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Rand also had a really bizarre view of just what "initiating violence" was. She hailed John Galt as a hero for literally destroying society and leaving everybody but him and his buddies to starve and suffer. The Galtian Revolution was nothing more than deliberately ruining the lives of the majority of the human race because "gently caress you I'm smart."
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Feb 24, 2015 22:03
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Mr Interweb posted:I've heard Rush mention the thing about the FCC "hiding" the new regulations from the public. Is it that they're "hiding" it, or that they don't have everything formally written down yet? He just knows that the FCC is going to use any new regulations to destroy right wing media as we know it so obviously the FCC is a freedom-hating lieberal conspiracy that must be abolished for the good of
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Feb 27, 2015 06:02
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asdf32 posted:Are we talking about medeival europe or 2015? Who is easier to steal from; an overworked poor guy who care barely afford his rent or a billionaire that can comfortably afford to have a few bodyguards with him at all times? Also note that the disenfranchised poor can't always even get to the super rich. The obscenely rich often have various types of walls around them in better funded neighborhoods that probably have better police. Wealthy areas are just flat out more secure. They're also often a good distance away from where poor people live, often by design. Ever wonder why low-income housing is such a NIMBY thing? Part of the reason the poor tend to steal from each other rather than from the rich is that the police locally are probably not funded very well, there isn't security, nothing is locked in a vault, and they're also way closer. A horde of poor people all moving in the same direction also tends to attract a lot of attention. Richy McMoneypants is probably going to notice and can probably hire more poor people from another group to beat the poo poo out of the poor people marching. Read about the 1800's in America. poo poo like this happened all the loving time and is part of why some of the laws we have exist right now. When workers starting planning strikes or demanding better wages the rich responded by hiring Pinkertons and thugs to beat the poo poo out of the "agitators" or spy on the rest. Anybody that got too uppity was fired, black listed, and told they were not allowed to work anywhere ever again. That promise was kept. Think about that for a moment; is that the kind of world you want to live in? One where the rich can just declare you tainted and literally starve you to death because you didn't keep your head down and make them richer? America already tried a libertarian paradise two centuries ago. The results were loving horrifying.
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Mar 2, 2015 06:15
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TLM3101 posted:So, as has been mentioned before in this thread, Libertarians - or at least JRod - seem to base their notion of property-rights on a mangled, perverted version of the ideas of John Locke. In and of themselves, Locke's ideas are sensible enough: By cultivating a piece of land ( tilling a Field, say ) a person gains a right of ownership of that particular parcel, having invested time and effort and ( most crucially ) labor into that particular piece of property. So, in essence? Yes. In Locke's view, ( and presumably in Libertopia/ancapland ) someone can, in fact, find an 'unused' plot of land, squat there, and claim it as their own, as long as they throw up a shack and put down a vegetable-patch. Now, these ideas make sense, so far as they go, as long as you include the Lockian proviso: that "... there is enough, and as good, left in common for others". The biggest snag is that according to those ideas nobody is supposed to prevent anybody from utilizing unused land or worrying about how builds what where. If I found a chunk of "unused land" right next to a huge, very productive farm and decided to use it by dumping industrial waste all over it it is very likely that would affect the production of the farm. How does libertopia prevent that sort of thing from happening? Industrial waste needs to go somewhere.
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Mar 2, 2015 10:52
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What business is McDonald's in? I'll give you a hint: it isn't cheeseburgers.
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Mar 3, 2015 17:33
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One of the big issues with libertarianism is that libertarian thought is very, very tightly tied to economic though which is ungodly awful at predicting how things will work on a large scale. You can kind of sort of get an idea of how poo poo will probably work like some of the time but there are just far too many factors involved in how the world works. It also depends on how you define "rational." Even though analysis would point out that Japan would lose a war with the U.S. if memory serves the Japanese were full of hubris at the time and believed themselves unbeatable. If you believe yourself unbeatable it's rational to pick a fight with whoever who the gently caress cares I can't lose. However the big issue is that the libertarians tend to assume that "rational" means "perfectly logical, all the time, based on infinite information." The information we have is limited at all times. We also make quick decisions based on things like how we feel and previous experience and once again those things are not perfect. There is also an rear end load of misinformation in the world they don't account for. Economic thought can give you statistics on how people will probably act but you can't base literally an entire government system based on that. In a perfect world libertarianism would work. Granted in a perfect world so would literally any government system.
