Republicans Represent the People

[TheDarkestOfAngels]

1. Politicians thinking they are the masters of the economy who decide that they are going to allocate our resources for us.

Indeed they do. They do because the people paying them tell them to do so because they are bought and paid for. Their masters become the wealthy and powerful and not the people who elected them into office. That's not a result of the government's level of involvement in the economy. That's a result of someone wanting said politician to legislate favorably to the individuals who bought them.

If you're going to insist on spending taxpayer money on energy don't give it to a fucking private interest, give it to a R&D program at a university or research lab.

I agree.

No shit sherlock, that's what I've been saying all along.

Indeed, but it's NOT COMING FROM THE GOVERNMENT!

Oh bullshit, the governments decided that they know best and can rule the economy from on high, corporations saw this as an opportunity to get the conditions they wanted and launched at it.

Aaaand I'm going to have to stop you right here.
No.
I don't know if it's different in your country or not (I highly doubt it, but I don't honestly know) but that's now how this happens in most cases. If the government did not have the power to legislate the economy, then that's not going to stop people who want legislation of the economy from making exceptions.
It's happened in my country and given one of the threads you started about the ... I think it was some law that got passed that banned smoking in your country? It sounds like something we have in common. Don't pretend like CEOs are going to be perfect angels in a non-stop free market theVoid-Approved society because you're just being naive.
Government non-interferance in the economy gives these abusers at least equal opportunity for many of the abuses they already commit.

Are you shitting me? You're all broke and more controlled by corporate interests than ever! It has not fucking worked, things aren't more equal, the working class isn't better off, the rich don't have to work harder for their profits, it's had the complete opposite effect.

Yes. Thanks to small government anti-regulation pro-business interests that heavily de-regulated the market lowered taxes and funded a pair of illegal and expensive wars without paying for any of it in the budgets except by cutting popular social programs and forcing the government to intervene on a woman's uterus.

Keynesianism is a fucking disaster!

Oh right. Paper money. That's why my government is in debt.

No it doesn't, Government is the gatekeeper, I want to remove the gates entirely and puts up a fucking wall - Not one business gets taxpayer money, period.

Which is pointless when the wealthy and powerful can still buy a sledgehammer.

Regulation IS different to policing, massively different!

Yes, not that I said any different.

Sure more rules for the people to follow, more things become illegal. You want more and more rules? Fuck that, we need less rules and harsher punishments. Punishing people that commit crimes with tough sentences is far more fair and effective than trying to stem it by imposing on everyone, even the people who wouldn't do wrong to begin with! It's also far far cheaper, so you don't end up a debt riddled mess like your country.

These regulations fuck more people over than the help.

I don't give a damn about how many rules there are as long as they're effective at what they do and enforced as such. More rules doesn't mean worse and fewer doesn't always mean better. I'm sure that's a fallacious logical arguement whose name I've forgotten.
Punishing people more harshly means diddly poop if wealthy people can continue to buy their way out of trouble. White collar crime in most countries is very difficult to prosecute in most cases and your system doesn't make easier to charge them appropriately to the crime they commit.
I'd settle for equal enforcement of the law as much as humanly possible.

Still, that's a nice opinion you have of regulation but given your confusion over what laws are and what regulations are, you seem to have your own idea as to what constitutes which that doesn't seem to follow the defintions and uses I've come across anytime I reference them.
Still, thanks to my state and local water regulators, I can be quite certain I'll be drinking clean water tonight. Thanks to the FDA, I can be reasonably certain that these peanut butter M&Ms I'm eating now won't injure my health (anymore than peanut butter M&Ms normally would given the ingredients list that's there thanks to the FDA.)

By the by, your link was quite amusing. So the FCC is a corrupt company, sure, thanks to the media conglomerates that 'purchased' it.
Your solution to this is... to eliminate the FCC I'm guessing? How wonderful. Now those media conglomerates don't need to corrupt a regulating body to do whatever mischief they intend to inflict upon us. Good work.

A regulation IS a law, I never said it wasn't, I said Regulation is not POLICING.

You certainly did, not that I was arguing that regulation was a manner of policing, so I'm not sure why you're stating this.

So you think we should treat all restaurants like potential criminals and check up on them like some parole officer, all of which costs tons of money, because some restaurant somewhere will neglect their responsibilities and make someone sick? Fuck that, why should ethical companies suffer because of the unethical few? When it does occur that someone gets sick at a restaurant then the government should shut them down and fine or imprison the owners, they should not treat them like criminals before they have done something wrong.

Strawman. Wasn't my arguement.

They do it anyway! At least I'm promoting a system that would make it fucking hard for them to do so, one in which their propagation isn't supported by the government and made legal.

