Most of your post shows a good deal of sense, which is why this particular statement sticks out so much. Can you imagine if we followed this line of reasoning when making all our most important decisions?

The first car you try is the best if you never test-drive another one... may as well buy it.

The first house you look at it is the best if you stop there and don't look at any others.

The first college you visit is the one for you, so long as you never experience what another one might offer.

Sex is an important component of a successful marriage. Refraining from sex until marriage, so that you only ever have sex with one person and therefore have no standard of comparison, is a terrible idea. No other part of the relationship works this way, unless you're participating in arranged marriages. You evaluate prospective mates based on any number of important factors: their looks, their sense of humor, their passions, their interests, their attitude, etc. etc. Why shouldn't you treat sex the same way? Premarital sex, especially premarital sex with multiple partners before making your decision, is just one more way to know that the person you've chosen is the right one for you.

Sure, unsafe sex is bad. And yes, plenty of people prioritize sex as the most important thing when picking a mate, which is usually a mistake. But taking the opposite approach can be just as bad; if you conserve yourself until marriage and then the sex is bad (and you WILL know, even without anything to compare it to), then you're far more likely to get a divorce or have an extramarital affair.

It's really quite funny that you keep referencing Malthus when people have been predicting a Malthusian catastrophe for about 200 years and we haven't had one yet in spite of massive population growth. The numbers, the numbers! The numbers show that we can't possibly sustain the pace that we're on! Except that the numbers always change, and we always figure out newer and better ways of doing things. Yet you honestly believe that a world capable of creating spaceships and advanced medicines and the internet is going to be suddenly unable to feed itself.

No, what will happen is that new sources of energy will be discovered, either through new technologies or just new discoveries of caches of fossil fuels. And new methods of farming will be created that use less resources and produce more output. And the world population will keep on growing.

If laying a heavier tax on the usage of fossil fuels were to result in less consumption which in turn resulted in a weakening of our already fragile economy, it could certainly be considered drastic. We could argue the extent of the effect and whether or not it's necessary, but please don't dismiss a tax increase as minor. Those taxes don't simply disappear from the profit margins of the oil barons; they get reflected in an increased price for the commodity, which then gets passed on to every product in our economy that gets transported at some point in its lifecycle (so, basically everything). It may seem like a small thing to raise the gas tax another penny or two, but it could very well result in a 5-10 cent increase in everything you buy at your local supermarket. Drastic indeed, for those who are already scraping to get by.

If the money being poured into the environmental lobby were to be spent instead on actual research towards newer, cleaner technologies, we might be in a lot better shape than we actually are. But that's more an indictment on the influence of lobbies and corporations on our political system than it is a criticism of environmentalists themselves.

What about the people who believe the world is warming up, are willing to accept that mankind is a contributing cause, and think the problem won't go away on its own, but don't want to make any changes because they enjoy warm weather, and the clothes-reducing effect it has on attractive young women?

I don't think you're using the right metric. It's not about how much food we produce, it's about how much food we're capable of producing. GP is right, the "world hunger" issue is about distribution, not production capacity. With current technologies we will easily be able to keep up with global demand for a long, long time... and the technologies are improving rapidly as well. If we have to dedicate more land to food production, we can and will do that.

This, from a user named jitterman.

Sheer fallacy. If you credit the rich with becoming rich because of society, then you have to credit the poor with becoming poor because of society. Rich and poor are completely arbitrarily, relevant terms. A man who has all his needs met is rich when surrounded by the needy and poor when surrounded by the wealthy, but if he has his needs met, what does it matter how you term him?

Do you really believe that the only purpose of law is to protect property? A homeless man has many things worth protecting: his life, his health, his rights as a human being. Society exists for these purposes first and foremost.

You don't think a poor man benefits from the stability of society? If a man is poor because he lacks the ability to produce sufficient goods to satisfy his own needs (either directly or through bartering with others), then ultimately he will DIE on his own. In a stable society, where he has the opportunity to seek employment, to join forces with other producers in order to meet each of their needs, he can survive. Your argument that stable society only benefits the employers is sophistry.

