About that whole IRS scandal...

[mike777]

In America this returns to the same old discussion

 

 

1) whatever the govt does...it must be wrong often...very often....not perfect just wrong/not best

2) whatever the govt does it must be right often...very often......not perfect just right/best

 

 

 

fwiw it seems Europe...does not see govt as wrong..often wrong or just plain silly/goofy/fascist.

[mike777]

to understand America....

 

 

Please Europe take any I mean any bill that is a debate, a real debate in your country:

 

 

1) if you pass it America thinks it is silly...goofy

2) it has elements of being fascist.....

 

now you understand America...:)

[kenberg]

I did say "This appeals to me". I said it in response to a boxed quote, a boxed quote that is different from the one Cherdano attaches it to. I see the two boxed quotes as having different content, in particular one of the boxed quotes appeals to me, the other doesn't.

 

I am not planning on going crazy over this, I'm just sayin.

[mikeh]

 

 

All I'm saying is that the government has no business telling free citizens what kind of contracts they can write between themselves, or taxing or "licensing" such contracts. And organized religion has no business influencing the government to do that — which is what has happened in Western society over the past several hundred years.

 

 

This kind of inanity gets old very fast. Ideologues like BS seem to view 'government' as some sort of alien entity imposed upon us by utter strangers.

 

Reality 101: all human groupings develop a leadership structure. There is good reason to believe that humans are social animals. Our closest relatives, the great apes, are either solitary or, when they form groups, have well-defined social relationships, with varying degrees of status. This is true in other social animals as well: see wolf, or lion, or elephant, etc.

 

Thus in our pre-history, it appears clear that clans, then tribes always had some form of hierarchical leadership: some form of 'government'.

 

Once history began to exist, in the sense that records came into being that could be reviewed by later generations, we see the development of various forms of government, almost always authoritarian but with some experiments in limited democracy (see some of the Greek city-states and republican Rome).

 

As nations grew larger and more complex, larger and more complex governments also developed and only someone steeped in ignorance would argue that such was invariably 'wrong' in some manner.

 

As our societies grew ever more complex, the need for a framework of directions, controls, guidance and, most of all, dispute-resolution grew as well. One could argue that the need for dispute resolution grows exponentially in relation to population growth. We all have multiple contacts with people. As the number of people grows, and the density/speed of interaction grows, the possibility of disagreement multiplies.

 

Viewed in one light, laws are basically dispute resolution mechanisms.

 

Leaving aside autocratic governments, in which the popular will is often ignored for years (altho at the risk of generating an explosion in the long term), laws in 'democracies' generally reflect the societal consensus. Laws are often cumbersome to change and thus laws can lag behind rapidly evolving societal consensus, but that lag doesn't invalidate the argument. Nor does the reality that special or vested interests can often delay or even prevent the evolution of laws to reflect the societal consensus. Even more problematic is the effect of money on the manipulation of the consensus, but those are problems of implementation and don't affect the basic scheme of democratic government.

 

Society sees some conduct as detrimental. Stealing or murder are two easy examples of this.

 

When A steals from B, in a libertarian fantasy world, that is B's problem. In a more mainstream world, it is still B's problem but society has an interest in reducing the incidence of theft, since there are more potential 'B's in the world than there are thieves, and allowing theft to become a matter of private rights would lead to chaos. So the government, which is an arm of society, enacts laws prohibiting theft and employs people whose tasks involve arrest, prosecution and punishment.

 

Society may also see that there are situations in which it is in the best interests of society as a whole that certain relationships be made to conform with or gain prescribed benefits from rules enacted to impact those relationships. Some relationships are seen as beneficial to society and thus suitable for encouragement.

 

Most societies have seen that pure economic freedom results in the accumulation of power and wealth in a tiny segment of society, while many end up impoverished and with little or no access to basic needs such as education or health care. So most western societies have decided that society ought to make provision for the poor to gain access to such benefits. The motives felt by those in society who feel this way may vary, but the result is that in most democracies the government takes upon itself the role of providing this access. Since this, and all the other services that we feel ought not to be distributed only to the wealthy, means that the government has to spend money, it needs to raise money as well.

 

It also has to regulate and define who gets access to what. Familial dependents are seen as being entitled to certain benefits associated with their familial relationships. Survivor's benefits, visitation rights, community property division upon the breakup of the relationship, etc. Once again, it is generally seen by most that failing to afford government recognition to these rights effectively dispossesses all but the rich from being able to assert them in the event of any dispute.

