The ‘libs=fearful’ thing is nothing but an elaborate cultural strawman. This is extremely rich coming from people who quake in terror at the idea that gays might get married or that someone might successfully avoid pregnancy by using a condom.
For the same reason that your OP should confound the other side, whatever side that is… It’s a dumb idea. Each side assumes that “since you disagree with me, and I am self-evidently right, the only reason you would disagree is because you fear me.” No, the proper answer is because BOTH OF YOU ARE DUMBASS STUPID!!!. Your mistake is in the DUMBASS ASSUMPTION “I’m self-evidently right”. Try wrapping your tiny minds around this concept: “Maybe both of us have a useful, and logically justifiable point. Maybe my ideas are NOT self-evident, and so I have to actually JUSTIFY them.”
No, I haven’t read this thread. Probably because I already realize that people who disagree with me may have legitimate reasons for doing so. That’s an attitude that seems to be in short supply, here, on the SDMB. If I were willing to READ this thread, I would, no doubt, see the same old dumbasses, making the same old arguments, in the same old way, on both sides of your incredibly stupid OP statement. You got arguments about what I said? Shove them up your posterior. Or send them via PM, and I may respond, but only if they are not the same old shit, because if they are, I will ignore them in the same old way (as they deserve, in the same old manner). Damn, but this OP statement is really fucking stupid…
Cheshire Human, I’m warning you for this post. It’s thread shitting and your tone is wrong for this forum.
Whoa whoa whoa WHOA. By “paying for your own health care,” do you mean actually paying for all of it with your own money, as distinct from just paying for health insurance?
Yes, I’m afraid of that. You better believe I’m afraid of that. I’d question the sanity of anyone who wasn’t afraid of that, unless his name was Warren Buffett or Bill Gates.
I’m not particularly afraid of dying in a terrorist attack. That seems far less likely than, say, getting struck by lightning. But losing my health insurance and suffering a serious illness or injury and being bankrupted by the cost of treatment? Or going without treatment altogether? That happens everywhere, all the time in the USA. If you don’t find this prospect terrifying, I wonder about you.
If you meant “paying for your own health insurance,” then I apologize for doubting your sanity.
Liberals are afraid of guns but don’t seem to be afraid of the inner city minority groups that kill with them.
Liberals are afraid of global warming but don’t seem to be afraid of driving big old suv’s or commuting to work by plane.
Liberals are afraid that the hard-working man is actually smarter than him.
If he’s so darn smart, why does he work so hard?
And get so little for it in hourly wages?
Somebody has to do the hard work. I guess the liberals think that the illegal aliens should do it?
“little” is relative.
I know people who have worked all their lives and have lived their entire lives in poverty…but still had a relatively happy life.
But still not smart enough to see they are being played for saps by the Republicans?
For some reason a lot of these folks prefer to work instead of getting every government entitlement benefit that they can…which is the liberal way.
Those who work (even the poor) = conservatives.
Those who wont work = liberals.
So why do the liberal blue states pay more taxes than they receive in federal spending, while conservative red states receive more federal spending than they pay in taxes? Conservatives are the ones getting the handouts.
The Democrats are the working-class party. If you think Democrats aren’t the party of working people, you should watch some Michael Moore movies & see to whom he plays. Working people are the freaking base.
So when the unemployment rate goes up, more people are becoming liberal and refusing to work? Then when it goes back down that means people are becoming conservative again? I doubt that, I think it’s more likely your claim is nonsense.
You can describe both parties in terms of what they fear.
Of course this is a generalization, but you could say that liberals are afraid of the market. They are afraid of not being in control. They want the economy directed by smart people with a plan, they want a large state firmly in control of the market and taking constant action to direct society. They are afraid that the market is a malevolent presence in society, transferring wealth from poor and middle class to the rich and increasingly enslaving the people.
Traditional Liberals and libertarians fear being controlled by others. They are comfortable in the free marketplace, willing to compete with everyone else. They think liberals are fearful of this and therefore demand more protection from the government.
Liberals think the future needs to be planned. Government should be making ‘investments’ and directing the energy and wealth of society down guided paths set by them.
