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Comments Posted By Diane Merriam

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The Court Ruling that Could Kill ACA

Definitely against. Minimum wage is a tax on the poor by those who are a little less poor. I’d rather be working at $5 an hour (which sometimes I do) than not working at $15.

» Posted By Diane Merriam On July 10, 2014 @ 11:29 pm

Quick FYI … If I could bring myself to do it, I qualify for Section 8 housing and a lot of other welfare stuff. I spent a good year and a half or so homeless and am a high school dropout. I turned a lot of that around (obviously) but then between a truck plowing into me and later a birth defect leaving me pretty much unable to be on my feet for more than a few minutes at a time brought me back down (financially) again.

» Posted By Diane Merriam On July 10, 2014 @ 11:23 pm

I’m planning a post on the LP in general. It’s just going to take me a while to put it all together and then cut it down to size.

» Posted By Diane Merriam On July 10, 2014 @ 11:22 pm

I tried to get the pdf, but there wasn’t a link.

Money and politics … As long as the government has favors to give out, then those who want to purchase them will do so. The solutions isn’t to demonize everyone with money, but to change the government so that it doesn’t have favors that it can hand out.

I’ve started on the video, but just in the first few minutes there have been a lot of questionable assumptions and accusations.

Harry Reid said that the Kochs want to do away with government. That’s not true. They want to greatly reduce the size of it, but that’s not the same as no government.

Income inequality, strictly in and of itself, isn’t a problem. An economy isn’t a fixed pie. As long as it keeps growing and everyone’s piece is getting bigger, that’s fine. It’s when the pieces get smaller for some while others’ are getting bigger that there’s a problem. In too many ways that is happening. My diagnosis is different though. The vast majority of the top increase is coming almost directly from the FED. All that extra money they’ve been putting into the economy isn’t actually going into it. It’s going into the stock market and they know it but keep doing it. Wall Street has been donating a lot more money to Democrats these days to keep the good times (for them) rolling.

I don’t see how it can last much longer, but then I was saying that in the early 2000s too and it still took years before those chicken started to come home to roost. The Price to Earnings ratios are even more outrageous now than then (no, I don’t own any stocks, I was just looking into understanding it at one time). High end real estate prices, both commercial and residential are skyrocketing again. Anything to try and make more money than you can get in conventional investments like actual businesses. Future costs are too uncertain for most businesses to be willing to make much in the way of improvements until and unless things settle down. In the long run we probably would have been better off letting Wall Street crash instead of propping it up. Letting companies that screw up go broke is part of what a true free market needs.

I wish there were simple sound bite answers and slogans that could explain what I think and why, but there aren’t, so I hope everyone forgives long responses.

I went over what I think of their father’s background fairly well in another comment so I won’t repeat all that, but suffice it to say he wouldn’t be anywhere on any of my top 1000 list from what I know of him. Still, if you’re going to denigrate what children do because of what their father did, the Kennedys couldn’t have come within a country mile of politics. Their father made his money bootlegging and was actively pro-Nazi. At least Frank Koch turned against what he learned of the Soviet Union … and then went too far the other way and created the John Birch Society, an organization I despise from what I know of them.

Amazing what you can learn on a side trip. There are 42 gallons in a barrel of oil. So 17,000 gallons is about 405 barrels. The standard railroad tank car holds up to 34,500 of oil. If that’s their biggest spill, less than 1/2 of one railroad car full, they’ve actually done pretty well. If they knowingly stole oil from Indian land then that’s a negative, no argument on that. There’s no love lost between Charles and David and their other two brothers though. Other fines and settlements? Again, compared to most oil companies, the numbers the video is giving are pretty good.

The Koch brothers spent over 80 million dollars on political causes (I’m sure it’s a lot more, but that’s the number they used)? Tom Steyer, has promised to spend 100 million dollars, this year alone, to any Democratic politician who opposes the Keystone XL pipeline.

10k, 20k political donations? They’ve made donations that big to Democrats too. Harry Reid himself has received Koch funded donations. So has Chuck Schumer. How about $30,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee? From CQ (Congressional Quarterly) 2000 to 2012: John Tanner D-TN; $68,500, Collin Peterson, D-MN; $67,500, Blanche Lincoln, D-AR; $57,500, Mary Landrieu, D-LA; $55,000, Mark Pryor, D-AR; $50,000.