And yet you are arguing for the GOVERNMENT to be the safekeeper of your society's wealth! If you, by your own words, have declared the threat of economic loss and the threat of physical harms to be equal, then why would you champion the government, which has the ability to enforce BOTH forms of threat?

If you truly believe this, then you should abandon your entire argument right here. You are claiming that a smart, hard-working man deserves more... but if that same smart, hard-working man succeeds at a level that outshines his peers, he should have the fruits of his labor taken from him and redistributed to his peers. How is that believing in "equality of opportunity and not equality of outcome"???

What RISKS do you claim to be taking??? Even money says you sit in an office at a computer all day, doing something that some entity with more money than you pays you for. Maybe you produce something, maybe you offer a service, maybe you don't do much of anything at all. But how are you taking any risks? You are confusing "taking a risk" with "being able to better survive a risk".

While this sounds superior to the current income tax system, you would never be able to maintain it. Capital would flow out of your economy overnight and you'd plunge into an intense depression, as those with wealth moved it into secret offshore bank accounts in other nations and minimized their apparent holdings in your nation.

Wow. Just wow. You have completely misunderstood the way the economy works.

If you increase taxes, companies will increase the prices of their products. If you force them to keep prices the same, companies will reduce expenditures, usually by laying off employees. If you prevent them from laying off employees or raising prices, but they still have to pay your tax, they won't just happily operate at a loss forever. They will FOLD. And then you'll have no tax income, no jobs, and no products. How can you not see this?

Even if you set up some perfect system where every single product was sold at exactly the cost of creating it, and any profits were appropriated by the government for redistribution... why would anyone EVER create a new business? What possible benefit would there be to taking the risk of your business collapsing, rather than take a safe job where you can't be downsized or have your salary reduced, on account of government fiat? The people out there taking REAL risks, the ones investing their life and energies into coming up with the next groundbreaking idea or product or service, will no longer do so. They'll be taking all the risk for no gain. Which is exactly the system you're railing against.

You CANNOT solve the problems of our economy through rampant taxation. Can't be done. If you want to argue that stricter regulations should be in place to prevent companies from using devious accounting or business practices to defraud consumers, I'll support that. If you want to argue that we need better enforcement of the existing laws that companies violate on a regular basis in the name of getting an advantage, I'll back that too. But thinking that you can take out a magic wand and decree that anyone who winds up succeeding has to hand over their efforts to the government to pay for those who have failed to take advantage of their opportunities is an illusion at best and extremely dangerous at worst. The system will only support itself for so long. And as the "taxed class" becomes more and more resentful of the government that is confiscating their efforts, the pressure on the system will increase until it collapses upon itself.

I can only hope that it happens peaceably.

The law mandates for the police to protect everyone, and for the most part they do. If you have an issue with the way the police do their job, it's a topic for another thread.

Public transportation usually runs at a net loss, when taking into account the cost of the vehicles. Only in places where the mass transit system is routinely fully utilized does the system sometimes turn a small profit. Why? Because any increases in fares are poor political moves, so the local governments subsidize the transport to some degree. You can argue that the lessened environmental impact of mass transit justifies the governmental subsidy, but it's impossible to quantify that in actual monetary terms.

I oppose farming subsidies, but without them, farmers would routinely overutilize their land, stripping the soil of its nutrients in order to maximize short-term profit and then selling the land to someone else when the harvests start to suffer. Has nothing to do with rich vs. poor and everything to do with human nature. There are better solutions (mandatory records of crop histories maintained in an open database by a regulatory agency, along with laws against destructive farming practices), but we aren't there yet and aren't likely to get there. More importantly, under the current system, discontinuing those food subsidies will reduce the income for farmers, forcing them to raise their prices, resulting in higher expenses for people who buy groceries, which last I checked was everybody, "owning class" or not. But the wealthy won't feel the pinch the same way the poor will.

