Libertarian Conservative : I Side With: 93% Ron Paul 89% Mitt Romney 77% Gary Johnson 30% Barack Obama 77% American Voters http://www.isidewith.com/

ie: we can add more police or more market. Libertarians prefer more market and fewer police. Leftists and conservatives prefer more police. THey just justify it using different language.

I don't know Gillespie, but I don't understand his argument. And you're arguing against a straw man because of it. The libertarian argument is this: a) violence is prosecutable (by restoration), even if conducted by children. b) theft is prosecutable (by restoration) even if conducted by children b) the social problem of ostracization (out-group sentiments) in schools is the product of not having a competitive market for schools, where children who misbehave can be ostracized from the school and therefore must attend one that is more disciplined. (ie: schools are indistinguishable from prisons.) c) the impact of this 'anti-bullying' when combined with the lack of physical activity is destructive to 'boys' who must learn dominance play, or be unable to function in a health manner in the real world. (This is a much longer argument.) But the data is pretty clear that males are 'checking out' of society in multiple cohorts. In other words, government is the problem because it prohibits market solutions to the natural course of human development, and in doing so creates 'prisons' that exacerbate natural human behavior. FUrther, that some of this 'dominance play' is highly useful for the healthy development of male interest in society, and without it, males will become detached from society. You're probably not a libertarian because you don't understand libertarianism, and neither do the vast majority of self described libertarians. :) That's OK. The rest of us will keep trying to help you understand it -- meanwhile our society devolves into castes and clans, and becomes completely polarized into political incompetence. Curt

Shotgun with Small shot. Easy to operate when you're half asleep and terrified. More likely to get a hit when you're full of adrenaline. Not likely to go through the walls and kill the neighbor by accident. People are terrified of them. Too. You will never see meth heads run as fast as they do when you chase them off your property at night with a shotgun. :)

1) Why should we expect that demand caused by credit expansion that does not result in productivity should be able to persist forever? 2) Japan isn't going to get out of it's situation for demographic reasons. The west is stuck in this situation for demographic reasons. The 30's were as much a reaction to rapid immigration followed by the decline of farming as a viable occupation as anything else. THe period of "recalculation" that followed may or may not have been solved by additional spending. But only if new innovations, relationships, and goals were developed, not past habits perpetuated.

Everyone understands. But as long as the debate is conducted as class warfare it won't advance. Your argument is empirical, persuasive, and logical: we will have better growth if the money is spent by government rather than lent to government. And if we have better growth we will have higher returns on private sector retained earnings. The problem is, and will remain, the public's sensitivity to intrusive government. So without guarantees that the money will be used for domestic infrastructure improvements, and possibly those improvements only, and without some guarantee that the DOE will be reconstructed or eliminated, the opposite side will block all action to their dying breath. And in that sense, I agree with their approach.

@cfaman RE:" "I can't understand why the wealth party doesn't agitate for policies to maintain wealth. " Externalities. The mission is to starve the state. The wealth delta is just the cost they are willing to pay to achieve it.

The underlying problem is that there is no 'We'. No community. There exists no common interest, so there can exist no community of common interest. The agrarian aristocratic and the industrial egalitarian visions are incompatible. The lower intelligence and higher impulsiveness of the lower classes can only be compensated for by behavioral virtues. And the fertility of the unproductive can only be constrained by ostracization -- an ostracization we can no longer rely upon the winter weather and threat of starvation to accomplish. Instead, we subsidize them, and force the middle class to forgo consumption so that the underclass can fail to adopt the virtues that would enable them to be productive.

@Paine: A community of common interest. Which your supposition is required to exist Can only do so when compensation is received for transfers. Where goals and sacrifices are the same. Where language, manners, ethics and morals are the same. That is where a community of common interest exists. Without which, none can. None does. And neither citizens nor politicians act so. Germans will not tolerate club-med behavior nor corruption. Germany restructured its economy and social order. The rest will have to follow or leave. Politics is an expression of human nature. And human nature is to rebel against injustice. And involuntary transfers without compensation are considered by all to be unjust.

