OT: Geek/Tech/Entrepreneur Stuff to do in PHX

[Eric Cope]

nice citation!

On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 8:51 PM, Austin William Wright <
diamondmagic at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:

> Craig White wrote:
> > On Sat, 2009-08-01 at 21:20 -0700, keith smith wrote:
> >
> >> If you are referring to the courts that is one thing the government
> >> needs to do.
> >>
> >> Water
> >> Sewer
> >> Trash pickup
> >> Streets
> >> Police
> >> Fire
> >> Standing Army
> >> and one or two other things.
> >>
> >> Everything else needs to be removed from the government.
> >>
> >> Using the courts to resolve a dispute is differently from the
> >> government providing for our business needs.
> >>
> >> Free enterprise.  Do you think as a small business owner I am afforded
> >> any protection under the law.  Not happening.  Only the big guys get
> >> help from the government.
> >>
> >> I really have to get a few things done so i will sing off for now.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> In NH, we got our own water, sewage, and trash. Why is government
> necessary for those things? Even roads maybe (though there are bigger
> things to think about), many of the highways are tollways.
> > Keep in mind I'm for small government and a free market.the problem is
> that free market has now proven to be a disaster. The
> > current economic mess is a direct result of deregulating things like the
> > banks, Wall Street, etc. While the John Galt logic sounded pretty good,
> > it simply didn't work and the great Ayn Rand disciple, Greenspan got it
> > all wrong. We are paying the consequences for this now and will be
> > paying even more consequences as the next wave of home and commercial
> > property foreclosures ramp up, unemployment starts to climb again and
> > more and more people's unemployment benefits expire. Free market is a
> > great concept that simply doesn't work because corporate interests are
> > predatory and irresponsible.
> >
> > The acknowledgment that essential government services listed above
> > justifies the role of government and you want to argue that it should do
> > no more. There is much more government should be doing...but they have
> > abrogated their responsibilities in things like consumer protection.
> >
> > Government will always be a problem but no government is a worse problem
> > considering the amount of people and the current trend of business
> > practices.
> I would examine the "free market" again. We are /not/ in a free market,
> and haven't even been close to one for a while. We never deregulated
> anything, indeed, the pages of regulation haven't decreased since Regan.
> Greenspan turned out to be one of the biggest interventionists, only
> outdone by Bernanke. You can't blame the mess on bankers, if they didn't
> make those decisions someone else would have, and the outcome wouldn't
> have been any different (in other words, it is a symptom, not a cause).
> The problem stems from many central banks including our own Federal
> reserve cutting interest rates from 2001-2004 by (essentially)
> "printing" money. Since the housing market was one of the most regulated
> (that is to say, there were government-enforced lending standards and
> intervention my Fannie and Freddie), so people spent that new money on
> houses before anything else (Oil too, because energy is closely tied to
> the market), drove prices up, created a misallocation of capital
> disproportionate with consumer demand, and we crashed when not enough
> people could humanly gather the money to buy a new house at the price
> they were at.
>
> Too many people get mislead by the number on the money, ignore the
> money, that isn't what an economy is about. It is about exchange and
> production. It is impossible measure how much an economy satisfies
> people's wants, some of their wants may not involve exchange with other
> people (so-called autistic exchange, which cannot be measured). Every
> dollar spent bailing out companies is a dollar that cannot be used to
> make televisions cheaper, or is a dollar that cannot be used to buy
> food. Every dollar borrowed by government is one that cannot be loaned
> out to a private investor, and raises interest rates at that. Every
> dollar printed by government is one that was not in turn made with any
> productive effort valued by someone else, and raises prices for the
> people who are honest, without getting any raise in their income to
> compensate. If GM collapsed, who knows how many companies would have
> wanted to buy their machinery to build electric cars cheaper, or invent
> the next great mode of transportation. Just because GM collapses,
> doesn't mean that the workers no longer are allowed to work, nor does it
> mean that the capital has vanished into thin air. It all still exists,
> to be re-allocated to a use /better/ and cheaper than cars (or
> specifically better than GM cars, if purchased by another car company),
> as judged by who who would value it the most (able to pay the most).
> Recessions are created by debt and caused by a bad structure of capital.
> We need to embrace failure, it lowers prices that allows us to pay off
> debt and re-form the right kinds of capital that will satisfy our wants
> more effectively then if we did not.
>
> This is why I oppose any and all science, art, think tank, and
> infrastructure funding. People allocate what they have to what they have
> (goods, which here includes renting their labor), to the most urgent
> needs first. If the only way an oil pipeline can be built is to force
> people to pay for it, then they are losing out on something they desire
> more. So how does infrastructure come about then? Conversion of capital.
> Money saved in a bank is effectively, for the purposes of economics, the
> same as the infrastructure (capital) itself, but time-delayed. (Interest
> rates play in, being the rate at which people value something now over
> something in the future.) People pool their savings in a bank, and the
> more people who save, the more they intend to defer their consumption
> until later. Since we have differed consumption, interest rates go down,
> and this money can be loaned out - to buy capital that will be able to
> produce the things people will want in the future. This is why Europe
> was able to advance so much more than the rest of the world until the
> industrial age, and especially the Native Americans who had /no/ pool of
> capital, because it had a far more modern banking system. It is the
> detail of why the Soviet Union failed (no savings, no capital). Only
> when the savings pool is more than the cost of the capital can it be
> undertaken, otherwise it will be a malinvestment and better spent on
> other projects. This is a very difficult thing to grasp, it has taken me
> much studying to even be able to explain this, hopefully it suffices. I
> also want to note, this is why manipulating interest rates is a /very
> bad idea/, because it encourages capital growth, like more houses or
> factories for instance, when people don't have the savings to draw from
> once they are manufactured - that is to say, people won't be able to
> exchange for the new capital at the time of their maturity at the rate
> that was expected when development began. This is why a bust follows an
> artificial boom, almost like clockwork throughout history (though, the
> same type of bust can also be caused without a boom by other things,
> there is no difference between a bust caused by too much spending in
> energy and a bust caused by a broken oil pipeline that forces people
> dependent on oil out of business).
>
> On topic, try a solar water heater. Solar anything. We haven't used
> electric heating for the past two months and are saving about $50/mo
> because of it. Take a look at what resources an economy has, in the case
> of Arizona, there is have labor, some types of crops, copper and other
> metals, and sun, and I know other things too. Phoenix especially is
> funny because it is (I think) the first big city not built next to
> water, usually you need transportation to be able to grow. Anyways, look
> for things that use the resources around you. Things powered by solar
> and simple electronic components (fasteners, wires and cables perhaps)
> come to mind.
>
> Austin Wright.
>
> PS. If this is at all interesting consider reading /Man, Economy, and
> State/.
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-- 
Eric Cope
http://cope-et-al.com
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