Renegade

78 million is peanuts compared to what is collected. Only 3% of tourists actually apply. It will have no impact on tourists decision to come to Canada.

I agree. But doesn't that contridict your position earlier? ie "We can't have that". Now you are saying that you want the best on the team.

No I think you misundersand what I ask. The incident I gave at the top of the thread is for a publicly institution putting barriers to sports based upon gender. Your example is of a commercial event. The commercial event, has every right to put the best mix of players together which generates demand for that event. If they choose to segregate men and women because then it can sell two events, more power to them. BTW, the PGA might actually benefit by letting the men an women play together, but could even the playing field by handicapping the stronger players (presumably the men) My question is for public sporting facilities and institutions.

Yes they might. But who is to say that gender is a better qualifier of who gets to participate in sports than ability. If boys are better at sports, maybe there ought to be more of them playing it than women. Either that, or women would flock to those sports which they are better at. The PGA and LPGA are commercial events. They are free to restrict the field of players to whatever generates teh most demand for the event. If they think there is market demand for segregated golf they are free to segregate by gender, race, age, or whatever they choose. As a society we have been used to segration by gender, so it doesn't really cause uproar. Race might be a different story simply because of sensitivities. We can't? Why not?

You guys are way off in your assumptions on how much is paid to service the debt: link

Looks like Tie and Leanne have settled! Not sure what Tie was doing anyway, Leanne is much hotter than Belinda. picture

Yes, of course. I'm assuming that the money is borrowed for a worthwhile purpose. In retrospect, that is probably a bad assumption given the use that was made of the money. Of course, if a government is going to waste the money, then even a loan at 0% is a bad deal (both for the borrower and the lender).

It is a 'social program' because it is a way to redistribute income from one group of Canadians to another. It is not simply a redistribution of 4% to the bond-holding public. The government (and by proxy the population) get something for it. They get the time-value of money. IOW they get to use the money. If the government is only paying 4%, it is getting a great deal from the bondholders, rather than running a social program for the bondholders.

You are exactly correct. There are other mechanisms for enabling best use of the property. If there is a better use of the property, the market will value its price accordingly, and give the existing residents a financial incentive to dispose of the property toward the better use. All this to say that expropriation in this case is not a societal necessity. Just let the market work its magic!!!

Most tourists aren't even aware of the GST let alone the GST exemption. It will have close to no impact.

Wrong! Their reason d'etre is to keep their supporters supporting them and garner more support. Their supporters want less government not more, and until that changes that is what they should do. There are two factors which make up a government deficit or a surplus: The amount the government spends and the amount the government collects. If it deems (correctly) that it is spending too much, it shoudl cut, independ of how much it collects, and hence independant of if there is a surplus or deficit. However, the right fiscal thing to do would be to adjust the amount collected so that surplus is eliminated.

kimmy, your earlier statement does not restrict the tangible benfit to the community to simply infrastructure projects. I would read your earlier statement as indicating that if there was a monetary benefit to the community, such as putting up expensive houses where there were cheap houses, that would be an acceptable use, so long as the gain was sufficient. Do you not see that when a government does this it is an egregious violation of property rights? The property rights are violated even when the property is confiscated for infrastructure projects, but in that case, I can't see any other solution.

Liam, I agree with you. If no distinction is made, the power of government is virtually unchecked in its ability to confiscate assets for what it deems is the public good. There really should be a clear definition on what property is eligible for expropriation, and what is acceptable "public good". For example is land the only property which can be expropriated? Should a government be able to expropriate your car if it deems that others can best use the car for car-pooling and thus is in the public good?

Many people have savings in accounts earning 1% or less. Another way of looking at this is the govenment is paying down debt earning effectively 4% instead of giving money back to the taxpayer so they can earn 1%.

Let me try and understand what you are saying: Occupations which put lives at risk (such as firefighter or combat arms), it is ok to consider physical standards, and by doing so we can justify segregation and discrimmination in those occupations. Occupations which are non-critical and simply for entertainment value, physical standards are less important, so integration of genders is ok. Is that what you are trying to say?

What I don't understand RB, is that if you acknowledge that as far as strength, endurance and several other physical attributes that women are inferior to men, then does it not logically follow that professions which require strength and endurance would naturally give a preference to men? You say strength in an occupation such as a firefighter is a different issue. Why? It looks like the same issue to me, but with a double standard being applied.

