Yes...you want a communist system...centralized planning, no private property, etc. Where is the liberty in that?

Most people do not own private property in a capitalist system, so if that's the sine qua non of freedom, most people are not free. The liberty of centralized planning is that there is no unemployment, there is no permanent reserve army of labor to depress wages and undermine the gains of labor. People do not have to worry about their job security or whether they'll see that next paycheck. People are not haunted by the prospect of not having a work, a home, or bread. Furthermore they get healthcare when they're sick. Where's the "liberty" of having to choose between medicine or rent/mortgage payments? Of having to decide between paying for your sick parents/siblings medical bills or having a college education? There is no liberty in that. The economy is structured according to human needs, not profit. There is boom and bust. There is no having to bribe and coddle the rich with tax incentives in order to get them to invest. The anarchy of production, the consumer/advertiser driven economy is replaced with intelligent investments in social goods instead of the junk we're forced to buy or use in a capitalist system.

Pretty soon, when our resources become completely depleted, we're going to find that the only possible solution is a planned economy. The overproduction of the market economy, the basing all decisions on voluntary exchange, simply doesn't work.

There is *no boom and bust

Boom and bust are good things - I have many friends that fell on hard times and had to use their creativity to innovate, reinvent themselves, generate new ideas and work hard to implement and test those ideas in the market place. All because they got busted down. Are you saying your system takes that away?

People should worry about their job security and next paycheck... that's called motivation.

. . . any policy that is sold as "protecting liberty."

. . . any "short-term emergency decree."

Yeah, well, never underestimate the cruelty of the aspiring bourgeoisie who thinks the millions of jobless and uninsured are a good thing. And look at all those "hardworking" bankers and middle managers, fleecing the public and their own workers while they play video games at work.

Dying and not being able to pay medical bills is "motivation", I guess. Motivation to do what exactly? Work another dead end job that underemploys their skills and doesn't provide health insurance or a pension? Motivation to avoid quitting their miserable jobs because they can't afford to risk moving elsewhere and losing their health insurance? Motivation to simply maintain their employment because they have no hope of a raise in this dreadful economic system? Tell me how the millions of migrant farm laborers are "motivated" by their slave wages and brutal working conditions. Tell me how they're going to "reinvent" themselves and generate "new ideas" and "test them in the market place". Tell me how the average person does that at all. Oh wait, you small business owners are just "average joe lunchbuckets". Everybody could be like you, right? Sure buddy.

The business class are no where to be found in this economy testing new ideas. They're hoarding capital and not investing. This is the greatness that is boom and bust. The government has to bribe them with all sorts of goodies and take all the risk before the capitalists will ever bother actually doing anything productive. Their idea of "management" is cutting costs and laying people off, not investing in new technologies and new ideas.

Maybe if interest rates weren't held artificially low for decades and the Federal Reserve didn't hold rates below a normal rate of return there would be more investing...

I don't follow how higher rates of interests for bank loans would make it so investors who make more profits from investments. If anything they loved the low interest rates, gave them access to cheap money to invest with.

Putin...you can't have liberty and have governmental control of production, population and property. Everything you espouse is antithetical to the premise of liberty. As already pointed out in this thread and stated more than 200 years ago "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Your premise of liberty is that liberty is synonymous with private property. Most everyone in the world rejects that premise of liberty. You ignore the social costs of your private market system and want to claim that meeting social needs is antithetical to liberty. Again, only someone who doesn't struggle to meet these things could say such things.

I'm not interested in cliches and slogans. It's quite obvious that the actual Constitutional framers who formed the government weren't so naive, which is why they implemented a constitution that was far less liberal than the Articles of Confederation to begin with, calling for a centralized independent executive, standing armies, the ability to quell rebellions with force, the ability to collect debts by force, all sorts of things libertarians of the time cried about.

And furthermore, the nice sounding slogans about liberty from people who owned slaves have no effect on me whatsoever. They ring hollow.

@Eden, tehe interest rate the Fed charges has little bearing on consumer or business interest rates. This interest rate is the rate that banks pay on overnight or very short term loans from the Fed to balance their books or to meet the reserve requirement. So if the Fed's discount rate is low, banks can charge less to lend out their money because it cost them less to obtain the funds. If the Fed's discount rate is high, it costs more for banks to loan money, so it costs more for consumers to borrow from those banks. Low interest rates are good things.

You brought up control of property. It wasn't my definition of liberty. It was yours when you cloaked communist ideas under the flag of Liberty.

Your objection was centered on government control of property. "You can't have liberty with government control of production, population, and *property*" Your exact words. You haven't offered a concrete premise of liberty. We get vague slogans that don't have any meaning.

