Yup money just buy freedom to do important things in life. Going running right now and I'll pick up the boys at 2:15
Big difference in taking taxpayer money in return for doing a job and potentially risking your life versus taking taxpayer money because someone else earns more so you're "entitled".
Big difference in taking taxpayer money in return for doing a job and potentially risking your life versus taking taxpayer money because someone else earns more so you're "entitled".
He'll never get it. He doesn't understand the difference and never will.
According to him my family's story is impossible, so he has to make it seem as if we had handouts.
That's because THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE. Marx promoted the creation of huge industrial and agricultural armies who purpose would be to produce or grow. The only difference is that your army's purpose was to destroy. You call one Capitalism and the other Socialism, but the distinction, for all intents and purposes, is non-existent.
From what you've told me about your family, your story is possible BECAUSE of the government, not in spite of it.
That's because THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE. Marx promoted the creation of huge industrial and agricultural armies who purpose would be to produce or grow. The only difference is that your army's purpose was to destroy. You call one Capitalism and the other Socialism, but the distinction, for all intents and purposes, is non-existent.
From what you've told me about your family, your story is possible BECAUSE of the government, not in spite of it.
In these guys' mind socialism=bad and free handouts. They don't understand that socialism could actually help hard working people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1-QcAPiunk
Yeah!
Summary: We should be receiving free education, which we are entitled to, to get a middle class job, which we are entitled to, to eat food, which we are entitled to, and not be governed by these million dollar senators.
Dude, seriously just stop. We all know what happened when Marx's "agricultural army" was tried. Just how many do YOU plan on starving to death? You have a lot more people now, so you may just be able to surpass Stalin and Mao.
Our constitution charters the government with one thing: Providing a national defense.
That's it. The individual is supposed to be FREE. Not a serf to the government.
Your way has been tried, and failed, miserably. In every case, the individual ends up with no freedom, and no rights... and more than likely, starving to death.
Now, you can go all "sophisticated" on me and start parroting all the expensive bullshit your professors filled your head with, or you can take a common sense look at history and see why freedom is better than socialism.
Sure it will! Just ask the tens of millions who paid the price for Stalin's and Mao's "agricultural armies."
What we have here is a failure to communicate.
On the one hand we have effete welfare liberal ideologues, learned in the theory and stuffed full of pride.
On the other hand we have the voices of hard experience, less verbose but much closer to the gritty reality of life.
The theoretician that has spent his entire life in a classroom surrounded mostly by dolts and praised by insignificant pedagogues is confident that his modeled society would work just so long as every tenet is fully adhered to. All losses are acceptable so long as the model is proved and the pat on the head is received.
The practical man has been on the receiving end of life's turns of fate. He knows the randomness of fortune and has stood firm after being knocked down and maybe knocked down again. Experience has taught him that theories do not put food on the table, nor do they build any notable strength of character.
The great ideal of socialism, the theory, never the implementation, is a wondrous thing. It promises the world. For all of the promises, for all the tried varieties of National Socialism, Marxist Leninism, Maoism, it delivers misery and death. Yet is remains a beacon for effete idiots for whom there is nothing but the gestalt.
The ideal of individualism holds no special truck with theory, it is the product of experience. It promises nothing but hard work. The triumph and the pride come from both the battle against fortune and the standing apart if successful.
The theoretician feels justified to put down the practical man for not knowing all the wondrous varieties of theory, intricate and beautiful in their meaningless detail. The practical man laughs at the naivete and the remove from reality of the theoretician.
Should the theoretician triumph in yet another moment of mass insanity and yet another socialist revolution does come, it will be the theoretician that will be put against a wall, next to the lawyer, to be shot first. For he is of little use to a brave new world. The practical man, the hard working individualist, the productive one, will bide silent until his ranks grow to rise again.
And then the cycle will repeat, for what we will have is a failure to communicate and more so, a failure to understand the reality of this life.
What we have here is a failure to communicate.
On the one hand we have effete welfare liberal ideologues, learned in the theory and stuffed full of pride.
On the other hand we have the voices of hard experience, less verbose but much closer to the gritty reality of life.
