Donnie

It is the same in the US mostly. Except there is no accountability. Zero. More importantly most people dont even know a good job from a bad job. Most people never thought of inflation as a tax, most people subscribe to Keynesian economics so believe institutions like the Fed are necessary and helpful.

There is $175k-$200k federal insurance on your money in the bank. So a bank run didnt matter. But part of the reasons banks were so vulnerable is because of fractional reserve banking which once again is subsidized. Plus if every bank in the country went under, where did BoA get their money? the federal reserve for a smaller interest rate then the national average. So if every bank went under people would form corporations again to fulfill the demands for banks. Again banks go under all the time Bank of America was the only one to survive paying out insurance on the Great San Fransisco earthquake I believe. Again you make it seem like there would be anarchy if even EVERY major bank went under. No, in the weeks that happened someone else will enter the game and the few banks that survive will continue lending. This is has happened all the time, where bad debts get cycled through with industries that were playing that game falling down too and new ones opening up in their place. INTERVENTIONS ON THIS PROCESS ALWAYS LEAD TO STAGNATION. See now, see the great depression, see Japan in recent times. ^ Went under in the recession too. Yet you can still buy them now. It seems a lot like these cookies were a good product with a bad company and some other company was willing to buy the recipe and keep producing. This is a good thing. Like a forest fire ends up making more trees then they destroy (especially pine). Why did the company making the cookies go under? Too high of expenses to survive the crash. They likely were not reinvesting in their business enough, they likely over-hired (see the iron law of institutions), and likely had other waste too.

http://en.wikipedia....and_Freddie_Mac I dont know how you can call it lack of regulations when government sponsored enterprises were to blame. 1.) they borrow from the Fed at lower interest rates then anyone else on the economy 2.) they are able to take on riskier loans then anyone else (to fulfill the political goal for everyone to own a home even if they cant afford it) 3.) other banks join in and sell off the crap loans to the GSE's. Creating a big bubble. Because of the subside there is more homes being sold then are really in demand. Creating artifically high home values and artificially high numbers of home buyers. 4.) The GSE's fail bigtime. 5.) Every other bank risks going under because they joined in taking bad loans. 6.) They all get bailed out instead of paying for bad business practices. 7.) the cost of this bailout is inflation, however much the dollar has been deflated by the bailouts is the same as getting taxed for that much. Say the $10,000 = 100 pounds of copper. Post bailout $10,000 = 60 pounds of copper. Then everyone got a 40% tax increase through inflation.

well short answer is bubbles pop and the crash is meant to restructure the economy to where it should've been (before subsidies created a bubble) and bailouts are as bad as the original problem perhaps in ways worse. I didn't give a direct answer I just posted a video. But that is my direct answer.

I gave my response several times on this thread and the elections one.

I see nothing wrong with people doing stupid stuff with their time. Lets drop it at that, to avoid the next 2 pages getting deleted.

Minimum wage isn't livable like it was intended to be. It does however make it harder for teenagers to get their first job. Of course the bigger part of that is the difficulty making a business limiting the total numbers of jobs overall is more damaging then minimum wage is. So minimum wage isn't great but its far from my first target. On why you shouldnt trust the FDA Monsanto is a better example then McDonalds

if the consumer doesn't care about a safe product then isn't regulation a waste anyways? If people do care then people will choose only to buy safe products. Yes irrational businesses my lie and cheat as much as possible to get a short term gain. But they wont be able to compete against businesses with safe products, to the extent that that is what people actually value.

again you have regulators regulating regulators regulating regulators. Again if a magazine is known for rating shitty games higher then they are and everyone else says its shit that magazine wont be taken seriously. If it happens often no one will trust that magazines opinion. Now the exact same applies for product safety regulators. With the FDA you get a monopoly agency that can be bribed and is enforced through force on the margins. With the legal system I am too lazy to spend hours and hours writing about why it would work and proving every nuance of why its better and worth changing as well as it would actually work. I am too lazy to do that right now, more importantly there are people who have all the information. If you are legitimately interested I can send you a load of information on the subject. Its just not worth posting on the thread because people will be joining the convo later and will be arguing with stuff that I had a response to 10 pages earlier.

