Even if you wanted to say that something that happened in the 12th Century is relevant, those were regional power struggles under the guise of religion.

Somehow you think the situation today is any different?

You can't explain that away by anything other than we're experiencing massive spending increases that have no relation to anything but that the feds just want to spend more money.

To be a little more complete, the "partners" of the feds who own private concerns doing contract business with the US government want the feds to spend more money. Government payrolls? Way down since 2000. Direct government assistance? Doesn't even come close to making up that increase.

The federal government wastes its money lining the pockets and coffers of private businesses. I believe that if it's worth it for government to spend money on something, then the government should operate it. Schools (local government), prisons, military, roads, etc. The only exception should be commodity procurement necessary for operations where there is a competitive marketplace.

I find it ludicrous that there are companies that contract with the US government whose executive compensation is in the tens or hundreds of millions per year. Civil servants should be doing their jobs.

When you pay back investors of government bonds here is what happens. They get a TON of extra capital. Where does it go? Back to the stock market and to the private sector in lines of credit for small business to hire and expand.

It goes into inflation. Buying back bonds doesn't increase GDP, it simply increases the cash in circulation relative to GDP.

Furthermore, with interest rates currently so low, and bond buyback serving to reduce yields, you end up with a situation where banks and other entities are even less likely to invest money in the economy at large.

You have it backwards. Issuing government bonds is a counter to inflation; buying them back can cause inflation.

Elections do, indeed, have consequences... the American people gave a large majority in the House of Representatives (where all taxes and spending are constitutionally-required to originate) to the Republicans

And yet Democrats received a majority of the votes for House members... not just a plurality, a majority... yet the Republicans used their control of Statehouses to gerrymander the shit out of Congressional districts.

The House Republicans have no mandate. The people of the US voted against them. Only chicanery has let them keep a majority in the House.

The American People did not choose to have Republicans control the House. It is fact that a majority of Americans voted for Democrats in the House this election cycle.

Your point does not stand.

Atheists don't believe in evil.

Bullshit. I'm an atheist, and I believe in evil. It may not be your version of "Evil" (so I agree with you on the subjective part). But then again, all morality is subjective.

But I digress.

And how does voting for evil fix anything?

Voting for the lesser of two evils, as he said, does make a difference (inasmuch as any single vote can make a difference). Faced with a choice between two undesirable outcomes, you opt for the less undesirable one. This is basic rationality, here... not sure how you could be confused by it.

You know that smelly unkempt guy who shows up at your LAN party and has just about every cheat installed and who shouts PWN! every time his aimbot blows your guy's head off? Yeah...the guy you want to knife in the Kidneys.

These guys will run for office one day as a Democrat.

Horseshit. We all know that guy is a libertarian.

But this is just disappointing. That "cheap import worker" has every bit the same right to the job that you do. There's no moral reason to deny it to him.

True. But there is a moral issue with allowing the company, who benefits from local society (infrastructure, security, etc), to receive those benefits without contributing appropriately. We can impose restrictions on a company's behavior in exchange for allowing them to benefit from our collective activity.

The key there is what behaviors we choose to permit or deny in exchange for what we give to that company.

For example, it is common for a locality to provide public roads, police service, emergency fire and medical coverage, education, etc to a company in exchange for that company providing jobs and workforce development in that location. To me, this is an specific abstraction of the general societal contract between employers and the general public. When a company decides to import cheap labor to avoid paying market rate on local labor, that is a violation of the societal contract, and thus is immoral.

Employers get the benefit of being located in the US, without bearing their share of costs. Not good.

But I am really under the impression that most visa are issues because one could not find a local ( == US) worker to fill the position in.

That's the official line. In fact, for many temporary visas, that's the only reason the visa will be granted.

But in actuality, it's not the case. The truth is that by increasing supply of qualified workers, companies can keep the price for those workers low. Basic microeconomics at play.

In my experience, the way it generally works is that the largest H1B-using companies actually provide the training necessary to meet their requirements via either related parties (offshore affiliates) or outsourcing firms. Then, because they haven't trained anyone locally in the skillset they need, they get those employees to come here under H1B.

Basically, instead of investing in the training in specific skills in local employees, they do so overseas. Then we watch those skills go back to the employees' home country with them.

I believe we need to increase the standard of living across the globe wherever we can. But I do not believe that companies allowed to operate in a certain country should be allowed to get away with not investing in the workforce of that specific country when they need skills there.

In that vein, I think we need to get rid of H1B and most other temporary visas. I believe all foreign workers who come here should be required to file for US citizenship. We bring over bright, well-educated, risk-taking people... them watch them leave after a few years, bringing their knowledge and experience back to their home countries. We are left with little to show for it, other than profit to their employer.

We should welcome these people with open arms, and have them settle here and contribute to our society for their lifetime. This has been one of the foundations of the US's success over the past couple centuries... why are we abandoning it now?

