Big Gov's "A" Game

[Schneibster]

OK, so point by point.

"The Mythical Man Month" by Brooks which neither our President nor S are familiar with says that adding people to a late software project will make it later.

Actually my experience is it takes a lot of careful management but it can be done. But the likelihood of it working decreases as an exponential function of the number of people added.

And I read books that have a bit less ideology, like Patterns, and Anti-Patterns, and Rapid Development.

A cascading failure.

Well, if you're a seagull manager perhaps.

Now the deal is: the roll out of the ACA does not give people confidence in government solutions. So you have to give its supporters a LOT of credit for accomplishing the opposite of their intended results.

I'm sorry, I have no idea what confidence has to do with the quality of a solution, nor with its intended results. I expect when they've had a while to look it over they'll have a better idea how it works. I see all the attempts to get people to decide before they look for themselves as indicative of deception.

I see a lot of people screaming it's bad; they all go hide when you ask them how. I smell propaganda. I also smell racism or something else equally stinky otherwise they wouldn't be trying to cover it up.

You mentioned The Mythical Man Month above, but you never (not even in the part of your post I deleted) told what this had to do with anything you discussed.

I stopped after you got incoherent. Are you OK?

[Schneibster]

http://obamacarefacts.com/obamacare-myths.php

Quite frankly, if instead of calling your congresscritters and telling them what you wanted, you called and said you hated it, we're all getting what you deserve.

Thanks.

[MSimon]

Unless you divest the ultra rich and the banks of their unneeded and wasteful unused wealth that's just sitting there clogging things up, your choices are quantitative easing, or printing more money.

Economies based on theft don't work. The incentives are wrong.

On top of that - money is mobile. Just ask any drug cartel. So what happens when the threat of confiscation is imminent? The money and its producers leave the country.

The money leaving is bad. Worse is the leaving of top producers. The 80-20 rule is nearly a natural constant. Roughly: 20% of a population are top producers and capture 80% of the resources.

"Concentration of wealth is a natural result of concentration of ability, and recurs in history. The rate of concentration varies (other factors being equal) with the economic freedom permitted by morals and the law... democracy, allowing the most liberty, accelerates it. -- Will and Ariel Durant

So what happens to that wealth? Over two or three generations it diffuses.

Case in point - the oil Rockefellers subsidized my (short) college education. And the infrastructure they built? It still (in its latest updated form) serves all of us. America is a rich country in part because the oil barons supplied resources and rationalized resource distribution.

Third world countries rely on confiscation. First world countries rely on wealth creation. The pie gets bigger. I prefer first world living. Compare with the government oil monopoly in Mexico or the mess Chavez made of Venezuela and its oil industry.

Amid food shortages, rampant inflation and widespread electricity blackouts, many Venezuelans are wondering if Chavez chose the right heir to his revolution

It is not the "heir" that is the problem. The problem is inherent in socialism which devolves into crony capitalism in places where socialism and capitalism coexist. And where they don't coexist? The USSR is no longer with us and China is quite a far bit away from Maoism.

The suffering of the poor IS heartbreaking. You get out of the heartbreak by capitalist means. Marx knew that. Pity that so few Marxists study Marx these days.

It is argued by Marx that socialism is an excellent system when there is no further wealth to be produced. We are a long way from that era.

And note: I worked most of my life for the rich. It is more profitable working for people with money.

Government is not efficient. In fact it is biased against efficiency. It rewards cronies rather than results. Solyndra ring a bell? Or the roll out of ACA? And what is wrong with things like single payer? Well, you have no enforceable contract with government. Bad as Aetna may be - you can sue them. Try suing government. It is not so easy. There are laws against it.

[MSimon]

Note: when government sets prices - as it does in Venezuela - one of two things happen.

1. Government under prices - shortages develop for consumers. Such as food shortages.
2. Government over prices - you get resource misallocations (too much production) and consumers do not get as much of the resource as they would in a fairly priced system.

A free market is the best way found so far to discover the optimum price. But government must keep its hands off the scales. Look at what government subsidies have done to the price of a college education. Compare with what has happened to Lasik surgery where there is no government subsidy. Or the price of boob jobs. No subsidy there either.

The hard facts of life are that you can't fool mother nature. But over time you can expand the pie. Competitive capitalism is the best mechanism we know for lowering the price (resources used) of a given good. Competition does that.

The problem is this: socialists want to see that everyone has enough to eat. Capitalists want to see that people get what they want to eat. In the US in consumption terms the rich consume about 4X as much as the poor. Not a big differential. The rest of the money of the rich goes into investment. Lots of things get tried. In the name of "efficiency" government tries one thing. To eliminate waste. Which system is more likely to find the best way to accomplish a given purpose? And when the optimum is found? Commoditization.

[Teahive]

You can't swap out your monetary system. If you can replace it at all it's slowly.

Hypothetically speaking, what would/could happen if the US government took over the Fed role of generating reserve money, stopped issuing Treasuries and generated money to cover any budget deficit out of thin air instead, and declared all existing Treasuries to be convertible to cash at their current market price?

[hanelyp]

Instant conversion of outstanding treasury bonds to cash?

According to http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12773.htm

There was approximately $1.2 trillion in circulation as of October 3, 2013, of which $1.16 trillion was in Federal Reserve notes.

17 trillion bonds being converted to cash... Instant surge of hyper inflation.

