[ExI] Even India and Haiti do it better

Tue May 12 18:35:29 UTC 2020

> On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] Even India and Haiti do it better

many voters claim they can tell them apart, but I still cannot.  What has either of them said to convince me they know what to do when the lenders suddenly stop lending?

spike

What if you were not a one issue guy, Spike?  Could you not tell them apart then?

bill w

Hi BillW, I see that one issue as so critically important, I fail to see why we flap around about the other stuff, abortion, guns, schools lunch programs, all the usual sound and fury signifying nothing.  None of that stuff is really going to change, right up until the day the Fed starts soft-defaulting on a lot of stuff: foreign aid drops suddenly and dramatically, Social Security recipients are underpaid, Medicare recipients are underpaid, federal subsidies to a number of things reduced, interstate highways under-repaired, the military has big layoffs (layoffs?) all the rest of it.

But I ask again: what happens when the lenders suddenly stop lending?  Is it really so hard to foresee?  We know of a run on the bank, when something happens where there is a sudden loss of faith, as in George Bailey’s Savings and Loan, a run by depositors.  There are so many positive feedback loops, exactly the kind of thing which causes Ponzi schemes to collapse: a sudden collective realization of the risk, everyone trying to get their money out in time.

OK so what if I were not a one-issue guy?  What if I had to pick something else to worry about and vote, something that the Fed does.  That second issue would be conservation.  If I pick a second issue, it would be that.  I would be a Green.  Now I land in a second small party, and I still can scarcely tell the two majors apart.  Can you?

spike

On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 12:26 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

> On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] Even India and Haiti do it better

> which is why it has never been done, even though nearly everyone at that level of power would have cheerfully done so.

>…I don't think that's true, Washington could have easily made himself dictator but he chose not to…

This makes me a big fan of Washington.  He was the first and perhaps only libertarian to be elected to that high office.  He set an important precedent that was followed but not codified into law until a century and a half later.  He left office after two terms, as did his successors. 

>… But Trump does want to be dictator and he already has the Senate and the Supreme Court in his pocket, not to mention the Attorney General.  John K Clark

Then why didn’t he do it?  Because the constitution prevents it.  The SCOTUS will swear in whoever it collectively believes wins the EC vote in December 2020.

What I see as a bigger threat: a seriously disputed election, not by the players but by the voters.  You have long known my uneasiness with machine voting, but now with expanded use of mail-in ballots and ballot harvesting, that problem gets worse.

We may not know who won the coming election.  It was kinda that way in 2000, but it didn’t matter then: the candidates were indistinguishable to most voters.  This time around, many voters claim they can tell them apart, but I still cannot.  What has either of them said to convince me they know what to do when the lenders suddenly stop lending?

spike

_______________________________________________
extropy-chat mailing list
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> 
http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20200512/f0231d4d/attachment.htm>