On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 11:23 PM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > On 11/17/2013 4:25 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: >> >> On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 8:41 AM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: >>> >>> On 11/16/2013 11:36 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: >>>>> >>>>> But I certainly take your point that there is a reason the government >>>>> is >>>>> not >>>>>> >>>>>> trusted. However, it is not the government that is warning us about >>>>>> global >>>>>> warming. It is in the scientific research literature. You didn't >>>>>> find >>>>>> lies >>>>>> about drones or drugs or the Patriout act in Physical Review or even >>>>>> in >>>>>> arXiv. >>>> >>>> No, but then they come up with this plan >>> >>> >>> What plan? Where is it? As far as I know there is no plan whatsoever. >> >> Here with "they" I mean the people with the most political clout, >> access to the media an so on who campaign for the reduction of CO2 >> emissions. Their demand seems to be for the signing of a global >> treaty. This is a demand for empowering governments to further >> regulate economic activity, now at a global scale, and one of the main >> suggestions is some global tax based on carbon emissions. Is this not >> correct? > > > That's the market based approach to reducing CO2 emissions by charging for > the externalities. But there is no treaty even on the table to require any > particular solution or even to enforce any degree of reduction. > > >> >>>> that the way to solve the >>>> problem is to give more power to the above-mentioned government. > > > So even the proposals don't give any new power to governments - they always > had the power to tax.
This is too simplistic. Taxes have a long and complicated history, and several types of taxes that are accepted today were very controversial not so long ago. For example, the income tax in the US came into existence in 1913, with ratification of the 16th amendment. My father lived a good part of his life under the fascist regime in Portugal. We had a thriving match industry, so there was a tax on lighters. I have the license he had to carry in his pocket to use his lighter. This tax would now be illegal because of a UE treaty that forbids this type of protectionism. It was made redundant before that by the post-revolutionary nationalisation and consequent destruction of the match industry. Then, also in the UE, we saw the social security system turn into a tax: first, people were convinced that they should put some money aside and let the government take care of it, so that it is later able to provide you with a pension. Now that this system is collapsing, existing pensions are being cut, future pensions are uncertain and the age of retirement is rising. Yet, people don't pay less to social security. The pattern seems to always be the same: an initial reasonable plan, then a slow slide down a long sequence of small "corrections" and "mistakes" that eventually lead to pure obligation with nothing in return. Now, most UE citizens are resigned to the idea that they have to pay taxes to make up for past mistakes and expect nothing in return. This was attained by a process of slow cooking. > >>> >>> You're protesting against a plan that you imagine. >>> >>> >>>> Any >>>> proposed solution that does not involve further government intrusion >>>> in our lives is rejected. >>> >>> >>> What solution is that? >> >> More nuclear power and geo-engineering. Both these proposals exists >> and there is interest on the part of investors. They are always met >> with a lot of resistance from environmentalists. I'm not saying that >> all of this resistance is unjustified, caution is a good thing in >> these matters, but I definitely see a lot of resistance that comes >> from some moral framework that sees these ideas as fundamentally >> immoral, even more so if someone can profit from them. > > > Sure, there's a lot of luddite resistance fed by scares like Fukushima. The > important role I see for government is driving the R&D to LFTRs. It's too > big and too politically risky to expect private investment to take it on. > It needs government funded and government protected development - just like > the internet, spaceflight, uranium reactors, vaccination, intercontinental > railroads, and just about any other really big technological development. I'll comment on two: the internet and railroads. The internet is the synergistic outcome of a number of technologies. I am fairly certain that no government desired the internet as it exists today. I can be fairly certain because they're using large chunks of our money to try to make it go away in its current format. Many different protocols were dreamt of. Creating a working internet protocol does not take a genius. It just so happened that TCP/IP gained popularity faster than other alternatives. A very great part of what makes the internet what it is today is open-source software. Sure, many companies and government organisations got in that action too for a number of reasons. But we saw an entire unix kernel being developed in front of our eyes by a Finnish kid and his followers. I remembered when this was laughed at, something that only a gigantic serious effort by government and corporations could achieve. That it would only ever be a toy. Now it powers Google, the majority of cell phones and several governments run on it. The initial history of the internet as we know it (circa '92 to '95) is a history of circumvention of red tape created by governments. Monopolistic government-backed telecoms made data exchange artificially expensive. It still does, by preventing long-range radio networks and open access points, purely for the purpose of the protection of monopolies and total surveillance. Yes, the internet could have been built without the government. We may have to do just that, if we are to keep it. As for transcontinental rail road in the US: yes, the market distortions introduced by government loans and subsidising are still physically visible in parallel lines running for hundreds of miles of bad terrain -- because bad terrain granted a higher subsidy, even if straighter, better options were available. The thing with successful entrepreneurs is that hey are rational and pragmatic: there isn't a shortcut they won't take. Telmo. > > Brent > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