Im talking about more Underwriters laboratories and less FDA. Businesses will pay UL to have their sticker saying that this product was tested and is safe. If UL gives the sticker to unsafe products their business is jeopardized. If UL is honest with their testing businesses that make products will continue to make products that meet their safety requirements to the extent that that is what makes products sell. I belive if you had an agency like UL for environmental regulation, that is only businesses that meet their environmental requirements can get the sticker saying their product is environmentally friendly. To the extent that consumers care about this is the extent that the regulations work. Now whats wrong with agencies like the FDA? Because if they get bribed there is no competing firm to say that X is really unsafe. Kind of like there is multiple companies that rate car safety. Or multiple companies that rate how good a video game is. Anyways on the whole law thing thats a thread in itself about how that would work. I listed some historic examples if your interested. If your just a critic and have no interest I dont really have time to explain atm. Class action lawsuits.

tea party is not significantly different then most republicans. They may be screaming anti-spending but have no plans to actually do anything but cut perceived increases on spending like Romney did. tea party republicans tend to support all the bullshit that wont succeed in a general election. Such as anti-abortion and gay marriage.

Yeah because the current laws remove all guilt from businesses. A free market on laws will and previously had to market extranalities correlate directly to the businesses profits themselves. Overfishing,polution, deforestation and other manners of pollution is a failure of the government, including agencies and laws that support the EPA. The only way you can have actual regulations against polluting businesses is if you open enforcement of laws to individuals. A good example of this is nuclear powerplants. If a nuclear meltdown came directly out of the owners pockets/investors pockets, and could result in crippling fines and perhaps even the death penalty (for 1 count of murder for everyone that dies as a result of failure) would there be as many nuclear plants? Hell no. Given that there are more nuclear power plants on the market then would be sustained if the owner recieved 100% of the punishment for failure then you can point to government intervention hurting peoples safety. Even worse is these power plants often ignore their own safety rules and cannot withstand the 8.0 earthquake that they were built to withstand. Once again subsidized safety makes less people safe. Like subsidized tuition makes colleges more expensive. Like the war on drugs makes drugs more accessible. Also since you mentioned the great recession please watch why it happened. Regulations are the cause. http://youtu.be/d-oLOSnITmM

Markets are the best way to deal with the demands of society. Why are government laws so terrible? Because its a monopoly on law. Enforced not by a market where you can pay for legal protection from agencies with the best balance of laws (for institutions/indivuals) but instead you either got a facist state who arbitrarily makes laws or you got a democratic state who makes laws based on what the will of the majority is. I recommend doing research on Medieval Iceland and Ireland. How their legal institutions were not government driven but market driven and how the quality of their laws were much fairer then other European states at that time. For iceland look up information about the Althing. Prechristianity it worked by each individual in iceland can subscribe to a chieftaincy who would have a set of laws, you could subscribe to any law maker in this case and your market decision decided which chieftaincies were more successful. Each year they met for an Althing to make agreements between chieftaincies and its roughly treated as a parliament in contemporary times, the difference being is you didnt vote you bought whichever laws/enforcement you agreed with. Brehon Law (Ireland). Brehon law worked similiar to iceland with some specific differences. Im kind of tired so im not going to list the specifics. Now your distrust of markets is a distrust of crony capitalism. Since people do only whats in their self interest, and the current economic system incentives [bleep]ing over everyone and making as much money as possible at the public expense (BP in a nutshell) thats what you get. If there was for example enough demand people then people would only buy organic foods that are not GMO and used no pesticides in the growing process. However by peoples own subjective value they care more about saving a few bucks then their own health. I see nothing wrong with this. California wants to force companies to label GMO foods. I agree with the idea behind it, but a better approach is to have companies that self label themselves as GMO free and people boycotting everything else.

