The stock market reaching record highs in the face of a bigger money supply is called inflation. That's a Bad Thing(TM).

It doesn't increase our productive capacity, but instead it's a form of theft from people who have savings (people who fund large capital projects), to the benefit of people who receive the money: typically banks, the government, the politically well-connected (in that order).

How about nobody steals from anyone?

Also, your anecdote is nice, but in reality there's very little evidence to suggest higher taxes means more prosperity. Prosperity is very strongly correlated with rule of law, however, which requires a minimum of taxes, if any.

If you think the government is the most efficient spender of your money, I have sad news for you. I scarcely have time to discuss the wars, failed projects, spying, or hell, the fact New York prosecutors couldn't even get a an indictment for police officers who killed a guy they said wasn't paying taxes. Killed a guy for not paying taxes, as a result of a direct order to NYPD to crack down on tax evasion. If he were smoking a joint it would have merely been a summons! But I digress.

No, the fact of the matter is without cost and revenue, there is no profit or loss, and we can't know if we're efficiently allocating resources or just wasting them. All other industry except government would collapse if they squandered resources as much as the government does. Yet they do it. Over and over again.

All other industry has to buy inputs - raw materials, labor, capital - and combine it and sell the result for a higher price than they bought it for, hence producing value. The government just shoves a gun in your face.

Anyways, if you're happy with giving away your money like that, then cut the damn check yourself. You most certainly don't speak for all of us, though.

That has to be the longest ad hominem I've ever read.

Very carefully, taking as little as possible.

If necessary at all: Also note that the US had no income tax until 1913.

Said worker didn't have any guarantee of employment, did they? No?

No one is stopping them from getting another job, right?

But they are seeing the benefits of increased marginal productivity of the workforce, in the form of lower prices. For the working class, you think that would be a good thing.

Your alternatives are (1) require people to hire employees (um, that's called slavery); or (2) prohibit companies from buying capital goods. Which is, like, 100% of the reason we have modern technology. But hey, enjoy your horse and buggy!

Sorry, no. Jobs are, to a company, a calculated exchange. Everyone wants to minimize costs and maximize value produced, and often hiring people is better at that than any alternative, so they do that.

There's nothing inherently good about "job creation" though. Ideally, I should just think "Coca-Cola" and instantly it starts going down my throat. (In reality, I have to get up out of my chair and fork over a dollar bill or two. Oh the horror!) The market gets us pretty darn close, though, no one person could possibly have figured out how to manufacture things so cheaply; it's something that's emerged from a positively staggering amount of entrepreneurs acting independently on prices of inputs, combining them in all sorts of ways, and seeing what they can sell the result for.

The most important thing for a productive economy is rule of law. Taxes (under threat of violence) are one way to prevent that; as is actual violence.

True that entire markets would not be possible if there were no demand for them; but that's not to say entrepreneurs don't create jobs. They do: They own the capital and decide how to allocate it.

Automation doesn't destroy jobs, it increases the amount of goods that a single worker can produce, making everyone richer. Supply and demand in the labor market ensures that jobs are redistributed accordingly in the most efficient manner.

To be fair, a decade later they also passed the Alien and Sedition Acts.

*whoosh*

From what? What's colliding with player's skulls with such force they're going to get fractured?

Other sports manage to find solutions to this without helmets. Think wrestling, water polo.

Nothing in the entire Federalist, so-called Anti-Federalist papers, or drafts of the Bill of Rights support this theory. Major citation needed. If you can find this, great! But I can't.

I don't like intellectual property any more than the next guy on /., but the First Amendment was not written to intentionally or unintentionally supersede Congress' copyright law-making ability, which is more specific than the First amendment.

The order of the provisions don't matter. The Constitution is a single, cohesive work spread across something like a dozen sheets of paper (two for the unamended Constitution; one for the Bill of Rights and 27th amendment and including one proposed amendment not (yet) part of the Constitution; and whatever the rest of the amendments are written on).

Like all common law works, the order of the statutes doesn't matter, and the dates in which they were passed doesn't matter. Hence why laws repealed specifically mention the sections of the Code to modify, or which previous laws are null and void. It is called lex specialis and instead of refuting my point, you just reiterated your point without managing to explain the hard reality of common law away.

Another example:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Before this amendment, Congress already had no power to search and seize property (unless maybe they could work it into "necessary and proper", because it's generally agreed there needs to be some warrant system in order to serve justice).

After the amendment, now there's an exception! Now all of a sudden, the ability to search and seize property is in (very narrow) cases, actually permitted. For better or worse.

Regardless, now "necessary and proper" no longer applies to search warrants, the more specific Fourth Amendment is the exclusive statute on what's lawful.