Risk-taking immigrants are the historical source of the US's economic vitality. Let's get back to what made this a great nation, and welcome not only "your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free", but also your innovators, your risk-takers, your eager engineers yearning to create.

No one deserves a "living wage" or any wage except what someone is willing to pay.

True. But that doesn't mean we can't to encourage employers to be willing to pay a living wage.

We can do this lots of ways, such as limiting their ability to import cheap workers, or by instituting fines for them paying too little (to expand upon this, I think we need to rais ethe minimum wage a la Australia to an actual liveable wage). I don't see a problem with 'nudging' employers to be willing to pay a living wage. You may, but that's because you're a pseudo-anarchist.

No one deserves anything from another, except to be left alone when desired

That's your opinion, and I respect that. I disagree, however, and I believe that we, as a whole, owe each other the opportunity to pursue action at the societal, rather than the individual, level.

That may be going a little to far, but the simple fact is: the total energy released in earthquakes represents a constant power input. Fracking may change the timing (for better or worse), but it has no effect whatsoever on the input power, or the total release energy over time.

Even if that is true (and I can think of a couple reasons it may not be true at any scale that is useful for discussion), it's meaningless. The "over time" qualifier is the tricky one... it's possible for the tectonic stress to be dissipated in a non-violent manner, over a long enough timescale. But we're not really concerned about low energy dissipation over millions of years... we're concerned about the one big event that causes catastrophic damage. And just as there is a straw that broke the camel's back, just as there is a keystone without which an arch will fail, the worry is that some action related to fracking may enable the release of a hug amount of energy in a very short time.

I think fracking is most likely viable; but I also believe we must act with caution and mitigate our risks. "Damn the torpedoes" is no way to run an energy industry when other people's lives are at stake.

- most people were producing food around the world, I said that industrialization allowed the economy to gain efficiencies necessary to shift most people from food production to something else, I didn't talk about any specific locality. Today farming is 1.2% of the reported GDP of USA and 6.1% of the reported world GDP. [wikipedia.org]

Nothing to do with my point. You're not addressing what the status was pre-industrialization. You're also ignoring mechanization, which has driven gains in yields wrt labor far, far more than industrialization.

OTOH 300 years ago [google.com] most of workforce was occupied in farming and farming related activities. (open that link and scroll a page down for actual statistics).

You equate agriculture with food production. They are not equivalent. Read the link you provided... 60% of the economy was based on agriculture... but a significant portion of that agriculture was non-food items (wood production, for example, is agricultural, but wood is obviously not a food item). Furthermore, % of the economy does not equate to % employed in food production.

If it's not growing in one particular day at the same rate that it is growing in the overall sense, over years, then it doesn't change the fact.

US government has been shrinking for three years. Cherrypick timelines all you want, you're still lying. You claimed it's the fastest-growing sector of the economy, and that's just false. Over the longer timelines you NOW reference, many sectors have grown faster than government. Healthcare. Telecom. Take your pick, there are many.

As to manufacturing - in USA manufacturing is shrinking, not growing. The pathetic little bit of growth that registered in the last 2 months is in assembling, not manufacturing, they don't grow manufacturing in USA and assembly is not the same thing.

Now you';re just making shit up to support a point, again. Stop lying. Manufacturing has been growing steadily, albeit slowly, since the end of the nominal recession in 2010, with a brief pause in Jun-Jul of this year.

Yes, it's true, the service sector is growing in USA, that's just like government, it adds to the trade deficit

What the hell are you talking about? Service sector growth doesn't add to the trade deficit. I have no idea where you get your "information" from, but you clearly have no fucking idea about economics.

(well, I consider the Federal reserve to be an arm of the government).

I see. you choose to deliberately believe something that is false. Extrapolated to everything else you write... makes sense to me.

I'm done discussing with you, it's a waste of my time. But please stop lying and making claims out of ignorance, it'd be a shame for your idiocy to spread further.

But capitalism became the main factor in the real push towards industrialization

This is false. The push towards industrialization was driven by demand for cheaply produced goods. Capitalism was a means towards an end, not a driving factor wrt industrialization.

...industrialization, and that's what really turned the economy into a much more productive one, so majority of people stopped being farmers, hunters, gatherers, fishers altogether,

Most people weren't food producers prior to industrialization, you have a very romanticized view of pre-industrial society. Most people were tradesmen or laborers. Specialization has existed far longer than industrialization.

I think you have a very limited, and often incorrect, understanding of economic history.

the government itself is a parasite, it produces nothing, it takes from producers, it promises to give to people who didn't produce part of wealth created by the people who do produce.

The government is not a parasite, it is a symbiote. Go ahead, look up the definition. Government produces transportation infrastructure, it produces legal infrastructure, it produces education, it produces economic stability, I could go on and on and on... all these things are things that businesses use to make profits.