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Mar 9, 2015 04:37
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jrodefeld posted:Putting aside anarchy for a moment, why is democracy better than an extremely limited State whose functions are expressly delegated? What does majority opinion have to do with the morality of public policy? And Democracy is inherently unstable since it allows the State to change democratically to an unknown and potentially despotic end. Of course we know that Hitler came to power democratically. Democracy starts with "here is a list of poo poo you can't do" and spreads power out. Oligarchs and monarchs tend to have way more power to skirt the list of "poo poo you can't do" than do presidents and senators. No, democracy is not perfect, but it's preferable to literally every other option available. Majority opinion matters because outside of the list of "poo poo you can't do" we need to come to some sort of agreement on what we can do. Majority opinion matters simply because that's literally how society functions. Most of us believe that stealing is wrong so we make it illegal. Part of the social contract is "don't steal from each other." If you don't enforce that then suddenly theft becomes totally acceptable behavior. You need some sort of system to enforce that which means you need some sort of state. No state, no enforcement. No enforcement, literally everything is now legal.
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Mar 22, 2015 09:06
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jrodefeld posted:Okay, well let me ask you a question. Where does prosperity come from? How do societies become wealthy? Prosperity and wealth for whom, exactly? If you're talking about prosperity and wealth for common folks it comes by twisting the arms of the wealthy and forcing them to not horde all the wealth.
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Mar 22, 2015 09:39
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jrodefeld posted:Okay Caros, here's the thing. You need to understand the difference between society, government, community, and the State. Libertarians oppose the State, not government. Government can mean social services, roads, infrastructure, courts, police, and all the trappings of civilization. There are many methods that societies provide these governmental institutions. What libertarians oppose is the State which is a territorial monopoly on the provision of certain services that is funded through coercive taxation. It doesn't allow competition or allow people to opt out and choose not to participate in its authority. What the hell does this even mean? I get a feeling you're going to ignore this like you ignored the rest of my questions. How the ever loving gently caress do you have things like roads and courts without a government monopoly? This reads as "I'm opposed to all government, except when I'm not."
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Mar 22, 2015 12:31
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jrodefeld posted:Libertarians are very precise when we describe what a "State" is. What I can't imagine is a road system that's even remotely sane. Urban planning exists for a reason as does things like having engineers planning road networks. Private roads are fine for situations where there isn't a lot of traffic but how, pray tell, do you get a functioning highway system without some sort of monopoly? Land is a finite resource that is getting even more pressure on it. Competition in roads means more of them which eats more land. Look at cities that were built with no urban planning. They're a loving mess. Design by committee is a lovely way to do certain things which is why a state monopoly on infrastructure exists. Some things are best left to the market; that I will not argue. However, some things are best left to the state and we have an assload of history that points to that. Roads are one of the big ones. The reason for that is because people study funny things like "traffic patterns" and "population density" and "where people want to go" and figure out how to make it all happen efficiently within their budget. Part of the reason America's infrastructure is so awful is because your precious libertarian ideals are making Republicans go "lol gently caress taxes." Now how about you answer my other questions instead of just this one that you think is easy? Have you ever heard about venue shopping? If we're going to talk about things like justice and state monopolies on it one major, major issue that the justice system runs into are various entities deliberately ensuring that court things happen in jurisdictions where they're more likely (sometimes guaranteed) to get the ruling they want. By that definition of state there will be private courts and multiple of them. What's to stop a court from saying "we'll rule in favor of whoever pays us the most?" ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 12:52 on Mar 22, 2015 |
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Mar 22, 2015 12:49
