President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

We've spent most of my life "regulating" exchange between people in larger ways (so that much of what people are allowed to do is no longer voluntary exchange), and "reimagining" things so someone could design a better "system" (to appeal to populist sentiment in the moment).

Predictably, when we reap what we sow. ... it's a "free markets" or "capitalism" problem.

When people frame "free markets" as something that produces some utopion outcome, the way the idiotic snark on here (not talking about you) tries to, it is coming from the same place as people who think they can create a plan that makes something with a cost "free" or that we need to turn our government into the allocator of resources to benefit who they think is most worthy (at the expense of whoever they think can "afford" it).

A free market simply means that we leave people alone (which is MORAL and is the basis for civil and human rights) to make decisions about what benefits them based on whatever information is available to them. It doesn't take a world in which there are scare resources and change reality. It doesn't "solve" the fact that life is not easy. It simply allows ALL OF US to have our own hand in how resources get allocated. ... without someone using dictatorial authority to design things for all of us (without even understanding the consequences of what they end up forcing on others).

Regardless, Federal and State government spending relative to our GDP is more than 40 percent in the U.S. Budgets have continually grown (exponentially), almost every aspect of our economy is controlled by government regulation (much of it corruptly arrived at) to the point that some things that impact a lot of people's lives are a complete mess today. And we aren't even drawing capital away from "free markets" to fund the craziness. ... we've been running up trillions of dollars of debt over the last couple of decades.

Free markets are definitely destroying the country.

 

I disagree with that.

Your "tuning" has already created massive problems, to which then. ... more "tuning" has been the inevitable answer.

The arsonist always rides in on the fire truck. And it's now to the point of blatant dishonesty in the populist rhetoric that drives each phase of "tuning" that gets foisted on people.

I'd much prefer a home where we all can just live our lives without others trying to "tune" everything way that THEY want. ... and a government that exists to simply create laws that PROTECTS all of our rights. Don't murder, don't steal, don't harm the next guy in your pursuit of whatever it is you want to pursue, etc. ... and be on your way.

We have gotten so far away from that. ... where rather than protecting rights, people now see it as the purpose of our government to harm some people (they can afford it!) to benefit whoever or whatever they think is important. They want to hijack political power because it is accepted that that is what the United States is now. ... It makes us like every corrupt place in the world. ... and it not only has created the political instability that I think plagues us now (it gave us Donald Trump), and has driven our two political parties to become dominated by factions that want to impose all kinds of dictatorial things on everyone else. ... it's the exact opposite of the enlightenment ideas (unattainable or not) that at least informed our country at its formation.

EDIT: I do agree that we're a cooperative species. People will cooperate when it makes sense on their own. When you force someone to do something (what your "tuning" really means), you don't have cooperation. You have coercion.