I have no control over the increasing average weight of the population at large, but am currently being charged for it by all airlines other than Samoa Air.

Funny you should mention the long straight roads. Not too far away, there's a piece of Autobahn (the A44) that's very straight, concreted in the middle (with removable barriers), has trees trimmed back from it and has two very large parking areas at either end. Why is it like this? In case the Russians attacked. Planes would take off from the US. By the time they were ready to land in Germany, the barriers would have been removed from the median and the whole thing would have been set up as an emergency runway.

Whilst there are a few in the area I live in, there are very few roundabouts in Germany.

At least as I understand TFA, traffic circles as you know them are not the same as the roundabouts now being introduced. On a traditional traffic circle, circulating traffic should yield to entering traffic, whereas on a roundabout, it's the other way round. The Wikipedia article on traffic circles appears to confirm this view.

So it's capitalism, but you want the government to intervene to artificially increase losses by seizing assets? You believe in the free market, but don't believe it's able to punish companies who are fined or lose executives because of misbehavior?

I don't argue (and haven't argued) that the company shouldn't in some way be punished (the suggestion that the company loses all proceeds from a contract they won by kickbacks seems like a sensible starting point), only that rubycodez' suggestion that the company be liquidated was seriously ill-thought-through.

So, let's say you have a retirement fund. You pay in your $100/month or whatever. The fund manager invests some of the money in the fund in a company that's doing well, has a sound business model, etc. The executives of that company are, unbeknownst to the fund manager, paying kickbacks and engaging in other illegal behaviour. According to you and the OP, once this is found out, you lose a chunk of your retirement fund? How is that in any way related to any concept of justice? It doesn't matter whether the victims of the kickbacks are the taxpayers or anyone else, that's no good reason to create more victims by arbitrarily confiscating the assets of people who've done nothing more criminal than (in this example) saving for their retirement.

The people committing the crime should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. People who unwittingly provided the capital with which the crime was performed are innocent.

Not to mention that if only the executives know about it, the shareholders or owners suddenly lose their entire investment - even though, if they'd known about the behaviour in question, they might have immediately terminated the executives in question and notified the authorities.

Punishing the innocent is something I often think of as best avoided.

So what you're saying is that the market has chosen and its choice was that your steel should be more expensive due to lack of foreign competition as a result of the world's most obtuse protectionist obstacle to free trade?

HIs brain's warped, but not by MySQL, which supports this just fine, even with MyISAM.

I could be wrong, but I thing the GGP's "anything better to do" was sarcastic, pointing at the fact that the police have lots of better things to be doing, so why are we hiring them out to police private parties? I don't necessarily agree with him, just pointing out the alternative interpretation.

And having lived in the UK for 20 years and Germany for 10, I'll take the NHS. What do your personal preferences (or for that matter mine) have to do with the debate at hand?

The US government spends a lot of money on foreign aid (although not nearly as much as most Americans think it does). That doesn't mean it's running foreign countries.

I'm English and live in Germany. I'm mostly amazed that, even if I'm misinformed about the odd thing here and there, I have a better grasp of the proposed reform than most of the Americans I speak to.

Incidentally, I think your post was more replying to the grandparent post, not to me.