Laissez-faire must exist, since the lefties on this board have repeatedly claimed that the financial crisis proves that laissez-faire has failed.
Eh. You could say the exact same thing about free speech. I hear it’s chock full of goodness, but it’s never existed anywhere. And yet you and I both still defend it. I wonder why that is?
Name one. Cite the post.
From here:
There are many more. You asked for one, there it is.
Well said Blalron!
The system is designed to extract maximum wealth from the bottom and middle and funnel it to the top.
I used to play Everquest quite a few years ago, and like most MMORPG’s, they have their own economy, trading, and banking, and acquiring items that resembles the real world.
To get really nice items, you have to raid or camp certain mobs. Well, there would be people camping mobs 24/7 or guilds locking down a zone to keep out rival guilds. Of course people would complain, but the main reason it was that was is because of the design of the system.
With the addon of instances, guilds could no longer hoard over the mobs and everyone had a fair chance.
Contrast that to where the big mega corps in conjunction with the government (Haliburton, Goldman Sachs etc) rape the system through their own greed and its easy to see its because of the design. The design that those in power along with corporations make the rules, for themselves at the expense of everyone else.
May I ask a question, please?
In P1, you state “the system” is designed to extract maximum wealth from the bottom.
In P2, you state that mega corps rape “the system”.
So it seems that “the system” both extracts, and is simultaneously the subject of rape.
I’m trying to reconcile those two, and I’m struggling a bit. If you could help me out I’d appreciate it.
Perhaps a good way to start is to help me by defining exactly what “the system” is. Just point me in the general direction.
Thanks in advance,
IdahoMauleMan
You know why I focus on income disparity? Because there are poor people who don’t have anything, and rich people who have more than they need. If enough money were taxed from the rich in order to get all people above the poverty line, their wealth would barely be affected. The only problem: the rich people refuse to give up that little bit that would barely affect them. And why–because they value their money more than people.
And, yes, it is about enforcing my morality on someone else. Of course it is. So what? All policy decisions are ultimately about that. If you want to change anything about what people do, you enforce something. Heck, on this message board, we have people trying to force both sides to agree with their morality. That’s what we do.
The suggestion that is somehow inherently wrong is a strawman. It’s actually inherent to any change of policy and laws. Heck, that’s what laws do–enforce morality on the immoral.
I hope that makes sense, as I’m a little tired. But is it really that hard to understand?
Yes, it is hard to understand. Because I think you are missing the point.
You know who has more than they need? YOU. And most of the ‘poor’ in the United States.
I know that may sound hard to believe…seeing as you are probably permanently ensconced in victim status along with contempt-of-the-rich, but there are facts to back it up. The most famous of these studies is conducted by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, who has done extensive research on the state of American poor.
A good summary of his work is six paragraphs down:
“Overall, the typical American defined as poor by the government has a car, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry and he had sufficient funds in the past year to meet his family’s essential needs. While this individual’s life is not opulent, it is equally far from the popular images of dire poverty conveyed by the press, liberal activists, and politicians.”
That description above of material wealth is more than my wife and I had about twenty-five years ago, when I was a graduate student. We didn’t have a car or air conditioning.
The standard of living described in the paragraph above is also at about the 95th percentile, at least, of all human beings worldwide. It’s a little hard to judge, of course, but you can get an idea from the square footage tables down at the bottom.
And how about you, Mr BigT? I would posit that your standard of living right now is about at the 98th percentile worldwide. Meaning that 98 percent of the people in the world are worse off than you. You have access to a computer and the Internet. I presume you are well-fed. I presume you have a roof over your head, a room to sleep in, and are in a place that is reasonably well climate-controlled. It sounds like you have had access to some basic education.
There are billions of people dying of starvation and disease all over the world, right now. Whilst you and I are typing on our computers in a cozy room somewhere.
So what do you suggest? That in a land of such freedom, in an exceptional country that has fostered the greatest explosion of innovation, wealth creation and personal freedom known in the history of mankind, you propose to take (by force) from the 99+th percentiles and give it to the 95th through 98th percentiles. Because you think that life is so, so very unfair.
The first question, of course, is why do you think that the poor people wouldn’t blow their newly appropriated wealth on hookers and booze? Why do you think they would spend it wisely?
