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I'm not sure that the term either the Democrats or the Republicans can plausibly call themselves fiscally conservative, they seem to both to be broadly Keynesian with the exception that very rarely run surpluses (which they should be doing during a boom so they could at least be vaguely...

Agreed. We could use some here in Australia too, its not like were short of uranium or anything.

I would actually agree with you entirely on that point.

Apparently I'm a fanatic if I refuse to just take your word on an issue. From my perspective you are the one behaving like a fanatic. Is it actually impossible for you to conceive that another rational person might disagree with you? Since, as you appear to have by now conceded the fact...

1. No is forcing you to buy insurance. 2. If the government isn't distorting that particular market in a variety of ways than the insurance companies would actually have to compete with each other on price and service and coverage, people could choose the plan they wanted that fit within their...

They would have it, in a free market. It's not about "dicking people over for shits and giggles", its the fact that they have no incentive at all to behave in a way that benefits the 'customers' and have every incentive to behave in a way that is contrary to the interests to the 'customers'...

I would argue that it is in fact you that needs to get your facts straight. The Australian government severely restricts immigration, this prevents doctors who are trained overseas from coming to live and work in Australia. If they didn't do this than any attempts of Australian doctors to...

The people who should be having a say is the patients, by choosing between competing health care providers and competing treatments. Right. Bureaucrats are somehow different from everyone else in the world and immune to all conflicts of interest. A business in a free market has an...

I don't know if you've been paying any attention to US politics recently but the US government has been pretty consistently running large deficits for virtually every year for the last few decades. I live in Australia, I know we have a different system. This thread is about the US...

I'm not arguing that such a course of action would be easy, just that it is the best course of action. Even so, I recall Fraggle arguing that the size of the bureaucracy of such a scheme increases with the square or even the cube of the population, meaning such a proposal would be ruinously...

Yet you have no objection to placing it in the hands of bureaucrats and elected officials who have no training in this area nor any personal stake in the matter? who have no interest in or inclination to behave in your best interests? Those arguments apply equally to food production, and...

So reducing (or ideally, eliminating) the constraints on the free market seems like the obvious solution to me. Point taken, however one would expect that to be similarly inefficient for similar reasons (large bureaucracy, information problem, etc).

"The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer." Henry Kissinger (1923 - ), New York Times, Oct. 28, 1973 "It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit." Harry S Truman (1884 - 1972) "The most perfidious way of harming a cause...

There are too few animated gifs in this thread.

So far I have only used it to report blatant spam, shoe/phone salesbots, IIRC.

Crowding out isn't about the government increasing its share of the total spending on X, its the decrease in private spending on X that is of a larger magnitude than the increase in government spending on X. It's not a decrease in costs, its a distortion of spending patterns. You are...

That sounds more like crowding out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowding_out_(economics)

Happy Birthday Mac! Here's to many more! *raises imaginary glass*

Define, "too much space", please.

Is it possible that other people know your sisters password?