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Patrick's Platform


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2017 Feb 19, 6:18am   276,962 views  304 comments

by Patrick   ➕follow (60)   💰tip   ignore  

Copyright
Limit copyright to 20 years like patents, with no renewals, because renewals just protect the profits of Disney and other wealthy lobbyists.
Make DMCA takedown abuse a felony because it is used to stifle free speech.

Corruption
Issue massive cash rewards for exposing illegal or unethical behavior by government officials. Turn the rats against each other.
Ban congressmen and their family members from owning individual stocks, to stop flagrant insider trading like that by Nancy and Paul Pelosi.
Ban all levels of government from attempting to influence public opinion aside from direct quotable speech by specific elected officials; government should respect and reflect the will of the people.
Make it a felony for any elected official or government employee to knowingly lie to the public, or to materially misrepresent facts to the public the same way it is a crime for members of the public to lie to government.
Require all laws — like vaccine mandates and insider trading bans — to also apply to members of Congress without any exemptions.
Aggressively rotate out DC politicians with term limits before they can fully develop their corrupt networks.
Make a point of bringing in total political outsiders as often as possible.
Forbid everyone at the FDA or family members from ever working at any pharma company, and forbid all pharma employees or family members from ever working for the FDA, until the FDA is eliminated and its functions transferred to the states.
Make all government expenditures, down to the dollar, without exception, easily available for public inspection.
Hire the elderly, who often know how things work and have a lot of available time, to watch all public contracts for excessive spending and corruption.

Crime, the Law, and Prisons
Openly address the extremely disproportionate violent crime rate by black men relative to all others, instead of hiding it.
Abolish all "hate crime" laws because they inevitably result in unequal application of the law, favoring some groups over others, and violate the First Amendment. We already have laws against crime.
Implement public honors and a large cash reward for anyone who captures and flogs a looter or shoplifter.
Require all police to wear functioning bodycams at all times when interacting with the public or prisoners, all video to be used as evidence.
End civil forfeiture because it is theft by government.
Ban private prisons because they bribe judges to feed them more prisoners.
Legalize marijuana at the federal level because it is less harmful than alcohol.
Allow free speech for all prisoners so that we can learn about injustice.
Segregate prisons by biological sex. No men should ever be imprisoned among women, nor women among men.
Define "right to a speedy trial" to mean that a verdict must be reached within one year of imprisonment, defaulting to innocent.
Compensate those found innocent for their unjust time in jail. The money should come from the budget of the agency which imprisoned them.
End selective enforcement of laws by DAs. We should have minimal laws, but they should be enforced 100% of the time to avoid cases like Hunter Biden's never being charged with running the Biden Crime Family bribery racket.
First-time criminals should be given the option of flogging rather than imprisonment. Imprisonment creates hardened criminals who learn bad habits in prison.
Anyone who instigates a lawsuit and loses should have to pay his opponent's legal fees so that the suit itself was not a financial punishment. This is the law is most of the world already.

Discrimination
Forbid government from counting or classifying citizens by race.
End racism by refusing to talk about it, as Morgan Freeman suggested in his famous interview with Mike Wallace.
Prohibit any special access to government services regardless of a person's status, wealth, or payment.
Eliminate all government favoritism or exclusion of citizen by race; therefore no Affirmative Action, nor exclusion of whites or Asians from any programs.

Education
Offer a basic citizenship, numeracy, and literacy test for a high school diploma, administered by the US Office of Weights and Measures.
Fund college with temporary income share agreements, not loans, to give colleges a true motive to help students.
Let middle school and high school students test out of any subject and study whatever they want on their own, so they don't waste their time.
Require any university which gets government funding to award class credits and degrees purely for passing objective tests, no classes required.
Require elementary, middle, and high school classes on how to avoid getting trapped in debt.
Create state-level virtual universities of the very best teachers and classes, online, free for all students of any age.
Allow school choice, where parents can spend their tax money on any school in the state, public or private.
Promote practical education, such as plumbing and HVAC, but also promote reading the Latin and Greek classics, especially in the original languages.
Require middle school and high school courses to teach what rights are guaranteed by the Constitution, and how to sue for them.