 

So it is entirely appropriate, and essential to any societal fairness, that the government be the entity that defines these rules.

 

Can anyone argue, with a straight face, that in the southern US we wouldn't see even more racial prejudice and segregation than currently exists were the Federal Government to have taken a hands-off approach to the relationships between blacks and the rest of society? Would slavery still exist in the US were it not for the position taken by the US government in the 1860's? Would most of us not be smoking cigarettes were it not for the action of our governments to educate us on the perils of tobacco, while restricting the ability of cigarette manufacturers to advertise towards children?

 

Does BS really think that having millions of people dies slow, agonizing deaths from lung cancer and similar illnesses is a better outcome than allowing government to interfere with the tobacco industry? Does he really think that individual children or their parents can stand up to the brainwashing of massive advertising because it is a fair fight? That each of us can indeed see through the lies (the smoke) of the marketers of poison and, if we can't, too bad? That society has no vested interest in minimizing the harm?

 

These are just simple examples of areas in which we, as society, see it fit to act and we, as society, create a government to do for us collectively that which we, as individuals or small groups, can't do ourselves.

 

I could expand on this at length, but most here already understand the basics of what has been called the social contract, and those like BS who cling to their delusional notions about the very nature of society can't learn anyway. It's called cognitive dissonance and while most of us are subject to that in some aspects of our lives, libertarian and religious fundies seem to make it a fetish.

[blackshoe]

This kind of inanity gets old very fast. Ideologues like BS seem to view 'government' as some sort of alien entity imposed upon us by utter strangers.

[snip - tl;dr]

Nice abbreviating Mike. Very subtle. Not.

 

Government has three purposes: to protect citizens from the depredations of foreign nationals or nations (the purview, essentially, of the military), to protect citizens from the depredations of their fellow citizens (the police function), and to adjudicate civil disputes (the court function). Unfortunately we humans seem unable to shed the vestiges of old ideas about what government is supposed to do, not to mention relatively new ones that make no sense - like government control of the economy.

 

I don't view government the way you claim I do. I view government as a necessarily evil, to be constrained as much as possible, but not eliminated altogether. And I firmly believe in "of the people, by the people, and for the people" - a situation which in this country seems farther from reality every day.

 

Cherdano: you mentioned "the gold standard". First, there's more than one way to establish a gold standard. Second, I ask you, what is it about a gold standard that makes it "idiotic"?

[barmar]

Nice abbreviating Mike. Very subtle. Not.

 

Government has three purposes:

According to our Constitution, the purposes are:

1. form a more perfect union
   
2. establish justice
   
3. insure domestic tranquility
   
4. provide for the common defense
   
5. promote the general welfare
   
6. secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity
   

Your list only includes #2 and #4. (I'm including both police and civil court in #2).

[kenberg]

According to our Constitution, the purposes are:

1. form a more perfect union
2. establish justice
3. insure domestic tranquility
4. provide for the common defense
5. promote the general welfare
6. secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity

Your list only includes #2 and #4. (I'm including both police and civil court in #2).

 

I confess it had never occurred to me to take this list and think about how successful modern government is when set against these standards.

 

 

Number 1. seems a bit vague, and 3. and 5. seem very open ended. Insuring domestic tranquility sounds downright frightening, promoting the general welfare seems much better. Securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity is a wonderful ideal that I would expect conservatives, liberals and whachmacallits like me can agree to even if we may not interpret it in quite the same way.

 

 

Number 2., establishing justice, reminds me of when I was in traffic court. The judge informed us all that we could seek justice by demanding a trial. He assured us that if we did that, we would indeed get justice.

 

Anyway, I like looking over the list. It seems to me that it would be an excellent high school civics assignment to have the students write an essay on how they think we are doing with respect to that list.

[mikeh]

According to our Constitution, the purposes are:

1. form a more perfect union
   
2. establish justice
   
3. insure domestic tranquility
   
4. provide for the common defense
   
5. promote the general welfare
   
6. secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity
   

Your list only includes #2 and #4. (I'm including both police and civil court in #2).

At the risk of creating even more problems on the thread, I think it useful to point out that the vast majority of humans now alive, and an even vaster proportion of now-dead people do not live and never have lived under the US Constitution, yet all or virtually all live or lived under some form of government.

 

It is easy to get focused on the US Government, but it seems to me that it may be useful to think, in some respects, to think of government as an idea, as a concept. I have written before that I see government as an aspect of society that is the inevitable consequence of human nature when humans form groups of any kind.

