But they are

That's why the Jews have Israel

What about when Iran nukes the crap out of Israel. Your prophecies will get smoked.

that's when we find out how chosen we really are

So being Jewish is basically like dodgeball.

I'm always interested to hear people's views on Ireland.

tea party would not be happy about that

jews are the original socialists.



step one - get them all onto one island...

historically speaking, pretty much.

Tea Party would just have to shut up and deal with it. We're talking about 3000 year old prophecies here, this is serious business

Not as optimal as giving them the best part of Germany (assuming there is such a thing) and calling the place "LOL HITLER"

6000

Get out. Pretty sure humans still had gills and lived in the trees to avoid all the dinosaurs 6000 years ago.

im sorry 5774

No chance.

Good beer and potatoes

Give Mets a break, he's not that good with numbers and things people said

so why the shot at me being bad with numbers?

The earth was created 6000 years ago, duh.

well im not sure what the definitoon of day is

or when they started keeping track!!!

right so i'm taking this to the politics threads as pub is for cat gifs and beer talk.

The first thing wrong with this is that you assume that liars only seek money. I assume politicians like money as everyone else does, but there is also a desire for power, control and status. These are desires that are readily available for those with a silver tongue in politics. This is available along with vast monetary wealth without the burden of having to provide services for their income as any CEO of a company has to in a free market.

Unless you're argument is that government literally doesn't contain any liars (and that is provably false), you have to account for the fact that lying scumbags (like Obama, Cameron, Blair, Dubya) do make up the majority of the highest echelons of government. There is a reason they didn't go into the private sector, all are millionaires btw accumulating vast fortunes.


I don't think this is "unambiguous". The 200+ million people killed by their own governments not including war in the 20th century might have something to say about government being "unambiguously good".

Also every first world nation has had a government for the last few hundred years so it's difficult to compare one thing with an empty set.

If you mean that the presence of government in a part of society is unambiguously good then that is a huge claim that really doesn't hold up to the evidence. If your argument is that government has a magic touch that makes everything better then really government should be in all facets of everyone's life. There are goods such as food, clothing, marriage, entertainment and technology that have relatively low government interference, but if government is always unanimously good then why involve the government in all parts of these industries?

One easy way to show this is by comparing countries who have allowed a more free market with those whose states run almost everything. The two best comparisons that are two very similar countries with similar resources that have gone in different directions. Those countries are North/South Korea and East/West Germany. These countries have gone in opposite directions in terms of government involvement and there is no comparison between them in terms of quality of living. Clearly government just doesn't magically make everything better, it's not just broken here or there, it has huge costs.

I'm assuming pointing out academics who disagree would just garner the response that they are "not respected", but that's hardly an objective thing. I recently read a book by Michael Huemer called "The Problem with Political Authority" (extremely recommended) which is extremely anti-government and he is a philosophy professor at the University of Colorado, and I could name several others. I want to know what criteria you're using for deciding whether academics are respected or not respected unless you're criteria is "respected" just means they agree with you which is obviously not very convincing.

One of my huge bug bears about this sort of argument is that it assumes that government is perfect and anything government does wrong is because of "outside interests and corruption." This seems like a very religious belief in the intentions of governments.

I'm sure I could argue each one of those supposed benefits in tern but shortly, I don't believe in public goods or the rule of law, the redistribution of wealth is in fact, theft and regulating industries causes monopolies and the corporate greed that you so hate.

So people are dickish and would screw over their neighbour for a slight leg up and your solution is to have a government made up out of... people? The logic doesn't follow.

It's not a massive strawman. it's a necessary step to take to justify the forcible redistribution of wealth. The idea that the government knows what's for the greater good of society enough to take person A's property and give it to person B relies on there being an actual "greater good of society" that can be known. I don't believe in such a thing because value is subjective and this "greater good" means different things to different people. Person A might think that it's for the "greater good" that he keeps his property. Thus unless your argument is that the "greater good" is whatever the government says it is, which allows for every kind of tyranny you can think of, then either you need to come up with an objective theory of "the greater good" or the wealth redistribution is just theft.

I would really doubt that 95% of all government action everyone finds fine and dandy, I'm not sure how you came up with that figure. Everyone has different ideas how to run the NHS, national defense, the tax system, the monarchy, whether or not Scotland will be independent, the EU, the public transport etc etc etc. To say that 95% of the stuff the government does is unanimously agreed on is completely wrong, even if you discount those who disagree that the government should be involved in those areas you will not find unanimity.



