A lot of young people were blanently lied to about what constitutes a "job skill", but instead of being pissed at the schools that gave them useless skills and charged them $100k for the priveledge, they're pissed at companies who won't employ them to do the useless things they're trianed at. There is certianly a legitimate grievance in that case, but the anger seems misdirected.

The world doesn't owe you anything, you know - you need to find something to do that other people want or need, not just somehting that seems valuable to you.

Or were you talking about something else?

I'm just baffeled by your non-sequitor here. Is this some strawman you haul out whenever you need to attack something? Were you trying to make some actual point here, or just repeating a comforting mantra?

Nah, there will be clear and well-understood male/female communications, which so violates the rules of the universe that the universe itself will be destroyed and remade. Bet on it.

There's very little need for power to be symmetrically distributed - the buyer needs the power to choose from mutliple sellers, and to actually get what he was promised in the transaction, that's about it. Information is different, fraud prevention is a quite important function of government after all.

Look at how the commodities markets work. Almost anyone would consider those a free market, yet there's tons of rules involved. But there are few actual laws, mostly where non-economic disincentives for cheating need to be added, and most of the rules are procedural. It's a "free" market because the governement doesn't limit who can buy or sell, nor at what price, not because anything goes.

No I got your point. I'm jut saying you might be very wrong about what's better for the working poor. "Better" is a question of values, and yours are not universal. People are pretty damn savvy about their own self-interest, so when they seem to be voting against it you should consider that they just might not share your values.

Also, "cutting off social safety net funding" might very well be an effective way to help people work for their keep, if that action creates tons of jobs, which is the argument being made. Yes, every net $X in taxes you raise is one less job out there, and one more person in the safety net. It really does work that way, it's just a question of X.

First crack and then meth surfaced after the DEA started really cracking down on cocaine.

Well, I don't either, but which choice is net worse for society, the downside of meth, or the masive downsides of the war on drugs (over-the-top imprisonment of Americans, vast corruption problems, street gangs armed with automatic weapons, and now we're seeing no-go areas in the southwest where the police have just given up). If General Mills made cocaine, it would cost the same as coffee and most of those problems would vanish - and meth might vanish as well. Maybe not - but that's the conversation to be having, not "meth is icky".

In a free market, both the buyers and sellers are free to choose. Yes, it is very much fine for the sellers to push as hard as they want to to sell their goods. It's up to the buyers to decide what they need. The problem here is that the decisions are being made by third parties - doctors and sometimes parents - who sometimes don't act with the best interests of the consumer.

But in any case, the closer the decision making is to the consumer, the better (cases where the consumer by the very nature of the problem can't be the one making the decision are always going to be problematic).

Ultimitely working for what you get is better for the human spirit than handouts. And there really is a trade off between the amount of handouts and the difficulty of self-sufficiency. But it's easier to just accuse people of greed and meanness than think things through, I guess.

Companies exist to game the system for maximum profits. Markets pit them against one another for the least-bad system - other systems, especially central planning, just gt gamed worse.

It's amazing how often, in this day and age, governments keep creating legal monopolies/oligopolies.

Hard liquor consumption shot up during prohibition, and fell since repeal. Prohibition generally means more people on the more dangerous and addictive forms of whatever drug. Prohibition defeinity causes collateral damage to skyrocket, as it's the only source of enough income for street gangs to buy automatic weapons.

Just because X is bad does not always mean that society is better off if X is illegal - the details matter.