Makes a decent case for tort reform not for scapping the ADA. Nice one throwing in the Exxon Valdez as an example and of course an uncited MIT study. You can do better than that can’t you?
Greenspan. Wolfowitz and the rest of Bush’s Libertarians/Neocons proved what a fine system Libertarianism can be .
Surveying the people who vote is drawing from a sufficiently nonrepresentative sample to constitute cherry-picking?? Guess we ought to throw out all the U.S. election results ever, then. :rolleyes:
I’m not saying there aren’t meaningful differences between those who vote and those who don’t; of course there are. But like it or not, the ones who care enough to take the trouble to register and vote are the ones who get to decide who’s elected. They’re the ones whose political orientations actually matter.
As far as the ‘agree to an exit poll’ part is concerned, it’s true that any statistical survey can have an element of nonresponse bias, but that doesn’t necessarily invalidate the survey results. So, Sam, tell me what the nature and degree of nonresponse bias is in the exit polls. First of all, what percentage of individuals sampled refuse to participate? That’s a clear upper bound of the extent of NR bias.
And then what do we know about the nature of the bias, and how do we know it? I know, for instance, how we know of the nonresponse bias in volunteer surveys. While common sense would lead one to anticipate such a bias - people more likely to volunteer might well also be more likely to take the time to respond to a government survey - it takes some work to demonstrate it. Fortunately, in the case of volunteer surveys, that work’s been done: a strong negative correlation has been demonstrated between response rates and volunteerism rates.
So tell me what you’ve got with respect to these exit polls. I’m dying to learn.
You’ve destroyed your own character endlessly on the board without me having to do anything. You’re at it again in this thread. And claiming that leaving regulation to the market is far better than having the government do it, after the evidence of the last few years in particular, isn’t partisan bilge? I think it should win a partisan bilge award.
I didn’t include the columns that were irrelevent. The assertion I was refuting was that libertarians are mostly ‘upper middle class’, and therefore aren’t affected by libertarian policies. I found a report from PEW, one of the more respected social polling firms around, which showed that this wasn’t the case.
There was nothing in the question about populists, so I didn’t bother with the populist column. And this had nothing to do with why the numbers didn’t add - the columns are independent. I just felt it was completely irrelevent, because populists are not libertarians. If there had been a column labeled “Communist” I wouldn’t have added that either. I did add liberals and conservatives because I thought it provided the necessary comparison and I was actually trying to go the extra mile to be fair - I didn’t need to include them either. There nothing dishonest, misleading, cherry-picked, or otherwise unscrupulous about it.
The reason the column doesn’t add to 100% has to do with Pew’s methodology, which they don’t describe. I assume it’s because some people in the survey didn’t want to say what their income was, or perhaps they checked two boxes so their results were invalid, or whatever. But I tend to trust PEW, and so do most people - PEW is heavily cited by liberal organizations as well. It’s not the CATO institute.
Well you might, but you’d be wrong. Huey Long was a populist. Labor leaders use populist rhetoric. Sarah Palin has elements of populism in her rhetoric. Mike Huckabee is kind of a populist. John Edwards, with his ‘two Americas’ rhetoric, was employing populism. Populism spans all political belief systems to a certain degree. But it probably has less in common with libertarianism than with liberalism or conservatism, because populism tends to put people in groups and pit them against each other. Libertarians are individualists.
Populism is better thought of as a tactic than as a political belief system. A populist leader can arise from the right or the left. A left-wing populist might blame rich robber barons for the problems of the people, and promise to elevate the people back into control over the robber barons. A right-wing populist might claim that evil bureaucrats, or the ‘academic elite’ are responsible for all the ills of the people, and that he’ll ‘take back the government’ for the people if elected. Populism is a play on the emotional discontent of the electorate. Hitler was a populist leader to a certain degree. As an ideology rather than a tactic, it is incoherent.
And incidentally, if I had included populists as libertarians it would have made my point stronger, since you’ll notice that populists skew to the poor side the spectrum. That’s proof against your claim that I left them off in order to ‘cherry pick’ the data.
Bullshit. This is a form of ‘big lie’ on this board. I point out something people don’t like or can’t refute, so they claim that I’m cherry-picking, or being disingenous, or using a poor source, or whatever. They may believe it, because they’re so sure I’m wrong because they’re not used to those particular beliefs being challenged perhaps. Then I have to refute it like I’m doing now, but a week down the road an episode like this will be used against me to show that I have a ‘pattern’ of doing this, when really what’s going on is that there’s a pattern of making wild accusations about bias or deception that can’t be substantiated.
