Vicodin withdrawls. Vicodin. Dangers of vicodin. Effects of taking vicodin. Cheap vicodin cod. How l ong does vicodin stay in your system….

And you must refrain from lumping in Republicans with progressives. The Republicans are far more the responsibility of libertarianism then are the democrats and progressive. The two notable market crashes have followed era of Republican policy dominance. The last one and this one were/ will be fixed by progressive governance.

Don't go anywhere because I want to take you along for the ride and see how you explain away the Obama recovery as it happens real time.
You are on record proclaiming our imminent collapse.

Free markets do not exist.

Poorly regulated ones are prone to big crashes and inefficiencies.

Well regulated ones optimizes the benefits of capitalism and the efficiencies of market competition.

End of discussion!

We are a collapsing empire.

BS, the U.S. economy exhibited its greatest growth before the political class was prevailed upon to pool efforts to provide basic access, etc.

Many things occur simultaneously. You like to ascribe all our modern success to the political machina because it suits your "progressive" precepts.

The government management model has failed repeatedly throughout human history. There are no "right" people to make it "work".

… Let's not pretend 'mandatory government schooling' is anything but a sanitized form of slavery.

'Going hand in hand with the spread of public education have been compulsory attendance laws, which have forced all children up to a high—and continually increasing—minimum age, to attend either a public school or a private school certified as suitable by the state apparatus… the entire mass of the population has thus been coerced by the government into spending a large portion of the most impressionable years of their lives in public institutions…

..what institution is more evidently a vast system of incarceration ?

… critics of government education trenchantly exposed the nation's public schools—and to a lesser extent their private appendages—as a vast prison system for the nation's youth, dragooning the entire youth population into vast prisons in the guise of "education," with teachers and administrators serving as surrogate wardens and guards….' (Murray Rothbard)

______

"There is nothing in the real world to suggest that getting rid of public education, health care and other safety nets would improve economic efficiency or personal freedom"

You made it abundantly clear that you do not understand the Singapore system.

"There is nothing in the real world to suggest that getting rid of public education, health care and other safety nets would improve economic efficiency or personal freedom."

There is a great deal of evidence that restricting the rewards for productive behavior, and thereby transferring responsibility for production to the political class, dramatically reduces the ability of society to provide the things you mention, or even to provide a decent standard of living for most of the population. And yet, this you do advocate – frequently.

Posted by: Gil

Whatever you say Mr. Hoover.

"Making sure" that people are taken care of will make them less than they can be.

Posted by: Sam Grove

You are just shooting your mouth off saying something that sounds good to you but is in absolute contradiction to the facts and reality of the real world.

The most successful economies, the most free people through all of history are those of us who live in societies (the modern developed social democracies) where our efforts are pooled to provide basic access to the things people need to succeed. There is nothing in the real world to suggest that getting rid of public education, health care and other safety nets would improve economic efficiency or personal freedom.

"By all means put up your best candidate and tell him to tell the tax payers they will no longer have to fund education or Medicare but they will also o longer benefit from these programs… you will lose every-time and your personal interpretation of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will matter not."

Tell the taxpayers that their dollars are going to:

1) Infrastructure: All hype. Only 5% ($43 billion) of the bloated $825 billion package is for transportation, including only 3% for highways. Very little is “shovel-ready” work; most wouldn’t be spent for two years or more.

2) Continued bailouts: It’s not about government efficiency. The $43 billion for transportation spending is overshadowed by five times as much (more than $200 billion) to bail out state and local governments that have overspent their budgets.

3) New spending: $136 billion of the bill is for unproven ideas — to start 32 new federal programs.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/11400327/Stimulus-New-Programs

4) Rewarding those that put the Tabula Rasa in office: ACORN would get their own new slush fund, look for the Democrats to push for 'Card Check'.

5) Additional waste: $20-million to re-sod the National Mall, hundreds of millions for contraceptives (Pelosi wants us to become Western Europe), $650 million for digital TV coupons, and $250-million for an after-school snack program.