Patents aside (id rather not get on that topic) your right they dont. Still a high investment cost is not a real barrier. Given the cell phone monopoly in Mexico and the ridiculous profits that generates, if you got rid of market restrictions you would probably expect half a dozen companies that get get enough capital to pop up and compete overnight. Now what if all 7 of them then decided to cartelize? There is a huge cost in making your own cell phone company how would this cartel ever be broken? Easy, if the profits that can be made off breaking the cartel are high enough investors will flock to it. If they aren't is the cartel all that bad? Sure its not optimal but its not the end of the world. This is a natural regulation. Lawsuits dont have to be expensive. Thats a problem with the current legal sytem, not the economical principles behind them. That doesn't really apply directly against this idea. If you pollute only the land you own I see no problem with this, now if your pollution affected land outside your property there is a problem right there. Your right these can be convoluted, but government involvement leads to things like BP getting exept from environmental regulations because they donated lots of money to Obama's 08 campaign. So there is loopholes in any system. Just less in this one.

This sounds almost like predatory pricing. That is walmart and target and kmart can all lower their prices to non profitable levels to [bleep] every mom and pop store. Never happened even with people like Rockefeller. Specific to Rockefeller his price drops were due to cutting waste and lower prices to stay competitive. Again either the cartel isn't that bad so it takes a long time for additional competition to respond to the higher prices, or they are totally price gouging and the competitors enter quickly to annihilate the cartel. Think about a real world cartel like the drug cartel. Insane prices right? Massive barriers to entry, you have to have enormous connections to bribe politicans, have regulation agencies turn a blind eye, have people to smuggle for you, people to sell to, wars between other cartels, etc. Therefore cartels exist, however the profit is so good that even then there is competition and plenty of it. If you got rid of all drug laws, a massive wave of competition would swoop in and make marijuana for example about as much as non hallucinogenic weeds. Basically your theory never happens in the real world without some sort of government barrier to allow it to happen. On regulations there are plenty of natural regulations, such as boycotting shitty businesses. I know plenty of gay people that will never have a chicken sandwhich from Chick-fil-a. I also believe in private lawsuits for market externalities and/or business agreements. That is a business paying a beekeeper to do business next to their orchards if they help. Or a hotel company suing a factory opening next door. Or a hotel paying a ski/surf rental shop to open next door. I dont know what the rules should be, but I do know that there is some level of balance that is fair to both the factory owner and the hotel owner.

something small like that no. Maybe if you do it everyday and I have some proof you do. Potentially yes. by trash I had something more like toxic waste in mind though

Its very unstable though if one backed down everyone else is screwed. It takes unanimous support to maintain a cartel. My argument is that governments are the only reason they can last. For example a barrier to entry (perhaps some shady lobbying that requires all newcomers to pay an extra billion to enter the game) making it nearly impossible to have more then the current number of airlines is whats needed to maintain a cartel. Otherwise someone notices high profits and enters the market and breaks it up. If that newcomer was smart they would do everything in their power to tell their customers what the other guys were doing and why you should boycott their business. Im not against regulations. If someone dumped trash on my house I would like to be able to sue them. The free market solution to pollution from day 1 of the industrial revolution was that it was a property rights violation. But a massive government intervention interfered with the general will of the population at large. I dont believe in having some government regulating body to watch who is polluting or not, i believe in people living in a city and a mining company covers the city in smoke being able to enter in a class action suit against them.

cartels and monopolies only form with the governments help btw. vaccines can be reverse engineered soon after creation plus if they exploit their monopoly people wont stay loyal to them after competitors come out. If costs time and money for company A to make the vaccine and if they [bleep] everyone over with it, peopel might boycott their other stuff for reverse engineered competitors. green subsidies fail for all the same reasons as anything else. The only way you can fix pollution is to treat it as a property rights violation if someone pollutes your air.

I don't know specifics but I can say with certainty that all subsidizes lead to problems and never help solve the initial problem they were meant to solve.

