So, it turns out that all these grasping and greedy gremlins are toiling, night and day, for our benefit! They are our slaves, rather than the other way round! Dumb fucks, we sure outsmarted them!
Sounds like a good argument for having innovation money awarded to many different people with different ideas competing for government research funding, rather than mostly accumulating in the pockets of a tiny elite of megalomaniac multibillionaire entrepreneurs. You can’t simultaneously worship at the shrine of that tiny elite and also declare that excessive concentration of wealth in the hands of a few stifles innovation.
This is just standard libertarian repetition of dogmatic pieties largely untouched by reality. For one thing, nobody’s proposing a world where every idea has to be approved by a large committee or a government body, and for another, large committees and government bodies have frequently approved some amazingly innovative ideas.
What you fail to note though in this particular instance, it was because of NASA program that SpaceX could come into being. Also, a lot of the money for ventures by Elon Musk is from the government.Who knows if left to his own devices he would have invested time and effort into his current ventures?
And while the advancement of science is certainly a worthy goal, as well as is deciding to help people in Africa in a way that a particular billionaire thinks is best, it does not address the fact that there were about 15 million people in the US that were food insecure.
There is also no guarantee that they will continue to be charitable, or that others who benefit from the large income inequality that exist will take up their mantle after they are gone.
All of that is well and good - the existence of rich people isn’t a problem. They can do what they want with the money that they have left over from taxation, and I’m sure they could do good things with that money. Trimming their wealth down from $100 billion in net worth to $50 billion in net worth isn’t going to be much of a burden. That’s true even if you reduce their wealth down to $25 billion. There comes a point when the money doesn’t matter anymore.
Having a system of economic redistribution is necessary to free up more capital so that it is spread throughout the economy more evenly and so that more people can participate in the economic activity. We have 80% of the country living paycheck to paycheck. That limits their financial decision making. That limits their financial freedom, and you could even argue that it limits their personal freedom. If someone is spending a total of 60-70 hours a week either at work or traveling to and from work just to get barely get by, they aren’t really all that “free”
We can have billionaires, but they should coexist with a healthier and more vibrant middle class
Yeah this is not relevant. The Republican party gets smaller and smaller. I think people will see the presidential candidate for leadership skills, not so much left right stuff. The president will sign whatever bills the Democratic congress can pass. If the Senate stays Republican in 2020, the fear of “socialism” is ridiculous. They will fix healthcare and it will just be an expanded Obamacare with subsidies. Medicare for all is down the road, maybe 8 years.
Older democrats are more moderate but the calls you get are likely some kind of astroturfing campaign. Most of the older Dems I’ve spoken to, and I mean at least 70, tent to be repulsed by the GOP let alone Trump.
I suspect this is probably where we’re headed not because it’s the best system but it’s the path that’s most politically expeditious and feasible. At least some republican governors and legislatures want federal money, and those that don’t are, well, rock fucking stupid, and risk turning red states purple as we saw in Louisiana and Kansas. Republicans can only fall on that sword so many times.
Even so, this is not a great system because the healthcare system is still a patchwork and an expensive one at that. It would be better to overhaul the system and implement a full-on national health system that provides public hospitalization and insurance options and allows for private market solutions for those who want to pay for them.
If that 80% number is real, the 80th percentile household is making $130k/y. Which suggests the problem is with their decision making, not their lack of funds. Someone else having more money than me does not limit my freedom. If I want more money, I have the means to aquire it without legislating it away from other people.
This whole thing is just faith-based poppycock… I know because I used to argue it… but the emboldened is particularly striking, given as it was written
… on a computer, whose basic template was developed by government funding (British and American) during WW2 and the post-WW2 era
… using a communications network which was first brought into national use by the Kingsbury Commitment of 1913, giving ATT a monopoly on wired communications, these wires to form the backbone of the first commercial and individual access to…
… the Internet, another government-created entity, first consisting of connections between four universities, where, over time, DARPANET became ARPANET became the NSF which then transferred control of the internet to commercial entities in the mid 1990s because of the explosion of individual use of the internet caused by…
… the creation of the WWW by Tim Berners Lee, a government employee working in a government facility (CERN), to do the sort of science only governments seem capable of doing…
… Oh, and let us not forget that the Kingsbury Commitment monopoly + the WW2 investment gave ATT the necessary funds to conduct basic research into such things as the transistor, laser, microwave communications, et al. Money, forced from the consumer, to ATT, by the government, which lead to innovation.
Sam, if I went back and researched your examples, I will easily find tons of government assistance - tax breaks, innovation credits, basic research, more - and I won’t even have to make the case that the entire communications network which makes SpaceX function is a creation of the government through war, investment, monopoly creation, and research.
SpaceX only exists because of NASA. It was NASA funding that saved them from bankruptcy and a legacy of NASA engineering, research and infrastructure that enabled them to achieve the things they have. I think it’s more fair to say that SpaceX is NASA’s successful insurance project to circumvent some of the long standing inefficiencies foisted upon them by Congress and a Republican party devoted to feeding a bloated military Aerospace industry within their respective districts.
So, you’ve read your Rand, right? I have too, so let’s discuss:
Does Elon Musk receiving a government loan… ala Orren Boyle… does that make him a Moocher or a Looter? I’ve always been a bit confused between the two, and now we have a real-world example… provided by you, thx… to discuss!
It’s alway seemed to me, Sam, that a Looter was a person who would be a Randian Producer, but devoted his energies into getting subsidies, loans, monopoly power, and the like for his (obviously) wasteful, inefficient, non-innovative enterprise.
And a Moocher is someone who just doesn’t want to work at all, the lowest of the Randian low. These, I thought, were the “welfare queens” in Rand’s America… like the inhabitants of Starkeville, WI, after the Barnes’s (IIRC) motor factory closed.
Sam decided to do some faith-based defense of Capitalism over Socialism, we’re showing him that the facts do not support this conclusion as readily as he assumes. I decided to bring in Ayn Rand because I’ve always wondered about this, and feel that Sam might have some insights as to how Musk fits the Randian archetype for evil. Feel free to join in!
I am not sure why you would call the OP bogus. The post was about a personal experiences situation that was coloring the poster’s perception, though not their enthusiasm. They wanted to know if there was a broader dataset that would reinforce their anecdotal perception, or was this just being blown out of proportion. And, of course, there is the enforced perception that people abandoning the Democratic Party will be reaching for the comforting arms of the Republican Party, because, what else is there, when, really, the No-Party is what is strongest right now.
