No the economic crisis at the end of the Bush fiasco is on your type of people. Do we blame the recipients of the Ninja loans, or do we blame the people who made the money off of those loans? In these situations you blame the people who took the money and ran, just like the vultures on Wall Street who get their cut even if the stocks lose value. But in the minds of people like you, that's just all fine and good! Legal, I guess technically - ethical, a resounding hell no. But you somehow blame the leftists instead of the douchebag right wingers with all of their failed economic philosophies: huge tax cuts for the wealthy and then they'll share it with the rest of the masses. 🙄 How 30 years of that was allowed to happen ranks right up there with the devil convincing the world he doesn't exist.

Originally Posted by: DakotaT 

No Texas, the guys that walked away with the money are the people to blame. You can polish up turds all you want, but at the end of the day, you point the finger at the thieves. What upsets me are the amount of taxpaying Americans such as yourself who just say "oh that's how it is", we can't do anything about it. And the thieves go unprosecuted and laugh as they spend their ill gotten wealth. America, what a country, there is no honor left here anymore so spare me all that patriotic crap you seem to always be so proud of.

Originally Posted by: DakotaT 

You keep saying that, but you fail to say, WHAT money? Stolen by WHOM? And HOW did they "steal" it?

You have a bunch of poor unqualified people who got houses with mortgages they never should have been allowed to get. They lived there for a while, got way behind on payments - usually 7-9 months before finally being foreclosed. You have the mortgage companies - who you seem to be saying benefited - that put up a big lump sum of money for which they failed to receive payments. They ended up with houses mostly trashed out and severely lower in value because of the market crash. What exactly did THEY steal? You have these big corporations like A.I.G. that bought bundles of these mortgages that were defaulted on, and took a beating that way. Did they steal anything? You have Obama's housing czar and a couple of others who really cleaned up on kickbacks or some kind of corruption, but somehow I doubt THEY are the "thieves" you are referring to.

Patriotic crap? Hell Yeah. Through it all, America is still on top of the world. We basically ALL have great lives, and it will continue as long as YOUR kind of people are kept in check even a little bit from fucking things up.

Originally Posted by: texaspackerbacker 

Haven't you ever taken out a mortgage? Weren't there some incredible costs in the loan process? And then if there were new homes being built, there would have had to have been at least 10% paid to the contractor. I would call any loan officer and the bank he/she works for who gives a loan out to a person who could not possibly afford the home, a thief. But that's how I think, that's my ethics. I would also call most of the businessmen in this country who take a product, put a 40% markup on it, and resell it, a thief. But that is how I think. That is not honorable work, and then turn around a pay your employee as little as you have to is not ethical, in my mind! Are we getting a clearer picture, yet? You call them Christian achievers, and I don't see it that way.

And I think you better start wrapping your mind around the concept of a global economy. But thankfully for your old ass on the dole, you'll never have to actually work in it, and maybe I'll continue being a spoiled American for another 20 years too.

Originally Posted by: DakotaT 

Not Texas, only a small percentage of people in those capitalistic societies are thriving, and you're not one of those in ours. Just another of the unpaid soldiers, who vote for the criminals. And you also need to quit comparing everything to Walmart for markup. I'm talking about the contractor/retailers in this country making money hand over fist and then balk at paying $20 an hour with limited benefits. 40% markup for them is standard.

The check and balance on capitalism is taxes. Unfortunately for all of us little people, the Capitalists own the government and keep giving legalized tax evasion, which is why people are pissed off at the redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the top 5%. It really is that simple - but buffoons keep muddling up the works because you listen to the right wing programming.

Originally Posted by: DakotaT 

Gosh, Dakota, you're off your game today. I read this a few hours ago, but I was a little busy then. Besides, it didn't hurt to let your weak effort sit there unchallenged for a while.

As for those other countries operating on capitalist principals, how many of those countries have you been to in the last decade or two? Which of them did not seem to be thriving - and I mean down to the masses? My count is 5, not counting Canada and Mexico, and they all seemed to be doing fine. For that matter, thanks for your concern hahahaha, but I'm doing fine too - just like virtually everybody else in this country.

You were not real clear about that 40% mark up thing. Are you saying Walmart DOESN'T make that much - which would certainly be correct? Are you saying that more small-time "contractors and retailers" have a bigger profit margin than Walmart? That doesn't sound correct, but who knows. Anyway, the relevant point - about which you show GROSS lack of understanding - is that market forces control what a business can and can't do in terms of profit margin, prices, wages paid, etc. , NOT government intrusion either by taxes, as you fantasize or by regulation. Tax and regulation just tend to screw things up. How in the hell do you expect any company, big or small, to thrive or even survive if they are charging too much for their goods or services? And how do you expect a company to get decent employees if they don't pay the wage the market requires?