 

Yes, founding fathers and similar groups of people get together from time to time to create elaborate, lofty documents that often purport to proclaim ideas and rules, and purposes, and goals, and so on.

 

None of these ever 'create' 'government'. They all document a transition in governance but, to use the US as an example, there was a functioning government in power before and for quite some time during the revolution. It, too, served various purposes, and many of them were, superficially, the same as the purposes of the US Constitution, altho the British constitution was largely unwritten.

 

This approach to the concept of government as an idea is why I wrote that it is arguable that just about everything governments do is about dispute resolution in one form or another.

 

This includes foreign affairs...a war is simply an extreme form of dispute resolution, after all.

 

It includes policing: absent government policing, and sometimes even with it, crimes would give rise to self-help remedies.

 

Forming a more perfect union amongst subordinate political entities (the individual states) was clearly an attempt at dispute resolution or avoidance.

 

Insure [sic...one of my pet peeves is the use of 'insure' when the writer means 'ensure'] domestic tranquility: clearly dispute related

 

Promotion of the general welfare can also be viewed as requiring a regulation of the affairs of the economy, education, and so on in a manner that minimizes, resolves or avoids disputes. Disputes generally disrupt all affected, and this is rarely beneficial. Btw, this power is, within the US framework, at least conceptually a justification for efforts to regulate the economy. We are all to some degree living with the consequences of the deregulation of the US financial markets in the early years of this century.

 

Securing the blessings of liberty.

 

Well, even the most sincere of political figures like to wrap themselves in some lofty language, usually while ignoring it in practice. The FF, collectively didn't give a damn about trying to secure liberty for most of the population. They didn't care much for the 1st nations peoples. They didn't (collectively at least) give a damn about negroes, and you can look in vain for any attempt to secure anything resembling freedom for women.

 

I am not being judgmental about any of this. They were creatures of their time, and it would have struck most, if not all, of them as absurd that women be treated equally with men. Even the abolitionists, then and later, were virtually unanimous in their views that blacks were inferior to whites...the objection to slavery was rarely, if ever, on the grounds that there should be equality between the 'races'. Given the cultural mores that existed, the constitutional documents were impressive. However, societies change, and mores change. The concept and general role of the institution of government doesn't, except perhaps to inevitably become ever more complex as the society it governs becomes more complex.

[GreenMan]

Insure [sic...one of my pet peeves is the use of 'insure' when the writer means 'ensure'] domestic tranquility: clearly dispute related

 

The two spellings are mostly interchangeable today and were entirely interchangeable in the 18th century. Getting annoyed when someone in the 1700s doesn't follow the preference of some 21st-century people seems a waste of energy to me.

[mikeh]

The two spellings are mostly interchangeable today and were entirely interchangeable in the 18th century. Getting annoyed when someone in the 1700s doesn't follow the preference of some 21st-century people seems a waste of energy to me.

Since they mean fundamentally different things, I think you are mistaken.

 

When I 'insure', I am making arrangements that will get me compensation in the event that what I am insuring fails or is damaged in some way.

 

I prepay a hotel reservation and then take out travel insurance so that if I have to cancel, for a reason covered by the insurance, I get my money back.

 

However, the reason I prepaid was to ensure that I had a place to stay.

 

I insure my car with 10MM 3rd party liability insurance in an effort to ensure that if I negligently cause catastrophic injury to someone, I won't face financial ruin when I get sued and have to pay out 8MM.

 

It would make no sense to write that I ensured my car in order to insure that I won't face financial ruin.

 

Since I am an insurance litigator, I am quite confident that my usage is correct. I ensured that it was so by doing a little research as well. However, I can't insure against the consequences of error.

 

I may be a pedant, but I do think I'm correct in this: indeed, my research has provided me with assurance such that even if I could insure against being wrong, I think doing so would merely ensure that I was out of pocket to the tune of the premium.

[GreenMan]

Since they mean fundamentally different things, I think you are mistaken.

 

... Since I am an insurance litigator, I am quite confident that my usage is correct. I ensured that it was so by doing a little research as well. However, I can't insure against the consequences of error.

 

I may be a pedant, but I do think I'm correct in this: indeed, my research has provided me with assurance such that even if I could insure against being wrong, I think doing so would merely ensure that I was out of pocket to the tune of the premium.