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jrodefeld posted:Okay. Since so many of you seem to be throwing a fit about how I didn't answer all the questions you wanted me to answer, then pick out the top ones that you want me to respond to and I will. What I won't do is comb through all 220 pages of this thread and answer every critique that has been lobbed against me. It is ridiculous to expect me to do such a thing. Fine, I posted these two things and you completely failed to respond to them. quote:Democracy starts with "here is a list of poo poo you can't do" and spreads power out. Oligarchs and monarchs tend to have way more power to skirt the list of "poo poo you can't do" than do presidents and senators. No, democracy is not perfect, but it's preferable to literally every other option available. Majority opinion matters because outside of the list of "poo poo you can't do" we need to come to some sort of agreement on what we can do. Majority opinion matters simply because that's literally how society functions. Most of us believe that stealing is wrong so we make it illegal. Part of the social contract is "don't steal from each other." If you don't enforce that then suddenly theft becomes totally acceptable behavior. You need some sort of system to enforce that which means you need some sort of state. No state, no enforcement. No enforcement, literally everything is now legal. quote:Prosperity and wealth for whom, exactly? If you're talking about prosperity and wealth for common folks it comes by twisting the arms of the wealthy and forcing them to not horde all the wealth. Don't just say "freedom will lead to more prosperity and wealth." Explain to me exactly how. What mechanism will removing this boogeyman of a state cause to increase prosperity and freedom? Tell me about how removing state-level protection will make everybody richer and not lead to oligarchy and exploitation. History has a poo poo load of examples of fewer rules leading directly to the strong exploiting the weak. How do you prevent billionaires from exploiting the hell out of workers if there is no state to prevent that from happening? More importantly how do you have government without a state, exactly? If anybody can opt out of the government any time they want then how the gently caress does that government actually enforce anything, ever? I'm not talking about things like taxation or whatever I'm talking about things like, you know, murder, theft, and corruption, the things you argue would magically vanish if the state were removed in its entirety.
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Mar 22, 2015 18:54
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Actually jrode I have a few more questions based on a few concepts I want to know if you understand. Do you understand the phrase "Magical Thinking?" It's one of the problems with religion and why you sound like a street preacher to many. If you pray for something and you don't get it or it doesn't happen a lot of people will say "well just pray harder" or "God decided you didn't need it" or some such. Literally anything that happens after praying is handwaved away with stuff like that. This is what you sound like. You're saying "well we need to freedom harder" and if the results aren't what you want it's just "well you didn't freedom hard enough or freedom the right way." That or "the market decided this is the way it should be." It's magical thinking. Like seriously. You're literally using magical thinking only instead of some deity or magic it's the market and freedom. You also say believe a lot but why do you believe? It's often "X dude wrote Y." Do you also understand the phrase "Worthy Victims?" This is one of the problems with charity. A government assistance program is geared to give to whoever needs it. That's the point of state-run social safety nets. You don't let somebody dictate who gets help and who does not. Private charity gives more control. The reason this is considered racist is because charities tend to favor who those that donate to them does and guess how that will affect black people in America. Think about it for a bit. Non-white people in America tend to have less wealth than white people. If white people give to charities guess who is going to benefit from them most? I'll give you a hint; it rhymes with "right people." Private charity is also a massive tool for groups that want to sway opinions. Attend X church or you don't get your food this week. Believe Y thing or go look elsewhere for charity. Support Z group or welp I guess you get to starve! This is how you get things like workhouses on top of it all. The poor and desperate would have little choice but to get arrested for vagrancy or go to the work house and get paid almost nothing to make somebody else richer with little hope of getting a better life. Private charity tends to have conditions attached to it. Private giving also tends to have the assistance going to only specific kinds of people. For example if a single upper middle class white woman goes missing it's a horrible tragedy that needs to be investigated with all we have. When police are literally murdering black men at the slightest provocation it's "lol stupid darkies think they're people." In America white people, especially attractive young women, are Worthy Victims while minorities are the poor are not. How would libertopia deal with that problem? ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 20:39 on Mar 22, 2015 |
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Mar 22, 2015 20:36
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So jrode are you going to make the effort to actually answer the questions that I went back and dug up or the other stuff I asked?