Those money numbers being read part? If you listen they’re repeating the same ones over and over.

That’s just the first 5 minutes.

There’s only so much time in a day and I need to get some other stuff done.

» Posted By Diane Merriam On July 10, 2014 @ 11:15 pm

In order …. You state “You stated that it is better to turn social services functions over to private donors because it is better to have a person who funds something all the time than to have a government who can pull the plug anytime they want.”

I do think that private charity is better than forced charity via the government, but I’ve never given a reason like that. Where do you find that I said that?

You say you have studied the Religious Right and the Kochs for 6 years. What does that have to do with anything? I’m an agnostic, and even then only to the point that, in formal logic, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Until Reed started hitting on the Kochs I hadn’t really thought about them, politically, in decades. So what does that have to do with me or anything I’ve said?

You say left leaning think tanks have put out plenty of info on both of these subjects. Have you ever done any research for yourself? Have you ever read the Cato articles they’re referring to, whichever ones they may be? I’m here. I regularly read on Salon and HuffPo, The Washington Post and the New York Times. I watch videos from MSNBC (I don’t have a TV). Before I go rampaging off making claims about someone I do some research to see if what I’ve read is actually correct.

California’s budget? I really wish it were true. I was born in San Diego and I’ve also lived in Sacramento and Tahoe. I love California except for one thing … the governments in California. I lived across the street from Brown when he was first Governor. Sac housing was very mixed. I was in a $60 a month studio apartment, he was in a penthouse apartment. Anyway, I was coming out one day and saw a news crew across the street. I figured something momentous was happening so I went over and asked one of the cameramen what was going on. He said, and I quote: “We’re just doing a piece on the Governor’s day. We’re just waiting for him to come down to go to work… If he comes down… If he goes to work.” then shrugged and gave a chuckle. I understand he’s grown up some since then, but it would be really hard for me to change my impression of him.

Anyway, budget. Rather than go into a long response in an already long response, here’s a link: http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasdelbeccaro/2013/07/08/jerry-brown-stands-atop-californias-collapsing-house-of-cards/

You say I am for a cause and then support it’s opposite. Where? What cause? I support the reputation of the Cato Institute. Do you consider that a cause? I support many of the causes that the Kochs donate to, but not all of them. You say I’m lying. What, specifically, have I said that you consider a lie? All I’m hearing is generalities.

Oh – and your link … Your proof is a hyped up description of a single 37 year old article?

If that’s the best you can do and if you can’t come up with any specifics for the other accusations you’re throwing at me, then don’t waste my time.

» Posted By Diane Merriam On July 10, 2014 @ 9:39 pm

Aren’t being in favor of gay marriage and legalizing drugs, plus you can add in stem cell research, being against the war in Iraq, believing in evolution, all things that religious right are against?

Government doesn’t always have the best ideas for how to do things. They often stick with old rules long after new information becomes available, so I don’t automatically question resistance to government intrusions without knowing the specifics on both sides. Same thing on environmental issues. I need specifics before I’ll pass judgement one way or another.

I don’t pretend to be a mind reader and know what’s in their minds.

Their father was a Bircher and, in a different reply, I already said that that would worry me a bit myself based on what I know of them. But are you going to hold the son responsible for the actions of his father?

I’m perplexed as to what you are considering to be lies.

» Posted By Diane Merriam On July 9, 2014 @ 2:58 am

If you believe that you have the right to take what someone else has earned with a gun to their head then either you’re a criminal or they’re a slave who does not own the results of his labor. Everything that a government does is, at the root, backed up by guns.

Free markets? A free market is one in which everyone competes with each other without government interference or aid. If you don’t keep your customers satisfied then you go under. There’s no government official that you can bribe with contributions or more tangible gifts that will help your company get a leg up on their competition or to make the regulatory costs high enough that a new competitor can’t afford to get into that market to begin with. There’s no inspector you can bribe to give you the proper stamp of approval. You have to depend on your reputation.

