I’m sorry the government dominated insurance world failed you.
It is great that there is a class churn. It is what capitalism is all about. Those who best serve consumers are elevated, while others are not. Everyone froths at the mouth about the 1% while the top income earners are ever-changing. Everyone worries about the bottom, when those at the bottom nearly always rise up. A large part of so-called inequality is explained by differences in compensation relative to age. As a typical person proceeds through life, they start in the bottom quintile, peak somewhere in the upper quintiles, and then regress towards the end of life.
I should have said in a capitalist country, not a backwater socialist democracy that feasts on generational wealth and protects the upper class from competition.
The reason I was never even close to being tempted to join or vote for Libertarians, is because I saw from the beginning, that they actually don’t support solving ANYTHING WHATSOEVER.
They are essentially right-wing Republicans, who want to use entertainment drugs legally. Nothing more. This is no doubt why they always end up allying themselves to the Republicans, if they get anywhere near having power themselves.
Look at their approach: it’s the same as the “free-market” people in the larger world. It consists of simply declaring that nothing is to be done consciously, and that all problems will solve themselves, if we just ignore them.
The fact that every single time that a large region has lost all government ( and which fails to either recover it, or roll directly into a dictatorship of some kind), devolves into complete violent squalor and produces nothing but death and decay, completely escapes their notice.
Just as it is invisible to them, that the reason why many government programs are inefficient, isn’t due to the lack of private for profit magic; it’s due to the program being sabotaged by the opposition to it existing at all, who shackle it with all manner of regulations and limits and demands for certainty that for every dime given to genuinely needy people, that fifty dollars be spent to insure that not even ONE person gets so much as a nickel that they don’t deserve.
The subjects of the Association internationale du Congo would have been very surprised to learn this although its shareholders profited well.
Of course the assertion is not worth the electrons as it is making the mistake of assuming the difference is from the asserted idea of the consumer boycotts - there are no numbers from the data to support a conclusion like this.
Of course the numerical economic history you do not believe in…
You meant of course the fantasy country of the ideological asserted imaginings.
the actual data on the continuity of the transmission of the wealth and the association of protection is not something so easy as the ideological assertions a priori believed.
Yes there are skilled technocrats in Germany that have cobbled together something pretty good. The fact remains that in the backwaters of Europe you are familiar with, the upper class enjoys much more stability than in more capitalist countries.
So you see no difference between Republicans and libertarians on foreign policy and human rights? It’s observant people like you who ought to speak out more!
Perhaps I am forbidden to adopt your purely anecdotal style for a spell.
“But the very opposite conclusion arises in studies that follow actual flesh-and-blood individuals over time, most of whom move up across the various income brackets with the passing years. Most working Americans who were initially in the bottom 20 percent of income-earners, rise out of that bottom 20 percent. More of them end up in the top 20 percent than remain in the bottom 20 percent.”
“People who were initially in the bottom 20 percent in income have had the highest rate of increase in their incomes, while those who were initially in the top 20 percent have had the lowest. This is the direct opposite of the pattern found when following income brackets over time, rather than following individual people.”
Of course governments kill and steal more than corporations. As you endlessly talk about, governments uphold a monopoly on force. It’s illegal for corporations to use force to kill or steal.
Your plan is that we should remove those restrictions and allow thousands of corporations to have the same ability to kill and steal that one government currently has. Sensible people see that that would increase killing and stealing by a thousandfold.
As for boycotts, what happens when somebody argues with the government and tries to boycott the government? I’m sure you’re eager to answer that question. But now answer this one; if you give corporations the same freedom to act that the government has, what would happen when somebody argues with a corporation and tries to boycott that corporation?
This is why your theories won’t work. You constantly complain about how the government abuses its powers. But your solution is to give thousands of other organizations those same powers. Corporations that have the power of the government would act like the government. Worse actually; they wouldn’t have the restrain on their actions that elections put on the government.
This is the tested and failed “trickle-down theory”. The basic problem with it is that increased availability of capital and profit does not translate directly into increased jobs, because there’s just no reason it would – if I need to employ ten people to produce all the widgets my customers want, lowering my taxes doesn’t change the fact that I don’t need and therefore will not hire an eleventh person. Lowering my customers’ taxes might help (or might not, if they’re already able to afford all the widgets they want), which is why tax relief directed toward the lower to middle income ranges (which buy most of the stuff, either directly or indirectly by buying the stuff made using the tools-to-make-the-tools) is more effective than trickle-down cuts for the top income ranges.
I have a reasonable reading in the actual real economic study of the economic mobility and the challenges limited data available to make conclusions about the real transmission of the wealth, and in particular the problems of knowing the degree of the social retransmission.
But since I have learned the data based economics and not the extreme ideology pretending to be an economics, but in reality a social philosophy, I avoid the black-and-white conclusions asserted without good data to support.
My clients would be amused I think, since they are not the americain libertarians, but they are irrelevant to this in all ways.
You make simplistic claims based on a collosal amount of asserted ideas without foundation in the actual evidence and with huge confusions between the cause and the effect…
I cited the instance of the utter amoral rapacity of the corporation outside of the government framework - as an illustration of the extreme naïveté of your proposition, which packed in so many extreme assumptions … well it is boring and time consuming to unpack these.
Indeed - in the real world where there is not a government, there are fine examples of the direct corproate control (the infamous company towns outside of effective government contorl, the Belgian Congo before its nationalization and the extreme abuses that even managed to shock the racist European powers of the 1890s [although nicely profitable to the shareholders before the nationalization]).
He imagines due to his a priori conclusions based on his ideology that the corporation will behave in the same fashion as if there was the state to restrain it or them.
It is entirely unexamined what is the restraint, it is simply asserted. All the bad done by government is ascribed to the abstract entity “government” due to the ideological understanding that the entity itself is bad, not that the badness is indeed coming from the human being and the seeking of the power and the monopoly of the resources.
It is “difficult” to put seven-figure sums into a couple of widely diversified funds and live a luxurious lifestyle off the interest? What counts as “easy” on your planet? Breathing?
Supposedly 60% of the time a family fortune is gone by the time the kids have had access to it. 90% of the time it is gone by the time the grandkids have had access to it.
However I don’t know what counts as a ‘fortune’ in that situation. If it is an estate worth a few hundred thousand or maybe a few million, yeah that is possible. But if it is in the billions I"m sure trusts can be established (like the Johnsons, Rockefellers, etc do).