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Mar 23, 2015 02:21
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I like how he just kind of ignored everything I handed to him. Hey, here are some reasons that what you believe is literally racist and will cause people to suffer, better ignore them for the sake of declaring yourself the victor, j.
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Mar 23, 2015 03:27
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Who What Now posted:I was shocked as hell when he accused Caros' study (well, what he thought was Caros' study) of not being empirical or repeatable. Since when did libertarians give two shits about that?m They care about whatever validates their argument at the moment. Real world data is useless because you can't repeat economic experiments in the real world. Except when they agree with libertarian ideals. Then they're irrefutable and must never be questioned. Ever.
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Mar 23, 2015 03:51
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VitalSigns posted:Socrates was also an ultra-statist who preferred to drink hemlock rather than break the social contract and escape the laws of the city he had agreed to follow. Wasn't the other side of that the fact that the state said "recant everything you said or die" and he just grabbed the cup and said "gently caress you I'm right."
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Mar 23, 2015 04:50
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Caros posted:Well I believe he is still human, and capable of realizing when he stepped in the poo poo. Benefit of the doubt I suppose. Libertarians frequently fail to realize that they are, in fact, standing in poo poo. You know how you get accustomed to bad smells if you're around them long enough? Yeah.
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Mar 24, 2015 01:34
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So how long until jrode posts a link to the infamous "If I was a Poor Black Kid..." article?
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Mar 30, 2015 00:34
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VitalSigns posted:Seriously jrod, while you entertain me, maybe you should take a break from hitting He does have internal consistency. Everybody that isn't him is wrong.
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Mar 30, 2015 02:06
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and examine your own ideas critically for some internal consistency.
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OwlFancier posted:Wait, does America have different minimum wages per-state? The federal minimum is the absolute overall minimum. States can set a higher minimum if they want. Some cities do as well, actually. In particular some of the very expensive cities have a minimum a few dollars higher than everywhere else. Seattle apparently is pushing for a $15 minimum. There's a lot of pressure overall to increase all of the minimums.
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Mar 30, 2015 16:52
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Captain_Maclaine posted:Usually they'll just repeatedly schedule anyone that asks for the difference in pay onto the least productive shift they can until that person quits, to lessen the already-minimal chances of the former employee making a successful labor complaint. That's actually how the restaurant world gets rid of people in general. I think the only time I ever saw somebody actually get fired fired was when they were caught literally stealing from the place. Other than that it was just cut their hours until they leave. If they don't then it isn't like it matters; you're only ever paying them for like 6 hours a week. Before the economy shat itself servers usually did pretty OK in most places I saw. I made pretty good money when I was a waiter despite the $2.83/hour wage. If you were good at the job you could do well but servers are extremely vulnerable to recessions. Once the recession hit tips overall took a huge nosedive. People weren't eating out as much first off but second off they were just flat out being less generous. I actually kind of wonder what lolbertarians think about that. When times were good I made drat fine money for being a dude on the bottom rung with no college education. When times got bad I was lucky to break over minimum. It had nothing to do with how hard I worked or how productive I was. People just weren't eating out and those that were were not as willing to pay for it. Every restaurant in the area was having the same problem and a fair number of them closed or moved. It's almost as if external factors beyond one's control could affect their potential earnings! That was when I left to unload trucks for $8.50/hour because that was the only other job anybody offered me. I didn't have the money to start a business and couldn't rely on family for anything. Somehow that was my fault, obviously.
