They can complain about organized labor all day long but heaven forbid they throw in some “dues” and start their own organization to balance things among middle class, middle of the political road voters*
*not so thinly disguised swipe at the cheapskates around here who are free with the criticism but have short arms and long pockets

Michael still fails to grasp the critical difference between mandatory union monopolies established by state law through “closed shop” legislation and voluntary associations of individuals as might occur in a right-to-work state. Until he understands and acknowledges this distinction, his criticisms will continue to be misguided and irrelevant.

Steve is like the high school hotshot who graduates but still loves to come home and lurk around the school party circuit on the weekend, trying pick up the teen girls because the college women are wise to his act.
In Colorado, he probably doesn’t get the attention he desperately craves.

Russ,
That was sarcasm, right? It is 2011 and this is Rhode Island.

OTL – you simply do not understand the libertarian objection in those instances, nor is it even relevant to the issue in the first place. Many libertarians are against gay marriage also, for the reason that they don’t believe government should be involved in marriage at all. Please go away and stop speaking about things you don’t understand.

That is “tenets”, not “tenants”. It’s always amusing to watch Leftists strut around as if they are some higher order of human, while they can’t even manage simple grammar and usage. Lefty’s post is the rhetorical equivalent of walking through the bar with toilet paper stuck to his shoe.
Actually, all of his posts are like that.
Lefty’s post also contains a factual error, also known as as a “lie”. There is no honest reading of the bit he quoted from the Libertarian Party platform that could conclude that it opposes “right-to-work” laws. I suspect that Lefty has never read the text of a “right-to-work” statute.

No, Max. Totally serious about that, although in fairness I could have blamed Clinton and a host of others as well because of things like the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act.
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/the-origins-and-severity-of-the-public-pension-crisis

There has been considerable attention given in recent months to the shortfalls faced by state and local pension funds. Using the current methodology of assessing pension obligations, the shortfalls sum to nearly $1 trillion. Some analysts have argued that by using what they consider to be a more accurate methodology, the shortfalls could be more than three times this size. Based on these projections, many political figures have argued the need to drastically reduce the generosity of public sector pensions, and possibly to default on pension obligations already incurred.
This paper shows:
– Most of the pension shortfall using the current methodology is attributable to the plunge in the stock market in the years 2007-2009.
– The argument that pension funds should only assume a risk-free rate of return in assessing pension fund adequacy ignores the distinction between governmental units, which need be little concerned over the timing of market fluctuations, and individual investors, who must be very sensitive to market timing.
– The size of the projected state and local government shortfalls measured as a share of future gross state products appear manageable.

I’m quoting a noted economist (and, yes, a liberal one). You guys are quoting Steve Laffey and have the nerve to question my source? Ha!
Notably, Dan doesn’t even attempt to question the content of the report or my contention that the housing bust and Bush recession were the causes of the current pension “crisis.”

While state and local government pensions should be funded at levels that allow them to weather the impact of cyclical downturns, it is important to recognize that the current downturn is by far the longest and deepest of the post-war period. The managers of these funds obviously failed to recognize the housing bubble and the dangers it posed to the economy, but this was true of the vast majority of economic and business analysts at the time. Certainly state and local pension funds were not well served by the professional managers who advised them. It might be reasonable to ask why financial experts, who were often highly compensated for their services, failed to see such an obvious threat to the economy and the stock market as the collapse of a housing bubble. However, this is an issue of the failings of the financial industry, not the failings of state and local governments, except insofar as they exercised poor judgment in buying the industry’s services. [my emphasis]

Well, Dan, as always you’re welcome to take Laffey’s word for it. As they say “ignorance is strength.”
If you want to call it “corporate greed” that’s fine with me. I might be more likely to describe it as the product of deregulation stemming from a corrupt political system, awash in special interest cash.

