I called our education pathetic, not our involvement...

Incorrect!  Frank buckles is 107 years old.  1917 bud.  You go by the end of the war recruits, not the beginning.  The US wasn't even involved in 1914.  Of course, he also lied about his age to get in, but whatever.

You noticed all the self deprecation!  Occasionally I get called an elitist instead, stupid people provide endless entertainment.  I just find your calling him an idiot because WW1 and 2 were unavoidable regardless of party to be unfair.  Agreement is irrelevant to the fact that there are rational, factually backed reasons why it's not something beyond the pale.

WW1 probably would have not been entered into had someone honest been in office, WW2 was all but guaranteed to be a no show.  Both wars were entered into with massive public resistance only after they finally took the bait the dishonest presidents offered them.

In WW1, the Germans attacked our merchants because we were supplying arms to their enemies during a war.  They even ceased after we demanded it until later when it was going badly and they simply had no choice besides surrender.  We were killing them from the very start by keeping them well supplied with hot lead.  They looked for aid against us because it was obvious that Wilson, having won reelection, no longer needed to worry about his career and was just looking for an excuse to go back in.  An honest president wouldn't have allowed the underhanded supply of one side and not the other while claiming neutrality.  No Wilson, maybe no war.

In WW2, we took it much farther.  We blocked Japan's access to oil reserves, sent men and warplanes into China and Britain.  This country had switched domestic production to war time production specifically to supply the enemy with everything from bullets to bombers.  FDR practically begged for a declaration of war because it was the only chance in hell he had of getting involved.  Congress had already outlawed the aid to avoid it and he went and supplied them anyway.  To the people, it was disgraceful that they were behaving like animals.  They'd just been through the bloodiest war in the history of the world a scant generation earlier.  If the first thirty million weren't enough why bother helping a second time around?  The protest against Vietnam wouldn't have held a candle to what would have happened if Congress had declared war on the Axis powers before being attacked.  No FDR, no war.  Maybe a Reagan could have gotten us into it, but I doubt it.

I called the first one a joke in the context that it wasn't a world war.  I was challenged on my statement, so I provided others that were equally deserving.  As an aside, we were sorta involved in that first one.  The colonies saw fighting with the French.

Since you consider them both unavoidable, you must be lacking in education.

That makes you a swine not.  You are a product of the phenominally fucked up school system and press core like damn near everyone else.  When someone is taught wrong, it usually takes, this is easily observed in wackjob cults, military training, middle management at the local store, any structure where ideas are drilled into people.  If they drill the wrong ones in first, only the brightest break out of their box.

I didn't need to be bright.  I was blessed with having an absolutely horrific kindergarten teacher, she swore in class and hated children, and a mother that didn't hold her tounge often enough.  Being a skeptic from a young age insulated me against being taught wrong, because I've never actually trusted my teachers.  Ending up a paranoid freak of nature that assumes he's being lied to from the start and works from there has it's benefits, not having to worry about falling for a pretty girl on the internet for instance.  Since you're all eighty year old perverts I don't have to worry.

I do consider people in general to be idiots, but then everyone would if they paid attention.  Detach from your self interest and look back on today, just today  I'd bet you did some really stupid shit today without even realizing it.  If you count irrelevant and petty actions with no point to life, just posting here proves that you're an idiot.  I know you can't have gone out in public without having seen idiocy in copious amounts, we have entire industries devoted to it.

I didn't either, why do you think I supplied some?

Edit: To my knowledge the US had no military involvement in the French Revolutionary Wars.  The Napolionic Wars yes, but those are a seperate list.  Yet again, we were supplying one side in a war that didn't concern us and got our butts scorched for it.

Which is why when arguing profit and taxes, you never ever equate dollar increases in taxes with dollar increases in prices, they aren't related anyway.

Either you're even more distrusting of people in politics than I am, or you're retarded, not sure which.  Oh well, can't figure out everything in life.

Just in the neither here nor there, although Fannie/Freddie made some mistakes, the GOP 'they caused this meltdown' theory has been pretty thoroughly debunked  - I'm running a three person shift myself at the moment, so I'm just going to link to a good reference point that goes over it in detail (Hooray I hear you cry!).

As an aside - given the fannie/freddie policies that the GOP has tried to insist caused this date back to the 70's, I have the vague thought that if they were going to cause humongous meltdowns, someone might have noticed before now.

