Quote from: silverfuture on February 26, 2015, 12:14:22 PM

Quote from: billyjoeallen on February 26, 2015, 11:46:57 AM

Quote from: Fatman3001 on February 26, 2015, 11:23:45 AM

1) I'm sorry, I forgot who I was talking to.
2) There are very good reasons why that applies to personal debt and very good reasons why they don't apply to public debt. A country is not a person. It doesn't die. If and when it is dissolved, vanquished, conquered, then it is reasonable to ask where the debt goes.

But yes, there is a lot of risk involved with adding to an already huge debt. But sometimes the alternatives are worse. There was no reason to keep adding to the deficit after the dot-com crash of 2001 had been dealt with. So from 2002/2003-2008 both congress and the president should have focused on turning the deficit into a surplus. But instead they decided to gamble the nations future on an oxymoron called big-government conservatism. Kicking the dollar and replacing it with Bitcoin is not going to make republicans (both voters and politicians) less stupid. That requires education, publicly funded education. Even those on the right should recognize this.

1) no problem.
2) a government is not a country.

I'm not conservative (except culturally). I don't want to end the dollar. I want to end the forced use of the dollar by ending legal tender laws. Bitcoin may not ever catch on, but we should be free to use whatever form of money a buyer and seller agrees on.

Education is important, but politicians, bureaucrats and teachers don't have the incentives to do it well, which is why the don't do it well. Public choice economics predicts this and test scores confirm it. Online resources like The Khan Academy is free and take no tax money. That's not the whole solution, but part of it. https://www.khanacademy.org/

Well said BJA. Education certainly does not need to be publicly funded and controlled by bureaucrats to be effective or accessible at all. Why does this myth exist in spite of the myriad evidence against it?

It does in order to be accessible. And for society and social econommics, that's the important bit.