Muda69

No, you did not. You ducked, dived, and dodged. Like you usually do. All from the safety of your Hamilton county compound. And please, tell us about your government school degree(s). What are they in again?

https://reason.com/2019/10/30/former-time-editor-and-ceo-of-constitution-center-calls-for-ending-first-amendment-passing-hate-speech-laws/#comments Is he kidding? "Why would a country founded in large part on the Enlightenment values of free speech and religious freedom allow free speech and religious freedom?" doesn't seem like a tough question to answer. He doesn't name the countries his "most sophisticated Arab diplomats represented, so we need to fill that detail in. Let's assume they were from Saudi Arabia, a country completely unworthy of emulation when it comes to respecting basic human rights and whose Prince Mohammed bin Salman has taken responsibility for the brutal torture and murder of Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. We allow the burning of the Koran for the same reasons we allow the burning of King James and St. Jerome Bibles, the desecration of the U.S. flag, and the potential libeling of elected officials: We believe that individuals have rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. With a few exceptions such as "fighting words," "true threats," and obscenity, we know that it's better to allow more speech rather than less. Surprisingly, people get along better when they can more freely speak their minds. The search for "truth"—or at least consensus—benefits from free expression, too, as ideas and attitudes are subjected to examination from friends and foes alike. But the pragmatic answer is ultimately secondary to the expressive one: We allow free speech because no one, certainly not the government, has a right to curtail it. As befits a man who helmed a legacy media outlet that is slowly being reduced to rubble like a statue of Ozymandias in the desert, Stengel is particularly distraught over "the Internet" and the "Web." He implies that the "marketplace of ideas" worked well enough when John Milton and, a bit later, America's founders pushed an unregulated press, but, well, times have changed. If you're basing the erosion of constitutional rights on the reading comprehension skills of middle schoolers, you're doing it wrong. And by it, I mean journalism, constitutional analysis, politics, and just about everything else, too. Stengel pivots from discussing truth in media to "hate speech," a ridiculously expansive term he never defines with precision (he even writes, "there's no agreed-upon definition of what hate speech actually is"). But because mass shooters such as Dylann Roof, Omar Mateen, and the El Paso shooter "were consumers of hate speech," it's time to chuck out hard-fought victories that allow individuals and groups to express themselves in words and pictures. Hate speech, laments Stengel, doesn't just cause violence (though strangely, violence is declining even as social media is flourishing), it also A quick reading of the First Amendment would have reminded Stengel—the former chairman and CEO of the National Constitution Center, fer chrissakes!—that the First Amendment isn't about limiting speech that bothers the sensibilities of people. It's actually all about Congress not making laws that would create an official religion or restricting individual speech and freedom of the press; it also guarantees that we have the right of assembly and petition. The values it reflects involve pluralism and tolerance, not shutting down, regulating, or restricting speech that makers of "new guardrails" find offensive, annoying, or inconvenient. If you grew up any time in the past 60 years or so, you've taken freedom of speech for granted. That's due to a series of legal rulings that struck down the ability of elected officials to strangle speech they didn't like, ranging from potentially libelous personal attacks to once-banned literary works as Lady Chatterley's Lover, Howl, and Ulysses, along with materials such as the Pentagon Papers and the rise of technology that made producing and consuming all sorts of texts, images, music, video, and other forms of creative expression vastly easier. It's incredibly dispiriting to see baby boomers like Stengel brush aside the incredible wins in free expression because of concerns about vaguely defined terms such as "hate speech." He gives off a strong whiff of internet and Cold War paranoia—"Russian agents assumed fake identities, promulgated false narratives and spread lies on Twitter and Facebook, all protected by the First Amendment"—that seems widely shared by his generational peers. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) is an increasingly strong presidential candidate who has vowed to regulate explicitly political speech, especially its online iterations: Older boomers are syncing with millennials and younger Americans, who show a strong predilection to limiting "bad" speech (a 2015 Pew survey found 40 percent of millennials supported censoring "offensive statements about minorities"). These are not good developments, and neither is an op-ed in The Washington Post calling for an effective revocation of the First Amendment. Throw in bipartisan interest in regulating social media platforms as public utilities, the president's interest in "opening up" the libel laws so he can more easily sue his critics, the rise of "cancel culture," and we're one Zippo lighter short of a good, old-fashioned book burning. Yes we are. And it is frightening. What kind of America are we leaving for our children and grandchildren?

Nice dodge, gonzo. Try again please. Do you believe government could do as good of a job as the free market in producing motor vehicles and/or cheeseburgers? Why or why not? I guess as much like you need to revisit the definition of one of your favorite words, socialism.

But your quote: "Privatization rarely eases cost to consumers, or provide a better quality of service. Plus, it does not lower taxes." logically seems to indicate otherwise. Please explain.

So you believe practically every means of production, from electricity to cars to cheeseburgers, should be owned by the government. Got it. https://liberty-intl.org/1988/10/privatization-providing-better-services-with-lower-taxes/

NCAA Okays Paying Student Athletes, Republican Senator Immediately Wants to Tax Their Scholarships: https://reason.com/2019/10/30/ncaa-okays-paying-student-athletes-republican-senator-richard-burr-north-carolina-immediately-wants-to-tax-their-scholarships/ Typical that a government bureaucrat would demand a piece of the pie.

