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And lets face it, conservative philosophies always fail in the end. Not just one or two of the worst of them, all of them. Every. single. time. they are tried. It's one of those inevitable facts that plagues our history. But why? Why do conservatives, time and again, fight furiously to perpetrate old cockamamie conservative schemes on our society? History is very clear, yet their belief in these debunked philosophies only grows stronger in the face of overwhelming facts to the contrary!(Remember that Seinfeld episode were George says "it's not a lie...if you believe it!") Yes, Elmo, good point. In fact, the 20th century is littered with the massive failures of the free market.... Oh, wait... maybe I was thinking of socialism.... The answer, quite clearly, is that they are socially retarded. And truth about enzyte proud of it, to boot. Your meds need to be doubled. Lets start with the founding of this great nation. With the Seven Years' War over, leaving the British strapped for cash, the conservatives of the day, who called themselves Tories, figured that corporate welfare would be the fix to their financial woes. I can't wait for this one.... That's right, supply side economics. One of their companies, The East India Company, who managed the tea trade on behalf of the British government, was going bankrupted. So they stopped the export tax on East India Company and started charging a modest import tax on American tea merchants. Then flooded the American market with cheap British tea. The conventional wisdom was, this will work because Americans love cheap shit! How'd that work out for ya, Tories? Good one, dick. Did you mention the little part about the British government protecting the colonies from French and Indian attack? The reason taxes were implemented on the colonies after the war was to pay back the debt the British ran up defending them. The colonists had no problem with the principal of taxation by the crown. What they did have a problem with was TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION. Sorta like what your liberal cockfags want to do when they tax businesses who in turn pass the higher costs on to the consumer. Oh... and I now turn my attention to the most idiotic notion in your argument (and there are many). It goes something like this: "The British Government taxed American tea mearchants and then flooded the American market with cheap tea from the East India Company as a form of corporate welfare". Lol. Ask yourself this: where did these so called "American tea merchants" get their tea from? Give up? The East India Company you fucking moron. It was the only source of tea in America due to something called 'mercantilism' (look it up, dumbsky)- a non-freemarket system more akin to the type favored by liberals. America did not and does not today produce its own tea. Thus, the British never 'flooded the market with cheap tea' to put Americans out of business since there was no domestic tea supply to begin with; what they imposed was a systemic and global import tax on tea brought to America by the East India Company. By taxing the tea and allowing the colonies no alternative supply, the result was an increase in tax revenue which was passed off as a cost of living increase. The closest modern parallel would be if the government placed a windfall tax on Exxon. The oil company would surely pass on the tax to the public in the form of higher gas prices. IN short, you have totally misunderstood history and economics but what should I expect? Next lets take a look at The Roaring 20's. The Great War was over, and America did not want much to do with the rest of the world. Mass production and mass consumption was the way of the day. Production processes were taken out of the hands of skilled craftsmen Whats the matter, you getting tired of your own nonsense? Ill end with this- mass production is what we have today because IT IS SUPERIOR TO HAND CRAFTMANSHIP. IT IS CHEAPER AND FASTER AND OFFERS BETTER QUALITY CONTROL. Production was not 'taken' from skilled craftsmen; Rather they were put out of business by superior techniques. posted by The TDL News Team at 8:18 PM Comments (10) | Trackback Editor's note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper columnist, and in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the current state of journalism. An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America: I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know. This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration. It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans. What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay. The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating. They end up worse off than before. This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them. Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.) Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending? I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate." Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed. As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled "Do Facts Matter?" ( http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com] ): "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury." These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party. Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout! What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame? Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae. And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing. If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was. But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign. You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican. If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama. If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis. There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.) If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression. Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper. But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to. |