5 Years of YouTube Politics
Yes, and with it we can see how the politicians' quality decreased, year after year. And we have the infographic to prove it. Oh boy, 2012 is just around the corner, and all the contestants are lining up...wohoo!
Yes, and with it we can see how the politicians' quality decreased, year after year. And we have the infographic to prove it. Oh boy, 2012 is just around the corner, and all the contestants are lining up...wohoo!
An evocation of all of Christopher HItchens' career. Awesome!
I'm hating politics and politicians and their ties with corporations more and more each day...
Principles of a Social Democratic Internet Policy
Henning Meyer on 30.01.2010 • Categorized as Front Page Blogs, Social Democracy • (0)
Tagged as: censorship, internet, policy, Social Democracy, social networkingCC Flickr
Social democratic parties have had a difficult time adjusting to the internet age. They have severe difficulties in understanding in what way – positive and negative – online technologies penetrate people’s lives. The age structure of parties is an additional obstacle as different generations tend to use the internet differently.
When parties have dealt with online issues, they tended to look at the downsides of the web: illegal pornography, hate websites, breaches of copyright and so on. The misguided “Netzsperre” censorship policy of the SPD in Germany was one example of this (I know people who left the party because of that).
Even though the above issues are serious and we have to work on how to address them, I think it is wrong that this focus determines our general approach to internet questions.
Without neglecting the negatives, social democratic parties need to develop a positive internet policy narrative highlighting the revolutionary advances the internet has brought and that by far outweigh the negatives.
To start off, here are a few general ideas:
- Internet access should be a human right and social democratic parties should actively advocate the rollout of the internet to the corners of the planet where people are still largely offline
- In Europe we should advocate the rollout of high-speed broadband everywhere and guarantee access to it
- Accept and use the community building power of social networking tools and embrace the way in which they connect people and give them a voice against oppression (see Iran)
- Embrace social network technologies to develop an honest discussion with society and be open to new ideas.
- Use internet technologies to campaign for specific policies that are likely to have broad public support
- Advocate ways in which such campaigns are legally and institutionally linked into the official decision-making processess (petitions that prompt some form of action)
- The internet enables a new policy of knowledge equality. If access is generally available, we should support efforts to make as much knowledge as possible freely available. This will enable people to inform and educate themselves at no cost. Projects such as Google’s book scanning are controversial in terms of copyright, but the general principle should be to provide as much knowledge as possible for free.
These are just a few ideas off the top of my head. What we really need is a broader debate to develop a positive social democratic internet policy.
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Having failed to learn what causes depressions and how to treat them when they arrive, our nation's leaders are steering us straight into a monetary catastrophe. Predictably, the major media voices are clinging to the assurances of Keynesians, who see new wads of debt and paper money and conclude that the good times are ready to roll again; don't pay any heed to the millions still looking for work.
The free-lunch Keynesians even tell us how we got into the crisis and what saved us. Paul Krugman speaks for many when he blames market deregulation for the meltdown and hails the Fed's printing press as our savior.
What does this mean? It means we can laugh at rumors that the Fed's cheap credit brought on the crisis. We can laugh even harder at the claim that Fed monetary pumping will ensure an even greater disaster down the road. And we can save our biggest laughs for that lucky guesser, Peter Schiff, whose knowledgeable detractors laughed at him in 2006 when he predicted the current meltdown.
For many, it was the government's tinkering with Glass-Steagall that gave investors a free hand to commit evil — by allowing greedy mouths to gorge themselves to the brink of self-destruction. Because those mouths were so big, our leaders had no choice but to fleece taxpayers and dollar-holders to save them. Once again, we were told, freedom in economics became a recipe for disaster.
Sorry, state lovers, but rigging regulations to create a stupendous moral hazard does not reflect the "influence of free-market ideology," as Krugman claims. Regulations are interventions, and interventions are that seemingly benign collection of stepping-stones from capitalism to socialism. The current economic debacle is overwhelmingly a crisis of government meddling, not free markets.
A free economy is one that is — how to say this? — free. It is free of cronyism, favoritism, handout-ism, protectionism, or anything else that amounts to using the state as a means of living at the expense of others. If paupers or billionaires need help, they're required to get it without picking the pockets of others.