They do charge what they need to charge and pay whatever wages they need to charge. As a result, we all have the greatest life of any people in the history of the world. Would you actually say we don't? And the rest of the world, while still way behind us in America - as they should be, are making progress too - those with the sense to do things our way, anyway. It's all good - for everybody except the loons who hate America's success - you know, Dakota, people like you see when you look in the mirror.

Originally Posted by: texaspackerbacker 

It's amazing to me the mediocrity you accept as "everyone is doing great". I guess the only benchmark you use is that they have crappy food to eat. You and I live in different universes. I'm going to start being like you and not give a fuck about anybody and just live in my own little bubble. What I do know is that those superheroes of yours, the capitalists, are going to have a lot of explaining to do when they meet the Almighty. And for your information, I live in a booming economy where 40% profit is pretty normal. People have a lot of money around these parts and enjoy spending it. We here in North Dakota actually live the kind of shit you're always imaging in that head of yours.

Originally Posted by: DakotaT 

What you don't understand is the other industry is corporate farming, or more or less socialism. See, North Dakota takes in all this Federal Pork called the Farm Bill and subsidies to farmers that do not need them. We also have 2 Air Force bases when 1 would be sufficient to babysit all the nucs we have in the ground here. Lots of Federal dollars spent in North Dakota. In fact, we are net welfare state.

Trickle down economics is about unethical tax reductions for the wealthy. The part of that equation that never worked was the wealthy sharing of the tax breaks by reinvesting it in America. Instead they send the money to banks in the Caman Islands and Switzerland. At least with welfare to poor people, the money gets redistributed in American communities.

Let's just agree that the hogs at the top are disgusting, despicable human beings who only care about money. And the rest of us just get to keep the table scraps. Some of us disagree with these sorts of things, and other like you accept it. But Capitalism is hardly the utopia you make it out to be because of the imperfect human beings that leach of it.

Originally Posted by: DakotaT 

You see despicable capitalist hogs - "vulture capitalists" and I see rotten left wing social planning bureaucrats. I'll agree about the badness of your bogeymen if you agree about mine hahaha. Both are stumbling blocks to that "utopia" you mentioned.

Originally Posted by: texaspackerbacker 

You see despicable capitalist hogs - "vulture capitalists" and I see rotten left wing social planning bureaucrats. I'll agree about the badness of your bogeymen if you agree about mine hahaha. Both are stumbling blocks to that "utopia" you mentioned.

It's all good in America, though - plenty for all - just so long as our military dominance in the world continues.

Originally Posted by: texaspackerbacker 

Problem is, those left wing social planning bureaucrats and those vulture capitalists are incestuous lovers. Rhetoric notwithstanding, it isn't the vulture capitalists who pay for the social planning and regulatory control/punishment that anti-vultures like Dakota wants. The vultures can afford lots of $1000/hour lawyers and invariably manipulate the rules in ways that increase, not decrease, their competitive edge over non-vultures.

That's why, as much as I hate "corporate capitalism" (probably at least as much as Dakota hates it), I remain an anarchist. Because I have zero confidence in the government, in any incarnation, liberal or conservative, Demopublican or Republocrat, to do anything but make that corporate capitalism worse.

Case in point: Eisenhower used the term "military-industrial complex" in the 1950s. Since that time we have had Democrat, Democrat, Republican, Republican, Democrat, Republican, Republican, Democrat, Republican, Democrat. And does anyone truly believe the problems Eisenhower saw have gotten better in any way shape or form? "Big business" power has increased from 1960 to 1970 to 1980 to 1990 to 2000 to 2010, despite hundreds of thousands of pages of government regulation in the name of consumer protection, product safety, fair employment, OSHA, environmental safety, income inequality, AFDC, health care, insurance, banking, blah blah blah blah. So has income inequality. Inner cities have continued to decline. Etc etc etc.

Government doesn't counter the problems of big business power. It exacerbates them and makes them harder to deal with. The real power of the "capitalist class" doesn't come because they have accumulated wealth; the real power comes because it is the nature of states to give power according to relative wealth. That is true of authoritarian states, of monarchical states, and it is true -- in spades -- of the states shaped by "representative" democracy. Because the franchise notwithstanding, it is wealth that shapes access and influence over those who would administer the rest of us.

90% of "Deregulation" as it has been practiced in *ANY* administration since Eisenhower ranted has been little more than rhetorical non-speak, just new varieties of re-regulation that enable some vultures to do their thing better while claiming to do the opposite.

If you want to reduce the power and control of the vultures, really reduce it, the solution isn't de-regulation it is anti-regulation. Anything else just increases the vulture's lifespan and creates full-employment for the vultures' hired guns of lawyers, accountants, lobbyists, bureaucrats, and politicians.

