From the summary:

'food additives require premarket approval based on data demonstrating safety submitted to the agency' -- and caffeine is a food additive

Requiring premarket approval does not mean it is banned, just that you need approval. Before you market it.

This was figured out 40 years ago. Send couples, the come back for the next generation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_in_a_Strange_Land

Did you save the graph?

One major miss in your assessment is that deflation is related to the local currency. Most of the raw materials are imported. So if the yuan falls against the Australian dollar, copper becomes more expensive to the Chinese in real terms. Deflation continues to make the finished product less valuable.

If they were not a minority, these laws would not be passed and existing ones would be overturned

A founding principle of our republic is minority rights and majority rule. I think that gets overlooked at times.

I put in my time at Circuit City many years ago. Around the end of that time they had just started moving some departments from commission to hourly. I say this is the #1 reason they eventually tanked. Commisioned people are more motivated. Good commissioned people are more interested in repeat business than the immediate sale.
I haven't paid any attention to CE retailers and I'm not one to really go to the big box stores as a consumer too often. I do know that when I started working for CC beating a competitor's price by 10% of the difference was new in the industry and we did shop and match competitor's prices (We'd go in with hidden mics and record model prices).

And I would _really_ like to see major software companies arguing that software patents are invalid.

I realize I'm posting too late to ever get read, but this another arguement into my head:

If I duplicate Facebook's site and change only the breast policy, do you think that people will switch, even though the new one is better?

If you were to duplicate Facebook's site, you'd be immediately sued into oblivion. IIRC, I've seen a few stories about Facebook's patents get posted over the last couple years. Then there are the trademark and copyright concerns.

In effect, Facebook has a government protected monopoly. As such, they are obligated to open and accessable. If they decide to ban a (protected) class of people based on private proptery rights, they should be obligated to return the public property they have in the forms of patents, trademarks, and copyrights.

Even in GD Part I there was plenty of food produced in this country. Deflation caused a lot of farms to go under, but we had food surpluses. Distribution is what gets tricky and I'm not sure that we have as good a system in place to feed those that need help as we did back then.