I'd really recommend reading the book i mentioned earlier, "The Problem with Political Authority" by Michael Huemer, which really goes into this better than I can.
Of course, I always like a debate even though I thoroughly suck at them.

**** man that is a ****ing huge post and I don't have time to deal with it right now so imma just pull out the points I think are the key areas of disagreement but hey, drunkbloo so don't count on total coverage
lolwut

In what world do politicians not provide any kind of service? Their service is comparable to that of a higher management function in a private company, albeit with vastly inferior pay, worse job security and far higher scrutiny.

****, I know people earning more than British MPs who work 9-5, clock-in, clock-out.
I'd obviously not say no liars. But I think you're taking an overly cynical view here in assuming that only liars go into politics.
citation needed

I notice that the governmentless societies that still exist/have existed were never as successful as the societies with government.

Food regulation is probably one of the most important areas of government regulation. Who ensures that companies aren't filling our foods with unsafe additives?

Marriage is an institution that only exists as a function of government so I really don't know what your point is there.

Tech - do you know how much IP is ultimately the result of research either funded or part-funded by government? Because it's a hell of a lot.
You're strawmanning again here, comparing countries with vastly authoritarian governments that virtually no-one would advocate, against countries that, hey, still have extensive government faculties.

How about comparing Europe and the USA? You've got a bit of that 'larger government, bigger social burden, more state interference' in most European countries, compared to the generally smaller government in the USA.
I mean, I was looking more at historians/historical economists rather than theorists. I know there's theorists out there who are very anti-government. I'd be very surprised if there's many respected historians who'd look back at the past 200 years and say 'this would have been better without a government'.
Eh? I think I said the exact opposite. Government is almost inherently flawed. But it's better than the alternative. You seem to have a religious belief in the free market, by contrast.
Oh wow, I think this is the crux of it. How do you not believe in public goods or the rule of law? Like, public goods are almost unambiguously things that exist, I literally can't fathom how someone can look into the theory and go 'no, that's not a thing'. Ditto, the necessity of a rule of law and someone (or a group of people) to have the authority to impose that law is almost unarguably a thing - I thought even anarchists were in favour of property law?

Regulation of industries tampers down monopolies, not causes them. The regulation of industries should (and I note, this is not always the case, but in general the slant is definitely in the right direction) iron out the intrinsic market inefficiencies that exist in almost every single market because there is no such thing as a perfect market, and there are any number of people out there trying to twist those imperfections to their advantage.
No. Individual people are dicks but we can harness the power of society to force them to be less dickish. Institutions are the key. A government is constrained, to a greater or lesser degree, by the need to maintain public approval.
No, I still disagree here. Just because something's hard to measure doesn't mean that we say 'oh, therefore it can't be done'. The 'greater good' is what society says it is, which is ultimately what government, the elected representatives say it is. If government's view of 'the greater good' is vastly different from that of society, they lose the support of the people and lose their authority.
My point is that they have different ideas on how to do many of these things, but the general mechanism of government, the things constantly being done in the background to keep everything in the country, those are things that people want, and those make up the vast majority of government activities. The stuff that actually gets debated and batted about is just the froth on the top.

PMed you about a beer sometime.

Also, I haven't read that specific book (and at 360 odd pages I'm unlikely to have the time to soon), but I'm no ingenue dabbling in a field beyond my ken here, I studied economics (with a little politics) at University, and now work in finance, so I would be moderately surprised if it was putting forwards any arguments that were vastly different from those I've already encountered (although if you think it does offer a different bent from the traditional libertarian arguments I'd be interested to hear how).

And it's not as if Warwick is some uber-leftwing bastion of socialism either, that place loves it some free-market economics.

yo ignore most of that though. the key points are the ones where you straight up dismiss all the problems with the free market that the government corrects. I think that if you don't believe in public goods, the rule of law, and think that regulation is a universal wrong, then yeah, maybe you could reach the conclusion that government is a bad thing

I'd vehemently disagree with you on all those points though (and probably more that just haven't come up). And I think those really are the crux of the issue - I view the benefits that the government provides through fixing these market inequalities and providing the necessary institutions to be easily worth the level of corruption/self-servingness of those elected to rule. Because, like Hobbes, I believe that without them that there simply would be no way for a society to function, due to the inherent selfishness of man.

What does "hell of a lot" mean? I don't have a numerical answer but I would guess it's miniscule compared to investments by private enterprise.

i want to hear pog's anglishmen's take on the scottish thing.

what implications does it have for live werewolf in the british isles, for example?