NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/alt/californ/2054

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-18 | 9.3 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!infoserv!steiny!
From: [e-mail] (Don Steiny)
Newsgroups: alt.california
Subject: Re: relocation
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 18 Nov 92 17:29:50 GMT
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Organization: Don Steiny Software
Lines: 181

[e-mail] (C D Burdorf) writes:

>The high interest rates that Reagen imposed did a lot of damage to our
>industrial base.

    Reagan did not impose the high interest rates.   The Federal Reserve
bank decides on interest rates.   It is an independent part of the government.
They successfully controlled double digit inflation.

> Also, open trade policies allowed Japanese
>companies to dump products at below cost on the US market and
>drive the US competitors out of business.  Then they raise
>prices once they've got control of the market.  This has killed
>the memory chip industry, badly hurt the auto industry, and destroyed
>the steel industry.

    That is a pretty strange thing to say.    Historically open trade
has been beneficial.    They way I see it is that US policies allowed me
to buy a decent car from people who were capible of making a decent car.
Are you suggesting that it would be better to subsidize incompitence
by increasing tarrifs on foreign goods?    During the Reagan years the
government did interceed because of dumping of RAM.    They imposed a tarrif
on DRAMS.   Because of the tarrif Japanese companies could get DRAMS cheaper
than US companies and thus could not compete in consumer electronics.   We
shot ourselves in the foot big time.

>>    According to the October issue of Scientific American the amount
>>of money spent on education increased from about 4% of GDP to about 6%
>>of GDP during the Reagan/Bush years.

>Well, I don't know where it all went.  Teachers salaries are still
>abhorent.  State university tuition continues to increase and
>keep lower income students out. My friends in the educational
>research field say that funding has been reduced.  Where has it gone?

    I don't know, the article was on health care and did not go into
it.  But as I have said in every article, the issues are far more complex
than you make them out to be.

>>>The Republican party platform with it's anti-gay
>>>message had some real fascist sentiments as well.
>>    Hmm, that must mean that Muslums are fascists.   And the Zoroasterans
>>--before 500BC they wrote some very anti-gay stuff.   Early fascists.
>Yeah sure, why not?  Singling out  groups of people for attack, that's
>a fascist element.  That was an element of another poster's definition.

    Sorry, that does not compute.    Fascists did not happen until the
20th century.   It makes no sense to call Zoroasteran fascists.    People
often have perspectives based on the best information available to them.

>>    I doubt that the same people who voted for him because of the
>>Willie Horton ad suddenly stopped being afraid and saw the light.   Likewise
>>I have never seen any analysis that indicated that the reason people
>>voted Bush out was because of his evironmental stance.    Besides, in a
>>few paragraphs you are going to accuse your fellow citizens of being
>>fascists.   These fascists of yours are a confusing lot, voting against
>>their own kind.

>The Willie Horton ad effected a lot of people on an emotional level.
>Both Reagen and Bush appealed to the lowest level of human motives:
>greed, fear, racism, hatred.  They couldn't get away with it directly,
>so they worked at it subliminally.

    So what?   Ross Perot applealed to people's racism too, he is anti-free
trade (Mexicans), he wanted to turn the war-on-drugs into a military
occupation (use the military to fight the war . . .)    Who is is that
people are so afraid of that they are willing to suspend the constitution?
Not their children, they are afraid of inner city blacks.   Perot presented
some bullshit graphs that basically blamed our industrial problems on
foreigners.   It is wild that you would rant and rave about how liberal
you are and then buy into isolationism.

>>
>>    Such an intelligent and important man as the great Ross Perot has
>>much better things to do than give an audience to me.

>Interesting, first you say that Ross Perot is intelligent and important
>and then you say that he is wrong.

    Boy, did you have your humor gland removed?   Irony: "Perot
is intelligent and important" "Ross Perot was wrong."

>> However, economists
>>do not agree that the debt is as terrible as it is made out to be.   One
>>point is that after WWII the debt as a percentage of GDB was about 3 times
>>what it is now and we had a terrific boom and paid it all off.    It looks
>>like we won the cold war for 1/3 the cost of WWII.

