Yeah I can't find anything to substantiate the claim that North Dakota is investing in education at all. The only pro news article I can find is one about the state assuming more of the funding responsibility, and lots contra (some from within the past month, talking about pending state college budget cuts).

The only concrete data I can find says that they aren't really hiring teachers, and they're giving teachers basically the minimum raises they can without losing those teachers to the rigs.... The more I look into this, the more I'm convinced that there's no success story of any kind here. Government program being held at current service levels despite a hugely booming economy.

Yeah, I'm seeing those articles (from the past year or so) about cutting post-secondary education, too.

I'll move in with you, Eversor. Will you vouch for my butt insurance?

speaking of butts





This new SBC show is really going a long way in demonstrating how completely unscrupulous and careless many Republicans are. By playing along with these gags they sure are demonstrating how they don't have a moral thought that interjects and tells them not to make a bad decision -- or if they do, they don't listen to it.

Lmao holy ****ing **** the clips of Cohen playing that IDF officer are incredible. Perfect caricature of all the ideal IDF commandos I have met, and perfectly encapsulates how much American military want to impress Israeli commandos.

His accent could be better. t's still pretty good though.

I noticed really sparsely populated states have higher money spent per student, I'm not sure why but it's probably a combination of having to attract college educated people to places people don't want to live (hence why they're sparsely populated, I genuinely don't mean that as some kind of insult) and that maintaining school infrastructure has a base cost which they have have to pay for, but less students, as in the marginal cost of having more students decreases the more you have.

It does though. That's what the comparative Minnesota/Wisconsin study claims. I'm not sure what your reasoning is for disagreeing.

I like how this is an entire genre of opinion piece. My only contention is rich *******s don't write, it should be "by some bootlicker".

lol, yeah. My only answer is: it's the NYT, what did you expect, socialist propaganda?

Im impressed he is doing what he is doing with those prosthetics

I finally got around to watching the Ken Burns documentary on Vietnam and it blew my mind.

Republicans are moving to impeach Rod Rosenstein, it's official.

Traitors.

It's a caricature, though, so I don't think he's even going for a more accurate accent. It's the same thing with his other characters. In this case, he's emphasizing some of the traits heard in a lot of Hebrew speakers' English accents.

For sure. Borat, Bruno and this character all have a recognizably SBC-quality to them (including speaking Hebrew. There are entire scenes in Borat where, when Borat's speech is subtitled, he's speaking Hebrew).

I didn't read past the first paragraph, in part because it's not worth anybody's time reading what "a group of republicans" have done this time, because "a group of republicans" are always doing insane, radical ****. It's a little bit different when the party is unanimous or at least the party leadership is behind the motion.

Democrats have drafted articles of impeachment against Trump, Republicans drafted articles of impeachment against Obama, Democrats drafted articles of impeachment against Bush...

http://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/democratic-rep-sherman-files-article-of-impeachment-against-trump

Yes, exactly!

To be fair, impeaching Trump has more grounds than any president of the past 30 or so years.

It sure seems like it. Or, at least, it seems close. We don't know yet if there's a good obstruction case against Trump that would hold up as well as the one against Clinton in '98.

Ouch:

[quote=The New York Times]
[...]

The special counsel’s investigators have told Mr. Trump’s lawyers they are examining the tweets under a wide-ranging obstruction-of-justice law beefed up after the Enron accounting scandal, according to the three people. The investigators did not explicitly say they were examining possible witness tampering, but the nature of the questions they want to ask the president, and the fact that they are scrutinizing his actions under a section of the United States Code titled “Tampering With a Witness, Victim, or an Informant,” raised concerns for his lawyers about Mr. Trump’s exposure in the investigation.

A spokesman for Mr. Mueller’s office declined to comment.

Mr. Trump’s lead lawyer in the case, Rudolph W. Giuliani, dismissed Mr. Mueller’s interest in the tweets as part of a desperate quest to sink the president.

“If you’re going to obstruct justice, you do it quietly and secretly, not in public,” Mr. Giuliani said.