See: Economist's View: Once Again, It Wasn't Fannie and Freddie

Jonnan

So, lets be clear on this, assuming you're responding to my post (On the one hand, it's the only post it looks like you *could* be responding to, on the other, you have no references or quotes, thus no context) - you're actually drawing a line, for some reason, between a sub-prime loan crisis that was precipitated by a lack of regulation, through some errors made by Fannie/Freddie which are really not at all related, and to the S&L crisis caused by deregulation over twenty years ago?

I've gotten used to the weird faux-histories of conservativism over the years, but the fact that prices rose is *not* the indication of a bubble - increasing demand/diminishing supply does that. There *are* a number of factors that *do* indicate bubbles that people like Paul Krugman were talking about six years ago (Fortunately, since listening to him helped keep me from taking a bath in the housing market myself), but if there's a line to be drawn from the sub-prime to fannie/freddie to the S&L's to the 70's regulations that made housing easier for people to get for 40 years, it depends on some historical assumptions buried in conservative mythology, not in any real life histories.

You're going to have to state and defend your assumptions here.

Jonnan

re: The World War stuff: Maybe, just maybe, we were right to be supporting the enemies of Japan in WWII. After all, they had taken over a good chunk of China and a few other nations. This whole idea that they were just innocents doing absolutely nothing is IMHO a vast mischaracterization of the situation.

re: Taxes: Taxes do create a deadweight loss if I remember correctly - since they go to the government, they reduce the amount of profit a business can make, and the amount of money a worker can make on their paychecks. It's basically money that neither the consumer nor the business nor the worker will ever see again. It's money that completely leaves the economy. That's basically the reasoning behind the Republicans wanting low taxes.

re: Housing: Not much to say, plenty of blame to go around. I'm still not really buying the "social inertia" argument presented earlier. One thing that did change during Bush's last year is that congress became heavily deocratic - and recently is becoming almost veto proof. Bush has almost no power now. If it weren't for the people demanding that something be done about our financial situation, he'd be a complete lame duck.

Alright I guess I'll go in to it.  And so we're clear, I don't watch Fox News, I'm neither Republican nor Democrat, and I supported neither Obama nor McCain.  So let's not categorize people without even knowing them.

Essentially, the greatest tragedy of the Bush administration has not been its destructive big government spending policy and idiotic pre emptive strikes overseas, but the fact that it did all of this under the guise of conservatism, and with a republican or slightly democratic congress throughout the duration.  Let's be clear:  Republicans are NOT conservative in their current incarnation.  There are segments of the party, which, God willing, will someday soon have some clout again, that still carry these ideals, but Republicans haven't really elected a conservative since Reagan. 

However, as they do each time we hit the latest recession, statists and socialists will come out firing on capitalism, saying it's dead and the like.  Unfortunately, to those less well read in economics, this seems to make some sense.  In fact, the debacles they point to always prove the opposing viewpoint.  The problem is that we're not running a pure form a capitalism, much like the republicans are not really conservative, and just like you can't blame capitalism for something resulting from a mixed economy (and therefore ambiguous as to what really caused the latest recession), you can't blame conservatism where it isn't to be found.  But unfortunately for those of us who love liberty, this time they can blame conservatism and get many people to listen because the statists in office have continually shouted out 'conservatism... we're still conservative' even as their plane goes down in flames.

What's really unfortunate is that the obvious economic viewpoint for those who don't understand economics is a leftist one.  It's really easy to agree with the viewpoint that simply states "Americans are having a tough time, and we think the government should help them out."  It is consistently people who read economics for laughs who end up on the right.  Because the idea that the government has little to no role in helping people out economically is counter intuitive for those outside a book.  Of course the government should help those of need, right?  Here it is important to remember that the government really helps no one.  All they can do is force you and your fellow Americans to be 'decent' to each other.  They have to take money to give it somewhere else.

And it is, in fact, this very same mentality which has caused this so called 'financial crisis.'  Put another way, it is the mixed economy, not capitalism, which is responsible.  Government is again the culprit, but since capitalism is another part of our system they'd much rather blame that.  Here is, in a word, what has happened, and what those in government either don't know or won't say...

The federal reserve bank has three main tools to regulate economic activity in our country.  They can buy and sell government and company bonds, they can raise and lower the discount rate (this is the rate at which banks can borrow from the Fed to increase their reserve ratio back to the minimum), or they can raise or lower that required reserve ratio.  Since the early nineties the Fed has been decreasing or holding steady on the discount rate, and they often 'monetize' the government's debt by buying Federal bonds with printed money.  Essentially, this allows the government to spend as much money, and go in to as much debt, as they like.  The existence of the Fed is precisely the cause of our government's runaway debt problem.

