Sixpence: I agree, to a point. But at some point there needs to be laws that regulate us.
Absolutely. And those laws should protect us from each other - like violence, theft, fraud, invasion of property.
It might be in the best interest of the majority to tell you where you can smoke. If the majority of us do not want smoke where we dine in public, this is not telling you that you can't smoke.
Wrong. You can tell me not to smoke in you property - without any vote. You and me can vote on whether someone could smoke on the property we commonly own - public property, like the street. But you should not be entitled to vote on whether I or my guests can smoke withing my own property (provided, of course I do not blow smoke into other person's property - that would be invasion). Nobody should be entitled to berge into my private property and enjoy smoke-free environment.
How come you precious democracy does not prevent smoking on the public proberty so I get sick woaking the streets - which I am entitled to and cannot avoid - but forbids smoking in private bars where I have choice not to enter? With all those smokers forced outside a get much more exposure to smoke now than before NYC outlawed it!
As well as I have a "pleasure" to see all those people enjoying themselves and getting sick so that I will have to pay for their treatment.
On a larger scale, we vote on how to pay for those who have health problems from smoking all their life and cannot afford to pay for those health expenses.
So I cannot vote to make them stop smoking and live healthy lifestyle but when they end up hurt I am obligated to pick up the tab.
The majority will decide, and to some it will be oppressive, to others it will be the democratic thing to do.
It's not oppressive or democratic - it's oppressive and democratic .
gofaster: If someone is walking around telling you how many children you can have, he's probably a priest, and those aren't elected officials under the US Constitution.
Liar. You know damn well that over 30,000 people were coercively sterilised in the US in the first half of the 20th century because officials deemed them as not worthy of procreation. If Hitler had not given eugenics a bad name, there is a chance that some stupid people on this board would be getting a state-administered snip.
There were laws to that effect voted for by majority and they can be voted in again once the people forget who Hitler was.
So how is this opposite from what the Founding Fathers intended?
"'A simple democracy,' wrote Benjamin Rush to John Adams in 1789, 'or an unbalanced republic, is one of the greatest of evils.' These two founding fathers of the United States, like nearly all of their fellow patriots, held a distinct disdain for, and distrust of, pure democracy. They correctly feared that a majority-mob would as surely trample the rights of a political minority as a tyrannical king."
Rude: You're a little too smart for me Miko....just telling me that capital invested in VIABLE ventures reaps success is far beyond me. We invest in only viable venture or we do not invest, as does everyone else I know.
Not smart, just educated in some matters to which I am trying top attract your interest. It requires some explanation and I will try to give a brief overview.
You are very wrong in your statement and it's a common mistake. Please read the folowing carefully, it's real science.
Thrawn: miko said, "How come all the american firms... I would like to hear it.
Here it comes:
Some ventures always fall because all investment is in future production, thus speculative. But in general, some entrepreneurs make better decisions, some worse and economy works. The way they decide which ventures to invest in is market signals - prices, etc., including the most important - interest rate. Free market interest rate is formed by a very complex interplay of real factors. Mostly it indicates availability of real resources for creating the projects. Enterprises are not built of paper money but of real goods - labor, materials, etc. that must be available to be purchased for that money.
If a venture is expected to bring 5% profit, you would not borrow capital at 6% to invest into it but you would borrow and invest if the interest rate dropped to 4%.
If the interest rate drops, a lot of projects that were unprofitable will become profitable and will be initiated. A very important point is that the longer-term projects are more sensitive to interest-rate fluctuiations, just like long-term bonds. The drop in iterest rates will cause increase of investment in long-term projects like mining, heavy industry, etc. much more than into short-term ventures.
So what happens when the real resources availability does not change but the interest rates are manipulated down by government credit expansion? All entrepreneurs are fooled into opening projects, especially long-term ones and there will not be enough resources to finish them or manipylate them profitably. As they near completion, they will compete for scarce resources, so they will borrow money to pay for them - raising interest rates, raising prices or both! No matter what happens, some of the projects will necessarily not reach profitability, go bust and the resources already invested in them will be wasted.
The artificially-induced boom and raise in production and employment will be followed by the inevitable bust and drop in production and employment while the capital misallocations are corrected and failed businesses are liquidated. We end up worse than if we had natural rate of growth.
Here is an example: from the 90s Firms fooled by low interest invest in software business, because it seems that population is consuming less and saving/investing more - say in education. They intend to build offices and hire programmers at $50K a pop. They do build offices, overpaying for the limber and steel, which can fortunately be imported, but when it comes to hiring programmers, they find out that people were not investing in programming education! So they borrow more money and drive the programmers salaries into $200! They get a lot of crappy jhalf-baked programmers and they cannot possibly be profitable with such high expenses. You see - teh dollars printed by Fed and multiplied by fractional reserve bank system were not backed by real investable stuff! So the businesses fold, not only the start-ups but the old good ones, like Sun and Lucent who lost good programers to the newcomers and had to pay triple for the remaining ones.
They have to scramble for indian programmers and imports and once they set up outsorcing, it will be difficult to get those jobs back. They already went to all the expence to set up the subcidiaries, so thr US programmer's salary will have to drop a lot lower than it would have been without artificial boom to make them forego that investment and bring the jobs back in.
So you end up with lots of resources inverted into offices wasted, lots of "dark" fiber cable wasted, lots of productive connections scrambled, lots of people with expensive houses bought at the peak salaries and no jobs to pay the mortgage, etc. Same happens in other industries.
That is why I do not rejoice when I hear that Fed caused a drop in rates and production increased. I know that some of that production is bound to fail. Not every growth is good - only the sustainable growth where resources are not misallocated from the start.
Business cycle is not a feature of capitalism, but of government credit expansions. There were no general boom/bust cycles before government legalised fractional reserve monetary system and enabled credit expansion to occur in the early 1800s.
miko
