloquent would finish this thought whilst I go back to work.
As usual you have hit on the problem. Mark Steyn already ruined my weekend. Good post. The idea that government will bail companies out shifts the entire risk analysis. And except for Lehman Brothers, a lot of companies did well in the meltdown as a result when they probably should have been wacked for their behavior. And the expansion of health care by the government is going to be such a giant bubble that we are going to end up being a Big Fat Greek Country. But with no Germany to bail us out.
A Nobody, I remember those posts about Argentina. I also had friends who were from Argentina. They confirmed it. I suspect we will fall somewhere between Greece and Argentina when the bills have to be paid. But since there is no conceivable way they will be paid, the result will be default, a draconian cut in entitlements, and a greatly weakened United States. The risks that will pose will be enormous.
A Nobody, unless there is an armed revolt, what you describe is spot on.
The government will not whither away; it will only grow in power, authority, control and intrusiveness. It will become more abusive and even more resistant to electoral change, no matter how little money there is. The less the money, the greater percentage that will be controlled by government.
The connected elite will be protected at all costs. It is unthinkable in the minds of most big city and Washington machine democrats to reduce the government and consequently their own power. Unfortunately, ditto for the institutional Pubs. Those in power have concocted an almost incomprehensible network of interlocking fiefdoms whose primary goal is survival above all else. Wresting power and control from them will be an onerous, difficult task.
Time is running out on our freedoms. We need to rally around the candidates that will defend them and take on this monstrous power mad machine running our government.
Of the Presidential contenders, only one stands out – Newt. Santorum and Romney are clearly on the side of the machine.
And for you Paulbots, it’s coming out that grandpa Ron is angling for a VP slot with Romney, (straight from son Rand’s mouth). It shows what I always thought Paul was – a grandstanding sellout who loved to blabber about the evils of fiat money, but never really wanted to do anything about it.
THE DEATH OF COMMON LAW
I don’t know how far back we started abandoning common law principles, but I know that they are no longer in vogue.
A DA or judge steeped in common law would have no problem calling Alvarez’s actions fraud, and would be able to make it stick if federal judges weren’t head-up-the-ass nincompoops.
We now have what I would call a “derivative law” system that seems to mimic the Napoleonic Code in its rigid complexity. It derives its force and logic from “precedents” that have reinterpreted the Constitution into oblivion. “Precedent” is, to me, the most destructive term in moder American jurisprudence.
#13. EBL, Unsk,
That cut in entitlements is what worries me. I have relatives in the states and they live near an area that is a large recipient of various government assistance packages. Right now, things are alright because of those things (welfare, food stamps, etc). After the crisis they will be fine again- some lowered level of support, but mostly quiet like the new slums built in Argentina. Well, provided a person stays away from the slum.
It’s the period of crisis itself that worries me- that recognition that the CalFresh EBT cards aren’t refilling, that the local shops will only take cash. When that recognition sets in, all hell will break loose at least for a short while. I have been the unfortunate witness to how bad things can get in how short a period of time. Even if they get cleaned up later, there’s still the matter of living through that minute, hour or day.
Now, I’m not making an argument that the entitelments must be continued no matter what. Quite the contrary- the landing must be managed. Unsk makes an important point with rallying around a candidate that will defend the basic freedoms of your country. Someone like that will be able to soft-land the thing- to slowly bring it under control and manage the result. If the present path is followed we’ll see full funding for entitlements right up until the day we don’t, and then kaboom.
Unfortunately for all of us there is a level of inevitability to the crisis ahead. It’s a bit like a rising flood- we can prepare a long time in advance, or a short time in advance, or we can have the waters rush over our heads. I think right now we’re at the sandbags and improvised berms stage, which means that some areas will be flooded. There will be loss. The key is to start those anti-flood measures as soon as possible to minimize it.
“A Nobody, unless there is an armed revolt, what you describe is spot on.”
