Posted on 04/16/2007 1:32:37 AM PDT by cva66snipe
Exactly. For you, as I understand your position, "Conservatism" must be objectively defined in terms of a "fundamental understanding of the role of Man within God's creation"... to make Conservatism subject to the whims of "Pragmatism" is to sacrifice, before the battle has even been joined, any concrete definition of Conservatism at all!
Oberon, I do not know if your understanding of "the role of Man within God's creation" is precisely the same as mine. I do not know if your personal beliefs favor the "Benevolent Watchmaker" Deist-God of Thomas Jefferson, or the more directly-involved "He holds All Destinies in His nail-scarred Hands" Jesus-God of Calvinism... and, according to the First Amendment, I don't need to know. That's your own business, although I'm happy to provide a Sermon upon request (bearing in mind always that I don't claim to be any sort of perfectly good Presbyterian; just a knowledgeable one).
But the very fact that you define Conservatism in terms of a "fundamental understanding of the role of Man within God's creation" tells me that you understand that Conservatism, in order to have any meaning AT ALL, must be objectively defined in terms which will stand the test of Time: God; Man; and Creation. What are our Rights under God? What are our Duties to our fellow Men? What are our Responsibilities in this beautiful Creation we have been given?
If Conservatism is subject to the whims of Pragmatism, it has (within the passage of time, of any one century or less) no real meaning at all.
I hope that "durasell" will understand your argument, and consider it thoughtfully.
It seemed clear to me that you never intended any Personal Attack in the first place.
best, OP
If we started paying off debt there would be a calamatous asset deflation, very destabilizing as in the 30s.
BUMP
Only some sophomoric moron thinks you could cut the Federal budget 40%, taking $680 BILLION dollars of economic activity out of the economy, and somehow MAGICALLY your tax receipts will stay the same. WHAT A HUGE AND BASIC SCREWUP!
Ron Paul has zero chance of being elected to anything outside of his current district. None
And it’s very sad that he will not win. A guy him him is what we need to save the country. At this rate, we are just going to elect another big government globalist Democrat/Republican.
Maybe. I just know its difficult to support a guy that isn’t sure which political party he wants to belong to, the GOP or the Libertarian Party.
By shopping for an attractive candidate the GOP misses out on qualified candidates.
That's different. When you said "far less than half a percent", You were talking about the Federal Budget. In point of Fact, Government Spending on Foreign Aid is more than 0.6% of the Budget.
Though, even just looking at National Income, even at 0.22%, what we're talking about is approximately $13 Billion dollars (just counting direct Foreign Aid) Taxed away from 75 million American Families... That's like $170 Bucks per family!! Yeah, if some Armed Thief was taking an extra $170 Bucks a year off my person, I'd be thrilled if he would just STOP.
An extra $170 Bucks a year is either an extra $100,000+ in Term Life Insurance for my family, or maybe 3 nice Cajun Crawfish Boil Dinners up in OKC with my Wife at her favorite restaurant (including money for baby-sitters).
Are you Married? Do you realize how important that is? Protecting your Family financially, or else spending more time Dating your Wife? Can you even put a Price on that? $170 Bucks a Year is CHEAP! Eliminate all Foreign Aid TOMORROW, I say!!
It is miniscule.
Liar. Globalist-Interventionist Foreign Aid is literally ROBBING me of $170 Bucks a Year I's rather spend on my family... and that's only counting direct Foreign Aid -- not even considering all the other costs of an Interventionist Foreign Policy.
Since 1949, the US assistance to Israel has been almost $100 billion. Do you consider that to be "good and positive and wise and BIBLICAL"?
No, I consider it BAD and NEGATIVE and STUPID and the worst CURSE any Country has ever laid on Israel... unless you think that Welfare is GOOD for the Welfare Recipient, and are going to start defending LBJ's War on Poverty!!
Welfare... certainly including the International Welfare of "Foreign Aid"... ALWAYS enervates the independence and self-sufficiency of the Welfare Recipient.
PRIOR to the Introduction of massive US Foreign Aid, the brilliant and productive Israeli Economy was growing at a Rate of over 9% a Year -- AND they'd developed their own Atomic Bomb. AFTER the introduction of massive US Foreign Aid, the Israeli Economy slowed to a growth rate of less than 4% a year -- and now Israel is yanked around by the Foreign Aid purse-strings every time some US President wants to pressure them into a losing "peace deal" with the terrorist PLO (or worse, HAMAS!)
