This is an explicitly bigoted principle, “Family values” means opposition to equal rights for LGBT people. This is the direct opposite of what I mean by non-bigoted.
If conservatives opposed corporate welfare, taxpayer-funded business ventures (like stadiums), farm subsidies, and the like, I would believe that this is one of their principles. However, it’s not, so I’m not willing to accept that this is an actual principle.
This isn’t a principle, this is a specific policy position. If the underlying principle in question is “government should not interfere with the relationship between the individual and the provider” then she should be opposed to all drug laws, all occupational licensing laws, all ‘blue laws’, ‘right to work’ laws, and the like. But they’re not.
This is at odds with the earlier claim that a large military is a conservative principle. Also with the near fetishization of law enforcement agencies like ICE and the DEA by conservatives. “Big government is bad” is not a principle of anyone who supports the war on certain drugs or the massive expansion and militarization of law enforcement in the country.
This ‘principle’ starts with a factual inaccuracy, there is lots of discrimination that is completely legal, and conservatives work hard to block or roll-back anti-discrimination protections. The principle itself is explicitly and openly pro-bigotry.
And including the line about ‘hard working immigrants from all over the world’ is just laughable from the people shouting ‘go back where you came from’ at rallies. Republicans have made it clear that they are explicitly and openly anti-immigrant.
This is not a conservative principle, as they constantly talk about their Christian beliefs and do things like erect monoments to the ten commandments on courthouses. Seriously, you can’t generally get conservatives to stop talking about Christian this and Bible that, especially in government.
As you said, that was “before the election”. They’ve now fallen in line with supporting him and his policies, so no they aren’t a counter example. If the “Never Trumpers” were actually opposing Trump’s policies and/or refusing to vote for people who support Trump, then I would believe it - but the number of people actually doing that is so small as to be insignificant.
I’ve also already conceded that there are a few small conservative principles that aren’t bigoted, but there’s a surprising lack of principles that are not either bigoted at the core, bigoted in practice, or not actually practiced in the first place.
Interesting note for anyone who actually does what Shodan suggests and reads my OP: I don’t actually use the word racism, and all of the examples I gave were of anti-LGBT bigotry. While it wasn’t a conscious decision (the examples were just what popped to mind), I do find it interesting that he’s harping on a post that doesn’t use the word ‘racism’ or any exampls of racism as an example of an accusation of racism ‘in bad faith’.
Conservatives claiming ‘bad faith’ tend to be completely unable to substantiate the ‘bad faith’ part (calling someone a racist for chanting ‘go back where you came from’ to American citizens is not bad faith, for example) but in this case it goes to another level as the original post doesn’t actually even mention race.
It doesn’t have to be wealth redistribution, it can be a different methodology to deal with scarcity. You’ve shown that we have a scarce resource, you’ve chosen money as the way to distribute that resource, and claimed that nothing can be changed about the poor getting fucked over without absolute wealth distribution.
I have a way to distribute tickets without the poor getting automatically screwed out of getting a ticket. Wait on line. Everybody who wants a ticket gets on the damn line, when you get to the front, you pay the man an affordable price and go in. If Richie Rich doesn’t want to stand for an hour in the sun to get his ticket, he doesn’t get one, even if he want’s to throw a bunch of money around, but Joe Sixpack can get in, if he’s willing to wait. That’s equality too, everyone, rich and poor alike, has to wait on line for his ticket.
Now, the owner of the team won’t make as much money this way, but that’s a VERY different story than saying there’s simply no other way besides money to distribute a scarce resource. Money is a convenient and effective way to distribute scarce resources because it relies on the greed of the resource owner to work, and greed is a fuel that will never run out. But it’s not the only way to distribute scarce resources, and when those resources are actually really fucking important, maybe we shouldn’t just take the easy way out, and should thoughtfully direct those resources to the people who actually need it the most.
A distinct failure to differentiate between taxation of Capital and of Income. Very few people are suggesting taxation of capital assets and the people who are don’t understand how those things work. But hey, conflating the two as a propaganda path certainly has gained popularity among Republicans.
The world economy grew quite well and a lot of large companies were created when the highest marginal tax rate WAS 70-95%, so quite clearly, the claim that those companies would not exist if we did that again is pure horseshit.
At one point, Elon Musk’s capital was income. Tax the income, and you can’t build the capital. Unless we are explicitly talking about capital gains taxes, but as far as I know most socialists also want to increase capital gains taxes.
But even excluding people who make their money with capital gains, high income taxes would preclude average people from saving enough to start a business. For example, my local dentist worked as a dentist for 10 years or so, saving his money to open his own practice. That would have required several hundred thousand dollars. If he had been taxed 70-90% of his income, he could never have opened his practice.