In a free economy the only role for force is the enforcement of property rights. Using force for other means is a violation of the natural freedom of individuals. This is what classical liberals meant by laissez-faire. A free-market ideology is one that calls for a free market, not the massaging of one or two regulations out of a constellation of a million.
But don't markets need regulating? Of course. Markets in which the government hasn't turned criminal regulate themselves without violating anyone's rights. If a bank insists on practicing fractional-reserve lending, for example, and finds itself unable to meet depositor demands, it files for bankruptcy, not a bailout. The free bank is thereby discouraged from creating multiple claims to the same dollar. It cannot ask for a loan from its friendly central banker because it doesn't have one.
A central bank such as the federal reserve could not exist in a free market. Central banking requires a monopoly of note issue, and monopolies — as grants of privilege — require the enforcing arm of government. Through bank competition and the threat of runs, a free market limits the tendency of bankers to practice fractional-reserve lending, which is the root of the business cycle.
But since fractional-reserve lending is profitable to bankers and government in the same way that counterfeiting is profitable to counterfeiters, we find ourselves saddled with a central bank to make sure the various costs of expanding the money supply are passed on to the poor and middle class.
The idea that central banks are independent from the governments that gave them life is a bad joke. Through their purchase of government debt obligations, central banks provide a convenient way for politicians to spend wildly on their pet projects — whether it's welfare for seniors or wars overseas — without having to raise taxes.
The hidden tax of bank inflation is perfectly suited to their ends. It gives the impression that government is an endless source of largess, while shifting the blame for crises and everyday higher prices onto governments' favorite whipping boys, speculators and business people. By depreciating the currency, bank inflation quietly takes wealth from our pockets and gives it to those in on the racket.
The very existence of a fiat-paper money like federal reserve notes precludes the possibility of a free market. "In no period of human history has paper money spontaneously emerged on a free market," Jörg Guido Hülsmann writes in The Ethics of Money Production.
Whenever governments issue the stuff, they of necessity impose a "legal obligation for each citizen to accept it as legal tender." At one point, paper money certificates were "backed" by a certain weight of gold or silver. But with widespread indifference to monetary issues, it proved easy for governments to blame crises on the commodity backing rather than the inflation of the notes. Governments outlawed the use of gold and silver as money so they could inflate with minimal restraint.
Paper money, in short, is not a market phenomenon; it comes into use only when the police power of the state forces us to accept it.
Writing recently in Foreign Affairs, Harvard historian and bestselling author Niall Ferguson noted that the current crisis has made certain dead economists look good, others not so good.
Though superficially this crisis seems like a defeat for Smith, Hayek, and Friedman, and a victory for Marx, Keynes, and Polanyi, that might well turn out to be wrong. Far from having been caused by unregulated free markets, this crisis may have been caused by distortions of the market from ill-advised government actions: explicit and implicit guarantees to supersized banks, inappropriate empowerment of rating agencies, disastrously loose monetary policy, bad regulation of big insurers, systematic encouragement of reckless mortgage lending — not to mention distortions of currency markets by central bank intervention.
The Austrians, in Ferguson's view, were "the biggest winners, among economists at least," because they "saw credit-propelled asset bubbles as the biggest threat to the stability of capitalism."
According to Austrian economics, we need to rein in the central bank. But what does our 2008 Nobel-prize-winning economist say about bubbles? In a New York Times editorial of August 2, 2002, Krugman wrote,
To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.
On the other hand, Ron Paul, on September 10, 2003, addressed the House Financial Services Committee on the moral hazard of the federal government's policy of providing special privileges to the GSEs, Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, and the growing credit bubble in housing:
Like all artificially-created bubbles, the boom in housing prices cannot last forever. When housing prices fall, homeowners will experience difficulty as their equity is wiped out. Furthermore, the holders of the mortgage debt will also have a loss. These losses will be greater than they would have otherwise been had government policy not actively encouraged over-investment in housing.