Note that in a purely free economy the treasury could lend money to banks, but, having a finite amount of money, the discount rate would increase the more federal loans were under demand.  Essentially, the less funds the treasury had, the more risk they would have to take on for further loans and thus they would demand higher interest rates.  By decreasing the discount rate below this equilibrium rate and not allowing it to rise as it should, they print more money to meet this demand.  Now if banks can get loans at artificially low rates, they essentially no longer have a required reserve ratio.  If they drop below it, it's still very cheap to borrow money.  All they have to do is loan out money at higher rates than they're borrowing it, and they have infinite funds.  -- Keep in mind that for much of the last fifteen years the discount rate, adjusting for inflation, has been negative.  The effect on banks' lending is that they loan out more money at cheaper rates... and to individuals with bad credit or for riskier investments than they otherwise would.

The government and the fed have been using this scheme to artificially boost the economy.  Ever since Clinton the Federal Government has used publicly funded, private companies like Freddie and Fannie to give loans to those who wouldn't be able to get them in a private market.. under the belief that 'every American should be able to purchase a home.'  They've also been giving handouts to banks who loan to those with bad credit. 

Back to the story of the Average American.. Joe Schmo, having bad credit, buys a house under the delusion that the housing market can never falter again.  After a few years, he takes the new market value of his house and uses that as collateral for an equity loan.  But the problem is that the value of his house is only percieved value.  It's like any other commodity.  Eventually, in any market, the demand dwindles.  There are only so many people to buy houses.  So the demand starts to top out, and prices stop rising, even fall a bit.  And all those people who bought houses as investment (since the housing market 'can never falter again') put their houses on the market.  The price falls.  Enough so that Joe's equity loan is worth more than his house.  So he defaults of course.  And banks, which actually have negative reserves at this point, being in debt to the Fed, start going belly up.  And despite the government's and Fed's attempt to hand them as much money as they can, in the form of bailouts and more Fed loans, at some point there's just nothing there.  Even a business with free money eventually goes under when they're on the verge of having decidely negative assets.

The same thing happens to Freddie and Fannie.  Had they been private they long ago would have gone under.  It cannot be overstated just how many Americans received loans from these pseudo public companies they wouldn't have gotten otherwise.  A publicly funded, privately operated, company is spending taxpayers' money to engage in private activity.  There is no incentive for them to do business properly.  They look good if they just give out as many bad loans as possible, forgoing the future entirely.  If they turn a profit short term, they give themselves huge bonuses.  If they operate at a loss later on, uncle sam just throws more money at them.  They win at the taxpayers' expense every time. And the same goes for companies getting bailed out.  What incentive do they have to operate at a profit if when they don't they just get handed free money?  In fact they might have a larger incentive to fail.

The problem with this system is that the government isn't creating wealth.  All they are doing is inflating the supply of dollars, devaluing each American's savings and income, and giving new dollars to corporations, banks, and the government itself.  The whole system is built on false wealth.  And the government is currently trying to solve the crisis by printing more money and handing it out again.  This only distorts incentives, further hurts every American, and further inflates the bubble so that when it pops assets are even more overvalued and have further to fall.  And the stated purpose of the bailouts, to 'get credit flowing again,' is ludicrous.  Why would a failing business given new money immediately continue loaning it to those with bad credit or for risky investments when that is what got them there in first place?  They wouldn't.  They'd keep the money and only loan it to those who would otherwise get loans anyway.

The point is that government is responsible for this mess, and would that anyone in power understood what's going on... because they're only continually making the crisis worse by trying to fix it.  They cannot prop up false wealth by making more. 

And once again it becomes clear that capitalism is not the problem.  The system works on mutual incentives for two individuals to do business together.  And what government has done is distort these incentives, causing individuals to make unwise investments and shaking the very foundations of the system.

Instead, we should blame the mixed economy, and those redistributing wealth.  The very same hiding under the wreck of their fallacious system and pointing accusingly at capitalism as if this system were the very same.  Further, blaming conservatism carries the same foolishness.  For wealth redistribution and government control runs opposite what any true conservative believes.  There are, in fact, no conservatives in power to blame.  Blaming conservatism is like blaming dinosaurs for humans' environmental destruction.  Hasn't been a dino 'round here for ages.