>Why haven't we had a big boom this time.  1) Resources are in
>much shorter supply. 2) Germany and Japan were devastated after
>the war and we pilaged a lot of their industrial equipment. Now
>they are our main competitors.

    They are also great consumers.

    Economists do disagree with each other.   I know that you mostly read
socialists in the Nation and so on, but many capitalist economists who write in
the Wall Street Journal and the Economist feel that this recession is no
big deal.   There was a small drop in GDP in 1991 and it has been going
up ever since.   The opinions I have seen (and of course, economics is
just opinions) say that there has not been a huge boom because there was
not a huge bust, and that part of the woe people are feeling is due to
disinflation and the structural changes investing based on low and zero
inflation.     Believe it or not, the Wall Street Journal had and article
the other day  that said for the last three quarters the relative percentage
of the wealth owned by the richest portion of the country had started to
decline.   This is because the very rich make their money off of interest.
A decline in interest rates (which can only happen if inflation is low)
would benefit the middle class and the poor a great deal.   Note that
I am talking about longsterm rates.  Part of interest in long term loans
is to offset inflation.

> My point is that the escalation of
>the arms race wasn't necessary to defeat the Soviet Union.  I don't
>believe for one minute that Star Wars caused Gorbachev to pursue
>Perestroika.

    You may be right.  I have no absolute knowledge.  I simply pointed
out that in Foreign Affairs, a publication that is hated by the right,
several authors have said that was the case.   For reasons besides the
economic pressure.   Besides, the same Scientific Americian that has
the graphs about education also has a graph of defense spending as a
percentage of GDP, and though it increased some, it was no where close
to what it was at the end of the Vietnam War.

>Since you use the word in such an unusual way, it
>>seems to me that you are just repeating the word because you think it is
>>"right" to do so without really understanding what the word means or
>>when it is appropriate to use.

>From my perspective there are fascist elements in the Reagen and Bush
>camp and that people like you aren't willing to see it, because you
>get seduced into accepting it.

    To say that there are "fascist elements in the Reagen [sic] and Bush
camp" is a far cry from saying that Reagan and Bush are fascists.   I don't know
everyone in their camp as you apparently do, so how could I know?    But if
even if it is true, so what?   I imagine that somewhere in Clintons group
there are unsavory characters.   Besides, right wing != fascist, to
most people.   I know you choose the Humpty Dumpty approach to language
(words mean whatever I choose them to mean).  It is not too easy to
devine what you could mean by using words in this way.

>>>Oh, so if I attack the right, then I must be crazy.  Grow up!!
>>    Why attack anyone?   What is this "right" anyway?   Do you see
>>the world as divided into "left" and "right" that is at war?
>There is such a thing as a political spectrum, and what one expouses
>politically places one's views at some point on that spectrum.

    I do not believe you.  Please tell me where I can find one so I
can see a political spectrum.

> I believe that right-wing views are dangerous and destructive, so I choose
>to make a statement as such.  Why do you have a problem with this?

    Boy, "views" seem to be pretty dangerous creatures to you.  I cannot
imagine why a "view" would be dangerous to anyone unless it lead to some action
by someone that held it.    It would be pretty tough to demonstrate a chain
of causation from a "view" to an "act."   This is because "views" are not
objects that exist in the world you share with other people.   One person
that would probably disagree with you is Karl Marx, whose "materialist
dialectic" theorized that views were caused by material events, not the other
way around.

>Am I not allowed to express my views?

    Perhaps you are new to USENET.   What happens is that you post
your article and it goes to lots of machines.   People on those machines
have software that allows them to respond to your posting.   If you post
things on USENET, you should not be surprised if you get a response.

    If you write articles that are pissed-off and factually inconsistant
they it is even more likely that you will get responses.    IMHO, it has
nothing to do with politics.

-don
--
Don Steiny
Don Steiny Software
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
[phone]