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Mar 30, 2015 21:41
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Caros posted:Wait is ToxicSlurpee black? Significantly Polish, otherwise pretty white and a bit Irish just for the record. The former shows; the latter does not. The area of the world I live in has a history of racism against the Polish. It's declining but Poles are second-class whites at best and I have an olivey complexion that makes some people assume I'm stupid and/or a criminal. Captain_Maclaine posted:While primarily dogwhistle for "blacks are lazy," it can also be applied generally to anyone who's poverty/misfortune you need to explain away. I've also lived in poverty and only managed to start college based on a stroke of dumb, stupid, uncontrollable luck. Can't wire home for money and neither of my parents, nor my grandparents for that matter, got a bachelor's or higher. Most of my gene pool is laborers and people that went to trade school at most. I get really, really sick of hearing the "well it's your own stupid fault for being poor you stupid poor" because it's complete bullshit. I also have a history of mental illness so there's another strike. Borderline disorder can gently caress up your life something fierce. People like jrode really piss me off just because their response to situations like mine is "well work harder, you loving pleb." Yup, it's totally my fault I was born in the heart of the Rust Belt; a region known for being very sticky when you try to escape it.
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Mar 31, 2015 02:02
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VitalSigns posted:Was she dragging around a chained Job Creator and holding a gun to his head to do it? God I hope so. I don't know about you guys but my food just doesn't taste good unless I force somebody else to pay for it.
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Mar 31, 2015 04:51
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Hey JRod, a question since you seem to love paying people in "experience" and whatnot. How do you feel about the use of interns as literal free labor? This is becoming rampant. The biggest issue is that people who aren't being subsidized by family somehow are literally incapable of doing this. In some industries you end up needing to work for free for two years or more before even getting a single job offer. In fact it's gotten so lovely that some people are literally paying for internships. Now, if you have $200,000 from dad that isn't a huge deal but how does somebody like me who has no choice but to immediately enter the workforce after graduating not starve to death? I can't afford to work for free for any amount of time but that's the expectation. Places are paying people with nebulous things like "experience" and "connections" rather than, you know, actual loving cash. More importantly do you consider that a disgusting practice or just good business sense? Let me put this simply; some industries require educated workers that went to college to loving purchase the opportunity to get a job. It isn't even a guarantee or a promise; just the possibility that you might get a job some day.
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Mar 31, 2015 14:11
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Ron Paul Atreides posted:Jrod, you've spoken about wanting to get rid of the Fed and moving back to the gold standard, as the great Ron Paul (pbuh) has dictated to his people. The nations that recovered from the Great Depression the fastest and best were the ones that abandoned the gold standard earliest. America in particular abandoned the gold standard around the lowest point and recovery began not long after that. What do you say to that, jrod? History has shown pretty strongly that the gold standard is stupid loving idea.
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Apr 1, 2015 19:28
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Who What Now posted:Because doing so is either impossible or would cost far more than paying the wage. Which is the case right now. Automation isn't magic, dude, it can't just do whatever you want instantly when you want it. It isn't that people believe automation is magic and can do literally anything it's that automation is increasing and being able to do more and more things. We can't really stop this and a great many lolbertarian ideals are based on assumptions made hundreds of years ago when robots didn't exist. Early factories and assembly lines were still assembly lines using machines but it was humans still pulling the levers and guiding the machines. Adam Smith wrote his thing during a time where almost everything was still done by hand. With things like 3D printing, rapid prototyping, and increasingly powerful AI we're getting to the point where we just flat out don't need hordes of people in every factory to get anything done. This is part of why things are getting increasingly lovely for workers; the business owners just flat out don't need as many people to get poo poo done as before. The demand for labor is decreasing as the supply of it (i.e., total humans) is increasing. Part of the reason worker organization was such a huge deal and why labor was able to twist the arms of the wealthy and loving make them not pay starvation wages was because the wealthy could literally not do what they wanted without hands on machines. Now we even have cars that drive themselves. People are 3D printing metal tools with moving parts. Family farms are a thing of the past and it takes fewer and fewer people to grow enough food every year. No matter what the human race decides to do it just flat out takes fewer people to do it now; this is why automation is brought up. No it isn't magic and it takes people to run and design it but the more you automate things the more you can cut labor out of it. The very wealthy, if given enough time, will get to the point where they can just say "OK fine, just starve to death you loving plebs. Have fun." Taken with the financial fuckery that happens in America on top of stuff like collusion in industries to keep wages low or just flat out doing large amounts of the work using unpaid interns and you have a situation where it becomes harder and harder for the