Ryan Joy (atxryan)

"a nice way to say that we need to work hard to avoid creating fascist robots that exercise a homogenizing influence on diverse human experiences."

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." – Frederic Bastiat

"Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers' (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers. "

Henry Paulson, U.S. Treasury secretary during the bailout and a former Goldman Sachs CEO, let it slip during testimony to Congress last summer when he explained why it was so critical to bail out Goldman Sachs, and — oh yes — the other banks. People “were unhappy with the big discrepancies in wealth, but they at least believed in the system and in some form of market-driven capitalism. But if we had a complete meltdown, it could lead to people questioning the basis of the system.”

There you have it. The bailout was meant to keep the curtain drawn on the way the rich make money, not from the free market, but from the lack of one.

“President Lyndon Johnson was on the verge of becoming a transformative president in the winter of 1965. Since taking office, Johnson had presided over the passage of a sweeping body of domestic measures unequaled by almost any president in American history other than Franklin Roosevelt. … Yet all those accomplishments seemed to disappear in the [...]

Krugman's argument ignores the fact that very large numbers like this will always serve as a 'debt scare' (and for good reason!) in our democracy.