lol

They teach you that in grade school? Where was the freedom and justice for the natives, or the slaves, or the women, or the non-Protestants? Where was freedom for the interned Japanese, or justice for people accused of Communism during the red scare? Where was the freedom and justice for all the South Americans and Middle Easterners, as they were ruled by our blood-thirsty puppets?

Fuck, was there ever even a single ten year period in which this country "held to the standards of freedom and justice"?

No. There never was. This country is great because it was founded by people who could easily slaughter their only nearby opponents. It's great because after slaughtering the natives, there were ample resources to go around. It's great because our ancestors were immoral enough to build an economy on the backs of slaves, and later on the backs of immigrants who worked themselves to death in hopes of attaining a wealth that none would ever see. It's great because we were left nearly untouched while the rest of the developed world was bombed to ash during WWII. It's great by accident.

Don't blame the NSA for ruining the Land of the Free. That place never existed outside of storybooks. Reality has always been a lot messier, you're just noticing it for the first time.

Yeah, tell me how that worked out for the bankers? And at least the NSA folks were trying to work for us, even if they went about it in the worst way possible. The bankers were trying (with great success!) to enrich themselves at our expense. Hell, HSBC literally laundered money for mass-murdering drug kingpins. How many of them saw the inside of a cell?

Jail is for the poor.

You don't say.

There is a world of difference between gold and Bitcoins. Gold was always valuable in itself, before anybody used it as money, people wanted it just because the metal was fairly rare and easy to make jewellery from. It's not like gold was found and immediately people said: that's money. No, gold was a metal that was desired for thousands of years, then eventually it was used as money also for thousands of years. Gold was storing value for people before people started commonly using it as money, the metal proved itself to be capable of withstanding the test of time in business of storing value.

Bitcoins were intended to be money from the beginning, their entire existence is for one purpose: to be money. In that sense Bitcoins are a currency, and since they are not backed by anything (no gold behind Bitcoins), they are a FIAT currency. The difference is that they are not printed by government, but the scarcity argument is moot, every bit of Bitcoin is about as 'valuable' as any other bit. One Bitcoin is essentially 10Million coins, each one can take an arbitrary value. More importantly, competing electronic fiat currencies exist and there will be more and more of them as more people want to participate in this new electronic currency market.

To say that Bitcoins store value is premature AT BEST, I don't think Bitcoins will become less volatile with time, I think they will be more volatile with time, I don't think they store value, I think they are an interesting vehicle for speculation and many disciplined day traders can make a killing trading these, but there is no value outside of its direct purpose: be currency.

Some say that the protocol and the network are the value, but again, those are replicated across many other currencies and there will be more of them, there is nothing special about Bitcoin except for it being first, but being first also has disadvantages. With Bitcoin prices going up, every time the price goes up, the risk that one takes buying them is bigger than the day before. There was very little risk buying 1000 Bitcoins at a few dollars a few years back. Today to buy 1000 Bitcoins you need half a million or more dollars and given the speculative nature and volatility, very few people will buy 1000 Bitcoins, but they will buy a few or maybe fractions - coins of smaller denomination. Or maybe they'll buy other coins, that are perceived to be cheaper.

Basically declaring that Bitcoin is a store of value is extremely premature but also is most likely completely false.

So a former MS exec is now in charge of USA 'health insurance' system. I wonder, how much time before MS is hired to write a secondary system that will replace the original one (at a hefty price tag, of-course)?

Yeah, you are one of those. There are no 'worker rights', there are no 'women rights', there are no 'children rights', there are no 'gay rights', there are no 'disabled rights', there are no 'racial minority rights', there are only group privileges, which impose obligations upon somebody else to provide those privileges and that means that some groups of people exert legislative and thus lethal (as in bullets) power over other groups of people.

Unions are not interested in YOUR rights, they are interested in THEIR privileges, they want special status, special treatment, MONOPOLY on the supply of labour so they can extract undue profits from the economy, where the economy would rather see much more efficiency.

