What presidential candidate would be most beneficial to the climbing community and land access?

This is a Greek pensioner crying in the street because his govt broke its promises to him.

Broken promises

I'd prefer to not glorify reliance on the govt but, like I said, my generation seems to put a lot of trust in the state/politicians to fix our problems.

I suppose everything in this world is cyclical.

Todd,

dosomething.org/facts/11-fa…

Todd Graham wrote: Quinn -- I understand. But in America, it is very rare that people starve here. In fact, the biggest problem for poor people in America is obesity. We also have many state and federal welfare programs that feed the down and out, as well as church and other private missions that do the same thing. No one in America starves if they reach out just a little bit to these programs. Re the homeless, the vast majority are mentally ill and cannot be legally held against their will in institutions as in times past.

You're focusing on the minutiae of my post, and not the big picture. Perhaps food is a bad example. I thought of using healthcare, but figured that was a bit more of a "hot topic" than I wanted to use.

As a different example: What philosophical qualms would you have about a system of healthcare that makes it so you don't have to pay for necessary medical services, but if you want a different procedure or tests that your doctor thinks aren't necessary/worth it, you can pay for them if you chose to? To me, that is a good hybrid of socialized medicine (nobody goes bankrupt because they get cancer, or horribly injured) and privatized medicine (where you can get that treatment that only has 5% chance of success if that is your choice and you can pay for it).

From a recent article in the Federalist:

Scandinavian Countries Aren’t Socialist

One of the reasons it is incorrect to refer to countries like Sweden as “socialist” is that these countries were once far more progressive than they are now. The Economist says Sweden was once a “tax-and-spend” economy in which author Astrid Lindgren (of “Pippi Longstocking” fame) was required to pay more than 100 percent of her income in taxes. This heavily progressive tax rate stunted economic growth, and Sweden fell from the fourth-wealthiest country in the world to the fourteenth-wealthiest country in just 23 years.

The electoral success of moderate and conservative parties throughout Scandinavia is at once a rejection of progressive policies and an endorsement of free markets.

The government recognized the cause of the trouble and instituted several capitalist reforms to resuscitate Sweden’s economy. According to The Economist, following the success of Sweden’s relatively right-leaning Moderate party, “Swedish GDP is growing strongly, and unemployment is falling. The budget is heading into surplus next year.” The article notes that many Swedes support moderate and right-wing reforms: “The centre-right has made welfare payments less generous, cut taxes for the lower-paid and trimmed the numbers on sickness benefit. Voters seem to approve.” The electoral success of moderate and conservative parties throughout Scandinavia is at once a rejection of progressive policies and an endorsement of free markets in what some consider to be the most progressive region in the world.

In some ways, Sweden is now less progressive than the United States. Harvard professor Gregory Mankiw writes that the wealthiest decile of Swedes carries 26.7 percent of the tax burden. In The United States, the figure is a whopping 45.1 percent. Additionally, wealth inequality is more pronounced in Scandinavian countries than it is in the United States. In Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Norway, the top decile of earners own between 65 and 69 percent of the country’s total wealth, an astonishing figure. Sanders is apparently unaware of this reality, given that one of his primary reasons for praising Scandinavia was their low levels of wealth inequality.

Quinn Baker wrote: You're focusing on the minutiae of my post, and not the big picture. Perhaps food is a bad example. I thought of using healthcare, but figured that was a bit more of a "hot topic" than I wanted to use. As a different example: What philosophical qualms would you have about a system of healthcare that makes it so you don't have to pay for necessary medical services, but if you want a different procedure or tests that your doctor thinks aren't necessary/worth it, you can pay for them if you chose to? To me, that is a good hybrid of socialized medicine (nobody goes bankrupt because they get cancer, or horribly injured) and privatized medicine (where you can get that treatment that only has 5% chance of success if that is your choice and you can pay for it).

that's a great idea, but I don't think it would ever happen. True liberalism wouldn't allow that. The rich and privileged would then be taking resources away from the poor and we can't have that. Not to mention that economics wouldn't allow it. You would quickly have no doctors left in the public system, because it couldn't keep up with the pay of the private sector. Who wants to work for less?

Quinn Baker wrote: You're focusing on the minutiae of my post, and not the big picture. Perhaps food is a bad example. I thought of using healthcare, but figured that was a bit more of a "hot topic" than I wanted to use. As a different example: What philosophical qualms would you have about a system of healthcare that makes it so you don't have to pay for necessary medical services, but if you want a different procedure or tests that your doctor thinks aren't necessary/worth it, you can pay for them if you chose to? To me, that is a good hybrid of socialized medicine (nobody goes bankrupt because they get cancer, or horribly injured) and privatized medicine (where you can get that treatment that only has 5% chance of success if that is your choice and you can pay for it).

