--- Alypius Skinner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: "'John Hull wrote: 1. The program will prevent poor from coming to the States. I think that's wrong....' So you think its wrong to demand that poor people respect private property rights...."
That's a bit of a non sequitur. :) Nope. All I was saying is that poor shouldn't be prevented from immigrating simply for being poor (and that the proposed citizenship structure would do that, a view that has been well challenged). Furthermore, that people should be allowed to move from country to country fairly unhindered--taking the fleas with the dog. No insightful economic arguments here, it's just a value that I have (and interjected). Alypius Skinner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: "Ken Lay, Bill Clinton (Hillary in 2008), what's the difference? Lay might even be an improvement." Hillary in 2008? Ooof. Humor aside, I'm not sure I agree that Lay-esque leadership would be an improvement. You remark how stupid and apathetic voters are, it seems to me that in that environment someone more clever than I could come up with a scheme to build stock prices in the short-run, get paid, and bail out of office. The world has certainly seen its share of bad leaders, but that doesn't mean that they couldn't be worse. I think that the proposed scheme would shorten political time horizons by linking reward to a very short-term phenomenon, and thereby produce even greater incentives for bone-head moves. I feel that if leaders' primary compensation comes in the form of going down in the history books in a good light, then they'll be more inclined to think in the longer term. Obviously, I don't have a general argument to back this up. It is also obvious that one could easily pick out plenty of counter examples, which I could not counter with counter examples because we're dealing with a hypothetical. I would like to hear an argument as to why linking reward to an extremely short-term phenomenon would produce better leaders on average. I'm not throwing down the gauntlet...it's just something I'd like to hear. --- Alypius Skinner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: "But all the incentives for that scenario (embracing mercantile excesses) already exist." That must be true to some degree since people keep putting Pat Buchanan on TV. But I submit that those incentives arise from your aforementioned voter ignorance & stupidity: some people support schemes that are ultimately harmful for the nation & the world and will vote for the slobs who enact such policies. The proposed scheme, IMO, creates an *institutional* incentive for such mercantilist policies because they can, at least in the short-run, hurt the rest of the world alot more than they will hurt us. Thanks for reading my stuff, jsh ===== "...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong." -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? HotJobs - Search Thousands of New Jobs http://www.hotjobs.com