I repeat: I quoted a source accurately. It is a respected, non-biased source. Its result showed that Libertarians are not primarily made up of rich people, and that the percentage of libertarians who are ‘upper middle class’ is almost the same as the percentage of liberals that are upper middle class. And that the percentage of libertarians that are poor is almost the same as the percentage of liberals that are poor. That’s what the PEW survey shows. Period. Your tangent about populists is irrelevant. If you persist on including it to massage the data to somehow make your point, I will accuse you of attempting to cherry-pick the data - I just used the data exactly as presented.
Now, PEW could be wrong. They’re pretty good at what they do, but it’s always possible. It’s also possible that they only captured a snapshot in time, and that libertarians have changed. Or, it’s possible that the missing 13 percent skews the result (but then, the liberal column isn’t 100% either, so maybe it’s also skewed). That would be a problem with PEW’s methodology, but I can’t believe they would be that sloppy.
So the correct response from you if you want to have this debate would be to find conflicting data. Then we can look at both sources and try to figure out where the discrepancies are, and maybe we can both learn something. Instead, when confronted with uncomfortable hard data that showed your own statement to be wrong, you chose to go for the character assassination route and accuse me of improper tactics rather than debate honestly.
By the way - about your incorrect assertion: If I had done that, I would have been accused of being a liar. You made a statement of fact that was not correct. Personally, I read that and went, “Yeah, that’s what he thinks, but I think he’s wrong, so I’ll go and dig up information to prove it.” It didn’t even occur to me to accuse you of lying or being intentionally deceiving or any of that nonsense.
But it’s interesting how you made a flat assertion without any cite at all, and I refuted it by actually citing material from a respected polling firm, and yet the entire thread got derailed into a discussion of MY honesty and whether I play fair with the facts. You didn’t even try to back up what you said. Do you understand how annoying that is?
The statement I was refuting was whether most libertarians are ‘at least upper middle class’. You responded with exit polls about conservatives, which is A) off topic, and B) not necessarily representative, even for conservatives. But forgetting about B) for a moment - your cite regarding conservatives had nothing to do with the subject, unless you’re using it to try to discredit PEW’s entire survey. In which case I’d have to say that it’s more likely that exit polling data is showing something other than general population trends. Voters who answer exit polls are not the same as the population at large. To know which is more accurate we’d have to look at where the exit polls were, what the issues were in that particular election, etc.
For example, if poor Republicans are more likely to be rural than poor Democrats, they’re probably under-represented in election polls. If a major issue in a campaign is a social program for poor people in the inner city, you’re likely to skew more towards poor liberals than poor Conservatives. If the liberals are better at getting out the poor vote, you’re going to skew the liberal exit polls towards poor people. If more poor Republicans are in the military or in places where they file absentee ballots, you’re again going to skew the results towards rich Republicans.
I don’t know that any of that’s true, but they’re all examples of how exit polling can be skewed. There are many others.
Sure. And if the question was about the wealth makeup of the people who are politically active, you’d have a better point.
That’s not my job. As we’ve discovered in this thread, it’s the job of the person who cites the data to vouch for its quality. I just had to do that with the PEW data.
And it’s funny how I used a much more established method of identifying social trends from a respected firm, and I got accused of cherry-picking and of selective bias in choosing my source. You come up with a novel use for exit polls because they say what you want them to say, and no one questions it. That’s how the bias on this board works. People on my side of the aisle have to be twice as scrupulous and careful with our facts, because we’re second-guessed on all of it, all the time. And even then, you can be assured that we’ll be accused of dishonesty or cherry-picking. You can come up with whatever cockamamie refutation you want, and it’ll get a pass.
See all the sources of potential bias I listed above. To add more, consider that people are asked how they voted, and then asked what income level they’re at. But it’s entirely possible to be generally conservative and vote for a liberal if you don’t like the other candidate. Or you may be a single issue voter. Or the Democrat in the race may actually be more conservative than the Republican. Or you could be casting a protest vote. Or there could be bias in the exit polling process itself - the exit polls may tend to be in more locations that are generally poor, or where the mix of conservatives to liberals is not representative (for example, in an area where most workers are liberal but most business owners are conservative, vs an area with a university, where most liberals might be highly paid academics and the conservatives may be working class).
Trying to extrapolate general demographic trends from exit polling data is therefore risky. Which is why other forms of surveys exist and are generally more used in sociological research than is exit polling data, which tends to get used only where relevent (i.e. examining voting patterns).
I’ll leave it to others who have read what I have to say vs what you have to say to determine who is more reasonable and honest. Your opinion is worthless to me.
