Losing respect for Rand Paul

[Minimalist]

You are years too late, Tiz.

[Amarok]

You are years too late, Tiz.

Or maybe i'm just a hopeless optimist. Or maybe a world of a total privatized corporatist dictatorship that hides itself behind the moniker "Free Market " and "Small Government " are to worrisome .

[Minimalist]

I agree but the battle has been lost.

[The Grand Nudger]

I disagree, I think that the battle has simply changed..and we find ourselves in the position of being a sort of civil insurgency..so we either adopt asymmetric tactics or continue to get the shit beat out of us.  Playing their game on their chosen field will yield predictable results..and so I no longer seek to change my government by voting where I know my vote won't..and can't..effect change.

Bottom up, from here on out...there's no sense in hoping that installing the right people at the top will fix this...that;s how we got into this mess. If we make it shitty enough here, the corporate shills will buy puppets elsewhere and fuck with somebody else...eventually.

[Minimalist]

If we make it shitty enough here

Did you ever see Soylent Green?  There is a remarkable vision of the future.... one that the republicunts will fully endorse.  The rich live in their enclaves while the poor are fed dead bodies and scooped up by garbage trucks when they protest.

[Amarok]

In other words Trump supporter heaven

[The Grand Nudger]

If we make it shitty enough here

Did you ever see Soylent Green?  There is a remarkable vision of the future.... one that the republicunts will fully endorse.  The rich live in their enclaves while the poor are fed dead bodies and scooped up by garbage trucks when they protest.

Ever seen the middle east?  I'll commit myself to turning this country into that..if that shit is ever pulled, lol. Corporate nterests aren;t as stupid as our government, they'll pull out long before it's turned into an unprofitable morass. Thankfully, that can be accomplished, and targeted specifically at them..without resorting to the scorched earth doctrine. They can go fuck with the canadians or the brits..subvert the eu, whatevs. I won't say I don't give any fucks..but I'll admit to giving far fewer fucks, lol.

[shadow]

This site is so cynical 

[GUBU]

Instead of reading Rand in school, I read More and Plato).

 on Plato. What do you think Plato would think of capitalism? .... (We already know how he would feel about Trump.)

He probably wouldn't like it all that much (though some bits likre fucking over poor people would go well with him), I always got the impression that something akin to feudalism was his preferred government, from reading the Republic.

---

Study the Danish economy and how it got to be there. You're doing an economics degree over there, any academic worth his salt will show you just how much socialist and social democratic policies have shaped the country into pretty much the closest thing we've got to Utopia on this planet right now (and yes I am aware of the provenance of that name. Instead of reading Rand in school, I read More and Plato).

This is actually the whole reason I'm studying in Denmark - because I studied their society in a transportation geography class and thought it was brilliant. I'm not doing an econ degree, I'm majoring in Business and Environment because I've made it my goal in life to practically implement sustainability. So I study socialism and these systems extensively - it's the other half of my degree. I just don't have faith in NGOs and democracy because I've seen them fail at accomplishing these things that I value so much, and I don't want to be powerless, so I'm learning business too.

You've got to remember, lad that you're young yet.

*lass 

When you've seen what happens when you're not the perfect drone (and even when you) are, you'll hopefully lose your childish infatuation with Randian libertarianism.

If you actually disagree with my arguments, then address those, but calling me out for being young and stereotyping me is not something I can comment on.

You're studying an economics degree lad, don't kid yourself. Anything with business in it is in the economics field.

You see NGOs fail because they're part of the capitalist system. Their job isn't really to help the poor, but salve the consciences of the rich by giving an appearance of helping the poor*. And democracy has failed because it has been corrupted by the one rule of capitalism "money is the only thing allowed to talk", and the forms which give a veneer of popular rule are viciously anti democratic today.

What you are seeing is not the failures of the systems you decry but the triumph of the systems you acclaim.


*Yes I know the people and organisations making up the NGO sector are mostly good, idealistic people looking to improve the world, but lok what happens when the rich and famous get involved, when imperialistc first world goverments interfere and worst of all compare the mountains of money and resources stolen out of the tgird world and compare it to the molehill of aid given (for example for every dollar spent in aid to Africa [including the US selling guns to the Egyptian dictatorship] ten dollars at least are lost to western corporations offshoring their African profits and not paying taxes they are legally obliged to).

[GUBU]

I don't think that solar energy is less efficient than coal.  I know that profitable solar manufacturing can be...and that the largest manufacturers, even when they beat coal, are not what you or I would consider sustainable or environmentally sound by a wide stretch.  

I think that you're expressing an academic naivety.  The market reality is that these dirty producers dominate, and will be your competition.  You will never be able to compete with them in a "free market"..because all other things being equal, the exploitative model is more cost effective to a producer...that's why we do it in the first place.  You will (and we already do) rely on regulation to even make the attempt, and lose.

I think Shadow is laburing under the economists' delusion that because they model markets as perfect systems (ie every actor in a market is a perfectly rational actor with perfect knowledge) that markets are so in real life. He is labouring under the delusion that the ideal is the typical.

And I'd also like to point out that the thinking behind that and other delusions, creating models to support your ideology and then assuming those models are reality, is the reason why the only worthwhile new idea in economics since Keynes*9 was thought up by two psychologists with little training in economic academia.

*There have been good economists since Keynes but they were all universally either followers of Keynes or his collaborator Galbraith.