Notice that so far there isn’t a political party here. LGBT rights are more often supported by democrats, but Dick Cheny was the first VP to support gay marriage. Democrat Bill Clinton passed the largest modern anti-gay legislation in DOMA and DADT. So we really need to look at the individual politician, not the party.
Not really. This is like pointing to some Republican who raised taxes and a Democrat who cut taxes to prove that taxation isn't really about party. But it obviously is; the Democrats are, in general, a lot more likely to raise taxes and the Republicans to cut them. And often the "Exceptions" are cases where there was an overwhelming bipartisan consensus that this was a good idea or really necessary, aka cases where politics doesn't come into play too much. If there's a budget crisis, even a Republican might raise taxes. If there's a regressive stupid tax on the poor, the Dems will cut it.
It may be hard to remember now, but DOMA was a noncontroversial, hugely bipartisan bill in Congress. Absolutely nobody of that era wanted Hawaii imposing radical gay marriage craziness on every other state, and DOMA was narrowly tailored enough to "solve" this pressing concern. It was, however, largely a
conservative directed moral panic, just one that,
in that era, the liberal side had little cause to dispute. There were other problems to fight and there wasn't a moral case in favor of gay marriage yet. So blame the Dems of that era if you want, but it seems unlikely that had there been an overwhelming Dem majority in Congress that they'd have cared enough to pass it.
DADT I think you're being very unfair on. As a reminder, before DADT, the standard was that homosexuality was grounds for dismissal from the armed services. Clinton actually looked into abolishing this in 1992, which caused a backlash freak-out, and the threat of Congressional override which would make the situation *worse* (the old bad practice codified into law). What Clinton did was quite an ingenious compromise that was broadly popular in the era: he left the fig leaf of homosexuality still being grounds for dismissal, but removed the ability to actually investigate it. It doesn't take a genius to guess what would happen 10-15 years later after more gay officers had risen through the ranks and had the ability to have their private life be secret go away. So in short, DADT was progressive-for-the-era, and also nearly guaranteed its own eventual repeal.
Government control can mean government tyranny. Now, normally in a democracy, tyranny won’t hurt the majority population.
This is a side nitpick, but answer is "it depends a lot." Apartheid South Africa was a democracy that wasn't particularly friendly to its majority population. Any time you have a democracy where the majority for whatever reason doesn't vote / can't vote / has less political power, you can see this.
Short Selling is banned in lots of countries–why is it legal in the US?
It actually is highly regulated & restricted, possibly too much so! So devil's advocate:
1) I propose "bubbles" are generally bad. If the "fair" price of cheese is 10 dollars, and there's a rush on cheese with people buying cheese at 15 dollars and hoping to sell at 20 dollars, followed by a crash to 8 dollars, this is pointless churn. Replace "cheese" with "housing / real estate" and you have 2003-2007.
2) Short selling allows canny investors to "pop" bubbles early, and be rewarded for doing so, so that they don't get TOO big and have even worse consequences later. Why should only positivity be allowed? There should be ways to bet the price of something will drop. This is a valuable signal the market needs.
From what I can tell, ban derivatives, high frequency trading, and all forms of speculation. No candidate has even proposed this. But this seems like common sense legislation
How is it even possible to ban speculation? How would you do this? Not sure how you distinguish "I'm buying these 5 homes in Florida because I might become a landlord" and "I'm buying them to speculate." And what about the case where I genuinely want to be a landlord, but I run into liquidity troubles, and now need to sell? Am I a retroactive speculator?
Same problem with currencies. Countries have occasionally tried to ban speculation that a currency will drop, say, because the government is maintaining an expensive peg. This is basically impossible to enforce even if you think it's a good idea. What exactly can stop you from trading your dollars for swiss francs for Egyptian pounds? And is this even a bad thing to begin with? Maybe the government shouldn't have been pouring money into currency nonsense to begin with if you didn't want other people to come in and participate as well.
If the Axis had won in WW2…honestly, Videogames would probably still exist, perhaps a little censored.
I realize you're being a tad flip / humorous with all the "solely with respect to the video game industry" comments, but you underestimate how horrible the Nazis were. Speaking *solely* from the perspective of the closest equivalent to video games of the time, art & literature, the Nazis:
* Looted everything, including museums, and shot you if you got in the way
* Censored more than "a little", and this includes in 1932-38, so not something that goes away after wartime
* Enforced an art style that was somehow worse than Socialist Realism. Like the commies, they hated anything abstract and imaginative, and preferred "classical" style paintings.
* The same with poetry: it was horrible, horrible chest-pounding doggerel about how awesome your nation is. Musolinni even wrote some IIRC.
* You might have heard about some unpleasantness involving the Jews. Well... Jews were/are major players in the entertainment industry (most famously Hollywood) which has some cross-connection with videogames, and there'd be a lot fewer of them.
Well here’s Trump saying he would negotiate for Chinese factories to have the same environmental regulations as US factories.
I wish President Trump good luck with this, it'll happen right after President Sanders defeats the invading spider-people. Pretty sure other countries are sovereign entities; there's a huge amount of whining even within the EU about cross-national regulations. Until the US is agreeable to complying by other countries regulations (hahahaha), I don't think we'll have much success convincing them to submit to ours.
China was willing to bail out the US debt in 2008
People way overplay this meme. China was buying tons of US debt before 2008 and they bought tons of treasuries afterward. As do many world governments & corporations seeking a safe haven for money. It just happened there was more debt for sale in 2008-09 then usual. I doubt there was much "political" motive behind it as merely seeing treasuries as a solid & safe investment in a world economy that was in trouble.