And 99% of regulation is STILL done by the market. The market regulates the supply and demand of almost all of the goods in an economy like the U.S.'s. It also regulates the vast majority of quality decisions, workplace environment and pay decisions, etc. No government agency told the manufacturer of the monitor you’re looking at right now to make sure it had nice contrast, no pincushioning, or a failure rate that would make it likely to last for many years. The market did that. If you make more than minimum wage or work in an office with greater than minimum amenities, it’s not because the government did it for you. It’s because the market compelled the monitor manufacturer or your employer to do it.
Yes, the market can break down. I’ve said so repeatedly. I’ve even said it broke down in the case of the financial industry. You, being a hard-core lefty, want to use that as a weapon to attack markets in general. You’d be wrong.
Do we even have to look to other countries? Don’t we have our own history of food and drug safety in a pre-regulatory market?
After over a decade on this board, you should realize that we can look back and see what you actually said, rather than having to take your word for it.
Let’s roll tape, though I should point out in advance that the bolding is mine:
You were making a point - hell, making it, and pounding it into the ground - about liberals being more affluent than conservatives. I refuted it.
And yeah, the exit polls, which are pretty damned consistent over time, do in fact suggest that Pew is a bit of an outlier. Or maybe you’re presenting Pew’s results in a way that doesn’t fairly represent what they actually came up with; I didn’t care enough to look. Either way, you’re wrong.
The poll data you cite is from 2004, and has categories for conservative (15%), liberal (18%), libertarian(9%), populist (16%) and ambivalent (42%). Without arguing the relevancy or lack thereof, you could at least put in all the source columns that add up to 100 (and they do in your cite). And then make your observations on whether or not it’s relevant. You do tend to editorialize if not outright cherry pick data and presentation. This being just the most recent example.
Surely you should be able to agree that a poll with 5 categories but only showing the results for 3 totalling 42% of those polled will sku the overall poll? And that’s without getting into the defination of the 5 buckets and where they would fall if there were only 3, etc.
That’s because voters are not the same as the population at large.
Those are indeed examples of how a poll can be skewed. But that’s like saying I can come up with all sorts of reasons why you might be a space alien. Doesn’t mean that there’s any real likelihood of it.
You had to do that with the PEW data because (a) you presented their numbers in a way that failed to add up in a coherent way (which was your bad), and (b) they don’t seem to be consistent with other polls that have mined related territory - and yes, if you’re going to rely on an apparent outlier, you’ve got to justify why you believe the outlier and not the bulk of the polling evidence.
Because nothing was novel about it in the least?
Good grief, it’s time to call the WAAAAAmbulance, isn’t it? Seriously, that’s one major pity party!
You haven’t given reason to believe that any of them are present. You’ve just said, the dice could be loaded in these different ways, without presenting any evidence that they are.
Sure, these outliers can happen in your sample; that’s why you don’t go with a sample of size 1. But on the whole, liberals will vote Democratic, and conservatives will vote Republican. Almost every Dem House candidate is to the left of every GOP House candidate, so people voting Dem are almost always more liberal than people voting GOP, and people voting GOP are almost always more liberal than people voting Dem.
Again, there could be survey bias of this, that, or the other type. That doesn’t mean there IS.
But if we tossed out any survey that could have bias, we’d have to toss out every statistical survey that ever was. Because every last one of them could have bias. Hell, they all do, to some extent; there’s no way of eliminating it entirely.
So all you’re saying is: I’m using the results of a survey, rather than a census, therefore it’s suspect. The same, of course, is true of your Pew survey, which means you have no business arguing that its results support anything you’re saying.
You’re simply wrong. The columns are independent. The data is presented as “percentage of people of various ideologies by income quintile”. It is IRRELEVENT whether there are five columns or one, since each column represents a complete sample of people who meet that criterion. For example, they could have added a sixth column called “Communists”, and another column for “Followers of Kang and Kodos”, and it wouldn’t make a lick of difference to the result for libertarians.
The only way leaving out columns would skew the data is if there were two columns for libertarians (i.e. “fundamentalist libertarian” and “moderate libertarian” and I had picked the column that best suited my premise and left the other out. But that’s not the case. There is no obvious overlap between the columns I left out and “Libertarian”. Therefore, leaving them out didn’t matter.
Also, the ‘didn’t add up to 100’ problem was not cross-column - it was that the numbers in the column itself didn’t add up to 100. That was true whether I included one column or six.
Let me make it clear - I could have just posted the libertarian column all by itself, and it would have been equally valid. I added the other two for context. I stopped there because I was in a hurry and formatting a big table for this message board takes some time.