So in a world of low capital gains taxes but high income taxes, the effect would be the opposite of you want - average people would be frozen out business creation, leaving it only to the very wealthy and bankers. Is that a better world?
The average person won’t be paying 70-90% taxes. But that’s just another disingenuous right wing talking point. We’re talking about income over $1 million dollars. Not someone making $30k a year or a Dentist making $200k. A 90% marginal tax rate on income over $1 million would not impact your Dentist example in the slightest, because he isn’t making that much money. Nor is the person working in a grocery store that Republicans want to scare with these claims.
Maybe, but that doesn’t mean you need capital to be distributed the way it is ; and that really doesn’t mean you need capital to be inherited (which is one of, if not **the **worst driving force behind socio economic inequalities).
It’s possible to imagine a society where you get to shoot your own shot from an absolutely equal base - say that, at birth, the government grants you some form of housing and a fixed sum of money to get you started in life. Also free education, free healthcare etc (bear with me). Then you get to learn and grind and achieve and entreprise all that good shit, keeping all of it for your own self. No taxes ! Not one red cent to give back !
Then you die and the state takes back every single penny you owned (to fund the birth money and the public services). Any property you bought is auctioned, any company you built is sold off for parts, any patent you invented becomes public domain… In essence, you’re allowed to become as filthy rich as you could possibly get - but just you. Yes, yes, I’m sure you can come up with ways to game the system and emulate inheritance. Assume for the sake of the hypo that all attempts to do this get smacked down immediately.
Such a system would be (on the surface - yes I know sex and skin colour and innate sexual orientation and fuck off I’m philosophical thought experimenting here, don’t boring details me to death) absolutely “equal opportunity”, “fair” and “meritocratic”. You achieve as much as you can get away with without any handouts or government meddling, all from a baseline start-of-game that is shared across the board.
Obviously such a scheme will never actually happen, and I’m not even claiming it’s smart or better - just demonstrating that there are ways to do capitalism beyond what we got going.
Besides, earned income in the US was taxed WAY harder in the past than it is right now. It’s taxed quite a bit higher in many other developed countries. They manage to struggle along and build their own corrupt military/industrial complexes and Big Pharmas and such just fine :), just as the Rotschilds of yesteryear somehow managed to struggle along.
Then you have invalidated your own point, and we’re right back to Elon Musk having 70-90% of his proceeds from the sale of PayPal being taxed, and therefore SpaceX not existing. No Tesla, either.
Income over $1 million, and capital gains over $1 million, because you want to tax capital gains as income. So, no more venture capital, no more private bootstrapping from smaller businesses to larger ones.
And the $1 million income limit still inhibits people from saving and investing at larger scales. It still removes concentrations of capital from society and puts it in the hands of government: Capital that would have been used for private investment, and which will now be in the hands of government bureaucrats. If you believe that central planning is inferior to emergent order of private markets, which I do, then this will make markets less efficient and make government planning larger. Bad choice.
It’s hideously inefficient, in that the allocation is about as related to demand as flying a plane over the city and throwing them out so people can pick them up. It’s totally dependent on when someone got in line.
Markets are generally economically efficient, even if they’re not compassionate or convenient. Meaning that they make sure that the goods get to those most willing to pay for them, because the price is high. (someone help me out here; my economics class experience was a long time ago)
The main question here is WHOSE scarce, really fucking important resources are those? Are they the owner/producer, who made them, or are they the property of the people who presumably need them?
THAT is the critical question here. Let’s say that aliens visit me and give me a couple million doses of nanobots that’ll cure pretty much any disease/condition- not just treat it, but cure it outright. Who owns those nanobots? Clearly it’s VERY important to the people who might be treated by them, but the aliens gave them to me.
Moral obligations aside, what right does anyone else have to tell me what to do with MY nanobots? That’s basically what you’re proposing here- to take someone else’s “really fucking important” scarce resources and redistribute them according to how someone else deems most important, without consideration of their ownership or desires in how to dispose of them.
At the very least, whoever’s doing the disposing should pay a real market price for them.
Err, that’s, like, your opinion, Dude.
I know there’s this axiom among right wing folks that “government is inept, wasteful, inefficient !”… And I admit, I don’t get it. I mean I get it in the sense of “claiming that is a self-serving ploy to benefit from privatizations”, but I don’t get it in a “making sense” sense. There’s nothing magical about private corpos nor anything cursed about governments. They’re all made up of people applying their smarts and resources to a given problem. The only meaningful difference is that corporations try to do what is most immediately profitable (which isn’t always a social benefit - to whit, BP’s oil rigs or for-profit prisons) while nationalized entities strive more towards quality of service regardless of cost. In most things, I find I’d rather have something that works well enough rather than something that hobbles along as dysfunctionally as possible so long as some private entities get to count the moneys. It’s not like corporatist history lacks for horror stories, be it in terms of damage done overall, or net social impact… or even actual efficiency.