non-rich to actually get by. Given that demand is one of the largest drivers of the economy and increased demand means more stuff getting made which means more jobs you kind of need to have workers actually getting paid non-starvation wages to grow an economy. In the past the lumber industry would float large amounts of logs down the river to get them to the mill. Sometimes the logs would get stuck and back up the river. Sometimes it would get so bad that you couldn't just shove them out. It just happened sometimes. So what they would do was throw some dynamite out to break it up some. Yeah you lost some logs in the process but it got the logs moving again and you can't run a lumber mill with no logs. People like Jrod are arguing that the wealthy have a right to expand the places that logs get jammed up at and deliberately jam them to hold the livelihoods of the people at the lumber mill hostage. He is arguing that if one person owns all the logs he has the right to say "fine gently caress you, no logs for anybody." He's the one standing at the jammed logs saying "well do we really need to unjam the logs? If the people at the lumber mill wanted logs they'd just work harder and buy some." He's the one arguing that it would be just ducky if somebody cut down literally all the trees and turned the forest into a wasteland then just shrugged and walked away when the lumber mill workers said "but what about us?" He's the one that would later argue that the lumber mill workers should have seen it coming and planned appropriately so it was their own fault. Jrod is the one saying that teleportation would get the logs to the lumber mill faster and more efficiently so we should just switch to that system and destroy the river no matter how many times people tell him that's literally impossible and the river is still useful for other things even if it was. Ron Paul Atreides posted:They would be competing for the same workers if their wasn't an abundance of them. Right now, current labour markets are full of unskilled labour, much more labour than jobs needing to be filled by that labour. That means an employer doesn't need to compete with anyone, they just need to wait till they find a worker willing to take the least amount of pay they offer, and there will always be someone desperate enough to do so in a labour market this tilted. The nature of these jobs lead to skill or experience not having an appreciable effect on the productivity, it's literally just about having someone there to push the buttons. To expand on this some one of the issues of the world right now is that there are estimates that the amount of money being horded by the super rich is in the trillions. Yeah, that's right. With a T and an R. Trillions. Multiple loving trillions. More importantly there are hundreds of millions of people (billions, probably) that own no land, have little to no savings, and no have way to survive beyond selling their time to others. Those "others" are always wealthier than they are so the question that comes up is does the wealthy man have a right to deliberately starve somebody to death if they won't take a deal? I'd say that's a pretty violent thing to do. This is one of the main points where lolbertarian theory falls apart because that's literally what the rich are doing. They horde the wealth, they horde the land, and their response to "people are starving" is literally "welp, sucks to be them! They should have tried harder." There is no way out of that, either. Oh hey you went to college but never got a job? Well you should have picked a different major, pleb. Oh you want to go back to school then? Lolnope! You already have six figures of debt you can't pay just go starve to death under a bridge somewhere while we all blame you. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Apr 1, 2015 |
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Apr 1, 2015 22:41
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Hey asdf let's look at a key difference between "thing I sell" and "thing I purchase so I can sell things." In the gas station example gas is in the "thing I sell" category. The gas station exists to sell things, primarily gas, to make profit. There is a certain minimum amount of labor required to do that. Even if the thing were completely, totally, 100% automated it's still going to break at some point so you at the least need somebody that can maintain it. Even so the way they work now you need somebody to run the cash register, make sure nobody steals anything, and pump the gas in certain areas. The person the gas station hires is in the category of "thing I purchase so I can sell things." When you hire somebody you're literally purchasing their time. It's "I will pay you $X to do Y thing for Z time." This is an expense.. There is a certain minimum amount of labor required to sell "things I sell" but if the amount of "things I can sell" is limited than the amount of labor I will ever need is limited. Now, businesses constantly seek to reduce their expenses. Lower expenses on the same amount of sales is more profit. The bottom line improves if you can eliminate an expense so of loving course a business isn't going to hire more labor than it can actually utilize. If a single janitor can easily clean the entire business in 40 hours a week it doesn't matter how desirable the position is. If the business has a janitor it just isn't going to hire another until that janitor quits/is/fired/is replaced. The issue is that if Karl the Janitor wants to work for $15/hour with bennies but there are 5,000 other Karls that can do the job exactly as well but are happy to work for $8/hour with no bennies then Karl's days on that job are numbered. He is going to be gotten rid of because why pay him that much when somebody else can do exactly the same job for what amounts to less than half the price? Paying Karl is an expense. If you can find some other Karl that works for less then hey cool, more profit! Hiring a second Karl while keeping the first just increases expenses for no gain. You can bet your rear end that a company just isn't going to do that no matter how many janitors are on the market. Generally speaking a business needs a Karl to clean things. However he is in the "thing I purchase so I can sell things" categories.
