Wholly Generic Web Log
Dedicated to the proposition that all opinions are created equally worthless.
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Pass Go. Collect $200
8/17/2009
How about those collectives? Isn't it wonderful how we can save money and achieve a greater independence and spending efficiency by forming collective bodies for resource management? Look at cities, for example. People in the suburbs or in the country have to pay outrageous amounts for housing, transportation, food, medicine and other necessities of life. When you live in a city, though, everything becomes cheaper. Taxes are lower. Housing is practically free. Food is more plentiful and less expensive. Utilities costs drop almost daily. Medical care is immediate, excellent and cheap. The economies of scale provide inexpensive living for all and streets paved with gold. This is why we need stronger government with increases in the centralization of services and administration. A strong administration of public resources is the best way to achieve maximum efficiency. Left to their own, people will waste resources, throwing money away left and right with wild abandon and never a thought for tomorrow. They must be properly educated before they are able to exercise the greed, selfishness and parsimony required for survival in difficult times. Turning over their welfare to a collective can teach them these valuable lessons. This is why we need higher taxation and more government services. It is a social imperitive with the very survival of humanity at stake. Only a strong central administration of resources can direct production and consumption to produce a free and plentiful flow of goods and services. It takes more than a village. It takes an empire. Free trade and representative democratic republics are archaic concepts that don't address the needs of the collective. This is the only reason that collectives ever fail. They are driven into the ground by the greed and hostile policies of non-collectives. I heard it, so it must be true.
Angel on My Shoulder, Hoover in My Pocket
9/13/2009
As in the days of Herbert Hoover, we are once again poised to take on and defeat the waste, fraud and inefficiencies of government institutions. Our health care and transportation, just to name two contemporary villains, are draining our resources and must be reformed. My suggestion would be to get government out of them entirely. Every government institution in the history of mankind in the world has been an example of waste, fraud and inefficiency. Our secular institutions are suffering from divine intervention. Setting a governmental body loose to find an appropriate economic business model for any enterprise is a lot like setting a wildfire to protect the environment from wildfires. It works beautifully. Once all of the money and political will to waste is used up, people face depression and war, where the economic principles of thrift and productivity are enforced by necessity in the interests of survival in a world that has EXACTLY THE SAME RESOURCES IT EVER HAD. I like to shout that last bit. It does no good, but it makes me feel better.
How Health Care Stole Christmas
2/3/2011
The problem with socialized medicine is not free care for all. It never was. The problem is that it will cost more and will not provide better care to more people. Restricting harm to the economy by taxation is a better option. This is why our constitution limits the government, and not the people.
Taxation inflates all costs. Otherwise pretty much everything would be affordable. Wealth is production, not money. A fair share of no production with no profit is no wealth. Tax breaks are an insult. There is no corporate tax. Tax is a business expense. There is no income tax. Pay negotiation allows for taxation. All taxes add to the cost of goods and services. All tax is paid by the people who need or want the goods and services produced. The one exception is tax on real property. You cannot own your land. You rent it from the government after paying a substantial deposit. If you fail to pay the government, you get kicked off your land. You do get your deposit back, adjusted to the current market.
Nations having socialized medicine only enjoy better public relations. Their care is limited by the cost of it. They cannot provide immediate high quality care to every person who seeks it. It must be rationed.
The economy balances on production and consumption. If we produce more than we need, we have capital profit that may be traded. The intelligent use of capital gains further increases productivity by affording loans to business and to individuals. It really isn't very complex at all.
A healthy economic system rewards production and discourages consumption beyond need. This is the purpose of a free market system. No government system of control of the production and consumption can provide the flexibility and sensitive responsiveness of a free market. Big government is mostly necessary for big defense against invasion or attack.
If government kept out of businesses such as health care, then business would thrive and goods and services would be cheap. People could afford their own goods and services. Insurance is not an exception, either. Insurance companies are only viewed as an enemy of the people because they manage large funds of other people's money. Some politicians believe that all such pools of other people's money should be theirs to control.
Scott Adams For President!