Tragedy of the commons (private) solutions: Roads are a good example of tragedy of the common. Traffic and wear and tear sucks. A toll road solves that, if there is too much traffic raise the toll, if the fee is too high they lose money. Farmers feeding animals is another example. If you have a common field and allow all the farmers to let their cattle eat the grass each wants to feed their cattle as much as possible so the other guys dont take it all. Easy solution is for someone to own the field and charge based on how much grass was eaten. Solves that problem and improves the health of the field. Pollution is another example. Pollution in the early industrial revolution was treated as a property rights violation until the factory owners payed off the courts or lawmakers to remove those laws. Go back to those standards and thats yet another one solves on a free market (in this case a free market of law).

It creates bubbles and it desensitizes institutions to good business practices. Ex 1: James J. Hill is a good example of this. While every transcontinental railroad in the US was subsidized his was not. What they would do is have really bad work and exploit the subsidy to the fullest. They got paid more to go up hills so they would instead of sticking a shorter route. A lot of Hill's competitors chose to go through scenic routes because of the subsidies. Hill since he was an actual market entrepreneur wanted the fastest route and best built railroads and Hill's railroad was the only one not to go out of business in the 1890's as a result of this. Ex 2: College subsidies, two different ones are at play. State paid subsidies and federal student loan guarantees. State subsidies are money given to colleges that they dont have to earn. State funding for colleges. Colleges have more money to spend on whatever they want. These colleges make the schools very pretty looking and pay the teachers more. Neither directly correlate to college students having a better education and being worth the added cost. However students like these nicer schools and also forces private colleges to raise tuition to compete. The result of states trying to make college more accessible is that you make them less accessible because you raise the cost of competing. Student loans. If a bank was giving out student loans (without all those laws that make it so you must pay even if you file bankruptcy or w/e) they would loan out money to students most likely to earn it back. Ie: lawyers, doctors, engineers would be the first people they would loan to. Now the government can loan directly to art majors and since everyone can afford college now they can charge more for different degrees then before. So if it was known that art isn't a profitable degree the school might've charged less for the classes. But when you cna loan to everyone this drives up the prices for each student. On these if your still confused I might've stated too much on what is instead of why. I am kind of tired :D

My claims to cut back the US national debt were. 1.) Totally private health insurance would be relatively and absolutely cheaper and more accessible for the individual, including the poorest 10% and retired medicare recipients and minimum wage employees. Would also save over a trillion dollars annually from government spending. 2.) Military spending is unnecessary aside from nukes. I conceded to fallout and martyr countries making this unlikely to be an effective strategy. I still think the military could do with a 50% cut in spending. So about 400B+ cut. 3.) Market interventions are always bad. NO EXCEPTIONS. The great recession was caused by intervention and the bail outs only make things worse in the long run. 4.) Social security "fix". Pay out to everyone over 50 when they should receive it. Everyone 30-50 has the option of whether or not to pay into it and recieve benefits or opt out. Everyone 30 and younger is forced to get an IRA and life insurance in place of SS (if you believe people sould be forced ot save for retirement). Long term fix to a broken ponzy scheme, medium term cost to it. 5.) Release all prisoners convicted of a victimless crime. If you disagree with this one thats fine its almost not in the same category as everything else.

