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Stinky_Pete posted:The idea that someone's ideas must be right and valuable simply because they are Published and have a following OwlFancier posted:That's "actually capitalism is fine" so I don't know if it counts as either.
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Jan 18, 2018 00:35
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Cingulate posted:Ok, I'm sticking with the point: even as you think you have reason to dismiss the field (by accusing them of motivated reasoning or corruption), I am saying that libertarian economists are probably not completely wrong in a trivial manner. It remains to be seen if my intuition is true or false here. Did you just crawl out from under a rock, cause how the gently caress don't you know by now that right-libertarianism is intellectually bankrupt garbage? Oh right, it's Cingulate, the guy who's perpetually JAQ-ing off and whose posting sometimes comes weirdly close to being alt-right adjacent apologia.
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Jan 18, 2018 00:37
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I mean literally Liberalism came into existence because rich cunts were annoyed that the king kept telling them what to do and it hasn't really deviated from that except now it's the government instead of the king. Social democracy is when you go "hmm yes but the plebs keep rioting, better throw them some bones or they might think that liberal capitalism isn't the way to go." Also what exactly are you saying if not that when you go "well they can't be trivially wrong, because they're published" because it sure as hell looks like that. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Jan 18, 2018 |
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Jan 18, 2018 00:37
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OwlFancier posted:I mean literally Liberalism came into existence because rich cunts were annoyed that the king kept telling them what to do and it hasn't really deviated from that except now it's the government instead of the king. Social democracy is when you go "hmm yes but the plebs keep rioting, better throw them some bones or they might think that liberal capitalism isn't the way to go." 
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Jan 18, 2018 00:40
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Corvinus posted:Did you just crawl out from under a rock, cause how the gently caress don't you know by now that right-libertarianism is intellectually bankrupt garbage? I don't really know libertarianism, but I know Robert Nozick is not intellectually bankrupt. I'd also be quite surprised if Von Mises and Hayek were. OwlFancier posted:Also what exactly are you saying if not that when you go "well they can't be trivially wrong, because they're published" because it sure as hell looks like that.
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Jan 18, 2018 00:47
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"I don't know anything about this but I instinctively believe it's correct" is certainly a novel viewpoint. Look, why the hell are you assuming intellectual honesty about a political matter? How can you have lived to a presumably adult age and not considered the possibility that a shitload of people are not intellectually honest about their political views? OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:51 on Jan 18, 2018 |
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Jan 18, 2018 00:48
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OwlFancier posted:"I don't know anything about this but I instinctively believe it's correct" is certainly a novel viewpoint. So this is you being sloppy here. And if you are as sloppy with these guys as you are with my forum posts - whose content you are missing in trivial ways - then the chances of you building a substantial critique of their actual ideas is very low. OwlFancier posted:"I don't know anything about this but I instinctively believe it's correct" is certainly a novel viewpoint.
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Jan 18, 2018 00:53
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I don't build a substantial critique of libertarianism because to me it is quite self evident that the ideology which believes that thought experiments are true even in the face of evidence to the contrary, is not an ideology which merits a substantial critique because it is basically mental illness, as it should be to anybody who even approaches the idea, especially from an allegedly "social democratic" viewpoint as pissweak as that philosophy might be.
