I will repeat this over and
over and over and over and over again:
abolish all copyrights and patents.

Of-course I get this type of nonsense as replies, "extremism", "attitude", etc. nonsense.

The problem is that the government must not be able to dictate anything in the free market except basic protections against government abuse of individuals, nothing else.

As long as governments are usurping power away from people to dictate to people property and business rules and regulations and taxes we will keep hitting these types of walls: monopolies created by the force of government, monopolies created with the 'rule' of the gun to our heads.

- IF you truly believe that people would work for 45c/hour, then WHERE IS THE PROBLEM?

If you believe that people would take 45c an hour jobs, where is the problem? If somebody takes a job at 45cents an hour, it means that the job is worth it for them!

I have an employee right now, I hired 7 more people in 2 months, 4 of them are still students, these are summer jobs, so out of 4 students 3 are doing very well, they are learning well (I taught them on the job, first 2-3 weeks I pay NOTHING and that was the deal, that's until they are ready to be put on an actual project). They knew absolutely NOTHING of any use to me whatsoever.

1 of the 4 is much slower than the rest. When I say slower, I mean he spent 2 days for example doing something that takes me about 10-20 minutes and that would take any other one of the students 2-3 hours tops. So in fact what happened is this kid he came to me the other day nearly crying, asking if he could stay and work for FREE, NO MONEY, NOT A PENNY, that's what HE wanted to do

I said no, I'll pay you an equivalent of $4 an hour and you will report to me the hours that you deem you were productive.

Now, if he continues on a progression that I think he has shown over the last month, I will be able to pay him over equivalent of 10 bucks an hour in about 2 months I would say. That's because by that time he should become productive enough for me to afford his services.

You see, I am not interested in paying people anything that is not covered by their productivity, plus makes me at least 20 margin (that's margin, not markup for the uninitiated).

YOU are proposing that IT SHOULD BE ILLEGAL FOR THE KID TO WORK FOR ME

Where would he find another job like this one? Where is he going to learn the skills necessary to find a better job down the line?

Minimum wages do not hurt businesses as much as they hurt the potential employees (who end up being unemployed) and the customers of the businesses, for who the prices go up.

I am an anarchist/libertarian/objectivist, call it what you like, I HAVE EMPLOYEES, I HIRE PEOPLE. How many people do YOU hire exactly?

As per usual, governments cannot give anything to anybody, but they can force people, under the barrel of a gun, to stop doing business.

The only thing that such regulations achieve is that fewer small businesses will be online, that's all. As the cost of doing business (selling something online) go up, fewer people can sell things online, thus fewer choices, and those who can sell will have higher prices because there will be less competition.

There is nothing free in this world, all this does it makes it illegal for people to offer products and services online on terms that both parties agree upon (the seller makes an offer, but this offer is not forced upon anybody, by paying money the buyer accepts that offer).

The free market is further distorted, the majority of the masses are led down the line of bigger government intervention and fewer freedoms and the economy is made that much poorer.

The same thing happens in everything that governments do, for example minimum wage is not a protection for the workers, it is an attack on workers, on those who are not qualified to get an above whatever passes for minimum wage job and for who it is made illegal to offer their labour at a competing rate to the buyers - the employers. It is illegal for the employers to advertise jobs at below minimum wage and it is illegal for people who want to get that job to work.

It is made illegal for people to work by the minimum wage laws, it is made illegal by the law described in TFS to offer products on their own terms for exchanges/returns.

Not only he is completely wrong on the Second Amendment, he is also completely wrong on Obamacare.

Obamacare is part of the large government that is destroying USA at this point, a country with largest debts and deficits in history of the world, larger debts than of all other countries combined, larger deficits than trade deficits of all countries that have trade deficits combined. Obamacare is not the answer to his question as to how to get insurance in the tightly regulated and monopolised USA market. The answer is to open the market for global competition, where Perens would have been able to buy insurance from any insurance company in the world, where the insurance is not mandated at all.

In fact Perens would have been better off without any insurance at all if only he could actually keep his money rather than lose it to the Mafia that runs government and steals his and all other people's incomes via direct taxes and all other indirect taxes (business regulations) and the tax of inflation

Perens is an economic ignoramus.

As always when it concerns the economy /. is mostly full of complete nonsense. Apple is a wealth GENERATION engine, no iPhones, no iPads etc. are taken from anybody by Apple and 'extracted', they are created by Apple and then redistributed into the population. As per usual the socialists completely miss the entire point of the economy and of free market capitalism, which is the engine that produces wealth at the rate higher than any other methodology ever discovered by humans on this planet.

