Some people think we need less government

Government should never make their own budget, the budget must be done by the states and be openly discussed and voted but again i think the government as non elected body of scientists , technocrats , philosophers and scholars whose role is to coordinate , supervise , provide knowledge and technical support whenever asked but not as a body that makes decisions.

I am Greek citizen and a communist so no vote for the GOP from me , my proposals are not exactly textbook socialism but i think they are close to the socialist ideals. You can not restrict trade among communities as you can not force monopolies and "too big to fail" "people" .
How communities handle their resources , capitalism or socialist planning (or not planning) should be up to them to decide .

Last time i checked California had positive population growth but i generally agree that wherever central government is involved things go terribly wrong ( check out the mess in Europe where our central government lies in Brussels ).

 

What thieves? Like FDR that setup a social security scam that takes 13.5% of the workers pay for their money back with less then treasury bill interest after his friends have had a taste? Or thieves that increase your taxes while giving money to their private interest friends?

Without protection from government, a corporation can't steal from you. If it does, you can sue them. Lawyers are a lot scarier to corporations then government, that is why they always run to the government for protection from them. Apple didn't steal from anyone that didn't have a right to sue them. Tech is a highly unregulated industry though.

You name a corporation that has undue influence over people, and I will show you a corporation that has been given its power by a government that is too big.

 

Now you're talking.

 

The private money will always find a way into elections as long as government retains the power to meddle in the economy.

It's the power that corrupts, not the money.

 

false, monopoly corporations are like mini governments themselves

 

So like a Chamber of Commerce breakfast? They have that.

Oh cool, I am going there next month. I think we agree on a lot surprisingly, very weak, decentralized government without the power to do much other then enforce agreements among voluntary people and provide for the defense of the nation, and citizens against crime. Real crime too, injury to property or person, none of this victimless crime nonsense.

Things have changed. The middle class is fleeing California. Maybe actual positive growth, but not relative.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/trulia/...-leaving-california-for-texas-but-people-are/

Lot of cities going bankrupt etc...

Not for nothing but you are so close to being libertarian, why not just change labels so you dont have to explain that you are a communist, but in a way that resembles a libertarian government. Checkout Milton Friedman when you get the chance, I think you would like his ideas.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EwaLys3Zak

 

If government controls economic outcome, what freedom do you have to choose working for another employer, or have the freedom to choose to compete against that business, create a new industry?

What method gives you the most freedom to set your salary, without forcing another person to sacrifice? In the socialism you support, the governement gives all the people what they need to survive, but none are free to go as far as their talent and hard work will get them. That sounds more like slavery to me. No free market forces you to work for a particular company, that is a false argument anyway. If a nation's wages are going down that doesn't mean you are a slave, that means the nation is not producing as much real value as they used to.

 

A monopoly corporation that does not have government empowerment and protection won't be a monopoly long.

 

Communal councils in USSR were called Soviets (Soviet singular) , Lenin failed to safeguard them and Stalin destroyed them .... because you know state communism is the same evil with central / federal governments and when you have an (*)(*)(*)(*)(*)(*) in charge you are in trouble.

Coming into details will make my post a book long but no i do not subscribe to libertarian ideas for the simple fact that i do not believe in waged labour but this is out of topic. Let's just agree that we all indeed need less government .

 

Agreed, and resolved. We should have as little government as practically possible.

 

Bugger my salary - I want democratic control of industry, so that it should benefit my children and grandchildren rather than a lot of fat foreign thieves. You have the usual american noodle's notion that socialism = government. No - Socialism = democratic control. At the moment, as we all know, we have a capitalist dictatorship everywhere, which means they are stealing everything from us.

 

You and your mates invades, in force, destroying the democracy of the soviets and the (small) working class, so that State Capitalism was the only answer for the people you would otherwise have murdered. Aincha proud?

 

Then buy a corporate share and vote at a board meeting. Otherwise, vote your dollars and shop with companies that make products you like so other companies you dont like can get your money.

But that isn't what you want, what you really want to do is enslave the workers in an industry and make them give you their goods for little or less comparative work on your end. That is what socialism really is, aristocracy for the intelligent people who are to afraid to compete and the people who dominate them.

 

So you're bossing me now? When I want your advice, I'll ask for it. You're not a man unless you're a union man. You'd rather boss other posters around than stand up to the boss. Red-staters are yellow.

 

You repeat this dribble about the non-existence of Zero Sum as if it were a self-evident truth handed down by some Supreme Being. What is self-evident is the fact that some Right Wing talk-show ventriloquist is using you for a dummy.

It is, in fact, a Negative Sum. The Capitaliban hoarding all the money deprive creative people of opportunities or of the incentive to create. In a positive world, the only purpose of an investor is to make an inventor rich.