Armed revolt can come in various forms. I don’t see any way back to true American values, meaning strict interpretation of the Constitution, except the red states, with Texas as the center, to opt out of the federal government. There is a part of the population, (the truly invisible man) who has done all the right things: became educated, sought empolyment, saved instead of spent, paid their taxes, raised children with similar values, etc. Instead of reaping the success of their actions they are now being told they have to clean up after the irresponsible.
No. Not acceptable. The shooting will start when they finally, inevitably come for the rest of our personal property.
Speakeasy, it isn’t just the welfare recipients who will come for your stuff. They will be preceded by the public employees.
Feeling morally emboldened by the idea of “But I have a CONTRACT”‘ they will literally take the last bit of private wealth through a sense of legal aggrievedness.
Never mind that it was the public employees who violated the social contract between public and private sector over the past ninety or so years. When you say, “I have no money left”‘ they will say , “Speakeasy, you still have a boat/gun/house/ car, you need to sell it and give me the money”. Count on it.
USK #14, Don R #15, Speakeasy #17:
Hear what happened the other day in New Hampshire? You know, the place that says “Live free or Die”?
A man came home to find his house had been burglarized. And a burglar, apparently the same one, was next door robbing his neighbor’s house. So he got his gun, fired a shot into the ground to explain to the burgler what was going to happen to him next if he did not halt, and called the cops.
The cops came and arrested the burglar. And they arrested the homeowner, too, charging him with “reckless endangerment.”
Arrested for shooting the ground at his own home. Imagine what would have occurred if he had actually shot the burglar.
I have told of a man in my home town who returned fire when a burglar ipned up on him and was then sued by the burglar, a 17 prior felony conviction career criminal. He lost his house as part of the settlement.
It’s been aximoatic that if you have to shoot a criminal you shoot to kill. It is becoming the case where you don’t detain them nor simply wound them but shoot to kill, dump the body somewhere and don’t bother contacting the police.
So it’s getting to be a more brutal world, both here at home and overseas. We are going to end up not just burning some Korans but whole countries. At home we are going to have to just plug’em and plant’em and don’t tell nobody nuthin.
RWE-
Take a look at the UK to see this dynamic in place.
The behavior of the police, as public employees, is easy to predict. Will they:
A). Promote the use of firearms by private citizens to defend themselves and stop or apprehend criminals, thereby decreasing the need for cops and the income stream security for themselves, or
B). Discourage the use of firearms by private citizens, making said citizens more dependent on the police for protection and thereby increasing the job security for LEO’s?
You see the problem? A great many LEOs have made the calculus that 2nd Amendment = less money for them, and less job security. Regardless of trampling on rights etc. The guaranteed paycheck, as it always does for public functionaries, trumps all.
RWE the legally correct method is to drag the perp across your own threshold.
Once inside your own home it’s a free fire zone.
This advice comes from my retired DA/ Uncle: he’s sent thousands off to prison.
( And they needed sending. )
“…the legally correct method is to drag the perp across your own threshold”
Put a screwdriver in his hand, say you thought it was a knife.
There is now a “Castle Law” in Florida, but I understand that it requires that you retreat as far as you can in your home before opening fire. Shooting them as they come in the front door won’t do, although an elderly man in Daytona Beach did just that a couple of weeks back – (against an intruder armed with a screwdriver, Annoy Mouse) – and was praised by the police chief for “doing something the criminal justice system was unable to do – getting this long time felon off the streets.” The guy went from being on the streets to being in a hole in the ground; that’s a real civic improvement.
But in SC several years ago a man shot at two black teens who were breaking into his home at 1AM, killing one. He was convicted of doing so – and the dead teenager’s parents were outraged that he only got 20 years and not the electric chair. They were going back to court to try to get a more severe sentence imposed.
Nope, no dragging them through the door. If they are not dead yet, correct that deficiency. Then drag them out to the bed of your pickup and down to the nearest sizeable body of water. If stopped by the police say you were rushing them to the hospital. Dead men tell no tales and file no lawsuits. When the bodies are found it will be regarded as another civic improvement.
