Commenter Archive

Comments by Joseph FM*

On “Perpetual Check

Fanfiction! I dig it.

On “Libertarianism and Liberalism and Labels

Obama's "Race To The Top" is a more liberaltarian school reformist policy than NCLB was - its based on incentives and competition rather than mandates.

Education policy is one area where I will always be considerably more leftist than elsewhere, though, due (as mentioned elsewhere) to suffering for several year under Jeb's botched (but profitable for Neil Bush) pseudo-reforms - as Erik once quoted me about in Forbes!

On “Misguided Attack on Libertarians (Prompts Some Reasonable Discussion)

To the extent your point is correct, though, the reason why a democracy where too many things are up for a vote could be tyrannical isn't the reason you imply. Quite the opposite in fact; it's that people don't like making choices. Choice is stressful, choice requires responsibility. Thus, you have things like county administrative elections where nobody but people with an obvious personal (as opposed to broadly socioeconomic) interest in the outcome even bothers to vote.

But this isn't a problem that can be solved by increasing individual choice, because the problem is the necessity of choice itself.

On “The joys of blogging

Geez. I warned ya'll not to feed the trolls...

On “Skin in the game

Safety net programs for the actual poor, anyway, as distinguished from the elderly of all socioeconomic classes.

As for the military issue - we could kill just as many people and spend a lot less on the military if we really wanted to. A lot of military spending basically is welfare for towns dependent on military bases or contractor factories for jobs, which is the real reason it's so difficult to cut, and indeed since the Cold War one of the biggest ways to get military spending through Congress has been to make hardware production less efficient in order to maximize the number of districts and states that would benefit. The thing is, it's been at such a high baseline for so long that it no longer really works as stimulus.

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The thing is, it will be cheap for the federal government to borrow until the day comes when something can actually replace then US dollar as a viable major reserve currency. Which, given how the Euro is going, looks like it will have to wait for China to liberalize significantly more.

On “Record Store Day

I meant that argument you're criticizing - if we just take current patterns and project, libraries are supposedly doomed. There's no better way to troll a library blog than to claim that because of the Internet, nobody needs them anymore. Of course, I do think it's likely that we'll end up with an even sharper divide in library types into museum-like special collections and public internet-centered social spaces with books, especially as the spaces for the latter currently provided by chain bookstores vanish.

As for Kanye, yeah it's overhyped, certainly, but that says more, I think, about the decline of mainstream rap than about the quality of the album - it's not totally flawless, and sonically it's ALL over the place, but it's at least an Album in a way that Born This Way or even The Blueprint 3 aren't. All I was really trying to say is that - yeah, he's more in line with Radiohead than with Gaga. And it took me a while to really get into it too.

On “Bloody Madness

Closer to what, to thinking you're objectively pro-tyranny? I was actually agreeing with Katherine, and it sounds an awful lot to me like you're saying that whomever can kill/oppress the most people is clearly entitled to do so because they have God's approval.

On “Record Store Day

Also, I'm also going to dispute what you're saying about albums, at least with regards to Kanye. He's absolutely a guy who thinks in terms of albums, big epic statements with thematic unity. Basically every track on My Beautiful Dark Twistsed Fantasy works better in the context of the album than on its own, and the same is true for Watch The Throne. What people who mourn the album are really doing is mourning the hugeness of consensus, and the supremacy of (white-washed) Rock And Roll.

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This is basically the same argument we hear all the time about libraries. Of course, that's kind of unhelpful - because if there's anything libraries are aware of, it's that people fail to recognize obvious resources for meeting their needs all the time, especially when those needs involve going to a physical place to look for something.

On “Bloody Madness

Only if you really believe God picked and chose who held earthly power at some point in the past. Are you a monarchist, Bob? Because I daresay there was not a single republic in history that governed by divine right.