 

Using the right language has been my business for probably as long as you've been doing what you're doing. You are speaking from inside the insurance industry, which I'm sure adheres to the convention you describe. In the wider world it's another story. Look in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage if you don't believe me; that's pretty much the authoritative resource for usage questions like this. Also check the Oxford English Dictionary to find both spellings for both usages going back to the 1600s if you doubt the historical point.

 

I know that lots of pop-grammar websites agree with you, but most of them just uncritically pass on usage superstitions rather than doing the hard work of research. I don't mind when people distinguish between insure, ensure and assure, and in fact I do the same in my own writing. But outside specialized areas such as yours, it's a preference, not a law.

[mikeh]

Using the right language has been my business for probably as long as you've been doing what you're doing. You are speaking from inside the insurance industry, which I'm sure adheres to the convention you describe. In the wider world it's another story. Look in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage if you don't believe me; that's pretty much the authoritative resource for usage questions like this. Also check the Oxford English Dictionary to find both spellings for both usages going back to the 1600s if you doubt the historical point.

 

I know that lots of pop-grammar websites agree with you, but most of them just uncritically pass on usage superstitions rather than doing the hard work of research. I don't mind when people distinguish between insure, ensure and assure, and in fact I do the same in my own writing. But outside specialized areas such as yours, it's a preference, not a law.

I don't need to check for historical usage, if only because it is of little consequence. I don't intend to be condescending but it really matters little how the words were used in the 1600's. Spelling was idiosyncratic at that time, and it wasn't until the middle of the next century that efforts were made to compile the first English dictionary: presumably a significant event in the standardization of spelling and usage.

 

What matters is the manner in which the language has evolved, and I recognize that it has evolved! I no longer cringe (well, not visibly) when I hear someone say that so and so did good, when what they mean is he or she did well.

 

The Oxford Dictionary of Current English (1998 ed) agrees with me and not you. It is a modest work and gives only, I think, the most popular uses and doesn't, as an example, give origins or historical references. My massively larger Merriam Webster is old...1945 Ed.

 

While it does indeed state that insure is sometimes used to convey the meaning of ensure, this is the 4th of 4 suggested meanings of 'insure' and the editors caution that ensure, in this sense, is the better literary term and the more common usage.

 

To state that the two words are used interchangeably seems a little much, given the way the dictionaries I have consulted define the words. The short(ish) modern one disagrees with you and the large one suggests that your view is unpopular, and incorrect but exists.

 

I found this to be an amusing diversion: today's been a slow day in part because I have had a minor health issue. I hadn't even realized we had a Merriam Webster in the office, let alone how huge it is. We used to have one of those editions of the Oxford that came in (IIRC) 2 or more volumes and with a magnifying glass because the print was so small one couldn't read it, even if one were far younger than am I today :P The M-W is actually quite an attractive book, and one of the losses we'll have when all books are e-books is the loss of the physical beauty of (a few) books.

 

Oh, while I practice insurance law, that doesn't come close to defining my areas of interest nor does it circumscribe my knowledge of the English language.

[blackshoe]

I confess it had never occurred to me to take this list and think about how successful modern government is when set against these standards.

 

 

Number 1. seems a bit vague, and 3. and 5. seem very open ended. Insuring domestic tranquility sounds downright frightening, promoting the general welfare seems much better. Securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity is a wonderful ideal that I would expect conservatives, liberals and whachmacallits like me can agree to even if we may not interpret it in quite the same way.

 

 

Number 2., establishing justice, reminds me of when I was in traffic court. The judge informed us all that we could seek justice by demanding a trial. He assured us that if we did that, we would indeed get justice.

 

Anyway, I like looking over the list. It seems to me that it would be an excellent high school civics assignment to have the students write an essay on how they think we are doing with respect to that list.

Yes, it would be an excellent class assignment. B-)

[hrothgar]

Why should I be required to think through all the consequences of a suggestion I threw out for discussion on an Internet forum?

 

Because if you don't people tend to dismiss your future arguments as having little to no merit...

[hrothgar]

Second, I ask you, what is it about a gold standard that makes it "idiotic"?

 

Here’s a short form critique of the gold standard

 

1. Maintaining a gold standard means that the Federal government is unable to use monetary policy to cool down / heat up the economy. While some people see this as an advantage, the vast majority of economists believe that the government should apply some form of monetary policy (even if some advocate something simple like have the money supply grow at a fixed rate like 1.38% per year).