Food
Make is a serious crime to introduce any insect-based food for humans without prominent warnings on the food that it includes insects.
Ban all seed oils as not appropriate for human consumption because they are poisonous, especially rapeseed oil, aka "Canola" oil.

Foreign Policy
Put compensating tariffs on foreign goods from countries with lower wages or lower environmental standards, to protect the US manufacturing base.
Seek national economic self-sufficiency in all necessary goods like oil and medicines so that the US may never be extorted by a foreign country.
Impose an absolute ban on dual citizenship, because it always creates conflicting loyalties. China prohibits dual citizenship for this reason.
Stop sending taxpayer money to Israel. They can take care of themselves.

Freedom of Speech
Create a Constitutional Amendment explicitly prohibiting all levels of government from "advising" or influencing any media on what to report or suppress.
Prohibit discrimination in hiring and firing based on political activities outside of work.
Revoke all laws against "hate speech" because such laws violate the First Amendment.

Homelessness
Require mandatory prison time for hard drug use, because most homeless are addicts, and former addicts testify that enforced sobriety in prison saved them.

Immigration
Issue permanent shoot-to-kill orders against anyone invading US borders. This was normal in all parts of the world until recently.
Make everyone who enters the US illegally permanently ineligible for citizenship, green cards, employment, and welfare, except for any who help to convict and imprison their own employers for employing illegal labor.
Build a wall along the southern US border, to protect low-wage American workers from illegal competition.
Deport everyone who entered the US illegally. Exception: grant US citizenship to any illegal alien who gets his employer convicted of employing him and imprisoned. This would be yet more effective than a wall.
Mandate federal prison time for all employers of illegal aliens.
Eliminate all H1B and similar visas unless the incoming worker is paid at least twice as much as an American would be for that job, to prevent, eg, Facebook's abuse of H1B.

Infrastructure
Give official federal priority to fast and cheap rail transit to city centers as in Europe, in place of subsidies and favoritism for highways and airports.
Attempt to re-achieve US energy independence to help keep us out of foreign wars and to improve our balance of trade.
Officially disparage and refuse to grant permits to sterile modern architecture because it is merely cheap shit pretending to be classy.
Return to classical public art, perhaps with subtle new touches. Refuse to spend money on crappy modern public "art".
Create pedestrian-friendly and completely safe town squares with fountains in every town, with a particular emphasis on introducing young people to each other.

Leaf Blowers
Ban gasoline powered leaf blowers in dense residential areas. They pollute with dirty engines, blow dust around, and make a lot of noise.

Legislation
Restrict the commerce clause’s interpretation back to what it was before the 1937 Supreme Court case "National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp." This reversal would greatly reduce the size of the Federal government.
Eliminate all regulations and rules. There must be only laws enacted by elected representatives of the people, and never any regulations and rules created by unelected bureaucrats.
Require lesser authorities to defy unconstitutional laws and orders.
Prohibit all "states of emergency" because they are used to subvert the Constitution, as was done in the Wuhan Virus scamdemic. We should be ready for emergencies at all times anyway.
Create a Constitutional amendment to explicitly state that no part of the Constitution may be suspended ever, for any reason, for any amount of time.
Anyone attempting to suspend any part of the Constitution for any amount of time, especially for an "emergency", shall be guilty of a capital offense.
Require all federal laws to be read in their entirety by all legislators before they may vote on them, to discourage lobbyist-written bills.
Require all federal laws to be clear enough that a 12th-grade education is sufficient to understand them perfectly, for more public participation.
Limit bill length to 30 normal-sized pages of normal sized font, for more clarity about what is in the bill, and more public participation.
Promote the principle of very few laws, very well enforced. "The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." -Tacitus.
Guarantee the right of the president to fire anyone within executive branch at any time, especially long-time "civil servants" like Fauci.
Eliminate anti-competitive imposition of "safety" costs on small businesses because those laws are almost all written to benefit large businesses.
Require 20 year sunset provisions for all federal laws, requiring a new vote on whether the law is to be continued after it expires.
Allow the public to vote to revoke the corporate charter of any company which they feel has abused the public, companies like Pfizer.
Publicly post all bills two weeks in advance of Congressional vote, to give the public a chance to read them.
Let the president have a line item veto.
Repeal the poorly-named "Patriot Act".

