ClaytonB
Member

Danny Devito's Penguin was one of the best live-action Batman villains of all time. Only Heath Ledger's Joker is better, IMO...

That paid-propagandist life be like...

Pelosi must have been giving him stock picks ... :tears: :tears: :tears:

Yeah, math is kind of my thing, so I get that. Hence why I qualified that this isn't what the Founders were actually trying to accomplish. But it's an acceptable first-approximation.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. - H. L. Mencken

"If the locks on your house were so good, how come we were able to break in?" The locks weren't there to make it impossible to break in. The locks were there to rouse the homeowner in case of a home-invasion. Vengeance is coming.

As I understand, the revenue collected on an apportioned tax would be pro-rata to each state according to its population... so Wyomingans would be paying a much smaller total tax bill than New Yorkers. In theory, that would all "cancel out" so that the net-percentage would theoretically be the same. But I don't think that's what the Framers were primarily concerned with. I think they wanted the burden to fall to each state in proportion to its representation in Congress in order to ensure that any direct Federal tax would be unpopular and would be most resisted by the big states. This is the opposite of what we have now. The biggest states are the biggest proponents of higher Federal taxes, because they are more "plugged in" to the pork-barrel system than smaller states. That's exactly what the Framers knew would happen.

As a matter of self-improvement, I've done a bit of memeing practice on this forum, probably at the expense of minor brain-damage to forum participants. Memeing, marketing, stumping, hyping, etc. is an art in itself. Those who develop it will excel at it. I've primarily developed other skills. In the last couple years I've done some backfill on my wit. But wit is not everything. It will not carry the day. You need both -- presentation to hook people, and then substance to persuade them to stay. - States are where the popular vote occurs and is counted (representation, "democracy") - The Framers put the States (and their people) in charge of all regulation and taxation except those few powers enumerated to the Federal government in the Constitution, see the 9th and 10th Amendments. - Direct taxation by the Federal government means any tax that bypasses the State governments (hence, DIRECT) and was explicitly prohibited by the Framers because it is taxation without representation, unless it is apportioned, which means that each State's citizens pay proportionally to their representation in Congress.

Don't. Go do what you're good at for the cause of liberty, instead.

I mean, if you want to make big claims, you should at least provide some backup for that. Words are cheap. Rothbard was a scholar whose field overlaps with history in many ways, since historical events are an important part of understanding economics. He never pretended to be something he wasn't, he just did very thorough scholarship in his chosen subjects.

No, that's not the issue. Most libertarians aren't deep-divers like me, either. A robust army does not consist of only light-infantry, or only cavalry. It has a broad mix of all the essential types of soldiers. If you want to know how the libertarian movement "should be" structured, go look at how the Marxists have structured their movement. They have been steam-rolling liberty for over a century. Given that they're literally fighting gravity at every step, they're certainly doing something right organizationally! The Marxists may be a lot of things, but they are well organized -- they are moving heaven and earth to impose their psychotic, upside-down-world tyranny. It's a lot longer than 3 seconds, but if you really want to understand how the Marxists have taken over, watch the following lecture. Reducing attention-spans and cutting The Message down into quotable 3-second clips is one aspect of how they've done this, but before they were able to do all of that, they had to build an army that could do it. We don't need a massive, secret army like they do, because we're not fighting gravity. We don't need to move heaven and earth, we only need to provide enough force to tip over their insanity and let it crumble under its own weight. A lie repeated often enough, will be believed. But it's never really true, it's still just a lie. The Emperor With No Clothes was reduced to shame by a lowly child, with a single question. That's all we need. But you won't even get there if you try to build everything on 3-second TikTok clips. It will never hold up to the flames.

Yes, and the opposition was successful because there was no taxation without representation. Once you have taxation without representation, the central bank can grease the palms of the legislative, and it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle. You completely misunderstand the Great Depression. If you want to actually understand what happened in the Great Depression, and the Fed's role in both causing and worsening it, read America's Great Depression by Murray Rothbard.

Yes, cyber-warfare exists.

