Trimdingman

In a free-market economy where prosperity is the norm, you would have to pay higher wages, and you would be making bigger profits. You would pay whatever it took to get reliable and capable staff, and charge accordingly. A donut might cost ten or fifteen cents more. As far as labor goes, it would be a balance between a buyers' market and a sellers' market. It would not be a beggars' market with the government forcing employers to pay wages above a starvation level. Workers would have enough dignity to be able to tell cheap employers what to do with "this job".

Jesus was an invention of the Roman government. The Jews refused to recognize the Emperor as a god, so they invented a god who was a peaceful Jew, hoping to stop the Jews from revolting against Roman authority. It didn't work with the Jews, but it started a new religion. The story was copied, enhanced, and changed over a few centuries, and the four least contradictory stories out of around one hundred eighty were selected for the official New Testament.

Morality does not spring from religion. Religions use "morality" as a tool to attract followers. Moses never existed, and the Ten Commandments attributed to him already, for the most part existed in older morality codes. Forensics have estimated that the books of Moses were written around 500 B.C., give or take a century; and Moses would have lived in the 15th century B.C. Where did the authors (there were four, plus one editor) get their information from? Religion is the greatest instigator of torture, murder, and genocide that ever existed. It infects your mind and limits your capacity to learn and think. Who cares what a left wing pope says? His whole philosophy is based on fantasy and nonsense.

Minimum wage law is a band-aid to cure a problem that the government, itself caused. Minimum wage law causes wages to go down, not up. In a vibrant economy with minimal government interferrance if you offered someone less than twenty dollars an hour to work for you, they would tell you; "good luck, but no thanks". When the government tells people that they are only worth minimum wage, they fall for it, and companies are able to get suckers to work for it. Of course, in some areas where Big Government has desolated the economic landscape, but kept the population intact through welfare payments, minimum wage is all businesses can afford, if that.

Minimum age laws are a symptom. The problem is too much government sucking too much money out of the economy. In a free market economy, wages would be dictated by supply and demand. People would be forced to go where the work is, if there were no government handouts. With people doing what they want with their money, instead of the government doing it for them, there would be a great demand for goods and services, along with a great demand for workers to provide these goods and services. Instead of the job going to the most skilled person who would work the cheapest; the employer who offered the best compensation would get the worker. There would be no need for minimum wage laws.

Half of my family's income tax, or about $30,000 per year goes toward socialized health care. I haven't been to a doctor in more than twenty years. It is too dangerous to my health. I had occasion to take my wife to an American hospital for emergency care. Nothing serious, thankfully. The difference between American and Canadian health care is astounding; yours being orders of magnitude superior. Don't give it up.

The solution is a user-pay system. Take away the monopoly and let the market set prices. You don't need to be a doctor with 10 years of university to do 99% of what doctors do. Eliminate that requirement. Bring on real competition and you will see health science advance like computer science did without the government interfering. They know how to do heart transplants. They just have to follow the procedure. They should be able to get the cost down to a few thousand dollars; but no. It is life or death, so they will extort it to the max, under the protection of their monopoly created by government regulation. Get the government out. Set competition and American know-how free, and soon we will all be living longer, healthier lives within our household budgets. We don't need government health care or insurance. Getting a heart transplant should be like getting a new set of kitchen appliances.

When I see a mob on the news on TV, there are police that the mob is mobbing against. Use your common sense. A family doesn't turn into a mob just because the government is not controlling them. It is control that drives people crazy. It is poverty, brought on by too much government that drives people to revolt. If there was no government, and universal prosperity, there would be no unrest. Satellites would monitor your property, and film anyone trespassing. Your cell phone would ring, and you could warn the trespasser and even shoot him by remote control. Don't get all ruffled now. There is nothing preventing someone from going around killing people now. It is not human nature. We have natural inhibition against killing our own species; just like every other animal. If we didn't, we would soon kill each other to extinction. We can be programmed or indoctrinated to kill, but it is not natural. We are programmed to believe that unlike other animals, who are below us on the evolutionary scale, we are incapable of surviving on our own. We have tools at our disposal that were not even dreamed of a generation ago. Why do we need a government postal service when we have e-mail? In Canada, we have the CBC, which sucks over a billion dollars a year out of the taxpayers instead of making money and surviving on it's own. It's main purpose is to turn us into communists. We have layer after layer of government and law enforcement. Local, state/provincial, federal, and international (CIA/CSIS). We don't need this. It has gotten way out of control.