Medical Care
Repeal the PREP act. All vaccines and other medical products must come with unlimited liability for manufacturers at all times.
Establish a Constitutional ban on lockdowns, mask requirements, and vaccine mandates. They must never be allowed under any circumstances.
Prosecute everyone involved with the creation of Wuhan Virus, especially the mass murderers Fauci, Collins, and Daszak.
Prosecute everyone who abused his or her power to mandate the dangerous and ineffective mRNA injection, whether in government, schools, or workplaces.
Require short clear written presentation of all non-emergency medical costs before treatment for market discipline of medical costs.
Absolve all patients from legal liability for medical care bills whose costs they did not agree to in writing in advance of treatment, aside from emergency care.
Require all emergency medical charges to be limited to moderate fixed prices by law, because there can be no market in emergencies.
Require medical insurers to give a coverage response to a proposed non-emergency medical bill within one day, again to control medical costs.
Allow import of prescription drugs from Canada and from every other country because the import restrictions are a scam to boost profits.
Make it a felony to offer doctors or other medical providers payments to recommend any drug or treatment.
Ban the practice of charging higher prices for the same medicine or treatment when the patient is uninsured. See image below.
Establish a Constitutional right to visit in person and hug any relative who wants visitors in a hospital or nursing home with no exceptions for any disease on either side. It must be their choice alone, never an administrator's.
Prohibit all hospitals and nursing homes from benefitting financially from the deaths of their patients, as they did with the Midazolam Murders.

Mens Rights
Ban kangaroo courts in corporate HR and University Title IX departments to protect men's rights.
Mandate paternity testing at birth to give all men the certainty which encourages paternal care. Eliminate all child support obligation for a non-biological father unless he legally adopts the child.
Require courts to assume that a woman of age, voluntarily alone in a bedroom with a man, has consented to sex.
Grant equal post-conception rights to men.

Military
Eliminate the US Army and instead require mandatory training and arming all sane non-felon adult male US citizens to defend US territory ONLY, organized into well-regulated militias.
Implement a mandatory death penalty for anyone who deliberately attempts to send US troops off of US soil.
Create a constitutional amendment prohibiting interventionism; American soldiers must never fight except against invasion of America, per George Washington's advice.
Ban gays from the military because they are corrosive to morale and because they spread the disease of homosexuality there, not to mention anal warts.
Ban trannies from the military because they are mentally ill.
Eliminate NATO, because Europe is not America.
Close all US military bases in foreign countries.
Create a Constitutional amendment prohibiting all interference in the affairs of foreign countries, especially sending weapons.

Money
Define the US currency to be one ounce of 0.999 pure silver, to be called an Ounce. Silver by weight worked well for thousands of years.
Prohibit the creation of any term for US currency except weight of 0.999 pure silver. So "pound" is OK for a pound of 0.999 pure silver, but "dollar" and all other such non-weight terms are to be prohibited because they can be redefined to devalue to the currency.
Require every business and government agency to accept silver metal by weight as payment.
Establish a Constitutional right to pay all debts and taxes with physical silver by weight, so that everyone can preserve savings as silver metal.
Ban all taxes on buying or selling silver. Such taxes are punishment of those who try to avoid being cheated by the Federal Reserve.
Forbid businesses from requiring payment in any form which can be blocked by government, the way Canada blocked the bank accounts of legitimate protestors who opposed deadly injection mandates.
Create a Constitutional prohibition on political discrimination as a reason to deny banking or payment system access.
Require classification and prominent marking of all non-metal payment instruments as "Not money, only a debt, MAY DEFAULT", because they are merely debts.
Eliminate the requirement for anyone to ever accept or pay with paper money because all paper money eventually becomes worthless.
Legally define all banking as either storage of silver for a fee, or participation in the bank's lending risk and bank run risk in return for an interest payment.
Eliminate the Federal Reserve entirely. Let the open market set interest rates at all times.
Limit the annual federal budget by Constitutional amendment to 1% of GDP with no exceptions, especially not for "emergencies".
Completely and permanently eliminate the national debt. Require the federal budget to be paid out of current revenue, similar to the "Swiss brake".
Ban asset managers, especially Blackrock and Vanguard, from voting the underlying shares that they don’t own but are merely managing.