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Jan 18, 2018 00:56
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You make me touch your posts for trivial reasons
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Jan 18, 2018 01:03
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Cingulate posted:OwlFancier, I'm not sure what your goal in this exchange is, but it surely does not seem like you're engaging in a good-faith, open-ended discussion with Uroboros, and it surely doesn't look like you're doing anything in the hope of getting them to see things from your point of view/becoming convinced of your take on things. Yeah, I’m not sure implying that anyone who is basically not ready to commit fully to Communism is just a gutless third-wayer is the best way to convince people. This forum seems to be an constant slap fight between radicals and incrementalists who both seem pretty convinced one another is deluded. For what it’s worth I actually think there is some merit to what people like OwlFancier want, hence why I had initially asked for advice on how to frame a question to someone like Harris who I’m sure falls in the Incrementalist category. Are there certain things in this world that we can simply say “are there things to important to put in the hands of profit driven enterprise? what are they? How can we best enact them? I’m not confident we can afford to wait, etc”. Since OwlFancier thinks Harris is basically a hack, and by an extension me, it makes any genuine conversation difficult
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Jan 18, 2018 01:46
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I'm saying that because what you're asking for makes no sense. If you're asking for literature that talks about the problems of capitalism but which avoids anything socialist or communist for fear that people might reject it, then what you're looking for is by definition Third Way stuff. If you're looking for said literature in the hopes of introducing people to anticapitalism then it's going to be in vain because we've literally been doing that crap for decades and it's the thing people are now complaining about. The commie perspective is that no, private property is inherently bad. The liberal perspective is that it's good and actually creates wealth rather than stealing it, so neither of these two positions are interested in drawing a line because they both think that everything should be one or the other. The third way perspective is, if I'm being charitable, "let's try and have stuff be both privately and publicly owned at the same time" but which has practically been shown to mean "privatise the profit, nationalize the risk". What other position are you looking for? OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Jan 18, 2018 |
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Jan 18, 2018 01:53
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Cingulate posted:It's saying: if you come across an established scholar, an expert, an academic, ... What does this line have to do with Sam Harris?
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Jan 18, 2018 02:27
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When speaking of a purely generic "professional scholar," that probabilistic view may be true; when speaking of one specific scholar, who may be relevant to discussion for the very fact that they are an outlier, wouldn't the probability necessarily change?
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Jan 18, 2018 02:53
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OwlFancier posted:I'm saying that because what you're asking for makes no sense. If you're asking for literature that talks about the problems of capitalism but which avoids anything socialist or communist for fear that people might reject it, then what you're looking for is by definition Third Way stuff. If you're looking for said literature in the hopes of introducing people to anticapitalism then it's going to be in vain because we've literally been doing that crap for decades and it's the thing people are now complaining about. I said Communist and Marxist...I get it’s a branding issue, but I’ve read a few Ha-Joon Chang books so I assume it’s possible. So, nationalize the profit and nationalize the risk in the areas it’s applied? Seems pretty straight foreword when it comes to certain industries, but I’m having trouble envisioning this working for things like the entertainment industry. Multiple times now I’ve asked for examples of industries we should make public and these need to have plans that explain how they will continue to work. They need to prove that they can work so the public will continue to support further efforts in that direction. I don’t really see how you get there any other way that doesn’t result in lots of violence.
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Jan 18, 2018 03:12
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Cingulate posted:Some libertarians are of course intellectually bankrupt. Even some tenured ones, probably. You stupid motherfucker this thread is 850 pages of Hayej and Mises being intellectually bankrupt shitheads Fight me bitch
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Jan 18, 2018 03:14
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That's our Benghazi! *laugh track, credits roll*
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Jan 18, 2018 03:16
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Uroboros posted:I said Communist and Marxist...I get it’s a branding issue, but I’ve read a few Ha-Joon Chang books so I assume it’s possible. So, nationalize the profit and nationalize the risk in the areas it’s applied? Seems pretty straight foreword when it comes to certain industries, but I’m having trouble envisioning this working for things like the entertainment industry. The same way they operate now... Like, necessarily any running business at present either operates at a profit or already relies on massive government subsidy. So the difference between a nationalized industry and a privately run one is that there is no necessary profit motive in the nationalized one, any spare money is recouped directly by the government and can be disbursed into other things but the industry could easily be propped up by tax or by other industries. For things like healthcare which aren't supposed to generate a profit, you cut the profit out and instead offer the service the same way you do, like, roads. You don't expect people to pay to drive on a road (unless you're a libertarian) but you realize that without them nothing else works because people can't go anywhere, the government puts money into it and gets a functioning society out at the other end, some other parts of which can make the money, collected by tax, to build the roads on which the society runs. Some people might argue "oh well why don't we just raise taxes and keep things private?" to which the obvious answer is why the hell do you need the private part? What does it add? There's nothing magical about nationalized industry that makes it work differently, you just change the priorities of the organization so that the point isn't to make a profit, it can be to provide the best healthcare for people, or if you're going to bother nationalizing hollywood, to make good movies regardless of whether they make money at least with some portion of the budget. If you want an example of that, there were plenty of government sponsored propaganda films during the second world war and even training films, they're not profitable but they were useful in some way. A state run entertainment industry could be very useful for illustrating why it's a good idea to have state run industries. You could keep plenty of it as a revenue source but you have better editorial control and can use it to churn out some decent propaganda every now and then as well as potentially a form of arts funding for non profit generating movies. They don't need to be "proven to work" because loving capitalism doesn't work but that's not stopped anybody from saying it's a wonderful loving idea. The burden of proof isn't applied honestly and is simply a cover for people who don't want to change things. "Oh the public won't accept it" is bullshit, the public will accept what they're told, it's just that what they're overwhelmingly told is that capitalism is great and its failings are actually features. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 03:34 on Jan 18, 2018 |
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Jan 18, 2018 03:23
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Cingulate posted:See, I quite obviously did not say "[some libertarian] is correct". I said, they're probably not completely wrong in a trivial way. The main school of economics to which libertarians subscribe literally claims that logically derived premises trump historical evidence, and axioms derived from the former are immune to contradiction by the latter. There's a reason we use "on the other hand, all of recorded history" as our go-to shorthand refutation in this thread, champ.
