If power is removed from government, some other entities will gain that power and become the new evil that must be fought.

I believe there are occasional market externalities that need to be dealt with via government. However the problem is that most people feel everything is a market externality that needs to be dealt with via government, thus government has too much power.

What is keeping YOU from competing with your local cable provider on higher-quality Internet connectivity? If you could prove to investors that your offering would be profitable, and they would invest in you because rich people like making money.

But then you would have to go to your local cable franchise board (set up because people feel that cable service is a "natural monopoly" that is not amenable to market forces, which is BS), and then you would have to fight against government power to be able to legally offer a service that people want.

Politicians are patently not answerable at the ballot box, by and large, or so many unpopular bits of legislation would not be passing.

I regularly vote against politicians who pass legislation I don't agree with. Why everyone else is sheep and votes for the incumbents is unclear to me!

starting with removing the corrupting influence of money

I have news for you, the corrupting influence of money will remain AS LONG AS POLITICIANS HAVE POWER. Money will "route around" such "campaign finance reforms". That is why all the campaign finance reforms put in place since the 1970's have consistently achieved nothing (except for allowing incumbents to hold on to power more strongly).

Politicians are always answerable at the ballot box. If you vote for politicians who promise to REMOVE POWER FROM GOVERNMENT, you will REMOVE THE POTENTIAL FOR CORRUPTION.

Most of our "Internet problems" are last mile problems. These are not national problems. You need to show up to your local government meetings and work on last mile access. I suggest local government reduce barriers to entries for new local ISPs (my suggestion). Or perhaps local governments should build open FTTH (which of course would be open to corruption to the contractors who build it, but perhaps that is better). But local is where to deal with this issue.

Neither country has ever carried out a test

You don't need a test for a U-235 gun-type fission weapon. It is too simple to make. "Little Boy" was never tested. But purifying U-235 is a huge industrial undertaking.

And it probably isn't too hard to work out the implosion mechanisms for a plutonium fission weapon either.

Getting fusion-boosted weapons to work might be a tad bit harder to do without practical experience.

So what kind of circuit is it?

I assume it is BJT based?

I can confirm that the Panasonic TC-L65WT600 65" 4K UHDTV can play 60 fps 4K over its HDMI 2.0 connector (yes, I actually have access to 4K/60p content and a 4K/60p video server). I have seen it for as low as $3500 on BestBuy.com.

World War 2 dragged the U.S. out of recession.

WW2 reduced private spending. The private component of GDP fell after 1941, and while the war lasted, private output never recovered to its pre-Pearl Harbor level. In 1943, real private GDP was 14% lower than it had been in 1941.

It was the end of WW2 (and perhaps co-indicdent with the destruction of Fascism and death of FDR, both large concerns of business leaders before the war) that allowed private spending to return to pre-war levels.

There were actually some economists who thought that the end of WW2 would plunge the world into another Great Depression due to the end of massive government defense spending. US government spending was cut nearly in half from 1945 ($118B) to 1947 ($57B). But the private economy boomed after WW2 despite the dramatic cuts in government spending.

These folks simply do not understand that the underlying goal is to drive U.S. wages to third world levels by introducing large labor surpluses.

It is unlikely that any surplus of labor would lead employers to pay significantly less than the productivity of a worker, especially in sectors such as computer programming where barriers to entry are low and new firms can rapidly form.

It is possible that labor surpluses could actually lower the prices of goods and services in general, which can benefit consumers.

for those who talk about expanding the economy to accommodate millions of new workers; how's that working for you?

Research suggests that "U.S. natives (especially high-skill natives) appear to have benefited from greater availability and reduced prices of nongraded goods and services that are intensive in low-skill labor"

Complimentary labor from low-skilled immigrants makes things better for high-skilled natives, although it may have a small negative effect on the earnings of low-skilled natives (especially those that drop out of high school).

BTW, I know several women in tech fields who only have the opportunity to work because of the low cost of services from immigrant nannies for their young children, immigrant house cleaners, etc.

Your argument is that the United States should be the only country in the world with open immigration?

Okay... lets do that. And then lets see how long your welfare and entitlement programs last with millions crossing the border and suddenly getting full social security benefits, EBT, etc.

I'm sure plenty of people would like to move to the US to work even if they do not get any entitlement benefits. Ethically, that would probably be better than forcing people to stay in places where they live at under $1 per day...

Warren Buffett once suggested a 100% capital gains tax on assets held less than a year.

Warren Buffet's main business is insurance, so he would like to encourage you to try to put your heritable funds into non-taxable insurance rather than into funds your children will directly inherit.

The "value" of stock is by no means connected to real world revenue of the issuing corporations anymore. It's just dependent on expectations of stock traders and whether or not they have any "faith" in the paper.

Actually equities price to earnings ratio (P/E) is highly correlated with 20-year annualized returns, (see graph here).

one in which financial returns are the priority, independent of whether they're associated with something innovative or useful in the real world.

Adam Smith pointed out in 1776...

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

You don't pay employer taxes when you hire a contractor.

The IRS says "There is no "magic" or set number of factors that "makes" the worker an employee or an independent contractor, and no one factor stands alone in making this determination."

But you can submit Form SS-8, Determination of Worker Status for Purposes of Federal Employment Taxes and Income Tax Withholding (PDF) with the IRS. The IRS will review the facts and circumstances and officially determine the worker's status. Be aware that it can take at least six months to get a determination.

I don't want my tax dollars subsidizing Sam Walton's low prices

I would prefer for tax transfers to "top up" low income people rather than distort the market through price floors on labor, that may lead to less employment of the less productive, and may raise prices for all.

I feel that it is better to take a few dollars from a rich person through taxes than to say to a person who only produces $9 per hour that they can't have a job because the wage floor is $10 per hour.

Moreover, wages are a price signal, and perhaps people should know that not finishing high school and getting additional post-secondary training or education does not lead to $10 per hour wages, but more like $5 per hour.

Your examples of Communism had little to do with actual communism

I prefer to look at real-world track records.

Capitalism (economic freedom and secure private property rights) has a great record of dramatically expanding economic growth and delivering tremendous technological innovation. It has also lead to income and/or wealth inequality, but even the poorest of capitalist countries experience improvements in well-being over time.

Attempts to "fix" capitalism through reductions in economic freedom (such as labor rigidities such as high wage floors, costly firing, etc.) and also overly high levels of redistribution generally find a point of diminishing returns and often are retrenched (see Germany's Hartz reforms).

The track records of attempts to have "common ownership" of the means of production has generally lead to violence, poverty, and lack of innovation. I would like to suggest that this is because the ownership is never truly "common", the ownership resides in political power, of politicians (elected or not) who are rent-seekers on the means of production, and they may have political needs to maintain power that is greater than economic profit of the means of production.

This is opposed to capitalism where ownership resides in those who put their actual capital at risk and are seeking actual profit by meeting the needs of customers.

CEO's may not always represent the best interests of shareholders, but shareholders can always sell their shares and invest elsewhere. It is typically difficult to exit a "common ownership" system.

China is informative, where common ownership is being converted into capitalist ownership, with great reductions in poverty along with higher levels of income inequality.