The theoretician that has spent his entire life in a classroom surrounded mostly by dolts and praised by insignificant pedagogues is confident that his modeled society would work just so long as every tenet is fully adhered to. All losses are acceptable so long as the model is proved and the pat on the head is received.
The practical man has been on the receiving end of life's turns of fate. He knows the randomness of fortune and has stood firm after being knocked down and maybe knocked down again. Experience has taught him that theories do not put food on the table, nor do they build any notable strength of character.
The great ideal of socialism, the theory, never the implementation, is a wondrous thing. It promises the world. For all of the promises, for all the tried varieties of National Socialism, Marxist Leninism, Maoism, it delivers misery and death. Yet is remains a beacon for effete idiots for whom there is nothing but the gestalt.
The ideal of individualism holds no special truck with theory, it is the product of experience. It promises nothing but hard work. The triumph and the pride come from both the battle against fortune and the standing apart if successful.
The theoretician feels justified to put down the practical man for not knowing all the wondrous varieties of theory, intricate and beautiful in their meaningless detail. The practical man laughs at the naivete and the remove from reality of the theoretician.
Should the theoretician triumph in yet another moment of mass insanity and yet another socialist revolution does come, it will be the theoretician that will be put against a wall, next to the lawyer, to be shot first. For he is of little use to a brave new world. The practical man, the hard working individualist, the productive one, will bide silent until his ranks grow to rise again.
And then the cycle will repeat, for what we will have is a failure to communicate and more so, a failure to understand the reality of this life.
No. The military is a constitutional duty of the government. Sticking "army" or "war" onto whatever socialist craptacular program you fancy at the moment does not somehow elevate those programs to the same status. The poor can of course join the military, to the extent that they qualify and are needed. The military (unlike most government programs) does not just take anyone who walks in.So if the government created an industrial army, agricultural army, environmental army, policing army, etc, etc, which took taxpayer money and paid people to do things that taxpayers might not approve of, this is ok and therefore not Socialism?
Or if those armies aren't dangerous enough for you (regardless of the fact that a large portion of the military never sees combat), it would be ok if the poor just en masse joined the military and the rich were forced to pay for it because at least they are doing a job. Is that correct?
No. The military is a constitutional duty of the government. Sticking "army" or "war" onto whatever socialist craptacular program you fancy at the moment does not somehow elevate those programs to the same status. The poor can of course join the military, to the extent that they qualify and are needed. The military (unlike most government programs) does not just take anyone who walks in.
Anything government does is at least slightly socialist, in that it is centrally managed and requires at least some measure of centralized control (confiscation) of production to accomplish. At the other end of the spectrum is full-blown socialism such as Communism (perhaps Obamunism?) Most individuals not riding the short bus (or even riding the short bus, but not required to wear a helmet when doing so) can differentiate between the two extremes and decide what level of socialism is constitutional and what level they find desirable (hopefully though not usually the same.)
I'm not a liberal.
Am I to expect a refutation based in theory or fact, or more self-aggrandizing rhetoric?
I fail to see how efficient free markets, any number of free trade theories, and non-interventionalism is based on fewer assumptions. As I've said before, Coase himself described the problems with his private bargaining as it scales to an increasing number of participants. You've researched these topics I'm assuming.
In this case, the man stood up because he took a job where his salary was paid by using the power of the State to take money from those who had it. Redistribution certainly put food on his table.
Or those who realize that Socialism is more than Nazism (which was really not a worker's movement at all), Leninism, or Maoism. I guess you also missed Orwell's experiences.
One might also ask how the workers of Friedman's prized Hong Kong are doing compared to their contemporaries in more Socialized European or even American societies. What percentage of their population is forced into public or publicly subsidized housing? Poverty rate? GDP growth? Economic inequality?
Great, another wannabe intellectual who's knowledge of Socialism comes from a few history books that describe the Soviet Union.
The practical man in this case laughs at the theory while refusing to acknowledge the application of that theory in their own success. That man is not practical, that man is delusional. And yes, I will "put down" such hypocrisy.
Wait, so is the result of the Socialist revolution the brave new world or are you describing some future "worker's" revolution.