Libertarians and classical liberals believe that the market is just the expressed desires of free people in a society, and they’re perfectly comfortable letting the people just choose their own path, and that order will emerge and the future will be just fine without all the bright boys in clipboards running everything from Washington.
I guess this explains why I see so many private jets lined up outside the employment office all the time. It’s all those private-plane flying liberals commuting to pick up their welfare checks.
Libertarians believe government should not protect the weak from the strong. Liberals disagree.
We are miles apart politically, but even though I disagree with your positions you do make cogent arguments. It’s good to have you here.
There’s nothing wrong with having a plan. There’s a saying: ‘He who fails to plan is planning to fail.’ Liberals do not fear not being in control. We do, however, have a problem with people being in control who do not have the good of the country as their primary goal. The Preamble to our Constitution says that one purpose of the new government is ‘to promote the general welfare’. That is, do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. If you’re not working toward that goal, you’re working against it.
The Right wants the opportunity to make as much money as possible. They fail to plan for those who are unable to make use of those opportunities. ‘I’m all right, Jack. Keep your hands off of my stack.’ ‘If they don’t have bread, let them eat cake!’ Then they’re surprised when their plans fall apart. The Left try to take into account those who don’t have the means to take advantage of opportunities. We are accused of wanting the government to control our lives. That is simply not true. We want a fair referee that will not allow those whose only goal is personal enrichment to control our lives. (And this extends to non-economic issues as well.)
The Right seems to say, ‘I worked hard to get where I am,’ (and in many cases, that’s true), ‘Why should I support people who won’t work hard, or won’t work at all?’ We counter that unless people are allowed to have the tools to better their positions, how can they better their positions? The Right seems to think that if they have all the money, some of it will fall out of their pockets and the lower classes will benefit. I don’t think the Trickle Down Theory works. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. We believe that a tree grows from the roots up. So concentrating resources at the base allows growth at the top. I’d rather have 1,000 people lower on the totem pole buy my product, than ten people at the top buying it. Maybe I’m not so good at math, but I think that if I sell 1,000 things it’s better than selling ten of them.
In any business, there is overhead. ‘It takes money to make money.’ I see such things as health care reform and education as being the cost of doing business. If a person is sick or uneducated, they’re not going to be able to take advantage of opportunities, or even work at all. We have to invest in the lower and middle classes so that we can reap the profits later. It’s not about stealing from the rich to give to the poor. It’s investing in one’s own company. There are tons of businesses that have cut corners or that have failed to invest in themselves and have gone bankrupt, just as there have been many trees that have fallen because they were not fed at the roots. The way to make the country strong and flourishing is to ‘promote the general welfare’.
You are basically describing Al Gore lol.
Johnny LA: Thanks for the nice compliment. Appreciated.
But what if the thing you’re trying to plan isn’t plannable? What if attempting to control it just makes things worse?
The key insight I think Libertarians have that others won’t or can’t grasp is that an economy is a complex adaptive system that exhibits properties of emergent order. It’s like an ecosystem or global climate - immensely complex in detail, and yet in aggregate it is efficient and self-regulating. It is self-regulating because ultimately it is responsive to the needs and wishes of the people, and the people act as negative feedback loops to maintain stability. Then the price of a good goes up, demand goes down and the production of alternative goods is stimulated.
Trying to plan a system like this is like trying to direct evolution along ‘better’ paths or like trying to control the climate. It’s doomed to failure, bound to be not as efficient as the emergent path, and rife with unintended consequences that require ever-increasing interventions to control until the system collapses.
I like the contrast between the English Language, which had no plan and which had a structure that emerged as the result of millions of preferences, and Esperanto, a scientifically ‘planned’ language. Esperanto was an attempt to create a ‘better’ language. One more logical, more efficient, more ‘scientific’. The thinking was that a language created by smart, educated people along scientific principles was bound to be superior to a language created haphazardly with no direction, no governing board, no one to guide it along the most efficient path.
How did that work out? It turns out that the completely unplanned and undirected language kicks Esperanto’s butt in almost every conceivable way, and Esperanto has never been anything but a niche language that a few enthusiasts bothered to learn. Like Klingon.