As to shrinking the government. There are three areas where a government is needed as impartial referee or an organizer. We need police to investigate crime. We need courts to judge the criminal and, if convicted, assess the penalties. We also need courts to judge civil suits, where even honest people of good intentions occasionally have disagreements. Finally we need an armed force to respond to outside attacks and protect the territorial integrity of the nation.

All the rest need to be cut off or at a minimum wound down over time.

A market is made of of billions of individual transactions every day between people making their preferences known by the price they are willing to pay or trade for a certain good. The combination of all those transactions is what tells a producer how much to make or an investor where to invest to best satisfy the needs and wants of the consumer. They don’t have to know why what they make is desired by anyone in particular. The fact that they can sell so much of something means to make more of it. If they put something on the market that people don’t want to buy, that fact gets sent to them as well and production is lowered or stopped while the resources that it would have taken are put to better uses.

An economy run (if you can call it that) from above has “disinterested” (at best) people deciding how much of something will be made and at what price it will be sold. But it’s impossible to know what the actual combined value to the consumers of something is without price information. That guarantees that resources will be wastefully allocated, making too much of one thing and not enough of another.

» Posted By Diane Merriam On July 9, 2014 @ 1:54 am

Would the names of people I know mean anything to you? They’re not anyone you could look up in the papers. I hesitate to put their names up without their consent.

» Posted By Diane Merriam On July 9, 2014 @ 1:30 am

I’ll have to reply to myself because of how deep the nest is at this point.

From Wikipedia (for quickness): “In 1928, Koch traveled to the Soviet Union searching for business opportunities, but he came to despise communism and Joseph Stalin’s regime,[6][7] writing in his 1960 book, A Business Man Looks at Communism, that he found the Soviet Union to be “a land of hunger, misery, and terror”.[16] He toured the countryside with Jerome Livshitz. Livshitz gave Fred Koch what he would call a “liberal education in Communist techniques and methods” and Koch grew persuaded that the Soviet threat needed to be countered in America.[11]

According to his son, Charles, “Many of the Soviet engineers he worked with were longtime Bolsheviks who had helped bring on the revolution.” It deeply bothered Fred Koch that so many of those so committed to the Communist cause were later purged.[11]

His anti-Soviet views led him to become a founding members of the John Birch Society.”

The John Birch Society, at least what I knew of it from the 70s to 80s, would worry me more than his initial willingness to build refineries for Stalin in the 30s. Either way, it wasn’t David and Charles… unless you believe that the sins of the father should be laid upon the son.

The Kennedy fortune was created from bootlegging. Charles Lindbergh was pro Nazi Germany. There are several large family fortunes that were originally built on less than licit operations.

» Posted By Diane Merriam On July 9, 2014 @ 1:28 am

I used to cuss like a sailor, but when my son was born I decided that do as I say, not as I do wasn’t an acceptable approach.

Besides, using {expletive deleted} lets people use whatever cussing means the most to them in its place 🙂

» Posted By Diane Merriam On July 7, 2014 @ 11:40 pm

Actually David Koch 🙂

They are a very credible organization. Someone else earlier in these comments gave some numbers I wasn’t aware of. I copied them here:

According to the 2011 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report (Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program, University of Pennsylvania), Cato is number 14 in the “Top Thirty Worldwide Think Tanks” and number 6 in the “Top Fifty United States Think Tanks”

The Institute’s website states, “The mission of the Cato Institute is to originate, disseminate, and increase understanding of public policies based on the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.”

» Posted By Diane Merriam On July 7, 2014 @ 11:37 pm

I much prefer individualism to universal slavery. The fact that the world is so big and complicated is the best reason there is for us needing small government and free markets. No person or organization, anywhere, no matter how well intentioned, can know enough to direct our interactions from above.

Rand’s characters, and especially Galt, did tend to be more than a bit cut-out. I think a lot of it is just Russian writing. They spend the first third of a book introducing you to every player on every stage, without taking the time for depth to develop a character as a whole person.

I was talking to someone about about her work a few weeks ago and finally, I think, put a good finger on what was missing. I asked him if he had any kids and saw his face mellow when he said yes. I said “Then you know … That first moment, when you look at your child, how fragile and precious and so totally dependent on you, it changes you.”

His eyes opened wider while he said “Yes, it does.”

I said “That’s what’s missing.”

