— John Danforth (R-Mo) regarding the Federal Reserve (via reformyourself)
Beyond Our Means tells for the first time how other nations aggressively encouraged their citizens to save by means of special savings institutions and savings campaigns. The U.S. government, meanwhile, promoted mass consumption and reliance on credit, culminating in the global financial meltdown.
Browse content here.
Megavideo, a company based in Hong Kong and run by a German chap, got shut down by the American government.
Sorry, since when did you have the right to shut down other country’s shit?
Hmm… maybe when they started stealing stuff from Americans?
What I hear from so many of you fucks is “wah wah we want our free shit!”
Piracy is not fucking cool. I don’t care if your shit is free, you don’t understand the first thing about right and wrong, let alone economics. Shit is not free. It should not be free. So get the fuck over it.
I’ve found it very rare musicans who are also celebrities say anything intelligent regarding current event politics, and Jay Z has impressed me today. With endless debates over economic policies and government spending, taxes taxes taxes, cuts cuts cuts, Jay Z says (in so many words) “People in privileged places would be okay paying higher taxes if they knew where it was going. There should be open book keeping on where our taxes went.”
What a concept. If only the government were willing to disclose that information, we would trust them so much more. That is very true, except for the fact that tons of our money goes nowhere, and it would be so fucking shocking to the American population how much money gets wasted or put into the wrong hands for things that are not “the current welfare” If the government did have open books, the books would be crooked, and not everything would be written in there for us to see. Not that that’s not normal for a government, but I would be willing to bet less money would go to bullshit it we did have an open bookkeeping system on TAXES! The largest collection of money in the United States.
Man…haha, I’ll keep dreaming though. That’ll be the day.
- The Great Wazoo
(Source: magnolius)
— Steve Bridges
The US just lost their AAA rating!
BLAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! How many of you tumblr toolz thought Obama was going to be a great president? What happened:
- Bigger bailouts than Bush going mostly to campaign supporters
- $1 trillion plus annual budget deficits and not even passing a budget for 2+ years - just running on continuation resolutions
- Maintainence of wars and prison bases
- Creation of a new healthcare bill which forces people to buy health insurance (and wouldn’t you know, health insurance companies were some of Obama’s biggest campaign donors). See, the health insurance companies, with the help of government barriers to entry, have been able to form a cartel and jack up prices. Some people have found it easier to not buy health insurance because prices are too high now. With obamacare, you HAVE TO BUY IT. Oh yes, this is obama helping out the little guy.
- Granting BP’s Deepwater Horizons an exemption from environmental inspection, with lulzy consequences. Oh and banning the use of dutch oil cleaning ships which could have cleaned up the spill a lot sooner. Oh an SURPRISE! Big oil was some of Obama’s biggest campaign donors too!
Whatever your political persuasions are, there is no reason to support Obama. He has been an unambiguous, unqualified failure at all levels. He’s harming the US, but he’s also harming the image of “socialism” or “social democracy” or whatever you want to call it.
But one thing I cannot resist saying is that the obama presidency is the realization of the democrat party. The democrats had the house, senate and executive. For two disastrous years, the US was essentially ruled by the democrat party.
To be fair, following 9/11, the US was ruled by the GOP, leading to a different kind of disaster.
So lets take this time to look toward alternatives. The problem is that the alternatives people propose are based on what they think failed:
- If you think “capitalism” failed, you may advocate outright central planning, or simply expansion of the state and even more “regulation”.
Of course you all know my argument which is that “regulations”, often drafted by the businesses to be “regulated”, serve mainly to limit competition and allow industry to cartelize. And US gov’t spending as a percentage of GDP is already 43%. So if it’s raised to 50%, 60%, 70%, things will be better? 80% is about how much the USSR was, with 20% of the economy being a market economy despite it being illegal.
And that’s the problem with “anti-capitalist” alternatives, or commonly referred to as the alternative left or revolutionary left: it’s all been tried, and mostly failed. The only time it has worked has been on small communes where it’s personal enough that natural social forces are strong enough to where people will work for the collective.
- If you think the state, in some respect, has failed, then you may advocate massive reform of the state or abolition.
So those are really the two main alternatives:
- Radical libertarianism, minarchism, market anarchism
- Libertarian socialism / traditional anarchism
Now I hate anarchists and libertarian socialists. They are disgusting people who live in disgusting ways and tend to hate white people, males or anyone successful. And about half of them never advocate any reduction of the power of the state, and are really just orthodox marxists. But they are the only serious alternative to the status quo - other than radical libertarianism of course.