(and if you say “but Tesla !” I’ll retort with “but radar, laser, velcro, Tang, GPS, Krazy Glue,* the fucking Internet !*”. “The maw of government” can innovate just fine.)
Heinrich Hertz invented radar. Bill Mitchell of General Foods invented Tang. Harry Koover Of Eastman Kodak invented Krazy Glue. Roger Easton invented GPS (he was working for the Navy, so congrats you got one.)
The internet if you mean World Wide Web, that goes to Tim Berners Lee, a Brit who worked at CERN. Packet protocol probably goes to some universities, Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf. Government funding was involved with them, but I don’t think the Gov gets credit for this.
The “internet”, as in “the internet”, not just a subsection, Scylla. Gonna try to tell us DARPA was a Bell Labs project?
Hertz was employed by the German government by the way. Was a university professor, then was hired as a Director of the German Physics institute in Bonn, another government entity.
Every invention gets invented by someone. Who *invested *in them ? And for what initial purpose ? Was Tang invented to make money ? Radar ? ARPANET ? You don’t get to chant “free market, bitches !” when it’s a government contractor working on government money to fulfil a government req sheet.
Also you think CERN is a private, for-profit org apparently ? Look it up. You might be surprised !
Soooo OK, if I follow you and **Sam **then capitalist investment means whatever invention happens is FREE CAPITALISM WIN, but government funding is also no credit to the government and 100% private ingenuity because… Reasons I guess ? Seems convenient.
Oh look: Central planning. Now the government is deciding what kind of house I can have. You realize this means that government will have to heavily regulate the housing industry, right? As in, decide how big houses can be, where they can be built, and who can live in them.
Ah, free education. Make the cost of education free, and you will need some other mechanism to decide who goes to college, because colleges are scarce resources. In the real world, that will come down to politics, in-groups and out-groups, etc. Again, you are ceding the planning of education to the government. More central planning.
An economy where every business is ‘sold off for parts’ whenever the owner dies is an economy that will be destroyed in a generation or two. Or even faster, because one of the reasons people invest in business is to leave a legacy for their children. If I’m a 55 year old retiree, why would I invest my savings in a business that might take five years to be profitable, only to have it seized by the government in ten or twenty years when I die?
And do you know what would happen to supply chains if businesses were broken up and sold off every time the owner died? Some companies can have 50,000 businesses in their supply chains. Even moderate companies can have thousands. How would you like to manage supply when every year 10% of your suppliers vanished? This is madness. And what happens to all the people who own products that will no longer have support because the owner had the bad manners to die, forcing the government to dissolve the business - support teams and all? And what about all the people employed in those companies? I guess before I take a job I’ll have to check out the age and state of health of the owner.
Also, the reason we need to allow high profits for startup ventures is because they are enormously risky. If I start a business that has a 1 in 10 chance of succeeding, that success had better pay me ten times as much as just leaving my money in the bank, or it would be a stupid investment. This is something socialists never consider - the monetary value of risk. If you want people to take risks (and a healthy economy NEEDS risk-takers), the reward has to be commensurate.
A world in which my profits are taxed 70-90% until I die (but my losses are not refunded if the business fails, which is likely), then the whole business is taken away after my death, is a world in which no one but a complete idiot would invest in such a business.
So let’s look at two scenarios: One is that I can take advantage of a free education, free housing, and a universal basic income, and then just do whatever the hell I want. I will die poor, but I had lots of fun. Or, I can work my ass off to build a business, only to have it taken away by the government when I die. In no way can I use my wealth to benefit my children.
But let’s say I want to take the hard way, and build a business. With what? With what capital? There are no rich people, since everyone starts at zero when they are born and there are no large concentrations of private capital I can bargain for. And why would anyone invest in my business? If I die, they lose their investment. And if they get rich off it, they lose it when they die anyway and can’t help their family.
You are describing an economic system that cannot work. It’s a fantasy. And frankly, this is how socialists countries generally start - with a fantasy vision of a future utopia if only the government is given the power to control the flow of capital and make decisions for everyone. Then the inherent contradictions of the philophy take hold and things start to go to shit, so the government adopts further controls and makes bigger plans to fix everything - which makes them go to shit even faster. Rinse, repeat, and you have Venezuela. Or Cuba. Or any number of places that have tried to do such things and wound up destroying their economies.
