The Great Debate Thread - ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK!

[Searcher]

Uggg ... no time to respond must go to work ... I'll be back

[Gil Hamilton]

You have to admit that link you provide is basically useless for actual info about the situation and entirely propagandistic, Searcher. If it were honest, it would include that gas prices have a sawtooth shaped pattern over time and that the starting point happened to be in a "low point" shortly after the (all-time) high at the end of the Bush Administration, one which isn't really affected by the President at all, no matter how much FOXNews keeps repeating it over and over again.

Secondly, you know full well where the gasoline excise tax goes in the United States. Those taxes go directly into paying for the transportation infrastructure, IE, road maintenance, signage, et cetera. How do you think maintaining the roads is paid for? Fuel taxes, taxes from overland shipping on commercial trucks, and toll stations. These make sense, because people who drive more than thus contribute more damage to the roads will end up paying more fuel taxes and thus the "tax burden" is directly proportional to use.

Thirdly, that "one failure" managed to completely wreck the Gulf sea based economy, which it is still recovering from to this day, did enormous environment damage (still being cleaned up), AND was actually avoidable if the companies involved had done their job right.

It's an asinine system to have lax standards that trust companies not to deliberately cut corners or act at the expense of others if it benefits them. That's the number one rule of macroeconomics, isn't it? Everyone can be assumed to act in their own self-interest. The truth that's been proven historically true is that everyone can be assumed to act in their own self-interest, even at the expense and harm to others if they can see the benefit to it. Hence, government regulation. For the most part, this works. Virtually everything you touch, from the beef in your hamburger to the car you drive to the roads you drive on to the water that comes out your tap has been touched by a government agency and government regulation. You encounter government regulation all the time and it's mostly sensible, efficient, and more or less invisible.

It's foolish to wait for a tainted meat problem, then punish meat packers and slaughterhouses after the fact. Instead, we have the USDA. If a bridge falls down because a contractor used shit concrete that happened to be cheap, going "pobody's nerfect!" and merely punishing them dumb. They should have had rigorous standards in place to start with, making sure they are using quality materials, proper safety, and everyone is licensed and accountable.

Remember, virtually all rules made by government are reactive. Laws, regulations, et cetera all come into existence in response to a problem. All those rigid disposal laws for safe disposal of chemical waste exist not because they thought about it in advance and worked it out, they exist because assholes were dumping their industrial waste haphazardly and it was hurting people. Those pain in the ass standards that pharmaceuticals have to do in order to get FDA approval exist because of all those scandals in the fifties and sixties, for example, the issue with thalidomide. If you don't know what that is, it was a drug that was rushed through testing largely on account of the cheapness of the company and not wanting to deal with things like "placental barrier tests" possibly ruining their wonder drug and marketed the drug as a treatment for morning sickness in women... a drug that caused over ten thousand children in Europe to be born horribly deformed. You'll also note that thalidomide didn't make to sale in the US because a pharmacologist for the FDA had her shit together and refused to let the FDA approve it until legitimate research had been done (so only clinical trial pills ever made it here). President Kennedy gave her an award (over the protests of the pharma company). This also made congress pass laws requiring extensive testing, particularly for things like the placental barrier test, which actively cost Big Pharma a lot of money to meet and are some of those hated regulations you claim are doing so much harm. But, I suppose it's better than babies being born with flipper limbs.

By the way, "babies being born with flipper limbs" is what thalidomide actually did.

But you know, if you want your libertarian dream land, there is always the third world. They don't regulate a damn thing in Somalia. There's no gun control there either, so you can have a Kalashnikov for every day of the week and two for Sunday if you want.

[Don Alexander]

Here, by the way, is a totally biased and opinionated blog post by a German living in Florida which is right on topic and will probably get him shot sometime soon. ;)

[Searcher]

Where is my dueling banjo music ??????

More tommorrow, bad day at work ... after a great day at the beach in Clearwater ... Florida ROCKS! So I am too tired to make a rambling disjointed comment that you all expect from me.