Hey, churchies, here's an idea:

Let the government worry about everything involving this world.

Let your crackpot religion (that's every religion, btw) worry about the hereafter, and not interfere.

Simple, right?

Lefties aren't really Americans. They are actually a form of talking cockroach...

LordZorch: Lefties aren't really Americans. They are actually a form of talking cockroach...

no voting enabled?

They think Mark Steyn is brilliant? Wow.

Classic free-market economists hold that individuals are rational, or at least act rationally



And that is why you fail.

/No, government is no more rational or reliable than individuals or private endeavors, but the forces of public and private pressures can counterbalance each other to the point that neither side can fark up too much.

Bloody William: Classic free-market economists hold that individuals are rational, or at least act rationally

ok, while you depend on individuals to act rationally, i'll depend on them to act selfishly and out of their own greed. we'll see who wins.

Odd. I've seen a lot more people on the right insulting what America stands for over the last 9 years or so.
Stopped reading at the use of the word "technocrats". Honestly ....

I like lentil soup.

Hobodeluxe

That guy is the definition of a douche.

What is this POS blog?

FARK has completely turned into a WHARRGARBLL mill for trolls and flame wars.

"Health" is potentially a big-ticket item, but so's a house and a car, and most folks manage to handle those without a Government Accommodation Plan or a Government Motor Vehicles System - or, at any rate, they did in pre-bailout America.

You can live without a house or a car.

/Why can't we have a right-wing party that isn't defined as FAILGARBL?

So apparently "centrist" is the meatspace equivalent of "Fark Independent."

LouDobbsAwaaaay 2009-06-14 03:47:25 PM

You can live without a house or a car.

Speak for yourself, dingleweed.

It's one thing to greenlight articles that are deliberate flamebait, but this one was incoherent. It looked as if the author was getting paid by Scrabble score or somesuch.

Kittypie070: LouDobbsAwaaaay 2009-06-14 03:47:25 PM

You can live without a house or a car.

Speak for yourself, dingleweed.

Alright, I'll rephrase:

People who aren't completely retarded can live without a house or a car.

I'm a lefty and I have no idea what a lentil is. Wasn't that a Barbara Streisand movie?

bales: Bloody William: Classic free-market economists hold that individuals are rational, or at least act rationally

ok, while you depend on individuals to act rationally, i'll depend on them to act selfishly and out of their own greed. we'll see who wins.


I hate to sound like Gorden Gecko, but greed and selfishness are usually consistent with rationality, at least from one individual's point-of-view. How is it irrational to want more for oneself, or to act out of selfish interests? There's a strong case to be made for the so-called "rational" choices of altruism or long-term-planning to be the irrational choices for an individual and his or her progeny.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lentil

copy/paste for lentily goodness

Classic free-market economists hold that individuals are rational, or at least act rationally: thus free decisions in a free market deliver optimal economic results.

The latter does not necessarily follow from the former.

I think the idea that people always act rationally to be a bit daft, but don't necessarily think that government control is the answer: government, being controlled by individuals, can be every bit as irrational as individuals.

But despite that, the fact remains that unfettered free markets simply lend themselves to monopoly, discrimination, corruption, and pollution.

I farking love lentils.

deadsanta: I hate to sound like Gorden Gecko, but greed and selfishness are usually consistent with rationality, at least from one individual's point-of-view. How is it irrational to want more for oneself, or to act out of selfish interests?

Running a company into the ground, stealing the employee pension fund, and flying away on a golden parachute to rinse and repeat is perfectly rational from the greed and selfishness point of view.

But it doesn't help the argument that the economy should be run that way.

LouDobbsAwaaaay: Kittypie070: LouDobbsAwaaaay 2009-06-14 03:47:25 PM

You can live without a house or a car.

Speak for yourself, dingleweed.

Alright, I'll rephrase:

People who aren't completely retarded can live without a house or a car.

You must be one of those yuppies who lives in a city and believes everyone should live in a city.

