If you read the article, they are complaining that CA's system does not affect out-of-state emissions.

Duh.

I might agree if Social Security and Medicare were financed with income taxes, but they are funded with a flat tax on paychecks... working people, not the rich. Actually, it isn't even flat since it is regressive in that there is an income cap! Add defense spending to the mix, which is not a transfer of wealth, and you have a large proportion of the federal budget.

I completely agree. Not all of humankind's goals can be measured with economics. Perhaps exploring space has proven to be profitable, but that is not why we do it.

How in the world did you get a "Flamebait" mod?

Anyway, I think that all Republicans - and for that matter Libertarians - would not object at all if the government restricted itself to umpire. I hear very few objections to even huge intrusions in the private market; limited liability and intellectual property are these massive government regulations that have profound effects on the market, yet you don't hear much objection except from the most ideological Libertarians. Most Libertarians all but throw a "right to property" in with the 3 natural rights: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I am neither really Republican or Libertarian, so I happen to think that government is perfectly fine doing some of the things you describe. But the smaller government folks certainly do have a point about efficiency... it's just you don't always need efficiency as the top objective.

Actually, I pretty much agree with you. I don't really see a firm line between government and corporations. I think there SHOULD be a line, but I digress.

Printing it is the same thing. It devalues everyone's currency a little bit, which is no different than taxing except that it is not at all progressive.

In commerce, money is just a stand-in for barter. You hand over your money in exchange for something else - usually something that you could not economically produce yourself. The best private-market analogy to government is probably insurance - you pay for some protection should you fall down the social ladder or get invaded. The government also builds roads and such, but those items barely register on the federal budget.

Even the USSR "created wealth" - it's just they did so with far less efficiency than the "private" sector would have.

That is true and perhaps I used a poor choice of words. But we spend a depressingly small amount on those things compared to the overall federal budget.

I completely disagree. A hammer is objectively more useful than the rock that it was extracted from, and the person who possesses it is more wealthy than the person who possessed the rock. But the beauty is that once the hammer can be made from the rock, the rock itself also becomes more valuable. A hammer-making corporation thus creates a lot of wealth from nothing but rock.

While I don't agree with their claim, you are seriously misrepresenting their point. They aren't saying that the government doesn't hire people - that would be very stupid. They argue that the government has to take resources from someone else in order to pay that person. Those resources could be used otherwise in the economy, such that you are eliminating a job's worth of economic activity in order to create a job.

They most certainly do! Every generation of plane that they have created is more efficient, safer, and easier to maintain than previous generations. The plane is a tool for other people to use to make money.

Where I part ways with the "government doesn't create jobs" people is that the view is too extreme. You can look hard and find instances of government creating wealth. They also completely ignore the fact that corporations are in fact granted a charter by the government and have very strong ties to the government. Their argument would better be stated as: in general, private enterprise is more efficient than government. That isn't as sexy, though. But don't completely dismiss their point, and if you do don't try to do it by playing games with language.

Exactly - if your "scientific" classification system can't even classify the President of the United States (let alone his children), it isn't of very much scientific value.

Sure, you can see a lot of people who clearly come from some place... but you can also see a lot more people who don't clearly fall into any bucket, especially in the US where everyone is so mixed up. You might see a redhead with curly hair and freckles, and that person may have a bunch of African ancestry despite those traits being so traditionally "Irish". Even if you were right about that person being "Irish" - so what? Irish people didn't always look like that - there has been quite a bit of genetic exchange over the millennia, and it is doubtful that your idea of what an Irish person looks like would be true when Christians were being fed to lions. So now your idea of "race" is frozen at some point in time. Scientifically, it is OK to say that race is meaningless as a classification system while still accepting that traits are heritable.

Because bats all ways twerk so weld.

How would you text without a free hand?

Naw, go look at their Yelp page. Hell, just Google them. This will sting.