[...]
[/quote]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/26/us/politics/trump-tweets-mueller-obstruction.html

Speaking from experience?

You guys all know how right wingers have always ranted about 'socialism' making us into serfs? Turns out, they were actually talking about themselves:

[quote=George F. Will]
For three months in 1917, Leon Trotsky lived in the Bronx, just south of the congressional district where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently defeated a 10-term incumbent in a Democratic primary. Because she calls herself a democratic socialist, the word “socialism” is thrilling progressives who hanker to storm the Bastille, if only America had one. And the word has conservatives darkly anticipating the domestic equivalent of the Bolsheviks storming St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace 101 years ago in October, if there is an equivalent building in the eastern Bronx and northern Queens. Never mind that only about 16,000 voted for Ocasio-Cortez’s version of “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!”

A more apt connection of current events to actual socialism was made by Sen. Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican, when President Trump decided to validate the conservative axiom that government often is the disease for which it pretends to be the cure. When the president decided to give farmers a $12 billion bandage for the wound he inflicted on them with his splendid little (so far) trade war, and when other injured interests joined the clamor for comparable compensations, Johnson said, “This is becoming more and more like a Soviet type of economy here: Commissars deciding who’s going to be granted waivers, commissars in the administration figuring out how they’re going to sprinkle around benefits.”

Concerning Johnson’s observation, the Hoover Institution’s John H. Cochrane, who blogs as the Grumpy Economist, says actually, it’s worse than that: “It’s a darker system, which leads to crony capitalism.” Cochrane is just slightly wrong: Protectionism, and the promiscuous and capricious government interventions that inevitably accompany it, is , always and everywhere, crony capitalism. But he is spot on about the incompatibility of America’s new darker system and the rule of law:

“Everyone depends on the whim of the administration. Who gets tariff protection? On whim. But then you can apply for a waiver. Who gets those, on what basis? Now you can get subsidies. Who gets the subsidies? There is no law, no rule, no basis for any of this. If you think you deserve a waiver, on what basis do you sue to get one? Well, it sure can’t hurt not to be an outspoken critic of the administration when the tariffs, waivers and subsidies are being handed out on whim. This is a bipartisan danger. I was critical of the ACA (Obamacare) since so many businesses were asking for and getting waivers. I was critical of the Dodd-Frank Act since so much regulation and enforcement is discretionary. Keep your mouth shut and support the administration is good advice in both cases.”


Now do you see what Friedrich Hayek meant when he said that socialism puts a society on the road to serfdom? Protectionism — government coercion supplanting the voluntary transactions of markets in the allocation of wealth and opportunity — is socialism for the well connected. But, then, all socialism favors those adept at manipulating the state. As government expands its lawless power to reward and punish, the sphere of freedom contracts. People become wary and reticent lest they annoy those who wield the administrative state as a blunt instrument.

Tariffs are taxes, and presidents have the anti-constitutional power to unilaterally raise these taxes because Congress, in its last gasps as a legislature, gave away this power. What do the members retain? Their paychecks. Certainly not their dignity.

Noting that some Trump protectionism is rationalized as essential for “national security,” Cochrane, who clings to the quaint fiction that Congress still legislates, suggests a new law stipulating that such tariffs must be requested — and paid for — by the Defense Department: “Do we need steel mills so we can re-fight WWII? If so, put subsidized steel mills on the defense budget. If defense prefers to use the money for a new aircraft carrier rather than a steel mill, well, that’s their choice.” Actually, the Defense Department, unlike much of the rest of the government, has serious responsibilities and has not trafficked in “national security” nonsense about protectionism.

In 1932, three years into the terrifying Depression, the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate, Norman Thomas, received fewer votes (884,885) in the presidential election than Eugene Debs won (913,693) in 1920 when, thanks to the wartime hysteria Woodrow Wilson fomented, he was in jail. Now, however, there is a Republican president who can teach Ocasio-Cortez a thing or two about the essence of socialism, which is 10-thumbed government picking winners and losers and advancing the politicization of everything .
[/quote]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-could-teach-ocasio-cortez-a-thing-or-two-about-socialism/2018/07/27/f4672a2e-9102-11e8-bcd5-9d911c784c38_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.c1570a826db9

That's isn't what socialism means, it's actually what fascism has been in every state that's ever implemented it, but sure, whatever pejorative works.