 

Naive crap. Socialism is democratic control by the majority. Everything else is brainwashed drivel from slaves, as you know.

 

Let me see if I got this right. The fact that government practices mind-control proves that the Capitaliban don't. You have the best logic money can buy. Unlike the "pencil-neck geek" logic, yours can prove anything.

By the way, your sentence is a perfect example of why we should not follow this "non-sexist" grammatical fad of using they to refer to a singular antecedent. Used to Diploma Dumbo grammar, I first read "they can spend" as referring to "your neighbor." Everybody else is being trained to read things that way. No one is allowed to point this out as an example of dumbing-down brainwashing. Also, it is collectivist.

 

How do you go from "all the people who worked" to "Capitalism works"? The Capitaliban only hike the ball; the center shouldn't get credit for the touchdown. Your first sentence glorifies the people who actually produced the ore; your second sentence insults them by glorifying plutocratic parasites.

Just like Communism, Capitalism is a command economy run by suitcoats in offices. They don't have a handle on the market any more than the Communist bureaucrats did. I've seen many glaring examples of Dilbert reality. One was when the Houston Rockets won the city's first world championship. Newspapermen with Bizz Skule degrees in Marketing were too ignorant to anticipate that people would want souvenirs of the issue describing the final victory. It sold out extremely quickly and the Diploma Dumboes failed to order extra printings in anticipation of that.

Another is a product I've been buying for 20 years and am continually seeing run out. I even called corporate headquarters about it, but the glorified paper-shufflers there never responded, as true believers claims happens automatically with the Invisible Hand. Like Voodoo Economics, voodoo itself also preaches superstitions about an Invisible Hand. So you too have an "illogical theory." Only fools believe in cults, whether the well-preached power play is Capitalism, Communism, or Voodoo. We should meet the Capitaliban cult's Invisible Hand with a Visible Fist.

 

It must make you feel pretty important to have contempt for the masses. Despite your pose of "standing up for the little guy," your stance empowers the tyranny of the 1%, which turns loose all the other minorities on us. Democracy must be majoritarian, and the traces of democracy act that way. If a bill is passed to fund something with $100 million, but only gets 70% of the vote, do we feel that the only fair way is to fund it with $70 million? If the people think that a minority is a threat to them, why is your contempt of most people so morally superior that you can claim that their opinion represents only the desire to oppress the underprivileged and not to protect themselves?

 

It is logical to assume that the disease is something no one proposes curing, because all proposals are based on the mind control practiced by the ruling classes. Pseudo-reformers can mention inheritance tax, but will never propose outright abolishing inheritance and all other birth privileges. You will also never hear the historians and other pre-owned analysts identify this as the cancer that has destroyed all civilizations. But it is easy to figure out if you dare think for yourself without constantly referencing professional opinionators. Imagine if starting this season, all NFL rookies had to be sons of former players. In a few years, pro football teams wouldn't be able to beat even a losing college team, provided that college participation was not also hereditary. It doesn't matter that shortages and gaps would be filled in by unhereditary players with natural talent, any more than fitness in the rest of your body will save you from being killed by a malignant tumor.

 

Chile got fried by Friedman. He's the plutocratic prophet who led us to the Crash of 2008. He's just a toy rat for the fat cats to play with.

 

It is absolutely true. Take Bill Gates for example, Tech innovators accumulated wealth at an unprecedented pace, and the world also got richer at a fast pace. If wealth was a zero sum game, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell etc.. would have caused people to be poorer. It is because you can trade with someone who has a competitive advantage in production to you, and they trade for your competitive advantage. Not directly though, that would be super inefficient because of the bartering dillema, so you do it for cash. Same thing.

 

Is this the same CHile that is the richest in its region? I am pretty sure they pegged their currency to the dollar for awhile and when America's crash happened it rippled to Chile. Friedman was never for one country pegging its currency to anothers.

What about Botswana? That is another story of success. Maybe not the type of overnight success that never occurs but the left demands, but again - richest in the region and growing.

 

When the masses come to your door for your property or rights you will consider them a mob too. Freedom of the individual is what is best for everyone, and therefore what is best for the masses as you call them. That includes freedom of labor, and freedom to do what you want with the fruits of your labor. People should not be able to vote away one person's money to give it to another whenever practically possible to do so in a nation.

 

Let's try it this way; but it's the powers who "have" the money, and that power is granted, because of the money. Then, that money is allocated to the government by paying the government for them to do what the powers want, but not what you want. So, without the money, there would be no power for corruption. And this is how government retains the power to meddle with the economy. So, it's not up to the government to retain power. It's up to the powers with the money to give it to them. If it wasn't for that, the people would be more in charge of the government.