Please comment on TRUMP budget proposal. A large increase in defense spending, a 28% decrease in State Department spending, 31% cut in EPA budget to name a few things.

Comparing a counterfactual Hillary presidency to an extant Trump presidency is problematic, to say the least.

To early to tell on the whole how awful Trump's presidency will be, but a lot of it looks awfully awful. Already massively escalating Obama's drone war, Jeff "Muh Drug War" Sessions. Protectionism/anti-free trade/anti-immigration economic stupidity. $60B more for the MIC to light on fire. Trumpcare AKA Obamacare Lite. On the other hand these rumblings about gutting the administrative state sound awesome, but I'll believe it when I see it.

I asked my 4 year old and he says he definitely does NOT want a pony, because "they make too much poop."

More money spent on empire sucks. Cutting the EPA's budget is awesome.

What did you expect me to say?

I actually was just looking for a (partial) exemption and to see you include yourself in your own critique.

That's cool. I've started dating an amazing woman, personally. Dang, she's amazing.

Borodog,

I know it infuriates you that you need to get a permit from the city to install a garbage disposal, but Trump's a fascist. You know who recognizes that? Every police officer in the country.

They're all fascists.

There's like degrees of fascism. So shame on Barack Obama for droning Muslim kids and stuff but Trump isn't going to stop any of that. His Presidency didn't even get two weeks before he tried a blundering Made for TV military exercise that resulted in bunch of dead kids. So he's a bulwark against none of that.

But what Trump seems like a risk to do is set ICE and CBP off to cause misery among immigrants or anyone else that looks cross at them.

So even if you put on your libertarian hat, and try to see it from that point of view: he's going to dismantle bureaucracy and send a bunch of eggheads back to the private sector, yay to that, OK.

But his budgets don't actually look like they're shrinking the federal government:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017...-agencies.html

So the jackboots are still going to thieve your money. So instead of a wealth transfer to bureaucrats and administrators, it's going to the military.

Hard to see this as a victory for libertarianism. A victory for nihilists and anti-social people who I suppose see this as building to some sort of cataclysmic destructive endpoint. A victory for fascists for sure. Libertarians cheering the destruction of the state under Trump because he's sending the wonks at the EPA out to landings spots at universities or whatever and taking all the money saved to buy new weaponry and fund more overseas adventuring and other new "security" is like the textbook example of Pyrrhic victory.

Yeah, pretty sure I didn't say/do any of that. I will remind you that ICE and CBP enforcement were historically draconian under Obama.

FWIW I don't expect any president's proposed budgets to shrink government significantly because that would induce a gut wrenching recession that no president wants to take the blame for.

And yes, if I had to guess at this point, I expect Trump to be worse than Obama. But that's the general trend of history; each president tends to be worse than the previous, with notable exceptions (e.g. it's really hard to be worse than Woodrow Wilson). I certainly expected Hillary to be much worse than Obama on every front.

I changed my mind.

Anyone not wishing the Seasteading Institute success?



btw, DVaut1's posts are full of fail. There isn't one point there that's worth addressing.

1. Wars in the Middle East over keeping the US Dollar the currency of choice and oil suck.
2. Central banking sucks. Fractional reserve banking is embezzlement. Rothbard was right T-shirt.
3. Corporate bailouts, and banking bailouts are unforgivable.
4. Income taxes suck...
5. Majority of governments contemporary, and historically are insta-terrible. Also, more private property rights have historically lead to greater prosperity, and it's like this everywhere. South Korea, or North Korea? I mean the benefits of liberty are pretty lol-obvious.
6. The calculation debate.

List goes on-and-on...

Where I am heading with this is that the only conclusion you reach is that your rulers suck, and you're in this survival of the fittest where those that are able to manipulate people's emotions rise to the top of government's can rather than merit, which was a lot of what Ayn Rand wrote about. And the emotionalists like DVaut1 and microbet for instance are just really lazy in their thinking. Worldwide governments have historically a lot of entries in the failblog. Latest entry is going to be Trump's new wall proposal, which is like "omg voters are genius", and flattery just goes up to the top, because statism is a cult. So everyone blows smoke up Trump's ass until he's president, and now they have no way to build this utopic wall they propose, because statism is a total fantasy cult.

ya but bush was like really really bad. hard for obama to be worse than him.

I will never understand why white guys insist on walking in he middle of the street like that. What is the deal?

A border wall? Can you believe these rubes? Living in a fantasy world. Now let me tell you about my plan for floating freedom cities.

Obama was worse than Bush on many fronts. He did get 1-2 orders of magnitude fewer people though, so I'd give him the nod.

Libertarians who fail to notice the stark differences in policy between democrats and republicans are ignorant frauds.

Personally I'm hoping there's still a chance it was a misspelling all along, since I remain interested in learning about capitalism for arachnids. You're welcome for this A+ joke.

It's good that while Trump's CBP is denying entry to special immigrant visa holders and coercing people to "voluntarily" turn over green cards, Borodog is still woke enough to tell us this. Jesus.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/life/Linyphiidae

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160...s-50000-strong

If Trump starts a nuclear war and throws us all into concentration camps, they will still be crying about how Obama "deported" the most people ever and actually Hillary would have been much worse.

Derp.

After a few years of argument in the anarchy thread in PU they all turned out to be white guys who wanted it to be like the 50's without all those pesky civil rights for the blacks. And some delightful talks of sky roads.