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Apr 2, 2015 17:50
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asdf32 posted:Umm, that supply and demand sometimes sets low wages is my entire thesis. No your thesis was "a business that can afford more employees will always hire more." That's a loving stupid thesis. Just because a company can hire more people does not mean that it will. This is part of why not only supply-side economics but also the lolbertarian idea of "a rising tide lifts all boats" is stupid. If you give a wealthy company that can already afford to hire more workers but doesn't more money then their response is going to be "thanks for the check!" and literally nothing else. It isn't going to get reinvested and they won't hire any new workers except maybe the CEO's idiot cousin who just lost his job and can be stuffed in a corner office and forgotten about. So hey congrats on supporting increased nepotism, I guess? Your assumptions are frequently based on infinite demand which literally doesn't exist. Businesses only meet demand. To increase what a business supplies you need to increase demand. Less demand means the business supplies less. Lower supply being necessary means the business needs to purchase less labor. You see these things in the current, increasing earnings gap in America. The massive deregulation of the market let the rich get away with all sorts of fuckery. They're making themselves richer and loving over everybody else because that's what extremely rich people do. The only way to stop it is to say "oh by the way this is now illegal loving quit it or you get your money taken away and go to jail."
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Apr 2, 2015 18:55
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Ron Paul Atreides posted:I mean, gently caress, guys, I was pretty clear wasn't I? Doesn't matter; if I agreed with you that might lead to a poor person not starving to death and we can't have that.
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Apr 3, 2015 04:39
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Disinterested posted:Buffet says some weird cranky poo poo sometimes but I give him the benefit of the doubt for being old, I'm glad he realises that the tax system that taxes him barely at all is a monstrosity. Warren Buffett also doesn't exactly pay himself obscene amounts of money either. He's lived in the same house he bought in the 50's for basically ever and he ends up with an income of like $180,000 a year. Wealthy but not like "I literally have a swimming pool filled with $100s" wealthy. He's also flat out said that he is basically extremely lucky in that the things that interest him combined with the talents and skills he has just happened to be things that make poo poo loads of money in the era he lives in. He lives comfortably sure but the ridiculous extravagance that is typical of high level executives these days just isn't present there; in fact he thinks it's disgusting. His criticism of the tax system is really just "what the gently caress? I don't even need all this money and nobody does...stop letting me make so much." He's also spoken out against dynastic wealth and has literally given away billions. Far as super rich capitalists go you can find a lot worse examples than Buffett. It's a weird thing; he's taking advantage of the system and he knows it ultimately but he's doing better things with his money than buying his 87th house and 12th yacht.
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Apr 4, 2015 00:10
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Who What Now posted:Nah, asdf has been pretty consistent that he wants to tax the rich and fix the roads, but gently caress you poors you don't get a dime of this sweet, sweet road money. Think he'd support building infinite roads?