My basic philosophy is this -- Putting the most important economy/decisions in our society -- the economy of health care -- into the hands of government (i.e., politicians) that gives us the VA, the DMV, the CIA, the BIA, etc. etc. etc. is outright insane. Government should only be involved in health care in subsidizing the very very poor and the mentally infirm. All other forms of health care payments should come from health savings accounts (tax free income deferment for everyday doctor visits) and a highly competitive, across-state-lines, health insurance market that would cover catastrophic health emergencies.

Once you involve the government in health care, expect poorer service, longer waits, massive debt and inefficiencies, corruption, and more people dying. Just ask the vets who relied on the VA -- where NO ONE was fired for the disaster that was recently uncovered.

Incidentally, I feel like "Hitler said the same thing, therefore you are wrong" is the worst sort of lazy thinking. Hitler was evil, and we know this because he did a lot of evil things. But not all the things he did were evil in and of themselves, and certainly did not become so simply because Hitler promoted them.

His bit about working towards the common good? Sounds like your standard nuclear family. If I'm feeling especially lefty/wingnutty, I might describe my upbringing as highly Stalinistic, in that my parents (especially my father) demanded that we contribute as well as we could to the family, and in return, I received the care, food, and shelter that they could provide.
Does this mean my father is on a level with Hitler or Stalin? No! Now, if he executed my brother for speaking out against him, or my sister for needing glasses, then there's something to it.

In terms of Hitler advocating for everybody working for the common good, I think he means *to the exclusion* of personal goals. At the point where we are expected and obligated to leave all personal ambitions at the door, just to be a citizen, then we have real problems.

But that is *not* what I advocate for, and if that's what Bernie (or Hillary, or the Donald, or Cruz) advocated for, then I would be shouting in the streets to bring him down. All I'm advocating for is disabusing the public of this notion that they owe very little to their brethren, that they really can go it alone.

Todd Graham wrote: I understand your point. But my view is that the American experiment was founded upon the promotion and protection of individual liberty, not the opposite. If Americans vote themselves to be slaves ... .

How can you write such tripe? Do you even understand that the United States was founded on slavery (blacks and Indians), genocide (Indians), and subjugation (women)?

Todd Graham wrote: I understand. But in America, it is very rare that people starve here. In fact, the biggest problem for poor people in America is obesity.

I doubt a hungry child is comforted by the fact that someone else is obese. Not to mention that it is possible to be both hungry and obese.

PRRose wrote: How can you write such tripe? Do you even understand that the United States was founded on slavery (blacks and Indians), genocide (Indians), and subjugation (women)?

Slavery: State sanctioned and protected
Indian genocide: performed by men with guns working for the State
Subjugation: laws written by the State.

Obvious answer?
MORE FUCKING STATE!

Never mind the 250,000,000 killed in the 20th century alone by governments.
And guess which one is leading the way in killing this century. But keep on voting for your rulers.

PRRose wrote:

"How can you write such tripe? Do you even understand that the United States was founded on slavery (blacks and Indians), genocide (Indians), and subjugation (women)?"

so....what was the rest of the world's sprouting governments being founded upon at the time?

wasn't slavery, genocide and subjugation all pretty much the s.o.p. throughout the world until an 'exception' to that norm came along?

Just sayin'....

Mike is getting it...

Bottom line ... it was governments ... not private businesses ... that coralled the millions into concentration camps, gulags, ovens, and mass graves ... and always in the name of "fairness" or "equality". Once equality of result or outcome becomes government's mandate ... force must be used resulting in slavery and death.

And re America being founded on slavery ... yes ... it did exist ... but our Constitution and Dec of Independence ... as our Founders planned ... were the foundation for the elimination of slavery ... as Lincoln and Frederick Douglas acknowledged many times.

Across world history ... slavery was the norm and freedom the rare rare exception.

Todd Graham wrote: Plus -- the US military protects Europe ... Europe does not have to spend nearly anything on its own military protection.

UK, France, and Germany are all in the top 10 spenders on military. Together, they outspend Russia 2.5 to 1. And, two of them are nuclear powers.

Europe carries its own weight.