The cycle is repeating. The rise of Socialism and Syndicalism came after a massive rise in economic inequality and the infringement upon freedoms that ensues due to mass differences in ownership of property. You think by promoting a system that produces inequality you're killing Socialism, but you're just creating conditions similar to what originally caused its appearance.
- Confiscatory taxation is what it is.. I don't care how wealthy someone is. It's taking money from one person and giving it to another. Most of our taxes collected by the federal government are unconstitutional and have been created without a constitutional convention and amendment approval.
We have the highest or second highest corporate tax rate in the entire world.
We have the most regulations and standards that businesses have to follow.
Everything has to be federally approved.. making products, providing services, building codes, etc. (now there's even a bill in Congress that says all software created will have to be NIST federally approved) Companies just pack up and say see you later. Government backed Unions have increased the cost of labor incredibly high which in turn makes the products too expensive to compete with foreign made products, so they have to cheapen up the quality to keep competitive price-wise. On top of all this, the hundreds of billions and trillions in federal spending have increased the money supply which causes inflation and cost-of living increases. Just since I was born, things which once cost $1 now cost $2 and wages are roughly the same.
We have health options. I have the option to pay for whatever treatments I want, even though they are expensive, and I don't even have to have a policy if I don't want to. I don't have to be forced into any policy I don't want.. especially a government policy. If you choose a shitty health plan where you are denied certain coverages, that is your fault for not looking deep enough into your plan options.
True. I am a classical liberal and you are something else.
Only a theoretician can expect a refutation based in more theory and more rhetoric. It is the exercise of such which leads to a wholly lessened self-awareness and thus predicates a failure to communicate outside painfully apparent self-limited boundaries.
You regularly start and finish your arguments by relying on other thinkers to validate the inadequacy of your own gut, don't you? What an academician.
Be it as it may, I for one, do appreciate the nice segue to Coase as Coase was brilliant in describing considerations in microeconomics, transactional interplay and especially the contracting dynamic (I kind of thought the work was suspiciously derivative of certain lines of early philosophical inquiry, but nicely translated into the economic arena, nonetheless.)
The Coase Theorem in particular, IMHO, weakens in taking the insight into the macro sphere. For example, it gives much too much weight to rationality where many circumstances will require recognition of what might turn out to be more a prisoner's dilemma, and in other ways highly subject to externalities.
Redistribution always takes food from one man's plate and puts it on another's. Some argue that forced sharing is just. I argue it is theft.
Oh, I did not miss Orwell's experiences, I just saw them from the perspective of being the one who fires the shot rather than receives it.
I was in both Zaragoza and Barcelona at the end of last year. The plains and the hills both called to me as I retraced some other journey of discovery. The fact is that proximity to death often brings the illusion of particular insight, when all it represents is the stimulus of adrenaline and a rejoicing at not entering an unknown void. That which is meaningless becomes meaningful and the reverse is equally true.
Do we still have those great movements and great faiths of Orwell's days? Where are the learned anarchists and the romantic communists? The thinking so influential in those days is but a dusty memory. And the experiences that formed such schools is now a vapid regurgitation of triteness. On the whole, we are best off rid of them.
National Socialism = Communism = whatever totalitarian/authoritarian system you might care to conjecture. They are all death dealing though the excuses are always oh so unique. Not.
Do you expect stasis? Your criticisms are of competitors, systems and alliances in constant transition, molded by fleeting personalities and caught in a turmoil of externalities.
What weight do you give the economic, not the political, dominance of the PRC over tiny Hong Kong? I know first hand the agonizing that those left by the British went through to find a middle way. I don't wonder that the Central Committee then considered that HK could wag the dog. The compromise is a marvel, but the consequence is a mongrel.
I am certainly no intellectual. But I am someone who has lived life here and there. And have been much, much closer both historically and by personal experience to those places and those systems you revere. It just so happens I am quite irreverent and, moreover, despise the stale intellectualisms of those who themselves have not, unlike your precious Orwell, put their own lives where their mouth has wandered.
You are lost in the love of your own words and have no understanding of how important your own hypocrisy is to you.