/wouldn't get far here without a car
//wouldn't live in a city if someone paid me a 7 figure income.

hillbillypharmacist: the fact remains that unfettered free markets simply lend themselves to monopoly, discrimination, corruption, and pollution.



As opposed to gov't which is a monopoly, discriminatory, corrupt and polluted.

Tarkus: I'm a lefty and I have no idea what a lentil is. Wasn't that a Barbara Streisand movie?

They are one of the oldest forms of domesticated legumes. Aside from soy beans, they contain the highest amount of protein for a bean. Most cultures have treated it as a poverty food. Greeks used it the same way we use styrofoam peanuts. First cultivated in the US to feed a group of vegetarian Seventh Day Adventist.

Phil Herup: As opposed to gov't which is a monopoly, discriminatory, corrupt and polluted.

Such is human nature. At least in government, you get to vote.

http://images.google.com/images?q=lentil curry

Lentil curry is delicious. Nom. Nom. Nom.

You rightards are funny.

/random blog entries get greenlit?

The assumption of rationality is false (new window).

Also check out Dan Ariely (new window) and buy his book.

This throws a major spanner in the works of economic theory, and nobody really has a solution for it.

Phil Herup: As opposed to gov't which is a monopoly, discriminatory, corrupt and polluted.

Government = Mos Eisley Spaceport?

TFA: We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist...

Wait, you're a commune of what now?

bales: Bloody William: Classic free-market economists hold that individuals are rational, or at least act rationally

ok, while you depend on individuals to act rationally, i'll depend on them to act selfishly and out of their own greed. we'll see who wins.

His point, you missed it

kukukupo: You must be one of those yuppies who lives in a city and believes everyone should live in a city.

You say you can't live without your house/car the same way a 16 year-old says he can't live without his iPod and WoW account.

You may not like it, but you could do it (provided you could get over your melodramatic hand-wringing for ten seconds). I own a car, but I know that I could get by without one. It isn't something that I feel I am entitled to by the government.

But please, keep thinking I'm some insufferable yuppie if it keeps you the hell away from me.

ceremony_1968: Government = Mos Eisley Spaceport?


That is more of wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Laws are there to protect people from each other. People make mistakes and have accidents, but laws protect others from those accidents because sometimes they are not accidents. Sometimes, people cross the line in their greed and end up harming others due to "irrational" greed. Greed and selfishness are fine as long as they are good for the individual. When they cross that line and start to harm others, then they do harm others. This is why we have to have laws to protect us even in a free, capitalist society. There is no natural correction in a market when people cross lines and violate laws.

When a bank CEO, in order to pad his pockets with more money, starts to increase loans to the point of loaning money to people who have not yet reached a point at which they qualify, and then causes his "too big to fail" bank to collapse and takes down everything in its path, then that CEO crossed the line and violated the law. His greed and selfishness have gone too far and he needs to be punished.

Crown_of_Shoes: FARK has completely turned into a WHARRGARBLL mill for trolls and flame wars.

Agreed.

That must have been written by some drunk Alzheimer's patient. It was incoherent and rambling.

Phil Herup: ceremony_1968: Government = Mos Eisley Spaceport?


That is more of wretched hive of scum and villainy.

So Mos Eisley is more like the RNC then?

Lentils are delicious. Leave them out of your partisan raving.

Sigh, for a second, just for a second I thought the article was going to be about left handed Americans. Stupid multi-use slang.

/southpaw

"The government which governs least, governs best."

If these clowns actually believed Jefferson, if they truly believed in less government, I would be able to marry my girlfriend and then skip down to the corner store and buy some pot.
Instead, they operate on a system of "government control for what I believe in, and what I believe in only."
Anyone arguing against some form of healthcare reform is, by this point, either willfully ignorant or completely disingenuous. We've seen what happens when we let corporations that deal with the public regulate themselves--they get greedy and fark the public over. Greed is human nature--we need to accept this and work around it.
I'm not saying that the federal government is completely perfect for this job, but they're the only option we have, and we need to make it work.

