The point is that if you’re not out to alleviate suffering, whatever your religious or non-religious motivations are counts for bupkis.
Almost no one is pro-suffering, but plenty of people find convenient excuses to ignore suffering and pretend the suffering is about the healthy, well-fed, and wealthy. Catholicism means exactly zero to those of us who aren’t Catholic.
At the risk of distracting the audience from the titanic battle between pizza and Bricker, there seems to be a bit of a contradiction there.
If doing good works so as not to go to jail (i.e. paying taxes that help in part feed the hungry) doesn’t count as charity, then how can charity undertaken to earn your way into Heaven count? If you believe your choices are eternal bliss or eternal suffering, any acts that earn you option A are hardly voluntary. Or at least, no more than acts that keep you out of jail are.
If the doctrine is indeed what I’ve bolded above, there’s absolutely a requirement to do charity.
Charity can be effected through the law. The people as whole can be charitable, it doesn’t have be an individual act. This is an old argument. I forget who it was, maybe de Tocqueville, who discussed the difference between public and private charity. Something along the lines of 10 children in need of shoes recieving private charity will result in 1 of them being given a pair of the finest shoes while the rest still go barefoot. With public charity all of them will be given shoes, but of such poor quality that they will wear out and all 10 are soon barefoot again.
However, I never thought this argument was about charity, or even greed. I thought is was about the guy being a dick.
Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die.
Are you telling me you found a logical contradiction in a religious doctrine!?!?!? 
A Pizza Debate?
Hells YES!
I want to participate!
Totinos sucks hard core
Tombstone over Red Baron
Dominos IS improved
Does Godfathers still exist?
Minsky’s is better than Papas or the Hut!
Pizza tastes better than Politics! 
Oh and Onions are gross!
This changes EVERYTHING!!!
I know, I know. Worse than that, I’m in danger of arriving at the oh-so-original conclusion that there’s no such thing as a purely altruistic act.
In truth, I work in charity and my settled opinion is that I don’t give a tinker’s cuss what people’s motivation is, as long as they’re giving. Shame, self-promotion, fear of damnation, whimsy, attention-seeking, guilt, duty, personal morality, pure sentimentality - a gift is a gift. From the perspective of the giver, there may well be different moral dimension to “coerced” vs “voluntary” gifts; from the perspective of the beneficiary, there really isn’t - and it doesn’t behove charities to be sniffy about it.
Aaand when it comes right down to it, Bricker offers a semantic nit-pick. It seems his complaint was only with the exact verbiage used.
Perhaps Ask the Pizza Guy should have called the CEO an avaricious scumbag. Or a self-serving prick. Or maybe a money-loving arse.
Anyway Ask the Pizza Guy, if you are still here, give it up. My comrade Bricker is slipperier than a barrel of hagfish bathed in olive oil with a side order of PolyTetrafluoroethylene dipping sauce.
Pizza! Fancy you in an argument with Bricker. How’ve you been?
Actually, the OP has not returned to this thread since his Original Post and I am considering a move to either MPSIMS or The BBQ Pit for this thread.
Why?
Other people are actually debating it appears.
(From a biblical/religious perspective - )
[QUOTE=Luke 21]
As Jesus looked up, he saw the rich putting their gifts into the temple treasury. 2 He also saw a poor widow put in two very small copper coins. 3 “Truly I tell you,” he said, “this poor widow has put in more than all the others. 4 All these people gave their gifts out of their wealth; but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on.”
[/QUOTE]
True charity comes from the heart first and not the pocket book - if you are forced to do charitable things, then its not really ‘charity’.
That being said - I agree with Stanislaus in that I could care less the motivations of the person giving - those that are in need don’t either.
Pizza guy wins by DQ.
edit, didn’t realize this wasn’t the pit or I’d elucidate…
Actually, I had a round of extraordinary amounts of hours at my job which precluded me from internet debates, whereas just puttering around on the net checking my email/updating my other threads was possible.
I had also little intention of following up on this thread as the whole purpose behind it was sort of ignored- Bricker had been moaning about how the left-leaning website was against him and so forth, so I wanted to provide a safe haven for him to debate one on one. That never happened so I largely don’t see the point of the thread, really.
A debate involving more than one person would have been easy enough on the previous thread which inspired this, so it’s rather redundant.
Although the same-day dogpile of posts indicating I had left and disqualified myself was pretty amusing. Also fun to watch certain people go well, your other posts were great, but calling Bricker out on his BS well that’s just uncalled for.
I’m sorry to those folks. Didn’t realize my sole purpose here was to be a crowd pleaser. 
Now, as for my specific response. There’s been a few posts since my last one, and we’re clearly not following “the rules” I laid out, so don’t mind if I do some consecutive posting.
You can feel free to argue absurdities, but I was foolishly rather hoping we could talk about real life.