Privacy
Create an amendment establishing a Constitutional right to privacy because it is not perfectly clear from existing law that we have this right.
Prohibit all levels of government from collecting or holding information on any citizen except as absolutely necessary for census, taxation, criminal investigation, or driver's licenses.
Prohibit the federal government from monitoring the activities or location or even knowing the home address of anyone not currently accused of a specific crime. So no mass license plate reading or cell phone tracking without a warrant naming the specific person and the crime.
Require all private people and companies which collect or distribute home addresses and phone numbers to prominently display all of the owners' home addresses and phone numbers, and all similar information they collect. That is, demand equality of exposure.
Prohibit airlines and other transportation from demanding identity papers. Everyone should be able to travel anonymously, as we did before.
Prohibit websites from including 3rd party javascript, especially that from Google or Facebook, without a prominent notice that every keystroke or mouse movement etc is visible to Google or Facebook and that those sites may have altered the page content. It's spyware and most people are unaware of it.

Real Estate
Prohibit all foreigners, including everyone with any non-US citizenship, dual citizenship, or any foreign passport, from owning any land in the US.
Require notarization and publication of all bids on real estate to slow down the routine fraudulent bidding by realtors.
Require a publicly advertised price for a house to be a legally binding offer to immediately sell at that price, the same way it is with toasters and all other goods.
Prohibit government loan guarantees of all kinds, particularly housing or college loan guarantees, because they simply raise the cost of housing and of college.

Regulation and States Rights
Eliminate all federal government agencies outside of the military and commerce; everything else belongs to the states, as is written in the Constitution.
Eliminate the FBI, CIA, NSA, NIH, FDA, and CDC in particular, with their functions transferred to the states, as is written in the Constitution.
Allow girl scouts to bake their own cookies at home.

Sex
Strictly separate multiple-person bathrooms for men and women, whether a person is mentally ill with the fashionable "trans" disease or not.
Ban gay men from adopting, since the majority are gay because they were molested as boys, and then frequently go on to become molesters themselves.
Ban gay men from being alone with boys, ever, because most gays were created through homo-pedophilia.
Ban the sodomy or trans flag from any property funded by tax money, however indirectly. Only official government flags may be displayed.
Define the promotion of homosexuality or trans ideology to children as child sex abuse.
Revert the classification of transsexuality to be the mental illness which is obviously is.
Revert the classification of male homosexuality to be what it really is: a contagious life-shortening mental illness.

Schools
Ban the rainbow sodomy/pedo/trans flag from all schools.
Require middle and high school courses in law, taxes, personal finance, insurance, coding, cooking, home repair, car repair, self-defense, survival skills, etiquette, public speaking, and stress management.
Require daily weight lifting and running in PE classes at every level including publicly funded universities.

Taxes
Eliminate all income and sales taxes, to be replaced with Georgist land value taxes and import tariffs.
Swap the current maximum tax rates on income from work vs capital gains until Georgism is implemented and income tax eliminated.
End Prop 13 in California, to be replaced with a land value tax, with zero taxes on buildings.
Prohibit sales tax on used property which was already taxed when first sold. Ultimately eliminate sales tax in favor of a land value tax.
Prohibit all public sector unions, especially teachers unions and prison guard unions. Government workers may not unionize against the people they serve.

Voting
Make Jan 6th a national holiday honoring the political prisoners who protested the 2020 election fraud.
Arrest Pelosi, Ray Epps, and the other FBI goons of Jan 6th for conspiracy, entrapment, and incitement to violence.
Prosecute everyone in the DOJ who fabricated charges against the election fraud protestors entrapped by Pelosi and the FBI.
Eliminate all voting machines in favor of paper ballots alone because it is insane to give centralized control of the totals to Dominion and similar companies.
Eliminate mail-in voting or drop boxes; have only paper ballots with photo ID in person at a local school on that one day only, counted by each party.
Require proof of US citizenship with photo ID to vote.
Publicly fund all congressional and presidential campaigns.
Set term limits for Congress: 6x for the House, and twice for the Senate, so 12 years each, maximum.
Require a roll call vote in both houses of Congress on the verbatim topic of any petition with more than 10% popular support, without amendments.

