I apologize for not being more clear. I was responding to Der Trihs’ first sentence.
I don’t believe that most people who are suffering economically are doing so due to things within their control. I was born into poverty and think I’ve learned a lot from being there. I certainly did not have any control over my mom’s income. But, that being said, people can make some pretty stupid decisions that compound their problems…anyone who has lived among the extreme poor can tell you more than a few stories along these lines. There should be a course in high school about priorities in life.
There is a difference between suffering economically and living your entire life in abject povery. The former is the norm as most people living in the lowest quintile will advance beyond this point. The latter is usually due to bad decisions, drug addictions, etc. I think the latter group is largely responsible for their lot in life.
To a degree. They are also related to things like the availability of health care; which is a place that America falls far behind
In other words people were fooled and it’s the victims’ fault. Standard right wing social Darwinism.
:rolleyes: “Forget about economics”. Because if we DON’T forget about economics the inconvenient possibility comes up that economic inequality might be a motivation for street crime.
What? Time to do what you choose has nothing to do with standard of living? So much for your supposed fondness for freedom; you clearly don’t even grasp why it’s valuable.
It comes from any person or group with power, of which the government is only one.
Of course it belongs; a greater willingness to save people from the consequences of bad luck is one reason why many other countries are superior in terms of quality of life to America.
Health care is available to all Americans. It’s the insurance that we’ve been arguing about. In a country where extreme poverty means only having one television hooked up to cable, the biggest cause of health related problems in the younger age groups is obesity, sedentary lifestyle, and the use of tobacco and/or alcohol.
I’ve warned you about putting words into my mouth. Most of those “victims” knew what they were getting themselves into. Your view seems to be that anyone who is bankrupt is a victim of some ruthless corporation.
Economic inequality is the motivating factor behind hard work and trying to get ahead. Street crime is the exact opposite…it’s people trying to get ahead quickly by not working. Most people don’t resort to a life of crime because they can’t find a job and need to feed the family! What planet are you living on?
I didn’t say it is not important. I just don’t see how it relates to standard of living. Having a month off instead of two weeks doesn’t increase my standard of living…it makes me less productive. Oh, and I’d love to know what vacation time has to do with the concept of freedom.
Albeit the main one. The one that has the power to take your money and land legally. Maybe YOU should look into the definition of freedom and realize that it is not something the government hands out.
I think you are really referring to the consequences of bad decisions. Regardless, we save people from both in the U.S.
Televisions are cheap. And so is cable compared to medical care. Health care IS NOT available to all Americans, nor is insurance.
Generally yes. It’s not like any other kind of corporation is common.
The real one. The one where poor people who work hard tend to die poor. The world where the ruthless prosper. Especially in America, where the ruthless are venerated and decent people held in contempt.
:rolleyes: How are you free if you have no free time to do what you choose? And what does being “productive” have to do with quality of life?
Nonsense; nearly all freedom depends on the government. And there is at least as much if not more coercion from non-governmental sources.
No; our general philosophy towards our fellow Americans is “screw you!”
I’m aware of the Marxist definition of socialism and you are welcome to continue using it.
I and many others use it to describe countries with heavier taxation, wealth redistribution, and UHC. It’s your choice if you want to continue to be offended by it. The word “liberal” has changed from defining “free market” to “government intervention”. I do not complain and try to convert every leftist person using “liberal” to stop using that word because of the way it was used in 18th century – as you’re trying to enforce with “socialist” – it’s pointless language police work.
“Capitalist” also has negative connotations but I’m not offended if someone describes USA as a capitalist country. It is what it is.
It’s not a matter of being bloody offended, its a matter of bloody accurate. I happen to be a fine Capitalist and very much for free markets. However, just because the ignoramus Right in the US of A misuses Socialism to refer to Social Democratic Europe, doesn’t mean they’re correct.
And Marxist definition of Socialism has fuck all to do with the definition that I cited, which pre-existed bloody Marxism. I’ll leave American abuses of the word liberal alone.
It’s not bloody language police work to note that the Ignoramus Hard Right in America’s usage of Socialistic isn’t matched in the rest of the civilised English speaking world. Nor in proper learned usage either.