Would that be too much to ask? The alternatives presented were a laughably small price increase or a laughably small amount of labor control tightening.
Instead, what he said was that there would be a simultaneous raising of prices and hours would be cut so that some people wouldn’t qualify for care, which means lowering hours below 30.
Now, that’s already an overreaction, and even if he were cutting hours exactly enough to pay for the additional expense, or if he were raising prices exactly enough to pay for it, suggesting that he will do both indicates that he intends to make money off of the deal, rather than break even.
This is much like when delivery charges were raised but driver reimbursement remained static or did not keep pace. That means the companies involved ended up making more money, rather than simply covering costs, while misleading customers about what those charges were for.
So there are several issues here, all of which point to greed:
**1. It’s demonstrably true using very simple math that a price increase of about 14 cents per pizza alone would pay for the cost of this, in its entirety.
So already we have an inequity, where Papa John’s is screaming that they’ve been gravely wounded by this law and will be forced to do drastic things to pay for it, when we already know that this is a lie by extreme exaggeration.
** 3. Since the company will not be paying out the benefits required to employees under 30 hours in many cases, they are hurting the worker and avoiding the cost that they are then claiming they need to increase prices over.**
That’s where the greed comes in. Not only have they gone above and beyond the simple “pay for it” solution, they’ve gone into abuse the worker and the customer mode, and will stand to profit for it, while thousands of their own employees suffer.
So from whence comes the term “Greedy Fuck”?
Right there.
It’s clear as day.
I believe you’re throwing in unnecessary verbiage here. Who are you trying to impress?
I’ve “Preemptively” done nothing. This was in response to reported statements mister Schnatter had made. In other words, there’s nothing preemptive about it.
His proposed solution was X and Y together when a fraction of X was required.
I responded that his math was way off, and the result of his proposed solution would drastically harm his own worker base, shaft his customers, and make him even wealthier.
As such, he’s a greedy fuck, and since he’s hurting the people who made him rich, that makes him a greedy soulless fuck.
That’s all a tempest in a bottle, because now he may be recanting at least part of what he said.
Now why would he do that?
** 1. He didn’t say it to begin with, if that’s the case then shame on bad reporters. But I don’t believe that’s the case here.**
or
** 2. He did say it, and he’s now backtracking because the shitstorm he stirred up exposed him as a lying sack of greedy fuckitude.**
In which case, he’s now also a cowardly greedy soulless fuck, but at least his workers won’t suffer for his insanity.
Well I think this one is pretty cut and dried. Since I can show with math that he’s not only lying, but hurting people, and standing to gain from it, there’s really no grey area where you can go “well, maybe he’s not greedy”.
Although degrees of greed are open for debate, if the situation is that something will cost 8 dollars and someone raises prices 20 dollars and also lays off a bunch of people, that is mathematically an overreaction, and threatening to do something like that over political reasons (another example of which: CEO of coal company laying off workers because Obama got re-elected, textbook definition of spite and political posturing) and standing to gain profit from it while harming the worker, is a textbook example of being a greedy soulless fuck.
I mean really you can only debate at this point if he’s a greedy greedy fuck, or a greedy piggy piggy piggy fuck piggy piggy fuck. That’s the only debate remaining.
That you’d sit there and go “it’s not greedy” is amusing to me on some level, but on another level I attribute it to your political leanings. I’ve noticed conservative Republicans have a reflexive need to defend the indefensible greedy white man who shafts everyone else. That’s like their entire reason for waking up in the morning. But I digress.
Hahahahahahaha no.
The government can tell me I need to be insured in order to drive a car around. The reason for that is because society suffers if I ram into things and I’m not insured and not able to personally pay for things. Society also suffers if I’m injured or get an operable ailment but I can’t afford it even if I worked 80 hours a week, because I’ll go to the emergency room and get care and them someone else’s bill goes up to pay for it. That’s inequitable.
What is equitable is if I must pay for my own healthcare. Well I can’t afford it on 8 bucks an hour, and the employer won’t raise incomes for their workers because they have no motive to do so.
So, here’s a case where the government is putting forward a tax to pay for it, essentially. And that is going to be related to my pay, which means a higher amount that my employer must pay. But the employer isn’t really being taxed, here…
The employer is just passing the cost along to the consumer. Ultimately the consumer is being taxed an additional few cents per pizza. Hardly earth-shattering to ensure people are insured, which is the profit-based way we solve these matters.
What I won’t be dragged into is a debate as to whether it’s something the government can do- clearly they can. That’s settled.
Further, I won’t be dragged into a debate regarding whether it’s something the government should do- they do it all the time, that’s basically all the government does. And that’s when it’s doing its job in the first place.
But I know you’d like to have that debate, since it immediately presupposes that the government having a place in our society is up for debate. In libertarian-fantasy circles perhaps, but in the real world: no.
