Atheist Singles

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Comment by Patrick on January 11, 2011 at 6:31pm

@joseph
privatized schools would not lead to creationism being taught. hell, we dont even teach evolution now in public schools. if schools were privatized then anyone could open a school and compete for the parent's money. thus there would be an incentive for schools to have better teachers, better statistics on number of graduates who go to college, etc. this increase in competition would result in lower education prices as well. people would actually be able to send their kids to private schools if they werent paying out the ass in property taxes to fund our shitty public schools. furthermore, teachers who sucked would actually get fired instead of kept around because it's almost impossible to fire a government employee, especially a unionized one. since 1970 when the department of education was founded have our public schools got better or worse? are we still the world leader in math and science or are we getting beat by fucking zimbabwe? the greatest innovations in modern biology are gained with evolution as the backbone. so universities with evolution in the curriculum would have better results and their students would have more success in the real world. people would want to go to those universities so they would put their kids in schools that prepare them for those universities. hence, private schools that taught evolution would gain in popularity. i can't stand when people defend our public schools because they know how horrible they are. if you could send your kids to a private catholic school it would probably better prepare them for the world than a public school, minus the religion part which i think can easily be reversed if you raise your kids right. have you seen the studies that have been done where they compare the number of administrators and bureaucrats that are needed for a private catholic school and compared it to the number required for a public school right next door? the ratio is astonishing. i forget the exact ratio but it is like 1:50 or something crazy. then when you look at the same two schools which one had more graduates? which one put more into universities? which one cost less per student? government sucks at doing.... just about everything.

we should connect the value of our currency to some sort of commodity. it could be gold or silver or both or anything really, as long as it can't be produced at a rapid rate or fluctuating rate. the fact that it isnt connected to something means we can just print money willy nilly and decrease the value of the dollar. why is this a bad thing you ask? well because everytime you put a dollar into savings for retirement that dollar doesnt hold it's purchasing power. so you basically have to save faster than the fed prints money and causes inflation. you hurt the people who save. central banks cant just print money if it is locked to a commodity like gold because you can't make gold out of thin air. also you should read about the inflation tax. when a central bank prints a bunch of new money they buy things with that money before the value of the currency goes down. so the rich bankers get to spend the money at the old value of the currency and by the time the new dollars gets down to the poor people and the average americans the market has adjusted for the influx of new dollars and prices go up. inflation is merely an increase in supply of dollars. therefore our current system keeps the rich rich and hurts the poor and even the middle class. if you care about poor people the gold standard is for you.

minimum wage laws, as the black economist thomas sewell points out, hurt the poor blacks because it prevented them from getting jobs doing basic things and gaining job experience. employers couldnt afford to pay them the minimum wage so they simple didnt hire them(that's just one example). minimum wage limits also raise the prices of goods because businesses must charge more to pay for this artificial hand in the market.

"The government subsidies simply helped businesses open up in the industries that the government wanted to encourage growth in." This is the most ubsurd thing you've said so far. if you have any experience with subsidized industries you would see how wrong you are. subsidies create monopolies and robber barons. i am so confident of this fact that if you can give an example of a monopoly or robber barren who did not come into being as a result of government intervention in the free market... um... i will congratulate you on being the first person to do so... hell i might even give up libertarianism. this is a common myth that is associated with free markets.

i grew up on a farm in north dakota and i can tell you many stories about the evils of subsidizing.

Comment by Keith on January 11, 2011 at 12:45pm

Nice. Agreed 100% Fred W. Hill.

 

 

Comment by Fred W. Hill on January 11, 2011 at 7:05am

No one can be truly free in this modern world.  How free are we as individuals when corporations are free to polute the air and water we need to survive?  And yes, members of corporations who are making massive profits have proved to be stupid enough to destroy the very environment necessary for survival. And there was hardly any regulation when big businesses nearly destroyed themselves by bringing about the Great Depression.  iWe do not live in small bands of hunter/gatherers any more.  Regulations and laws are required to protect the interests of all people.  The libertarian model of government will never work, except for the benefit of the very wealthy.