On “Big Beer

CVS doesn't have much of a beer selection down here either, but there's a fairly good chance if you went to a gas station they'd at least have Oberon - I hear the kids in Western Michigan drink it like we drink Yuengling down here.

Though speaking of CVS and disappearing regional brands, pretty much any CVS in Florida that's been there more than a few years used to be an Eckerd's. It wasn't til they got bought out that I even realized that Eckerd's was mostly in Florida only.

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Of course, these are both better and a smidge more expensive than Bud or Miller - priced about the same as the non-lagers from the big beer companies (eg Amber Bock or Blue Moon), but much less than any of the craft beers or imports.

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Yeah, Yuengling's actually grown in recent years - they bought out the old AB brewery in Tampa, and now are basically in every store and bar in Florida, but of course it does taste slightly different from what you'd get in the Northeast.

Genessee's still around too, for that matter.

On “Class Warfare in London

Because that class is fairly small, and essentially, setting itself up for victimization. Because given the opportunity and emotional ammunition, a majority of people everywhere would be looters & rioters.

On “Nostalgia and film

This is an excellent point, and reminds me that some of ma favorite shows of late that were about people like me all had various surreal aspects to them. I'm thinking, especially, of Community -one of the few shows on the air with a cast of varying age and class.

On “We are all neoliberals now

It matters because despite your protestations otherwise, you've hitched your buggy to one side's horse. Remember when I used to comment at your blog? I still think that the path you advocate would not only fail to eliminate statism, it would in fact merely result in a furtherance of capture by a smaller and smaller cadre.

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Well, I'd expect to keep paying payroll taxes even when it's eliminated, because FICO makes of the largest % of taxes paid by the bottom bracket. And nobody's proposed getting rid of it until guys like him get paid, so my assumption has to be that these older Tea Party people want me to pay for their retirement while not expecting the same for myself.

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The federal government spends 40% more than it takes in year-to-year (with no credible means of reasonably addressing that issue) and someone is actually delusional enough to argue that this isn't the direct result of conservatives' political victories.

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Never mind that such a retirement - and even those supposedly sound choices - would have been off limits to him even in the 50s if he was black. In all likelihood he wouldn't have even been allowed to buy a house in the first place thanks to redlining and segregation.

And this: " He’s a bit concerned that there are those who never paid a dime into it who are much younger than him who are collecting now, even though the “system” is going broke."
That is not a real concern. The only people receiving SS payments who are younger than him are severely disabled and less able to work than he is, and in any case SS is pretty much solvent for nearly as long as somebody his age can expect to live. If anyone's concerned about it, it should be people my age and younger, who've paid into it for a few years only to have people like him try to eliminate it altogether.

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The funny thing is that all of the actual, self-proclaimed socialists I've ever met have also been anarchists and therefore every bit as anti-statist as Farmer himself.

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When have the state's action ever not helped one social class at the expense of another, ever, in history? I'm totally at a loss here.

Even "setting things up equitably" would inevitably end up at a loss of privilege by those benefiting from inequities.

On “Market liberals

Money is merely a medium of exchange to facilitate the easy transaction of things that are scarce.

The kind of economic system we use (let's call it "corporate mercantilism") is based on creating artificial scarcity in order to allow the state and the financial elite to increase their wealth through the exchange of artificially-scarce abstractions and shares of state-granted monopolies.

A money supply that increased directly based on true free market exchange of real goods and services - that is, wealth created by labor rather than usury and deceit - would not be subject to speculative bubbles. And if the value of currency was reset on a regular basis, relative to real economic output, inflation ceases to be a problem.

On “Luck and Desert

I assure you, sir, that I am entirely sober-minded - as demonstrated by the fact that I am not posting a Kanye West music video parody featuring My Little Pony characters. No sir.

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I think he's saying that for many people they are indeed unrewarded relative to the effort involved- whether by chance or, more often, because there historically been and continues to be externally, coercively imposed limits to people's opportunity to benefit from their labor.

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