'Sunlight is the best disinfectant': the longer this bill is out in the open the less support it will receive from the masses.

You want nationalized health care; I want something along the lines of the Singapore system.

If your ideal government is one where national health care is implemented, our tax dollars go to fund overseas abortions, our educational system is centrally controlled, wages are fixed, business is run through a central planner (ala the NKVD and the Red Army) and our politicians are not held accountable for excessive spending of our tax dollars then I believe it is time for that government to fail.

"Dude, The government is us…"

Who do you mean by "us"? I mean, I can see how you would believe that the government is you and yours (that would certainly explain your propensity for propaganda), but government is an enterprise of exploitation, and that's what you want it to be.

Thanks. Tom Sowell wrote an insightful article on India and western culture's perception of it a few years back, mentioning Ghandi as well.

I'm sort of surprised, and maybe glad, that no one said something like "how dare you insult our troops like that". I'd have responded with the fact that I've been deployed twice fairly recently but what does that have to do with whether I'm right or wrong?

Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism" is very insightful on the subject of the "liberal" search for the "moral equivalent of war". It's not really a subject that's come up recently, with the exception of Rangel's periodic calls to reinstate the draft and Obama's call for a domestic security force or whatever the hell he casually mentioned, but I do think it's noteworthy that the left doesn't mention the specific sacrifices of basic freedom entailed in military service and the reasons that such sacrifice is necessary whenever they're extolling "national service".

On a side note, I felt far more free to criticize actions of my nominal superiors in the USMC than my instructors in academia. Just a thought.

Not in this life. All I've seen from Mierduck is:

The Government is my shepherd,
I shall not want;
It makes me lay down my arms.
It leads me wherever it deems best I be;
It restores my soul.
It leads me in paths of Community Service
for His Holiness: The Divine Prophet Algore I's sake.

Even though I walk through the valley
of the shadow of death,
I fear no evil;
for You are with me;
Your guns and Your bureaucracy, they comfort me.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life;
and I shall dwell in a house in the Projects forever.

"We are not guaranteed crime protection nor defence forces nor access to taxpayer money when times get tough"

When times are tough, people can defend themselves by themselves and not try and free ride off everyone else.

We expect government to prohibit aggression, we should not wish it to practice aggression.

The government does not guarantee your life, only that others may not take it.

So why not make sure every person has access to the basics… health care, education and the basics which are wealthy society can easily afford.

You seem to have no grasp of the importance of incentives.

The cost of wealth is directed activity; risk, thinking, and labor. People pay the costs because of the reward of consumption.

The focus of political government is on redistribution. This shifts incentives from production to affecting the political process of redistribution.

A wealthy society that attempts to make sure everyone has access to the basics will become a poor society.

"Making sure" that people are taken care of will make them less than they can be.

BS, it has a life of its own.

Posted by: Babinich

I think "life" falls under healthcare. We pay the government to protect our lives from enemies foreign and domestic. A heart attack is a pretty big enemy if you have no health insurance.

If we want to include health care, education ect that''s our right as a self governing society.

By all means put up your best candidate and tell him to tell the tax payers they will no longer have to fund education or Medicare but they will also o longer benefit from these programs… you will lose every-time and your personal interpretation of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will matter not.

Thomas Jefferson's most proud achievement was the University of Virginia which he founded to be a tuition free university funded by the government.

When everyone is focused on how stuff is distributed, production of stuff is neglected.

When incentives are keyed to distribution, they are removed from production.

The best way to have plenty of cheap stuff available for distribution is to allow the rewards to fall to production.

This is why government management of economic factors leads to disaster, the focus of political management of the economy is on distribution and redistribution.

Everyone consumes, so when political management of wealth distribution becomes the norm, the incentives fall toward manipulation of political channels rather than toward production.

Besides, the worst thing you can do for people is to "make sure" they are taken care of.

Posted by: persiflage

Dude,

The government is us, you and I, your rant makes you sound like some one with multiple personalities ordering himself to obey… himself.