I mean, the more the merrier. You do you. Mises Institute is focused on "force-multipliers" which is where you train folks who can go out and train other folks. It can seem to not be having much of an effect for some time but, over time, it builds up into a "chain-reaction", and you get things like LPMC. As for the 3-seconds stuff, I'm not that guy. I think that a lot of Dave Smith's quotes are targeted to that aspect of messaging. And he's not the only person in the movement focusing on this. No one technique contains the whole key.

The people who can only muster their attention for 3 seconds at a time are natural-born followers. They don't think, really. They just need someone to be pointed at, to follow. So, the real issue is producing good leaders with right thinking, true beliefs and moral courage. That's what Mises U and similar programs are about.

Why did the first and second banks of America fail, but the Fed did not? False. The Fed directly caused the Depression. This is standard textbook history, so nothing revisionist about it. Then you oppose the Constitution.

^^^ THIS

Sure, most of it is Slick-Willy-style business-as-usual. But the 16th Amendment is a big deal because it is the only reason that the Fed is able to exist at all. End the anti-American and unconstitutional practice of DIRECT UNAPPORTIONED tax, (aka taxation-without-representation), and you implode the entire bond market without having to overturn the Federal Reserve Act. From whom is the Fed going to collect the "interest" on all those bonds? The US government? Them and what army? And if the US government has to collect taxes constitutionally -- meaning, by representative apportionment -- no way in hell are they going to be able to maintain the kind of colossal budget they are running right now. Everything will have to be cut and the first thing to go would be the damn interest payments. Let the banksters figure out what to do with all those worthless bonds.

Yes, the useless multiplication of words is a trademark of pseudo-intellectual ideologues (both left and right). Nevertheless, these are just front-rankers, ideological bullet-stoppers, useful idiots. The academic Marxists wouldn't be such a threat if they really were so stupid. They're not stupid. And their arguments, left unchallenged, are extremely dangerous. Look at the 100's of millions of innocents slaughtered in the name of "They Did It Wrong Last Time, It Will Work This Time." Answering, debunking and silencing the semantic content of the ideological Marxists is job #1 of those who choose to join the ranks of the "opinion-forming class", as the Austrians call it. And when the truth is on your side, numbers don't matter. 2+2=4 no matter how many people say otherwise. Gravity exists, no matter how many people say otherwise. Printing money causes or contributes to inflation no matter how many people say otherwise. These arguments don't make themselves. Some of us have to take on the task of deep-diving into the madness of Marxism and wiring up their bunkum ideology with demolition charges and imploding it from within. While my primary focus is not on Marxism itself (I primarily focus on the spiritual aspect behind Marxism), this is the kind of thing that I do. The whole framework needs to be torn down, top-to-bottom, so we need young folks out there learning the ropes, learning the logical fallacies, the economic fallacies, the civics fallacies, the constitutional fallacies, the historical fallacies, and ready to enter that "high-school debate" and flatten any and all who step up. There is no easy way to do it, but what's cool about the Mises and aligned movements is that we win no matter what. Want to be on the winning side? Join us, because truth wins, 2+2=4 wins. It is a force more powerful than any army, than any nuclear bomb -- indeed, the Truth is omnipotent.

The death of the forum has been predicted a thousand times, and it's false every time. Sure, the click-rate and bandwidth of forums like this isn't even a drop in the ocean of the twitterverse. But so what. I'm not interested in talking to people who can only think in 160-character chunks. I get it, brevity is the soul of wit, etc. but that's not what Twitter's character-limit was really about. It was about attenuating speech, because the most persuasive arguments in a short-format populist forum will always be left-wing sloganeering. "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" is a pithy quip, but it will never be popular. (2017) BI: The 10 most-liked tweets of all time are dominated by Obama. That is why Twitter was created (among other things). So yes, we need a space where people who want to think thoughts longer than 160-characters have a space where they can learn how that's actually done. Practice makes perfect. There are no shortcuts. You can't read your way into learning how to think... the only way to learn to think is to, you know, actually think.