“If you want to call it “corporate greed” that’s fine with me. I might be more likely to describe it as the product of deregulation stemming from a corrupt political system, awash in special interest cash.”
As I suspected, the same old ignorant and ideologically convenient progressive narrative fallacy. The housing bubble is directly traceable to actions and policies of the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, GSEs Fannie and Freddie, and Congressional mandates such as the Fair Housing Act. Any “account” that leaves out the roles of these entities should be dismissed out of hand. Wall Street investment was the mechanism through which the subprime mortgage market collapsed, but blaming them for the perverted market incentives that coordinated their purchasing behavior and made it profitable is like saying forks are responsible for obesity. I assume by “deregulation” you are referring to the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which reputable real banking experts (not to be confused with “progressive” armchair economists) can tell you was grossly out of date and would have had essentially no effect on the investment behavior anyway.

*Replace Fair Housing Act with Community Reinvestment Act in the above post.

That is “tenets”, not “tenants”.
Well, lefties love what rent seeking does for the extension of government power. For them , ‘tenants’ are more valuable than tenets or principles.

What’s tired is the old fallback of personal attacks.

Yep, no argument from me there Patrick. I just thought that photo of Bush was funny. I posted above, “in fairness I could have blamed Clinton and a host of others as well…”.
Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-street-in-jail-20110216

That’s the way it’s supposed to work. But a veritable mountain of evidence indicates that when it comes to Wall Street, the justice system not only sucks at punishing financial criminals, it has actually evolved into a highly effective mechanism for protecting financial criminals. This institutional reality has absolutely nothing to do with politics or ideology — it takes place no matter who’s in office or which party’s in power. To understand how the machinery functions, you have to start back at least a decade ago, as case after case of financial malfeasance was pursued too slowly or not at all, fumbled by a government bureaucracy that too often is on a first-name basis with its targets. Indeed, the shocking pattern of nonenforcement with regard to Wall Street is so deeply ingrained in Washington that it raises a profound and difficult question about the very nature of our society: whether we have created a class of people whose misdeeds are no longer perceived as crimes, almost no matter what those misdeeds are. The SEC and the Justice Department have evolved into a bizarre species of social surgeon serving this nonjailable class, expert not at administering punishment and justice, but at finding and removing criminal responsibility from the bodies of the accused.

No disagreement there, Patrick, but I’d argue that the rating agencies were also responding to the demand of Wall Street created by the perverted subprime housing market incentives. That degree of coordinated malinvestment simply does not occur randomly and is clearly the result of a central authority intervening in the market.

But Dan, the ratings agencies know they can’t be just driven by the demand of Wall Street because there are many other agencies that depend on their ratings, as this whole crisis proved. There were many retirement funds around the world that stocked the “safe” portion of the fund with these triple-A rated bonds. Triple A basically meant “cannot fail”. However, when people actually started looking at the mortgages that these triple A rated bonds covered, they were actually crap.
Even worse, there were people who sounded the alarms at the proper times explaining what crap all of this was and how the ratings agencies were either incompetent or criminally negligent. Either one of those should have put them behind bars. Instead, we still trust them to do proper ratings and believe their word.

1. I support right to work legislation inasmuch as it abolishes corrupt mandatory union legislation. I do not support the employer-based closed shop prohibition riders that some states have attached, although in practice they are of virtually no consequence because employers as a rule do not want a mandatory union in their business, so I don’t know why you are making such a big hooplah about it.
2. I like the protections Constitutions afford citizens from their governments. However, I do not believe that ours goes nearly far enough. Some mission creep is inevitable, so even with a constitution our individual liberties require eternal vigilance.
3. The pig farm parade of horribles doesn’t usually have much basis in residential reality, but hypothetically I would move away or seek restitution if my property was significantly adversely affected. Libertarianism doesn’t mean people can do whatever they want or create negative externalities for other people, you might be surprised to learn.
4. See #1
5. See #3

To be honest, I don’t really *want* to hear OTL explain his Marxist views because it’s a childish and economically discredited ideology which has failed every time it has been tried and doesn’t extend much farther intellectually than “employment = exploitation” and “give me more power to fix everything.” Besides its glaring overreliance upon pure altrusism, Marxism has no price mechanism and therefore has no functional informational network to evaluate actual supply and demand. It is literally the most inefficient resource allocation model devisable. More than enough said on that topic.
Unlike OTL, Michael, Russ, and others here, I answer all questions asked of me within reason, provided that they do not infringe upon my personal privacy.