Planned economies never work out as intended. They almost always grossly underperform free market economies. And the more rigid the plan, the worse the results.
But at least in a planned economy you know the direction you’re trying to go in, and I think that appeals to liberals. They want to see a strong captain at the tiller, trying to navigate the economy through treacherous waters.
That supposes that capitalists are truly in ‘control’, and not just responding to the pressures the market puts on them. There is plenty of evidence of the latter - the rich people are the ones who are best at figuring out what the market wants from them - they’re not controlling the market. If they were, they would be selling crappy goods at high prices. Instead, the market drives even the largest companies to cutting profits, improving quality, and constantly sampling the public to find out what it desires.
Of course there are exceptions in the case of monopolies and such. But in the aggregate, the economy’s emergent order is a powerful force that even rich people can’t ignore. Only politicians can, because they are the only ones given the right to use force to circumvent the expressed wishes of the marketplace.
‘The Right’ is a pretty broad brush (as is ‘The Left’). And I wouldn’t deny that there are plenty of authoritarians on both the right and the left. Often, the only difference between Republicans and Democrats is in what they choose to control, rather than a difference in the desire to control at all. That’s why I limited my comments to ‘classical liberals’ and ‘libertarians’, who I think are the truly fearless part of the electorate. Social Conservatives and Liberals are both fearful, battling each other to take over the reins of big government so they can use it to their own ends and prevent the other side from taking away what they value.
I don’t think that’s true. I think it may have been true when the left was pre-occupied with helping the truly poor and needy. I don’t think that’s the case any more. I rarely hear Democrats these days talking about issues like homelessness, welfare, child malnutrition, or even issues like poverty in Africa. The left used to be about truly helping the very poorest and the most needy.
These days, it seems like the intellectual energy of the left is focused on themselves - the ‘shrinking middle class’, the cost of health care, globalization taking manufacturing jobs, retirement benefits, global warming, public unions, funding for college, providing day care, etc. In other words, using government to protect the middle class and shave off the hard edges of normal American life. It’s about having government look after you, to be there in case you fall, make sure you can get an education and a good job, and provide for your retirement. Along the way you want to make sure that government protects you from bad drugs, bad products, smokers, wealthy capitalists, and other forces that scare you and you feel you have no control over.
I don’t think that’s true, and I’d offer as evidence the fact that people on the right give at least as much in personal charity as do people on the left. The attitude is more like, “I don’t want Washington deciding who I must help with my money. I think I’m a better judge of that.”
That would be true if the energy on the left was focused on making sure the poorest kids got a good education, rather than that the teachers of the kids must get good raises. But the energy is more about teachers and their jobs and their pay and their union than it is about the kids. That’s because the Democrats in the U.S. have been thoroughly hijacked by rent seekers who profit from big government.
No, the right thinks that the rich get richer by providing things people want. There’s no mystery over how the Walton family benefits poor people. Wal-Mart has made them rich by driving down the prices of goods consumed primarily by poor people, and by creating a business model which puts stores near poor communities and makes it easy for people like single mothers and large, low income families to get their shopping down as easily as possible. Note that Wal-Mart has been successful only be relentlessly pursuing low prices throughout its supply chain, and then turning the results of that effort over to poor people in the form of lower prices.
Except that the poor aren’t getting poorer. Not in free economies they aren’t. What’s actually happening is that everyone is getting richer, except the rich are getting richer faster. Until the recession hit, the poverty rate in the U.S. was at an all-time low, while products the poor use have grown steadily in quality.
The problem with your analogy is that it assumes that concentrating resources at the bottom does not take resources away from the top. I think the tree analogy is pretty tortured, but if you want to follow it, I’d say it’s more like removing all the leaves from the top of the canopy where the energy is gathered and using them for fertilizer at the bottom. It might give a bit more nourishment to the roots for a while, but ultimately it kills the tree.
You think that consumption drives economic growth, so if you give consumers lots of money, the economy will grow. I think that growth comes from innovation and improvements in efficiency, and the social surplus that arises out of that causes more consumption. And since the only way you can fund consumption is to take money out of production and investment, ultimately you’re choking off the long-term engine of growth even if you get a short-term boost in demand.