#politics

All of this could be classified as paleoconservatism



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« First        Comments 153 - 192 of 304       Last »     Search these comments

153   indigenous   2017 Feb 24, 7:54am  

here is the graph I came up with with the correct dates. I changed the scale to show the correlation.

Also notice that the correlation goes away since the fed has stopped increasing the money supply. In fact that is scary because the demand is coming from demographics.

155   joeyjojojunior   2017 Feb 24, 9:08am  

"I'm showing proof that it did. You are spewing your narrative..."

What proof exactly? All I've seen from you is a chart showing inequality over time.

"here is the graph I came up with with the correct dates. I changed the scale to show the correlation."

Also notice that the correlation goes away since the fed has stopped increasing the money supply. In fact that is scary because the demand is coming from demographics.

Was your previous graph the S&P 500 squared too? I didn't see that--or rather, I couldn't read it from your chart. And if the correlation goes away when the money supply is no longer increasing--it's not a causation. It should fit when both increasing and decreasing.

That definitely shows you are wrong.

156   indigenous   2017 Feb 24, 9:11am  

Wut the fuck are you talking about?

157   Patrick   2017 Feb 24, 9:13am  

MrEd says

But this would depend on the 'quote' function to work accurately, which it does for quoting one person only.

When highlighting quotes from multiple people in one post, it tends to only capture one of the people and assign all the quoted text to them.

You're right, that's a flaw.

OK, it's on my list of things to fix.

158   krc   2017 Feb 24, 10:56am  

Patrick - What about in the Men's Rights:
Marriage implies both parties agreement for procreation. Unmarried status: men should have equal post-conception rights and the ability to refuse financial obligation for a child where the woman unilaterally decides to continue the pregnancy.
I think there was a recent thread that discussed this in detail...

159   Patrick   2017 Feb 24, 11:04am  

krc says

Unmarried status: men should have equal post-conception rights and the ability to refuse financial obligation for a child where the woman unilaterally decides to continue the pregnancy.

Yes, that's a favorite issue of mine, and I'd like to get there, but I think it feels like it would be hard to get enough support and I've already get 3 men's rights issues that seem more likely to get support:

Ban corporate HR department and university Title IX kangaroo courts.
Mandate paternity testing at birth. Eliminate all child support obligation for non-biological fathers.
Require courts to assume that a woman of age, voluntarily alone in a bedroom with a man, has consented to sex.

160   krc   2017 Feb 24, 11:51am  

Establish the inalienability of the right to vote for all US citizens, whether in prison "or" not.

161   krc   2017 Feb 24, 11:53am  

BTW - I think that your third point (assumption of sexual consent if in a bedroom) is more controversial than my point. But I understand...

162   Patrick   2017 Feb 24, 12:17pm  

@krc you know what, you are right. I should add post-conception rights for men, because it is an injustice that they just don't have any.

I'll find a space.

163   Patrick   2017 Feb 24, 12:18pm  

krc says

Establish the inalienability of the right to vote for all US citizens, whether in prison "or" not.

Thanks for pointing out the error! Fixed now.

164   BayArea   2017 Feb 24, 4:25pm  

I'm interested in hearing more about banning corporate HR.

Patrick, would you please explain your logic/reasoning ?

165   Patrick   2017 Feb 24, 4:40pm  

BayArea says

I'm interested in hearing more about banning corporate HR.

Patrick, would you please explain your logic/reasoning ?

@BayArea thanks for the push. I expanded on the idea here:

https://patrick.net/1303363/2017-02-25-ban-kangaroo-courts-in-corporate-hr-and-university-title-ix-departments

166   BayArea   2017 Feb 24, 7:37pm  

Patrick thanks for sharing.

Regarding the Kangaroo courts, this is a topic that I don't think many people are very familiar with unless they've been through that system for some offense.

Thanks for bringing it to light.

167   MisdemeanorRebel   2017 Mar 10, 4:21pm  

Confine Colleges and Universities to plagarism and other scholastic offenses.