[Teahive]

It is curious that one piece of paper that guarantees (legally) a payout after N years should cause such an entirely different outcome than another piece of paper that bears the same value.

Where would all these new dollars rush to? Clearly not into buying consumer goods, since the owners of Treasuries express a clear preference of saving over consuming.

And what would happen if the conversion wasn't instant and outstanding Treasuries would simply be allowed to reach maturity?

[choff]

I don't like to upset our new playmate by posting on U.S. internal affairs, except that if the American financial system crashes the resultant black hole will suck the rest of the planet inside, so that becomes everybodies problem. I try to stick to the economics and ignore the politics, I consider the whole left/right thing a deliberate distraction from what really matters.

The only case I've ever seen for buying out the entire U.S. national debt with credit currency is "The Chicago Plan" , search on IMF WP12202 for modeling data. A better option would be to only create currency as credit in amounts needed to pay off debts as they came due, a more gradual approach. If you're a bond trader, and the government offered you cash now instead of new bonds that pay later, wouldn't you rather have the cash and buy up the diminishing supply of existing bonds. The more the supply of bonds shrinks(according to supply and demand), the higher the market price. Yield, and therefore interest rates, moves inversely to bond price.

The mistake made by people when they think of credit currency printing is that it causes hyperinflation, and that's exactly what banksters want you to believe. The reality is that because there is no compound interest payment, less currency/credit is created than the current debt based monetary system.

The real danger is that the bankster's will attempt to sabotage anything that threatens their control of money printing, and that's really the only big difference, who does the printing. They would probably try to have any president who attempted to create greenbacks killed, if that didn't work, they'd try to flood the market with their own printed money. That's how the British killed the orignal colonial script, they had two ships off the colonies equipped with printing presses running a massive counterfeit operation. In the case of Guernsey Island, the banks tried to stop the Island States by flooding the market with cheap loans.

The current near zero interest rate system is a disaster for the insurance industry, it forces insurance into a predatory survival mode, and makes any attempt to reform healthcare that much more problematic.

One final note, a harp seal tortures a cod fish to death the way a cat plays with a mouse. Canada placed a moratorium on cod fishing in order to replenish stocks(the seals staple), unfortuneately, the EU didn't care and strip mined the Atlantic of what was left. Rather than die a quick head whacking, the seals starved and their numbers have also collapsed. The seals have been harvested for their pelts for 10,000 years before now, not apart from the environment, but as a part of the environment.

[Schneibster]

Economies based on theft don't work. The incentives are wrong.

Yep, and they just stole seven trillion dollars. Do you think we should do something about it, or not?

[Schneibster]

Note: when government sets prices - as it does in Venezuela - one of two things happen.

Who suggested the government setting prices?

And BTW the last one to do so was Nixon.

[Schneibster]

You can't swap out your monetary system. If you can replace it at all it's slowly.

Hypothetically speaking, what would/could happen if the US government took over the Fed role of generating reserve money, stopped issuing Treasuries and generated money to cover any budget deficit out of thin air instead, and declared all existing Treasuries to be convertible to cash at their current market price?

The dollar would stop being the reference currency.

[Schneibster]

I don't like to upset our new playmate by posting on U.S. internal affairs, except that if the American financial system crashes the resultant black hole will suck the rest of the planet inside, so that becomes everybodies problem.

OK then stop suggesting we crash it by changing monetary systems.

[choff]

I'm not trying to crash the system, the bankster's very deliberately do that about every 7 years to shear the public. That's why I say take control of the monetary system away from them so they don't.

On another note, I am sorry if Ron Paul really does intend to wreck the pension system. In most other countries unfunded long term liabilities like pensions aren't counted as part of the debt, I thought the bankster's had already robbed the pensions and nothing was left. My impression was this would be a simple accounting rule change that would lower the total debt.

[Schneibster]

I'm not trying to crash the system, the bankster's very deliberately do that about every 7 years to shear the public.

Actually, they only got away with it twice between 1945 and 2000, when the Glass-Steagall Act was in effect. Since it was repealed they've done it twice more in only 13 years.

That's once every 27.5 years, then once every 6.5 years. Let's re-establish Glass-Steagall, take all the housing market money they stole back (even I think it's too late to get the other seven trillion from the 2000 stock market scam back) and put all the houses back over their mortgages, and then see where we are. We'll have 30 years to fix it after that, and this is one can I'm willing to kick down the road as long as I can get it far enough.

After that we could try giving money to the poor and investing in infrastructure and energy, and stop giving money away to banksters and oil barons who don't spend it.

[Schneibster]

On another note, I am sorry if Ron Paul really does intend to wreck the pension system. In most other countries unfunded long term liabilities like pensions aren't counted as part of the debt, I thought the bankster's had already robbed the pensions and nothing was left. My impression was this would be a simple accounting rule change that would lower the total debt.

As long as the US doesn't welsh on the debt, there's plenty of money in the SSTF to handle the Baby Boom, though it will require means testing.

As for Medicare, the problem is constantly inflating healthcare costs. For starters hospitals aren't going to be able to be profit centers any more. Equipment manufacturers will no longer be able to freely pad costs. Insurance executives will no longer fly in private jets. And doctors will have to get Toyotas instead of Lexuses.

Let the doctors bring the hammer down on the universities. It's not our problem.