Second, do you understand what this would do to prices?
Third, do you think there is any sort of moral hazard attached to your plan?
Slee
As admirable as Idaho’s plan for world-wide wealth redistribution may be, it is a bit premature. Baby steps, comrade, baby steps!
Unless, of course, he is poaching Sam’s territory, singing another tiresome aria about “liberal hypocrisy”.
But, of course, it is not merely the existence of the pampered rich that makes such a global utopia a daunting task, there are many, many challenges. We of the egalitarian left don’t blame these problems on the rich, but on the institutions, customs, and habits of which they are merely a noisesome symptom. Can it be done? Probably, I think. But is there another challenge so clearly worthy of the genius of a great nation and a noble people?
If not us, who? If not now, when? Its taking a lot longer than we thought, and we could use your help, if you’ve nothing better to do.
I’m not claiming liberals are necessarily hypocrites - I’m saying their philosophy is incoherent, often has the effect of hurting the poorest people, and is based on a whole bunch of ideas that are either not well thought-out or flatly, demonstrably wrong.
Also, I’m getting sick and tired of liberals attempting to claim the moral high ground, as if they own the claim to compassion, understanding, tolerance, and caring for their fellow man.
Take BigT’s message above. It’s completely wrong from top to bottom. It displays an ignorance of just how much money the wealthy really have, and of the nature of poverty and the effects of large-scale wealth redistribution.
Take this quote:
This is an utter load of crap. If you confiscated ALL of the income of everyone earning over $500,000 per year, you would raise about 1.5 trillion dollars - which would just barely cover the deficit before you even tried to bring one American above the poverty line. But of course, you can’t take all their income, or they’d all stop working and earning. So how about we just double the taxes on them? In 2008, that group paid $343 billion in tax. Double it, and you get another $343 billion - enough to pay for about 1/4 of the deficit, or about 1/2 of the military budget, or less than half of the ‘stimulus’.
But BigT only wants to take a little - so little that they’d ‘barely be affected’. So how about 10%? Raise taxes on the rich by 10% across the board. Now you get about $34 billion dollars. Obama added five times as much as that in discretionary spending in the last two years, and last I looked there were still Americans below the poverty line. That amount is roughly 5% of the current budget deficit - a drop in the bucket.
You liberals need to learn that ‘the rich’ aren’t your endless honeypot of gifts, and that you’re not going to solve poverty on the backs of the wealthy.
Of course, if you double taxes on everyone earning more than $500,000, you’re soon going to have a lot fewer of them. The deadweight loss of taxation will eat into that, tax avoidance activity will increase, more wealth will move offshore, and the economy will slow down.
In addition, if you starting giving all that money to the poor, it would act as a disincentive for them to work, and the ranks of the poor would begin to increase. Eventually, you’d have a smaller upper class, a larger underclass, institutionalized poverty, and an economy in the permanent doldrums.
This is all pretty basic math and economics.
BY the way, the total wealth of all the people in America with net worth over $2 million in 2004 was 8.9 trillion dollars. That’s all the houses, stocks, bonds, companies, and other investments they might have. BigT says that you could take so little that their wealth would be ‘barely affected’. How much is that? 10%? If so, that gets you $890 billion - once. Of course, to get that money out you’d have to force them to sell stocks, bonds, real estate - you’d be pulling money out of the productive economy, selling off assets, and giving the cash to the poor. The economy would suffer.
Liberals claim they want to help the poor, but many of of them support highly-paid unions, even when those unions collude to keep lower-paid workers out of the job market. For example, the Davis-Bacon act forbids any company that contracts with the government from paying any less than prevailing union wages - freezing out poor non-union workers.
When Republicans tried to get a temporary halt to Davis-Bacon for the stimulus, they were unanimously opposed by Democrats, even though it was clear that halting Davis-Bacon would have sped up infrastructure projects by eliminating prevailing-wage reviews, and would have increased the spending multiplier because more people could have been hired for the same money, and the people hired would be unemployed workers and not union workers already making a good wage. But no, Democrats wouldn’t hear of it. Their allegiance to big labor turned out to be more important than helping poor, unemployed people get a job.
The same goes for trade tariffs. Liberals claim to want to help the poor, but they march against ‘sweatshops’ in foreign countries and vote for trade barriers that prevent poor African textile workers from competing against high-priced union labor. Of course, the unions lobby for those laws and fund the protests and organize them.
