Your papers don’t even make that claim. Where are you getting that from?
The things I and others have been trying to explain to you are hardly rocket surgery. Yet you willfully ignore them. I’m sorry but I don’t how else to explain your behavior at this point except to call it trolling. That is, I think you’re being deliberately dishonest, probably to see what kind of reaction you get.
So far, you’ve mentioned one specific objection to public infrastructure- taxation. If you believe that everyone should live as a Randian superman, avoiding local roads and living off the land to avoid any use of public services, then I’ll just have to disagree on that assessment. Otherwise, people aren’t excited about getting rid of public infrastructure because doing so would simply make virtually everyone poorer.
I don’t think he’s trolling I just think we’re zerging him.
False. The parable of the broken window was another objection to government funding this stuff. Another was the price system.
Straw man. No one here has made this claim.
Just a continuation of the straw man.
Conclusion: TROLL
Mustang, I really think you’re going about this the wrong way.
You don’t need to justify public investment. Especially not to anyone on this forum.
If you want to take money from people to build whatever you wanna build then I’m with you.
But let’s not pretend that there’s not an opportunity cost, let’s not pretend that there’s not someone getting screwed.
You have to be willing, as a statist, to admit that you’re hurting someone somewhere. Just because GDP might go up or a nicer road might get built doesn’t mean there aren’t broken windows all along the way.
EDIT: And as far as the left wing/right wing stuff goes, most of that is a difference in degree rather than kind. There are aesthetic differences and rhetorical differences. Obviously the left tends to try and present itself as the party of the poor and downtrodden and the right as the party of the rich and privileged. The Right seems to be filled with its fair share of wealthy people but also value voters and people who say they want minimal government or whatever. It’s all rhetorical nonsense. Really, the big disagreement is about guns and butter. Neither side is opposed to public investment, there’s just disagreement about what the investments should be.
Sure. There world isn’t perfect. But the instances where public investment has raised pretty much everyone’s income are much more common than the times when mistakes were made or the overall return across projects was negative.
I’m still all for public investment if it allows decent infrastructure. It’s worth noting that before the public infrastructure projects, there was no rural electrification, very few paved roads in rural areas, and no interstate highway system. Being able to easily drive to the market or the hospital on well maintained roads is just convenient, too. In theory, private investment would provide all those things. In reality, they didn’t exist on anywhere near the scale that they do today before public programs.
Depends on what you mean. There have always been definite differences regarding public investment in the Republican and and Democratic budget plans. Or the Moderate and Socialist Party in Sweden, or the CDU and SPD in Germany, or quite a few other countries. Public investment is a major left/right issue, even if neither party goes to extremes (such as, “no public infrastructure at all anywhere”).
Well…the main disagreement seems to be on non-defense spending.
The left, for all their supposed doviness, aren’t exactly opposed to foreign intervention.
True. But I’m not voting Republican.
If the libertarian party ever wins more than 1% of the presidential vote, give me a shout.
Lol, I’ve never voted libertarian in my life.
I do vote Republican though. I’m more into guns than butter.
Also there are four elderly supreme court justices, I don’t wanna see Obama get to pick their replacements. Kagan and Sotomayor didn’t impress me much.
To each his own. Overturning Roe v Wade and teaching creationism in schools just ain’t my thing.
To each his own. Overturning Roe v Wade and teaching creationism in schools just ain’t my thing.
Nationalizing everything just ain’t my thing.
See what I did there?
@My Buddy
I did that to him earlier and he didn’t like it 
I wonder what he’ll say to you.
They still passed Citizen’s United. As a Republican, you can’t be that dissapointed. Unless you want someone like Alito or Scalia.
If Kennedy, Breyer and Ginsburg all stepped down and were replaced with Scalia-esque judges I would be very pleased indeed.
Sotomayor, Stevens, Breyer and Ginsburg did not join the entire majority opinion of Citizen’s United. The main part passed on a 5-4 vote with Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito concurring.
Some links:
It’s just hard to support corporate personhood and oppose corporatocracy at the same time.
It’s just hard to support national socialism and oppose corporatocracy at the same time.
Godwin’s law confirmed. Experimental data collection complete. Exiting thread.
Right, so ALL INFRASTRUCTURE SPENDING IS ALWAYS BENEFICIAL…so that $10 trillion road network, escalators to nowhere, or the White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal all register unerringly as double-plus-good GDP growth. The Soviet Apparatchiks over at Gosplan would have loved you (except when it came time to prevent the USSR from collapsing).
In the long run, those things would detract from GDP.
Anything else?