You are creating an issue out of nothing. I was completely fair and honest. If you want to keep beating this dead horse, go for it. In the meantime, I’d like to point out for everyone else that the elephant in the room here is a factually incorrent statement you made, which you didn’t even bother to cite at all. And now you’re nitpicking my own cites. I guess the message there is to not bother to cite at all. Maybe next time I should just say, “Oh no they’re not! So there!”.
By the way, would you like to retract that statement now? Or would you still like to claim that most libertarians are at least upper middle class? Let me point out to you that even if the 13% of non-responding libertarians in the Pew poll were ALL upper middle class, you still couldn’t get to a majority. You were not just wrong, you were wildly wrong. And I think you made that categorical statement of fact with absolutely nothing to back it up other than your own biased feeling about what must make someone a Libertarian. Pretty sloppy. You didn’t even couch it in weasel words like, “In my opinion”, or “I’m willing to bet that..” or anything like that. You stated it as hard fact.
Okay, that’s fair. I was thinking about the original statement I was refuting, and forgot that I had expanded it from there.
That doesn’t make my statements wrong, though. The Pew result backs up everything I said, and I did include the columns for the data required to validate my statement.
As for your other post about the difference between Pew and exit polling data… again, I think there’s a big difference between the data collected in exit polls and the data collected by general sociological surveys, and for the purpose of the questions being asked here, the sociological surveys represent the likely best data.
It’s quite hard to find other data on this. I’ve been searching Google today, and the only other article I found referenced the same Pew Data (from 2006, not 2004, China Guy). Anyway, this is a post by an Econ grad student, and he went to the trouble of graphing the Pew data.
If it helps anyone’s understanding, the data and graph is here: Are there poor libertarians?
You can see that the graph says exactly what I’ve been saying: there are more poor libertarians than poor liberals, there are slightly more high income libertarians than liberals, and there are a lot more liberals in the middle and upper middle classes than libertarians. Amusingly, he also doesn’t bother graphing the same two columns that I left out, probably for the same reason (they’re irrelevent), although he includes an image of the entire table.
Why are all of you bickering over an argumentum ad populum?
Any chance I’ll get an answer to my question, Sam? And keep in mind this time that I did not ask about your political philosophy.
Do you mean have I stopped beating my wife?
Your original question was whether I adhered to a code of ethics. I answered you, even though you followed it up with an ad-hominem insult. The next question was whether I was a utilitarian. I answered you. Your next question was whether I cared about people in wheelchairs having their lives ruined, which is a stupid question. Of course I do.
There, have I answered them all satisfactorily? Or do you want to know something else equally important, such as whether I use salt when I eat babies?
No.
No you didn’t. You replied with some vague, rah-rah platitudes about your political philosophy.
No, I didn’t. Stop saying this. Again: you aren’t bullied here.
No, it wasn’t. That was an attempt to make some sense out of your response and its (very tenuous, if extant) connection to my question.
Sigh. No, no Sam, you didn’t.
It is in fact not a stupid question at all, because it directly relates to your stated politics, which ignore the concerns of the disabled (or magic them away, to be more precise, but it’s the same effect).
I only asked you one question, and you haven’t even begun to answer it. It’s simple: Do you claim adherence to any religion or established code of morals or ethics? Note again that Libertarianism is none of these.
Your persecution complex is hilarious. If that was all I knew about you, I’d guess Christian.
Oh, you want to know my religion. I don’t have one. I’m an athiest. Or secular humanist, or scientific skepticist, or whatever you want to call it. That, however, is not the same as saying I do not have a code of morals or ethics. Whether it’s ‘established’ or not… I’m not sure how I would be able to answer that. Give me some examples of ‘established codes of ethics’ that are not tied to a religion, and can’t include an overaching political philosophy like libertarianism or utilitarianism.
Or if it can… I’m a libertarian. I think that’s sufficiently descriptive, unless I’m missing exactly what you’re looking for.
And why are you guys going on about ‘bullying’? I never said I was being bullied. I said that some people here were acting like dickheads. Totally different thing. (-:
At least be accurate. They can go to college, the contraversy is whether or not they are eligible for resident tuition.
That one even I cannot understand. Why would an illegal resident from another country be eligible for in-state tuition, when a legal resident from another state is not? It makes no sense.
I missed that. Have you provided the complete table? Because without the missing parts, it’s impossible to read the table intelligibly and figure out what it’s really saying.
Yeah, maybe we could follow the link to Pew, but it’s your business to make your argument, not ours to fill in the holes.
Besides, Pew-as-you’ve-conveyed-it is wrong about liberals and conservatives, so there’s no reason to believe it’s right about libertarians or populists.
Why do you believe Pew is better, other than that you like what it says? It’s clearly wrong about conservatives and liberals on the income scale.