If you don't know what "socialism" is then I guess you don't listen to enough AM radio

QED

Source: General Motors

I thought "none" was enough.



"In 1944, F.A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom rocked the English-speaking world. The book argued that there can be no political or civil liberty without economic liberty as a first principle. Every step away from economic liberty takes us closer to authoritarian control over the whole of society. With central control comes corruption, servitude, and relative impoverishment. The difference between the Reds and Browns, Hayek argued, matters in theory but not in practice: both paths lead to serfdom."

Your liberty to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.

Seriously though, if conservatives are going to have a ****ed up definition of the socialist boogeyman, then we might as well relish that the moment they realize it applies just as well (or better) to their own guy.

>Now do you see what Friedrich Hayek meant when he said that socialism puts a society on the road to serfdom? Protectionism — government coercion supplanting the voluntary transactions of markets in the allocation of wealth and opportunity — is socialism for the well connected. But, then, all socialism favors those adept at manipulating the state. As government expands its lawless power to reward and punish, the sphere of freedom contracts. People become wary and reticent lest they annoy those who wield the administrative state as a blunt instrument.

This is that all-American definition of socialism - where socialism is where the government does something, and the more it does it, the more socialister it is. You don't have to spend very long reading socialist texts to see why this is not a preferred way to understand socialism.

People don't really understand where the correctness of Hayek begins and ends. And they're not wrong that many socialist-leaning people make terrible economic arguments. The government being hands off is good much of the time. For instance, with housing, if housing is too expensive, you sometimes get people who want price caps on apartments. Things like this are a bad idea. A cap on rent merely disincentives people from building more housing. This kind of price control is exactly what Hayek is referring to as bad, essentially.

This was genuinely a problem in the Soviet system - factories could not run efficiently, because Soviet commissars couldn't figure out where to send stuff. Iron stock, for instance, could end up short at one factory, and be oversupplied to another. Because they couldn't figure out optimal distribution of iron. The theory is, if you have a money system instead, and let people buy their own iron from a bunch of suppliers, iron stock will end up being used more efficiently since the market will cause goods to shift hands more efficiently, and thus output will be higher. This higher output leads to all of the good growth **** and all of that. Hayek's idea was that no government could collect and process enough information to distribute materials as efficiently as the dumb logic of market economics. This then becomes an ideology that free markets are superior to centralized economies. So far, the understanding of Hayek is totally in the right.

However, there is none - not one - economist today who would say the government should stay entirely out of the economy. For instance, in 2008, during the threat of a real deflationary spiral, there is not one economist alive who would agree that all of the toxic assets should not be bought up to prevent the markets from collapsing. Many will disagree about exactly how and why the government should step in to stop deflation, but that it should be stopped is universal opinion (at least, wholly mainstream with maybe a handful of genuinely knowledgeable dissenters). In fact, if you spoke to an academic economist and asked, "we should be rid of government intervention entirely", you'd be laughed out of the room. This is where the understanding of Hayek is wrong: Hayek was ideologically anti-government, but even most neoliberals recognizes that sometimes intervention is good and necessary. However, there is a *huge* amount of people in popular culture who seem to have taken the bad lesson that government intervention = not good.

Of course, virtually any and all laws passed based on what we view as moral - like, you know, labor rights - are also a form of intervention. It may be that there are people out there willing to work in hazardous work environments for $3/hr, and can't find jobs otherwise - we might be not allocating labor efficiently because of minimum wage laws. It becomes a question of how much morality do we want, and what the downsides to the policy are. And there are people out there who would like to hire people in hazardous conditions for $3/hr. These people I think consciously are trying to get people to focus on the ideological aspects of Hayek and not follow mainstream economics. Because they want to use that anti-intervention ideology as a means to bludgeon away interventions that we've found to be economically healthy and good at protecting lower classes.