But one thing socialism won’t destroy - the ability of the powerful to extract money from everyone else for themselves. In the Soviet Union there were all kinds of hierarchies - they just weren’t expressed in money. Instead, they were expressed by who had access to stores where goods were sold, who got private ‘state’ limousines and Dachas on the Black Sea, who got access to the best apartments, how long you remained on a waiting list for a car, etc. Because you have to have incentives to get people to work and cooperate together, or you will get minimal effort and a failing economy. Stalin tried solving that by simply shooting the lazy. It worked for a while, but eventually turned everyone into yes-men and shut down the flow of information that planners needed. So, factory owners who met quotas instead got summer homes and nice apartments and access to luxury goods that others didn’t get.
Or as the old saying goes, “Under capitalism, the rich become powerful. Under socialism, the powerful become rich.” Maduro in Venezeuala is worth billions. Chavez’s kid has billions of dollars. The Venezuelen people? Not so much.
This is the kind of thing that happens when you invent an economic system that sounds fair but which can’t possibly work.
Yay! What a brave new world, when the government goes around ‘smacking down’ people who want to make their children’s lives better. Go socialism!
By the way, if such a system even worked the way you want, I would consider it highly immoral. The idea that I cannot save money to give my kid a better start in life is anathema to me. I would consider it an oppressive society, and so would many millions of people who don’t share your ‘egalitarianism at all costs’ attitude. So then comes the widespread civil disobedience, no doubt followed by ‘crackdowns’ by your highly empowered government that is charged with ‘smacking down’ people who try to get around the confiscation of their wealth. This is also a pattern in socialist countries.
Those are very strange definitions. Will I have an equal opportunity to go to Harvard? How about to have a home on a beach? A private airplane? Who gets them, when everyone is starting from zero and can ony earn so much before they die? Who gets to go to Harvard?
Inevitably, under a system where market order breaks down, it will be substituted by government control. Any bets that the people who get to go to Harvard under your system will be generally the people who think the current political regime is just peachy? Do you honestly believe the sons and daughters of politicians wouldn’t get ‘special’ access?
This is where fantasy meets reality. In reality, people are self-interested. They work to better their own condition and that of their children. They build businesses to leave legacies to their families.
The beauty of capitalism is that it doesn’t deny the self-interested nature of humanity - it is a system that aligns self-interest with the public good. Want to make money? Make something someone values more than their money, so that self-interest on both sides creates a profitable transaction. Want to get really rich? Figure out a way to improve the lives of millions.
Elon Musk became rich because he solved a problem that needed to be solved - a trusted way to enable payments on the internet. Thousands of companies benefited from this, and millions of consumers. Thus, he became rich. But socialists tend to just see the accumulation of wealth and decide it’s a bad thing. They don’t seem to understand WHY that happened, and why destroying the ability to accumulate wealth would destroy the economy.
And then when you die you give it all back, and your kids get moved into some drab government apartment, I guess. Anyone with children should find your world abhorrent. Even if it worked, which it can’t.
There is nothing remotely ‘capitalist’ about what you are proposing. Your proposal is the society of my nightmares. And it would not be even remotely free. And in the real world, it would rapidly devolve in a shabby world of political haves and have-nots, just as the Soviet Union did. Hey, if you have to ration cars, why not give them to the good party people instead of the deplorables, am I right?
No, it wasn’t. There were far fewer impediments to starting a business. New business startups are way down compared to previous decades. Nominal taxation at the highest brackets might have been as high as 91%, but there were so many loopholes that effective taxation was no higher. And the government share of revenue has been pretty much constant over many decades, only varying by a few percentage points.
I started a business in 1985. It was a couple of pages of paperwork, and done. Today, I couldn’t do the same thing without a lawyer, an accountant, and endless approvals and licenses. That’s not a tax issue, but it’s an issue that makes it harder for people to accumulate wealth.
What they don’t build is a dynamic, entrepreneurial society. The U.S. dominates in patents, in medical innovation, in computers and software, etc. Europe is stagnating. China steals the technology they can’t develop on their own, and their central planning has led to huge miscalculations and poor investments that are now starting to drag their economy down.
And you want to risk all this destruction and pain for what? Because you don’t like it that some people are rich? God forbid we should live in a world of 3.8% unemployment, rising incomes for the middle class, and general prosperity if it means we have to have some evil rich people running around. So let’s just smash it.
Oh so you know enough to understand that the packet switching predated Arpanet, the idea itself was probably first mentioned by Tesla, Vint and Kahn invented TCP/IP protocol which was later installed on Arpanet. A lot of different people over a long period of time had to do a lot of different things to bring the internet into existence. Claiming the Government invented is just wrong.
[quoteHertz was employed by the German government by the way. [Was a university professor]
(Karlsruhe Institute of Technology - Wikipedia), then was hired as a Director of the German Physics institute in Bonn, another government entity.
[/QUOTE]
He demonstrated radar as a professor at the Berlin Institute. I don’t think the government gets to take the credit for his work.
Government did invent the Nuclear bomb though.