They hate us for our freedom!!

vagabondvet

They'd be free if they had bombed the civilians with drone planes.

vagabondvet

Bernays was no rabid right-winger. He was an elitist liberal who believed that “engineering public consent” was for the greater good.

It seems like almost weekly I find out a new tidbit about the Progressive Era which shows it to be an evil point in American history.

vagabondvet

Wait! OP is saying that bad banks should be allowed to go out of business when they act in bad faith toward their customers, rather than maybe giving them a small fine and and then proceeding to bail them out? What is this?!

vagabondvet

He's trying to steal my dinner too.

vagabondvet

The bottom line is that it's really not any of their business whether or not the mosque is built because it is a private property issue. The mere fact that they are sticking their head in where it doesn't belong is proof positive that given the choice, they would use the state to push their own agenda at the expense of Muslims. After all, they've been doing it in the Middle East and Central Asia for the past decade.

The difference I see is that the only threats of death and violence are coming from the group that doesn't want some books burned.

Compare threats of violence to actual violence. The United States doesn't hesitate to bomb or kill any Muslims. Every single day Barack Obama kills Muslims with his robot airplanes. President Bush started one illegal war and one unnecessary war against Muslims. Bill Clinton routinely bombed them. And so on.

If they see this as a cultural war (although it's really not), then there is perfect justification for people who have been attacked by the West to be outraged that some fundamentalist nutjob wants to burn a holy book of theirs.

This is not an excuse for violence, but rather showing the motivation for such an act. Talking about "threats of death and violence" being even remotely dangerous compared to the ACTUAL harm the US has inflicted on Muslims is absurd.

vagabondvet

"Significant objection?"

vagabondvet

The "tea party" already faces enough strawmen created by the media that they are a bunch of racist homophobic theocratic war mongers. They don't need to actually have a racist homophobic theocratic war monger in charge of one of their groups to prove the mainstream media correct. Ravndal's first statement more than merely implied his bigotry, that somehow giving rights to gays would be a "violation of the Constitution and [his] rights." That alone should have been enough for the tea partiers to give him the boot.

vagabondvet

But I haven't heard anyone say that the rights of the owners to build whatever they want on that site should be removed.

It's implied. The argument is that Muslims shouldn't build what they want on their property. These people would jump on the chance to use the state to stop the Mosque in the same way they use the state to stop porn or online gambling.

vagabondvet

What is the story behind some of these troubles, like the fair use ordeal and the donation scandal?

vagabondvet

Look for the incidents where police extract fines from mundanes. Those are the victimless crimes.

vagabondvet

I don't see why blackmail is immoral. It's a voluntary trade (PDF, Chapter 6).

vagabondvet

Just throw this out there when someone digs up old dirt.

vagabondvet

Covered already.

vagabondvet

The desire to lower interest is mistakenly believed to increase general output and employment.

And why do you think the tax write off for R&D expenses is being pursued?

Taxes are a cost to firms. Instead of them paying the government money, they can pay for R&D, which by itself is not something that is due to being misled by artificially low interest costs.

I'm sure you understand this, but I'm going to go through it for the onlookers. Firms conduct business operations, where they gain revenue and have expenses. After subtracting expenses from revenue, the firm is left with gross profit. From this gross profit, taxes are paid. Firms get tax deductions for expenses in certain categories of assets and expenditures. If investing in a certain asset or activity leads to a larger tax deduction, businesses will invest in that direction because it will lead to a lower tax burden, even if the gross profit is exactly the same between the two activities.

Green energy is a great example of this, where without government tax incentives, it wouldn't be pursued because green energy is both expensive and inefficient. Many commentators have called this a bubble due to these incentives.

What Obama's plan is doing is creating incentives to invest in R&D by offering tax deductions for that investment. This is a bubble forming activity because it is encouraging investment in R&D that wouldn't normally be pursued.

There was free money being given to owners of beat up cars.

It was free money to owners of used cars to buy new cars. It was an incentive created to do something that wouldn't have otherwise been pursued. This was a bubble forming activity because it caused a short term boom in new car sales.

