FellowTraveler's comments

The question is not whether to redistribute income, but whether it is acceptable to force people to do so through threat of violence.

Likely the problem you are so quick to put government in charge of, wouldn't be a problem in the first place if we had a free economy.

Her concerns are legitimate, of course, and rooted in her own evolutionary strategy, but I would certainly recommend to my sons that they make their fortune _before_ getting tied down, and that they not get married too early, for this reason. Because they are less likely to take the necessary risks. Women, like it or not, tend to be much more risk-averse than men, and in a committed relationship, they will apply pressure toward this end. (And no risk, no reward.)

This is probably the same reason why many trust-funds are designed to give payouts to those who remain unmarried until at least the age of 25. There are many benefits to having a wife, including their perceptiveness and sensibility, which can be very valuable especially while climbing the social ladder, but given what I know now, I would want to make a success of myself first, before taking one on, and I would advise the same to my sons. (Just as I would advise my daughters to find a man who is already a success, versus getting tied down early on with Johnny Football Hero.)

One piece of advice I was given a few years back, is to "be your own inner parent." Which is to say, whenever you find yourself making a decision, to ask yourself what you would advise your own children to do, if they were to find themselves in the exact same situation you are facing. Then do precisely that.

> This is why I'm saying it's outdated advice rather than sexist advice: it presumes a model of marriage and relationships that has changed...

It very well could be that society has evolved, as you say. But it might instead be that the sexes are living in a bubble of wealth that was created by those who came before, enabling them to afford the luxury of a society that is able to constantly subsidize the "new reality" through educational programming, entertainment programming, social programming, glass ceiling legislation, welfare spending, etc which poorer societies are simply unable to afford.

What we see in Kazakhstan, for example, is a society returning to polygamy as the realities of poverty leave them unable to afford such luxuries as we enjoy. Perhaps, as you say, our culture has progressed. But maybe, just maybe, our culture is currently in a bubble, and as our economic freedoms decline, so will our wealth, causing gender relations to resolve back to equilibrium again -- the same mean we see in many other nations in the world.

Dual incomes may actually be a harbinger of this. For we know from the research that many women in our society do not work because they want to, but because they have no choice. A "modern" household cannot sustain itself without those dual incomes, can it? Yet in decades past, households were easily supported on a single income. Our society is becoming poorer.

Yeah like if you are Mexican and you made a comment online about drug cartels, and then you were disemboweled and strung up from a bridge as a warning to others.

Therefore, no one will ever spend their dollars to buy actual stuff.

My definition would be, "one without violence and coercion, enabling decisions to be made based on voluntary choices."

> Healthcare in Europe, where I'm from, is in many ways far less competitive and far more heavily regulated, yet Europeans seem to have better outcomes despite lower public expenditure on healthcare.

"Competitive" ?

I know a doctor in Alaska who was aghast at the high prices charged by the monopoly hospital in his region. He decided to open a surgery center, so as to offer better service at lower prices.

Unfortunately he discovered that competition is illegal. You cannot open operating rooms, you see, without first obtaining a "certificate of need" from the State, certifying that your community "needs" more operating rooms. And of course, such certificates are never actually handed out, since the state boards are always manned by hospital flunkies.

Does that sound like a free market to you? There is no competition in American health care.

I'm also surprised at your characterization of European health care as being "far more heavily regulated" in contrast to American health care. You must not realize just how heavily regulated American health care is.

The American health care system is a combination of socialism and fascism, and has been for quite some time. It features all manner of central planning, forced subsidies, regional monopolies, welfare programs, hospitals and insurance "companies" protected from any competition by legislation, unfunded mandates, price charts, and tax authorities.

The problems of health care in America are the problems of socialism and fascism, because that is what we practice. We do not have the benefits of the free market because we do not have a free market.

> yet Europeans seem to have better outcomes

Saying that Europeans have "better outcomes" than Americans (with regards to health care) is like saying that Cubans have "better food" than North Koreans. You are comparing two authoritarian systems, neither of which have any semblance of a free market.

Coercion does not innovate -- it does not lower prices, nor does it improve service. Even in Europe:

"While Sweden is a first world country, its health care system - at least in regards to access - is closer to the third world. Because the health care system is heavily-funded and operated by the government, the system is plagued with waiting lists for surgery. Those waiting lists increase patients' anxiety, pain and risk of death."

http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA555_Sweden_Health_Care.html

Resolving Globally Active, Systemically Important, Financial Institutions.

"...An efficient path for returning the sound operations of the G-SIFI to the private sector would be provided by exchanging or converting a sufficient amount of the unsecured debt from the original creditors of the failed company [meaning the depositors] into equity [or stock]. In the U.S., the new equity would become capital in one or more newly formed operating entities...the highest layer of surviving bailed-in creditors would become the owners of the resolved firm. In either country, the new equity holders would take on the corresponding risk of being shareholders in a financial institution."

===> Sounds like what happened in Cyprus. They got stock in return for the haircut. No exception is indicated for "insured deposits" in the U.S.

Bloomberg: "...Bank of America’s holding company...held almost $75 trillion of derivatives at the end of June..."

===> I don't know where you get your news, but I'm willing to bet that the sources you trust are not going to be talking about this until your haircut is complete. And when they do, they will probably blame it on "deregulation."

In fact, this is my whole point: that finance (and healthcare) are heavily-regulated, and that this is precisely the cause of their problems.

You could never claim that our healthcare problems are the result of a free market, because there is no free market in healthcare -- just a giant cartel of heavily-regulated (protected) bureaucracies.

Similarly, you could never claim that our monetary issues are the result of a free market, because there is no free market in money.

http://opentransactions.org/

Quote:

The Open-Transactions project is a collaborative effort to develop a robust, commercial-grade, fully-featured, free-software toolkit implementing the OTX protocol as well as a full-strength financial cryptography library, API, CLI, and prototype server.

Open-Transactions democratizes financial and monetary actions. You can use it for issuing currencies/stock, paying dividends, creating asset accounts, sending/receiving digital cash, writing/depositing cheques, cashier's cheques, creating basket currencies, trading on markets, scripting custom agreements, recurring payments, escrow, etc.

Open-Transactions uses strong crypto. The balances are unchangeable (even by a malicious server.) The receipts are destructible and redundant. The transactions are unforgeable. The cash is unlinkable. The cheques are non-repudiable. Etc.

Many statists get caught up in the argument about whether or not gold has "intrinsic" value, which is why I like to redirect their focus to the concept of substances with unique properties.

Because, whether or not value is "intrinsic", no one can disagree that specific substances have specific properties, and that some substances have properties more likely to be selected as currency by the Invisible Hand, than others.

And thus it becomes undeniable that gold and Bitcoin have quite a bit in common.

Bernanke stated at the FOMC Press Conference in March that such a haircut was possible.

The financial industry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_financial_regulatory_au...

The software industry: [Google] No results found for "list of software development regulatory bodies by country".

Mainstream journalism has an arrogance problem.

At the top, it consists of those regulating those banks.

Therefore the entity being regulated, is the same entity doing the regulating.

This Octopus has a monopoly -- unconstitutional and granted by government force -- on the creation of our money supply. Anyone who competes with them in this regard is imprisoned.

How is it that the act of counterfeiting -- an otherwise criminal act -- is perfectly legal for one specific entity to commit?

North Korea is known for printing dollars; the only difference between them and the Fed is that they do not charge us interest on those dollars.