BTW -- a great book on the history of socialism is called "Heaven on Earth ... the rise and fall of socialism" by Joshua Muravchik. Here is a good brief review of the book:

"Muravchik provides a devastating anatomy of the socialist dream–a dream that with clocklike regularity becomes a nightmare. If, as Muravchik suggests, “socialism was . . . the most popular political idea ever invented,” it is also undoubtedly the bloodiest. Of course, many who profess socialism are decent and humane people. And it is worth noting that socialism comes in mild as well as tyrannical versions. Muravchik, who was once a socialist himself, pays frequent homage to the generous impulses that lie behind some allotropes of the socialist enterprise. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that “regimes calling themselves socialist have murdered more than one hundred million people since 1917.” Why? . . . A large part of the answer lies in the intellectual dynamics of utopianism. “Utopia” is Greek for “nowhere”: a made-up word for a make-believe place. The search for nowhere inevitably deprecates any and every “somewhere”. Socialism, which is based on incorrigible optimism about human nature, is a species of utopianism. It experiences the friction of reality as an intolerable brake on its expectations. “Utopians,” the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski observed in “The Death of Utopia Reconsidered,” “once they attempt to convert their visions into practical proposals, come up with the most malignant project ever devised: they want to institutionalize fraternity, which is the surest way to totalitarian despotism.”

Read more at: nationalreview.com/liberal-…

AND BTW -- The single best way to screw corporations is 1) reduce or eliminate the laws, regulations, agencies, and bureaucrats that corporations manipulate to crush their competitors and reduce competition, and 2) very simply, make them COMPETE for your business. This approach, as opposed to penalizing them with onerous taxes and regulatory costs (which just get passed on to poor consumers anyway), has the benefit of forcing the corporations to please the consumer via low price and high quality. That is the essence of the free market, and that is what government's role should be -- making the marketplace more and more free, not less. When government tips the market in favor of certain corporations or industries (think the Solyndra debacle) the government ends up subsidizing failure or weak-performing companies, or even technologies that the private sector will not invest in.

PRRose wrote: How can you write such tripe? Do you even understand that the United States was founded on slavery (blacks and Indians), genocide (Indians), and subjugation (women)?

Yes not perfect, but there was a process set in place to make it better (the amendment process)...

slavery is gone, but how is the rest of the world doing on the other 2 issues? Seems those things are still going on in a lot of the world.

So imperfect? yes, but certainly much better than some of the alternatives.

"The founding fathers, said Lincoln, had opposed slavery. They adopted a Declaration of Independence that pronounced all men created equal. They enacted the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 banning slavery from the vast Northwest Territory. To be sure, many of the founders owned slaves. But they asserted their hostility to slavery in principle while tolerating it temporarily (as they hoped) in practice. That was why they did not mention the words "slave" or "slavery" in the Constitution, but referred only to "persons held to service." "Thus, the thing is hid away, in the constitution," said Lincoln, "just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time." The first step was to prevent the spread of this cancer, which the fathers took with the Northwest Ordinance, the prohibition of the African slave trade in 1807, and the Missouri Compromise restriction of 1820. The second was to begin a process of gradual emancipation, which the generation of the fathers had accomplished in the states north of Maryland."

The real scandal is the horrible racist history of the Democrat party. Google that for yourself.

Todd Graham wrote:The real scandal is the horrible racist history of the Democrat party. Google that for yourself.

The party flip is pretty funny. Most people don't realize that when the cry republican. Ummmm back in the 1800's YOU were the republican.

That's why I vote independent / conscious. I vote for the person that I believe will do the best job.

It's tough however balancing between a utilitarian mindset and voting your heart.

Politics. Sheesh.

It is my dearest hope that we can:

Ban the unions.

Instate a flat tax.

Reduce the Government to the size my left ball.

Privatize healthcare.

Get rid of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Get rid of Welfare.

Reduce schools to factory's that create angry, mindless, and easily manipulable sheep.

Get rid of the EPA and other regulatory agencies.

Shit, let's privatize this whole shebang.

That way, we can finally begin the revolution. It's gonna be like 1790 up in this bitch. I got a closet full of guns and ammunition, no children, plenty of shoe polish to rub on the face, and I watch the walking dead, so I am pretty sure I am gonna be alright.


Freedom!!!!

Plus, I get to quit the 9-5, boomshaka!

Trump for Prez yo!

JQ.. YESSSSSS! FREEDOM!!!! Freedom to succeed .. freedom to fail ... freedom of speech ... freedom from government elites telling us how to live ... what to eat ... what cars to drive ... what homes we live in ....yesssss... freedom. And btw... I ain't a Trump fan.

And .. imagine a flat tax. Our economy would explode!

Scott... you are a good man.