Just after he became president, G.W. Bush was asked by a group of foreign reporters what made America great. He replied that it was because we were kind to one another. I thought that was not the best answer he could have given at the time; I now think it was brilliant. And Obama will go down in history as the president who ended American kindness. We don’t have the Design Margin to be kind to everyone any more.
Let’s say someone owes me a hundred dollars. I say, “hey, I sure could use that hundred you owe me, could you pay it back now?” The reply- “no, I sure don’t have it, in fact I’m broke”. I say, “oh that’s too bad, sorry to hear that”. “But hey, if I give you a hundred bucks, you can pay me back with it. And, since you’ll still be broke, I’ll shoot you a fifty next week, and a fifty the week after, until you start to get back on your feet again.” Well, when you come to a fork in the road….
So, either he now owes me two hundred dollars now and not to mention I’m out the fifties I promised him too, or we’re even steven because he paid me the hundred he owed me with the hundred I gave him.
You can do some marvelous things with accounting when it’s someone else’s money. It’s the universal language now.
Evolution is at work. People who do not want babies will unbreed themselves out of existence.
The children of people who want babies will inherit the Earth. They may decide not to pay for the retirement of non-breeders. They may decide that family and tribal loyalties are the only loyalties that matter.
This decision would not be unprecidented.
The cops came and arrested the burglar. And they arrested the homeowner, too, charging him with “reckless endangerment.”
It was felony reckless endangerment. The shot fired made it a felony. But NH has a brand new “Stand Your Ground” law and a different attitude lately toward gun rights. If the NH Primary were held tomorrow, the man, Dennis Fleming, would be the frontrunner. So, now that all the facts of the case have come to light (meaning after it hit Fox News), the county attorney today decided to drop all charges against Fleming.
THE PLAYGROUND
The most prosperous, the freest, the most technologically and scientifically advanced society the world has ever seen is committing suicide, by choice. The advent of feminism, the sexual revolution, and most importantly, the invention of the birth control pill, has given women of the first world, for the first time in the life of humankind on earth, the ability to decline to have babies. And they have so declined.
The playground stands there, hushed and stilled
The child not there was coldly killed
His mother killed him, killed her child
It’s legal, charges won’t be filed
The swings sit idle, seesaws rust
And chairs and benches gather dust
The state has issued its decrees
No child will feel the cooling breeze
The state proclaims a woman’s choice
And thus the playground has no voice
And they have so declined.
The answer to that is the Health Care Mandate. What in principle prevents the government mandating women to have a certain number of children to keep the tax revenues flowing in? If you can be required to buy insurance; required to provide services perhaps contrary to your beliefs; required to give away services for “free”, what cannot a woman be “required” to have children?
Government could for example, stipulate that a person’s extended family have a minimum number of children (counting from your father or grandfather) equal to a certain ratio to the older age cohorts, or be ineligible for the state insurance pool. Otherwise a person would have to make other insurance or pension arrangements. The rational would be simple: we have to be “fair”, we have to make sure people contribute their “share”.
I’m not saying they should. But why could they? My fearless forecast is that they will. The government will start caring about the “sanctity of human life” — even start to ban contraception — the instant it clearly threatens the gravy train. Never get between the elite and money. Especially the public’s “contributions”. Why would socialism back off from requiring women to do x, y or z? Because they respect rights? If the state needed babies they would create baby hatcheries with women in them like battery hens.
“Rights” are just the bait part of the a bait-and-switch process of obtaining power. It’s just words, worth about as much as the paper they’re printed on. Once power is obtained, what need of “rights”?
It is a mistake, I think, to take any leftist rhetoric at face value. Nothing is ever done for the stated reason. The only reason anything is done is to gain power.
Walt @ 27: “The advent of feminism, the sexual revolution, and most importantly, the invention of the birth control pill, has given women of the first world, for the first time in the life of humankind on earth, the ability to decline to have babies.”
There was contraception before the birth control pill. Maybe more important than the birth control pill was (a) safe, encouraged abortion — if the woman did not want the child, and (b) guaranteed taxpayer support if she did — provided she stayed unmarried. Both of those were laws, not technology.