Long Branch Homeowners Take Fight Against Eminent Domain Abuse to Appeals Court When the government can sieze property from a private party to give it to another privaate under the pretext of "the public good" clearly they have gone too far. Abuse such as this is why we clearly need property rights enshrined in our Charter.

But wasn't your original complaint that the market was too complacent and let them get away with a lesser standard than any other product. On one hand you say you leave it to the market to decide, on the other hand you say that the market is basicly getting duped, and is too stupid to know what it is gettting. Which is it?

I agree. All of the above! I should add that there is one additional and signficant reason that it is wrong: The state generally uses coercion and threat of violence in order to enact the equalization. It amounts to an "the end justifies the means" excuse. It is the means which is wrong.

Yes it's wrong. The state should not have the mandate to equalize for a couple of reasons: 1. What is "equal" is a subjective call. You may start of rich, and I may start of with good looks. Is that equal or not? Should just the wealth be equalized? 2. Why would it be ok for the state to do the equalization but not others? Is it ok for me to rob Bill Gates and donate the money to the starving in Africa using the same justification as the state? 3. Life isn't fair. We should all get used to that without interference from the state as some proxy for God.

Interesting perspective, but have you seem to have the view that the prenup only matters if the marriage doesn't stays intact. This is not strictly true, the existance (or lack of) a prenup affects the marriage even when it is intact. If a prenup doesn't exist, the financially disadvantaged party (frequently the man) may opt to stay in the marriage for economic reasons, where he otherwise would have left.

For those of you who think segregation is justified, I have two questions. 1. There are argueably some sports in which women are as good as or better than men (eg long distance swimming, figure skating). Do you think in such sports segregation is still justified? 2. If I can demonstrate that some races have characteristics which give them an disadvantage in certain sports, would you be a proponent that we should segregate those races in those sports?

Yes, in that case I would blame Toyota. Show me how software vendors have done that.I thought I did up in a previous post but I now see that I repeated a link instead of adding a second one. I would edit my previous post but somebody has alread quoted it so I will leave the mistake. I will post the link here: http://www.informationweek.com/news/showAr...cleID=175700809 It woudl seem that if Microsoft issues a patch or acknowledges a security vunerability, you accuse them of making "security codes available to crooks". If they don't acknowledge a security vunerabilty or issue a patch, you would accuse them of being decietful, misleading the public and covering up. Given that they didn't intentionally create the software defect, what under the circumstances would you have them do? The OS permitted the intrusion in the same way that Toyota permits car theives to steal your car. Would you permit downloading if it had no effect? or if it had a detrimental effect? I would. Yes, I would. I didn't mean to suggest that the economic effect was the only one. There are many reasons why I believe downloading should be permissable.

You are quite right. I retract my suggestion. Really all we are doing is tryng to find a way to incent creators to create ideas while at the same time encouraging people to use those ideas. The current royalty scheme does incent creators, but can add barriers to people using those ideas. True, but the question was whether they considered it theft. Even if people do walk across a private property, they don't consider it theft. ------------- I agree with you that since the morality of this issue is a pragmitic invention, I as a consumer want to share in the proceeds, or I will find a way to revolt (eg by downloading). The only reason that many CDs are now $9.99 instead of $40 is that music companies are faced with the threat of dowloading. The beneficial economic effect of downloading is that it provides competition where there would otherwise be none and thus keeps prices low.

I agree. The point I was originally responding to was that I asserted that the reproduction and reuse of IP was not a moral transgression. It is however, and economic and incentive issue. How do we create an economic incentive system which will encourage new ideas? This is not just a technical point, it should be a requirement of the compensation scheme. If the incremental cost to use the idea is zero, and the incremental effort to the idea creator is zero. I don't see why there should be incremental revenue to the idea creator, or at least that incremental revenue should be shared by lowering the cost to the idea users. Ideally, we would assign a fair compensation for the idea based upon the effort and skill involved in creating that idea. We would then somehow collect contribution from each user of the idea totaling the amount required to compensate the creator. The more people who used an idea, the less it should cost each individual user. IOW, ideally we should incent the wider use of useful ideas not disincent them. I'm not either. People moral compass on stealing derive from whether they deprive someone of that product. Stealing a CD from a store, deprives the store of the ability to sell that physical CD. Copying a flie does not. Similarily most people would consider it stealing if they managed to hack into a bank account and electronicly transfer funds to themselves. So stealing doesn't really require the item to have a physical manifestation.