Inflation steals savings. Deflation does not steal anything, deflation increases value of your savings while simultaneously and as a side effect causing lowering of prices, which is a wonderful effect of increasing productivity. Capital gains taxes are paid on capital gains, which in case of a company, that would pay that to its owner means that that's money that was already taxed on the corporate level, but the end result is: the same owner first sees 35% tax and then 15% capital gains tax, so it's either a complete lack of understanding on the part of people who like to compare apples to hand grenades or it's wilful ignorance, designed to rile up the ignorant mob around a fake issue.

But since you asked: "what is your point", I will make it clear what my point is, and I already made it a number of times - income related taxes are illegal and immoral, and they are collected illegally.

I would absolutely treat all types of income in exactly the same way, they all should be paying the exact same rate: 0%

That's the only acceptable income related tax rate, any rate higher than that implies you do not own yourself, you don't own your productive output, the gov't owns you and it simply decides how much of your own productive output you are allowed to keep and how much will be stolen from you on any given day.

Let's speculate! I think Satoshi Nakamoto is actually a space alien, who introduced the Bitcoin on this planet in order to run his personal intergalactic ponzi scam. Bitcoins are just a tip of the GAWAY group (Galaxy Way), next thing you know, you are peddling your kidneys in the back alleys in exchange for Bitcoins, which you are promptly exchanging for the next dose of Jupiter III Moonshine dust so you can snort it off the back of a three legged blue-skinned tentacle'd hooker with tits for ears. Of-course you have to sell sell sell, that's the GAWAY, and so you have to try and pull your relatives into it, friends, friends of relatives, relatives of friends, relatives of relatives of friends' friends. Either they'll all become part of GAWAY or you will find yourself without any of those categories of people around you.

Right, what it actually means is that if you hold Euros for a year or more and in that time period the Federal reserve in tandem with the USA Treasury and thus the Congress decide NOT to increase the national debt, then you may not see this 'capital gains' tax.

Capital gains tax in the age of gov't created inflation is simply theft via both: first the value of your currency is stolen, secondly, if you don't hold your currency and are smart enough to avoid the inflation tax, they want your money anyway, so it's 'capital gains' tax. Gov't is not supposed to own people, but that's what ended up happening.

It's an advertisement. It's not supposed to make your life better. It's supposed to extract money from you.

It's the fucking NSA, man, they can't even intercept comments here without screwing up the site! Oh, I wonder just how many NSA man hours are wasted moderating every single one of my comments...

Seriously? Last time USA engaged in this type of activity (of-course coupled with Medicare introduction, SS expansion, business regulations expansion, basically creating and expanding all the worst parts of government), USA ended up DEFAULTING on its promise to the world to keep a gold reserve, USA defaulted on the gold dollar in 1971, all the current problems can be traced to that default and that default can be traced to government expansion of power. So you are saying: all that USA lacks is backbone. You ever stop and think, what exactly is the end goal? Is it to completely wipe out the economy? Well, you are pretty much there already.

China has no debt, China as a nation has a gigantic surplus and it has enough savings in the Treasury to negate a tiny external debt that exists for strategic reasons. Inside China there are debts to other Chinese and while it is problematic, the fact that some Chinese owe other Chinese something that cannot be repaid in the long run, this does not change the fact that China is a productive nation without international debt and it can afford an internal housing market crash for example without negative consequences to the economy. On the contrary, while the housing market crash in USA caused it a recession due to the fact that purchasing power of USA consumer is tied so much to their ability to refinance their mortgages, in China the housing market crash would only strengthen the economy, because their economy is not dependent on an asset bubble constantly inflating. In their case if the housing prices go down, it doesn't affect their ability to purchase consumer goods, it increases this ability, as the housing prices, rent will go down as well, so it's a boon. Falling prices opens up new markets, only the backwards Keynesians can't figure out that falling prices is a good thing for the consumers.

Anyway, good luck with your theories, they are not yours of-course, they are created for your consumption.

Stop judging all feminists by a handful of extremists. I guarantee that WHATEVER your beliefs on ANY topic, I can find some one with an extreme version, and then use that to write you off as an idiot.

It's intellectually dishonest, it's bigoted, don't do it.

The Chinese have the money to do this, no debt, huge Treasury reserves, huge surpluses. If the response by /. here is: USA should do this again, then the very next question should be: with what money? Chinese already have come out about 2 weeks ago with the statement that they won't be buying any more US Treasuries.