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Jan 18, 2018 03:28
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Captain_Maclaine posted:The main school of economics to which libertarians subscribe literally claims that logically derived premises trump historical evidence, and axioms derived from the former are immune to contradiction by the latter. There's a reason we use "on the other hand, all of recorded history" as our go-to shorthand refutation in this thread, champ. Ahhhhh, Praxeology. Thou art not as clever as you make people feel.
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Jan 18, 2018 03:46
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Weatherman posted:That's our Benghazi! *laugh track, credits roll* me challenging people to a fight itt is a historical precedent
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Jan 18, 2018 03:59
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BENGHAZI 2 posted:me challenging people to a fight itt is a historical precedent I know
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Jan 18, 2018 04:01
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BENGHAZI 2 posted:me challenging people to a fight itt is a historical precedent You are, no poo poo, one of my favourite posters.
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Jan 18, 2018 04:05
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Cingulate posted:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n5E7feJHw0
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Jan 18, 2018 04:09
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Avenging_Mikon posted:You are, no poo poo, one of my favourite posters. jesus i'm sorry
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Jan 18, 2018 04:11
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Uroboros posted:I don’t really see how you get there any other way that doesn’t result in lots of violence. To be fair, I don't really see how you get to where we are today in a way that doesn't require lots of violence. I think OwlFancier took your request to mean that any mention of Communism or Marxism makes a text unusable, when you meant having Marxism as the core identity trait creates a dead dusty image in the minds of the people you're trying to reach. I'm right there with you because I've never understood fixing an ideology that's meant to be universal and adaptable, to a specific formal name for a person or entity. Perhaps if any of us starts a writing career we should co-opt the term "humanism" or something like that. I think people are warming up to new images of socialism, as with feminism. If you want hard details that demonstrate how nearly all wealth (i.e. capital) in America is entirely predicated on lies, torture, and murder, there's a new book out called The Black Tax that traces numerically the overall thefts of slavery through sharecropping and beyond. Also demonstrates unconscious discrimination in wages and resume responses (white man resume with a felony record gets more responses than the same resume but it's a black man with no criminal record). The ethic of investment asserts that all that original money is directly responsible for all returns on new ventures and rents compounded on themselves, meaning all large sums of capital in America, are plainly stolen. If you want to debunk facile libertarian memes, you'll just have to keep apprised of memes as you come across them. There's one I saw recently about medieval peasants complaining about feudalism and one goes "actually, this is just crony feudalism, it would be better if the monarchy didn't exist to tax the land lords." If you want something moderately pithy that develops the social theory in a way that doesn't sound archaic on its face, there's Why Not Socialism? by Gerald Cohen. I found it in my college bookstore when I was a freshman and it basically closed the case for me, the rest was just learning more and more how bad things really are today. Jacobin has also published a free PDF that covers misconceptions and FAQs, called The ABCs of Socialism. Stinky_Pete fucked around with this message at 04:20 on Jan 18, 2018 |
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Jan 18, 2018 04:13
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Jan 18, 2018 04:20
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Libertarian peasants is a pretty great meme gotta say.
