— beg the question
1
: to pass over or ignore a question by assuming it to be established or settled
2
: to elicit a question logically as a reaction or response

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/05/how-savage-has-european-austerity-been.html

Where is the auserity in Europe?

This is a personality thing. If you hate Obama, he wants to please you. It’s a terrible fit for a high executive position.

A free and independent press is critical to the operation of a democracy. The loss of ours has greatly magnified the power of what is nothing other than propaganda while we remain oblivious to the fact that our form of government may not be able to function without it (see http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-big-money-big-media-big-trouble/)

“it’s not obvious how opposing growth right now helps anyone.”

For the wealthy, life in a stagnant economy is no different than life in a growing one. In fact, its much easier to deal with a powerless labor force than having to compete for scarce talent. Having a safe place to store your wealth until the “storm blows over” is more important than taking a chance on these safe havens becoming less secure just to achieve greater employment, and having inflation erode the real value of your assets is much more troublesome than high unemployment. There’s really no incentive to risk it, how much better could life really get for you if it works anyway?

-Closed Minds

The real pain is concentrated among a powerless minority that has no choice but to endure it based on existing laws. If the costs of an output gap were paid for by the entire population, there would be much greater political will to do something about it. There are no unemployed among the decision makers. If the markets were forced to be open to all participants or the victims to be fully compensated for having the markets closed to them, the pressure to act would be overwhelming. Having the ability to dump the entire cost on a small powerless group creates a disastrous and inequitable incentive structure for those with the power to implement solutions.

We refuse to even discuss alternatives that challenge the existing beneficiaries of our rigged system. While we talk of improvement through competition, protection from competition through monopolies and copyrights is largely what generates the profits for our oligarchs. With the exception of Dean Baker, there appears to be no serious discussion of the wisdom of granting these government windfalls to the wealthy and whether or not any public benefit we get out of proving these freebies cannot be better achieved at a much lower cost. We need to get our oligarchs off the government doles so that they can experience the “dignity of competition” (as Mitt Romney would probably put it).

“We” have nearly $60 trillion in wealth and $15 trillion in annual income. We don’t really have a money problem, we have a money distribution problem. If the “bond vigilantes” become a serious problem down the line we can always implement wealth taxes to pay the debt down and eliminate the problem. “We the People” have the power to solve these kinds of problems just like the kings of old did. We don’t really need to fear a water pistol when we’re holding a machine gun.

-Currency Manipulation

We generate more demand than any other country in the world and yet we face a demand shortfall from an employment standpoint because others manipulate their currencies so they can solve their problems by exporting to us? Maybe we’d think twice about this if we had to actually compensate the unemployed that have their income reduced to $0 because of this.

Many of our solutions are likely to come from options we refuse to discuss.

Very interesting reading: http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/3212.html