You're damn right they do it anyway. Yet, you're promoting a system that makes it harder for them to do by removing the vast majority of the regulations and laws that prevent them from taking advantage of an unsuspecting public and robbing them blind with far fewer roadblocks to do so.
At least with a regulating government, fire can be fought with fire and even with all this talk about how bad my government is doing, all of the industrialized nations on this planet are at least as regulated and are doing anywhere from worse to far better.
You're naive in the sense that you believe that less regulation means these corrupting companies, CEOs, and other powerful people are going be regulated by market forces they can control and a government with no power to tell them what they can or cannot do with their product or their money (other than, I assume taxes.)

We should punish them when they do something wrong, not BEFORE.

I'd hate to see the news report on how many got sick, injured, or killed as a result of that.

Safe food is food that does not make people sick. When you purchase food you do so under the promise that it won't make you sick - If a company does not comply then they are fined/shut down/imprisoned. You DO NOT need a big expensive government department to make that perfectly clear.

You need a "big expensive government department" to make sure they comply and enforce the rules that they may break. Being fined/shut down/imprisoned is a result of enforcement of regulations that would be gone under your system, assuming the individuals enforcing those laws aren't also removed due to them only existing as a 'big expensive government department."

Complete fucking straw man, I have covered this AT LENGTH already. If they neglect their responsibilities they do NOT get away with it, they get prosecuted!

It's not a strawman at all. You just don't appear to understand the results of the kind of society based on your own ideas on how governments should be run or even the role of regulations in society.
Yes, if they "neglect their responsibilities" then they will get prosecuted for doing so.
But what dictates those responsibilites? Who enforces them? At what point is what they're doing even considered a crime?

More importantly, how many deaths, injuries, and expensive lawsuits must there be before someone figures out that a local health department (big expensive government regulating body) and the laws that allow them to work (those evil, evil regulations) just to get one guy to occasionally visit food establishments and tell them not to keep their rat poison and fatatas so close to one another?
The FDA, FCC, Homeland Security, and all those agencies are created for a reason. On a larger scale, not entirely a different reason than what I've been highlighting it above.
Your system, on the other hand, is one that does away with the laws (regulations) and the enforcement (regulators) that allow my food to be edible and not poisonous to my health. Luckily, I don't have to loose my life or my livelihood (from health loss, injury, lawsuits, or medical expenses.)
Your system will not protect its citizens and it doesn't even protect itself from corruption and thanks to those protections against government interferance, it would be harder to erase those corruptions once they happen.

You've explained a lot about your position, but my assessment is not a strawman, only what I view as a logical conclusion of your views. Worse, you appear to think that your society will have the benefits of what many societies have today (regulation and enforcement of that regulation) would somehow be folded into standard law enforcement which can only happen after a worst-case scenario who enforce laws that aren't, apparently, regulative in nature but do what regulations do and are enforced as they are enforced, only not nearly as effectively (since enforcement can only be reactionary).

Bull. This kind of society would collapse from corruption and social problems at a rate equal to or greater than a nation that does regulate their economic activity.

False dichotomy, you can replace regulations with tougher sentences, make it perfectly clear that "We're not going to watch you like a naughty child or a certain criminal, but if you do fuck up be warned that you are going to get fucking slammed for it".

That way you have more freedom and more protection. Deterrents are effective, you DO NOT need a watch dog for every little thing that could go wrong - When you take the second approach you balloon the government and have to spend tons of money to maintain it all.

You certainly could, but I doubt its effectiveness and your conclusions.

Your living standards are amongst the most unequal in the western world! Once the per capita GDP is adjusted for disparity you go from #4 to #17! You go back before the Keynesian mentality took over your country, back when there were less regulations, have a look at the numbers there. The US used to rank #1.

Stop playing devils advocate, if you present stupid scenarios you don't agree with then don't bother getting your nickers in a twist when I call bullshit.

It was easy to rank #1 when the country was the only one left standing intact after two world wars. (Technically, the Soviet Union was, at the very least, #2 for several decades, which in no way helps your arguement.)
This was all still after we switched to paper money. Still after the government was well beyond starting to infiltrate into the economy. We were the number 1 nation in living standards well after all those evils had already made their mark. I could argue that it was because of those changes that we were able to do what we did in the WWs as well as excel afterword.
The nation began to decline just before the Reagan administration and aside from the Clinton Administration, it's been declining ever since thanks to Republicans not knowing or understanding how to spend money without deliberately setting things up to benefit the wealthy. Our issues have nothing to do with what our money is based on.
Our issues is entirely a result of corruption from people trying to turn this country into a plutocracy and their purchasing of our politicians. All of which goes into what I've been talking about. It doesn't matter what government we have, presently. There are forces who want that power to benefit them and no one else.

You used to have the highest quality care per $ in the world, before the regulations.

It helped that all the sick people were booted out of the healthcare system and prices were overinflated to help the insurance companies, before regulations. Thank you capitalism, your health insurance industry overcharges me more and more each month and when I need the #1 healthcare system in the world, you boot me out when I get too sick.