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Jan 18, 2018 04:22
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BENGHAZI 2 posted:jesus i'm sorry Don’t worry, I won’t stalk you and lurk outside your window with my sketch pad. Also, everyone stop replying to Cingulate. He never knows what he’s talking about but he’s always dry sure the unpopular side needs defenders because it just hasn’t been given a fair shake.
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Jan 18, 2018 04:30
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Mr Interweb posted:So just to confirm if I have this right re: business taxes. Pages ago, but gently caress the scholar discussion, let's educate a dude on taxes. First, to your actual question: If all you're doing is considering things one step beyond where they're at, no, it doesn't matter. If you raise the top tax rate (250K and above, as in your example) to 99%, that means nothing to anyone earns less than 250K in terms of the amount that's taken out of their paycheck. The problem is any change in tax policy will have knock on effects. Oh, the top rate got raised to 99%? Well, as CEO i'd like to take home the same amount of money, so I'm going to slash worker pay by X% to make that happen. And even if that puts them below a reasonable, sustainable existence that's okay because the government just went full socialist with all that extra tax money and now there's all kinds of government programs my impoverished employees can take advantage of! This is arguably something that companies are doing right now. Or it could go the other way. Hey, let's drop the top tax rate to 20%!. Again, anyone making below 250K doesn't care. In terms of taxes. But the CEO might be nice and generous and let that money trickle down in the form of higher wages! That happens occasionally, but not enough to actually close income gaps/wealth gaps/etc. More often it's just a matter of hey! Look-it! Higher after-tax revenue! Share prices will go up! Wal-mart does stand out as a good example of the way this [subs]screws employees[/sub] works. They're making moves to raise the wages of all of their employees to $11 an hour minimum which many of their employees already made thanks to state-level min. wage laws and also give them a nice bonus based on seniority but only if the employee isn't affected by the wage increase, so sometimes this can work out in favor of labor. [sbu]Also they're closing 60 or so Sam's club stores and laying off 10,000 employees in the process[/sub]. Oh look, that last part was out loud. Silly me. Now I'm going to veer off into the wilds and touch on tax loopholes, etc. Because expeditions are fun! Let's talk capital gains tax. Firstly, what's a capital gain? A capital gain is when you buy something, the price goes up, and then you sell it at that new price. The difference (profit) you make on that sale is the capital gain. Capital gains can (and in the USA, do) have their own tax rate. Generally lower. I think it's currently 15%, but I'm too lazy to look it up at the moment and that doesn't quite drive the point home to stick with this hypothetical's numbers, so let's say it's 5%. The idea behind having a lower tax on CG's is to encourage investment. Does that work? Meh. Here's what does happen though. Remember Mr. CEO? We're going to assume he's got savings of some sort. Any sort will do, he just needs enough to get through that first pay period. See, Mr. CEO gets paid in stock. That's right, no money at all, it's all stock! So the pay period ends, he gets his shares, and let's say he sells (some/all) of them. For a bajillion dollars. I'm not sure how many dollars a bajillion is, but we'll just say it's enough to push him into the 40%(or 99%, or 20%) category. Except it's all sold stock. So gets to pay 5%, and all his employees gets to pay the usual 10%. Stuff like that is how Warren Buffet's tax rate managed to be lower than his secretary's that one time. And probably some other times too. This also doesn't get into how the corporation is its own entity with its own tax rate. So the corporation pays a certain amount of tax on that 250K before it ever gets to any employees, or CEO's or whatever. Many people will use this fact to argue that dividends (a payout that some corporations give as a reward to people who own its stock), which are also taxed as a form of income, is double taxation. Taxed once at the corporate level, taxed again at the dividend level. They will, of course, never use this same logic to argue that payroll taxes are double taxation (corporate level, wage level) or that sales taxes are double taxation (wage level, item-purchased level) and that, in fact, sales taxes are TRIPLE taxation (corporate level, wage level, purchase level). That purchase can, of course, becomes profit for some other corporation which is then taxed AGAIN and now we're in an infinite tax recursion! (corp level, wage level, purchase level, corp level). It's loving silly how arbitrary so much of our economic system, and the resulting arguments it produces, is.