I'm less concerned about getting bad people to leave a forum, and more interested in getting good people to join it (and learn from it). The Internet is too big, and too septic, to be filtered. All you can do is set up supply of fresh, clean water and try to direct people's attention to it. Especially the up-and-coming LPMC/MisesU crowd who are new to liberty. They have the fire. They are the future. Ron Paul understands this, which is why he is the most successful libertarian movement leader ever.

... works for We The People and was created by the Constitution which We The People signed. Therefore, We The People can take SCOTUS back out of existence (by Amendment, if decided) and SCOTUS is not "the final word" on the meaning of the Constitution. In fact, the Constitution was written and designed to be read and understood by Everyman, precisely for this reason. If SCOTUS is "the final word" on the meaning of the Constitution, then SCOTUS is the Constitution. But SCOTUS is not the Constitution, the Constitution is the Constitution. So, no, I don't give a damn about SCOTUS's opinions on existential questions of Constitutional law. While taxation is (should be) simply "business-as-usual", well within the purview of SCOTUS, the problem with the 16th Amendment is that there was manifestly foul-play involved in its passage (there was no popular outcry, and income taxation is always unpopular in the absence of a crisis). The 16th Amendment overthrows a core tenet of American values in governance (no taxation without representation), but there is no suitably extraordinary rationale behind that Amendment. There was no revolution in American values in 1911-1913, whereby Americans all stopped believing that taxation without representation is tantamount to tyranny. It's like if the proposed Corwin Amendment were passed in 1861, and modern pro-slavers working under the umbrella of that amendment were arguing, "Yeah, maybe it's bad, but it's the law." Well, too bad that it's "the law" -- "One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." (attributed to Thomas Jefferson) "The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable." (Frederic Bastiat) The 16th Amendment was passed through some kind of subterfuge and it is deeply opposed to American values in governance. It is the lynchpin that has made the central bank feasible, which has led to a century of total war and economic destruction on a truly unimaginable scale. This is a discussion that needs to happen in an Amendment proposal or Con-con, not in SCOTUS, but a cancer-treatment has to begin with the diagnosis... acknowledging the reality that something is wrong.

"Digital blackface" ... BAHAHAHAHA!!! :tears: :tears: :tears:

Maybe that's where our real disagreement is.... get higher goals!

I can only go from what you write. You seem to get triggered virtually every time Trump's name is mentioned. And when I mention TDS. So, idk what to say to that... :shrugging:

Wow, you just excoriated my intelligence, then you make a big old reading-comprehension floparoo... right in your first sentence! It prohibits UNAPPORTIONED ... DIRECT ... TAXES. Read those three words -- or better yet, write them out on a chalkboard -- 100 times until you comprehend! NO UNAPPORTIONED DIRECT TAX. Just read it! Those, being gathered at the border of the nation, are not direct taxes on We The People. Duh. Wow, I just confirmed that ol' "Brickhead" Tufts is ChatGPT... behold:

Well you seem to materialize out of the ether like a poltergeist any time the name "Trump" is breathed anywhere on this forum. I'm not voting for DeSantis, so it's a waste of keystrokes to list off to me all of Trump's faults. And while I really do hope that Trump will become what Q/MAGA implied he would be (drain the Swamp, etc.), if he won't be, then I don't see any difference between Biden 2.0 and Trump 47. In the end, I am coming more to the view that the US government is like a septic pond... you need it there so you have a place to flush your turds but you don't want it in your house, your neighborhood, your schools, your churches, etc. It appears that the Swamp is so far gone that the only solution is to simply ignore them to death. And yes, we have that power if we choose to wield it...

Nailed it! Here is the universal-decoder-ring that unlocks the Fed/globalist agenda for product regulations and restrictions: Imagine the poor as though they are living in an open-air prison presided over by the Federales as their grand Warden. When the Warden wants to "reduce consumption" in order to "battle inflation", he orders the prison requisitions staff to reduce unit capacities, cut power allotments, and so on, and so forth. No, we are not living in an open-air prison but they think we are. That's the institutionalized mindset of the typical DC regulatory czar, warming a seat with their ass in some faceless DC Federal agency office. They view themselves as lab-rats, and they view us as cockroaches. But who cares what such worthless people think? Why does anybody even pay attention to them? That's the real question...