» Posted By Diane Merriam On July 7, 2014 @ 11:33 pm

I’ll make the same offer to you, Kes. Ask me some questions about what you think Libertarianism is and I’ll try to answer them.

» Posted By Diane Merriam On July 7, 2014 @ 11:20 pm

Ayn Rand did not found the Libertarian Party, nor are her principles the same as the basic principles of the party. There are several overlaps, but to claim they are one and the same? No go. I don’t know where you learned what you think you know about the Libertarian Party, but why don’t you ask some questions and I’ll see if I can answer them for you.

» Posted By Diane Merriam On July 7, 2014 @ 11:18 pm

To both Kes and Sue:

Yes. It’s still part of our platform. I’d a whole lot rather count on established private charity when it’s needed than what some yahoo in the government may decide to do that will flip everything upside down that you’ve planned for.

There is no Social Security Trust Fund. It’s a bunch of IOUs from the government to itself. Every dollar taken in has been spent, but since it’s an “internal” loan, it doesn’t show up on the books. That financial buffer used to fuel a lot of spending is just about gone and there’s nowhere else to borrow but on the open market. The debt can’t be hidden any more and the only way to pay what has been promised is to jack up more taxes to pay for all the unfunded liabilities. Detroit and California aren’t the only ones that have been playing that game.

The courts have also long since ruled that you have no legal claim on anything from Social Security. To all the people who say “It’s my money! I’m entitled to it.”, no you’re not. Not legally. There’s not even a legal contractual commitment as there is with, say, government retirees. You could fight for that in the courts. Not for Social Security or Medicare.

It’s not Libertarians running on Republican tickets. It’s Republicans with Libertarian leanings using the name to differentiate themselves. Ron Paul was our Presidential candidate in ’88, but he left the party. There are Libertarian leaning Democrats as well, but fortunately or unfortunately the Republican ones got out first using the name so the Democrats don’t.

There are a lot of people that aren’t who call themselves Libertarians or “little l libertarians.” It’s the “in” thing to be. We also, and definitely unfortunately, have a bunch of out and out anarchists who call themselves Libertarians. That’s our “lunatic fringe.” But there’s a big difference between small government and no government.

It’s not part of the Libertarian platform to never go to war. It IS part of the platform not to involve ourselves in wars, as a government, that are none of our business. If Pearl Harbor happened again tomorrow, there would be no Libertarian saying that we should just roll over and take it.

» Posted By Diane Merriam On July 7, 2014 @ 11:14 pm

Sure do, although not as you think. David Koch was our vice-presidential candidate in 1980 when I first found the Libertarian Party.

Are they angels? No. But they aren’t the devils the press and Harry Reid make them out to be either. You do know they’re also in favor of gay marriage and ending the war on drugs? That they also donate to the ACLU and NAACP? That they regularly back ideas which infuriate the Corporate Capitalists and the the fundamentalist Christian Right? Do you know they and their foundation are actually 60+ places down the list of political contributors, well behind many liberal groups?

Probably not, because on the left they make such good cannon fodder and it’s really easy to demonize a couple of rich individuals and make them the target for everything you’re against … even if they’re not. It saves them the effort of actually discussing any issue when it’s so much easier to set up the paradigm Koch = evil and then use that as shorthand for everything else. Good psychology.

On the right they don’t talk about their other positions because if they let some of them be generally known, it might make their constituents repudiate them. Can you imagine Jerry Falwell’s gang knowingly looking for backing or accepting money from someone who is in favor of gay marriage? The law and order lock ’em all up crowd knowingly looking for backing or accepting money from someone who is in favor of legalising drugs? Smart choice, to do their best to keep the Kochs’ other positions off the public radar.

Cato has the reputation they do because they are still, after all these years and unlike Heritage and a few others, ideologically consistent. You know where they’re coming from and you know they will give the facts and their reasoning that supports why they say what they say.

I can sum up my political philosophy in two sentences: I want the government out of my bedroom, out of my billfold and off of my back. If I’m not hurting someone else (and hurt feelings don’t count) or taking their stuff, then leave me the {expletive deleted} alone.

