Remember those oil rigs that President Obama assured us really do not cause spills? Well another one just exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. The explosion of the rig 80 miles off the Louisiana coast further undermines Obama’s insistence on lifting the long moratorium on drilling off our East Coast.
The platform is owner by Mariner Energy of Houston. The rig was not producing oil or gas at the time but it is unclear if there was a spill with this explosion. However, there are reports of a spreading oil spill around the rig. Other reports state that there were four or five active wells on the rig. Update: There are conflicting reports on the sighting of a spill from the explosion.
The Administration is committed to opening up the coast to drilling — even arguing for weeks that the oil from the BP spill had mysteriously disappeared until outside groups pointing to a huge 22-mile-long oil plume under the water.
Despite the President’s assurances, there have been other leaks at rigs — an inconvenient fact for the Administration.
Source: Miami Herald
Slarti:
“A couple of things. First, you think we’re not smart enough to control markets, but you have no problem with the assessment that the Gulf oil spill wont do much damage to a vastly more complex system about which we have much less precise information. Pick one or the other.”
how is that incompatible? That assessment is based on the 1979 Ixtoc 1 oil spill and newer information about a natural leak off the California Coast.
That is what the Fed has tried to do for almost 100 years, it hasn’t worked. Those busts need to happen to re-allocate resources properly. If you operated knowing that there is the very real possibility of a bust once in awhile your behaviour is going to be different than if you think everything is going to be stable. We have 100 years of experience to show your idea of slow growth doesn’t prevent busts and that those busts are longer than when we did not have the FED and other regulatory controls.
The market is a system but it is more than just a few feedback loops that need to be accounted for. How hard would it be to control the flow of urine into and out of a kidney?
Elaine,
Before you chew on me about the education comment, note that I said “hodge-podge”. 😀
“If capitalism is unnatural then why do countries that have relatively free markets thrive and those that don’t have serious problems?”
Also begging the question. Compared to us, Europe is weathering the economic crisis far better than we are. Shall we look to which countries in Europe are using some form of socialism?
Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, and Great Britain. And I’ll raise you a Canada.
Hmmm. All of them our allies.
What do those countries have in common aside from that?
They by in large enjoy higher standards of living and less social strife than the U.S. in addition to better educational systems. And Germany, the world’s sixth largest economy on its own, has managed to stay stable and maintain a reasonable GDP despite having some contraction forced by the global downturn.
France is currently experiencing social problems but they have less to do with economics than they do with attempting to integrate large populations of Muslims, many of whom have little or no desire to integrate into France’s standing culture – a primarily social rather than economic problem.
As to this:
“You can have both free market capitalism and a social safety net. But you cannot have socialism alone, it is not as productive as capitalism.” That simply fails to realize what socialism is along it’s spectrum. At the liberal democratic end of the socialism spectrum, it is precisely free markets for everything not directly related to national security and social stability. You demonize the word without understanding the subtle variations of meaning it conveys. Socialism isn’t one monolithic economic model and your continued mischaraterization of it just plays to your brainwashing that somehow equates it to communism. It’s a variety of models that incorporate safety mechanisms.
Like universal health care, not propping up private insurance company parasites like Congress opted for here.
Like adequate public transportation, unlike here.
Like real substantial public education, not the substandard moron producing underfunded hodge-podge mess America has.
Now let’s hear how private enterprise and free market capitalism is going to provide social stability better than our allies and competitors, all of whom have more socialized systems than we do.
It can’t. Because it’s as broken as pure communism was. Where communism failed for disregarding human nature, free market capitalism plays to the worst and most sociopathic parts of human nature – personal greed above social stability.
Buddha,
I loved the Jefferson quote – your service honors the rest of us. Be careful not to drop the cats, though… 😉
Byron said:
“Human beings are not smart enough to control markets and can only do so through force.”