Really, it's the type of intervention that matters - when, why, and how are the key questions. Intervention isn't good or bad. Though most economists would err on the side of less intervention, some people have successfully tricked people into thinking any and all intervention is bad. Neoliberals would disagree, as acolytes of Milton Friedman believe that economic freedom is the apex freedom, and all other freedom comes secondary. I think that's a little absurd. But I think the basic idea somewhere in there is right, that a society's freedom and its economic liberty are at least correlated. I have a hard time imagining that a society centralized and run by people would ever not be a corrupt ****stain, because people are animals, and our instincts dictate our actions, and those instincts do not make good institutions.

So how does this relate to socialism? Well, many policies the more rational socialists would prefer do work pretty well. For instance, despite all of the whining about the Laffer curve - which I have already explained on here is a terrible justification in our context for tax cuts - doesn't seem to be as strong a justification on pure data. I mean, we can look:

https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/redistribution-and-the-lesser-depression/

The basic data says redistributive policies hardly affect growth. I mean, really, if Jeff Bezos was worth $15 billion instead of $150 billion - would he really quit building Amazon because it was no longer worth it? I highly doubt it. The typical neoliberal argument is this, expressed by Margaret Thatcher:



The idea is that, as long as all people are getting more wealth, it doesn't matter that inequality is increasing. I doubt that, but what Margaret Thatcher says is sound - it's better to have increasing wealth inequality tied to increasing wealth overall, than inequality decrease as does overall wealth. Okay, yes, that's true. But it's kind of misleading. Because, the evidence seems to suggest that you can have redistributive policies without effecting wealth - so, Margaret, how about we keep the policies which are increasing wealth, and add policies to decrease inequality without hurting the wealth increase? It's doable, but I'm pretty sure you choose not to because you'd rather you and your rich friends have a bit more.

And this is all a pretty basic analysis. There are many reasons to be skeptical of everything neoliberals say. One thing that seems to elude them is, the common refrain: "poor people are actually less poor, so they really have no cause to be upset", which means, "since China can produce plasma TVs for so much cheaper, people can buy more useless crap, so people are wrong to dislike the current situation". I mean, we only have to look around us to see that this is a pretty poor argument. While it's not overwhelming, Americans generally feel worse about our current condition than in the past. It doesn't matter what wealth metrics should say if the lived experience of people is the opposite. What the issue is becomes squaring these things off.

Personally, I think a big reason for dissatisfaction isn't hardship. People can handle hardship. What people dislike about the state of America is they feel the hardship isn't equally spread out. It's like if there was a famine, and everybody stuck together and tried their best to feed everybody, versus if most stuck together, but a few snuck and hoarded food. The sneakers create an environment of paranoia and distrust that weakens society generally. People will feel the sneakers should be punished and made to pay their fare share.

Trying to figure out who the sneakers are and how to punish them is pretty indicative of the political struggles we are in. No matter what political camp you're in, you feel this is true, that there's somebody out there getting away with something during a hardship. Of course, I personally think Trump loving Republicans have falsely blamed this all on Democrats, immigrants, blacks, women and foreigners: to them, Hillary Clinton isn't paying her fair share and is, idk, laundering child sex slave money through the Clinton Foundation, welfare-sucking immigrants get paid $50k/year (lol) and don't pay taxes (refer to the Stephen Crowder video), and black people have too many kids and are all on welfare. Democrats focus on race and sexual issues: there is a specter haunting straight white men making them do bad things. Socialists blame class, social institutions that support class divides, and economic situations which produce these conditions. Of all of these, I think you can rank them by accuracy: Socialists > Democrats > Republicans. Sex and race issues are real, but overstated, and Republicans are majority delusional and wrong about everything they say and believe on these topics. However, class issues I feel are on point as most relevant as to why people feel so badly about society if things aren't objectively so bad.

By the way, if I was to propose foreign policy for a socialist administration, it would be to pressure the UN and other nations into an aggressive policy punishing tax havens and seeking to increase wealth taxes on the global rich. Ireland and Panama, for instance, need to be slapped with massive tariffs until they become more compliant with foreign tax agencies. I would also pursue an agenda of aggressive collective tariffs against countries which abuse labor, to prevent a "race to the bottom" condition of corporations seeking places where they can get labor as possible at the cheapest cost. In other words, my policy would be retribution for those who aide extreme wealth inequality, and would try to increase standards of living globally.