» Posted By Diane Merriam On July 7, 2014 @ 10:50 pm

That’s why I prefaced the use of Hitler and Stalin with “Exaggerating in the interest of making a point,…”

In these computer days it shouldn’t be that hard to come up with a computer program that will draw district lines based on some algorithm like minimizing boundary lengths or some such geometrical goal that can’t be fudged for cherry picking the district lines by party.

That would definitely make for some VERY different elections. The way things are now, not only the Republicans, but a lot of Democrats too are in districts that they know, barring some humongous screw up, that they can’t lose. Why bother worrying about what your constituents think if you know you’ll be re-elected anyway?

» Posted By Diane Merriam On July 7, 2014 @ 10:09 pm

Social issues like marijuana legalization and gay marriage and economic issues like ending corporate welfare. There are a lot more people than you would think that still have a R after their name that actually have a little sense about them. You just have to take the time to dig it out.

» Posted By Diane Merriam On July 7, 2014 @ 10:03 pm

Cato is NOT a conservative think tank, unless you consider gay marriage, pot legalization or most liberal social issues to actually be conservative ideas. They are Libertarian. Big difference.

» Posted By Diane Merriam On July 7, 2014 @ 12:34 pm

I only wish we had Libertarian votes on the SCOTUS. So many people don’t seem to know who we are and seem to think of us as a right spectrum party. That is not the case at all.

The best short form description I’ve come up with is that I want the government out of my bedroom, out of my billfold and off of my back. If I’m not hurting someone else (and hurt feelings don’t count) or their stuff then leave me the {expletive deleted} alone.

» Posted By Diane Merriam On July 7, 2014 @ 12:31 pm

Not everywhere. In Indiana you can pull the “L lever.”

I urge everyone to go and vote, even if there’s only one issue or person worth voting for. The fact that someone or something is on a ballot doesn’t mean you have to vote for or against that person or issue. Don’t vote the lesser of two evils.

Don’t vote for or against anything or anyone that you’re not actually, knowingly, understandingly casting your vote about. Not voting on any given race or issue is essentially voting for NOTA (None Of The Above)

The winner of an election never brags about being less bad than the other choices. Every vote is regarded as supporting what that person or issue stands for.

Exaggerating in the interest of making a point: If your choice is between Hitler and Stalin, whichever of them gets the most votes is going to say that all these people were voting FOR him and what he stands for.

What if, on the other hand, there was also a referendum on the ballot that got 10,000 votes one way or the other while Hitler got 124 votes and Stalin got 178. Stalin may “win” the election, but there’s no way it can be spun as having gotten a mandate from the electorate. Next election rolls around you can bet there will be much better candidates running because they know that there’s a big pool of voters who really didn’t like the choices they had in the last one.

Nevada has had a NOTA option for statewide races on its ballots since 1976 and there’s a bill in the New Hampshire Legislature to add it to the ballot there. At the start, if NOTA won, a new election for that office had to be held. Guess what … NOTA won too many elections and it was quickly changed to a non-binding vote, similar to Stalin “winning” the hypothetical election against Hitler. It has had an effect on office holders and future candidates knowing that more people wanted neither of the candidates than who voted for the one who won.

I had long heard that the basic Socialist platform was already pretty much in place but discounted it as a sounds good piece. Then I ran across a book at a flea market that was the 1932 Political Encyclopedia, a book that was put out in election years that covered all the candidates and parties and their platforms. Sure enough, when I looked up the Socialist Party, 9 out of 10 of their planks was, to one extent or another part of the platforms of today’s Democratic and even some in the Republican platform.

They never won a major election, but what they did was to get a core of voters that was bigger than the swing vote in a lot of elections. That forced the other candidates to include the Socialist ideas in order to try and attract those voters. Makes perfect sense politically, at least for career politicians.

The Libertarian Party is at the same point where candidates from both sides are having to take our beliefs into account when they’re in a close race. The only reason we seem to be more aligned with the Republicans is that, believe it or not, it’s proven a bit easier to find Republicans that will move towards the left on social issues than to find Democrats who will move towards the right on economic ones. We need to keep the pressure on and keep spreading our message.

We have won state and local elections and who knows, if we keep on fighting for liberty, one day that “L handle” may be a national choice.

» Posted By Diane Merriam On July 7, 2014 @ 12:25 pm