A couple of things. First, you think we’re not smart enough to control markets, but you have no problem with the assessment that the Gulf oil spill wont do much damage to a vastly more complex system about which we have much less precise information. Pick one or the other. (Neither is a perfectly fine choice, too ;-)) Secondly, markets can be controlled by many means, some more efficient and forceful than others. Personally, I think that the way we operate now (massive subsides via pollution, tax breaks, or direct funds) is just about the most inefficient method for controlling the free market. Control is an interesting word here – I know some control theory and the point of controlling a system is to prevent its behavior from undergoing a bifurcation or operating in a region where it displays chaotic behavior. The free market is just another system that we want to prevent from behaving chaotically or throwing us into a depression. In my opinion, taxes and fees are the best way to control the market because the entire point of the market is to put a price on everything. Until there is a cost associated with pollution the free market must necessarily ignore it and will never have an incentive to reduce it. What’s wrong with taking an Engineer’s approach to the economy and saying that we’d like to avoid the whole bubble and bust cycle and, say, operate the economy in a region where there is slower but steady growth?
Byron: Yes of course I read the link but you apparently didn’t get the implications. It shows that in a capitalist society, long steeped in relentless and often disgusting free market propaganda, only just over half of the people favor capitalism!
Pretty amazing numbers in a society wherein 33% consider themselves “born again” Christians, meaning they believe every word of the bible is literally true. I mean to get religiosity stats comparable to the USA you’d have to poll old women in Sicily.
My point all along was that a socialist consciousness is brewing in America, and it has nothing to do with the so-called socialism that Fixed News blowhards accuse Obama of. Obama is a creature of the banks, and bankers don’t have a socialist bone in their bodies.
No, I’m talking about the fact that amongst young people 18-25 socialist ideals are about double the general population’s stats, and why not, since they have no foreseeable capitalist future to look forward to except as service economy low wage slaves.
Let’s face it, with no housing equity or real manufacturing base left Americans soon won’t even be able to buy the plastic crap made in China that they don’t really need anymore from Wal-Mart.
Buddha:
If capitalism is unnatural then why do countries that have relatively free markets thrive and those that don’t have serious problems?
You can have both free market capitalism and a social safety net. But you cannot have socialism alone, it is not as productive as capitalism. As much as it goes against my Objectivist buddies thinking capitalism can produce enough wealth to help the truly needy but you cannot regulate the piss out of it and expect it to provide a high standard of living.
Way off topic…so forgive me.
“GROUND ZERO TERROR MOSQUE”: The B Movie Poster
http://www.theawl.com/2010/08/911-terror-mosque-the-b-movie-poster
“certainly be compelled to the contrary”
Pardon, my brain and my fingers operate at different throughput speeds.
Byron,
Your choice to act without compassion to society most certainly can be compelled by the state. Anti-social behaviors of all sort are stopped by state coercion all the time. Or do I need to point out again that murder is an anti-social behavior again?
“Modern men don’t gravitate toward socialism naturally they have to be forced. But they do gravitate toward free trade.”
Also logically flawed. You are committing the composition fallacy by assuming all me gravitate one way or another, the “from each to all” verbal fallacy, and you are begging the question, the material informal fallacy of Petitio Principii or Circulus in Probando, arguing in a circle by assuming the answer.
You may be a trained engineer, but I am a trained logician.
You are in a box you cannot escape without acknowledging your basis for argument may be wrong in part or in toto.
Buddha:
We all serve others in some manner or fashion. Sometimes for gain sometimes for nothing other than wanting to help a person out. I help people all the time, sending referrals or cutting my fees to a person who obviously needs engineering help but cant pay. We all do, it is part of our responsibility for being a member of a society. But I do it voluntarily, I am not forced to. Mr. Jefferson did it voluntarily, he would not agree to being forced to be generous or to serving his neighbor at the behest of the state.
Okay, they can try that all they like but a capitalism is an artificial construct as much as any economic system is. To try and tie to your failed attempts to claim the only natural economic system is free market capitalism?
Denial, rationalization and self-deception are wonderful things to see in action.
You claim not to be greedy, yet your premise only works if all people are greedy – another absolutist and incorrect perception I am sure you’ll turn into another false dilemma.
Byron,
Your assumption, from the start, is that free markets are the natural state, without offering proof other than your opinion. Your mischaracterization of Watts, or more directly, your lack of understanding, does not negate your logic is flawed for being a bifurcation fallacy as described now multiple times.
First you claim man is separate from nature. Then you claim natural order as your rationale for free market capitalism. When proven wrong, you then you claim that proving man is not separate from nature proves that men are naturally free market capitalists.