Educational Institutions that receive $1 of Federal (or State) Funding cannot expel or discipline students over suspected acts that would be considered Felonies. They must wait until a conviction is reached by a proper court.

Women's Studies Professors and Sociology Majors are not qualified to run a court judging Felonies, and since many allow the accuser not to testify...

168   Patrick   2017 Mar 10, 4:40pm  

Yes, good way to put it! I added your comment to my original post about kangaroo courts:

https://patrick.net/1303363/2017-02-25-ban-kangaroo-courts-in-corporate-hr-and-university-title-ix-departments

169   AmericanKulak   2022 Oct 21, 5:36pm  

I'm on board, as long as the first $1000 of monthly salary, wages, independent contractors, or any contracts must be paid with physical metal silver, not paper from ANY bank, public or private. Perhaps people can be given the right to voluntarily accept it, but if in any month they choose not to, they must be paid within 48 hours in the physical metal.

and no employer or government can require somebody to accept paper banknotes that aren't 100% insured by a third party for 100% payment in physical upon demand.

This insures: Cash is permanently King, and no institution can control all the physical while doling out notes. This was a huge and forgotten problem in the late metallic era.

There's plenty of silver to do this.

I would also prefer that no foreign transactions can be paid with US minted coins, foreigners can only receive paper bank notes for the silver. Including repatriating profits from DeutscheTelekom (aka T Mobile), TikTok, etc.
170   Undoctored   2022 Oct 21, 6:14pm  

Patrick says

all federal laws must be read in their entirety by all legislators before they may vote on them
all federal laws must be clear enough that a 12-grade education is sufficient to understand them perfectly


I like these but how would they be enforced? Would we have to establish an independent Department to test the bills for readability, and the legislators for comprehension thereof?

Turns out something along these lines already exists for other governmental documents, thanks to the Plain Writing Act of 2010, so this idea isn’t too far fetched!

https://www.plainlanguage.gov/law/
171   Patrick   2022 Oct 21, 7:30pm  

AmericanKulak says

no employer or government can require somebody to accept paper banknotes that aren't 100% insured by a third party for 100% payment in physical upon demand


Motion accepted!

I think a requirement to pay first $1000 in metal would be met with resistance because of the shipping.

AmericanKulak says

I would also prefer that no foreign transactions can be paid with US minted coins, foreigners can only receive paper bank notes for the silver.


Why though? To keep silver in the US?
172   Patrick   2022 Oct 21, 7:31pm  

Undoctored says

I like these but how would they be enforced? Would we have to establish an independent Department to test the bills for readability, and the legislators for comprehension thereof?


The various reading levels are well-established. It would not be hard to test the bills for reading level.

And maybe legislators should indeed have to pass a comprehension test before they can vote on the bill!
173   AmericanKulak   2022 Oct 21, 7:33pm  

Patrick says


Why though? To keep silver in the US?

Yeah. The Opium War wasn't just fought because of Opium, but because the trade imbalance was sucking China dry of metal currency to the point it was strangling the economy.

I'm happy with Siemens and Mercedes having to leave the silver in the US but can take the paper/digital notes back to Europe ;)

It also encourages those companies to invest the money back into the States in the form of expanded production (jobs, property taxes, etc.) rather than spend it back in Europe.
174   AmericanKulak   2022 Oct 21, 7:37pm  

Oh, one other idea Patrick:

80% Reserve banks, that only can issue 20% more silver NOTES than the metal silver they take in, though they'd probably charge you more to bank with them and/or offer lower interest rates.

Two reasons for my restriction of banknotes, is that we remember fractional reserve banking issues more paper money than silver it takes in: It was no different with the Medicis, or 19th Century banks with metal, than it was with paper money. 1 oz. of deposit silver = 10-12oz. of banknotes, allegedly redeemable in silver. By forcing employers to pay a part of the wages in physical silver insures that people get physical money, and that it isn't all locked up in institutions that only give people paper representations of silver.
175   Patrick   2022 Oct 21, 7:46pm  

I don't know enough about the implications of those to have an opinion.

Mercantilism was the attempt to increase the amount of silver and gold in a country, and I think that policy was a failure in the long term, distracting from actual production of good and services.