I'm done with this thread. You're dogmatically trying to tell me that credit expansion and interest rate manipulation are the only ways to create a bubble. I've pointed out examples of bubbles which haven't been created with this manner to show that you're fundamentally incorrect about the formation of bubbles, and your replies are getting unnecessarily long.

vagabondvet

If you define a bubble as merely a credit glut, then you're absolutely correct.

The problem is that your definition ignores the fundamental reason for artificially increasing credit. The reason why credit is expanded is to artificially increase investment in areas that normally wouldn't be invested because the project isn't profitable. This is the reason why time preference becomes discoordinated and a cluster of failures happens.

Now, let's look at an R&D investment tax cut, as is being put forward by Obama. This is precisely the same thing! Investors aren't doing R&D because the profitability of these projects isn't high enough for them to invest in them. Thus, by decreasing the costs (the tax cut), it artificially leads investors to invest in unsustainable projects.

did not thus throw the economy off onto an unsustainable path due to investor and consumer discoordination.

Really? So there wasn't an artificially stimulated short term boom in car sales? Automakers didn't start building more cars, with the thought that this could be extended into the future?

vagabondvet

A bubble can only form on the basis of credit expansion, because only credit expansion can mislead all investors in making errors regarding the supply of real savings.

What do you call Cash for Clunkers? That wasn't a credit bubble, was it?

Other than that, we're getting no where with this conversation. That's the only further point I have because we can go back and forth on whether credit is the only way to create a bubble or not.

vagabondvet

Which is company owners keeping more of their cash.

I don't think you understand the causality of the tax cut. They will have to spend money in order to get a tax cut. This means they will have less cash to get to keep some of their money.

No, it is a plan of temporarily decreasing taxes if companies invest in R&D, which is not an expansion of production at all.

It's an expansion of business activity that wouldn't otherwise be undertaken because the reward wasn't high enough based on the risk.

Not all risk taking is bubble forming.

I know this, but this is a bubble forming plan. It's meant to funnel money into areas that wouldn't have otherwise been invested. How many times do I need to rephrase the exact same thing?

Remember, with any expenditure, there is a revenue.

lol. Every expenditure leads to revenue, except when it doesn't, am I right?

vagabondvet

Allowing people to keep more of their cash never leads to bubbles.

This isn't a matter of people keeping more cash. This is a decrease in taxes, contingent on business owners spending more of their cash on investment.

If the rate of interest is not artificially lowered, then investors will not engage in longer term, more risky projects unless there is adequate real capital to do so. The rate of interest regulates the behaviors between investors and consumers.

Correct, but what this plan is advocating is temporarily decreasing costs associated with expanding business. Gross revenue consists of four components: pure interest rate (the time preference of investors), price premium (inflation), risk premium (political, macroeconomic, geographic, and market), and pure profit. What this plan advocates is a temporary increase in the risk premium, attracting investment that wouldn't otherwise be made based on normal conditions. How is that not a bubble?

vagabondvet

Remember how Cash for Clunkers was only a "temporary" program, yet remember how that led to a very short boom in car sales then an immediate and painful drop off?

This is the same concept.

vagabondvet

Only credit expansion brings about an unsustainable economic boom.

Not exactly true. A temporary tax reprieve measure like in the article would work in the same manner as a credit bubble. The whole reason why booms occur in the first place isn't the credit per se, but because there are a cluster of errors made due to entrepreneurs misinterpreting the profitability of investments. A credit bubble causes entrepreneurs to make malinvestments because the cost of credit is lower, which increases the entrepreneur's time preference; the write-off measure would also increase the entrepreneur's time preference by giving them a false idea of profitability regarding a new factory, thus also propping up a bubble.

the best would be to lower taxes for everyone

The best idea would be to drastically cut spending at all levels of government. This would generate more economic activity AND lead to lower debts in the future, paving the way for further tax decreases later on.

vagabondvet

Well we're pretty familiar with what happens when unsustainable expansion in various sectors of the economy are encouraged to grow with the housing bubble and the dotcom bubble in the past decade.

vagabondvet

TROPHY CASE

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