You know, very few people can claim to have actually met the guy that invented Get off my lawn!

From your constant insistence, over multiple comments, that under your proposed system nobody would "have" to work. I consider it a privilege to be able to work to provide for myself and my family, not a burden to be cast off at the first opportunity. My ideal world is one where everybody has the ability and opportunity to work for a living wage, not one where everybody gets free stuff.

As a matter of strict values, I share your vision of a world where nobody goes hungry or cold. But I strongly disagree with your path to getting there. You consider a world where nobody has to work as a utopia. My observation is just the opposite. If you take effort away from people, they tend to become entitled, lazy, selfish, and (ironically, with more leisure time) miserable. They may have enough to eat, but they lose so much of their humanity that they become less excellent as people. There is intrinsic value to hard work. In my experience, people who work hard (up to a certain limit) are happier. A society of bored people is one where crime is rampant and people are full of envy and strife (because nothing begets envy like a sense of entitlement). And that's not even to mention practical issues, like the inflation that dogs basic income economies.

My "utopia" is one where everybody works hard when they're working. When they're not working, ideally, they're building strong nuclear and extended families, raising children with a strong work ethic, and teaching them that when they are able, they should help those whose efforts have been less fruitful than their own. That help involves, for example, helping people through tough times, or giving them a lift while they do something to improve themselves like get an education or start a business. The end goal is always for everybody to get to a point where they can support themselves by their own efforts, so that nobody is dependent on government largess (as opposed to everybody). In fact, government hardly enters into it, except for providing some basic infrastructure and emergency services.

Perhaps that society is not possible in our present human condition, but it is an ideal I would sooner seek after than one where an over-powerful central government deals with poverty by subsidizing laziness.

Do you actually feel embarrassed about having posted this, or did you do it willingly?

Sex is a lot more comfortable on a soft, roomy bed. And I don't want my car to smell like bodily fluids. I'm going to spend the time reading.

I think you misunderstand the "Supreme" part of the "Supreme Court," and the legal doctrine of res judicata.

You seem to make it an either/or proposition. You can have laws that prevent these kinds of abuses without having huge regulatory bodies that just end up being the lapdogs of the "regulated" industry.

And you just disproved your thesis. The end result of a body that regulates a business sector is always that the regulators get in bed with the people they're supposedly regulating and work together to erect barriers to entry into their cozy little oligopoly. Throwing more money at them will not fix the problem.

Well, I didn't actually say anything about Senator McCarthy. It is true that there were communist infiltrators, and it is true that the Rosenbergs were guilty. I'm talking about J. Edgar Hoover, who had secret files on pretty much every person in power in America. Like that dangerous communist, John F. Kennedy, for example, who knew not to mess with J. Edgar because J. Edgar could prove that Jack was bedding two or three different women a week. How many current politicians know not to mess with the NSA, because they know the NSA could scuttle their careers?

Unfortunately, when it happens, the good things about the USA will fall with it. I admit, I enjoy being in a place where I can live on a nice suburban street with minimal immediate worries, drive a comfortable car with air conditioning, gas it up when necessary, and purchase as much food as I need at the grocery store whenever I need it. When the house of cards comes tumbling down, the WHOLE house of cards will come with it. Of course, our runaway spending will probably topple it before the iron fist of the NSA. But when it does happen, it will hardly matter what the most immediate exciting cause was.

No one, or almost no one, gets that high in the political machine without having some serious skeletons in the closet. And who knows where all those skeletons are hidden? Oh, yeah. The NSA. QED

Actually, the saying is, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." It was H.L. Mencken who said it.

I don't know about that. I'm sure it's been about as successful as J. Edgar Hoover's mid-century communism witch hunts, which had more to do with propping up Hoover's own personal empire than with catching communists.

Then you need to study the history of the 20th Century, and eugenics.

Perhaps the answer is to remember that "information wants to be free," and therefore it's a bad idea to beat up some random guy because he spilled beer on your girlfriend if that's not the kind of reputation you want to have. In the meantime, other people can consider whether this 20-year-old assault charge is or is not relevant to their particular circumstances. If I'm looking to hire somebody where overall emotional sobriety and self control are important, I'd at least want to find out if he'd cooled his temper in the past 20 years. If I'm interested in the guy's credit before I complete a financial transaction with him, I couldn't care less about his 20 year old assault charge.