Sorry vxt22 - I don't buy that theory of economics, and I somehow fooled my college professors into giving me A's in economics (My professor was a professional stockbroker and had made his money during the heydey of Reaganomics, just to forestall the inevitable 'college liberals' comments. We argued a lot, but I learned a lot from him too.) with aminor in business (Major in Computer Science, minors in Business and Mathematics).

Saying that it's never the fault of capitalism, just that we're not deregulating enough is kind of a faith-healing approach to economics in which the problem is always that you just didn'r have enough faith in the market to regulate itself. Since there's no way to disprove that theory ("What, you're enforcing contracts! Well, see, there's your problem - in a real free market you would let people break contracts and let the market decide whether to trust them with new contracts . . . ")

There is a criticism of Relativity that goes the same way, based on the concept that, in an absolute vacuum, the speed of light could be infinite. Well - sure, it could be that the problem is that we're assuming that the speed of light is affected in the point between almost absolute vacuum and absolute vaccum in a way completely different from the way it is affected in the various other meaasurment of vacuum before that - but since there's no way to test that, it's kind of a useless theory isn't it.

How come conservatives always discover how unconservative the people they elected are after their policies have failed for years?

Bush's Policies are virtually identical to the policies Reagan tried to implement. Fortunately for Reagan the Democrats were in control of Congress, so it turns out that, since Reagan couldn't get it all passed, he's still conservative. It's the successful conservatives that always get reclassified as liberal after the fact.

"Stewardess - I need a vomit bag please!"

Jonnan

I just don't understand that, conceptually - yeah, Ron Paul is conservative, literally. He wants to run an economy like it was the 1800's again.

Longer, deeper recessions, but on the good side you had more of them too. Yay.

Quick rundown: recessions of the 20th century; before the Great Depression and the advent of Keynesian economics, from 1900 to 1929 there were 8 recessions in 29 years - 11.25 years spent in recessions, only one of which was under a year.

Take every year and subract 4.5 months from it - that the time spent in recessions.

Afterwards there were 12 in the next 65 or so, 3 of which were over a year in length - 125 months in recession - literally, less time in recession in the next 67 years than in the 29 years before the Depression.

I will be the first to concede that this is a simplistic analysis, but it's worth considering the possibility that the correlation is in fact that direct because these theories are a better model of economics than the friedman/chicago school throwbacks to pre-Keynes thinking 'trickle down' theories of economics.

At least consider the possibility folks.

Jonnan

Oh for gods sake Psychoak, put away whatever self-published piece of shit histories you read, go to school, take a class so you have some concept of what the hell you're talking about.

Your desire to eat at the grown-ups table without educating yourself, checking your information, and simply asserting these speculative theories you throw out without a single reference except some vague claim that it is 'obvious' from other peoples references when those references make no claims that more than vaguely resemble what you might, if called on it later, claim is what you really meant, has passed the point of being amusing, taken a left turn at pitiable, and is fast approaching "God, I'd like to post a bug report" levels.

You don't know logic, math, history, you lack the reading skills that should have had any competent school system holding you back in the sixth grade for your own benefit, and worst of all you're so damn pathetic that you can't go two posts in a row without using language that would make any unkept fool posting from their parents basement embarrassed.

Your mom needs help folding laundry. Go do something useful.

With apologies to everyone else - Jonnan

At least you're finally stooping to personal attacks instead of pretending to take the high road while posting bullshit.

Logic I get, your warped view of the world has to make sense to you or you wouldn't hold to it, I hope...

Math?  You're the one that's blaming deregulation for a financial mess that started before the regulations were removed and claiming it took decades for something to come of the CRA when they had already started bleeding money on those bad investments before Carter even finished his term.

History you perhaps have more breathing room on, but since you're the one who's claims are being refuted, as opposed to dismissed, perhaps you could read up on actual history yourself instead?

Reading, you might have me there.  Graduates of West High in Anchorage aren't supposed to be able to read, would that then negate the post college reading level I had before getting to the sixth grade?

Definitely got me on the language though.  What can I say.  It's not like I called you a stupid cunt though.  Oh, right, I guess I did huh?  Also, my shorts are worn out because they're just too damn comfortable to throw out before they fall off, but yes I do qualify as unkept.

That's a good idea.  It's going to be a few weeks till I fly up there for Christmas, but I'll try to remember that.  Thanks.

If we kill all the lawyers we wont need to rewrite anything.  It's just those damned idiots that can't avoid reading between the lines for the mythical bullshit that's not really there.