“Hell, before the invention of the solid wall, even children would have seen it going on fairly regularly.”
… When you put it that way the solid wall could just be the greatest invention of all time.
“Cosmopolitan and racy Super Bowl ads are much more concerning to me than regular pornography.”
Why?
EDIT
Damn OP on two pages in a row! Doing well today!
Is human nature the behavior of human beings or Most human beings?
Is there a difference between behavior and action?
I visited Finland, Sweden, and Norway in August. They are all nice places, but their taxes are just too damn high. I wonder what the trends are in those countries for more or less government and taxes.
Until you realize that a lot of the Victorian sexual neuroses that we’ve inherited (simultaneous revulsion/obsession with the sex act) are a consequence of the effects of the solid walled, multi-roomed house.
Because they send an absurd message: “Look what you can’t have! Oh my god, you know you want it soooooooo baaaaaaaaaaad, but guess what, it’s Unobtanium for you buddy!”
This, in turn, drives an unhealthy love-hate relationship in males with sex. Doug Stanhope has an awesome bit on this. Sex, he posits, is the “carrot on a stick” that is dangled in front of our eyes to keep Joe producing at the factory so hopefully, one day, he can “afford to put that spoiler on my Honda” because, you know, that will really make his car the chick-magnet of all time.
The reality is almost the exact opposite. The only obstacle to sex is in your own mind. Women enjoy sex every bit as much as men. And if you’re desperately horny, there are always prostitutes.
The obsession with “getting laid” engendered by the Cosmo culture drives up time preferences, as illustrated by the need to buy a spoiler to “impress chicks”. The prohibition of sex industry (prostitution, pornography, etc.) in combination with the sexualization of the culture drives this high time-preference behavior in young men who, instead of spending their evenings and weekends at the bar fishing for floozies, should be buckling down, working long hours, building up cash savings and learning skills through apprenticeship and entrepreneurial endeavors. Sex services provide an economically efficient method to take care of natural needs without the absurd costs in time and money entailed in “the singles scene.”
Clayton -
If you trust this source, the taxes peaked, and are falling.
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/sweden/tax-revenue-percent-of-gdp-wb-data.html
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/norway/tax-revenue-percent-of-gdp-wb-data.html
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/finland/tax-revenue-percent-of-gdp-wb-data.html
I am a bit surprised by low figures, I would have guessed they should be ~50%.
The answer to this question is the same as the answer to the following question: Is dog nature the behavior of dogs or most dogs?
Yes.
Clayton -
Funny, I still have this in my clipboard from earlier today:
Human action is purposeful behavior. Or we may say: Action is will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego’s meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person’s conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life. Such paraphrases may clarify the definition given and prevent possible misinterpretations. But the definition itself is adequate and does not need complement of commentary.
Why do I care about taxes as a percent of GDP? I don’t. What are the effective tax rates for the individual?
What are the effective tax rates for the individual?
Do you mean a mean individual? Or a median one? Or a midhinge? What “the” individual?
Surprise me.
The best I have is this:
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_STAT-12-77_en.htm
Note that AFAIK the rate in Sweden vary depending on whether you are single, how many kids you have, etc., but if you do not care about specific kind of person, the overall trend is there.
Out of the Scandinavian countries, it looks like Norway has the lowest overall tax rate.
Out of the Scandinavian countries, it looks like Norway has the lowest overall tax rate.
Probably their government makes enough money on Statoil 
Money laundering, you know - no need to steal (much) if you invested previously stolen.
So back to an earlier comment before this topic got completely derailed. I just think it wrong to presume that people can be “educated” into libertarianism. People have to choose to be apart of it. Libertarianism is out there. It is available for mass consumption. It is not a choice that every individual is going to make.
if there is a libertarian party, but there also libertarian anarchists, how does that work? aren’t the anarchist still calling the minarchists people that want to steal?
I think you’ll find that barely anyone knows anything about libertarianism, and most of those who do only know about it from those who oppose it and who present its positions as a strawman. But I agree that it could be the case that most people can’t be rationally educated to support it. That’s not what I was talking about.
I hate to say it, but the only way we’ll ever get to some semblance of an actual limited goverment and free market is for libertarians of all stripes to takeover the Republican Party. There’s no other way around it. Swell the Party, educate the masses like Ron Paul did, and be in a position to effect meaningful change. We’re just going to have to suck it up and knock out the neocons from power. Also, we’ll have to be extremely patient in convincing social conservatives that it just doesn’t matter.
I thought the U.S was finished?