Now, I don't know you, "kabar" -- for all I know, you're some judeophobe Jew-Hater who actually wants Israel to be Destroyed. I don't know.
But I know this: US Foreign Aid provides Israeli Politicians with the grift and graft they need to maintain an Israeli Government Socialist Welfare State which is killing the otherwise-productive Israeli Economy.
I've shared a bottle of manischewitz wine with an IDF veteran of the Six Day War; have you? (I was young and arrogant, and asked him how many Arabs he'd had to kill; he bowed his head as if he was ashamed and admitted, "only three", as if 3-to-1 was a bad ratio). A Jewish warrior who came to America because he couldn't find enough economic opportunity in Israel itself.
Maybe you're happy about that. Maybe you want Israel to die on the vine.
But know this, "kabar": US Foreign Aid, with all its diplomatic strings attached, is a Socialist CURSE upon the Israeli Economy, and an Interventionist CURSE upon her independent Foreign Policy -- and God will Bless those who Bless Israel, and CURSE those who CURSE her.
If you seek to Curse Israel with Welfare-Dependency -- You will be Judged.
OP
So true.
You are madder than a March hare. Good day.
“Maybe. I just know its difficult to support a guy that isn’t sure which political party he wants to belong to, the GOP or the Libertarian Party
Why should one write an oath in blood to a particular party?”
I’m reminded of a line from a forgetable B movie - ‘Demolition Man’ with Sly Stallone and Dennis Leary.
Leary is speaking with a guy near the end of the movie that has his hair dyed multiple color’s.
Leary: “First thing, your hair...Pick A Color!’
Same suggestion for Ron Paul. Pick a party. Stick with it, and then maybe you will have demonstrated a decisiveness thats required in these times as President.
I don’t expect a ‘blood oath’. I expect that by the time you are seriously considering applying for the top job in this nation, you first pick which poltical party you honestly believe in.
I don’t care which of the available parties the candidate picks.
I do care when a politician seems to sway between two parties, depending on what the polls say on any given day. When Ron Paul is confronted with something he doesn’t agree with in the GOP, he plays ‘Libertarian’.
When it comes to fund raising, he plays ‘Republican’.
No thanks.
You have some catching up to do.
Let's see... I'll pick a few articles from the Ludwig von Mises Institute, (you know, those economic idiots who YOU are going to lecture with you superior knowledge)-
From an article written by Murray N. Rothbard (professor of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and vice-president for academic affairs at the Ludwig von Mises Institute) back in 1992.
... Unfortunately, paying off a national debt that will soon reach $4 trillion would quickly bankrupt the entire country. Think about the consequences of imposing new taxes of $4 trillion in the United States next year! Another way, and almost as devastating, a way to pay off the public debt would be to print $4 trillion of new money—either in paper dollars or by creating new bank credit. This method would be extraordinarily inflationary, and prices would quickly skyrocket, ruining all groups whose earnings did not increase to the same extent, and destroying the value of the dollar. ...
And here's one discussing how federal debt actually comes into existance, (much deeper discusssion than your childish understanding) -
... The fallacious argument here runs like this: 'If the government wants to increase its borrowing, it must induce people to lend to it. This means it must offer higher interest rates. Then everyone else must offer a higher interest rate in order to remain competitive.' The mistaken notion underlying this argument is that if Dick wants Jane to lend him a dollar at the prevailing rate of 10 percent, and if she is reluctant to do so, then Dick must offer a higher interest rate to get Jane to change her mind.
"Not so. There is another way to change Jane's mind. Dick can offer to lend Jane a dollar at 10 percent interest, in exchange for her making an identical loan to him. Indeed, Dick can convince her to lend him any amount at all as long as he lends her the same amount, at the same interest rate without producing any upward pressure on that rate.
"This example is not as fanciful as it sounds. Whenever the government wants to borrow a dollar, it simultaneously lends a dollar, just as Dick does. After all, why does the government borrow? It does so to avoid raising your taxes for the time being in effect lending you back the taxes it would ordinarily assess.
"Unlike the borrowing of an individual, government borrowing is always accompanied by an implicit loan to the taxpayers. The government, like Dick, borrows from the public (or Jane), while simultaneously lending the same amount at the same rate. Like Dick and Jane, the government and the public can carry this on at any level without having any effect on the rate of interest."