Tragedy of the commons solutions:Roads are a good example of tragedy of the common. Traffic and wear and tear sucks. A toll road solves that, if there is too much traffic raise the toll, if the fee is too high they lose money. Farmers feeding animals is another example. If you have a common field and allow all the farmers to let their cattle eat the grass each wants to feed their cattle as much as possible so the other guys dont take it all. Easy solution is for someone to own the field and charge based on how much grass was eaten. Solves that problem and improves the health of the field.Pollution is another example. Pollution in the early industrial revolution was treated as a property rights violation until the factory owners payed off the courts or lawmakers to remove those laws. Go back to those standards and thats yet another one solves on a free market (in this case a free market of law). Im sorry an "I was wrong" wont suffice 1 days wage buys 1 year's care in 1920. The nature of care is different. When people got cancer in 1920, they died. When people get cancer today, they stay in the hospital for a month. When people broke their arm in 1920, they'd either set it or amputate it. When people break their arm today, they x-ray it, figure out if they need surgery (set it with pins), then go through physical therapy. Your model is flawed even if you make grand (wrong) assumptions. Like everyone in America gets to visit a doctor for 1 hour a year (which is completely wrong), and that there are no such things as nurses, administration fees, etc. Oh, and people don't need to buy medication. So with those assumptions, health care costs X amount per year means that doctors get paid X amount per hour. Guess what? Even if X was $64, that isn't enough for a doctor! If you equated a doctor with an engineer (which requires less schooling), the engineer is already making more than $64 / hour! Engineers aren't regulated by the government like you're claiming doctors are, so where's the incentive? That means that X needs to be much higher (especially considering differences between the two professions, what it takes to be a doctor). a lot of the medical equiptment isn't as expensive as you think. Its price is shifted up because of subsidies. Just like college tuitions. Even if that $ amount is wrong, it would be significantly less on a market then it currently is. As far as incentives go, people go to school get $100k student loan debts to be a teacher.

I made that number up that with no artificial barriers you should be able to get full coverage on health care for 1 days wage. Doctors cost, medical machinery costs which are bid up by insurance cartel/medicare much like college tuitions are bid up by subsidies to student loans, patent trolls, artificial profit margins. With the average cost of insurance per year today is $5k+ (i dont remember the national average cost). I make the guess that it would be as low as $64 a year, but certainly lower then the cartel rates we have now and much more accessible then Obamacare. economies of scale aren't a problem because of the corporation. Not corporate personhood USA but the ability for a group of investors to gather capital to launch a new business. If there is enough profit being made from the monopoly company then people would flock to the opportunity to compete. Phone lines are a lot like railroads in the 1870's and high start up's are not a big barrier.

Im not sure which markets converge towards a natural monopoly so ill list a few i think you had in mind. The common theme with the ones I will list is they all require government made barriers to entry to actually have a control geographic monopolies: Ex 1: A limited supply of mountain passes These dont naturally form monoplies because of the extreme cost to get total control of the market. The last guy to own the mountain pass will sell it for the cost of the monopoly itself. Cartels can form if every mountain pass owner bands together to double the rate of entry. However they are naturally unstable because if 1 guy undercuts the cartel he is significantly better off and they are significantly worse off. This works out to the same set of rules as the prisoners dilemma. Unless you had state sanctioned land grants, like the United States did with railroad companies. Ex 2: Gas station in the middle of nowhere charging $10 a gallon for gas If there is no competition it is because its unprofitable or barely profitable for this business anyways. High profits lead to more gas stations opening nearby. Only way a monopoly or cartel can be sustained in this case too is with state intervention. Technology Monopolies: Ex 1: The secret ingredient in krabby patties is [bleep]. These monopolies are brand loyalty ones mainly. You can find the coca-cola recipe online and it will taste like coke. Assuming its not illegal and you tried to sell it as your own product called, "Awesome Drink" people would still prefer coca-cola. This is a natural monopoly or at least substantial control of a market that isn't government driven. However if coca-cola decided to charge $500 per 2 liter bottle people would choose awesome drink. With a state they can appeal to the government to outlaw any drink that has their recipe. Ex 2: So i just made this car that runs on hydrogen, is 100% safe and never needs to recharge/refule These monopolies are temporary. It costs 70% of the production cost to reverse engineer a device. In that time hydrocar has a total monopoly on the market and is building brand loyalty. when elementcar reverse engineers hydrocar and puts themselves on the market they would have to lower prices to get their foot in the door. The natural result is the innovater makes bank and the consumer gets an affordable product in the end. Patent laws prevent this and create a monopoly only through state intervention.