While history repeats itself, it is seldom recognized as a re-visitation, so enamored are most by the illusory uniqueness of their navel gazing.
Socialism is an escape from reality. Attempting to mold innate individuality to a theoretical gestalt is foolhardy. Only when the individual is recognized as innately valuable and nurtured to be fully actualized and not a cog in the machine will we see true happiness.
It is a conflict that is waged generationally. You are a harbinger of the collective as you pine for a society of equality. Should you succeed temporarily, you will, as countless others before you, find misery and death a result. For you are pursuing an unnatural state.
Should you discover the power of individualism, a recognition that the happiness of Man comes from whatever chance at uniqueness might exist, should you champion that over the fatal attraction of the collective, you will both bring and find great joy. For you will find yourself in accord with the natural state you have eschewed thus far in your miserable life.
Just sayin'.
:awe:
We have health options. I have the option to pay for whatever treatments I want, even though they are expensive, and I don't even have to have a policy if I don't want to. I don't have to be forced into any policy I don't want.. especially a government policy. If you choose a shitty health plan where you are denied certain coverages, that is your fault for not looking deep enough into your plan options.
What we have here is a failure to communicate.
On the one hand we have effete welfare liberal ideologues, learned in the theory and stuffed full of pride.
On the other hand we have the voices of hard experience, less verbose but much closer to the gritty reality of life.
e so, a failure to understand the reality of this life.
How are they not the same status? How is the military funded? Are you denying that on the macroeconomic scale, the military is basically a transfer of funds from the rich to the poor in exchange for work? That the work is destructive in nature does not change how it is funded.
Obamunism? What a joke. Is that the most clever critique of Crony Capitalism to be found these days?
And your definitions are way off base. How you can conflate Communism with complete control of production by the state is very confusing as, by definition, Communism is stateless.
I would assume that most people not riding the short bus (or even riding the short bus, but not required to wear a helmet while doing so) could see that the military is a very Marxist program. It is nothing more than the State providing work and paying those workers with money confiscated with taxes. The fact that this function is explicitly outlined in Article I, Section 8 doesn't change that fact. Article I, Section 8 also describes post offices, coinage, and obtaining credit, things found in Marx's Communist Manifesto as well. Does the fact that the US Constitution tells Congress to do these things make them not Marxist any longer?
I would never argue that free trade is the best policy, only that it the most fair. I'm fairly protectionist myself, because my first interest (after my family) is my country, not fairness. Free trade offers the greatest net gain to a country's wealth, but it also greatly stratifies wealth. The traditional liberal solution to this is for government to seize and redistribute wealth, which both empowers government (which does not produce wealth, but only consumes it and moves it around) and discourages innovation and work by decreasing the ultimate difference in compensation between working very hard and working very little (or not at all.) This is ultimately bad for a nation.
However in fairness I have to admit that free trade is the most fair, even when not completely supporting it (outside the USA) myself. Liberals tend to think free trade's unfairness is demonstrated by inequality of outcome, but for that to hold true every person must be equal.
This is easily demonstrated to be untrue. As one example, think of myself, Kobe Bryant, and a Mexican illegal immigrant with no education, and three available jobs - professional basketball player, engineer, and landscaping worker. Kobe Bryant makes far more money than do I because the pool of people who can competitively play basketball at a professional level is quite small and the potential loss or gain is relatively high. The uneducated Mexican illegal immigrant makes far less than I because the pool of people capable of doing landscaping is quite large and the potential loss or gain is relatively small. In offering our labor, Kobe Bryant is always going to earn more money than do I (as long as he is capable of playing) because he has less competition and little motivation to compete with me, and the uneducated Mexican illegal immigrant is always going to earn less because he can't compete with me. This doesn't mean the free market is not fair, but merely that everyone is NOT equal.
Likewise not every nation is equal. Different people in different nations are always going to earn different wages because of these inequalities. That an unskilled worker in Mexico earns less than an unskilled worker in the USA is not unfair any more than is my inability to play professional basketball.
Yes, I am denying just that. I and pretty much everyone with a functional cortex is denying that. So you should be used to it by now.