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Apr 6, 2015 22:44
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asdf32 posted:Yep there is more demand for smooth un-potholed roads than currently exists. I can attest to that. But is there infinite demand? Where would we put infinite roads?
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Apr 7, 2015 03:04
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Rockopolis posted:Really? I would have thought demand for holes was finite. After all each person has only one hole that was made for them. yeah but humans always want to reproduce so there is infinite demand for people so there is obviously an infinite supply of people and infinite people means infinite holes dddrrrrrrrrr
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Apr 8, 2015 06:53
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asdf32 posted:The funny thing to me is that the idea that people typically want more stuff than will ever realistically be produced has no idiolpgical consequences whatsoever. It's completely consistent with leftism. Poor people need more stuff and rich people are greedy and want more stuff too. I think you don't understand what "demand" means. I would like a new car. I however cannot currently afford one. As far as the car industry is concerned I am generating zero demand. Desire != demand. Until I have a handful of money that's enough to get a new car and I go out and say "I would like to purchase a new car" my desire for a new car will not lead to somebody supplying me a new car. As far as the economy is concerned I am generating exactly zero new car demand.
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Apr 9, 2015 02:39
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asdf32 posted:Heh didn't I already express my demand for a house cleaner (look for the part where I got called a murdering slave owner). But can you afford a house cleaner? If you can't afford one, and are not actively paying one or trying to hire one, that isn't "demand."
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Apr 9, 2015 03:01
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paragon1 posted:I have infinite demand for everything so I don't want to throw anything away. But I also have infinite demand for garbage pickup services. Well if you have infinite garbage you can throw away infinite things so it evens out.
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Apr 9, 2015 04:10
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QuarkJets posted:Do you actually believe that this is a hill worth dying on? "Demand for some things could be infinite if those things are free!" That's libertarianism in a nutshell at the moment, though. "Well in this theoretical world where X completely impossible thing is universally true libertarianism would totally usher in a magical utopia!" Well yeah in Theory Land it would work but this is, you know, Earth.
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Apr 9, 2015 04:17
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Muscle Tracer posted:one-step logic is not the specialty of this thread. 500-step logic with the interceding 498 steps excised, though? totally fine. It's actually infinite step logic.
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Apr 9, 2015 19:31
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Political Whores posted:Oh please. Listen the only reason that Business Insider is even running this piece is because it's a chuckling dismissal of calls to look at inequality. "See, Google says you need inequality to keep top talent!". Honestly who gives a gently caress about Google employees? These are the people who have a private shuttle bus to work to avoid dealing with the poors as much as possible. Somewhere in the Less Wrong thread before it closed, someone posted a blog from some Rationalist-Libertarian savant who was arguing about how hypocritical the left was because they were only interested in class inequality, and not things like temporal inequality ('what about all the poor people in the past") or familial inequality ("what if one kid gets the lion's share of the estate?"). Same basic idea here; shouldn't people who worry about inequality care about this inequality? Look how big it is! But Pareto says it works! It's also some heavy duty strawmanning. The left doesn't complain about inequality but rather the amount of it. People are literally going hungry so CEO Richy McGreedypants can buy his 12th mansion and brag about his $600,000,000 net worth. The left is totally OK with somebody that has skills that are in high demand or somebody that is highly productive making more money than others. What the left is not OK with is that person becoming extremely wealthy off of paying starvation wages to the guy cleaning his bathrooms. The janitor deserves to have a decent standard of living just as much as the CEO. This lolbertarian blathering about "but...but...but...MY FREEDOMS!!!!!  " are failing to understand what the left is concerned about. Poor people are often given the choice of starving to death quickly or starving to death slowly then dying of lack of medical care while laboring 70 hours a week to make some rich guy even richer. That's what the left is worried about.
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Apr 15, 2015 21:33
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 01:26 |
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There's also a pretty loving massive difference between "I got paid $1,000,000,000 to shuffle numbers around" and "I got paid $175,000 and a fat bonus to program an app that millions of people are now using."
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Apr 20, 2015 01:33
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