Paul warned about the danger of bubbles while Krugman was campaigning for their creation. Paul, an adherent of the Austrian School, believes there is no such thing as a free lunch. Krugman, the quintessential Keynesian, argues that there is, at least in a depression. He also says that "if politicians refuse to learn from the history of the recent financial crisis, they will condemn all of us to repeat it."
But if it's history's lessons we should imbibe, why have politicians and their pundits ignored the lessons of the 1920–1921 recession? Let me guess: maybe letting the market fix what government broke isn't an option they can bring themselves to embrace, even if it's the only way out.
George F. Smith is the author of The Flight of the Barbarous Relic, a novel about a renegade Fed chairman, and the book Eyes of Fire: Thomas Paine and the American Revolution, available now on Kindle and soon in paperback. Visit his website. Send him mail. See George F. Smith's article archives.
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A series of 12 videos from Harvard about philosophical dilemmas regarding hard choices that people have to make. I was schocked at some of the answeres. Definitely wothwhile.
By Daniel Kurtzman, About.com Guide
What can we expect for 2010?
Disclaimer: This is my personal view of the world, it might be biased but I'll try to be as objective as possible. This is not an in-depth analysis but an opinion.
For starters, opinions are divided, as always. On one side, we have the optimists, who think that just because some increase in sales during holiday season the economy is showing signs of bouncing back. On the other, the pesimists, which think we might never recover from this.
I am a skeptic, a bear, one that is always putting the worse ahead so that I am prepared for any situation. I think that right now, in the year to come, the world needs to embrace a new paradigm. That politicians leave their egos aside (and interest group friendships) and start taking note from the opinion leaders, economists and thinkers.
Usually, politicians like to take credit when things go according to plan (you probably knew that already) but when economies hit the proverbial fan, they immediately start panicking and don't know what to do. Why is this such a pandemic? Because politicians are humans, prone to mistakes? Oh, let's be real! With all the money involved you might think that one would act more responsibly. Guess not.
Politicians are like a plague (okay, it might be a harsh word, but most of them deserve it!) they use the people to satisfy their own meagre needs, their idiotic agendas, some of them thinking that we can't figure it out. Now for the good part. I've seen that there are some politicians with potential. One of them was elected president of the States in 2008. :-P
Now for the worldview. How can the world be in 2010? Better or worse?
World issues:
1. Iran - can the EU, USA and the rest of the happy bunch manage to control Iran's nuclear ambitions? I consider this more important because if Iran gets a nuke bye bye peace! Climate change will be the last thing we'll worry about. Hardcore measures are needed. I'm all for each and every country having the means to defend themselves. But when a country is run by ill-minded religious fundamentalists, everything changes. For the worst. Since we came here, let me add that no muslim country should have a nuke. (Pakistanis have it, too bad). Actually, coming to think about it a little better, no one should have a nuke. Those things are way too dangerous. So, if the west plus Russia plus China aren't able to stop Iran appetite for destruction we are in for a very dire 2010.
2. The Economic Crisis - will the world get out of the current hole? Not likely. And we owe it all to our beloved politicians and their ability to stall a decision for months if not years. Pay some attention to those economists and all the think tanks out there. They aren't using their knowledge just to show off, but to ail the world. We need a libertarian approach, a price on carbon, a tougher control on finance. We need to make sure no one gets paid off for making stupid decisions (remember AIG?)
3. Climate Change - Copenhagen, Hopenhagen, crapenhagen! From what I saw so far, they are at it again. Nature doesn't wait, we need to act, and how! And now! Talking is easy, doesn't cost the talker a penny, making promises that can be easily broken is not a great deal improvement either. We need papers signed, countries making commitments and applying them at a fast rate. Will anything be done? Remains to be seen.
4. Any and every other issue - they are important as well, just that these three top the list for 2010. And they need to be solved.
We could also add the Somali pirates problem. The drug cartel wars in Latin America. Religious fanatics. The ubiquitous corruption in politics in certain countries. And the list might never end...
This is partly how I see things rolling in 2010. I hope I'm wrong in certain aspects and that I will be proven wrong. I would really hate it for another conflict to start. There's already too much death and destruction in the world. Can't we evolve and put an end to this?