Wealth creation can bloody well be monopolised. Jaysus. One need only look at various Left and Right dictatorships in the Third World, where wealth creation (or more precisely the results, but same bloody effect) is monopolized by either by private oligarchies that have captured the state, or by state monopolies. It’s a big fucking problem in fact in emerging markets; corrupt elites sucking up the end results of economic wealth creation. Very opposite mind you of proper free markets.
I should be clear, my observation above should not be read as arguing Wealth Creation in a well-functioning market is a zero sum game. However, I am observing that is is an emperical fact that in distorted markets - generally dictatorships, whether oligarchic quasi state capitalist or left wing socialist - one can very well have wealth creation whose results are Extracted / Monopolised by either the state or private monopolists (or both for that matter). This is called Rents in economic literature.
Anyone who tries to explain that they are not doing “language police work” is doing “language police work.”
“Socialism” as the term has come to be used by ignoramus Americans is here to stay and wishing it away is pointless.
We also use the word “football” to describe the game of a ball played with the hands instead the feet (like other 5 billion non-USA people do) but the world has not self-destructed (yet) because of it.
You’re talking about a particular commodity or product. I was talking about the entire system of wealth creation. Nobody can monopolize that.
I interpreted your earlier post #40 to describing the entire universe of wealth creation.
Please explain how one person or one company or a tiny group of elites can hijack the entire universe of wealth creation.
If one person composes a song and another person buys it, that increase in wealth created by songwriter is not automatically in the hands of Bill Gates or Richard Branson or the Sultan of Brunei.
There is no possible way for the entire universe of wealth creation to flow into a single entity unless everyone’s brain is wired into a master computer preventing the escape of one newly composed song to be sold/bartered as a local transaction.
Saying that wealth creation can be monopolized is saying that somebody can prevent the total sum of all human ideas from manifesting itself as local transactions.
I presume we have a miscommunication here. I am speaking to a national level analysis, you seem to be speaking globally.
In the alternative, you may be taking a straw man exaggeration of my meaning of monopolise wealth creation; rather evidently even in a slave system, there is some “trickle down” surplus to the slaves. My reference was to the ordinary sense however, as one typically speaks of oligopolistic dictatorships ruling elites monopolising wealth (or extracting it). The start up entrepreneur with the song, in said systems, ends up finding himself with silent partners, for example, who skim off the profit.
If you remember, before the crash there was quite a bit of consternation from conservatives about why most people were dissatisfied with an economy which did create a good deal of wealth. As we saw, most of that went to the top 5%, with wages of the bottom 90% stagnant, and apparent increases in the standard of living happening on borrowed money. Do you consider the top 5% private monopolists? It seems a pretty broad brush. The wealth certainly didn’t go to the government.
That’s not the way it works. If the price of all things in life half, but my salary has stayed the same, have I ended up with more money? In all practical terms, yes I have. But if I’m your average bottom rung employee, I’ll most likely not take any notice of this and simply bitch that corporations are pulling in more money than they ever did before.
Your counter-factual example supposed that wages have stayed the same but that “price of all things in life half”. In that case, real income (adjusting for price changes) would double. Your wages would go twice as far if the price of everything in life was half as much as now.
It’s a nice fantasy, but as I said, that hasn’t happened in reality. Real income has been stagnant. Prices have not dropped. Rather, prices have increased at roughly the same rate that wages have increased, and so real income has not changed. For most people, their paychecks don’t really go farther today than their paychecks went years and years ago. The economy grew over the years, but the benefits of that extra production went almost exclusively to those in upper half of the income spectrum.
It was understandable that these poorer folk might “bitch” when the Wall Street Journal opinion page tried to tell them how great the economy was. The economy was not great for them. It was the same as it ever was.
No because as older products lower in price, new products come in to take the high end slots.
Figure that a low end car is equivalent to a supercar of 50 or however many years ago. The poorest of us is rich and getting richer the faster our economy grows. We just don’t notice.
You can’t make everyone rich by the standards of the day, but you can make the time delay before everyone is living up to the standards of the rich of today shorter, which is roughly equivalent to making everyone rich.