As for reserve levels, there should be some risk to depositors who put money in a bank to be lent out if they want to share in the bank profits, ie getting interest on their deposit. After all, as soon as the currency is physical metal silver coins by weight, there would be only two reasons to deposit with banks:

1. secure storage
2. participation in the profits from bank lending

Inflation would not longer be much of a concern. So maybe you should either pay for storage, or pay nothing and get interest - but also take the risk of loss because of bank runs or defaulting borrowers.

How about this, which I just added:

banking as either storage of silver for a fee, or participation in the bank's lending risk and the bank's run risk for an interest payment
176   stereotomy   2022 Oct 21, 8:10pm  

AmericanKulak says

Patrick says



Why though? To keep silver in the US?

Yeah. The Opium War wasn't just fought because of Opium, but because the trade imbalance was sucking China dry of metal currency to the point it was strangling the economy.

I'm happy with Siemens and Mercedes having to leave the silver in the US but can take the paper/digital notes back to Europe ;)

It also encourages those companies to invest the money back into the States in the form of expanded production (jobs, property taxes, etc.) rather than spend it back in Europe.

I thought it was the other way around - the English so loved their tea (produced by China) that the tea trade was depleting English silver. This was because the Chinese would only accept silver as payment. The English were frantic to find a commodity that the Chinese would buy (because they weren't buying anything else from England but their silver in exchange for tea). They used the East India Company to cultivate vast poppy plantations in India - this was a two-fer for the English: Addict the Chinese on opium and take enough Indian land out of food cultivation to create epic famines that killed millions of "wogs."

The English subsidized a fleet of privateers to smuggle opium into China. At it's height, about 25% of the entire Chinese population was addicted. This destroyed the Chinese civilization.

Why do you think the Chinese are smuggling all that fentanyl into the west? It's revenge for what was done to them almost 200 years ago.
177   Patrick   2022 Oct 21, 8:12pm  

Maybe tea brought silver into China and opium took silver out of China.
178   Patrick   2022 Oct 21, 8:13pm  

stereotomy says

The English subsidized a fleet of privateers to smuggle opium into China. At it's height, about 25% of the entire Chinese population was addicted. This destroyed the Chinese civilization.


Yes, and I've read that opium was the downfall of the Ottoman Empire as well.

I finally came across a negative about the Parsis of India: they first got rich in the opium trade with China.
179   stereotomy   2022 Oct 21, 8:18pm  

Patrick says

Maybe tea brought silver into China and opium took silver out of China.

That was probably the quid pro quo - subsidize the privateers, then get a cut of their black market silver haul.
180   Patrick   2022 Oct 21, 8:20pm  

stereotomy says


and take enough Indian land out of food cultivation to create epic famines that killed millions of "wogs."


But why would the British actually want to kill Indians in a famine?

Even in Ireland, I don't think it was the deliberate policy to kill the Irish through famine. It was only that the "rights of (English) landords" were to be protected and Britain provided with beef from Ireland. The British didn't really care how many Irish died.
181   Patrick   2022 Oct 21, 8:34pm  

Here's where I got the idea of limiting "safety" regulations:

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/why-you-should-be-a-one-issue-voter


let me tell you a story:
the wife of one of my closest friends had a business making baby clothes. she was a graphic designer and was doing fairly well creating fun images to put on all cotton onesies made by manufacturers and selling them. there was a rapidly booming business segment of others like her. it turns out parents like unique, local, interesting baby gear.

now, who did NOT like this gear were the big companies in the space. it took customers. it took revenues. and there was no way they could compete because their cycle times for small batch production were seasons vs weeks. these little companies could have ten new products in the time it took gap kids to release one.

so the “industry” collaborated with “the regulators” and decided that new “safety rules” were needed. suddenly, you just could not trust a cotton onesie that 10’s of thousands of kids had worn or the silk screen paints used for a generation. every single SKU had to be individually tested for safety because “hey, you never know, maybe the exact same footie pajamas with the exact same paints is now deadly dangerous because the picture on it is a sailboat and not a bunny!”