I would agree with you had you stopped at ‘the poor’ and not extended your analogy into the middle class. By all means, let’s make sure that the poorest people in society don’t have the first rung of the ladder of prosperity cut off. But the middle class is the bulk of the country, and you can’t subsidize them to any meaningful extent without destroying the engine that keeps it all running, or you can play a shell game where you rob Peter to pay Paul to no effect other than to insinuate government into everything.
This really makes no sense - it’s just an attempt to hijack the language of business to make wealth redistribution sound like reasonable economic policy to people who support business. But in fact what you’re doing is reducing investment to pay for current consumption. The money you need to subsidize the health care, education, and retirement of the middle class either comes out of the same middle class, in which case it does nothing, or it is borrowed, in which case it destroys future investment. It’s not coming from ‘the rich’ - there aren’t enough of them and they don’t have enough money. And if you take what they have, you destroy the system that provides the wealth in the first place.
To borrow from your analogy, the natural systems are pretty good at regulating themselves. But introduce rats or cats or snakes into a natural environment, and they can and have wiped out species. It’s true that the environment attains a new equilibrium – eventually, but that doesn’t bring back the species that have been made extinct.
I’m not talking about planned economies. What I’m talking about is an economy that works for the nation. This requires balance. More regulation may have averted the Recession.
You’re Canadian. I know you don’t like your health care system, but you have it. You’re not going to go bankrupt, lose your house and everything you’ve worked for, because of catastrophic illness, accident, or an insurance company that changes the rules after the fact. Not so here. There are people here – even on this board – who cannot buy health insurance for any price. There are others who can buy insurance, but can’t afford it. Literally, they cannot afford it. So what’s the solution? A bullet in the head? The Right would rather blame the victims or just not think about them at all. But the reality is that we cannot shoot the sick, or let them fend for themselves. They’re going to be there, whether or not they are acknowledged. So the solution is a publicly-funded system. This helps the needy, in that they get medical care. It helps business by ensuring a healthier workforce and greater productivity. It lowers the cost of care, and of overhead. All of this is beneficial to the country as a whole. As far as paying for it, I see it not as a giant tax hike, but as debt consolidation. You pay the same, but you only have one bill.
I’m not saying anything about ‘giving’ consumers money. Like it or not, we live in a consumer society. Businesses are in business to sell things, and that requires consumers. So it’s better if money goes into the pockets of the majority than into those of the minority. Growth does come from innovation and improvements; but you still need people to buy the innovative, improved products. It used to be that the U.S. produced a lot of new, innovative products. We built the best cars, the best planes, the best televisions, the best lottathings. And people bought them. But while the Japanese were improving their cars, American companies were pocketing the profits and cutting corners. Boeing still makes the best airplanes, but their New Innovative Product is years behind schedule (largely because of cost-cutting measures) and the Air Force might end up buying tankers from our European competitor. When I was a kid, any middle-class person might buy a General Aviation aircraft if he wanted one. Today, not so much. Have you looked for an American-made TV lately? There are successes, of course. I’m thinking mostly high-tech items.
The way I see it is that too much wealth is being concentrated in too small an area. When a CEO can fail utterly and still collect a billion-dollar bonus, something is wrong. Rewards should be paid for performance, and that includes the performance of the people who actually do the work. A business should take into account the well-being of the workers, and by extension the country as a whole, instead of the well-being of the stockholders. I know what you’re going to say: ‘If the stockholders don’t make a profit, then they won’t invest in the company!’ Well, that’s true. But if you kill the goose, you don’t get any eggs. I’m trying very hard to avoid ‘redistributing the wealth’. But the fact is that to make a balance, you need to distribute the weight properly. In my opinion the ‘top 1%’ are not carrying their weight.
Then why is it that liberals want cap and trade, while conservatives oppose it? Why is it that conservatives are afraid that health insurance companies will go bankrupt if they’re forced to compete? Why is it that liberals want the value of precious metals to be set by market forces, while conservatives want to nationalize the precious metal industry?