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Jan 18, 2018 05:24
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Avenging_Mikon posted:You are, no poo poo, one of my favourite posters. Same here. I like how your posts punctuate the other posts of intellectual and pseudo-intellectual rambling with sincere (I hope) desires to knock the piss out of arseholes. You threatened to literally kill Jrod at least 20 times and I would pay good money out of my poverty-level salary to watch you work him over with a shovel. As a dirt poor, over-educated, vastly underemployed victim of modern capitalism who is also drowning under massive amounts of student loan debt that I can only get out of by literally dying, I normally can't afford such fine entertainment. Edit: Every time the shovel hit Jrod's weeping and piss-soaked form, I would shout "YOU'RE VIOLATING THE NON-AGGRESSION PRINCIPLE" as loudly as possible while smiling diabolically and eating crisps. BENGHAZI 2 posted:jesus i'm sorry Don't be. JustJeff88 fucked around with this message at 05:36 on Jan 18, 2018 |
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Jan 18, 2018 05:30
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no for real if im your favorite poster you're reading some god awful posts somewhere and its throwing your perception off
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Jan 18, 2018 05:40
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Stinky_Pete posted:To be fair, I don't really see how you get to where we are today in a way that doesn't require lots of violence. Thanks for some good stuff. I might be able to avoid the black tax simply because I just listened to an audiobook on basically the exact same topic. Thanks for this response in general, I’m currently posting from a tablet so I can’t give you a substantive response.
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Jan 18, 2018 05:40
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I strongly resent the implication that there is anything remotely approaching intellectual about my posting.
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Jan 18, 2018 05:42
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OwlFancier posted:I strongly resent the implication that there is anything remotely approaching intellectual about my posting. I, for one, am under no such delusions, given that you are an owl fancier instead of acknowledging parrots as the One True Bird 
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Jan 18, 2018 09:50
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Captain_Maclaine posted:The main school of economics to which libertarians subscribe literally claims that logically derived premises trump historical evidence, and axioms derived from the former are immune to contradiction by the latter. There's a reason we use "on the other hand, all of recorded history" as our go-to shorthand refutation in this thread, champ. Susanne Langer posted:devastating refutation is based on a superficial reading or even a distorted one, subconsciously twisted by the desire to refute Oh god, please don't read this as me arguing in favour of any form of libertarianism as being the best ideology or whatever. I'm not, and I wouldn't. BENGHAZI 2 posted:You stupid motherfucker this thread is 850 pages of Hayej and Mises being intellectually bankrupt shitheads sleeptalker posted:When speaking of a purely generic "professional scholar," that probabilistic view may be true; when speaking of one specific scholar, who may be relevant to discussion for the very fact that they are an outlier, wouldn't the probability necessarily change?
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Jan 18, 2018 11:51
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Everything in that post is wrong. Why are you squaring off against the libertarian mock thread to defend libertarianism Wait it's because you're a stupid rear end in a top hat go away
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Jan 18, 2018 12:01
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Wait I'm sorry you're not defending libertarianism you just think we're being unfair to libertarian scholars by dismissing their bullshit, an ideology that explicitly rejects empirical evidence, out of hand Let me get out in front of that one because God knows you're a pedantic moron Still go away though
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Jan 18, 2018 12:08
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Cingulate, really, look up praxeology, it is trivially refutable. And it's a pillar of libertarian thought, it's literally endorsed by their leading "scholars". This would take like five minutes and save a lot of arguing about whether I seem like I'm being fair to libertarianism by saying it's a crock of poo poo out of hand.
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Jan 18, 2018 13:18
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OwlFancier posted:Cingulate, really, look up praxeology, it is trivially refutable.
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Jan 18, 2018 13:35
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Doctor Spaceman posted:The best bit is that according to praxeology you don't even need to know what it is to dismiss it since evidence is for the weak. That's actually true! I believe praxeology is bad therefore it is, and anything inconvenient like facts cannot serve to refute my logic.
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Jan 18, 2018 13:39
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