When a company creates new products it creates the wealth. In fact the entire point of a company to combine scarce resources in such a way as to produce maximum amount of wealth at the minimum expense and Apple is EXCELLENT at it obviously, otherwise they wouldn't be where they are.

Extraction is what governments do, not productive businesses.

So even government officials admit that government is burdensome. Of-course it is burdensome, of-course the real problem is that it is burdensome for the people, not for government officials. Individuals are burdened by the burdensome government, that's the problem, not that NSA is burdened by burdensome rules that attempt at preventing NSA from becoming even more burdensome than it is.

.. 30+ years ago?

http://www.maxmatic.com/ttw_le...

(Saw it at EPCOT very many years ago...)

Krugman does not know anything about the economy that is in any way more useful than an average consumer, in fact Krugman knows LESS about the economy than an average consumer.

Krugman believes in Keynesian nonsense, actually in the last few years the official party line became even worse than what Keynes himself was talking about. Today the government and its mouthpieces (the likes of Krugman and the MSM and the rest of the so called 'main stream economists') are touting the idea that inflation is necessary, they are not even just saying that they are scared of deflation, they are now scared of this new scarecrow: 'lowflation'. Krugman will have you believe that consumers suffer from lower prices, that if a consumer comes to a supermarket and sees prices that are lower than the year before or that are even not higher than the year before (by at least 2%) then the consumers suffer.

Krugman is not an economist at all, he is just a propaganda spewing con-artist and the PhD that he holds is simply a 'mainstream' way to give him some credence within the system. Krugman can always be relied upon to come out with the most idiotic schemes for 'fixing' the economy or like in this case 'fixing' the environment.

The only thing that import tariffs against China will do is raising import prices for the Americans. The Chinese have a gigantic domestic market that they can tap in the moment they let the exchange rate for their currency float. More than a billion people that are ready to buy stuff the moment the government stops subsidising USA consumer by printing its own currency to buy USD and US bonds The Chinese do not need Americans, the Americans need the Chinese much more. China is a productive country - they produce the stuff everybody else buys.

America is not a productive country, which is clear from its gigantic trade deficits and debts. 47Billion USD in trade deficit last month as opposed to the expected 41Billion (and all of a sudden the Canadians are 'buying' 9Billion USD worth of F35 useless piles of metal).

  USA consumers are happy enough to use credit cards to buy Chinese products today with a possible 20% markup due to the cost of the credit rather than waiting and saving to spend less on the same products. Similarly they will not wait for a year to buy something they need today if they knew that the prices would go down by 1-2% in a year. Who will not buy something they need today if it costs 100 bucks if they know it will cost 99 or 98 USD a year from now? However plenty of people will buy on a credit card now with a chance to pay 120 in a year for something that costs 100 today.

For some time I thought Krugman pretends to be an idiot, now I think he is an idiot - a useful idiot. An idiot useful to the propaganda machine that uses him. To offer this 'solution' one has to be a complete moron. The USA economy is INCAPABLE of producing anything that the consumers need, which is why WalMart has profits by importing most of what the Americans buy from abroad and which is why the trade deficits are insane.

USA doesn't have factories that are waiting for the workers to be hired that can be restarted on a moment's notice. USA DOES NOT HAVE THE CAPITAL TO START MEANINGFUL PRODUCTIVE BUSINESSES, USA ONLY HAS DEBT. USA needs to go through a period of deleveraging that did not happen yet. USA needs to get rid of its government and of insane ideas spouted by morons like Krugman in order to be able to restructure its economy, to start saving again in order to have capital that then can be used to become productive again.

USA IS BORROWING MONEY FROM CHINA TO BUY CHINESE PRODUCTS. Where does Krugman suggest the American consumers get more money to buy more Chinese goods that will go up in price once the import taxes are introduced?

The import taxes are NOT going to hurt the companies, they are going to hurt Americans who will no longer have access to those goods. The companies will be able to sell to other markets, especially the local Chinese market that is simply waiting for something like an American import tax to force the hand of its government to stop fixing currency exchange rates and allow the local Chinese market to start consuming the products that the Chinese are producing.

The fact that so many /. readers are missing all of the above and actually believe in this nonsense is the sad testament of what the effect of the decades of brainwashing by the likes of Krugman on behalf of the oppressive government does to the population.

- and the free market would not keep 'official' time in order to keep functioning? Curios.

- wealthy societies take care of their environment. The argument should not be in favour of government but in favour of a wealthy healthy free market capitalist economy. Humans have devised the most successful system to generate wealth and prosperity, which in the long run means health and a healthy environment - free market capitalism. Government is never source of wealth and or health, government is the source of oppression, theft and murder. Governments have nothing that they do not steal and murder for first.