"Yeah, well, never underestimate the cruelty of the aspiring bourgeoisie who thinks the millions of jobless and uninsured are a good thing. And look at all those "hardworking" bankers and middle managers, fleecing the public and their own workers while they play video games at work."

Putin33 you and TC are exactly the same. You're so on the extreme of something that you can't see the real world, and you've got no realistic answers so you have to blow my response out of proportion just to address it with your formulaic answers you've read somewhere. I never said I think "the millions of jobless and uninsured are a good thing." My statement had nothing to do with insurance of which I am for a public plan.

THINK please!!! It's people like you who take a hard dogmatic line and apply it to all walks of life that is causing dichotomous discourse and turning important political discussion into people yelling pi-partisan talking points at each other.

I'm genuinely asking you this question, and then I won't bother you again on this topic: Don't you think it's possible that the best possible system is a hybrid where the important staples of life (safe food, cost-effective housing, basic clothing, police and military protection, health care, transportation infrastructure) are socialized and the luxuries (art, electronics, recreational drugs, toys & games) are capitalist? I honestly want to know how hard a line in the sand you are drawing. I appreciate any reasonable response.

"But that's the whole point. "Eugenics" is anything which aims to improve the genetic composition of the population. This includes a large number of things that people have no problem doing, but eugenics still is uniformly condemned"

Just possibly, putin, people who say that are using the word in another, more restricted sense.

Kalel, you can't play this game where you claim to not take a hard line when you're claiming bust periods, and all their consequences, are a good thing. And lack of job security and lack of security how you're going to eat and how you're going to pay rent is a good thing, provides "motivation". No, sorry, doesn't work that way. You can't take those positions and then rail about the 'dogmatism' of other people, pretending you're for a hybrid system.

You were advocating a hardline market position and didn't mention anything about cushioning the blow of the bust periods. Now you're switching positions. How are people going to be "motivated", as you claimed they would be earlier, if you now want a public plan to take care of necessities? Your statements are completely contradictory.

Now please proceed by complaining about my tone and equating me to TC while ignoring your original comments.

I don't really care about so-called "luxury" goods, so if they're marketized, fine. The Soviet Union had markets for some consumer goods. That worked fine. The main engines of the economy, however, were planned. The economy doesn't run on toys and art. I'd ban recreational drugs, they have no place in society. Under capitalism they flourish because people want an escape route from the misery of this system. For many people drug dealing seems to be the only economic opportunity open to them.

I agree that there are those who do not want the responsbility that comes with liberty and that there may be those who would prefer a life without liberty. For myself, I cherish liberty and think that Thomas Jefferson said it best when he wrote that "Liberty is to the collective body, what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society."

"Just possibly, putin, people who say that are using the word in another, more restricted sense."

The 'restricted sense' is completely inaccurate, and to continue to blast away at eugenicists who had nothing to do with this restricted and distorted definition of the word is irresponsible and slanderous.

WTF....do you even remember what you write, or are you so indoctrinated?

"And capital entails more than exchange via money, it involves private ownership of the means of production."

You wrote that well before my first response to this thread. You have an axe to grind..I understand...but you can't make a case for giving individual freedoms to a central government and say you have Liberty. The basic definition of liberty is free from restriction or control. That's why I say the educational system is screwed when you argue for totalitarian control and call it "liberty"....jeez.

It's poetry hour for the forum Liberty Bells.

The point was that the artificial holding of interest rates low is keeping the market from recovering and extending the length of the economic downturn. That downturn is why people aren't investing. You allow interest rates to rise and allow the market to correct, and then post-correction people will start investing.

Spell of Wheels, and what of the restrictions and controls place on people by private interests? Are those irrelevant? Just admit that you value certain liberties more than others, and being free from hunger and employment is just not very important to you, so you want a monopoly over the term liberty.

I enjoy how libertarians quote verse from slaveowning rapists, as if they know anything about what freedom is.

''But that's the whole point. "Eugenics" is anything which aims to improve the genetic composition of the population. This includes a large number of things that people have no problem doing, but eugenics still is uniformly condemned.''

I believe that before WW2 (in fact I think that it lasted into the 1960s)over half the States in the US had a provision for compulsory sterilization of the ''unfit''. Some States also had legal constraints on who was allowed to marry who on grounds of genetic health. Fortunately in spite of the father of eugenics, Galton (Darwin's cousin), being British no such laws were passed there. Yet we may not rest on our laurels, Richard Dawkins puts the case for a revival of these ideas thus: “if you can breed cattle for milk yield, horses for running speed, and dogs for herding skill, why on Earth should it be impossible to breed humans for mathematical, musical or athletic ability."

Eugenics can indeed be a threat to liberty, but I suppose it all depends which end of the telescope you are looking through.