Modern American liberals are no so much champions of the poor as they are advocates for well-off middle class union members and special interest groups.
As for the morality of liberalism, I happen to think it’s immoral to constantly foster class division for the purpose of building political support for taking property from people by force. I think the fixation on what other people have rather than on making your own life better is materialistic and greedy. I think that assuming that whole classes of people can not survive without your help is condescending, and the hatred liberals show towards the wealthy business class and towards conservatives is bigotry. So I’m not longer going to stand by while liberals wrap themselves in the language of compassion and morality. You’d don’t get to plant your flag on the moral high ground with impugnity.
Well put.
Why don’t liberals understand that when you reward behavior you get more of it?
Please don’t get let it get you down, Sam, and get ‘sick and tired’ of it. It’s a smokescreen.
The support of big-government solutions, and the supposed compassion and caring isn’t for their fellow man. It’s for THEMSELVES.
As I’ve tried to conclusively demonstrate in multiple threads. All of the supposed government intervention to do this, or that, is cloaked in claims of help for ‘the other guys’…for the great unwashed masses, so to speak. But once you start to dig in a little bit, it becomes clear that they are doing it for themselves.
Shit, they got us! Caught dead to rights, we are. Idaho must have gotten hold of a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of ACORN. All our plans and schemes, shot to hell. Damn!
You mean like the rampant greed at the expense of the working class, which the rich are practicing right now?
Yeah, we’re getting a lot of that right now.
Good deal. So what was the point of you posting
“Let’s just say that favoring free markets over state controlled markets doesn’t require one to favor “greed”.”
What was the point of Sam Stone saying
“elucidator, it seems that your position is that free markets don’t exist.”
when in fact, free markets don’t exist.
Regulated markets exist. Just like there is no absolute right to free speech.
FYI… regulations = State control. There are no markets that exist today in the civilized world without a relatively high level of State control.
Free market bullshit is a fantasy, just like Communism. There are lightly regulated markets and heavily regulated markets. “Free markets” is a fantasy in a civilized nation just like Communism.
And in this thread, failed miserably.
Where in the world did you show this?
You couldn’t even show that you understood the difference between wealth (as in resources) that are available to extract and wealth that has been created.
Your brand of capitalism is all about greed. It’s all about Social Darwinism. Winner take all, everyone else can eat cake if they can afford it. When people like you get your way you get countries like Mexico and Somalia.
Every time we let Conservatives run things we get economic collapses and it takes Liberals to come along and fix it all up. We got 6 years of Bush and a Republican Congress and what happened? The debt SKYROCKETED, job growth lagged behind population growth, most economic growth was fueled by DEBT based spending (which means it was not growth at all), wages lagged behind inflation, the middle class shrank rapidly and the ranks of the poor grew like crazy. The stock market tanked and all those people with private retirement funds lost truckloads of money.
That’s what happens when we let you guys get control.
Conservatives are so feckless they then blame the Democrats when the Democrats take power the YEAR that all that debt based spending and SIX YEARS of Dick “Deficits don’t matter” Cheney start coming home to roost.
WTF… :rolleyes:
And ya damned skippy I’m a liberal because I’m in it for myself.
I selfishly want to live in a civilized country. Von-Mises style economics is not civilized. It’s how animals live.
I selfishly want to see the working class get a bigger share of the wealth. Hell, the richer they are, the more money comes to my business.
I selfishly don’t want America to become a plutocracy like Mexico. Because I don’t want drug lords taking over my country.
I selfishly like seeing upward mobility. So yeah I don’t like seeing the middle class disappear along with middle class jobs.
I selfishly like seeing people being able to eat well instead of going dumpster diving like Rush Limbaugh suggested America’s hungry kids should do.
So yeah, I’m selfish. Sue me.
Oh yeah and Capitalism has run its course, just like right wingers claim that unions have.
We needed Capitalism to get us out of the age of serfdom, but now Capitalism has outlived its usefulness and is holding society back.
We need to evolve toward trickle-up economics, where the wealth is concentrated at the bottom and not at the top.
At the rate we’re going, we’ll be more like Mexico than the “land of opportunity” that we are now.