Comment by Joseph P on January 11, 2011 at 7:02am

That's the road to theocracy, Michael.  If you privatize all schools, you'll end up with them teaching Creationism instead of Evolution.  Lots of private, religious schools already do that.  It was only through government influence that we got things to the way they are.  Even worse, without the government subsidy, any family that couldn't afford to send their children to the private grade schools would be stuck.  You'd end up creating an uneducated, virtual-slave labor class, which would become HUGE over time.  Uneducated people are far more likely to be religious.

Private welfare services were also a complete disaster.  Did you not read the article that started this whole discussion?

Deflation isn't even necessary.  Who cares what the actual number attached to the money is?  What you're talking about is going back on the gold standard.  That wouldn't cause 99% deflation overnight.  They would just peg the dollar value to the current value of gold.  You're not even making any sense.

And if the government had no role in the economy ... are you talking about the removal of the minimum wage laws?  Are you trying to take us back to the days of slave-labor wages, like in the days of the robber barons, as I mentioned?

 

Speaking of which, Patrick, you're confusing the cause of the problem with the Robber Barons.  They weren't a problem because of the government subsidies.  The government subsidies simply helped businesses open up in the industries that the government wanted to encourage growth in.  The problem was that they then turned their employees into economic slaves, because of the lack of laws to prevent them from doing so, then turned around and used their money to influence the government.

And yes, the government supported slavery, back in the day.  What does that have to do with anything?  The Federal government was quite minimalist back in those days, as well.  You can have slavery legal under any system.  It's just one tiny component of law within the system.

Comment by Michael Pianko on January 11, 2011 at 1:25am

Ideally, I would like the government to be absolutely as small as possible.  Everything that can at all possibly be handled by private organizations should be.  The private organizations should have to earn their own money without taxes.  Even money can and probably should be made by private organizations instead of the government.  In order to reverse inflation, the prices in stores has to decrease drastically, and this will only happen if there was a severe shortage of cash or if the amount of money in the economy is significantly reduced; if the government has to still produce money, then about 90 - 99% of the cash in existence should be confiscated and destroyed and not replaced.  If the government still has to have control over the economy, then someone should figure out how much gold the money in your bank account is worth, and then suddenly make you have only 1% of your current amount of money but what you have left would still be worth the same amount of gold.  

Remember that until 1913, there was no income tax.  I would rather that the government have no control over the economy.  All charity and welfare services should be provided by private organizations. 

Comment by Joseph P on January 11, 2011 at 12:02am

Umm, do you really think that letting Wall Street run wild and do whatever it wants will make the divide between rich and poor any less?

 

The reason the divide between rich and poor is so great is because of the mostly conservative government of the past 30 years.  We've been headed downhill ever since trickle-down economics was introduced.  Bill Clinton's presidency was the only, brief turn-around.

 

Calling the Democrats and Republicans the same party is pretty willfully ignorant, as well.

 

The basic problem with your conclusion that I see has to do with Europe.  They're far more socialist than America has ever been, and they're doing far better, even after the economic meltdown which we created.

 

I could go through all of the major issues of the day and explain how the Libertarian position will lead to more religion, a more ignorant, useless population on average, and often less freedom, because of all of our racist, ignorant countrymen who will push poor people and themselves even further down, by way of individual effort.  I don't feel like doing that in a Singles comment section, though.  :-D

Comment by Patrick on January 10, 2011 at 11:04pm

well im going to bed. ive got to work tomorrow. millions of people on welfare are depending on it.

Comment by Patrick on January 10, 2011 at 11:00pm

i hate conservatives as much as the next guy. i dont want to conserve anything. i want change. the status quo right now is horrible. i just think that if you truly care about the poor you would agree that expanding the government is a bad thing. the divide between rich and poor has never been so great in america. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/28/income-gap-widens-census-_...

the size of the government has also never been so great.

Comment by Keith on January 10, 2011 at 10:54pm

Some people are heartless pricks...aren't they?

 

It is conservative ideology that destroys society. And fucks up everything.

Comment by Patrick on January 10, 2011 at 10:51pm

republicans = democrats

they are exactly the same party. both expanding government and decreasing liberty.

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