Found a good article on the Community Reinvestment Act nonsense (debunked numerous places but sure not to convince those that think markets can never be wrong)…
prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=04&year=2008&base_name=liberals_and_the_shtpile

First, there’s the timing. CRA came in 1977. The crisis came in 2007. Indeed, by 2004, the Bush administration had weakened the CRA — and after that (though not, presumably, because of it), bubble lending really took off. Further, CRA only governs a certain class of federally insured banks. Problem is, half of the subprime loans came from mortgage companies with no CRA involvement at all. Another 25%-30% came from companies with very little CRA exposure. For those who left their abacus at home, that’s 80% of the loans which were fully or largely outside CRA jurisdiction. More than that, the non-CRA mortgage firms made subprime loans at twice the rate of CRA-covered firms. Which basically leaves a stake in the heart of this particular theory. Indeed, until now, some conservatives have been moaning that no one is talking about the CRA part because it’s so racially charged. Poppycock. It’s just a false charge that’s not worth talking about. As Gordon says, in one of my favorite kickers in some time, this “is not political correctness. It is correctness.”

Russ now blockquotes a website called “The American Prospect – Liberal Intelligence” and asserts that if we don’t accept its conclusions then we are ignorant and brainwashed. How painfully ironic.
Russ, do you understand that when you do things like this you only illustrate what a pathetic amateur and sheep you are? Blockquoting progressive websites and pundits can only undermine your credibility here further, if that is even possible. Just put yourself in our shoes and imagine if we were blockquoting Beck or Limbaugh to you as some source of authority.

OTL – I do not support corporate personhood because limited liability cuts against the very foundation of the libertarian philosophy and Austrian economics. You may be surprised to learn that I also support some form of public elections, because the election process is so fundamentally entwined with government that there is no way to “marketize” the process through political donations without making it even worse and corrupting it further. I don’t see much difference between bribery and political contributions (especially in RI where they are required for many jobs) and to say that political contributions equate to free speech is like saying bribery of the police is free speech. The solution in my opinion is to reduce the size and power of government so that there are fewer favors and unfair advantages worth buying. A lot of your objections to zoning laws could be handled privately through various means such as covenants, contracts, etc. but my goal is not to rebut every objection to purist libertarianism because I don’t claim to have every answer; nobody does. Suffice it to say that people are very good at innovating when allowed and incentivized to do so. I don’t view the “low hanging fruit” objections regarding roads and zoning laws that progressives trot out again and again as a refutation of libertarianism, any more than Marxists and progressives view the hundreds of millions of deaths and economic disasters resulting from top-down economic controls as a refutation of their own philosophies. The difference I see with libertarianism, however, is that it has never been attempted on a state or country-wide basis and where it has been implemented even in part in a state like New Hampshire, the results have been extremely promising. In other words, “freer” countries do much better than “unfreer” countries, so… Read more »

Just put yourself in our shoes and imagine if we were blockquoting Beck or Limbaugh to you as some source of authority.

If Beck or Limbaugh had Nobel Prizes for Economics, you might have a point. As is, the comparison only shows how off the deep-end some folks have gone.

“…but Rhode Island is a special case where we were nowhere near healthy before the trouble started.”
That’s true, but that doesn’t mean that assuming a 7.5% rate of return is appropriate, or that Baker’s conclusion is any less valid:

In most states the unfunded liabilities are well under 0.2 percent of future income. This implies that increased revenue equal to 20 cents of every $100 of future output would be more than sufficient to eliminate the shortfall. Even in the states with largest shortfalls, the burden appears manageable. In Ohio, the shortfall is equal to 0.47 percent of future output, in Illinois it is 0.37 percent of future output, and in Mississippi and Rhode Island it is equal to 0.36 percent.