Agreed, good thoughts.

That thread confused the hell outta me at the time. Bad language was bursting into floppy rainbow flowers between page refreshes and literally right after I'd chided the troll in question to stop trolling from the left. For one heady moment I thought I'd developed super powers. *sigh*

Well I'll be damned, I'm happy you're here Grant! The League now has a resident person who's against the enlightenment ideals based on criticisms from the left to contrast our dear Bob Cheeks who's against the enlightenment ideals based on criticisms from the right. I must confess, I feel a certain delight over this. Like finally acquiring the missing dish in a matching set.

I was 10... I don't even remember hearing about it. Too young myself.

I have no time at all today, alas, but a Republican party that broke up along either foreign policy lines (interventionist/noninterventionist) or even moreso over social policy (libertine/social con) would definitly produce a segment that would have considerable draw to right wingish Democrats I'd think.

My objection, Ward, is merely against the massive lunacy that is bound up in any fence like proposal. The ranch owner is welcome to waste his own private dollars putting up fences that the coyotes will merely evade, penetrate or subvert on his own dime. I have no interest in lending even a crumb of support to our governments doing the same ineffective, wasteful and pointless strategy on a grander and colossally more costly scale.

If we don't want illegal immigration then the only way to stop it is to either:

A) Accept higher prices on a vast slew of products and lower economic growth and target employers of illegal immigrants directly.

Or

B) Making illegal immigration legal by establishing some form of more open legal means for these workers to come here.

Everything else is just political posturing, hair splitting and snuffling after voters or pork.

Maybe time use? Travel? I honestly don't know. Homes (number and location) perhaps?

I guess so? I mean if there's a limited need/demand for free charitably donated clothing then it makes sense that the best condition articles are sorted out and the rest are recycled. If there're people going cold/naked for lack of clothes then obviously nothing should be thrown out and it should all be passed along. It's somewhat ambigous from what you wrote as to which is the case here.

If the dude doesn't want people on his ranch why doesn't he fence it himself? Surely there isn't a zoning regulation preventing it? Why would a libertarian like you Ward want him to be turning to the gummint to fence his property?

Correction: One scenario where Germany gets away with something is if they get the IMF involved. If American and Asian bucks go into the bailout solution then to the extent that happens Germany has scored a coup (but it might still be worth the money to the Americans and Asians to avoid the global recession).

If Germany does bail them out then they're paying for it and they got nothing for free. If Germany doesn't bail them out then they're going to be utterly wrecked economically for the near future as their hyper strong currency plays Cain with their employment and as their banks take a pasting. And this is assuming that the newly non-unified periphary markets keep up free trade with Germany which is a BIG assumption to make and in my minds a foolish one. Germany hasn't gotten away with anything yet and I don't see a scenario where they do.

That's a one sided spin on it, utterly inaccurate since it ignores the periphery's half of this bargain.

Unless it's banned I'll be drinking plum wine eagerly. God I love that stuff.

And even in the worst case scenario I don't see the whole country dying. Fukashima was a nasty mess but it didn't irradiate the whole country. I also still think that if their population density started really decreasing we'd see a change in their birthrates but only the future will tell us that.

Cool, just wanted to make sure they were on your list. Part of my ongoing project of helping paleolibertarians talk to lefties.

Very much so.

Burt, it very much isn't, there're people sitting unemployed everywhere. That is a huge amount of potential slack that the economy has to bring to bear if the demand for dollars were to flag. Unless we somehow get stagflation (and despite Libertarian shrieks to the contrary the US doesn't have the kind of direct government interference in the ecnonomy that it did to bring on stagflation in the 70's. I mean the feds were dictating commodity prices and instituting wage and price controls), inflation needs lower unemployment to really rev itself up.

Remember, every investor in the world wants dollars right now, the dollars' principle competitor, the Euro, is in the midst of a massive meltdown.

I think the radioactivity is overstated but Japan, while a big economy, is a very aging country which has only its people as resources and they very pointedly do not have an immigrant friendly culture or government. They're going to be a nursing home country very soon, quite possibly the first nursing home country in fact. The certainly will be in no condition to be a reserve currency.

Yes we're generally on the same page on this. I agree.

I'm gonna go with Jesse on this. You don't buy a billion barrels of oil with jewery and a hodgepodge of Canadians dollars and Israeli Sheckls. There's an enormous financial demand for a reserve currency and the US is the only currency game on the globe at the moment. The Chinese are too poor, too corrupt and too dictatorial. The Russians are too corrupt and too moribund. The Euro right now is out, in the future it'll depend on what they settle on. The rest of the currencies are simply tied to economies that're too small.

Jesse, we don't disagree very much actually. I was thinking primarily of Greece with what I said to Kimmie. Ireland is a real outlier, we have a country that was actually managing its spending very well that chose to essentially guarantee their banks even when they didn't have to and suddenly realized just how bad that promise was. Ireland essentially leaped into a pond to save a drowning maiden and discovered that the pond was actually quicksand and the maiden was a three hundred lb hippo.

But Greece was utterly inevitable. Accepting that the then collapsing house of cards also was inevitable following from that. The Greece debacle throws doubt onto the periphary bonds, the collapsing banks hike yields, hiking yields cause more defaults etc etc. I'd agree the recession exaberated that problem but there is a spending imbalance that has made most of the periphery countries unable to absorb the blow.

Well yes, if you target employers then the illegal immigration issue would vanish utterly. They won't come here if they can't get jobs. Problem is employers don't like being targetted, they like employing illegals on the cheap without compliance with labor regs and they have the ability (unlike illegals) to make life difficult for politicians that mess with them.

Easier to target the immigrants themselves. It pleases the voters who're upset about illegal immigration and doesn't actually effect the companies at all. Political win win for any immigration hawk pol.

With Europe? Yes. Greece was headed for this fiasco from the get go. The "FIRE" thing merely exposed the fact they weren't wearing any swim trunks somewhat sooner than it otherwise would. The fundamentals were there from the get go and FIRE was mostly incidental to that: The Germans were getting a free trade market without having to pay money to the periphary to buy their German made stuff. The periphary was able to spend like (worse than) Germans without having to work like Germans. Borrowing and cooked government books made up the difference. This couldn't have gone on forever. Either dissolution of the monetary union or closer political union had to happen.

 I'd say what really differentiates the US from the Eurozone is that the US could very easily fix its financial problems versus the Eurozone can't. If the US slashes spending and hiked taxes they'd have to do comparatively moderate amounts of both to balance the budget. That'd translate into lost votes and grumbling. The Eurostate on the other hand is looking at riots over the necessary cuts and their taxation is very clearly both being massively evaded and is already very high which means their options are badly limited. All those fundamentals are aside from the bonus ability of the US to print money and be the global reserve currency.

Really the difference if the US's budget chrisis is mostly artifically created by politicians while the Euro budget crisis is pretty fundamental to their entire system as it's currently set up.

Jay: Libya? Yes, I'd say exactly like Libya, you lob a few cruise missiles, pass the buck to the Europeans and dump the old dictator on the cheap while trying to cut defense spending at home. The conservative policy, on the other hand, is hike desense spending while advocating for a land war with Iran. There is a contrast there.

You left conservatives off your list of villains Dude, it's not the progressives or liberals who're leading the charge trying to build up defense spending and foreign interventions.