Excellent plan. Not original but still a good plan. Politically viable. Ethically tolerable. Behaviorally beneficial. Debt is the new citizenship anyway. :)

Roughly translated: "Paul has no idea."

"Deserving" is an attempt to mislead the reader. "Deserving" requires an exchange. To 'deserve' something, one must have done something to deserve reward for it. The poor deserve something only if they refrain from theft, fraud, violence and childbearing, and only if they obey manners, ethics and moral norms. In exchange for those actions we can argue successfully that it is cheaper to subsidize them so that they continue to refrain from fraud, theft, violence and childbearing. If people are poor because they bore children that they cannot afford, or because they committed crimes, or because they refuse to obey norms, then they do not deserve anything. THey're just stealing from everyone else already. If people immigrated into this country and are poor, they don't deserve anything, they're just stealing. People are due someone in exchange, not due something because lack of exchange, or are obligated for something because of exchange. That is all.

I think you miss the point that from the right's position, NGDP targeting would require that the government focus its efforts on industrial policy in order to be able to fund redistribution, and therefore cooperate rather than prey on business and industry. This in turn would require we correct our dysfunctional education system that creates uncompetitive workers, and it would reduce class warfare by focusing on specific policy initiatives that would make the nation competitive rather than devolutionary. The right originally abandoned industrial policy because of the collaboration between unions and the state. Now that they see unions as weak and foreign states as a threat, they would prefer to return to industrial policy and very likely, away from free trade - which was just a vehicle for competing against the government-union alliance while the USA had a temporary postwar technological advantage. Conservatism is the sentiment and subsequent philosophy of inter-temporal group persistence by the concentration of capital in all it's forms. In the USA conservatism also includes an allegiance to the status quo of classical liberalism, which in itself is a commercial meritocratic philosophy that retains the english system of class cooperation through multiple houses of government. The democratic socialist movement is an attempt by the proletariat and public intellectuals to obtain political and economic power by propagating the mythos of equality in order to undermine the multi-class system of government in which tehy are at a disadvantage compared to the commercial productive classes. But it is nothing more than an appeal to power for the purpose of material gain. Nothing more and nothing less. While conservatism is more likely to rely on historical metaphor and moral argument because of their inter-temporal content, and the left is more likely to argue for empirical positivism because it specifically lacks that inter-temporal content and replaces that historical view with an absolute faith in the human ability to manage it's own destiny, that does not mean that conservatism cannot be articulated as a rational philosophy. It simply means, that because it is more complex, it is harder to do so. But then again, concepts of this depth are usually outside of the understanding of macro economists, and are instead the provenance of political philosophers and historians to whom economic activity is a predictable cycle driven by little more than institutions, military power, trade routes, and population composition.

Dani The question you must follow with, is "once a country has enough of a middle class to develop democracy, how long can that country remain a democracy before Schumpater's problem of public intellectuals converts it back to totalitarianism?" :)

Legislatures traditionally cut services that will punish taxpayers, rather than obligations that serve the interests of the bureaucracy. Education, emergency services, and recreation are the favorite targets. Despite the fact that bureaucratic obligations are the source of the financial problem. There is enough of a body of evidence to support the allegation. Given that education is being cut because of California's overindulgent financial policies, what is it that you recommend be done instead of cutting costs on education? Complaining about cuts is easy - and meaningless. Recommending alternatives is the hard part.

@CM So, I'm sorry (and I'm not being sarcastic) but I don't really understand your point. What I think you mean is that even slums will have businesses? That's true. But if you you want prosperity in a population you need productivity in order to obtain that which you cannot produce yourselves, and to create productivity you need to produce exports, and exports that are more scarce than competing products. If you mean something else, I don't understand. The point I was making was the "little things" strategy of urban renewal: "Ticket for jaywalking and spitting on the street or fixing a broken window". Fix the little things and the big things will be taken care of. This is the opposite of the 'big project' urban development projects put forth in Detroit. Clean, Safe, Friendly, and Available Credit and the market will take care of the problem. The problem is making it clean, safe, and friendly so that credit can do it's job. The other problem, which I refer to below is the culture of the political system. And that, I don't think, can be fixed in Detroit. And it's pretty clear that it isn't getting fixed in souther california either. and because of that, it isn't getting fixed in california in general.