For someone who claims to be an adult in a middle-income family, you have a pisspoor grasp of basic economics, which pretty much matches that of our government. You can't circumvent the basic laws of supply and demand and every step you take to intrude on the process results in more overhead, more waste, more cost. Look at what happened in California when the government regulators thought they could just say "make it so" to the power industry. The state's population grew, and demand increased. Those who wanted to increase supply were prevented from building new power plants by environmental laws and regulations and bureaucratic delays. With demand rising and supply remaining constant, price goes up. Then the government stepped in and froze prices. Well if supply is constant and price is constant, demand will go unmet. Thus, brownouts, blackouts, and everyone suffered, from the people who needed electricity to heat and cool their homes to the people who just wanted to be able to drive their fancy eco-friendly electric cars. And the government found itself voted out of power.

If you dramatically increase tariffs on foreign goods, other nations will do the same to yours. Your companies are no longer able to justify exporting their goods, which causes loss of sales, which causes loss of jobs. If you take money from the wealthy and attempt to redistribute it to those without wealth, the system will only support itself for so long. Then the wealthy will find someplace else to live and to work and to produce. And you might cheer at the thought of the CEOs and the tycoons all moving away and leaving our country a better place... but when they take their wealth with them, and the businesses they were leading crumble and falter and unemployment is rampant, you will turn to the next-most-wealthy and attempt to bleed them dry: the doctors, the engineers, the most skilled and most educated of your laborers. And then they too will leave, and you'll be left with a society lacking in education and production, trying to support itself by consuming itself rather than getting out of the way.

And no amount of +1 Insightful mods would correct the doom that your proposed policies would bring.

Citation most definitely needed.

No matter how much you bloviate about taxing offshore products at 100% (because rampant protectionism is ALWAYS the solution to all of life's problems... ask any economist...) or taxing the wealthy at 90% (because it's so clear that those who are the most successful should also be the most liable for their peers), you can't alter fundamental economics.

If you're in the store and you're looking at two identical products, but one costs $5 less than the other, you're going to choose that product. Is it $5 less because the company employs sound management, sticks to a budget, doesn't overspend on luxuries and has figured out the best way to make its product affordable? Maybe. Or maybe the labor was outsourced to foreigners being paid a dollar an hour. Or maybe the product is backed by a massive company that can afford to take a loss in order to drive a smaller rival out of business. Or maybe it just happens to be on sale this week and next week, its competitor will be $5 cheaper. No matter what the rationale behind the price difference, you're going to choose the cheaper one, in the absence of any compelling reason not to do so. And if you want to protest business practices by choosing a more expensive option because it's a local business or just because it's "made in America", you go right ahead. But most of the people you're attempting to defend don't have the luxury of voting with their cash; they have to stretch their funds as far as possible and buying the discounted product is the way they're going to go.

So you can long for the "post-war golden age" and pretend that all of America's problems were solved by taxing the rich, even though there's no meaningful correlation between the two and things were far worse for the poor then than they are now, but your argument isn't going to hold water.

And how did you twist your thoughts into that final paragraph? An individual can easily produce a surplus and maintain it. I'm a carpenter and I need a dining room table, so I make one. I like the first one, so I make another. Boom, surplus. Now without society (e.g. someone else to buy or trade for the second table), making a surplus is wasteful and unnecessary, but that doesn't mean it's not possible. Unless you're trying to talk about what the world would be like with only one person, your statement is completely meaningless. And why the vitriol for people making the smart decision not to invest more than they can afford to lose? Are you saying that only the poor should be commended for taking risks, because they're gambling what they can't spare? That seems awfully backwards to me.

You see money as power. I see money as the physical manifestation of one's labor. You may think that the rich deserve to be punished for being rich by having their money taken away and given to someone else. I think that the rich man who invests his capital into a startup company and gives them the means to hire more employees, expand operations, make more products and services available, and grow to new heights deserves to be rewarded for his decision. That investor could leave his money under his mattress instead, and the startup company might have no money to hire more people and ultimately slide back into nothingness. Yet you think this is the way it should be?

Wait, no, you think that the government should appropriate that investor's money and use it for their own purposes. Yeah, that makes so much more sense.

