I'm not disputing what you claim, just saying that your use case is marginal. It's like snowmobiles. Some people use them for work. For the most part, they are toys.

I'm going to throw an assumption out there: very, very few people are doing this. Yes, you could - in theory - "dock" your phone/tablet and do productive things with it. But a really top-notch phone is going to cost you $600+ and a really low-end computer that can kick the shit out of it will cost $200. I think that anyone who can afford the monitor, keyboard, and high-end phone will probably not sweat the cheap cpu too much.

So in the end, while I'm sure there are people in the fringes doing productive things on their phones and tablets, for the vast majority they are toys. This is not meant to be a disparaging comment - I have a smartphone, I have tablets... but I don't do anything more productive on them than take short notes and check email. Mostly they are consumption devices.

Perfectly allowed? ISIS is being bombed by the US military!

(sorry for the obscurity)

Corporations are government. They get their charter from government, and most of the big ones have very tight ties to government through lobbying and contracts. Corporations now do almost all of the actual work that we typically associate with government. It's a way of letting us have a ruling class while still maintaining the facade of democracy.

And I guess at the end of the day, we could always pass a law revoking corporate charters. Good luck with that, though.

What you said is true, but obvious. Effectiveness on global CO2 levels aside, the CA program has been a success by other measures. They intended it to be a pilot program, and it looks like it has mostly worked out from a technical standpoint. They have demonstrated that the system is workable from an administrative and bureaucratic standpoint. Few people are silly enough to think that CO2 emissions can be handled on a local (or even national) level - but having what is effectively one of the largest economies in the world to use as an example is a pretty good start.

Well, here you go!

On the surface, it has been quite successful. But you have to remember that most of the reduction has come from natural gas displacing coal - which thanks to fracking would have happened even without the carbon trading.

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.