Yes. They are part of the 'western expansion', which combined the ports, cheap labor, and financial power of NYC with the politics, administration and military power of washington. This greater area, in 'Nine Nations Of North America' terms, is 'the foundry'. Or what we call 'the rust belt' now that the US has been de-industrialized. NYC's position is the result of the middle class and upper middle class leaving the city in order to spend money on child rearing. Human beings appear, in all cultures, to favor 'spatial freedom' (homes) above all other freedom. They do so because they must make fewer compromises, and can more easily avoid interpersonal conflicts. DC is a slum on the european model. A high investment core surrounded by a donut of subsidized poverty and ignorance. If you are brave enough to look at the data, you will find the same racial and cultural problem as the Levant experienced: A sufficient number of a certain class and culture of people is necessary to preserve an economic order. The less 'white and christian' a police force the greater will be incidence of crime. That's just the data. Plain and simple. It may not be a race problem in the sense that it is genetic. It is more likely a cultural problem common to a race of people who establish an identity that consists largely of a set of status signals, where status signals also incorporate physical appearances. As such, status signals are more 'profitable' intra-group than extra-group. (For example, women are far more unlikely to mate across racial groups than men - except for hispanic women. Women value race and looks more than money in their mates - to the disappointment of wealthy men everywhere.) But either way, whether the biases are genetic or cultural, they are a problem for governance. The same cultural biases are present in most minorities, and more importantly, in the middle classes of each minority. Jews are the most interesting at 2%, and americans of protestant english heritage as well at12%, because the cultures are commercially biased. So, because of status signals in cultural and racial groups, and primarily in the middle and upper proletariat classes, tribal proclivity can easily overwhelm political institutions. Institutions only codify tribal proclivities. They do not create them. In other words, a city dies if it's racial and cultural mixture are incompatible with it's constitutional institutions and processes -- all of which place unmodified requirements on individuals in order to function. Believing differently will not make it so. The data is the data.

It's actually that we've moved them to a) areas where there are valuable trade routes and b) where the cost of enduring winter, and it's impact on built capital is lower. The area around the great lakes was used to fill up the country when the trade routes were entirely in the atlantic. The continent is filled, the western economic advantage is undermined, and the pacific is as great or better a trade area than the atlantic. Therefore the current trade routes are coastal. The current opportunities are therefore coastal. The population is following opportunities. The US is organizing geographically into the south american model: a very high income, very small, urban upper class, surrounded by a hedonistic proletariat, with suburban middle class. Which will rapidly separate into racial and cultural divisions. The data from dollar bill traffic records, and uhaul records show further divisions that are politically untenable in the long term.

Am I missing something or are you missing the effect of intertemporal considerations on equilibria?

The rising tide does float all boats. The rate of distribution of the tide is perceptible during some periods, and not during others. The problem is creating the tide. The rarity in human history is creating a consistent rising of the tide. If we look at the long term in every civilization this process is a constant. If someone shows a counter example, it's easy to refute. The rise of the northern european west is due to atlantic discovery and expansion. The decline of europe was caused by a reaction to it . THe western expansion is complete. The western model is being copied by everyone else. And we are entering a period of indifference- a moderation of differences which will create more global equality. That global equality will mean that the high rate standard of living of western proles will decline. The most important products that a society can create are: a) a class of 'nobility' which performs consumer innovation and research in pursuit of status demonstration. (THis is the source of western innovation). It is important that this innovation be material consumer innovation rather than political or religious innovation. b) common law, and property rights, and decreasing corruption in a bureaucracy. c) a means of enfranchisement in the middle class lifestyle of consumption for proles. d) a means of reducing the fertility of the proles.