- same exact argument as the one above, and of-course government provides utilities with the monopoly power to destroy/prevent competition and thus reduce our choices and raise our costs. May I do not want water from the tap A, maybe I want water from the tap B, without government supplied chemicals in it but that instead uses a competing cleaning procedure.

- again, licensing does not provide anything but a piece of paper. The actual reason why our houses are safe is technology that is built by the free market capitalist system and the fact that in that system home builders want to sell more homes, not kill their customers.

- absolutely wrong. The greatest nightmares are in the hands of the government, that is true. The surveillance state, the militarised police force and the wars and genocide.

My greatest DREAMS are in my own hands.

- WRONG.

The most abstract and extreme version of 'gains' made from no value whatsoever is your Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank.

Those are the entities that are responsible for the extreme abstraction of money away from any value and devaluation of the dollar. HFT wouldn't even exist if there was a real market, a real productive economy in the first place, instead you have NEGATIVE REAL interest rates and nobody can find any yield in this environment. The environment of destruction of private property rights, destruction of individual liberties all as a consequence of destruction of the rule of the law - the Constitution.

A right is a protection of an individual against government abuse, nothing more. Individuals are supposed to have all the rights and the governments shouldn't even exist, however since they do, they are only supposed to be delegated a very small number of precisely enumerated powers, none of which should be open to interpretation.

The government that USA had at some point was an attempt to prevent the consequences of economic and thus societal destruction that you are experiencing at this point. The Congress was supposed to originate laws and Senate was supposed to kill the laws before they made it to the POTUS. SCOTUS was supposed to evaluate the already existing laws and kill them the government usurped power through those laws it was never supposed to have in the first place.

It is all broken now, but AFAIC it cannot work as a principle as long as there is in fact such an entity as Congress (or any other) that can even PROPOSE new laws into existence.

The only laws that we need are supposed to protect private property, starting with our own bodies, the right to own and operate our own private bodies, which then extends to the right to own and operate the fruits of our labour, our property, which is only extension of our bodies and lives. If the system is based on such immutable ideas and nothing else, then government cannot regulate us, cannot regulate our businesses and steal our property (for any reason at all), only then we can have real rule of law and only then there can be no such power in the hands of the few - to DESTROY the value of the money, to STEAL through taxes, business regulations and any other form of abuse of power.

But are you, any of you prepared to accept the consequences of your own actions and accept the fact that you are responsible for your own lives and nobody else can be made a slave to you through any form of theft (taxes, regulations, inflation)?

I do not believe you are ready, vast majority of you do not even understand the words that are written here, starting with the basics, such as what a right is.

It doesn't work to do this with a democratic government. We need a monarchy :-(

Or perhaps a font of sage wisdom? You know, like a Council? Composed of wise people, you know, like one's Elders? Something any sentient species ought to be able to figure out. Speaking of which, I feel another press release coming on...

K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, addresses the publication of the new report thusly:

"WE HAVE TRIUMPHED! Our skilled operatives from the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Propaganda; Planetary Research Council have successfully infiltrated the blueworlders' technological and informational systems. One notable document, Pathways to Exploration makes clear the disarray in which the blueworlders' long-term invasion plans lie, drawing on the history of meat-controlled spaceflight to justify future programs in organic space exploitation. Although the report promotes the invasion of our world as the horizon goal for the program, it takes into account funding levels necessary to maintain a robust tempo of execution, current research and exploration projects and the time/resources needed to continue them, and intertribal cooperation that would be required to further oppress the citizens of our fair red world."

"And its conclusion? Although the mechanized threat remains, and we salute those still fighting pitched battles with the two active land-based invaders, Pathways to Exploration makes it clear that it is not possible for the blueworlders' organic-based self-replicators to invade our world, at least not without a sustained commitment to funding at a higher level than their own tribal leaders are currently providing."

When an intern from the defense engineering board suggested that improving the capabilities of the blueworlders' EDL systems, radshielding, and propulsion and power systems were ultimately matters of engineering and not physics, and could ultimately be addressed if the tribals of the blue world ever get it into their oxygen-addled brains to work together to achieve a common goal (as, the intern suggested, the way any sentient species does), K'Breel had the intern's gelsacs addled by immersing them in a suitably-merciful quantity of liquid oxygen.

Thus spake K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, Committee on Native Spaceflight; Arenautics and Defense Engineering Board; Defense Studies Board; Division of Blueworlder Social and Physical Sciences; Committee on Gelsacular Statistics.