It might be a bubble, with too many people getting college degrees, and yet, USA is losing a lot of its business to overseas countries that have way more college degrees than we do. I wouldn't say it's a bubble, as much as it's people studying what no one needs. USA is in dire need of degrees in science, engineering, and mathematics.

I don't think anyone here is disavowing anyone. On the contrary. The argument isn't, "yeah, there are a lot of Randians in government, but they're not "true Randians," the argument is that there are few (very few) Randians in government, not many, and not enough.


We got to 3. Out of 541 members in house and senate, and 7 members of the Board at the Federal Reserve. I'm sure the actual number is more than 3, since a lot of them likely stay quiet, but I doubt it's much more than 3, or anywhere near "many." Especially since Democrats don't like Randian ideas because they are decidedly pro-capitalist/anti-socialist, and Republicans don't like her ideas because they are decidedly anti-religious/anti-corporate cronyism. Democrats need to keep getting elected by pushing more social programs, and Republicans need to keep pushing god, and getting corporate kickbacks and  lobbying.

Even if he is a jackass, can he cast founded aspersions at YOUR country? Or is that forbidden too?

Well, yeah, we know about him, and there's also Rand Paul and Paul Ryan... That's 3 well known ones out of the 100 senators, 500 members of house, 50 governors, and many other officials. Many of these people are very socialist (both republicans and democrats, with just their own brand of socialism) or religious ideologues. So... where is the "many" that are Randians?

Huh? Examples?

Too late

I'm from here. Who likes terrorism, me or myrkul? I definitely don't like it, nor think it's an effective method for anything, and I would hope myrkul doesn't either.

My comment, btw, was a crack at you for assuming myrkul was making fun of anyone. You seem to be a bit too focused on thinking people are making fun of the victims, when no one here is. Kinda makes me wonder why you are so focused on making fun of terrorism victims.

I wish people would call it all "Nigerian scamming attempts." It's no more accurate than the ponzi claims, but it at least sounds amusing.

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Of course it's OK to make fun of people who were just victims in a bombing. But only as long as you make fun indirectly, by blaming someone else for making fun of those people. Kinda like how it's ok to do homosexual sex acts, as long as you are only blaming others for doing homosexual sex acts (and are yourself a republican politician)

How are they doing that??

Read it fir the first time when I was about 26 or 27. Mind you, AFTER I got my degree in finance and economics (the one that included Keynesian based economic theories, and nothing about Mises)

Many of which were "Be a sheep!" and "One of us! One of us!"
If your point was, "It's ok, you don't have to pay taxes, the government will be upset, but they will for the most part leave you alone," I think it's really bad advice.

It was at $22, but yep. Sucks to have missed out on the nice rise in price, but at least I'm not going to be affected by the wild swings any more.

Congrats on winning your Hindsight 20/20 prize. Have a gold star *

The topic at hand, though, is specifically offloading the debt that Bitfloor owed to you. In DeathandTaxes's case, Bitfloor owed him 200BTC, and although Bitfloor was not willing to do anything with the debt other than hold it on their books and attempt to repay it, Deathandtaxes was able to offload it to someone else in a private contract. Entropy just wasn't as lucky.

I remember reading about a guy who avoids paying taxes, but the only reason he's not being arrested is because he          now lives on his own compound, is heavily armed, and grows his own food and generates his own power. Basically, the only reason he is left alone is because they police figure it'll be too much trouble to go after him, guns blazing. So as long as he's just doing his own thing, they're leaving him alone.
Does anyone remember what the notorious gangster Al Capone was sentenced to life in prison for?

Also, I was disappointed that the video did not touch on a rather important part of the Social Contract. Specifically, what are the terms, and what is owed? Typically, in a contract, one party owes an obligation to another, and the contract is in force until that obligation is paid. So...

• Is the Social Contract a certain amount of debt that a citizen has amassed while being born, growing up, and living in a country? If yes, then that amount of debt should be a specific number, and one should be able to pay it off. If the number is "infinity" or "your life," that's not a debt contract, that's slavery.
• Is the Social Contract a sort of post-paid services agreement, like a cell phone bill, that you have to pay after using? If that's the case, then you should be able to get a bill for the things you actually used, and at least have an option to pay for extra things you want and not pay for things you don't want. It doesn't matter if someone is stupid or smart enough to know what they want or need. That choice really shouldn't be up to anyone but the person agreeing to the contract. Otherwise it's called fraud, where you are signed up for services you never asked for, and charge with a bill you can't fight (some magazine companies do this).
• Is the Social Contract a rental agreement, that says that as long as you live here on this land, you have to pay rent to cover the land and all the fees that it entails? If that's the case, then there should be a certain price that you can pay to just buy the property outright. There should be an option to go from being a renter to being an owner. Yet there isn't, and the only option is to rent, regardless of how much you pay. This thing may be the only example that goes counter to "everything is for sale," since even if you own billions, instead of offering to sell the property to you, the government will just charge you higher rent. Because they can.
• And by the way, just leaving isn't an option, either. As long as you are a citizen, even if you live overseas, you typically still have to pay taxes back to your country of origin. You could renounce your citizenship, but that typically puts you on a shit list of whatever country you renounced from, meaniing it's only worth the risk if you already have a ton of money at the time to begin with.

Note that the issue with energy is actually extracting it, and that the easier it gets, the more I guess "futuristic" our economy becomes. We pay way less energy to get food and high-tech gadgets now than we did 100 years ago. Once we have enormous amounts of plentiful energy compared to what we have now, we'll no doubt have some technologies and quality of life we can't even dream of right now, but we will still have energy scarcity to "pay" for those incredible things we'll have. (e.g. you're currently not paying for energy to transport stuff between planets, because it's stupid-expensive. In the future, despite millions of watts of energy being possibly cheap, you would still need to spend billions of it to transport stuff across space).

I'm having trouble imagining Ripple being released and being adopted by a large enough network to be useful this year, let along having a debit card.

I'm pretty sure he posted that in DeathandTaxes's thread, too, so what's your point?


How is that Roman's or DeathandTaxes's fault?

I think you may be missing the investment potential part of the value. Also, if the debt was denominated in Argentine Pesos value, Bitfloor would only have to pay out 1/6th of the USD value now. So... why USD? And isn't "value" rather arbitrary?