For socialism at home, my primary belief is that capital needs to be more open and free. Neoliberalism, at least in the United States, has failed to make markets freer. As I've discussed in previous posts, monopoly power is increasing, and M&A is still extremely common in the business world. We need to start actually fighting monopoly power, and as before, work with other countries to limit the effects of global competitors to seek monopoly positions in global markets. If you could get a whole bunch of countries to collectively tariff Chinese goods when they're dumping product, you could achieve quite a bit to prevent markets from breaking down. But in terms of economics within a country, reducing any barrier to creating new companies and creating barriers which limit the excessive growth and reach of companies would be a good idea. This is tricky, though, because it's not prima facie guaranteed that increasing market control is due to monopoly behavior and not truly because of a superior product. Details aside, there are some really obvious problems in American business that should be fixed; one of them is Disney, the others are in Silicon Valley, and many others that aren't household names.

Oh, and I would work to make it harder for money to influence politics. Because that's a huge problem that's underappreciated.

Okay, long-ass post over.

The people who argue that rising inequality doesn’t matter because quality of life is rising aren’t doing it in good faith. There are different markets for productive capital and personal effects; people today may be able to individually afford more of the latter, but with rising inequality they are shut out of the former. Literally what they are saying - and they know this, but couch it in confusing language - is that the poor have been forced to trade their economic liberty for a bigger TV, and that they should be happy about it.

**** Margaret Thatcher. Burn in hell you hag.


To anybody who believes the government should intervene less in the economy: I agree with you. You are totally right. We should have less intervention, beginning with the government’s imposition of the will of a generational elite upon our free commerce and individual productivity.

She always did come across as rather icy from what video clips of her I've seen.

well, yeah, we're all cows, all you need to do is feed us and entertain us and we're objectively happy. freedom and self-determination are noble values not suited for working folk.

what i really mean is, liberalism involves more guillotines

Is there anything inherently wrong with working for a living? Are people who need to work to earn a living by definition less free? For what it's worth, my gut tells me the only real difference between those well connected to money and power and the rest of us is that they have a monopoly on various forms of coercion, and we don't: the existence of things like a police force can make us safer from one another (or sometimes do a shamefully bad job at this, and make things objectively worse like killing / tossing poor people in prison for minor offenses), but ultimately it's the rich and powerful who benefit. But beyond not having the right to help the government bomb a bunch of people in the Middle East just so I can buy another yacht? I don't exactly like the idea that I'm a 'cow' just because I have to work for a living. That doesn't mean there aren't parasites leeching off my salary (or that it wouldn't be nice to have to work less and live longer), but there are parasites all over the planet. Of course it becomes a serious problem when the parasite sucks the host dry or causes serious systemic problems. I don't think that having a parasite makes me a cow, though!

Let me put it this way: I've done more damage to myself than capitalism has (visibly) done to me, so far (although the jury's still out on what kind of wonderful diseases I can expect to acquire as I get older as a result of all the nasty things that corporations have put in my food / water / air).

Finally, do cows work? Are they even mentally capable of doing anything but chewing on grass?? If you ask me, the rich more closely resemble cows than the rest of us do.

"I can be any kind of meat I want," said the cow.

Yes, the rich are awfully lazy and stupid. That doesn't stop the rich from eating us, though.

People have been known to live happy and productive lives for decades, despite having cancer. Likewise, I don't think the existence of rich people in the economy is a reason to completely give up hope and take a bleak outlook on society. Although I'd say we could sure use some radiation therapy.

Unless by "cow" you are referring to the fact that I am forced to sit in an office chair and type at a computer in relative social isolation, instead of freely roaming the African savannah to scavenge for carcasses like my ancestors did, I don't see the difference between a happy, productive person in ancient versus modern society. Then again, I guess I'm fairly privileged.