You must know some real radicals out
there in Cal-i-forn-i-a. Articles of Confederation?? Wow.
Social Security and Medicare are sticky wickets, no matter how they are
sliced. There are suggestions afoot that one should be forced to invest
your 401k in government bonds. While that solves the problem (a little)
of skittish buyers (not really, it just forces SOME of the skittish
buyers to buy), I don't see that as a net win, either. Even with my IRA
and 401k in mutual funds (lots of stock) the 2008-2009 meltdown took
those investments back to 2003 levels, still miles ahead of where they
started. So IF Social Security was in the market people may have lost 5
years of profits and/or investments. With the system bankrupt and
unemployment high, where are the tax revenues going to come from to fix
the hole? Assuming that my job isn't outsourced completely to India in
2 1/2 years.
You cannot convince me that there has been absolutely NO bureaucratic
overreach by a lot of the agencies you mention, particularly now that
the EPA has classed CO2 as a pollutant. Are they going to have to give
us permits to exhale? Bet this administration would only give them to
those registered to the Democratic Party.
:-)
Just kidding, barely.
And why does it take so d...@mn long to get drugs approved here? I believe
we hold the record for the longest length of time from research and
development to market. Lantus Insulin was developed in Germany and took
a few years to get approved over here. German standards aren't good
enough?
And let's not mention the winking and nodding that goes on today. Many
are seeing the Goldman Sachs case as a very weak one, brought up at
this time only to help push the latest "Financial System Reform"
through. Looks like it may indeed have that impact. Now, if Goldman
Sachs is acquitted, then what? Sorry, but I don't think that we will
see a rollback of this "Reform."
David
"Anyone
who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people
do is a swine."--P.
J. O’Rourke
On 4/20/2010 11:24 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
Hi David,
On Apr 20, 2010, at 8:52 PM, David R. Block wrote:
Dear Billy and Ernie,
"And contrary to the libertarian dreams, we can't really freeze development at a certain stage. We can and should make regulation smarter and leaner, but we can't go back to the pre-New-Deal America, unless we execute a dramatically non-libertarian edict to simultaneously shrink all companies, social organizations, and even educational institutions back to their previous tiny size. Otherwise, whatever modern-scale institutions left would end up filling the void. Like it or not, we live in a complex world, and complex governance (for all its flaws) is the only thing that can handle it."
Majoring in overstatement just a bit??
No libertarian that I have read has suggested going back to pre-New Deal America. None have suggested that we shrink all companies, social organizations or educational institutions. And for heaven's sake, no suggestion has been made to freeze development at a certain stage, particularly economic development.
Sorry, I skipped a step in my argument, though I think you also missed my "unless".
The standard libertarian argument I've seen is that government should basically go back to what it was doing before FDR: e.g., national defense (that's the "weak" version; the strong version is that we should go back to before Lincoln, and the really strong one is to the Articles of Confederation :-). That implies eliminating the FDA, EPA, SEC, etc., and letting the market take care of issues like financial regulation, health and safety, and so forth.
Is that an overstatement? If so, I apologize.
The only "intrusive" government function I've seen libertarians advocate is "full disclosure"; however, it was never clear to me that a) it would work, or if it did then b) how it would be an less susceptible to "regulatory capture" than any other form of oversight. Do you know?
What ARE we going to do about Social Security and Medicare, now bankrupt, with the impending fiscal disaster of Obamacare waiting in the wings? I have some sympathy with the idea that "too big to fail" should be "too big to exist." Particularly if the taxpayers are on the hook for it all, and we are.
I agree it is a legitimate concern. But if you're saying that the solution is to have never implemented Social Security, then that supports my point about libertarians wanting to go back to before the New Deal.
If you're arguing that we need a better way to budget and assess costs to avoid things like the "balance of payment" gap between entitlement outlays and income, then I completely agree, and would love to hear the libertarian proposal for that. The traditional conservative solution was to let people invest in the stock market instead of Social Security, but oddly I haven't heard anyone mention that lately...
-- Ernie P.
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