Thread necro by proxy? JA37 is a master. He even got a "filthy libertarian" to do his dirty work!  

Edit: If this post doesn't make any sense, ignore it!

Actually, small and medium sized companies are creating the most jobs.
Since most of them are not running at full capacity they don't see a reason to hire more people.
They only hire more if they can sell the products.

It's irrelevant when it comes to facts. And fact is, we haven't had a free market.

The education is not free, someone has to pay for it.  Regardless, I have personally seen relatively poor families do very well while homeschooling, and I personally attended a private school that did and does accept students whose parents cannot pay for tuition.  Homeschooling, generally speaking, is a much cheaper option than any other method; including taxpayer supported education.  And with much better results.  Furthermore, one can literally homeschool via an online 'distance learning' program associated with a state funded university for zero personal cost, and the results are similar.  They are often called 'virtual schools'.  So from a certain perspective, the US could literally homeschool every child willing to participate in that manner with a quality and free-to-them education.  Whether or not the results would be competitive to Finland under such circumstances, I would not hazard a guess.

This is a useless study.  It compares government school systems to each other, based on arbitrary metrics comparing scores between groups of 15 year olds (an arbitrary age) in testing for arbitrarily chosen subjects.  It would be trivial for any number of different private school systems in the US to crush Finland's numbers.  Average scores for US students in government sponsored schools in the US suck, in part, because everyone knows that they suck so many parents with means don't send their children to government schools, so those government schools suck more.  Compare Finland's scores to say, Covington Latin in Covington, Kentucky or St Francis High School in Downtown Louisville, Kentucky or Highlands Latin School in the Highlands district of Louisville, Kentucky and these scores would be embarressing.  And those three are just a few that I could think of off the top of my head.  For that matter, just comparing Finland's average scoring to the average American homeschooled high school aged student would make a lot of Finnish schoolteachers question the effectiveness of their careers considering what the average, untrained parent educator can do.

I've heard really good things about Montessori schools, but I'm not sure what benefits you're looking for beyond "the children learn what they need to." What more should a school be obligated to provide?

Groups all over the world force bad systems into place. One of them is the best. Not surprising.

Finland also has a high suicide rate

Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.

Like Finland, Norway is small and not especially diverse overall, but unlike Finland it has taken an approach to education that is more American than Finnish. The result? Mediocre performance in the PISA survey.

That's not strictly true, either.  You have to have capital (wealth) to start a business.  But without demand you will not survive long.  Like I said earlier it's a double-sided coin.

No you moron, people aren't going to found companies when no one has any money to buy their products. This is the core of the problem. Republicans have been giving tax breaks to the rich and tax hikes to the poor for so long now that the rich have more money than they can ever spend while the poor are forced to buy essentially nothing, which stifles the economy and prevents job growth by decreasing demand for essentially everything.

Alright, let's see the argument.


These companies that employ thousands of people aren't creating jobs? Those jobs would exist without those companies? I think not. Nice try.

There's always a staggering amount of money lost in illegal activities, but is it really so big that it can cause a crisis? I'm neither an economist nor a police investigator, but the accusation "they stole the money and spent it on drugs and whores" sounds more like sensationalism to get a viewer angry then a real reason for the crisis

Interesting that you think that. That's not my experience. You charge what your competitors charge, more or less, depending on how you position yourself. Lower cost to provide means more profit, not lower consumer cost.

Your prices are set by the state? Really? Where do you live? I get to choose which company should exploit me, and they set their prices according to "free market principles" meaning that they collude to skin us all.

They probably would operate at a loss if the prices weren't set by the state. That's because power companies doesn't like competition. They have no incentive to allow this, and every reason to resist it. That doesn't mean that it's inefficient, it just means that power companies like profit.

In general people end up with money because they have money. If not forced, centralized redistribution (aka taxation) is the way, then what is?  How do you level the playing field and make everybody reach their full potential? Being born poor is having the deck stacked against you, some overcome that, but most don't.

Do you still live under the delusion that what you pay and what cost the company have are somehow connected?

Not in the electric power industry.

Here a private company raised their prices because people were using their service, when according to you logic prices should go down. The only connection there is, is when their cost is higher than what they can charge.

That's not quite what I said. The price to an individual customer should go down as their usage goes up. But higher total usage across all customers will cause prices to rise. It's the same with any other product. If you want to buy 10 Volvos, you can probably negotiate a rock bottom price. But if everyone wants a Volvo, they're all going to pay more.

What I find interesting about the German village discussed is that the Government have actually set a price that the power companies have to buy power back to. Without that law there would be no buyback and no incentives to produce power for small communities. The government is acting as an enabler here, promoting innovation and change.

Right, but it's promoting inefficient innovation and change. It's not clear that producing power that costs more than people are willing to pay for it is beneficial. Meanwhile, the resources that went to producing this miniscule amount of unprofitable power can't go to other things.

Not what people would call libertarian I guess. Let's see a way a libertarian could address global warming, this one wasn't it.

The right way to deal with global warming is to become so smart and rich that we forget it ever even was an issue. This is the same way the human race has solved every problem it's ever solved.