What part of self-rationalizing assumption don’t you understand?
Buddha:
Your logic is incorrect, you may have proved it to yourself and others here on this blog but you have proved nothing. But I did like that video quite a bit. I am going to share it with my friends so they can use it as a defense of capitalism.
Thank you for posting them.
“Thomas Jefferson most notably made reference to man’s social side, observing in correspondence to John Adams that man is ‘an animal destined to live in society.’ For this reason, Jefferson would deliberately criticize the anti‐social, atomistic conceptions of Hobbes as a ‘humiliation to human nature.’ Thomas Pangle records that Jefferson had derived from the Enlightenment philosopher Helvetius that we experience pleasure ‘when we aid or even when we seem to sacrifice for others.’ Jefferson was not fully satisfied that Helvetius had explained the origin of the pleasure derived from the service to others and was unprepared to ascribe the origin of man’s moral sense solely to God since that would leave unaccounted for the moral sense or like sensation in a disbeliever. Therefore, on a philosophical level, Jefferson would conclude that, like other aspects of the moral sense in man, nature simply reveals the pleasure of service. As he grew older, Jefferson would come to value tranquility over continued public service, but he would continue to lean upon the theorem that the pursuit of happiness was dependent upon the virtue of knowing oneself and being useful to others. The “moral instinct” that inclines us to do good out of a love of others is, Jefferson would conclude, ‘the brightest gem with which the human character is studded, and the want of it as more degrading than the most hideous of bodily deformities.'” [emphasis added] from The Human Nature of Freedom and Identiy — We Hold More Than Random Thoughts by Douglas W. Kmiec, Harvard Law Review, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 38-39.
Now perhaps you’ll see why I am so fond of saying “One lives to be of service”.
Buddha:
your video expressed why I like free markets. In fact we had those in Jefferson’s time or at least much more free than they are today. We also had a good deal more personal freedom than we do today.
I would like to know why you think I am a fascist? I don’t like the bank bailout, I don’t like car companies being owned by the government, I don’t like government regulation of industry, I don’t like the Federal Reserve, I don’t like lobbying. All fascist policies. So I would like to know how I am a fascist? Because I don’t care if someone makes 50 million a year or I think that the court system ought to be used to right wrongs? Or I think people should be responsible for themselves and not rely on others for their survival unless they just aren’t able to produce for themselves?
What is it?
You posted the videos, I didn’t. Seems to me they support my position of doing nothing laissez faire, he even says what I have said all along-men aren’t smart enough to control nature. By your own admission men are part of nature so any system they devise is “natural”. Modern men don’t gravitate toward socialism naturally they have to be forced. But they do gravitate toward free trade. So how is my logic flawed?
Address your false dilemma problem, Byron. It’s a fatal logical flaw to your arguments, such as they are.
Until you do, you are doing nothing by floundering in your unsubstantiated belief in the superiority of a demonstrably unstable (and indeed socially destabilizing) system, free market capitalism.
cultist\ˈkəlt-ist\, n.,
1: a follower of a cult
cult\ˈkəlt\, n., att. n.,
1: formal religious veneration : worship
2: a system of religious beliefs and ritual; also : its body of adherents
3: a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious; also : its body of adherents
4: a system for the cure of disease based on dogma set forth by its promulgator (health cults)
5 a : great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work (as a film or book); especially : such devotion regarded as a literary or intellectual fad b : the object of such devotion c : a usually small group of people characterized by such devotion
Karl Friedrich:
did you even read your own link?
“In an April 2009 poll conducted by Rasmussen, respondents were asked “which is a better system-capitalism or socialism?” Just 53% of adult Americans prefer capitalism, 20% of respondents favor socialism and 27% responded not sure.”
53 > 20 2.5 times to be exact. Yep you sure are on fire, it must be a brain fever.
Byron,
I proved there is a problem with your logic. What I believe is irrelevant. But please, resort to troll tactics when you can’t address the logic. I called you a cultist because you are acting like one. But please . . . “A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. It sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn’t it? And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked on a word and made a mountain out of a pea- he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility… Do get up from your knees and sit down, I beg you, these posturings are false, too…”
Feel free to be offended some more. You only prove my point when you run from the logic of the analysis.