But "no government control, damn it!"? Please. They shouldn't kid yourselves. They love government control when it's for other people.

deadsanta: I hate to sound like Gorden Gecko, but greed and selfishness are usually consistent with rationality, at least from one individual's point-of-view. How is it irrational to want more for oneself, or to act out of selfish interests? There's a strong case to be made for the so-called "rational" choices of altruism or long-term-planning to be the irrational choices for an individual and his or her progeny.

That's the thing though. We aren't rational. No one is. We all have our emotional prejudices, our pet peeves and favorites, our preferences. And we have empathy and sympathy. If they weren't evolutionarily viable, AKA if you were right and purely rational thought would rule out empathy and sympathy, why is it that we have them at all? If they present no evolutionary advantage, wouldn't they be gone, or not arisen in the first place?

Now, it could be that they are a byproduct of some other part of human evolution that has not proved particularly harmful or helpful and so sticks around. But I don't think so.

The key statement, I think, is individual. Yes, it may be best, just tracking a singly individual, for that individual to be greedy and selfish. But individuals, contrary to popular belief, is not the only scale upon which evolution works. Especially in social creatures like ourselves, evolution works on a larger scale, a group scale. A group of individuals who might be unfit on their own can come together and live. There are species in nature much simpler than our own with habits which look a lot like altruism. And, in a society like ours, if the group fails, the individual will likely fail as well.

But really, that's not the problem. Any kind of study of humanity which approximates us as rational and/or wholly self centered will fail, because we are not. And even if we were, marketing can disrupt that by misinforming the consumer.

RemyDuron: deadsanta: I hate to sound like Gorden Gecko, but greed and selfishness are usually consistent with rationality, at least from one individual's point-of-view. How is it irrational to want more for oneself, or to act out of selfish interests? There's a strong case to be made for the so-called "rational" choices of altruism or long-term-planning to be the irrational choices for an individual and his or her progeny.

That's the thing though. We aren't rational. No one is. We all have our emotional prejudices, our pet peeves and favorites, our preferences. And we have empathy and sympathy. If they weren't evolutionarily viable, AKA if you were right and purely rational thought would rule out empathy and sympathy, why is it that we have them at all? If they present no evolutionary advantage, wouldn't they be gone, or not arisen in the first place?

Now, it could be that they are a byproduct of some other part of human evolution that has not proved particularly harmful or helpful and so sticks around. But I don't think so.

The key statement, I think, is individual. Yes, it may be best, just tracking a singly individual, for that individual to be greedy and selfish. But individuals, contrary to popular belief, is not the only scale upon which evolution works. Especially in social creatures like ourselves, evolution works on a larger scale, a group scale. A group of individuals who might be unfit on their own can come together and live. There are species in nature much simpler than our own with habits which look a lot like altruism. And, in a society like ours, if the group fails, the individual will likely fail as well.

But really, that's not the problem. Any kind of study of humanity which approximates us as rational and/or wholly self centered will fail, because we are not. And even if we were, marketing can disrupt that by misinforming the consumer.

Wow. . . that's a lot of typos. Sorry. Oh well, it's still pretty readable.

Phil Herup: hillbillypharmacist: the fact remains that unfettered free markets simply lend themselves to monopoly, discrimination, corruption, and pollution.



As opposed to gov't which is a monopoly, discriminatory, corrupt and polluted.

Move somewhere else.

Bucky Katt: Lentils are delicious.



I just asked my GF to make lentils for dinner now.

As someone who both enjoys lentils and wants to study behavioral economics in grad school, I did NOT get a kick out of this... well, it's not an article. Blog post, I guess?

ckccfa: Move somewhere else.



like Somalia?

"Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs."

no kidding

Phil Herup: Bucky Katt: Lentils are delicious.

I just asked my GF to make lentils for dinner now.

Munchies...kicking in...

Fark needs to put out a cookbook. It'd probably be so huge and thick that you'd be able to use it as a melee weapon, which would just improve sales.