Our economy isn't having any trouble producing THINGS. Our corporations are getting all the THINGS they need, mostly from factories in other countries where workers are willing to take less money for their efforts. The minimum wage, along with a pervasive sense of entitlement, prevents those jobs from being kept here. The act of spending money on foreign factories because they produce goods at cheaper costs isn't some grand evil on the part of corporations; it's just sound business sense. Perhaps if we altered the rules here in the United States, we'd be able to retain more and more of those manufacturing jobs.

The reason that the unemployed aren't getting the things they need isn't because those things are in short supply, it's because the unemployed can't afford those things, even if they were being sold at cost. Furthermore, the list of things that people feel they "need" has swelled far beyond reality; witness the person in front of you in line, paying for her groceries with food stamps while chatting away on her shiny new iPhone.

As to our infrastructure, I can agree with you there. We could create more jobs by investing more money in construction and repair. But those jobs are often hard and dangerous, and many people, even desperate people, refuse to attempt them. Just like the migrant farm worker jobs that have been in the news so much lately. Why is it that people will stoop to accepting these sort of jobs only after their two years of unemployment benefits have expired?

I don't think your suggestion accurately reflects the scope of the problem. Infrastructure jobs are a good start but aren't nearly enough to provide employment for the vast number of jobless people in this country... and if they're performed correctly, the improvements can last for decades, once again rendering fewer of these jobs necessary. The unemployment problem is far worse than the 9% that's being reported in the media; that number is sheer sophistry, since it doesn't take into account those people who have been rejected from so many jobs that they're not even continuing to look.

I too fear for the social stability of the US, and for all those other countries out there struggling with the fallout of rampant government overexpenditure and massive amounts of debt. What happens when the welfare checks run out for more and more people with no end to the recession in sight? But I don't believe that the government has any tricks left in its bag. Sooner or later, someone in power is going to have to force hard decisions upon the people. There's a natural limit to how much any entity, be it an individual, a corporation, or a government, can overextend itself before the bill comes due. Here's hoping that current and future administrations learn this lesson before we're faced with the same sort of austerity measures that Greece is currently undergoing.

Absolutely agreed. I selected this option because broadband internet is the absolute last thing I would give up from the list provided, but like many other /.ers, I don't pay for home phone service and instead I rely on my mobile phone. But I have an older mobile phone without a data package which is extremely cheap to maintain. And if pressed between the luxury of a mobile phone and the luxury of broadband, I'd have to keep the broadband. I'm already giving up car insurance, meaning I'm not going to BE anywhere else but home, so I can set up a Skype/VOIP sort of solution that allows people to contact me by phone even if I don't have a physical phone to use.

Other than health insurance, which I would at least get some governmental coverage on, most of the other options beside phone/broadband/car are just wasted space. Exercise can be done at no cost, condoms are cheap, and I'm not a drug user or NPR member.

Why invest in jobs when you can continue to push your current employees to work harder (because they're desperate to keep their jobs and not join the ranks of the unemployed)?

With advances in automation and global transportation, the simple fact is that most highly-developed nations are supporting a population that is far beyond the natural level of justifiable employment opportunities. Governments can only go so far in taking money from the populace with taxation and turning it into employment that in many cases is completely unnecessary. How many people do you know whose jobs produce little to nothing of value? How many people would be hard-pressed to justify their eight hours of wages a day?

The uncomfortable truth is that as populations continue to rise and the production capability of highly skilled individuals continues to improve, the unskilled or unintelligent laborer will continue to have to fight for fewer and fewer opportunities, and no amount of government strongarming will change that fact. It's not about the people at the top selfishly hoarding the profits of a business out of some sinister motivation; it's about the people at the top not being able to economically justify the creation of new jobs, especially jobs requiring little to no skill or education.

Right. Like signing with the Miami Heat.

Wow, a socialist offering a definition of libertarianism that's both reasonably accurate and not laden with snide insults. You, sir (or madam), are a rarity among your kind. I salute you.

What the hell else would you compile them from??