I am not offering a Utopia. There will always be danger in this world. I would prefer a system where a person can prosper without a "Mafia" government not just "wetting it's beak" but taking a bath. If there is opportunity and freedom to defend oneself, why would anyone need to take from others. Criminal operations like the Mafia flourish under "law and order". If a biker gang rides into a town seeking to do mayhem, and the street is lined with citizens holding automatic weapons, they will not even spit. It happened to the James gang in Northfield. No gang can stand up to the citizenry, unless they have been neutered by the government. Corrupt politicians want to ban guns so the citizens are at their mercy, and in need of their "protection".

It usually will cost much more to the taxpayers to pursue, apprehend, convict, and incarcerate a "criminal" than the losses directly associated with the actual crime. Therefore, the system is not working. Let people use all available technology to protect themselves from crime and leave the government out of it. You could have a weapon aimed by remote control by your cell phone to keep prowlers and car thieves from robbing you. If someone kills one of your friends or family, kill back. Soon, this behavior would cease. Very few people are inclined to harm others, anyway; and the few who are would think twice if they knew they were bringing retribution down on their heads instead of being protected by the law and the government. Poverty, brought on by too much government leads many people to crime, and our "justice" system makes it easy to get away with it.

How is the system we have so great? Now we have total crime, with the government and banks in cahoots. This is anarchy. Criminals operate under the protection of the law, while honest citizens are threatened with losing everything if they attempt to take matters into their own hands. They are threatened on both sides; the criminals and the government. Even so, life is bearable, as it would be without government with people fending for themselves. Only we would be much richer. People would be able to retire at age thirty or forty, and although technology would eliminate many jobs, most people would not need or want to work, so supply and demand would force wages higher. A society that needs to have minimum wage laws is really out of kilter. It means that something is seriously wrong. It is government. You cannot go back in history and see where libertarianism failed, because to-day it is a whole different ball game. We have technology that we have never had before. We have total information and total communication. We need to use that to gain our freedom, not to allow the government to have total control over us.

Whether we have government or not, we have responsibility. In fact, with government we have the choice of shirking our responsibilities without consequence. In the natural world, we reap what we sow, and this will lead to a stronger superior species. Any institution which seeks to control will subjugate; be it government, religion, parents, employer, you name it. Freedom fosters advancement. It is good to have help until you learn the ropes; but at this point, you need to be free to pursue your own ambitions. Without government squandering resources and killing ambition, there would be universal prosperity, and high wages with employers out-bidding each other for scarce labor. Any suffering would be taken care of by peoples' natural generosity. As it is now, many have lost that because of government.

How about this? Say the government was the sole provider of food like they are the nearly sole provider of education and health care. Suppose it has been this way for over a hundred years, and people know nothing else. Suppose someone came up with the idea that people should be able to go out and buy their own food. How many arguments would the left come up with saying that this would never work? People would starve. People would be sick from eating unhealthy food. Regions where there is no agriculture would suffer famine when crops were poor. These are similar to arguments when anyone suggests doing away with any government programs. I don't think that we need government at all. New technology eliminates the need for government. The left argues that new technology requires more government, as it makes it harder to control freedom. Freedom should be looked on as a good thing.