Anarchism doesn't promise fairness and it doesn't promise inequality. It merely limits power of all, and in so constrains the ability of wealth to manipulate the rules of the game for its benefit without actually offering value in return. Madison's Constitution had possibilities for providing similar constraints under republicanism, but with Wickard v Filburn and the decades of Supreme Court decisions emasculating the 9th and 10th amendments and the post WWII rise in government-of-entitlement-and-empowerment, Madison's Constitution is a dead experiment.

Except for the names of the players, and a few technological whizbangs, we've let ourselves be returned to the world of 1763-1789. Madison, Washington and Jefferson,Montesquieu and Tocqueville, Burke and Paine, they offered us a route to replace the worlds of power, of mercantilism and feudalism and empire, with something better, something built on foundations of mutually advantageous exchange and individual self-interest and forbearance.

But we let the pursuers of power con us with their promises of coercion of those who don't want to do everything we want them do for us, con us with their reduction of everything to some "them" who are "making" us do something we don't want to do.

The only question remaining is who gets to be part of the Committee on Public Safety and who ends up having a choice between having one's head smashed in a food riot or carried away in a post-guillotine basket.

Originally Posted by: Wade 

Funny thing about revolutions is that one can rarely predict the outcome.

Most modern revolutions have tended toward emulation of the French of 1789 and/or the Russians of 1917.

Once, however, a group of radical English managed to avoid both paths, and managed to do so for over 200 years.

I used to believe that anarchic society would be a natural evolution for the descendants of those radical English. The approach of those radical English was, after all an approach that valued representative government, innovation, and steady growth of literacy and human capital while it also structured matters to limit the temptations of empire and the delusions of the power-seeking. Their descendants, having benefited from generations of increasing affluence, knowledge, and technological possibilities, would see anarchism not as a route to Hobbesian chaos but as a step that allowed the next order-of-magnitude improvement in the human condition. That they would see it not as a pipe dream of crazy idealists like me, but as a natural progression along the path that 1776 began building.

I still believe in anarchism. I no longer have any confidence in those descendants, i.e., us, to see the logic and, yes, practicality, of evolution beyond state-defined society. My lifetime has been one extended regression toward dependence on today's equivalent of the emperor (popularly-elected legislators and father figure-executives), his mandarins (bureaucrats), and his feudal lords (corporate CEOs, "thought leaders," and Tex's Illuminati), one repudiation after another of the vision of the American experiment, and generations of massive and systematic failure by educators in matters of basic economics and civic responsibility.

America might see its way to anarchism, but if it does, it isn't going to come save as the end of a traumatic period of revolution akin to that of 1789-1848 or 1917-1945, a revolution that will make the civil and imperial wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries look like the argument of a 5-year-old's birthday party by comparison.

However, even though I see revolution as the only possible way people located in the geographic region currently called the US of A might luck out and move to an anarchic society, I am not advocating revolution. I think the chances of revolution actually leading us forward in social evolution are somewhere between slim and none. While our technological possibilities far exceed those available to those free-born Englishmen of 1776, our ignorance exceeds theirs far more.

The Vikings winning a Super Bowl is probably more likely.

Rome is going to fall. Only question is which of our lifetimes it happens in.

Originally Posted by: Wade 

1. No, I am not advocating revolution. I thought I said this in my previous post, but it probably got buried in the rest of the verbiage.

But, no, I do not advocate revolution. Not even on the days I am simultaneously most pissed off at my employer, the POTUS, the SCOTUS, the COTHUS, politicians and liberals everywhere, AND Ted Thompson.

I doubt I would even if I believed my anarchist vision would prevail (which I don't) and even if I didn't believe I would end up being among the first lined up against the wall (which I do).

2. As for why I think anarchism would be an improvement over current America, let me just a few of my reasons without explanation for now and wait until I'm a little less tired. For the third day in a row I find myself not yet home as 9 pm. approach despite having abandoned Thuji before 7:30 am. But here's some reasons:
1. No individual can kill as many people or cause as much damage as any state in human history (including our own) has.
2. No company, no matter how multinational and humongous, can either.
3. States concentrate power, that's what they do. Imperial states concentrate it more.
4. Power corrupts, and more power corrupts more.
5. Human progress has happened because of the actions of free individuals acting in their self-interest, not because the right group happened to have power over others.
6. Free societies innovate more. More free societies innovate even more.
7. The genius of the American Experiment was in somehow finding a way to focus on limiting all types of power, not in ensuring that more people had power.
8. Empowerment inevitably leads back to #4.
9. Anarchism means freer markets. Freer markets mean more sustained economic growth. History shows that sustained economic growth has is accompanying by sustained improvements in health, nutrition, life expectancy, and other "non-material" measures of human improvement.
10. Free markets don't work by entitlement, they work because people are finding new ways to mutually benefit.

That's enough for now.

Originally Posted by: Wade