This, in spades. We have almost reached the Democrat goal of 50%+ of the population paying no taxes (or more properly, convinced they pay no taxes, not understanding that taxes on corporations are passed on to the consumer) and receiving government largess. from that point we will have a small, very wealthy class that makes the rules and largely self-selects its new members, and a very large poor class (that largely thinks it is middle class) which is equalized by oppressive taxes and government redistribution. At that point progress largely stops because starting new businesses will become difficult and self-defeating. Only education and working for government will offer any real prospect of improvement in one's condition. Only large corporations and those individuals favored by government will start new businesses. We are going to be Greece within a decade, two at the most. Except we'll be fatter and even more spoiled, if possible.
I mean that no third party biased the deal. Both parties are free to walk away and seek a better deal elsewhere. Therefore both parties receive something of more value than that which they give.When you say "fair" what exactly do you mean by it?
I too am not convinced that unrestrained international free trade offers a prosperous nation any wealth gain in the long run, only the short run. What I was attempting to say (evidently poorly) was that unrestrained international free trade has undeniable benefits in the short term, but causes problems (or whose solutions cause problems) that are bad for a nation in the long run. To be more clear, I am not in favor of unrestrained international free trade, but in fairness I have to admit that it is the most fair system. I just think the disadvantages outweigh the fairness aspect. I am more concerned with my own country (and countrymen) than with whether or not Red China's or Viet Nam's or Mexico's citizens get a fair shot at our jobs. And I prefer a strong blue collar middle class to lots of cheap stuff. I'm old, I have no room for the stuff I already have.I'm not convinced that unrestrained international free trade offers the greatest gain for a nation's wealth. I think it's very possible that a nation could find that it ends up losing wealth as it imports ephemeral consumer goods while exchanging its hard asses--land and business ownership--for those short-lived consumer goods. See Warren Buffet's essay about Squanderville.
Yes, I am oversimplifying liberals' position, which is why I said "tend to think". Not being liberal on most issues, it would be difficult for me to really do justice to liberals' position on most things, but liberals tend to view unequal results as proof of biased circumstances. The problems with that are legion, but include a disincentive for the privileged group to try harder and an inability to remedy the supposed systemic bias without imposing the same systemic bias on someone else.I think you're really oversimplifying the liberals' position. It's like you're portraying their position as a strawman. I highly doubt that most liberals would disagree that people who work harder and contribute more should receive more wealth in compensation.
Here you are conflating equality of outcome with fairness. Forcing one party to increase compensation may be desirable, but it is certainly less fair as you are intentionally forcing one person to give more (or accept less) than would be the case in a private deal. I don't disagree that minimum wage laws for instance provide a valuable service to society, but introducing a systemic bias in favor of one party is the very essence of unfairness. Again, there are benefits to society, but fairness is not one of them.I think I also learned about that concept in 5th grade, right after I learned about the Free Trader principle. Of course, in reality the situation is a little more complicated and we need to ask whether or not someone who does backbreaking work for 60 hours/week should be able to afford a modest home, a car, and health care and whether someone who happens to be athletically gifted who also works very hard really deserves tens of millions of dollars and whether he is actually overcompensated.
As in real estate, location is important. An engineer in India is cheaper than an engineer in Tennessee, but an engineer in Tennessee is worth far more to me. But within the same location, then you are correct that two people with the same job function, same experience, and same productivity should earn the same amount. Since this is quite difficult to actually judge outside of production piece work, liberals always default back to evaluating outcomes and seeing inequality of outcome as proof of bias. And this isn't oversimplification by me, it's just what eventually happens because people, and their relative worth to an employer, are devilishly hard to evaluate. What for instance is the value of an extra ten years' experience in a medical doctor? What about in an assembly line machine operator? What is the value of a customer service rep or sales engineer with a great personality and an excellent mind versus one who is merely average in both?Why is it not unfair in some sort of a way? If two people performing the same job function work just as long and just as hard and are as equally productive and produce the same amount of wealth, why shouldn't they both receive about the same amount of compensation? I'm not saying that our nation's economic or political policies should do anything about it, just that this outcome is not necessarily "fair".