 

2. Gold demand and production of gold exhibit considerable variance. Pegging your money supply to gold isn’t any guarantee of a stable money supply. Historically, the best example of this was the large influx of gold into Western Europe following the Spanish and Portuguese exploitation of South America that devastated economies from Spain to Turkey. However, the recent speculative bubble in gold is another good example.

 

3. The reason that countries all abandoned the gold supply is that they couldn’t support pegging the price level. There’s no reason to believe that this has changed. The financial maneuvers necessary to go back on the gold standard would be devastating to the economy. It’s estimated that there’s something like 120,000 tons of gold in the world. On average, the US consumes about 10% of world gold production. With gold costing about $1,200 an ounce, this works out to be about half a trillion dollar’s worth of gold. (Note that this is ALL the gold in the US) In contrast, the US money supply (M1) is about $2.5 trillion. Simply put, there’s nowhere near enough gold out there to support the size of the US money supply.

 

4. Empirically, the gold standard hasn’t provided the stability that its proponent’s claim. Empirically, economies that are on the gold standard experience significantly hort term price volatility and numerous financial crises. As an example, the under the gold standard the US experienced financial crises in 1873, 1884, 1890, 1893, 1907, 1930, 1931, 1932, and 1933

[GreenMan]

I don't need to check for historical usage, if only because it is of little consequence. I don't intend to be condescending but it really matters little how the words were used in the 1600's.

 

This is quite disingenuous considering that you were griping about an example of its usage in the 1700s. Our Founding Fathers did not anticipate 21st-century grammar nags! Oh, what great men they might have been.

 

The Oxford Dictionary of Current English (1998 ed) agrees with me and not you. It is a modest work and gives only, I think, the most popular uses and doesn't, as an example, give origins or historical references. My massively larger Merriam Webster is old...1945 Ed.

 

While it does indeed state that insure is sometimes used to convey the meaning of ensure, this is the 4th of 4 suggested meanings of 'insure' and the editors caution that ensure, in this sense, is the better literary term and the more common usage.

 

Now you're relying on a small British publication to argue American usage, and saying a 1945 dictionary overrides the same publisher's 1994 usage volume. That's just laughable.

[cherdano]

Cherdano: you mentioned "the gold standard". First, there's more than one way to establish a gold standard. Second, I ask you, what is it about a gold standard that makes it "idiotic"?

 

Think about how much we right now sweat whether the projected 5 year inflation is 1.8% or 2.5% or 4%. Then look at this:

Yahoo Gold price chart 2008-2013

These fluctuations would be terrible periods of inflation or deflation (which after all is nothing but money getting more or less expensive).

If that doesn't convince you, probably http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2012/01/23/survey-no-support-for-gold-standard-among-top-economists/ won't convince you either.

 

In any case, the problem isn't that you personally are unaware of such basic economics. The problem is that libertarians have created their own world of macroeconomic illiteracy in which they reinforce each others' macroeconomic views, without any input from the universal consensus by the people who do know about macroeconomics (i.e., economists).

[mikeh]

This is quite disingenuous considering that you were griping about an example of its usage in the 1700s. Our Founding Fathers did not anticipate 21st-century grammar nags! Oh, what great men they might have been.

 

 

 

Now you're relying on a small British publication to argue American usage, and saying a 1945 dictionary overrides the same publisher's 1994 usage volume. That's just laughable.

 

 

When did I ever express any concern about 'American usage'?????

 

I'm not *drumroll please* an American.

 

I don't speak American and I don't write American

 

I was writing about a peeve, or very minor level of annoyance, I have with the conflation by some (and I see it here in Canada and elsewhere) of two words that, to me, seem to be quite different in meaning. My perception is based on my understanding of the English language as I learned it in (second drumroll, please) England, at what is known there as a Public School....an institution known for its inculcation of the English language in its students.

 

That understanding has been influenced by further education in Canada and work, using words as my primary tool, for almost 40 years.

 

You butted in by asserting that I was mistaken in my usage of the English language.

 

It turns out that you assumed, due to arrogance mixed with ignorance, that I was using American English. I wasn't.

 

I spell programme with more letters than I assume you do. I pronounce the letter 'Z' as 'zed'. I use colourful language on occasion, and never color anything.

 

If I ever want a lesson in American usage, I'll let you know. Otherwise, maybe we can end this silly exchange. Unless, of course, you are now going to tell me that I am wrong in my English or Canadian usage of English as well :D

 

I just figured out the first part of that quote: I had assumed that the poster who used insure rather than ensure was making a mistake: I didn't assume that he was quoting from the historical document! Maybe I was wrong: maybe the FF did use 'insure' and if so, then I was in error in my assumption and this whole string of posts has been a semi-comical series of errors. I wasn't debating 17th or 18th century meanings: how people used the words back then isn't something that peeves me in the slightest.

