Darren New wrote:
> Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> against things like fraud, theft, violence, etc., wouldn't have done 
>> anything to **stop** the current financial crisis, because nothing the 
>> companies that caused it did falls into **any** of those categories. 
> 
> Except to the extent they are regulated banks and the government already 
> took over banking and money, yeah. I mean, given that you let the 
> government control printing of the money, confiscating gold, and 
> eliminating risk for banks, no, there's nothing they did that fall into 
> those categories. One of the things Ron Paul (as I understand it) 
> advocates is getting the government out of the business of trying to 
> regulate the economy in the first place.
> 
Oh, yes, things where so much better back in colonial times, when every 
state, or even county, and sometimes cities, printed their own money, 
and you never knew if the next place you landed in would accept it..

Sorry, but no. For a system to function you need a stable basis for the 
system not 50 different interpretations of what that "basis" should be. 
At one time, that was a gold standard, and some countries still, sort 
of, operate off it. But there just isn't enough fracking gold in the 
world to support, never mind back, the number of transactions that 
actually take place in the modern world. Moving away from that as a 
standard, to currency itself being the standard, **helped** growth. You 
know what has hurt growth in the US? Two things:

1) exceptionalism. The idiot belief that America is the best at 
everything, and always will be, which has left companies like Ford and 
the rest *fighting* the Asian automakers to this day, most recently by 
selling shit pickups and Hummers, and other gas guzzling scrap piles, 
when we should have been paying attention to the fact that the rest of 
the world figured out 20 years ago that small, efficient and 
streamlined, was the future.

2) anti-intellectualism. Its now insanely common to hear idiots in the 
press and government babbling about the "elitists" that don't "feel" 
right about anything, so must be "wrong" because they use facts, logic 
and science to find solutions, instead of gut reactions, traditional 
thinking, and a persistent belief that nothing can go wrong, because, 
see #1.

The former blinds us to the fact that the only places that are bigger 
hell holes than the US when it comes to violence, bigotry, poor medical 
coverage, poor economic growth, bad education and unemployment is... 
places like the Middle East, and third world countries. Its just ***not 
possible*** for the average American to admit that the US is turning 
into a third world country, and when they do, they blame gays, 
terrorist, atheists (since you can't safely blame blacks or Jews any 
more), or "liberalism" (never mind the fact that most of the world takes 
one look at what we call liberals and asks, "Wait? Why are the 
conservatives attacking other conservatives over not being conservative 
enough?). The later is why people don't "stay" in the US as much any 
more, after getting an education, why BS like 'No Child Left 
less-Behind' gets cheers, while suggesting we teach critical thinking 
and problem solving actually, in one case I know of, got the parent 
chewed out for "Teaching their kid, instead of letting the school do it, 
since all the questions they asked, and their demand for **real** 
information and explanations for things was **disruptive**."

The modern US thinks we are #1, while simultaneously thinking that being 
smart, knowledgeable, logical, or just prone to use a lot of big words, 
makes you a pariah and untrustworthy. Even if we closed every over seas 
manufacturing plant, reopened every US business that used to make stuff 
here and then started hiring workers to fill the positions, we would 
have to ship people in from half the rest of the world to "find" enough 
people that know the difference between silicon gel and silicon chips, 
never mind had a damn clue what the hell the difference made.

And the companies know this, which is one reason why, recently, as of 
like last year, the major car manufactures in the US flat out stated, 
"We are moving much of our operations to Canada, because in recent years 
we simply can't find enough people in the US that are knowledgeable 
enough when hired to do the job, and those we have hired tend, for the 
most part, to be **untrainable**."

When the business world has no resources other than the same idiots that 
take out 16 credit cards, then try to use them to pay off each other, to 
hire in the first place, it hardly matters what the companies *or* the 
government does, the result is going to have more in common with the 
movie Idiocracy, than with Libertarianism.

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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