But outright central planning and now social democracy in the US and most of europe has clearly failed.
You have to pay your taxes next week, and General Electric doesn’t. That’s right: GE, America’s largest corporation, employs 975 people just to work on their taxes, which, it turns out, is a really great way to handle your taxes! …GE paid no taxes paid no taxes on $14 billion in profit. Why aren’t…
(Source: inothernews, via tamburinaa)
theuniverseandi asked: Hey :) Thanks for responding to my post about ebay. I know that the max bid doesn't show and what not, it's just annoying when the max bid is wayyyyyy higher than the actual bid. I've been bidding and bidding and still no luck. It's probably way too expensive lol.
Great way to save money: never pay retail price for anything (unless the retailer has some unique quality of an item a regular person can’t give you.)
Ebay is a great place to see the true market price of just about anything. New or used. The beautiful thing about it is it’s traffic, like any website, varies with the time of day, and that can determine how much people bid on something at the last minute. Find those items that you want with auctions ending at weird times, and almost always they go for a little less than the others, unless you have intelligent max bidders who go way up.
You never know how high a max bid is, so never go higher than your willing to pay, because you might offer just too much, trying to beat another bidder.
—
Are schools now just a factory of people who are precisely conditioned to produce money? A production line of ‘students’ that are being separated into ‘batches’? A large conceptual cage that’s still being controlled according to the interests of the government, of the economists, of the corporate elite? (via iamnothingami)
Ofcourse the internet is going to give you more free room to learn what you want, because it’s an unlimited pool of knowledge and even education which we have virtually free access to at all times, in mass quantities. It’s also going to feel like a lot more of a comfortable place to learn about yourself because you’re not paying a lot of money and forcing a lot of your time to be there. I also do not believe college is truly designed to teach you what you want to do with your life, even though that’s how it ends up working for most people. It is designed, in an ideal situation, to get your degree, and get into working condition quicker. This is not a bad thing. No matter what we love and like doing, we’re going to eventually be working in that field, or in something else that we want to do so we can make money in. School does nothing to hinder us from getting a type of job we want, life hinders us from that because it’s such a competitive and difficult industry no matter where you go.
I still disagree greatly with the education system in America, but not because of it’s “narrowing down our choices”, but because of it’s inefficient use of time and money. And the college textbook industry, which is one of the biggest fucking scams of all time.
Going to throw that out there in it’s relevance: buy international editions of textbooks, half the price, and softcover. Same content.
One of the greatest and most common mistakes I see in the daily business world is the practice of following all-encompassing rules, that are allowed and believed to take precedence over human judgment and decision-making skills in every unique (which is every) situation.
I am thoroughly against the concepts, ideas, and practices of a corporate office. I worked for one for 3 years of my young life and regret ever wanting to progress within it’s walls of oppression. As cliche as that may sound, they are the perfect words to describe what I observed and experienced in such an environment.
Capitalism is not a problem. Human greed is, and it is seen at it’s worst in large numbers, under the roof of corporate buildings. It can be seen as such as slaves busting their ass, taking little to nothing, to increase the profits of a small number while depleting the life and liberty of many others. People do have the ability to make this choice, though, and this must be accepted for what it is. If you do not like it, you cannot destroy those with power, but destroy the weak-mindedness that allows themselves to succumb to that torture. With no working force to do their bidding for them, these ‘men of power’ truly have nothing.
Whenever a system is devised to able to stand on it’s own, with it’s given rules and regulations, without the ability of it’s lower-levels to intervene or change anything, it is flawed. Power over people is never something that can be given to something inanimate, because in our world of the false concepts of power and hierarchy that people devised, it only works on other people that believe in the same thing. A system cannot enforce rules and know the difference between right and wrong, it is only devised so that it is able to do so the majority (hopefully) of the time. It is found very often than sometimes it’s ‘decision’ is not even right most of the time, but just more efficient, which is usually just the physical manifestation of laziness incorporated into a system.
All of this can be extended to refer to government, as well.
Much of the time, the smaller companies that are run with total control over those who own it, who foresee everything and work with their employees, are the best run companies. This is because the power is given to intelligent human beings who have the right, rhyme, and reason to make decisions to make their company run better.
Support your local businesses, and if you don’t like what a big company is doing, stop giving them your money. You continue to allow them to do the things you disagree with, essentially making the world a worse place, in your eyes. Use your dollar wisely, as they are your true votes in this country.