So that *fruitful *debate will not happen. Because it’s more of the “Magical” fruit variety, and the more of it you eat, etc.
Hahaha bull. Having a safety net mandated by the government is the only way these workers will get their doctor’s bills paid for. There’s no national charity paying everyone’s doctor bills, and people under a certain income level cannot afford to see doctors.
Conservatives like to wax poetic about charity, as if charity solves everything.
If the police force was funded by charity, there would be police, posted at every rich person’s mansion, and nowhere else.
But of course. The government shouldn’t provide for the sick, needy, young, old, or uneducated. All of that should be paid for whenever some rich guy feels like it.
If they’re having an extra fantastic super-rapaciously profitable month, maybe a few hundred kids get food for a couple weeks. Yay! How generous. And then in a down economy, or whenever rich guy doesn’t feel like donating, those who need medical care, or schooling, or the police to come to their house, well, they can go chew themselves in the taint.
I know that’s a nice little setup for the guy who pays into the system more than he gets out of it. And it’s his privilege to fight for his own interests. I’m just here to point out that if we ran the world his way, only he would be able to be comfortable. In the government pays for school, medicine, social security, etc world, all of a sudden people who pay into the system their whole lives get something out of it, instead of simply 7 bucks an hour until they can’t work anymore. A net for them.
Again, there’s no debate between charity and government. Charity does not fill the role that government does. Even if we erased taxes from the books completely, there would be no charity to take its place that could do the job that government does. So whenever I hear right-leaning folks talk about charity as an alternative to publicly-funded things that poor people need, I remember: There’s actual medicine, and there’s faith healing.
Charity is essentially faith healing. Sometimes it “works” and makes us feel better about ourselves, but most of the time it doesn’t come close to solving any actual problem. Whereas a properly funded public education system eliminates the need to have bake sales to send poor people to school.
It’s just ridiculous to compare the two, but conservatives such as yourself constantly do this. Let’s talk about the role of government, let’s talk about how great charity is.
Instead of handouts, how about paying the people in the workforce what they need to survive? How about mandatory minimums? Especially when that minimum is a few cents more than what it is now, and covers almost everyone?
That beats having to wait for some person to feel bad for me and give me a quarter. Charity, by comparison, simply blows. There’s no contest. It’s decentralized, disorganized, unreliable, and without public regulation, a lot of it is corrupt and/or a scam. How much of your donation actually goes to the people in need, for most charities?
Whereas, all 14 cents of that increase to the price of the pie, goes to my healthcare cost. All of it. And I don’t need to beg you for a donation.
That’s how you run a society. Not by the whims of the people who want to feel magnanimous, by** properly governing based on the real needs of the people.**
And this right here is bullcrap.
This isn’t John Schnatter being taxed to pay for other people’s healthcare. As already stated, he’s passing the costs onto the consumer, who by all accounts, is willing to pay 14 extra cents.
So please, spare me this He’s greedy because he’s being asked for charity and he’s refusing nonsense.
This affects Schnatter not one bit, if he simply passes the cost along, which was his stated plan.
Why he’s a greedy fuck is because he goes well above and beyond that, and lies to us about it, and hurts the people who made him rich in the process.
At no point was HE asked for ANYTHING.
That’s why you frame the argument the way you do, because when I un-twist all the spin, it shows that your argument isn’t based in reality, and you, like Schnatter, are full of it.
He’s possibly entitled to ask his customers to pay 14 cents more per pie.
Maybe. If he’s telling the truth about his costs, which he hasn’t been truthful to us so far, so why should I believe him?
But he is, by definition, using real math based on his numbers, seeking more than what he’s entitled to for these costs.
Ergo, by your own definition, he’s a greedy person.
So add the word fuck to it at the end, and we’re in agreement.
Glad I could get you to come around to reality.
This post is a great example of the alternate reality a conservative mind lives in all day.
See, for you Bricker, this isn’t about a tax to pay for the healthcare that the poor are already sucking from emergency rooms, essentially, pushing the tax from the hospital bills on those who pay, to the paycheck of the worker who gets the care. Ultimately a reorganization of where the cost is being paid for, no additional benefits are really being added to the system. Different people are being charged, but in a more equitable and fair manner.
It’s fair for someone who is buying pizza to pay for the pizza person’s living expenses. That is, of course, why a person is delivering pizza- to make a living.
I’m not talking about plasma screen TVs and Mercedes for everyone. That is the logical leap you make on your own.
It’s fair to buy a pizza and have part of that cost go to the cook seeing a doctor once in a while. It’s not fair to go to the doctor and pay your doctor bill, plus the bill of people who didn’t pay.
This Affordable Care Act makes people who are irresponsible (through no fault of their own… lowering wages on workers is usually one-sided, especially when the workers are nonunion) actually responsible for their own fates.