The problem is that companies are leaving the country to escape onerous government regulation and taxation. You solve that by reducing regulations and taxes, not by increasing them. The government has reached the saturation point on taxation and even on borrowing from outside the country. Now they are just printing up counterfeit currency to create the illusion of a recovery, when in actuality, they are broke, and if you are accepting dollars in exchange for goods and services, it is like accepting IOUs from someone on welfare. Issuing phony paper has been going on for awhile. Why not just give everyone a million bucks and solve the problem? Oh... That is similar to what they are actually doing!

Maybe they are planning to do away with the hood down the road.

Prosperity comes from creating a fertile environment for investment. When that happens, companies will be out-bidding each other for workers. When the government forces expensive rules on private businesses, they find ways around it; like cutting wages and reducing the workforce and increasing the workloads of employees. Companies seek out greener pastures, so there are more unemployed than job openings. Then supply and demand pushes wages lower. Government responds by enacting minimum wage laws, and raising taxes to support all of the displaced people who were displaced because of their meddling in the free market. When they tax everybody to the limit, they fire up the printing presses until they destroy the currency.

phil 1336: I do see religion as potentially as big a threat as government. It was in the past. To-day, religion is not forced on you. You can take it or leave it. Government is, however forced on you whether you like it or not. When you are indoctrinated into government in school, it becomes a religion. I also see unions as cults. In countries where religion is forced, there are no human rights. Our rights and freedoms under bigger and bigger government are slowly but surely eroding away, also.

Unless the basic structure of government changes, we will continue down the path to the "Big Re-set". We allow the government to "educate" our children. Do you think they are being taught that government should be kept to a minimum so that it will not get out of control; or are they taught that more government will solve every problem? People come out of government institutions of indoctrination intuitively believing that government is the air they breathe. Government should be seen as a disease that needs to be eradicated. Government sees people who think this way as the disease, and they also control health care. I find this scary.

Think of it as one of the side-benefits of the communist nanny state.

Government and Organized Crime support each other and cause each other to flourish through Drug Prohibition Laws. Both sides want them to stay in place. It is a winning partnership for everybody except the tax-payer and innocent by-stander. They will try to drag you in any chance they get. I will not get involved in their "cops-and-robbers" game if called upon to testify. I am not part of it. Let them kill each other if they want to in order to make lots of money. Count me out. Legalize it and forget about it. Problem solved.

It doesn't stop. While in rehab, Ford loans his Cadillac Esplanade to a female, also in rehab, who goes out, gets drunk, gets pulled over by the cops, charged with DUI, and Ford's SUV is impounded.

Ford is now in re-hab. The election is in November (I think). I'm betting on Ford being re-elected. There is so much hate for the commies on Toronto city council that the people will vote for any alternative. They can't risk splitting the vote by voting for some Johnny-come- lately Conservative. Olivia Chow is already talking about more bike lanes and street closures to gridlock automobile traffic. She opposes subways that would take buses and streetcars off the roads. Ford will not march in the Gay Pride Parade, and doesn't want the rainbow flag flown at City Hall. He is cracking down on graffiti, where lefty mayors in the past have encouraged it. Ford is making Toronto fiscally sound with low property taxes, clean streets, fewer beggars and street con people harassing tourists and shoppers. He is what the city has needed for a long time.

Rob Ford is not liked by the left wing mainstream media. They have been on him like vultures since before he was even elected mayor, and any of his private life was even known. He is a threat to the socialist gravy train. If he was a lefty, his antics would be either ignored, swept under the rug, or made light of like the Kennedys. Winston Churchill and U.S. Grant were drunks. If the media wanted to destroy them, they could have painted them like they do Rob Ford. It used to be that celebrities were handled and removed from situations before they embarrassed themselves so the general public never found out. Now they are goaded and agitated and filmed at their worst moments.

Maybe Rob Ford should not be mayor of Toronto, but the alternative would be a disaster. That is why he continues to have a lot of support. Toronto city council makes San Francisco look like Dodge City.

Conservatism is logic. Liberalism/socialism/communism/fascism is religion pushed by Big Government.