this destroyed an entire cottage industry at a stroke. the cost to test was on the order of $25k per SKU; no big deal for gap, far in excess of SKU revenue for all the small players who, in aggregate, were cutting into profits but who, alone, could never afford this. it was custom crafted to look like safety while actually being a precise tactical strike against innovation and competition. there was never a safety issue, only a set of vested interests in oligopoly and anti-consumer behavior.

it was easy to blow this ball by an unsuspecting public. almost no one outside industry even noticed it and those that did saw tepid media stories about “new safety rules protect toddlers! even industry giants support this common sense legislation!” and so 1000 small businesses died and a few big companies retained a hammerlock on kiddie clothes.

and once you start digging into regulation, how it is made, and what it is for, you realize that this story is EVERYWHERE.
182   Patrick   2022 Oct 22, 10:34pm  

https://www.hennessysview.com/p/a-constitutional-amendment-to-control


A Constitutional Amendment to Control the Administrative State
The greatest threat to freedom is the federal bureaucracy. We must attack it from every angle. ...

While my proposal will not kill the beast, it will cripple and slow the bureaucracy, making it an easy target for the kill shot.

I propose a Constitutional amendment talked about since the Reagan administration: a cap on the growth of federal outlays. ...

The amendment would simply fix (or cap) the federal budget at a certain percentage of US GDP. The budget could exceed GDP only by a 2/3 vote of both houses of Congress and only for the current fiscal year.

Further, if a decline in GDP during a fiscal puts the federal budget over the ceiling, the following year’s budget must “pay back” the excess in nominal dollars. (If FY1’s spending exceeded the revised GDP cap by $600 billion, FY2’s budget must be $600 billion below its expected limit.) In short, Congress must return to the taxpayers excess spending, even if spent by accident.

The amendment might read something like this:

The sum of appropriations of the United States government shall not exceed [number] percent of gross domestic product in any fiscal year, except by a vote of two-thirds of the House and two-thirds of the Senate. Nor shall actual outlays by the Executive exceed [number] percent of gross domestic product in any fiscal year. Outlays in excess of this limit in any fiscal year shall be returned to the Treasury in the following fiscal year.

I’ll leave it to the lawyers to re-write until it actually works. I’m just getting things started for you.


I like it.
184   Patrick   2022 Oct 29, 11:23am  

This is why federal revenue also has to be limited by ending the federal income tax.
185   AmericanKulak   2022 Oct 29, 7:50pm  

stereotomy says

I thought it was the other way around - the English so loved their tea (produced by China) that the tea trade was depleting English silver. This was because the Chinese would only accept silver as payment. The English were frantic to find a commodity that the Chinese would buy (because they weren't buying anything else from England but their silver in exchange for tea). They used the East India Company to cultivate vast poppy plantations in India - this was a two-fer for the English: Addict the Chinese on opium and take enough Indian land out of food cultivation to create epic famines that killed millions of "wogs."

It was... but once opium took off in China, the imbalance went the other way and the Chinese had no silver taels for their own internal economy.
186   AmericanKulak   2022 Oct 29, 7:51pm  

Patrick says

But why would the British actually want to kill Indians in a famine?

They didn't. And there were regular famines in India not more than a decade apart going back 1000s of years.

In fact, I think in the 1700s before the British began puppeting huge swaths of India in earnest, there was a massive famine that had nothing to do with Bengal Opium or anything else, just a bad mansoon destroying crops.
187   Patrick   2022 Oct 30, 7:01pm  




OK, Ted is with me on this!
188   FortwayeAsFuckJoeBiden   2022 Oct 30, 7:13pm  

abolish all taxation and spending, fuck this government
189   fdhfoiehfeoi   2022 Oct 31, 10:18am  

I wish I could find a place that would pay me in metals. It's the next level up from changing dollars to pesos. I'd actually take a pay cut as long as they paid based a fixed weight.
190   Patrick   2022 Oct 31, 11:00am  

Patrick says

constitutional amendment prohibiting interventionism; American soldiers must never fight except against invasion of America, per George Washington's advice




192   AmericanKulak   2022 Nov 3, 2:10pm  

Replace the income tax with a 10% baseline tariff on imports. Including Canada and Mexico.

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