Economists call this the "Ricardian Equivalence" argument. It asserts that taxpayers recognize that bond-financed deficit spending implies the present-value-equivalent of future taxes. With any increase in government borrowing, taxpayers will increase their savings just enough to negate any effect on interest rates. Taxpayers will purchase any additional amount of government bonds without reluctance at the existing yield, because they recognize that if government is selling more bonds, then the taxpayers need to acquire more bonds in order to afford their (or their heirs') higher future taxes. If the government sells $1 billion in perpetual bonds at 10 percent per annum, then it must increase taxes by $100 million per year. The anticipation of those taxes creates the demand for exactly $1 billion in government bonds paying 10 percent per annum. Landsburg and Feinstone assert the savings imperative forcefully: "Knowing that you are committed to making payments of [$100 million] a year forever, you will be forced to set aside a fund from which to make these payments."
Ricardian Equivalence (with intergenerational bequests that vary one-for-one with the size of the inherited government debt) provides a useful theoretical benchmark. It gives us a logically possible limiting case in which deficits would not affect interest rates. Those who argue that "the government must offer higher interest rates when it borrows more" would thus be uttering a fallacy (as Landsburg and Feinstone say) if by "must" they were to mean that no other result is logically possible. But if, as we believe is the case, they only mean, "must, given the world as it actually is," then the argument is not fallacious. The Landsburg Feinstone critique is misplaced.
Does Ricardian Equivalence actually hold in the world as it is? That's an empirical question, and there is an ongoing debate among economists over which side's evidence is weaker. Perfect Ricardian Equivalence seems unlikely on the face of it.
Loyalties shift. There aren’t any contants. It’s the way the game of realpolitik is played.
Hold on... do you mean to tell me that you are some Marxist-Educated freshman undergrad (if you've even gotten that far) who actually thinks that most Federal Spending is in some way Economically Productive?!
Do you not even recognize the Economic Fact that MOST Federal Domestic Spending (on Welfare, on Health Care, on Education, et cetera) is actually COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE? That Federal Spending so utterly distorts incentives, pricing structures, capital allocations, and productivity as to actually reduce Private Market profitability for every Federal Dollar spent??
Are you really THAT stupid? I had, honestly, no idea. WHAT A HUGE AND BASIC SCREWUP!
Do you really think that spending $250 Million dollars on an Alaskan "Bridge to Nowhere" is somehow GOOD because it generates "Economic Activity"?
What about the Opportunity Costs the Economy suffers when the Federal Government sells Bonds in order to paper over such Deficit Spending, thus taking money out of the Private Capital Markets? OR WORSE, just prints the additional money via Debt Purchase into the Federal Reserve System, thereby generating dollar-destroying Inflation throughout the entire Economy? Did you ever think about THAT??
Mere "Economic Activity", if generated by COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE and therefore ANTI-PROFITABLE Government Spending, is NOT a Good Thing!
Gross "Economic Activity" is NOT necessarily a virtue in and of itself. Good grief, am I debating a Conservative or a Marxist Keynesian??
A Tale of Two Economies (Each with an equivalent Trade Balance, NX, for the sake of Example).
Of course, if we admit of any sort of economic forecasting, I think that it is CERTAIN that the more-Capitalistic "Economy B" will out-perform the more-Socialistic "Economy A" over time, thus producing both MORE for the Private Citizenry AND a larger Gross Product.
However, at this point, I am really trying to make it as simple as possible for you to understand. Gross "Economic Activity" itself is NOT necessarily a "Good Thing" if it is Inflation-Funded or Tax-Funded or Debt-Funded Government Spending which operates at the expense of the Private Markets and undermines incentives, pricing structures, capital allocations, and productivity. Can you at least grasp that notion?
If you can't... well, then there's only so much I can do. I can't make a Fiscal Conservative of someone who's been poisoned by fiscal Marxism to the root. I'm not Jesus Christ and I can't work miracles.
I agree with what you’re saying. The government is the largest holder of acquired property. Unfortunately much of it was taken for Unconstitutional purposes even as an agent for private corps to steal land. Which brings us back to the point someone made the government becomes the master to whom it owes. In doing so it enslaves us.
It's gonna happen sooner or later. Not just the debt holders within our nation but nations in which we foolishly owe far more than we have coming back to us in trade such as China. We are soon to reach a point where a few nations can literally shut us down simply by calling in the debt. What will be our solution? Military action? The DEMS and the GOP have gutted the military as well.
We should never do such. But hey some persons are registered GOP and will vote Independent. Well imagine that :>}
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