In this case irrelevant. Perhaps you need to revisit the definition of the word 'socialism'. Government should not be in the utility business, period. https://www.cato.org/publications/tax-budget-bulletin/privatizing-federal-electricity-infrastructure

Yet another remnant of FDR's socialism. It should have privatized years ago: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/think-about-privatizing-the-tva/2013/04/25/3b6bbf34-a860-11e2-b029-8fb7e977ef71_story.html

*sigh* https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/how-electricity-grid-works Not under Dante's socialist system. He would be be content with DC power generated by coal fired plants. After all, you run everything at cost, for public benefit.

So where is the incentives to improve your product/service, if you always operate at cost?

Ahh. Interesting. Thank you.

Where does Boone Grove play it's home football games? I don't know much about the place so I looked it up on Google Maps: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Boone+Grove+High+School/@41.3958962,-87.1694752,1431m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m13!1m7!3m6!1s0x881193fed4126f33:0xb7498bb4399ae601!2sPorter+County,+IN!3b1!8m2!3d41.5248577!4d-87.1023746!3m4!1s0x88118df4c9d027bf:0xf95e62acc1838505!8m2!3d41.3962682!4d-87.1658599 See what looks to be a practice field, but no competition field with seating? Could be an old image though......

Yep, a socialist like Dante's utopia, if only they could somehow do "socialism better". Whatever the heck that means.

You must be joking. Exactly how would that make them more efficient and more open to market forces?

What about the children who see this?

Thank you for your support.

Using that logic it would seem that schools which don't have an Endzone camera have effectively been winless since their invention/availability in the market. Is this really true?

a) All of my kids are now too old for youth or high school football. Does that mean I should no longer attend high school football games? b) ? Please explain.

Nothing should be free from continuous improvement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen

Sorry you choose to give up.

I disagree. As paying patrons to IHSAA sponsored events we certainly have the business to voice our opinions on how to improve the product.

https://mises.org/wire/pges-failures-show-dangers-government-imposed-utility-monopolies So we’ve solved the most immediate puzzle: The reason PG&E can get away with such outrageous mismanagement and shoddy customer service, is that the California government literally guarantees them their business. It is illegal for another company to try to entice PG&E’s disgruntled customers to switch their patronage. ... Any adult American reading my article surely can agree—regardless of your politics—that I am speaking the truth. To repeat, you simply do not see private companies in (relatively) open markets operating the way PG&E and other “public utilities” do. So the mismanagement and shoddy service of PG&E can’t possibly be the fault merely of corporate greed and neglect. Rather, the difference is due to the institutional structure and incentives that the government sets up. As McGillis explained in the block quotation above, a regulated public utility is typically given a monopoly for a certain region. It’s not allowed to charge “whatever the market will bear,” but instead must have its retail prices approved by government regulators. After showing the regulators the official cost of providing the service—whether electricity, natural gas, land phone lines, water, etc.—the utility is then allowed to charge enough to cover its costs and earn a reasonable rate of return for the investors. The problem with this approach should be all too obvious, in light of PG&E’s debacle and the similar episodes we see all the time with other government-regulated monopolies—the residential drinking water crisis in Flint, MI comes to mind. Once a company is guaranteed its customers, with competition expressly outlawed, there is little reason for it to maintain quality. Furthermore, because the retail price to the final consumer is regulated, whenever the quantity demanded exceeds the supply, the only solution is to artificially restrict the ability of customers to use the product. In a normal, relatively unregulated market, the price rapidly adjusts to balance the quantity demanded and supplied. In extreme situations—such as the immediate aftermath of a hurricane—this can lead to “outrageous” prices for bottled water and batteries, but such “price gouging” is exactly what we want to ration the available supply and motivate outsiders to bring in new supplies. The Conceptual Flaw With Mainstream Models of Regulation The textbook rationale for regulating certain services—such as residential electricity and water—is that they constitute “natural monopolies.” The idea is that a certain level of infrastructure spending is necessary to even have the ability to offer these services to a particular region, and so in an unregulated open market you would either have unnecessary duplication—with a given street having numerous pipes and power lines from different companies—or you would have one company that had captured the market and could charge outrageously high prices for such essentials. In order to combat these undesirable outcomes, the model of a publicly regulated monopolist with cost-plus pricing was developed. Yet as I’ve argued above, there is something terribly wrong with this approach. It simply takes it as a given that a regulated monopoly will provide the same quality of service as one facing open competition, which we see in practice is simply not true. Furthermore, as those in the Austrian tradition of economics stress, there is no such thing as an objectively given “cost of production.” Firms need to discover cheaper methods of producing electricity, water, etc., and we would expect them to look more diligently when they have profits as a reward. In other words, once your firm is allowed to charge its “cost” plus a markup for profit, you have no reason to weed out inefficiencies—the regulators will simply make you cut your retail price. Conclusion The PG&E debacle showcases the flaws of government-regulated monopolies. This is not an isolated incident, but is typical of the entire model. Yes, there are practical reasons that free and open competition might not work as smoothly with services requiring large infrastructure spending, but these complications pale in comparison to the dangers of having government outlaw competition. If we see the benefits of competition in trivial goods like soda and cereal, we should all the more so insist on competition for essentials like electricity and drinking water. Agreed. Government-backed utility monopolies need to go away, and they need to compete in a free and open market.

https://reason.com/2019/10/29/anti-vaping-propaganda-in-schools-undermines-critical-thinking-and-spreads-dangerous-misinformation/ Of course that isn't the lesson the government schools are trying to teach. Their lesson is that government and the information it approves is good and never, ever lies.

No idea. I never got to see the AD's secret list. Did you?