[jonottawa]

When did I ever express any concern about 'American usage'?????

 

I'm not *drumroll please* an American.

 

I don't speak American and I don't write American

 

I was writing about a peeve, or very minor level of annoyance, I have with the conflation by some (and I see it here in Canada and elsewhere) of two words that, to me, seem to be quite different in meaning. My perception is based on my understanding of the English language as I learned it in (second drumroll, please) England, at what is known there as a Public School....an institution known for its inculcation of the English language in its students.

 

That understanding has been influenced by further education in Canada and work, using words as my primary tool, for almost 40 years.

 

You butted in by asserting that I was mistaken in my usage of the English language.

 

It turns out that you assumed, due to arrogance mixed with ignorance, that I was using American English. I wasn't.

 

I spell programme with more letters than I assume you do. I pronounce the letter 'Z' as 'zed'. I use colourful language on occasion, and never color anything.

 

If I ever want a lesson in American usage, I'll let you know. Otherwise, maybe we can end this silly exchange. Unless, of course, you are now going to tell me that I am wrong in my English or Canadian usage of English as well :D

 

I just figured out the first part of that quote: I had assumed that the poster who used insure rather than ensure was making a mistake: I didn't assume that he was quoting from the historical document! Maybe I was wrong: maybe the FF did use 'insure' and if so, then I was in error in my assumption and this whole string of posts has been a semi-comical series of errors. I wasn't debating 17th or 18th century meanings: how people used the words back then isn't something that peeves me in the slightest.

I guess that's as close as you're going to come to an apology for your 'arrogance mixed with ignorance'?

[mikeh]

I guess that's as close as you're going to come to an apology for your 'arrogance mixed with ignorance'?

I did a little research and find that my assumptions were in error. I apologize. I now see why greenman was so bent out of shape: he thought I was expressing a peeve about the actual uasge employed in the preamble to US Constitution while I thought, mistakenly, that barmar had either mispelled the word or made an improper usage. So I offended greenman, for sure, and implicitly insulted barmar. I apologize to both.

 

I still remain peeved by those who conflate the two terms these days :P

[jonottawa]

My faith in MikeH is restored. All is right with the world.

 

I apologize for butting in.

[blackshoe]

Think about how much we right now sweat whether the projected 5 year inflation is 1.8% or 2.5% or 4%. Then look at this:

Yahoo Gold price chart 2008-2013

These fluctuations would be terrible periods of inflation or deflation (which after all is nothing but money getting more or less expensive).

If that doesn't convince you, probably http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2012/01/23/survey-no-support-for-gold-standard-among-top-economists/ won't convince you either.

 

In any case, the problem isn't that you personally are unaware of such basic economics. The problem is that libertarians have created their own world of macroeconomic illiteracy in which they reinforce each others' macroeconomic views, without any input from the universal consensus by the people who do know about macroeconomics (i.e., economists).

What causes inflation? Does government screwing around with the economy or the market have anything to do with it?

 

How many of those "top economists" were of the Austrian School? If you ask 20 "top" Precision players what the best bidding system is, how many of them will say "Standard American"?

 

I think returning to a gold standard, at this point, would be very, very difficult, for a lot of reasons. But I don't think that in itself is reason not to do it.

[kenberg]

I did a little research and find that my assumptions were in error. I apologize. I now see why greenman was so bent out of shape: he thought I was expressing a peeve about the actual uasge employed in the preamble to US Constitution while I thought, mistakenly, that barmar had either mispelled the word or made an improper usage. So I offended greenman, for sure, and implicitly insulted barmar. I apologize to both.

 

I still remain peeved by those who conflate the two terms these days :P

 

I was very pleased to see this prolonged discussion. Whenever someone demeans mathematicians as being unbearable fussbudgets I shall refer them to this thread.

[blackshoe]

ROFL! :lol:

[cherdano]

he thought I was expressing a peeve about the actual uasge employed in the preamble to US Constitution while I thought, mistakenly, that barmar had either mispelled the word or made an improper usage.

Wow, you didn't realize that barmar's post was essentially a quote? You guys must have a really big wall at the border to prevent you from noticing anything that's said on the Southern side of the fence.

 

In any case, Merriam Webster lists both meanings for "insure".