In the UK, unmarried pregnancy is now effectively a career choice for the teenage girl; one which pays better than most entry-level jobs.
The other side of the equation is the high taxes to support those unmarried mothers, which means that many of the more responsible women can’t afford to take years off work to be mothers.
Let’s not blame chemistry. Not when there are lawyers & politicians crawling over the surface of the planet.
At what does it serve to have more babies when banks are betting on their death?
http://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2012/02/22/s-enrichir-en-speculant-sur-la-mort-c-est-possible_1646982_3234.html
apparently it’s what does Deutschebank, butt doens’t get mamy profits
more immoral you die !
Wretchard #28:
“What in principle prevents the government mandating women to have a certain number of children to keep the tax revenues flowing in?”
I understand they did just that in the Eastern Bloc, especially in Romania. Tax revenues probably were not the problem; foot soldiers and future viability of the State certainly was, which in a communist state is all the same thing.
And, of course, that would in turn exterminate that nation. As some people say, if you want to eliminate venereal disease then give it a National Stock Number and put a government agency in charge of distributing it.
Of course you all know what happened to the birthrate in NY nine months after a blackout a few years ago?
The answer is simple. Weekly random blackouts from, say, 7pm to 11pm. Birth rate problem solved. (Did my share, we have six.)
28. wretchard
This is Brilliant
“Government could for example, stipulate that a person’s extended family have a minimum number of children (counting from your father or grandfather) equal to a certain ratio to the older age cohorts, or be ineligible for the state insurance pool. Otherwise a person would have to make other insurance or pension arrangements.”
Government could for example, stipulate that a person’s extended family have a minimum number of children (counting from your father or grandfather) equal to a certain ratio to the older age cohorts, or be ineligible for the state insurance pool. Otherwise a person would have to make other insurance or pension arrangements. The rational would be simple: we have to be “fair”, we have to make sure people contribute their “share”.
Would that be *instead* of social security withholding?
Seems pretty harsh to put requirements on people to keep them in a ponzi game.
Can’t we just donate a firstborn to the state and call it even?
The Secret Meeting to solve the demographic crisis.
And now for something completely different!!
Okay, this goes out to all you studmuffins who truly believe that 50 is the new 40, and life beings at “forty”.
http://tinyurl.com/7smggu5
My memory is getting a bit rusty but i’m pretty sure God said something about multiplying in that book he wrote.
http://www.youtube.com/user/thealexjoneschannel?ob=4#p/u/0/pBY_rzbpwp4
Unsk @14, take it straight from the mouth of author of those horrible racist newsletters Lew Rockwell, Ron Paul is not going to be a VP on Romney’s ticket. And I don’t think the banksters would go for Rand either!
When we were in Italy a few years ago, our young tour guide shared this with us. She was almost 40 and lived with her boyfriend, and they had no plans to have kids. Their view was that the future was so bleak for young people in Europe that they isn’t want to bring a kid into that world. I guess that’s the ultimate self fufilling prophecy.
when government wanders off the reservation, the trespass creates injustice
State power corrupts; as power increases, so does corruption.
How long can private gain and socialized cost coexist? How many things are really too big to fail?
Its not how big they are, its how politically connected they are.
For the small and politically insignificant just the opposite is true. For the small businessmen losses are private
and the gains are socialized.
Many people say that to understand things you need to follow the money. It is true but its really just like a sonic boom, a sign of something more significant that has passed by. To really understand things you need to follow the political connections, for no one who is politically connected shall ever be allowed to want for money.
RWE (23),
Fortunately, you understand wrong. Under Florida law there is specifically no duty to retreat if you’re in your home or car.
RWE’s understanding concurs with my own. Additionally, although I don’t believe it ever rose to the level of a mandate, the Communist Party in Russia was originally quite pro-natalist. Even Communists still had an ingrained sense of reality in those days.
A profound statement worth pondering deeply about. Thanks.