5/1/2011
In a January 9, 2011 Dilbert cartoon, Dilbert explains to a co-worker that there is no actual disagreement between them. There is only the deficiency of reason and understanding on the part of the co-worker regarding the problems as they exist and the solution as proposed by Dilbert. As a punch line, he says to Dogbert, upon arriving home, “Did you ever notice how clarity makes people angry?” In light of the 2012 campaigns, this seems prescient. Nobody disagrees on what is good. Peace, prosperity, harmony and progress are universally desired. We differ in perceptions of reality and the way forward. We abandon common goals to pursue the power to realize them. Then people are angry when their choices result in unfit policies and legislation. Is it possible to choose candidates on their content instead of their packaging? Can we realize our desires? Normally, we suffer a plague of Dimmesdales, hiding in the Dimmsdale Dimmadome and flagellating those who are unworthy in the eyes of our almighty and judgmental supreme intellect while wishing for a better world. We impose our divine justice upon the body of humanity opposing our views. It’s sort of like A Study in the Purloined Scarlet Pimpernel. And frankly, my dear, we seldom act in our own enlightened self-interest. I have often thought that a pair of goldfish would make for a better presidential ticket.
LINKS: Masque of the Red Death : Dimmesdale : Dimmsdale : A Study In Scarlet : The Purloined Letter : The Scarlet Pimpernel : Scarlet Ohara
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Political Alchemy
6/15/2011
Words have meanings. They possess weight and moment. They have properties and qualities. Some, like expenditure and investment, are not interchangeable. They are not synonyms. They are not even homonyms.
In alchemy, the goal of transmutation was to make one thing into another. The total balance is kept. Matter is modified, not created.
Public transportation provides no benefit to the common wealth. Private transportation serves the needs of the customers and they return the cost as profit to the providers. Private enterprise increases the value of things. Public enterprise relies on the increased real value of raw materials that is provided by private enterprise. The cost of public transportation per user reveals that it would be cheaper and less trouble to provide people using public transport with the use of a car and driver as needed. At some point, all modes of mass transport make economic sense. Riverboats and trains and planes have their day. As modes of transportation become economic burdens they may be taken over as public concerns. Their inefficiency is obvious before they are adopted as public ventures.
Defining public transport as an investment requires redefining private transport as expenditure. This is actually done in modern political alchemy. Not taxing business is considered an un-funded expenditure. Providing funds for economically failed modes of transport is called an investment. The actual properties of the two things are swapped to turn lead to gold, and also gold into lead.
For public transport to succeed, it would need to be flexible and on-demand. It would need to be able to thrive in today's technology and then go away as we progress. That's what business does. Businesses that fail in usefulness fail in fact. The principles involved take their gains and move on to something else. Public institutions that fail to be useful just go on and on and become detrimental to the common wealth. Progress is stagnation and stagnation is progressive in Political Alchemy.
Right is Right, or Knot
1/8/2012
Health care is a right. It should be free for everyone. A good living wage is a right. Food and shelter are a right. Public transportation and infrastructure are a right.
What isn’t a right? Energy is not a right. Energy production should be taxed and regulated until wind and solar are economically competitive technologies to coal, petroleum and nuclear.
And any income from medical services should be waived. Doctors should work as slaves. And they should pay more taxes, too. And people should have to buy electric cars that they can’t afford to charge from a renewable energy grid. And if taxes on corporations and energy and real estate and everything else happens to make food, shelter and other basics of life unaffordable, then we have to tax them more and give that money to subsidize the things we make unaffordable so the poor can enjoy the benefits of the commerce we despise.
And that is a Sheepshank knot!
http://www.animatedknots.com/sheepshank/index.php
Note that the use of the sheepshank is not recommended. It is known to fail under loads.
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Night of the Living Wage
4/29/2012
I think that a living wage is a good thing. I have a problem with exactly what makes any wage a living wage, however. Every time I buy something, the cost of taxation for every step in production and distribution for each item is included in what I pay. This goes for the most basic things like food, water, medical care and transportation as well as for luxuries like a smart phone, video game, dinner and a movie or a premium cable channel. The national annual deficit is greater than the combined wealth of the top 40%. That's not just their income. It is their total worth. Every thing I need to buy costs three to four times more than it would without runaway government spending, or the Financial Global Warming Crisis that we expect to leave all major cities swimming in debt and uninhabitable before too long. If I'm making $10/hr and taking home around $280 after all payroll deductions, that would be around $14K/Yr. Hard to live on that. Take out the burden of the government siphon and my $14K would be equivalent to between $42K and $56K per year. That sounds like a living wage, if not for the dying light. It's not too late, or is it?

Updated January 8th, 2012

Another day, another heavily taxed dollar...
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