But since they can’t magically conjure money out of their own ass, the cost is being added to the consumer. That’s also fair.
Like when gas prices rose, and so the delivery driver is paying 100 to 200 extra dollars per month. That money doesn’t come from the gasoline fairy. The customer pays that. The cost is passed along.
But instead of passing along the costs of basic necessities, which are already being charged elsewhere (to emergency rooms, for example), in a more fair and equitable manner, folks like Bricker are taking a stand.
A **brave **stand against the imaginary.
We can’t do this, because soon, the government will mandate everyone gets to have a Rolex watch. Soon, rich people will be punished for being rich. Soon, everyone’s wages will be exactly the same.
This imaginary demon, the invisible communist devil, is the object of the right’s purely religious crusade… a righteous crusade if there ever was one. To slay the fictional beast.
Keep in mind, income disparity continues to expand, and the rich have never been richer, and the poor are getting poorer. Inflation crushes the poor while wages stagnate. Costs rise but pay does not. In this lousy economy, the only people having a comfortable go of it in Obama’s evil commie socialist hellscape are the super-rich.
They’re enjoying more than a decade of temporary tax relief, for reasons which remain unclear.
We lowered taxes, and the economy tanked. We extended the low taxes, and that hasn’t magically made everything all better. And it’s not regulation that’s at fault, because less regulation and less objective regulation is the reason why so many industries failed anyway.
None of the trickle-down solutions helped. But they were tried.
What did help? The bailouts saved entire industries. And the government got repaid. And the for-profit companies are still for-profit. Capitalism lives, thanks to government intervention and regulation.
But we must stop the communist boogeyman. There’s an invisible, fictional movement led by liberals to stop rich people from being rich, and we’ve gotta stop them.
The problem we have here is that some people live in the real world, and others live in a cold war fantasyland where the fragile baby tree of capitalism is in danger of being overrun by communist weeds.
Never have the ultra-rich been so in control, so above the problems the rest of us must endure, never have they been coddled more, never have their needs been placed so high above all others.
Tax cuts when the economy is doing well. Tax cuts when the economy is doing poorly. Tax cuts when we’re at war. Tax cuts when we’re in two wars. Gosh, it reminds me of a song…
I get tax cuts in the morning,
I get tax cuts at night.
I get tax cuts in the afternoon,
It makes me feel all right.
I get tax cuts in time of peace,
And in time of war.
I extend tax cuts before I extend tax cuts,
And then I extend some more.
Capitalists are alive and well. They’re not in danger of being destroyed by liberals or Obama.
That’s a fantasy.
But the absurdity that capitalism is about to be destroyed if we increase tax rates back to where they were in the nineties, that’s laughable. You’d have to be smoking at least two joints to believe it.
The affordable care act, I’ve demonstrated just in the realm of the pizza-business, is actually affordable. And it helps poor people see a doctor. And it’s not being paid for by soaking the rich. The people ultimately paying for it are the same folks that buy the pizza. The middle and lower class folks. Hardly a tax on the super-rich.
But Bricker would like to frame this argument as liberals think Schnatter is greedy because he won’t give to charity. Because, that framing is a fantasy, and the only way folks like **Bricker **can win a debate that involves facts, is to put those facts in a place where they suffocate and die, drowned by fears that do not exist, blurred by superstition, and blinded by delusions.
If you argue something that doesn’t exist, and you argue from fear, then sure, lies can win. If you untwist and remove the distortion, and point out none of these fears or arguments put forth by the right have any basis in reality, the issue becomes a lot clearer.
If you believe in magic, and won’t let your arguments be dictated by fact-checkers, then please, by all means, join Bricker’s crusade against the imaginary creep of the evil communists.
If you like math, and reality, you understand the Affordable Care Act is about as remarkable as the government telling me I have to be insured to drive, or the bank telling me my house has to be insured if I owe them money for that same house. It’s not the Iron Curtain falling on America, destroying the flag, putting feces in your apple pie, and setting puppies on fire, as much as the hysterical Republican party wishes you to believe it is so.
If you put reality back into the discussion, the opposition has no argument.
Damn you are good Pizza Guy! Great post.
Looking forward to Bricker’s response. There’s so much wrong with pizzaguy’s soapbox speech, it’s hard to know where to begin.
But…does he even engage the straw men that pizzaguy props up, however easy that might be? Or does he just show why the argument offered is fallacious, having no obligation to buttress an argument he never made? Does he just ignore him completely? Stayed tuned, sports fans…
I, for one, am glad to learn that Capitalism won’t be destroyed if we increase tax rates. I’ve been sweating that one out since the election!
Slay the fictional beast! That’s what I say. Kill him twice, the bastard, then raise his taxes.
Askthepizzaguy, if a person has grown to adulthood on this globe, and has not aquired any knowledge or skill that the market values above the legal minimum, whos’ fault is it?